This episode is sponsored by Blinkist.
Blinkist takes all the need-to-know information from thousands of nonfiction books
and condenses them down to just 15 minutes.
Go to Blinkist.com/SciShowPsych to learn more.
[♪ INTRO]
You’ve probably heard that diamonds are a girl’s best friend,
but it might actually be more accurate to say that diamonds are everyone’s best friend.
Humans love shiny things, from jewelry to cars to even buildings.
And you might think it’s because we associate shiny things with value,
from precious metals to glossy packaging.
But some researchers think that our love of shininess goes way deeper,
and might even be an evolutionary means of finding water.
So let’s look at the evidence.
Studies have shown that people find shiny, glossy
things more attractive and might actually perceive them as being higher quality.
But that’s probably not just an artifact of our polished consumer culture.
There’s evidence that pretty much all humans like shiny stuff, and always have.
The archeological record suggests our love of shiny things goes a long way back.
Archaeologists have found bone tools polished to a shine dating back 70,000 years.
Sometimes that polishing was part of shaping the tool,
but at other times it was purely for aesthetic or even symbolic reasons.
We seem to pick it up at an early age, too.
Kids as young as two pick out shiny surfaces and
gold and silver things as their favorite pieces in art museums.
In other words, we really like shiny stuff.
And if it goes that deep, researchers would love to know why.
The field of evolutionary aesthetics studies
how evolution may have shaped our brains to influence what we like to look at.
And several researchers in this area have suggested that our love of glossy, shiny things
might actually be due to the fact that humans rely on fresh water for survival.
The hypothesis is simple: Because water is so critical for life,
brain mechanisms evolved that help us spot and recognize it.
In natural environments, shiny, sparkly surfaces are often... water.
So our brains may have evolved to associate those features with being good, or safe,
or pleasing so that we’ll know to go over to them and get water.
This is a fairly complex argument, and hypotheses
in evolutionary psychology can be very difficult to prove.
So let’s look at some of the pieces, and how they fit together.
First, our brains would need to have a way to pick out shiny things.
And that seems to be the case.
Actually, it turns out that spotting shiny is really complex.
To process glossiness, our brains take into account light, object shape, color, texture, motion, and reflection.
Like other properties of surfaces, information about gloss is
mostly processed in the ventral visual stream.
That’s a series of brain areas that are associated with understanding an object’s form and identity.
And glossiness-related activity in these brain areas is not unique to humans.
Other primates, like macaques and marmosets, demonstrate similar patterns.
So it’s likely that gloss perception is something that developed a long time ago in our shared evolutionary history.
Research in those primates has identified neurons that respond especially well to gloss,
which suggests that the brain can specifically process shine,
not just general information about texture.
Secondly in support of the shiny hypothesis, we’d need to associate shine and water.
A study published in 1990 suggested that people tend to perceive glossy things as being wet,
even when we’re just looking at painted panels
with no other context that would indicate the presence of water.
And it turns out that people like glossy things even more when they’re thirsty.
In another study published in 2013, researchers
showed 126 people pictures of planets printed on glossy and non-glossy paper
and asked them to rate what they thought about them.
The twist was that some of the participants were asked to eat salty crackers, and then rate the pictures.
It turns out that the people who were made thirsty by the crackers rated the glossy pictures higher,
and the non-glossy pictures lower, than the non-thirsty people did.
Now, third, it helps to show that our brains drive us to like water.
And it turns out that we do have aesthetic preferences for water,
and it can make us feel good, even if it’s not drinkable.
A 2003 study of water features in urban plazas
found that people tend to give them positive ratings.
They can make us feel calm or excited,
but either way water seems to have a mostly positive effect on our emotions.
Other researchers show that when kids look at paintings, they tend to prefer ones that have water in them.
So let’s add it up.
Our brains have evolved circuits for detecting features of water, like glossiness and shine.
We tend to associate glossy things with water.
And we like water and it makes us feel good.
So does that mean we like shiny things because they remind us of water?
Well, we’re not quite there yet.
While a lot of the pieces are there, some are still missing.
For example, you’d expect that there would be
overlap between how our brains process water and how they process gloss,
and we don’t know if that’s the case yet!
And even then, that wouldn’t mean that this is why our brains evolved this way,
or if it’s a happy side effect of some other evolutionary factor.
Like we said, brains are super complex,
and evolutionary theories like this can be very hard to test.
So we still need more research into the relationship between water and shiny,
and how we process that information,
before we can say for sure that all that glitters... is actually water.
It can be hard to find the time to learn everything we want to learn!
But Blinkist is here to make things faster.
Blinkist is an app that takes the best insights from over 3,000 nonfiction books
and condenses them down into just 15 minutes that you can read or listen to.
For example, if you’re into biographies,
they’ve got Genghis Khan and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and everyone in between.
So now you have no excuses to not be caught up on your history!
They’ve also got everything else too, from science to self-help.
The first 100 people to go to Blinkist.com/SciShowPsych
will get unlimited access for 1 week to try it out.
You’ll also get 25% off if you want the full membership.
If you’re interested, you can click the link in the description to start your free trial.
[♪ OUTRO]