When you are fascinated by the mascot of the Winter Olympic Games, "Ice Pier", don't forget the Mascot of the Winter Paralympic Games, "Snow Melting". (Source: Beijing Winter Olympics Organizing Committee official website)
When you read this article, in the online store of the Olympic official flagship store, the two hottest ice piers have been sold out and removed from the shelves.
Written by | Joel Frohlich
Translate | Zhang Xue
Edit | Twenty-seven
In 2022, the mascot of the Beijing Winter Olympics, the "ice pier", has really become the top stream, first fascinated a number of athletes and journalists, and then relying on "Carmen" and "shivering snow" on the hot search. Obviously, in the cold winter, no one can refuse a "rock candy rolling". But why is the ice pier so cute that it "hits the heart"?
Japanese journalist Tsujioka Yoshido who bought too many ice pier badges and was spat out of the circle (Source: CCTV News)
In English, the word "cute" first appeared as an abbreviation of the word acute, which originally meant "alert, intelligent, or shrewd." In the early 19th century, Elementary School students in the United States began to use the word cut to describe cute or attractive things. But in some contexts, cuteness also means fragility: the French word for "cute" is mignon, but the word also means "petite and pretty", and its etymology comes from the English word minion, meaning servant or subordinate. The Japanese word for cute "kawaii" (かわいい, pronounced Kawaii) has a similar meaning – the word first appeared in the 11th century to mean "poor".
Obviously, the cuteness of the ice pier is not created by the pitiful image of ChuChu, we prefer to call it "cute": big eyes, short hands and short legs and disproportionate heads———— these baby-like features, so that the mascot of the Winter Olympics that looks full of vitality can also look innocent and cute.
Infant schema
It wasn't until the 20th century that Nobel laureates Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen described what people thought was cute or endearing, the "infant schema": round eyes, fat cheeks, high brow bones, small chins, and proportions of large heads and small bodies. These traits are essential for human evolution because they help the brain identify weak babies and give them attention and care to help them survive.
From the appearance, many "cute things" are a weak and vulnerable image, but the characteristic of "cute" is very powerful. In 2016, Morten M. Thompson of the University of Oxford L. L. Kringelbach et al. published a review of "cuteness." In the article, they say that "cuteness" is "one of the most fundamental and powerful forces capable of shaping human behavior."
In fact, the judgment of "cuteness" may be necessary for humans. Klingerbach's team did an experiment in which they showed the faces of infants and adults and examined brain activity when participants saw these images. They found that the brain reacted in less than a seventh of a second after seeing the "cute thing." His team concluded that "cuteness" is the first key to unlocking the brain's rapid attention resources, after which the brain networks about empathy and empathy come into play.
The Brain's "Master Key"
If cuteness is such an important key, can a locksmith forge a master key? Decades ago, Lorenz and Tynbergen introduced the concept of "supernormal stimulus," a stimulus that is more prominent or intense than natural stimuli. In a classic experiment, Timbergen found that if real goose eggs were placed with white volleyballs, geese were more likely to roll the volleyballs back to their nests. In the eyes of these geese, larger, rounder white volleyballs are clearly more attractive than real goose eggs. Here, volleyball is an extraordinary thrill.
Similarly, the baby features of the ice pier may be more prominent than that of real babies, which makes it an extraordinary thrill: too cute, too cute to resist, and at the same time not as difficult to serve as real babies. This "cuteness" doesn't make us want to actually raise an ice pier or a giant panda (?). But our brains are still "hijacked" by the oversized eyes and bicephalic bodies of such cute images. It's as if we evolved the ability to perceive sugar in food just to get better energy, but now that ability makes us fall in love with sweets.
Ice piers shake snow (Source: CCTV)
Cute cartoon images, like extraordinary stimuli like high-sugar foods, stimulate our brain's nucleus accumbens, a neural structure that is critical in the brain's reward loop. Neurons in the nucleus accumbens can release the "source of happiness"—dopamine. Studies have shown that extraordinary stimulation activates the nucleus accumbens, allowing the brain's entire attention to focus on the reward response. This phenomenon was studied by an international team of researchers who manually processed photos of babies to make them "cuter" or "less cute" than normal babies, thus screening out facial features that people thought were supernormal stimuli. The researchers showed the women real and processed pictures and scanned their brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). As the researchers envisioned, an increase or decrease in cuteness had a significant effect on metabolic activity in the nucleus accumbens, suggesting that this brain region is able to respond to extraordinary stimuli and stimulate altruistic and nurturing behaviors toward infants.
Other extraordinary stimuli such as sugar activate the brain's reward circuits in a similar way. One showed that dopamine activity in the cerebral nucleus accumbens region of laboratory rats was associated with the amount of sugar they ingested. Similarly, researchers in Oregon have shown that obese adolescent women who enjoy chocolate shakes also exhibit extraordinary brain activity in their caudate nucleus (the caudal nucleus is a brain region adjacent to the accumbenda, also associated with the reward mechanism). It seems that whether it is the cuteness of the baby, or the sugar, or other reward stimuli, it seems that they all have the privilege of opening up the brain's attention system first. For the brain's reward circuit, the ice pier is the same as a cup of hot chocolate.
"Superficial Love"
The science of "cuteness" has both intuitive and puzzling parts. Two hundred years ago, "cuteness" may have been just a linguistic concept that just emerged. Today, it has become a shortcut to quickly accessing our critical neural resources of attention, love, and care.
Our love for the ice pier may instead reveal the "superficiality" of human emotions: Why is love inspired by such shallow outward features rather than by deeper criteria of judgment? Klingerbach and colleagues want to learn more about these "algorithms" of the brain. In any case, as people's cultural awareness of cuteness continues to grow, big eyes or round faces may become more deeply rooted in people's hearts.
Cover source: International Olympic Committee
Original link:
https://aeon.co/ideas/how-the-cute-pikachu-is-a-chocolate-milkshake-for-the-brain
Reference Links:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12933362/
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0001664
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19025237/
http://www.pnas.org/content/106/22/9115.full
https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/pdf/S1364-6613(16)30042-0.pdf
The reproduced content represents the views of the author only
Does not represent the position of the Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Source: Global Science
Edit: Paarthurnax