So a couple of weeks ago I got to hang out with Tara Long and Anthony Carboni while they
were doing all sorts of cool fire experiments for their show Hard Science which you should
totally watch and subscribe to if you don't already. As I was helping Tara light Anthony
on fire--I'm not joking we did that--I was thinking to myself first of all oh my god
if something goes wrong I'm going to be partially responsible for a man burning to death--and
considering how dangerous it is how often kids are obsessed with it. Oooh. Oh god.
Here are a few blazingly astounding facts from the National Fire Protection Association.
And yes there probably will be a lot of fire puns in this video. Who are the likeliest
culprits of fires that fire departments respond to? Preschoolers and kindergarteners. Who
gave little Johnny a lighter? Between 2005 and 2009 in the United States children started
more than 56,000 fires around the country, killing 110 people and causing 268 million
dollars worth of property damage. [Singing] We didn't start the fire. Because it was probably
kids cause they're always starting fires. Even though most accidental fires are started
by younger children according to fire experts our adolescent fire interest peaks at age
12. Why are kids so obsessed with fire, from birthday candles, campfires, trying to kill
bugs by lighting fires with sun's reflection through magnifying glasses? That might be
a little bit more disturbing behavior. Evolutionary anthropologist named Daniel Fessler at UCLA
actually researched this very topic and if you're thinking that it has something to do
with evolution, ha, well your brain is on fire. Fessler contends that our childhood
fascination with fire is actually an evolutionarily ingrained psychological mechanism that we
developed because fire was so integral to our human survival. If you look at cultures
in more developing nations where fire might be used as a daily tool, you see kids as young
as five years old being taught how to safely set and use fires. He even says that on average
seven year olds are usually able to master fires. But here in the west due to things
like modern electricity and other conveniences we usually have no need to regularly build
fires or teach children how to build fires, so he contends that our fascination with fire
lasts into adulthood as essentially a holdover from our psychological instinct to learn fire
that we never fulfilled in our childhood. Really all of this unfulfilled childhood desire
is actually starting to sound a little more Freudian than Darwinian but his theory makes
sense. Even though today we might think of fire more in the sense of danger and prevention,
our early ancestors would have considered it more of a tool for living. Not dying in
a pile of burning ash. Which was the fear instinct kicking in in my brain as I was lighting
Anthony Carboni's arm on fire. For that reason kids being interested in fire and wanting
to know how it works and even experiment with it some is totally natural unless that kid
is starting to set fires and play with fires repeatedly even after he or she is told not
to that's when you might want to sit the kid down and see if there might be some underlying
issues at hand. But those underlying issues, speaking of which, might not necessarily be
pyromania. Pyromania which is an impulse control disorder is very uncommon. Most arsonists
aren't actually pyromaniacs at all. There's one landmark study looking at a group of 200
arsonists. Of those only two could be classified as pyromaniacs. Not only that, not only is
there a stereotype of boys being more pyromaniacal, girls are actually a lot likelier to be pyromaniacs
than boys. It's an incredibly rare disorder but it seems to effect overwhelmingly girls
whereas most convicted arsonists are men. Hmm. Are there any fire lovers in our midst?
Let me know in the comments below also it'd be really cool to hear from people who might
do things like firebreathing and other interesting things with fire, not just setting things
on fire and watching them burn to the ground. And hey be sure to watch me and Tara Long
and Anthony Carboni holding fire and doing other really cool things over on Hard Science.