Podcasts are fun. It’s like phasing out of whatever you’d been dealing with through the day and tuning in to some quiet, relatable me time. Pre-pandemic days, podcast used to be my default playlist while driving to & from work. These days, they are more part of my horrible cooking routine. The cooking is horrible, the routine is not. Anyway, couple of days ago, I listened to this interesting podcast called Kleptotherm by Radiolabs. They have a fleet of amazing podcasts all through this past year, but this one struck a chord with something deep inside my mind. While this ain’t a Radiolabs publicity post, do check that podcast out, and you won’t be disappointed.
First, definitions:
In the animal kingdom, kleptothermy is any form of thermoregulation by which an animal shares in the metabolic thermogenesis of another. Penguins do it to keep their eggs warm, cold-blooded animals do it to survive, and cute vervet monkeys benefit from thermoregulation by sticking together in groups and forming complex social networks. Literal meaning – thermal theft. For this piece though, I am talking more about social kleptothermy/thermoregulation that’s an attribute of humans behave in the society.
While the “Kleptotherm” podcast itself has 4 different story lines, one stuck on with me. They described this experiment by a research group evaluating the “physical” effect that people and inter-personal relationships have on a person’s body temperature. A very simple experiment. Its called the Cyberball study. There’s a cyber space of “room” filled with participants – people who may or may not know each other. There’s a researcher leading this study. The study itself is simple. On entering the experiment, the participant is invited to play “virtual catch” with two other computer players. In that, they “throw” a ball to each other, including the participant, in turns. Keep repeating this process for a while, but then, after a few turns – start skipping the participant. Start intentionally “excluding” someone from the group activity. Resultant effect being the participant is anticipating that in the next turn they will be playing with the group as well, but to their dismay – they keep being excluded. The point of the entire study was to understand what happens to your body temperature when you feel “excluded” in a group. All participants had a wearable thermometer attached to their hands. Temperatures were recorded before starting the experiment, and during the study. As you may have guessed reading so far – participants who were intentionally skipped during the experiment rated the temperature of the room being “colder”. And not simply a mental perception. The wearable thermometers recorded their skin peripheral temperature dropping as the experiment progressed. Simply put, this mental perception of being excluded from a group manifested to their physical realities. All this while playing catch with cyber participants – absolute strangers – and feeling excluded. Says a lot about human relationships, doesn’t it? And the cold-blooded-loneliness associated with them.
Now, it may be just me reveling over this fact here – I’m a little ignorant that way. It may be common knowledge to a lot of folks. But I couldn’t help wonder how easily this ties down to real life incidents. All those phrases start making sense – more than ever – now that they’re backed by science:
“You make my soul feel warm”
When someone says, “I just feel cold around you”
Or how “somebody’s smile fills you up with warmth”!
Or how when describing a person you tend to say your feelings for them are “warm” or “cold”
Or why you tend to feel cold before an interview or a difficult presentation at work.
Or how stage fright is accompanied with sometimes feeling cold in a packed room, and sometimes how the simplest of compliments can put you at ease in a group of strangers.
On some level, it’s almost intuitive, and ties in very well with the whole idea of how human beings are social animals and how we thrive best when we know we have a safety net of people to fall back on. You tend to think of this as something that’s purely psychological. However, insights from this experiment dictate that feeling “cold” or “warm as a mush” in somebody’s presence can extend to your physiology as well. Disclaimer: I don’t mean that people who associate as loners don’t thrive at all. They do, perhaps even better – I don’t have statistically significant data to support this. And for a person who’s had a love-hate relationship with this notion of “people being imperative to your existence in a society”, I’m intrigued by the results from this study. For a good part of by late teens and twenties, I ran with the misanthropic assumption that except in certain scenarios, people and the baggage they bring add an unnecessary distraction to your pursuit of aspirations in life. You do end up doing a lot of stuff, but something is always amiss. Perhaps it’s just this “warmth” associated with having people around.
Involuntarily, for the last 5 years, I have been using this idea behind social kleptothermy quite a lot. Changing continents isn’t easy. Leaving behind people you’ve known all your life isn’t easy. It’s so easy focusing on the task at hand: getting that thesis done, working through your job. But the moment your mind is off whatever the heck you wish to achieve, there’s always this void. A gap that needs to be filled. A warm, mushy feeling missing from your core. Now when I look back at all those moments when this happened in the past, I find myself involuntarily reaching out to the people around. Always. Folks at school, folks at work, folks continents apart. In person, through video calls, through unending phone calls. Purely from personal experiences, I believe now that this knowledge of having a safety net in the form of people you can rely on makes you braver. You tend to take more risks, because you know somebody will help you clean up the mess if things go haywire. Knowing that you’ll always have someone looking out for you, or to hold you when and if you fall. You need to be absolutely vulnerable for this idea to work, but it’s totally worth it.
After this experiment and based on the findings, the researchers made a hypothesis that if social scenarios can cause a person’s peripheral temperatures to “drop” – can you “fool” the system by inducing physical warmth and make the participant feel more “included” in the group? During an extended version of this experiment, the researchers offered a hot and cold beverage to all participants. They noticed that folks who felt “excluded” opted readily for the hot beverage, AND reported feeling better after simply holding a warm cup of tea. Which means, as easy it is for the social equation to put someone at blatant unease, it is equally straightforward to put someone out of their misery in a social situation! (Hint: Sheldon Cooper saying “May I offer you a hot beverage?”)
Simply put, in the human context, being a kleptotherm is about sustaining each other’s cold, cold hearts by borrowing – and at the right time – lending “warmth” to each other. And no, the gestures don’t need to be elaborate for “kleptothermy” to work. Things such as –
Whiling away on a lazy, all-to-yourself Saturday and being pleasantly interrupted by a video call from the other side of the world – only to resume conversations left aside 5 years ago.
Waiting in line at the grocery checkout corner, watching a baby making faces at your – you returning the favor – and watching the baby cooing out of joy.
Watching a random set of parents fuss over their child for the perfect graduation picture.
Walking into a café and striking a disarming conversation with the barista about the state of life as we know it.
Just “listening” patiently to a person when they feel like ranting instead of offering them solutions to fix the situation.
Simply saying “I’m here for you if you need me” to someone who is struggling but doesn’t yet wish to talk about it.
In my humbly flawed opinion, these in fact, are the simplest gestures us humans are capable of. My best friends are all sadistically funny creatures. They derive special pleasure out of reminding me time and again that “it’s really people you need at the end of the day”. I usually brush them off, calling out their preachy talks as random hocus-pocus. I’m sure they have a derisive smile plastered on their faces reading this as I agree that, “yes, people are what you need at the end of the day”. Call it a change of heart if you may, I prefer “upgrading your understanding using science-backed-data”.
Given the year that was, and the pandemic enforced social distancing – social thermoregulation is more important now than ever. Holding onto folks around is imperative. And at times challenging. Adulting is difficult, makes us lose focus on things that should matter and instead chase something else. Its easy to forget our lessons in kindness and empathy. Interestingly, its simple enough to keep reminding ourselves of the very nature of social dynamics we live in, and work towards making it better for everyone involved. A simple post-it note reading “be kind” in front of your work desk can do wonders. You’d be surprised to see how effective it can be. At the end of the day, we are all kleptotherms – you and I..!
PS and References:
1. You can read more about the Cyberball experiment and the over-arching research behind it here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22717422/
2. The Radiolab podcast that this piece is named after is here: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/kleptotherms
3. I’d love to know your thoughts about this piece! 🙂
Musings of a Nyctophiliac..! 