Emily Elias: My cat Juno is so cute. She’s a little tuxedo cat, and she looks like she’s always dressed for dinner, and she has the tiniest little white paws.

But more importantly, I am obsessed with telling everyone I meet about her. And thankfully, there’s a scientific reason that can explain my obsession/madness about her cuteness. On this episode of the Oxford Sparks Big Questions Podcast, we’re asking ‘why are people obsessed with how cute cats are’?

Hello, I’m Emily Elias, and this is the show where we seek out the brightest minds at the University of Oxford, and we ask them the big questions. And for this one, we have found a researcher who not only loves cats, but studies cuteness and our brains.

Morten Kringelbach: So, my name is Morton Kringlebach. I’m a Professor of neuroscience interested in pleasure, but also really interested in cuteness.

Emily: What a fun specialty.

Morten: Well, you know, my colleagues always say, Morten, are you sure that’s science? But absolutely, there’s a science there. And I think the most important thing here, really, is that one shouldn’t shy away from the good things in life.

Emily: Heading into this podcast, you made a very special request that we start by playing this sound. “This is Evelyn. Very clear. Grace and Emma. Okay, daddy’s gonna make you laugh now. Ready? [BABY LAUGHING]”.

Emily: Hang on. Why did I play that audio?

Morten: Well, I think it’s a reminder of how wonderful things are, really. You know, it’s a reminder of what it is about vocaliAations that gets us all warm and fuzzy. And, of course, the reason why you played this and the reason why I requested it is that there’s nothing more fun and warm and fussy than the sound of babies here.

Here, of course they’re laughing, but they could equally just be babbling. And, of course, if they were crying, and imagine what it was like if you had quadruplets crying all the time. It’s heartbreaking. So why is that? Why is it that it goes directly into our brains? That’s the kind of thing that I’ve been obsessed with for some time, because I think ultimately it tells us something about who we are.

Emily: Those are babies. Today we’re talking about cats. How did the two relate?

Morten: So, obviously, every species has some particular things that we are very interested in. Evolution built us in a way so that we could survive. And, of course, looking after our young is probably the most important thing that we can do. And so, for humans, it’s the sound of baby laughter, baby crying, babbling, that is basically what we know that we need to attend to in order to be able to… in order to be able to survive. Not just as just our babies, but as a species.

And it’s not just the sounds, it’s also the way that they look. Now, the interesting thing about cats is that cats also make these vocalisations. And what is even more interesting, of course, is that just like with babies, they make vocalisations to their parents. They will make all these kind of vocalisations to the mother when they are small and then they stop making vocalisations to each other, except, of course, if they’re in a fighting mood. But interestingly, they make these vocalisations to us as a way of really, I think, binding themselves to us.

Emily: Is that vocalisation what makes them so cute, or is it other factors that go into it?

Morten: Well, I think it’s both, of course, the vocalisations. And if you look at the spectrogram, if you look at the way that the sounds are structured, other scientists have found that, in fact, they are very much like the sound of baby crying. Features that make them, your brain sort of think, is that a baby crying or is it something else going on?

But equally, of course, if you look at kittens, they have certain facial configurations that look a lot like babies. They have those adorable big eyes, they have those large ears. In many ways, exactly the kind of features that you would find in human babies. And so we basically become very, very interested in that. And it’s sort of irrespective whether we are men and women. Although, as we’ve also studied, it turns out that a lot of men can’t really admit to finding these things so cute.

Emily: Really. Okay, so why is that? How do men and women see cuteness differently?

Morten: Well, it’s an interesting question. It is one that I sort of… because, of course, most men would say, well, I don’t really find that cute and they will make all kinds of sounds about that. But in fact, if you test them both in terms of their behaviour, but also in terms of their brains, you can see that in fact, they do respond.

So one of the things we did in an experiment where we took a lot of Oxford undergraduates, we basically had them look at babies. So baby faces, and we asked them to rate these baby faces in terms of how cute they were, how attractive they were. And what you find is that most women, in fact, all women, find them very cute. And of course, we also varied the amount of cuteness because it turns out that there’s even an objective score of how cute things are. Something about the proportions, about the eyes, to the forehead, to the ears. And so, of course, women were very sensitive to that. They would find the ones that were objectively less cute, less cute, and they would give them a lower score.

Now, interestingly, when you, then we did exactly the same experiment with men, they systematically found them less cute. So in other words, they scored them lower. Now, interestingly, though, and this sort of gave us a hint that this not all was well, was when they did the same thing to the adult faces, men also systematically would find them less cute or attractive. So we thought, why don’t we do a different kind of task? Because it turns out that the kind of things we like, we can, of course, say how much we like them but it’s not always the best way of actually telling somebody whether you like something.

A much better measure, if you like, is to see how much work you put into it, how much you want something. And so we had a different task where you saw an image on the screen, the same images as before, and now there was a bar that was slowly decreasing, and you could stop that from decreasing because you knew that when they got to the bottom, then the image would go away. Now, if you then press the button on a keypad, a lot of times you could slow that progression. In other words, so you could keep that image longer.

What you found in the women is that, again, the most cute babies got them working more than the less cute babies. And interestingly, you found, of course, the same in men. But even more interesting than when you looked at that measure, there was no difference between men and women, suggesting that perhaps it’s not okay for men to say that we like babies.

And in fact, if you start to then look at their brains, which we also did using, a machine called a magnetoencephalography, which is a machine that looks like a giant hair dryer, but is quite unique in that it allows us to look at what happens over thousands of a second. So, in other words, we can track the signals as they get into our brains and what we then do about them. And what we found was, and this was really quite surprising initially, was that when you see something cute, what happens is it comes into your eye and then immediately goes to the back of your brain, which is where the brain starts to process it, sort of sorts out the lines. And at some point, about 130 milliseconds, a 7th of a second, there’s a part of your brain, which is at the back of the brain, which is called the fusiform face area, where if you record from there, you can find that basically, this is where faces are. Hence the name.

So, anyway, the signal comes in here. And what we found using this particular scanner was, most to our surprise, that at the time when you actually see a face (but only for the baby faces and not for the adult faces, and irrespective of whether they were happy or whether they were sad or whether they were neutral), we found that there was activity in the orbitofrontal cortex. Now, the orbitofrontal cortex is very much in front of your brain, is just over the orbits, over the eyeballs. And in this particular region, in many other studies that we’ve done on things that we find pleasurable or painful, things that evoke some kind of emotionalness, this is the key region. But we’ve always thought that this part of the brain was something that happened later. You realize what is out there, and then you form an emotion about it.

But the exciting thing about this is that when you were looking at the babies, because there was activity both in the fusiform face area in the orbital frontal cortex at the same time, that suggests that it’s almost automatic. So, in other words, what is happening here is you see a baby, and even before you’re conscious of it, your brain has already decided that this is cute. This is kind of exciting, right?

Emily: I mean, it’s very exciting, but this is looking at babies. Does that then apply to animals like little cute kittens and puppies and all those sorts of wonderful little pets that we have running around our houses?

Morten: Yeah. I mean, certainly in the visual domain. We ran an experiment where we looked at what happens when you not only look at babies, but also at kittens and puppies. And initially, it’s the same kind of response as what you get for the babies.

And only later does your brain realize that it’s not actually a baby, but then it’s too late. You’ve already gone, oh, this is really important, this is cute. And something very similar happens in the auditory domain. When you hear a baby cry, for instance, it goes directly into your brain, and you know that you need to do something. And even though we haven’t done that particular experiment yet, it stands to reason that that’s exactly what would happen if you played these baby, these kittens crying or making sounds that kind of get right into the heart of us.

Emily: I am very obsessed with my cat, and I get so much joy just, like, telling everybody about her, even though I can completely tell that they don’t care as much as I want them to care. Why do I get such pleasure from my little cat?

Morten: Well, I mean, why do we get pleasure from anything in the first place, right? I think in this case, of course, you’re sharing something that you really love. And, you know, many people have the same kind of thing with their babies. Many people have it with their dogs, many people have it with their partner. There’s something about sharing that I think speaks to our humanity. And this, of course, is why I’m interested in cuteness in the first place, because I think it’s sort of like a door. It’s an opening. And if we share, and as we do love for cats, I think that really gives us a platform for building a much deeper relationship.

And at the end of the day, I mean, it’s really about being with other people. There’s a saying in Wolof, which is a language from Senegal in West Africa, which is called Nit Nithai Karabam – people are people’s medicine. And in many ways, of course, the reason why I’m also interested in these things is because by just having a single shot of four laughing babies in the morning, or looking at beautiful kittens and, obsessively, perhaps, looking at cat videos on the internet, we might actually find a way in which, and especially if we’ve related to other people, we might find a way where this day could be a little brighter, where we could find some flourishing in this day.

Emily: Could it be a case that, like, one day, I’ll say, I’m feeling sad, and a doctor would go, you know what you need? Cat videos! Like, I could get prescribed cat videos to help lift my mood.

Morten: Oh, wouldn’t that be wonderful? And not just any kind of cat movies, because, you know, as I can hear that you also are a connoisseur of cat videos, there really is a sort of a, there’s a spectrum, right? I mean, some of them are funny, some of them are quite moving in different ways.

So, yes, I would hope that there would be something like that, but I would also hope that you would keep sharing it with other people, because, of course, that is really what is important. In many ways,a lot of these things that we do for pleasure, and this is really what the rest of my research is about, is what are the things that gives us pleasure? How can we alleviate the kind of suffering that we all feel? Could it be that cat videos, or perhaps even drugs could give us a sense of meaning? And I feel very strongly, just listening to you talking about your cat, is that there’s something about the cat that makes you actually get meaning in life, and you get even more meaning as you are sharing that love with others.

Emily: Yes, well, I’m definitely stepping into my crazy cat lady era and embracing it. And I’m happy for that because despite the agony that she puts me through when she does crazy things like eating onions from the stove, I get so much pleasure and joy from her.

Morten: Yeah, I mean, there’s something about the unexpectedness of that. Why would you do that and not get tearful from that, right? But also, and this is something that has always sort of bothered me a bit, why would we call it crazy cat woman? I mean, what is there crazy about love? I mean, love is, of course, crazy, as we know from Beyonce, but at the same time, I mean, there’s nothing wrong with having those strong passions, right?

Emily: Well, I mean, I guess we could get into the whole world of misogyny, and maybe, that would explain the differences between men and women reacting differently to cuteness.

Morten: Well, maybe. And of course, going back to the question of why is it that men can’t actually say how much they love these things is definitely to do with the culture, right. And maybe, again, there’s something about men are not supposed to say that they really like cats. They’re certainly not allowed to talk about their love for children, which I always found odd, because, of course, we are humans. Yes, we share the same kind of loves. And the more we are able to do that, even if we do it covertly, and not just on a podcast like here, where I finally come out as the crazy cat man, right? it’s important. Yes, it’s important to share the love.

Emily: Well, let’s be crazy cat people together.

Morten: Absolutely. Count me in.

Emily: This podcast was brought to you by Oxford Sparks from the University of

Oxford, with music by John Lyons. And a special thanks to Professor Morton

Kingelbach, who would love it if you would send photos of your cats over. Seriously, he loves cats.

Tell us anything about this podcast. We are on social media @OxfordSparks, and we have a website oxfordsparks.ox.ac.uk.

I’m Emily Elias. Bye for now.