Disgustology (REPULSION TO GROSS STUFF) with Paul Rozin
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I know I usually save my secrets for the end of the episode, but I'm going to tell you my secret favorite candy. It's Reese's Peanut Butter Cup.

It's really Reese's anything. But Reese's peanut butter cups are the thing that I'm like, have I had a bad day? I get these. Have I had a good day? I get these. Chocolate, salty peanut butter, the textures. I love everything about them. Also that there's two. So I'm like, oh, I get this one for later, which is one second later. Anyway, Reese's peanut butter cups. I love you. That's all. If you're me, you can shop Reese's peanut butter cups now at a store near you. Found wherever candy is sold. And I am. Hey, Fidelity. What's it cost to invest with the Fidelity app?

Start with as little as $1 with no account fees or trade commissions on U.S. stocks and ETFs. Hmm, that's music to my ears. I can only talk. Investing involves risk, including risk of loss. Zero account fees apply to retail brokerage accounts only. Sell order assessment fee not included. A limited number of ETFs are subject to a transaction-based service fee of $100. See full list at fidelity.com slash commissions. Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC. Member NYSE SIPC.

Oh, just a content warning up top. We talk about all kinds of things in this. Sex, of course. Things you may not want to eat, things you might. It gets gross. It's disgust. What can I tell you? Enjoy.

Hey, so it's your friend who offered you a mint and now you're overthinking why. Allie Ward, here we are. We're about to experience something together. It gets wild, friends. Come along. This is one that's been sitting in the stacks for a bit. It's kind of been fermenting because it was recorded over the summer right before I got really sick. And getting into it this week, I realized I had forgotten how good it was.

absolutely unhinged this one is in terms of subject matter. Like, you're in for a treat. You're in for a treat. But first, thank you to Patreon. You submitted thoughtful questions for this revolting romp. And to join, you could submit your questions before our interviews. Just hop over to patreon.com slash ologies.

where it costs one hot dollar a month to join. Thank you also to everyone wearing Ologies merch from ologiesmerch.com. Also, side note, thanks for all the really, really, really sweet supportive messages after last week's field trip episode of my getting surgery. It meant more to me than you know. And I even got some notes in our reviews. And to prove that I read every review, I pick a fresh...

non-rotting one each week, such as this one from rnrglslc who said, "Love the theme song, love the tangents and secrets, love the rawness." I love that review, rnrglslc. And thank you to everyone who left reviews, including another user by the name of PooPooPeePee, who is right on target for this episode because disgustology, it's a real term. It stems from the word gusto, which is taste. So it means a distaste

or to put off one's appetite. So if you are hoping to stop snacking for at least an hour, you have arrived at the right place. I interviewed a Harvard-trained cultural psychologist who is now a professor at University of Pennsylvania. I got myself to this beautiful building in the heart of the metropolis, and I was warmly invited into his high-rise home.

His windows were a panoramic vista cast in blue-gray as this afternoon summer thunderstorm churned over the city.

What's cozy for you? Anything you'd like. So I got settled in a deep chair next to the couch and we had a lovely, just casual kind of chit chat about spit, potty training, fork sharing, spoiled meat, xenophobia, sex kinks, funereal experiments, perfume that you may or may not want to buy, food,

You may not want to eat the ick, nipples, World War II, and so much more. It gets spicy. So face your fears and get to know the emotion that keeps you alive with psychology professor, researcher, lauded expert, and he who bears the title officially of disgustologist, Dr. Paul Rosen. ♪

Oh.

Oh. So I don't have the same name as many of my relatives. But you can call him Dr. Disgust. Several news outlets have. So in setting a motion, disgust turns out to be very convenient. Toilet training, which is a very interesting thing, was, of course, a central issue for Freud.

But it's disgusting. There's two things. People don't want to study anything Freud was interested in because, you know, we've gotten past him. He wasn't really a scientist and we're a real science now. I mean, it's a fascinating area where you take something that kids love. They love poop. And you get them to hate it.

We are really upset by it. And that's an amazing transformation. Yeah. And nobody's really seriously looked at that. Do you think that in psychology, people think of Freud as a contaminant and they don't want that contagion of being associated with Freud? I'm not quite sure he's a contaminant, but certainly they don't want to be associated with Freud.

Because Freud was not a scientist. He had a lot of interesting ideas. He didn't pursue them in a scientific way. He thought of himself as a scientist, by the way. The psychology has been fighting to be called a science ever since I've been in the field and since the middle of the 20th century. And they wanted to be with biology and chemistry, not with sociology and anthropology. And chemists

Shedding Freud was part of that. So I wrote this paper on the seven holes in the body and how the psychology of each hole. For more on this, you can see Dr. Rosen's 2007 address, Exploring the Landscape of Modern Academic Psychology, Finding and Filling the Holes, in which he explains in the presence of holes, the clear demarcation between self and other inner

is blurred and each bodily hole offers both vulnerability and promise, which is so true.

For what is our bodily self without access to that which surrounds us? Without a hole for snacks, our body's really hungry and probably dead. I did one study showing that medical students who dissect the cadaver. Oh, yeah. Okay, so after they dissect the cadaver, they're much less disgusted by cadavers. Huh. Okay. But they're not less disgusted by fresh dead bodies.

Really? It's very specific. Shall we enjoy a reading from the book of Cambridge University Press, 2023, titled Hedonic Adaptation, Specific Habituation to Disgust-Death Elicitors as a Result of Dissecting a Cadaver, LETS. So in this, Paul writes that by using the disgust scale as a metric, they find a significant reduction in disgust responses to death and, quote, body envelope violation elicitors,

Don't know what that means, but I can imagine. So maggots or a dirty Kleenex might still be gross to a med student, but a cold corpse just becomes no biggie. So if you're scared of doing something new, like taking the bus or wearing baggier but more fashionable pants, just think, with exposure therapy, we can get more comfy slicing into dead people. So try the pants. Do it. You got this.

Have you ever had to interview anyone that works at a morgue and see why they're able to like eat their lunch around dead bodies? Well, first of all, some people...

Can't do that. Okay. But they're not likely to become workers in morgues, of course. Good point. So you have a lot of selection. But people get used to almost everything. That's the story. You get used to all kinds of getting old. Yeah. And you get used to the environment you're in. I had a case where I...

We were doing a disgust study, one of my favorite studies. And we were looking at actual exposure to real disgust things with people. Our instructions were, we had 32 tasks, I think, we asked them to do.

One of them was to take a glass and spit in it, and then would you drink the glass? Even though that spit was just in my mouth, I don't want to do that. That's right. Isn't that interesting? Yeah. Yeah, it was just in your mouth. Okay. And we got a freshly cut pig's head from a butcher, and we said we have a pig head in the refrigerator. Would you be willing to pull it out and look at it? Yeah. Would you be willing to touch it? Would you be willing to stick a pin in its eye? Woo!

And we asked people, listen, some people didn't, some people didn't. Then we said, no problem. You don't do it. Fine. More on human relationships with animals in terms of food, not other stuff, in a bit.

And we had them do all these crazy things. We also had a starter's pistol. We showed them what it was. And there's no real bullets in it. Would you hold it to your head and pull the trigger? And somebody, ooh, no, no. So we had all these tasks. We had a Nazi, a true Nazi hat.

from World War II and we said, would you look at it? Would you touch it? Would you put it on your head? - Oh boy. - Okay, so we went through this whole thing. And one thing we wanted to do was get ashes, cremated ashes. - Okay. - Everything we gave them was absolutely true. We said everything was, Nazi act was a real Nazi act. Then we decided we couldn't really do cremated ashes.

People donate their bodies. But we did want to get something that looked just like it. So he went to a crematorium, a student and I. We take a field trip. And we visited the guy who does this. And we explained what we wanted.

And he said, oh, he said, you want to see cremated ashes? He said, yeah. He said, oh, come here. And he had this room full of, you know, like shoe boxes filled with cremated. He says, here's one. Here's another one. And he started showing us like he was selling them to us. OK. And he was so thrilled. No one had ever come to him and said, I want to see what you do. And he said, you want to see your body burning? And he went on this whole thing. And we learned from him how to make cremated ashes.

from dog bone mash, ground bone and some couple of other things, how we could make it look. So instead of someone's abandoned cremains, they opted for mashed up beef bones from a pet food store. And maybe they got creative with like some fireplace ash or some cornstarch or something. But it was a convincing craft project. And we got an urn. We bought an urn from them. So we have this thing, which we said were cremated ashes. It's the only lie we told. Oh.

And we asked people, would they look at the urn? Would they open the urn? Would they touch the ashes with their hand? So we had people doing all these things and we measured how willing they were to do it. And we had previously, they had already taken a disgust scale months before. So we had measures of an indirect measure and now we had a direct measure of how disgust ends so we could compare them.

And the interesting thing about this study is after the study was over, they'd been through all these things. People said, this was terrific, they would say. I want to get my friends to do this. Oh, jeez. Because, you know, this sort of playing with disgust that's safe. Yeah. It's sort of actually sort of fun. Well, it's like Halloween. It's like a haunted house to them, but with real disgusting artifacts. Yeah, it's like a haunted house. That's right. So that's funny. One of the interesting things about disgust that's always interested me is how central it is in humor.

Oh, for sure. There's all these disgust jokes. I mean, there's loads of them. Toilet humor got its name for a reason. Toilet humor, scatological humor. Yes, that's right. And people can laugh at it as long as it isn't in their face. That is, they're not facing the disgust. Right. Somebody else is.

And if you'd like more on everything from chuckles to hysterics to roast comedy and slapstick, early in Allogies, I interviewed Dr. Lee Burke, who is a renowned professor and a gelatologist who studies laughter's effect on the body. And he says he's the guy who is serious about studying comedy. And he's not wrong. And he's a darling. Going back a little bit, in terms of defining disgust,

Is disgust an emotion? Is it a reaction? Where does disgust fall in the spectrum of things that we can feel? How is it classified? Well, it's classified as an emotion. And it's even classified as one of the big six emotions in psychology, along with fear, anger, sad, happy, anger.

Surprise. I don't like that one. And disgust. And there are other taxonomies. There's an Indian taxonomy, which has 10 emotions, but disgust is one of those too. Let's explore a few extra emotions via the Turn of the Century 2000 paper, Exploring Hindu-Indian Emotional Expressions, Evidence for Accurate Recognition by Americans and Indians, which is a paper by the

which list the culturally recognized emotions. This is via a rough translation from the Sanskrit as, get ready for this, anger, disgust, fear, heroism, humor or amusement, love, peace, sadness, shame or embarrassment, and wonder. I love that range. And I also love that wonder is an emotion. I'm just, I'm in wonder about that. And

And I got to say, if you're not familiar with the emotions wheel, look it up. It's this thing. It's like a color wheel, but it has Western psychology's recognized six emotions, which are fear, anger, disgust, surprise, happiness, and sadness. With these subsets and variations under each of them, like under happy, there's peaceful.

or remorseful is under sad. And disgust emotions can vary from judgmental to hesitant or disappointed. And if you must know, I have a laminated copy of this wheel up in my office. And I also purchased a throw pillow for the couch. And if Jarrett and I are pissy to each other, we literally bust out the emotions wheel pillow and we point to what we're really feeling, which is honestly, usually fear, which has underlying feelings of

anxious, inadequate, or even overwhelmed. How about that? And surprise emotions can include amazed or awestruck, startled or shocked or dismayed. Now, so what if you hate surprises? What if you hate them?

I'm not one of those people, but some personality psychologists say that this is in line with higher prefrontal cortex activity in a part of the brain called the anterior cingulate gyrus, which handles thinky tasks like decision-making and attention to detail and avoiding mistakes. And according to this book, You Happier, these types of folks who hate surprises tend to be a little more stubborn, but they like routines and they have a lot of perseverance, maybe the

They're a little more anxious. Maybe they hang on to grudges, but they really get shit done. And for more on personality psychology, we have an excellent episode with Dr. Samin Vizier, which I hope...

surprises you with energetic awe and amazement and eager astonishment, according to the wheel that I just looked up. But let's roll on backwards to disgust. So it's got most of the properties of an emotion. It's got a facial expression that's clear. It's an acute feeling. You don't feel disgusted for a month. You feel disgusted. It's almost always tied to some events. And

Where does that facial expression come from? I think disgust is originally about rejecting offensive foods. That's where it starts.

And that's, I think, where we see it first in children. And it's closing of the nose, opening of the mouth, gaping sometimes, sticking your tongue out. That's all getting rid of things. It's expelling it. And you're closing off your palate, right? To not let anything down the hatch. You're basically spitting out or closing it off. That's right. So that's what it looks like. And that is functionally what it is. Now, when you show that to something else, like,

I say, Adolf Hitler. Well, that's, of course, an extension of that same disgust. It's not about eating Hitler, but it's the same system that's applied to moral things now. How can you tell that that is disgust and not anger, say, for example? Well, OK, so first of all, anger is an approach emotion.

Oh, what's an approach emotion? An emotion that when you experience it, you want to engage with whatever stimulated you. You're angry at it. Whereas disgust is a withdrawal emotion. So it's very different. It's the opposite. They're both negative. But one is a negative approach. The other is a negative withdrawal.

Now, there is some overlap in the facial because this disgust thing also bears your teeth. Oh, yeah, you're right. One anger face is also a disgust face. And this disgust face is not at all anger. And that's just, you're not bearing your teeth. You're just tongue out.

Let's turn our attention briefly to the varieties of disgust faces and the structure of disgust, which was co-authored by, yes, Dr. Paul Rosen. In it, you're going to learn that the nose wrinkle is associated with either irritating or offensive smells and to some extent bad tastes.

And gape and tongue excursion, like are associated with food offense, disgust, and oral irritation. But a raised upper lip correlates to boundary violations like bodily or personal space or certain moral offenses. And so humans evolved these signals way back prehistorically. And this study was authored just a scant 30 years ago by Paul. But I

I'm thinking with the number of like selfie camera monologues we deliver to AI-equipped social media biometric capturing platforms, I'm sure we have more data than we could ever use to analyze just what our faces are doing when we're grossed out. Someone out there, work with an evil social media company and figure this out. They'll do it for the sake of profit and coercion. You might not even have to get a grant. Just thinking about that curls my lip.

The raised upper lip is part of both anger and disgust. When disgust is a moral reaction to like Adolf Hitler, it's sometimes difficult to distinguish from anger because psychologically you're disgusted by Hitler, but you also want to hit him. Right. Ah, that's an interesting notion. Is it disgust? Is it a lot about threat abatement? Is it really your... Yeah, it's a threat. You could say it's a threat, but it's not a threat that's...

that's directed at you so it's one that you can withdraw from. Here's an example. If you're watching someone on the street dressed in a formal wear, a man and a woman, and the man steps in dog do.

Right. That's really funny. But if you step in dog, though, it's not funny. Oh, not funny. I will say that it matters profoundly who steps in it and if I hate them. And if it's like a sweet couple that's celebrating their anniversary because it might be the last one before one of them dies because they have cancer and like the nice man wants to take his beautiful wife out to this special dinner and she feels like,

herself in a wig and a fancy dress and then he steps in dog do left by some jerk who doesn't clean up after his expensive purebred dog from a backyard breeder then no that's not very funny and I'm having too many emotions but yeah let's suppose that the poo stepper let's just pretend that that is your childhood bully

who you later dated, but then they cheated on you with your boss and the two of them were going to a fancy dinner using your stolen credit card and then one of them stepped in dog doo and you see it from across the street because you're hiding in a bush getting video footage for a court case. That's funny. And why?

And why? Okay, so I look this up. In terms of humor theory, this example, this one example touches on a few basic concepts. These have been noted by philosophers going back like thousands of years. And one of them is the relief theory, where something absurd happens to break tension in a situation. But there's also the superiority theory, where someone with power over you is humbled, and that's funny. And then there's this

theory of disposition where we can enjoy when good things happen to people we like, but then when bad things happen to assholes. So in this example, though, it's best to see it and not to smell it. A lot of disgust humor requires that you be away from it. It's not really threatening you. That's true of a lot of things. I have a concept.

We call it benign masochism, which is that people all around the world seem to enjoy the arousal of negative emotions, fear, disgust, as long as they're not really threatened by them. And that includes a roller coaster where you're not really falling to your death, but you think you are. And the fear becomes part of the pleasure.

and disgust at someone else's disgusting situation is you feel it, but it's not about you. You didn't step in the dog, though. Yeah. So that's part of why they now discuss humor works. It's a third party who dropped his lunch in the...

outhouse and has to go down and pull it out. You know, it's not you. Again, that's your ex who cheated on you. So that's hilarious. And the most tension and release I feel isn't in like a $3 airport massage chair, but it's probably watching the television sketch comedy program called I Think You Should Leave. Every episode, every sketch hurts my soul and I love it. I keep going back for more. What about cringe humor where you're watching someone have a really uncomfortable, awkward moment

interaction and you're not even involved, but it just is like, like hurts to watch. It hurts to watch, but the hurt is pleasant. Right, right. It's good you initiated. Right. Because that's the same thing. So benign masochism is the idea that we enjoy these innately negative things because when we're secure that we're not threatened by them. That even includes jumping out of a plane for, you know, on a parachute. It includes the

Taking cold showers. There are a lot of things where your body is not really threatened, but your body thinks it's being threatened. But when we're disgusted or when we evade the threat that disgusts us, do we get any pleasure from surviving it? We might get pleasure from surviving it. So the pleasure, for example, of pain from running a mile or 10 miles.

There may be some feeling of overcoming, but it's also that the actual pain can become pleasant. Not just the success, but the experience of the pain. And if you need scholarly justification for remaining emo, you can see the 2023 study, Glad to be Sad, and other examples of benign masochism, co-authored by one Paul Rosen, which explains that hedonic reversals can be a major source of pleasure.

And they can range from liking sad experiences like music or novels or tearjerker movies or like my entire college CD collection to enjoying food that's spicy or the strong taste of coffee or alcohol. Now, how bad is good? That's the question. So this study concludes that the favored lifestyle.

level of initially negative experiences is something that's just below the level that can be tolerated. So I guess it's kind of like edging, but with a bummer. Speaking of, does this include kinks? We're going to get to that later, but back to his history. And what about when your family came over? I was wondering, because you've done studies with Nazi ephemera, did you have members of your family who were Jewish or who were- My family's

And both sides are Jewish. No one in my family was in Europe during the Nazi period. I've done studies on that. I know two people who are victims of the Holocaust who were in camps. They were anti-Nazi, but they had no problem going to Germany. And I knew lots of American Jews who never had anything to do with the Holocaust, who wouldn't ride in a Volkswagen.

I wouldn't eat sour, all sorts of stuff. I was really puzzled. I get puzzled by this. How could someone who was in Auschwitz for two years not be anti-German and someone who's just sitting here and none of their relatives even were in Germany, but they're so anti-German. It turns out, just like we discussed, there's an enormous range of anti-German-ness that

in Jewish people. So we found that quite a few people who were in the Holocaust were not anti-German. - That's interesting, yeah. - And there's a lot of reasons, but one reason, very simple one, is that the German ones had experienced nice Germans before the Holocaust. Germany was not the most anti-Semitic country in Europe, actually. And there were lots of successful Jews in Germany. So they knew nice Germans and then they met

in the PAMS, the Nazis. And so we got interested in that. We studied about 40 of the survivors. Wow. And we got them to tell us, would they go in a...

Volkswagen, could they listen to the German language spoken? Would they be upset about living in an apartment house which had a grandson of a Nazi living in that house? And some of them, "Oh, that's terrible." And other people, "That's no problem." - Yeah. Oh, that's interesting. - But anyway, yeah. I mean, there are puzzling things about people who go through terrible trauma and come out opposite.

You know, and we don't understand why. Yeah. But it's great to be asking the questions. And what about you? What drove you to this particular niche? How did you find yourself as the godfather of disgust, a disgust ecologist? Well, it's actually a very simple story. Okay. I was studying what people eat and why they eat it. Perhaps the favorite food of humans around the world is meat. Oh, okay. Okay.

So yes, this is true. And we discussed hunter-gatherer diets in the metabolism episode in January. And our lead editor, Mercedes Maitland, also has an anthropology background and chimed in letting me know that meat and honey, not to say that's what people actually manage to eat the most, she says, but that's what are historically the most prized foods.

And she continues, for example, in hunter-gatherer societies, people will tend to put more time and energy into getting X number of calories from meat than they would into getting X number of calories from plant foods. Now, how does this translate to you wandering indecisively at the mall food court as your lunch break minutes change?

dwindle away. Well, according to the United States Food and Agriculture Organization, globally, pork is the most consumed meat, and it makes up over a third of the world's meat consumption. I wouldn't have guessed that. Next is birds. And yes, we have a whole episode about chickens. And yes, it's called chickenology. I didn't make that up.

It is what it is. Do not call me a fool. However, if you listened to the hydrochoreology episode recently about capybaras, you'd know that those big mammalian rodents are actually fish. Happy Easter.

But then it turns out that meat is also the most tabooed food. You don't get vegetable taboos very often. Now, why is this food that is so desirable often prohibited? Sometimes they're tabooed for everybody. And if you think of, say, Americans, there are 4,000 species of mammals. We eat three. Pigs, cows, maybe sheep. Right. Right.

That's about it. Wow. Yeah, that's a good point. I kept thinking of birds. What about the other 3,009? We are meat eaters and we love our meat, but we are disgusted not only by almost every species of mammal and every other kind of species, but we're also disgusted by most parts of them. We don't eat eyeballs.

We don't eat skin. We don't eat fat, masses of fat. We don't eat a lot of things. We eat basically muscle. We don't eat brain. In the United States, we don't eat most viscera. We just eat muscle. Again, this is in Western or U.S. culture. And fun fact...

So the way that I met my spouse, Jarrett, was by walking into this organic nose-to-tail butcher shop. And he was behind the counter. He was wearing a chainmail apron.

But that smile. And I remember he used to tell these tales of all these upscale Hollywood clients that just wanted either pork belly or a skinless chicken breast and no other part of the animal. They had to convince people to like try chicken thighs, but not just not a lot of people tossing pig kidneys into their air fryers. So.

So we're eating one kind of thing from only a few animals and the rest of them are all disgusting. Yeah. Why is that? Why culturally are Americans like that? I would say that the story is, first of all, almost all food disgusts are animal products. Almost all. Huh. Except for durian, maybe. Yeah, but yes. And durian, of course, smells like it's rotting.

Meat. Yes, that's right. So the question is, why do we find most meat disgusting? And that includes earthworms and rats and all the things that we find disgusting. But another way to ask the question is, why do we eat any meat? Right. So we eat this tiny percentage of all the animal food we could eat.

And the question is how we made an exception to that. You could ask the question either way. But the important point is that there's all this great animal protein out there and we don't want to have anything to do with any of it. And even traditional cultures, which eat much more meat than we do and more parts of the animal, still find many animals disgusting. And he says in different parts of the world, different cultures eat different types of protein sources.

But they still don't eat at all. And they tend to not like decayed meat, which is generally disgusting. Now, there are exceptions to that, but they're very special. You know, there are cultures that eat rotted meat, but only...

certain cases and it's generally not consumed. So that's what got me going was here is this most favorite food of humans. Again, talking meat. And people are rejecting almost all instances of it. And they're not just saying I won't eat it. Like you might say about paper, they're actually offended by it. So I said, what's going on there? And that's how I got going. And what do you think about types of meat that we'll readily eat

such as a hot dog, even though we know

There's buttholes in it, but we wouldn't eat just... We know there's what in it? Buttholes. We know that it's full of anuses. A hot dog is full of pink lips and butts. Well, you can't be full of a hole. Well, sure. It's fingers. You mean the liners. Entrails. I mean, I love hot dogs. Don't get me wrong. But I know that hot dogs are full of things that if they weren't macerated and emulsified, I probably would not eat a hot dog. Yes, in actual fact,

I've never looked at that shirt. It's a good question. What's in a hot dog? Do we want to know? Should we learn this?

You know what, some wieners, you got to look straight in the face. So I Googled the sentence, what's in a hot dog? Just level with me. And I got to say, the image search returns had a lot of appetizing photos of like crusty buns, taut meat links and mustard squiggles and the like. But let's give it up for people for the ethical treatment of animals. Just busted out the disgust with photos of...

a vat containing what looked like giant ribbons of milk chocolate frozen yogurt, but what actually contained whipped and emulsified muscle. And I found myself knee-deep in a clip on the YouTube channel for how it's made. Traditional hot dogs are made from a mix of pork, beef, and chicken. The cuts they start with are called trimmings, pieces of meat left over from cutting steaks or pork chops.

And I realized this isn't, you're working with an audio only format and you're welcome for that right now. But I'm going to have you visualize this because I had to see it.

Just think of like an industrial stainless steel tub about the size of a minivan. And in it is a churning, fluffy, grayish brown substance. And I stared at it and I was like, what does it look like? And I realized it resembled Jabba the Hutt just rolling over in his sleep, just over and over. That in a vat, but it's liquid-ish.

I mean, and some of the things like that, sausages are actually encased in intestine skin, you know? Right. Yeah. So there's all sorts of ways that we work around a lot of these things. I mean, after all, people are breathing everyone else's air when they walk around, and they don't seem to be upset by that. Right. You go to a theater, you're sitting right next to someone.

They're breathing, you're breathing their air in. And unless you're worried about COVID, you don't think about it. People aren't too upset about being in the same room as something disgusting, but they don't want to touch it.

Right. So the touch and eat it. Oh, that's terrible. It's just exponential contact. Yes. And eating is the worst thing. And no one, by the way, I don't think anyone's ever done discussed sensitivity of the vagina. But I assume it's somewhat like the mouth. I mean, the idea of touching a piece of raw meat,

I mean, it doesn't appeal, but then again, it depends on if the raw meat is alive and a person, you know? Yeah. Well, I mean, if you look at what you don't want to put in your mouth, it's probably not unrelated to what you don't want to put in your mouth. For sure. Whereas, I mean, a lot of people wouldn't mind touching it to their ear.

I mean, they don't want to touch it to anything, but the ear is not, it's a hole, but you know, it's a neutral hole sort of. So would I touch a piece of raw pork to my mouth? No, not at all.

No. Would I touch it to my newly surgically altered vagina? Hell no, brother. And if you're like, excuse me, what did you get done to wear? You can see last week's episode, Field Trip, Allie's Mystery Surgery. I'm going to leave you hanging. Just got to go listen. Now, would I let raw pork touch my ear, which is a neutral hole? I think I would. I think I would because an ear canal is totally different in terms of consistency. It's not a blank canvas for contamination like a mouth, a

a butt or a cooter. Is it epithelial tissue that makes us squeamish? Well, there's epithelial tissue in the ear too. Is there epithelial? I didn't know that. Well, there's an internal epithelium, which is a little different, which is the moist one that you have in the vagina and the mouth. I fact-checked this and yeah, it checks out. If you still don't believe me, you can...

skip over to the 2019 paper, Single Origin of the Epithelium of the Human Middle Ear, like I did. But epithelial tissue, it's all over the body, okay? It comes in a variety of cellular shapes, like scale or squamous or tube-shaped cells and even cubic-shaped cells. And this type of epithelial tissue, it's all over our organs, our blood vessels, it lines cavities. And if you're like, what does epithelial even mean? I'm glad you asked because I just learned that

its etymology in Greek means on the nipple or of the teat. And apparently, even the epidermis is a type of epithelial tissue. So this is news to me. I'm all ears. You have a little bit in the nose. So it could be the moisture that's

Moisture sort of makes things more conductive. Right. What do you think of the word moist? What do I think of the word? People hate the word moist. How do you feel about that? Yeah, moist is... Well, you know, a lot of disgusting things are damp. Yeah. Wet. And viscera are wet. Well, moist in English...

has a certain negative. If you ask people, is moist a positive or a negative word? Right. Or damp, they would say negative. So moist is a feature of solids that's often associated with decay. And there are plenty of foods that are moist. So moist is fascinating. It has a negative overtone. I think you're right.

in English. Oh, I wish we had a language expert to explain why we hate the word moist, among others. But I stumbled upon an article titled

A language expert explains why you hate the word moist, among others, in Vice. And that pointed me to a 2016 scholarly article called, "A Moist Crevice for Word Aversion: In Semantics, Not Sounds." And they concluded that around 10 to 20% of the population gets the creepy crawlies at the mention of moist. Now, if you listened to our rhinology and our hagfishology episodes, both bangers, in the past,

I left all the shits and the fucks in, but I bleeped any mention of the word mucus for sensitive listeners, mostly myself. And I have since matured. And though the word mucus very much still on my shit list, I'm just I grit my teeth and I get through it. But know that it hurts me. I don't like it.

But anyway, back to that 2016 study, which continued that word aversion is more prevalent among younger and more neurotic people. And it's more commonly reported by females than males, which personally, it tracks.

That's making sense for me. But this is all just when it comes to words, at least. What about culturally? Do certain cultures tend to be quicker to disgust than others? We do know that women are more sensitive to disgust than men, at least in Japan and the United States. These two places I know maybe more than that.

Because there are disgust scales measuring sensitivity. There's an enormous range of disgust sensitivity. There are people who almost show no disgust. Who are those people? Regular people. Regular people, but are there certain neurodivergences? Are people with ADHD less likely to be disgusted? I have no idea about ADHD, but in a quote, normal population, you find people who are hypersensitive to disgust. So for example, dysregulation.

One thing we criteria we use, would you blow your nose in a brand new piece of toilet paper coming right out of the package? Yeah, but there are people that won't do that. Okay. Oh, okay. Oh, because it's toilet. Oh, yeah. I wouldn't care about that. Well, you see, but you're probably somewhere in the middle. Yeah, somewhere in the middle. And there are other people who can't believe that anybody would be like that. And I really don't find feces disgusting. Who are they?

I mean, it also depends on whose dog it is. I don't want to pick up my friend's dog's poop, but I'll pick up my own. Well, that's an interesting issue there, too. Why are we relatively insensitive to our own poop? Yeah. And of course you better be because otherwise you're carrying it around with you all the time, isn't it? Yeah.

So people are definitely much less sensitive to their own poop. Sometimes it extends to your lover's poop. Sometimes it doesn't. Your baby's poop, yes. Mothers typically find their...

- Babies poop much less disgusting than some other babies. And you said it with your dog. - Right. Yeah, I'll pick up my dog's poop all day, but do not ask me to pick up another person's dog poop. Oh man, I just had the cringiest feeling 'cause I remember during that soiree I had with my girlfriends before my surgery, I talked about it in the field trip episode,

My friend Daylin was over early and she's like, anything I can do? And I was like, can you take Grammy for a walk? My hands are so full right now. And I had completely forgotten until right now that Daylin cannot stand picking up other dogs' poop. And she did it. She didn't say a word about it, but I just remembered it. And now I want to die. Also that night, I suggested my friend Sarah. I was like, you've got to try one of these grapes. These are such good grapes. And she reminded me that to eat a grape is easy.

incredibly difficult for her because if it were squishy, it would signify a little bit of rot and she would gag. So I'm over here. I'm just doing amazing. Like anyone want to come see the pig head in my refrigerator or touch this bowl of bone dust? Let's

Let's party. Now, you could say about yourself, your own poop, that that's, of course, you're not threatened by your own poop biologically because you already have all those organisms in you. Yeah, that's true. Whereas someone else's poop might have something that you don't have. But everyone agrees that disgust has something to do with infection, avoiding infection. So there's no question about that. So you could say that your own poop

is less threatening and that's why you are less disgusted. I don't think that's the reason myself. But your dog's example, which I think is not atypical, there's no way that you're less threatened by your dog's poop than by someone else's other dog's poop. Yeah. Maybe it's the devil you know. You know what I mean? Well, it's a familiarity, but you love your dog. That is correct. So you could try to show, for example, the more you love your dog,

the less you're upset about its poop. Now, I once tried to do a study like that. It was about looking at how intimate people are with their dog as a relation to disgust, so that they sleep in bed with it, so on, things like that. We wanted to look at that. So we went to the vet school here. We have a great vet school at Penn. And we went into the

clinic waiting area and we interviewed people with their dogs and asked them these things. And we found much to our distress that almost everybody there sleeps with their dog, talks to their dog as if it's a child, and basically makes it into a member of their family. They treat it essentially as a human being. I plead guilty.

And so we didn't get these people where dogs are kept mostly for protection or something, and they're not really cuddled with. Cuddle those pups, because according to the 2020 Frontiers paper, household pet ownership and the microbial diversity of the human gut microbiota, pets do increase the diversity of our microbiome, with dogs contributing more types of bacteria than kitties. And a 2017 New York Times article, Are Pets the New Probiotic? reports that

Epidemiological studies show that children who grow up in households with docs have a lower risk for developing autoimmune illnesses like asthma,

or allergies. And of course, animals can bring in the nasties like toxoplasmosis or salmonella if you cuddle with turtles. So doctors advise washing your damn hands before you eat. But what if the animal itself touches your food? Let's check out the 2020 paper. Bugs are blech, butterflies are beautiful, but both are bad to bite. Admired animals are disgusting to eat, but are themselves neither disgusting nor contaminating.

co-authored by, you guessed it, Dr. Disgust, Paul Rosen. And it found that the more you like an animal, the less bothered you are by it touching your food. So imagine a butterfly that alights upon your sandwich, just blessing it with peace and beauty. Would you want to eat the actual butterfly? Heavens no. But what if a cockroach

with the big wings landed on your sandwich, one of those big flying ones, and licked your meat. Would you want to eat anything ever again? Maybe not. However, cockroaches are fastidious groomers, and according to our Lepidopterology episode with Phil Torres, butterflies love to slurp shit.

and they're often drunk off rotting fruit. So you would think that studying butterflies would be this hazy rainbow of bliss just set to like an Enya soundtrack. But Phil explains in that episode that in order to lure butterflies, sometimes scientists have to pee on cans of rotting tuna in the rainforest. So butterfly expertise necessitates a pretty strong stomach. Now there are people, occasional cases, neurological cases of people who have no disgust.

What part of their brain is not firing? It mostly involves the insula. Okay. The base of the brain. Related to the olfactory system, by the way, which is not surprising. Right. It's discussed as about basically smell and taste. Again, see our Gustology episode about taste, which is linked in the show notes. And right now, take inventory. If you're snacking on a chocolate-covered banana or a sausage or chocolate-covered sausage...

Just set it down for a sec. It's going to get rough. And by the way, we've worked with chocolate dog do's, of course. We've made chocolate dog do's that look just like dog do's. Oh, no. And we've made it with stinky cheese. Stinky cheese and chocolate. It smells like shit.

And we'd ask people if they would eat it. Oh, no, just the thought of it is closing my throat up. But a simple thing to do is just take melted chocolate and make it into a dog turd. It's solid chocolate, perfectly good. Right, right. Just a reminder, this is a job.

Once again, this is a job that pays money and you need a PhD for it. Amazing. And you ask people, you show them that what it's made of is it's solid chocolate. Would you eat it? And a lot of people won't bite it. I know. Just the thought of it is making my throat close. What's happening? My brain is just thinking about it and saying, do not eat it.

Put that in your stomach. Don't put it in your stomach. And see, the thing about it is that we are built in a way that says that if it looks like an X, it's an X. Because in the real world, that's true. In the old days, if it looked like a tiger, it was a tiger. So you have something in your head that says, looks like dog doo, it is dog doo. Now you know in your brain that that's not dog doo, that's chocolate. But that piece of your head is saying that. Looks like dog doo is dog doo. And

You know, you don't want to touch it. How disgusted are you? Because your home is immaculate. I wouldn't go that far. Your home is beautiful and it's so well decorated. Everything is in place. There's not a speck of dust anywhere. You're well dressed. Your description of my home doesn't resonate with me. Immaculate. It's not immaculate. It's okay.

Yeah. But are you, do you fall on like the cleaner side, the more meticulous side? Generally speaking, you'd expect that most of the people who work in this area are relatively insensitive. Otherwise, they would be disgusted by their work and not do it. I had a colleague who worked with me who was very disgust sensitive. But generally speaking, I'm not particularly disgust sensitive.

There are some things that I don't like that are a little bit disgusting, but no, I'm not disgusting. What's the most reliable test a layperson could take to find out where they fall on the scale? Well, we can start with, I'm just making this up now. Okay. Brand new toilet paper at one end. Would you be upset about blowing your nose in that? Not at all. But I'm assuming that's one way in the extreme. Are you willing to use a public toilet? Yes.

Sure. Yeah, but there are people who are really very upset about that. Yeah. How about used clothing? Oh, sure. I'll wash it. Yeah. I'm just thinking for myself. Yeah. I don't mind any of those things. But then you can get to more difficult things. Some things that almost everybody's disgusted by, like a fresh piece of dog shit.

On the one hand, on the other one, on the other end, you have this brand new toilet paper. And you could just see where you stand. But there's a very wide range. This is something that people are all over the place on.

Just this morning, the same morning this will air because we hustle our bustles here. Jarrett and I went to a park and we decided to spend some special married romantic time sipping coffee and taking this disgust scale quiz, which was co-authored by this week's guest in 1994. So we sat down at a park table. We got to work. All right. Are you ready? Yes. Let's rate our disgust. Are you recording this?

You're already recording? Yeah. Oh good, you gotta set up. Good, good, good, great. Okay, please indicate how much you agree with each of the following statements or how true it is about you. Right at number zero to four. Zero, strongly disagree. Four, strongly agree. So the higher the number, the more you agree. I might be willing to try eating monkey meat under some circumstances. I would say, I guess three. I'm really opposed to eating monkey meat.

But I can't... Oh, that squirrel just did a backward somersault while he was trying to eat a stick. It was really cute. Sorry. I can imagine circumstances... Don't say that. Because I have ADHD and I can't find my pills this morning, I literally just went, squirrel! Oh my god, dude. That is really embarrassing. Well, taking a test. Okay. Okay.

I can't imagine a circumstance where someone would be like, "We're eating this monkey. It's, you know, a thing that we do." And I go, "I guess when in Rome..." Okay, I had a three too. Alright, we can't go through all of these. Fine, fine, fine. Bothers me to hear someone clear throat full of mucus. Strongly disagree. Strongly agree. Weird. I would go out of my way to avoid walking through a graveyard. Two.

- Oh yeah? I used to have panic attacks when I was a kid going through graveyards. Driving by one, 'cause I used to have nightmares of bodies coming out of the ground. Anyway, we watch "Poltergeist." - Seeing a cockroach in someone else's house doesn't bother me.

Mildly disagree. Strongly disagree. It would bother me tremendously to touch a dead body. Too. Strongly disagree. If you have been raised Catholic, you have touched, I've touched so many dead bodies because you, you know, kiss their cheek or put your hand on them. Really? It's like an open casket thing, yeah. I've touched at least three or four dead bodies. I probably would not go to my favorite restaurant if I found out that the cook had a cold. A cold or COVID? COVID.

'Cause that's real different. It would not upset me at all to watch a person with a glass eye take the eye out of the socket. It would not upset me. It would bother me to see a rat run across my path in a park. - Strongly disagree. Don't give a shit. - Um, mildly disagree.

Um, I would rather eat a piece of fruit than a piece of paper. I strongly agree with that. At the end it's gonna be like, "Please eat the piece of paper." Okay, even if I was hungry, I would not drink a bowl of my favorite soup if it had been stirred by a used but thoroughly washed flyswatter. I strongly disagree. I would do it if it was washed. I would not drink it.

It would bother me to sleep in a nice hotel room if I knew that a man had died of a heart attack in that room the night before. Mildly agree. Mildly agree, yeah. You see maggots on a piece of meat in an outdoor garbage pail. Moderately. That's very disgusting. It's still very disgusting. It just is. I would say moderately disgusting because I like bugs. While you're walking through a tunnel under a railroad track, you smell urine. That's just living in the city, babe, but it's still moderately disgusting. Yeah, moderately disgusting. Okay.

Your friend's pet cat dies and you have to pick up the dead body with your bare hands. Slightly disgusting. Well, how recently dead is it? I would say not disgusting at all because it's my friend's cat and so it's inactive. I'm going to do zero too. I think I'm going to go with the recently dead cat. Look at this next one. You see someone put ketchup on vanilla ice cream and eat it. That to me is one of the most disgusting things that I've seen here. That's so funny. That's a four.

A four for you? Because I appreciate how weird it is, but I'd be like, I eat a lot of weird stuff. It's jam. It's jam. Because it's fruit and sugar and spices. Yeah, it's like strawberry syrup. It's disgusting to me. You discover that a friend of yours changes underwear only once a week. That's a three. That's very disgusting. Yeah. I hope that it's, I hope it's circumstantial and not habitual or philosophical.

You're walking barefoot on concrete and you step on an earthworm. I do find that extremely disgusting. Okay, so here we go. Finally, add up all your responses to all 25 and the total will be a number between 0 and 100. Oh, I'm so curious. Okay. What's yours? I got 41. Oh, I got 48. Pretty close. Pretty close. We're in the lower end of disgusted people. Those sirens are not coming from the road if you're driving that was in the park.

So, 48 to 41. Perhaps we're going to make it in this big, disgusting adventure we call life. And it's important to know this because, for example, if you marry someone. Right. Are you married? I am. And I'm married to an absolutely gorgeous, wonderful slob.

I would say I'm normal. I'm not normal to neat. And my beautiful, amazing husband, it looks like a bomb went off in his car. And for more on ADHD, you can see the Attention Deficit Neuropsychology two-part episode with world ADHD expert, Dr. Russell Barkley, as well as part two, which is a podcast about ADHD.

which has How to ADHD's Jessica McCabe and Renee Brooks of Black Girl Lost Keys. And we also discuss really great resources and books for folks who have ADHD and how their family and friends can learn to stop getting mad at them all the time for the way that their brain works. He says he's messy, but he's not dirty. He hates filth, but he doesn't mind clutter. Well, that's another issue. That's right. Messiness is not really disgusting. Okay.

I mean, to most people who are not that sensitive to this. They see that as disorder. Right. But it's not the same thing. Like he changes into inside slippers when he gets in the house. He will not wear outside things into the house. And as soon as he gets home from the gym, he washes his clothes and takes a shower. Yeah, okay. But you see, so there are lots of people who are disordered.

in their possessions, but very clean. I prefer everything orderly, but my office shed is home to at least seven alive spiders, living their best lives just in these dusty webs full of dead bug husks. And my husband, he does a much better job of scrubbing dishes and floors and vacuuming, yet he does not mind at all if his desk looks like it was raided by Vikings who are looking for a pen.

If you're married to somebody who's very different from you and disgust, you'll have great problems with sharing a bathroom. Right. For example, that's a yod or not disgust that you'll use his towel. Sure. He would never use yours. Right. And gets really upset when you do that. And,

There's a lot of areas where you could have difficulty with people. It's all having to do with washing dishes and all kinds of stuff where, I mean, at the extreme, you'd want your own silverware. Not to have anyone else's mouth touch your... It's interesting that we go out to eat all the time and don't even think about the fact that this fork was in someone else's mouth an hour ago. We don't even think about it. That's right. Well, that's the way we get around this. Yeah. We don't think about the chair that we're sitting in in a restaurant. Right. We don't think about how to butter someone else up against it.

We don't think of the people in the kitchen and what they're doing with the food. You know, are they sweating into it? Who knows what they're doing? Unless something hits us in the face, we don't think about it too much.

Well, what about disorders like obsessive compulsive disorder? And I know people throw around OCD, like, I'm so OCD, but it's an actual real disorder that doesn't... Absolutely, but there are a lot. Like the stress sensitivity, there's a wide range of a sensitivity. And a lot of people are OCD-ish, but they're not really, they don't meet clinical criteria, but they have some of the features.

One of the features being cleanliness. It's not the only thing. One form of OCD has to do with hyper cleanliness. And fun fact, that's not the only type of OCD. This is a giant misconception. So there are other subtypes that involve symmetry and relationship questioning and sexuality questioning or intrusive or distressing thoughts like imagining violent scenarios or strict adherence to a moral code.

And even a distressing level of perfectionism is under that OCD umbrella as an obsession. And compulsions are the behaviors repeated to try to feel better or to mitigate the anxiety. And those can range from washing hands to checking on things like locks or stoves to just avoidance that looks like procrastination or seeking reassurance to make sure that you're not an asshole.

And a lot of people have OCD behaviors that they may not even recognize because we're so used to just thinking of like, oh, everything has to be really clean. But it's encouraging to know that it can get better with the right help. Is there something, is there a part of the brain that's firing excessively in folks who are afflicted with OCD? I don't know. Yeah. And I don't know if you could separate clean versus, I mean, there are people who OCD about nothing to do with disgust about pain.

the door being locked, go back six times to make sure. That's very different in its manifestation from a disgust kind of OCD, but they both have the property of being repetitive, overwhelming concern. I was looking at some brand new research from June 2023 out of the University of Cambridge, which found that OCD sufferers had higher levels of glutamate and lower levels of GABA in the anterior cingulate cortex.

part of the brain compared to people without OCD. And the severity of symptoms correlated to the amount of glutamate in the brain. And they also found that those with OCD-like behaviors, but not clinical OCD, have increased glutamate levels in one of the brain regions. Now, exposure and response prevention and more general cognitive behavioral therapy, as well as

SSRIs have shown to be effective treatments, but some psychiatrists are starting to use Lamictal or its generic form, Lamotrigine, which is an anti-seizure medication as an off-label OCD therapy because it inhibits the release of glutamate in the brain.

which is interesting stuff. Either way, I love my brain. I love your brain. And for other neurodivergent folks, this other study recently came out titled Disgust Processing and Potential Relationships with Behaviors in Autism. And that explains that in autism, there is evidence for differences in physical disgust processing and research...

indicates that autistic folks may have higher or much lower sensory capabilities around certain things. So if you're on the spectrum and there are specific textures or tastes that really give you the squicks, and then others you're totally chill with, that's common. And it may make you more adept at certain activities. And we all have individual thresholds, and we can use them to our advantage instead of just being shamed to conforming. Doctors are probably...

And nurses are probably less disgust sensitive because they wouldn't have gone into that. They wouldn't want to deal with body substances. So you get a lot of pre-selection. Extensive experience can make you

more tolerant, or more sensitized. Because you overcame it, your sensitivity could go down. And that's one of the issues in treating phobias. One treatment is to desensitize you, to expose you to very weak forms of your phobia and gradually make it. Another is exposing you to maximum form, which could be traumatic, but in some cases, at least, it makes you overcome the phobia. So, you know...

You can go into a room full of spiders if you're spider-phobic. Oh, I would love a room full of spiders. I have put myself in a room full of spiders. See my office? You like spiders? I loved it. I love them. I volunteered at a spider pavilion at the museum. Free-range spiders everywhere. Spiders are interesting, by the way, because spiders and snakes are a mixture of fear and disgust.

Oh, that's a good point. Yeah. An earthworm is sort of disgust. Yeah. It's not threatening. But a spider and snakes are dry, sort of. You know, they don't have that moist quality that goes along with disgust. Anyway, are we discussing what you want? Yeah. Can I ask you questions from listeners? Sure. They know that you're coming on.

And they submitted questions for me to ask you. Oh, sure. Yeah, this is fun. I enjoy it. Okay, good. Okay, but before we get to questions, a quick break and a donation to a cause of Theologist's choosing. And Dr. Rosen would like it to go to Philadelphia's Interact Theater Company, which is dedicated to commissioning, developing, and processing new and contemporary plays that explore the social, political, and cultural issues of our time.

So they're doing great work. So we'll send a donation there. And we'll also send a donation to the International OCD Foundation, since we talked about them so much, who's working to clear up misconceptions about obsessive compulsive disorder, saying, we know it can be difficult for members of the OCD and related disorders community to hear the term OCD misused, which can belittle the disorder and contribute to stigma. That prevents many people from seeking treatment. And the International OCD Foundation provides resources for learning and treatment. So donations will go to both of those groups. Thank you to sponsors of the show for making that possible.

When U.S. Bank says they're in it with you, they mean it. Not just for the good stuff, the grand openings and celebrations, although those are pretty great, but for all the hard work it took to get there. The fine tuning of goals, the managing of cash and workflows, and decision making. They're in to help you through all of it.

because together they're proving day in and day out that there is nothing as powerful as the power of us. Visit usbank.com to get started today. Equal housing lender, member FDIC, copyright 2024, US Bank. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. And as I record this, my dog, Gremmy, is snoring. So

Sometimes you gotta stop and smell the roses. Sometimes you gotta stop and record the snoring. Even when we know what makes us happy, it's hard to make time for it. And when you feel like you have no time for yourself, non-negotiables like therapy are more important than ever. So if you were thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online. It's designed to be convenient and flexible.

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I've used BetterHelp. It has helped me through some really tough stuff in my life and has really taught me to stop, let myself relax, pet my dog, go to bed early, that I'm worth those things, I deserve those things, and it'll make my life better in the long run. So never skip therapy day with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash ologies today to get 10% off your first month. So that's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash ologies. Grammy says it's okay to nap too.

This episode is brought to you by Merrick Pet Care. And y'all know I have a little dog named Gremmy, which is short for Gremlin. And y'all helped me name her. And there's nothing that we like more than seeing her happy, which means tasty dog foods. And Merrick has been crafting high quality dog food for over 30 years. They were founded in Hereford, Texas.

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Now, if you're a patron at patreon.com slash ologies, you get the inside track to send questions before we record. And many of you had this insider question, including Andrea Devlin, Caitlin Powell, Scott Sheldon, TJ McKenna, and Nicole Kleinman. Okay. Several wanted to know if you've seen the movie Inside Out by Pixar, which has a character named Disgust.

No. You got to see it. It's Inside Out. This is Disgust. Whether advising on your social life or on life's little messes, Disgust is there to, well... Yeah, it's a Pixar movie and they represent emotions.

And one of the, I think one of the emotions is disgust. Sorry, everyone. Okay, but I did look up that Pixar artists wanted really strong colors to represent those six core emotions and that red seemed like a winner for anger. Sadness was blue, of course, and then disgust was...

which was voiced by Mindy Kaling, was a green color because as the designers put it, when you see green food, it kind of indicates that it's gone bad. So let this be a reminder right now to just go grab your leftovers from the office fridge before it starts to smell like Satan's outhouse in there. Do it for everyone. But of course, not all disgust is food related and not all things trigger disgust in everyone.

And then I raise my eyebrows at you. Shadeen Lannan wants to know, what's the deal with things that are normatively disgusting or taboo, like urine, blood, feces, becoming sexual fetishes? Okay. Well, first of all, we have the phenomenon, which really hasn't been studied much, of disgusting features of a person becoming attractive.

And in romantic relationships. Now, when you kiss, things change saliva. But that's not salient. I mean, if you think about it, it's happening. But that's not what makes it a pleasure. Generally speaking, well, okay. So let's just take something. Vaginal odor is appealing to some people. Sure. Disgusting to others.

There are people who will not do cunnilingus, males. Feel bad for them. Let's talk about heterosexuals. And there are others who love it. And similarly, I think for females with fellatio, cunnilingus is more interesting disgust-wise because it's moist. Yeah. So that's a big difference.

Right off in response to this question. Listen, you can do whatever you're comfortable with. It's your body. But if you're very famous and you talk about it on a morning zoo radio program, don't expect people to hold their opinions. DJ Khaled. I don't do that. I don't do that. Not even like for her birthday? Nah. Nah, if she told you she don't do that, is that okay?

I'm not. It's not okay. So either silence is golden or you can go by the golden rule of doing unto others what you would like done to you. Or maybe what's golden the most is showers. Now you get more into the kinky side with people who are interested in being urinated on or maybe defecated on. That's not that common. In the area where something becomes an unusual fetish,

Certainly that includes body products. Why that's true, we don't know. And how it happens, we don't know. And echoing Dr. Rosen's thoughts is the opening statement of the 2021 study, The Psychology of Kink, a cross-sectional survey study investigating the roles of sensation-seeking and coping style in BDSM-related interests, which sighs upon opening.

Empirical research on the motives and underlying psychological mechanisms driving BDSM practitioners is scarce. Not a lot out there. But then I found this 2022 study titled Current Biopsychosocial Science on Understanding Kink, which off the bat answers our burning, what exactly is kink, curiosity with this tight definition. So they say that kink practices can include administering or receiving intense sensation, including but not limited to pain,

eroticizing the expression of power and authority differences, being aroused by unusual sensual stimuli, including specific non-genital body parts or inanimate objects, quote, fetish, unquote, perhaps engaging in role play of erotic scenarios and engaging in activities that induce shifts and changes in consciousness, which is called headspace in kink subcultures. It clues us in with.

And if you're like, ew, freaks, the study continues to say that research finds 45 to 60 percent of people fantasize about kink, but only 20 to 47 percent act on those desires. And that the literature suggests that participants remain highly stigmatized, including by some clinicians, although no studies have found any psychopathological conditions that distinguish a group of people involved in kink from those who are not involved, generally showing that the prevalence...

of previous trauma and abuse experiences, especially by those who enjoy masochism, is slightly lower in kinky folks than the general population. So big shrug here. Let people do what they want if they're not hurting anyone else, unless that person asked them to hurt them and gave enthusiastic consent. But on the topic of rooting around past childhood experiences, Fastcliff, CC Third Bridge,

Shakira, Allahi, Jen, Pompeo, Edward McGregor, and Earl of Gramekin asked in Bass's words, why are we not grossed out by things when we're kids, but they become really off-putting as adults? Well, of course, and the great example of that is feces, which little kids, one-year-olds like. And something about toilet training. Contagion is a major feature of disgust when something touches something else. Something disgusts

and touches something else, it renders it inedible. You wouldn't eat your favorite food of a cockroach or a crosshead or touch a piece of feces. Now, that doesn't appear until about four years of age. Toilet training occurs in our culture well before four, not in all cultures, but in our culture it does. So that a kid who's at three years of age in our culture who doesn't, who says feces, you know, you show them feces, they say, ooh, but if it touches feces,

something that they like, they'll still eat it. Really? So that comes in at about 4:00.

Maybe they're establishing their microbiome still. Well, that's a different kind of account. Okay. You're trying to show how it might serve you a function. That doesn't explain how it actually happens. But yes, you could make a statement like that. But there are people who are much less concerned about this sort of thing, sharing food, all that stuff like that, which many people find disgusting at a

Dinner table. Some people don't want to share other people's food. Right. If you bite something no one or someone else doesn't want, other people don't. That's fine. Yeah. Never mind if they love you. That's yet another thing. But even if they don't love you,

Or, you know, if somebody at the next table in a restaurant is eating something, you think it's better looking, but would you mind them having a piece? You wouldn't love it. I know people have done that. But the point is, you don't mind their cutting a piece of oven given. Right. It might make a big difference to some people, whether they cut it off with a knife. So they cut off a piece that's never touched their lips. Right. Or they use their fork.

which would be contaminating. So there are some people who would be very sensitive to that, and other people who wouldn't even pay attention. As we've evolved as a species, do you think that our disgust tolerance has changed? And a lot of people wanted to know how much of it is learned versus extinctive. How much is nature versus nurture? Which was on the minds of Jessamy Ritchie, Brooke Hicks, Anthony Willis, Alia Myers, Britt Klein, Mariah Walser, Patricia Evans, Heather...

Horton Whedon, Samantha, and Earl of Grammelkin. Oh, and Mari Strombom Johnson, first time class jostler, and Nico Price. There's a sense in which it's all nurtured, a sense in which, in the sense that little babies don't show any disgust. Disgust is universal. Probably the original disgust is something to be avoided for health reasons. My guess is we're predisposed biologically to avoid

Things that, for example, smell bad. Spoiled smell is the smell of disgust. And is that why bodies smell like inherently so disgusting to people? Like, I always read that once you smell a dead body, you never forget the odor. Well, it depends when the body died. Right. Decaying human flesh, does it smell different from decaying other animals' flesh? I don't know. But I'm quite ready to believe that there's a tendency where the predisposed...

to learn that that kind of smell is bad. Oh, shoot. I had long notes here for a whole aside, but I'll cut to the chase. So there are these two compounds that are notable in dead flesh smell, and they are wonderfully named cadaverine and putrescine. And then there's another compound, benzaldehyde, and that also comes off a corpse. And the last one is said to have like the sickeningly sweet odor.

almost almond-like smell and apparently Bath & Body Works scent Cherry Crisp smells a lot like a dead person or a dying person because it has this benzaldehyde and so does Tom Ford's very high-end scent Lost Cherry because they both have benzaldehyde in them.

And folks on TikTok were up in dead arms about this. And I was comment surfing and I saw some great opinions such as, OMG, I've smelt a deceased person and I know exactly what the sweet smell she's talking about is. It's the worst sweet smell ever. And another person said, interesting. I remember someone died in my apartment building and it smelled like rotten meat with old period blood, in my opinion. And then another person weighed in and said that dead people smell like rotting meat,

bad armpit stink and a weird sweet cologne and that the sweet smell is the creepiest because it smells human. So if you would like to get a whiff, if you have a dark sensibility, I guess start with a spritz of Tom Ford Lost Cherry, apparently. On one post about it, TikToker Savannah simply commented, Tomb Ford.

Nice. But then you think of all these people, you know many of them, who like stinky cheese. Now, they like that smell, but only if it's coming from cheese. If you say to them, here's something, sniff, and they smell it's cheese. Let's say they don't know that. Now, if you say,

This is a piece of Limburger cheese. Oh, it smells great. He said, oh, I'm sorry, that's ketchup. He said, oh, my God, oh, that's terrible. Same smell. So side note, if you wonder why some feet smell like cheese, you can thank the teeny tiny tiny brevibacterium, which both lives on our skin to gobble up dead skin cells like its own charcuterie board, and it also ripens many cheeses such as Munster and Limburger. So it's not...

that your feet smell cheesy, it's probably that your cheese smells footy. Have you ever seen those sketches where someone says, ugh, this smells awful, smell this? Hey, Kevin, Kevin, you've got to try this milk, man. It's so far gone, it's unreal. Oh, stop the music, that is bad. Why do you think we do that? Yes.

That's a very, very common thing. People like, this is what I was talking about before about denial, masochism. People like to experience negative things in a safe context. That's a very safe context. They're saying, your smell is, they're not going to get you with toxin or anything. People are very complicated. So they're enjoying what's negative. Some people probably enjoy defecating. Other people don't. If you said to some, everyone,

No one's asked this question as far as I know. Would you rather be a person who didn't have to defecate?

Some people would say no and some people would say yes. Some people might say, don't take that away from me. Yeah, there's a pleasure of expelling stuff. So we differ on all these things. I assume it's the less disgust sensitive people who are more likely to enjoy defecation or even urination. Right. Sometimes peeing feels great. You're like, oof. But maybe that's the relief thing of being like, ah, I'm no longer in danger. Well, first of all, you're getting rid of

heated stuff. So that could be a positive thing. And in addition, there is a pleasure. I mean, the actual acidification produces input to your brain from your anus, and that could be positive. And there are people who sit on a pot for half an hour reading a newspaper and they love it.

And other people just want to do it and get it over with, and I wish I didn't have to do it. These are fascinating issues. They're discussed on a day-to-day basis. I have two more listener questions. Now, there's something called, and I'm not sure if you've heard of this. You don't strike me as someone who spends a lot of time on TikTok. No, I've never been on TikTok. Exactly. By the way, I've never been on Facebook.

Facebook? What? Facebook? I've never been on Facebook. I've never been on anything. Don't bother. It's all garbage. No, I don't want to. I have no interest. It's all garbage. Your life is so much better. Yeah. But there is something on TikTok.

that is called the ick. Have you heard of this? - No. - It is, the ick is when you're attracted to someone or maybe you like them and then suddenly they do something that just, just the ick. Like it might be the way they eat a sandwich. It might be the way that they ride a bike. - So it's not always disgusting. - It seems- - If it's the way they ride a bike, it wouldn't be disgusting. - There's something in Laurel's words and also from Naomi Chaim, Emma Giles, Isabel Brooks, Hannah Michael, and yes, Laurel asked.

When it comes to dating and relationships, why is there such a sudden irreversible trigger that's sometimes so arbitrary? And I'm wondering, where is disgust and contempt? You said anger draws you close because you want to maybe hurt or engage with someone. But what is it that you just say, no, with a person or a situation? So you could ask.

Sure, yeah. No, that makes me say...

The guy's got to do a lot of toothbrushing and a lot of Listerine for me to be drawn in. Yeah. But suppose you're not even in a romantic with a friend. Your friend gives enemas to people in the hospital or something. That doesn't bother me as much as someone who like over pronounces something in a language in which they're not fluent. You know, someone who does cringy behaviors that are just like, well,

Well, there's cringy behavior. There's a lot of cringy things that have nothing to do with disgust. Okay. So the ick has been described by some psychologists as a mix of shame, anger, disgust, and embarrassment. And some people say it is a gut reaction that that person is not right for you. And others say that's not true. It's a manifestation of avoidant attachment issues that you should work through.

So your mileage may vary, but don't talk yourself into something you don't want. But also keep in mind, we all have icks. I ick myself daily and I just have to deal with it. I'm never going to break up with myself. By the way, you get used to everything. Right. But, you know, when you make a decision right now, you might say, I wouldn't deal with that person. And then it might turn out that if you have to, you get used to it. Well, you know, we talked a lot in the beginning about Hitler being a disgusting figure, but where does xenophobia...

come into play when it comes into disgust and people who might have racist or xenophobic tendencies. This was also asked by listener Gemma, who wanted to know about decolonizing disgust. Are they finding disgust in things that they're threatened by? They might be finding disgust in it. For example, if someone from the despised group, could be of race, could be of anything, touched something, but they not wanted to hold it, but they would be unwilling to wear used clothing that was worn by an ex-

where an ex is someone that they really are phobic to. And we can use that as a criterion for disgust. And certainly I'm sure some xenophobia manifests that way, that you don't want anything to do with their bodies or...

Ooh, lightning. That's exciting. Yeah, that's good lightning. And there is some research to be had. Like the 2023 paper, Body Odor Disgust Sensitivity is Associated with Xenophobia, Evidence from Nine Countries Across Five Continents. And the 2019 address, How and Why Disgust Responses Underlie Prejudice, which notes that people treat an atypical person

appearance as a stronger sign of unfamiliar pathogens. And then there's also this paper that came out, Disgust is a Factor in Extreme Prejudice, which notes that bigotry may be distinguished by high levels of disgust. So we've learned that disgust crops up in situations where things won't actually harm us, but bigotry is harmful. Hence, bigotry is worthy of disgust, much more so than disgust over touching an earthworm. What about

Julia Taylor and me want to know, what's the most disgusting thing you've ever encountered? And was it smelly or gory or psychologically upsetting? What is the grossest thing about your work or the thing that you like the least? I have not experienced this, but a rotting human body would probably be disgusting.

about as disgusting as... I've fortunately not had to not experience that. Knock on wood. On the battlefield, you might run into it. In a hospital, you might run into it, but not normally because your body isn't rotted when you first die and it's put into the freezer or the refrigerator right away. But of course, the police run into this and

buried bodies and stuff. I always suspect that that would be the most. And you might expect that it should be. I mean, because it's about meat and it's about decay and there's nothing more sensitive than human meat. And just buckle up. We got a casual revelation coming here. I'm not terribly disgusted personally by the prospect of eating human flesh. If I knew that someone wasn't killed for this matter,

Oh, if someone, say, donated their body to a barbecue? Yeah, if a person died and right after that some of their muscle was harvested, I would be interested in just tasting it to see. By the way, I'm saying that when I actually faced it, I might not be. Right. But I think that I'm curious about that, and I don't feel widely disgusted by that.

And, you know, it's interesting because I do feel like a lot of, say, campaigns toward having a plant-based diet and eliminating meat or campaigns pro-vegetarianism use disgust as a factor in maybe discouraging meat consumption. Yes, and showing people pictures of the way animals are treated, that can be a form of disgust. Absolutely. And since...

going toward a plant-based diet is agreed by most people who are worried about the environment to be a very good idea. I do a little work on sustainability. Oh, yeah. Psychology of sustainability. So, yeah, I think that

Disgust is working in the favor of sustainability because it's animal foods that are disgusting. And so we have this funny ambivalence about animal foods. We don't have ambivalence about vegetable. Yeah. We may not like their taste, but we don't feel there's anything deeply...

wrong with eating a piece of asparagus. Right. We're not upset about pain that it might produce. As someone who may have gotten salmonella from a cantaloupe a month or so ago, I should be forever disgusted by melons. We should have not a good relationship. But no, I had some honeydew yesterday. No ancestors warned or forbade me from diner fruit cup salmonella outbreaks. So thanks for nothing.

And the Bible doesn't have any passages about like, definitely don't eat broccoli on a Sunday. You know what I mean? I feel like... Almost all prohibitions, as I said, are about meat. Yeah, that's right. So disgust is working in favor of sustainability, in favor of vegetarianism. You know, I'm not mad at that. I feel like if you asked me to go kill a hog, I would say, absolutely not. But if you asked me to have a piece of bacon, I'd say, sure, why not? So I think it's maybe coming to terms with exactly what we're...

willing to do based on what we see or smell or, you know what I mean? Like, I think it's... I'm a partial vegetarian. Yeah. And I've become that in the last 10 years. Yeah. There are three kinds of vegetarians, sort of. I mean, some people are all three. There's health vegetarians, which I am not. Then there is...

There are environmental vegetarians, there are sustainability vegetarians. I'm sympathetic with that, but that's not my core motive. My core motive is compassionate. I don't like the idea of killing animals. Yeah, I feel you. I don't want to be a party to that by eating meat. Now, I do eat fish and I do eat the shellfish, and so I'm a little bit hypocritical. And I'm sensitive to that. I don't like that either. But a lobster,

Or shrimp, that's a moving animal. No, they can live forever. In terms of sustainability, if you cut your meat intake 50%, you're doing a good job. Yeah, that's great to know. And it's great to hear it. It's something that I'm moving toward as well. But last question I always have to ask is what's your favorite thing about your work? What do you love the most? Well, I love teaching. I love gardening.

exposing not so much about disgust, but I do teach a little about that. But I like to open students' eyes to the wonders of the world and to how we can actually find out things like what's going on in the head without looking, without looking in the head, indirectly. I love to show them that. So I care a lot about teaching, preparing people to be good thinkers in the modern world. I like to find things out. I enjoy being puzzled by something.

And then saying, I wonder what's going on there and being able to say, well, here, I have some idea now about what's going on. I love to look at the world and see something that doesn't make sense to me. My first study on food was, why would people eat hot pepper when it tastes so bad? Oh, that's a great question. Have you ever seen, you probably haven't seen this on YouTube, but it's called Hot Ones. It's celebrity interviews with people who are, you know,

great actors and serious Oscar-winning actors, and they're in a room with a bunch of hot wings. Then they go from mild to...

call an ambulance and they see how far they can get. And it's people like Cate Blanchett and Paul Rudd, and they're in so much pain. But it's something that, once again, we hate to have it happen to us. We don't mind watching it. Well, but no, but we like it until it gets too painful. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's what got me onto Benign Massacre. It was eating hot chili pepper. And I did some work in a Mexican village on it. And everyone in the village over four or five

eats hot pepper and likes it. And none of the animals in the village do, even though they eat it because they eat the garbage. So they eat hot pepper, but they don't get to like it. So that was to me saying there's something about humans here. And it turns out it is about humans. We got too much brains for our own good, huh? Yeah, well, these are sort of side effects of having a big brain. There are many side effects of having a big brain. I mean, you know, once you've got this brain that can do all sorts of things,

things and imaginations, all kinds of things happen. And they're fascinating. Just a heads up, there's a New Mexico chili pepper scientist very much on my list. I'm coming for you. I'm coming in hot. But that is in the future. And right now, let's shutter up our disgust. What a great time. Thank you so much for talking to me. You're welcome to talk to me.

So ask delightful people disgusting questions because you might find yourself chatting about hot peppers and hopefully consensual cannibalism just in the middle of a thunderstorm. Now, we have linked more about Dr. Rosen in the show notes. Thank you, Dr. Rosen, so much for doing this.

along with charities of choice. And no, you will not find his handle on TikTok anytime soon if you want to be online friends. But we are at Ologies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm on both as Allie Ward. Allie has one L. I'm doing a terrible job on TikTok, but I am there. We also have Smologies episodes, which are filth free. They're cleaned up for kids. They're shorter versions of our classics. To join the Ologies Patreon and leave questions for guests, you can head over to

patreon.com slash ologies where it costs $1 a month to join. Ologies merch is available at the link in the show notes too. Thank you to Aaron Talbert for managing the Ologies podcast Facebook group. Aveline Malik and The Wordery make our professional transcripts. Noelle Dilworth is scheduling producer. Susan Hale is our managing director. Kelly Ardoire makes the website. We welcome brand new second editor Jake Chaffee into the fold. Jake is amazing. We're getting ready for a little exciting shift in

and an addition in programming, debuting on May 16th. So mark your calendars for that, folks. Our lead editor is the very palatable Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Nick Thorburn made the theme music. And if you stick around until the end of the episode, I tell you a secret. And this is one of the most disgusting things that has ever happened to me, ever. And I'm going to tell you about it.

So during this trip to Philly, I overscheduled myself in a way that could have actually killed me. I'm surprised it didn't. I did 10 interviews in like three or four days. I did a keynote to 5,000 people. I had a ton of meetings. And then I had an immediate flight to Catalina Island to teach this symposium. Stress was high. Sleep was little. I was not doing well. So when I got home, I started to come down with pneumonia, as you may remember I had in July. Now, at the same time, flies...

started appearing in our house. Like,

Not tiny fruit flies, not cute fruit flies, like big, hairy, gross flies. No idea where they came from. First, there's just one or two and we're like, oh. And then over the course of a week, we were killing like 30 flies a day. I couldn't take it. Jarrett has this thing called an assault rifle and it shoots like a high powered mist of table salt. This thing is deadly and effective against bugs. It's not humane. I'm sorry. I couldn't deal with them inside.

Does it aerosolize fly guts and then you breathe them in? We're not going to think about it. But my anxiety was through the roof, being so sick with these disgusting iridescent bottle flies everywhere. We kept all the doors shut. We sealed up all the cracks and they kept finding their way in. And we eventually, we killed them all. And about a week later, I took out our Swiffer from the broom closet and I saw fly egg cases in the back corner everywhere.

And what had happened was this one bitch fly laid eggs in a Swiffer wet jet maxi pad thing. And I hadn't taken off the dirty one before shoving it in the closet. So they just nested in there. That's where they were coming from. They were hatching out of a Swiffer wet jet maxi pad.

And anyway, it was truly a blight on my mental health. I think about it and I start choking with anxiety. Anyway, remove the old Swiffer thing before storing it because I didn't know that this horror show was even possible. Also, we have a whole episode on flies and in that I try to get us to like flies. We're doing our best over here, all right? Also, I can't remember if I've told you the secret before, but I feel like it's so embarrassing I probably haven't. If I have, I hope you got the detail that you've been craving. Anyway...

I'm sorry, flies. Just please go find a dead possum or something instead of a mop. If only I was able to make hot dogs out of the flies. I'm going to... Actual gagging. I took that too far. I took it too far. Pull it back. Okay, bye-bye.

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