No Stupid Questions - 203. Do You Need a Hug?

Episode Date: July 14, 2024

Do humans need touch to survive? Do any of us get enough touch throughout our lives? And why doesn’t Angela want to hug anyone for eight seconds? SOURCES:Ophelia Deroy, chair of the department of philosophy of mind and cognitive neuroscience at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.Kory Floyd, professor of communications at the University of Arizona.Harry Harlow, 20th-century American psychologist.Sirin Kale, associate editor at Vice.Christy Kane, clinical mental health counselor.Carmen Rasmusen Herbert, country music artist and columnist.Virginia Satir, 20th-century clinical social worker and family therapist. RESOURCES:"A Systematic Review and Multivariate Meta-Analysis of the Physical and Mental Health Benefits of Touch Interventions," by Julian Packheiser, Helena Hartmann, Kelly Fredriksen, Valeria Gazzola, Christian Keysers, and Frédéric Michon (Nature Human Behaviour, 2024)."WHO Advises Immediate Skin to Skin Care for Survival of Small and Preterm Babies," by the World Health Organization (2022)."Affective Interpersonal Touch in Close Relationships: A Cross-Cultural Perspective," by Agnieszka Sorokowska, Supreet Saluja, Ilona Croy, et al. (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2021)."Results Revealed for The Touch Test: The World’s Largest Study of Touch," (BBC Media Centre, 2020)."How 8-Second Hugs Can Counteract the Negative Side Effects From Electronics," by Carmen Rasmusen Herbert (Deseret News, 2018)."Confidence is Higher in Touch Than in Vision in Cases of Perceptual Ambiguity," by Merle T. Fairhurst, Eoin Travers, Vincent Hayward, and Ophelia Deroy (Nature: Scientific Reports, 2018)."The Life of the Skin-Hungry: Can You Go Crazy from a Lack Of Touch?" by Sirin Kale (Vice, 2016)."Warm Partner Contact Is Related to Lower Cardiovascular Reactivity," by Karen M. Grewen, Bobbi J. Anderson, Susan S. Girdler, and Kathleen C. Light (Behavioral Medicine, 2010)."The Nature of Love," by Harry Harlow (American Psychologist, 1958). EXTRAS:"Did Covid-19 Kill the Handshake?" by No Stupid Questions (2020).

You know. I'm Angela Duckworth. I'm Mike Mon. And you're listening to No Stupid Questions. Today on the show, do humans need physical touch? Most of the interventions lasted five minutes or more. Wait, a five minute hug? That's called cuddling.

Mike we have an email from a listener named Kristen and she says it's for both of us. Okay. You have to pay attention. Okay? Perfect. Hello, Kristen. I have a question for Angela and Mike. I have a question just for Angela, and I'm like, okay, well, I will see you next time.

I'm just gonna take a nap. Okay, Kristin asks, I've heard that babies can die if they don't receive physical touch. Is physical touch a basic need for adults as well? During COVID lockdown, I noticed a longing for hugs that I could feel emotionally and physically Since then I've continued to be aware of this longing if I go a few days or sometimes even less without hugs Don't you just want to go find Kristen and give her a hug? I was gonna say I knew that's where you were gonna go

I was like Kristen come on bring it in look. I was like, Kristin, come on, bring it in. Look, I think that hugs are really important. I will say my immediate reaction came to my graduate school experience because I was doing a joint degree, so I would move between Harvard and Northwestern every semester or two. At Kellogg, at business school, it was a very like shake hands culture

and very fun and exciting, but at the Kennedy School, it was much more serious. Like you'd sit down to lunch and within 10 to 12 seconds, people were talking about nuclear non-proliferation and you're like, this is not fun, interesting, but not fun. That sounds like Harvard. But what was interesting about it,

my program was mostly international and everybody would greet each other with that one kiss on the cheek or the two kisses on either side of the cheek. And it created this level of obviously very platonic, but intimacy among everyone, because it's such a cultural tradition in many countries. And I found when I would go back to business school

in Chicago, where the program was still very international, but it just lacked the same culture. You know, I'd been for six months kissing everyone on the cheek and they, me, and then you get back to Northwestern and your immediate reaction was, oh wait, no, that's not a thing here. And I found that I missed it. It's not part of US culture, it's not something I do now,

but for that one period of time at the Harvard Kennedy School where it was just something that everybody did, I actually found that it was kind of this really beautiful tradition, and again, very platonic intimacy where it drew people together in a way that I don't think I ever understood before and

haven't experienced since. So when I got this question, I was also thinking about like, oh yeah, what's my own experience? Because we have a kind of a touch history, right? Like when I was growing up, my mom and my dad rarely hugged me. I'm not saying that they never touched me or never embraced me in any way. And by the way, researchers who study touch distinguish between embracing and hugging. Embracing is like one arm. Hugging is like, you know, you're really bringing it in. Oh, it's like the side hug is the embrace.

Exactly. The side. They call it embracing, but it's pretty much a side hug. And then there is something called stroking, which... Terrible, terrible, terrible name. No matter what you're about to say, it's a terrible name. Absolutely has to be rebranded. It's like petting. Okay, that doesn't help very much. Which also sounds so bad.

It sounds so bad. We'll work on another word for that. And then there's kissing, but there are all these forms of physical touch. And when I think about the way I grew up, you know, my parents are born in China. And I had to say, it wasn't like I would come home from after school activities, and my dad would be like, hey, come on, give me a hug. Like, never. Right, right.

Like, maybe graduating from high school. So it's interesting because this form of human interaction on one hand is universal. So there have been these cross-cultural studies. There is no culture in the world that doesn't have some ritual of touch, touch between strangers like shaking hands, et cetera, touch between intimates like parent-child or romantic partners. But at the same time, the same research shows that there's enormous diversity in how much touch is normal and the kinds of touch that are normal. So I feel like I grew up in this Chinese household, even though we were in New Jersey, like culturally, it was pretty low touch.

And I would imagine, I don't have this data, but I would imagine that, for example, in Latin America, it's a very high touch culture. You know, let me look it up because there actually is this paper that looked at touch around the world. There are 14,000 people who answered a survey in 45 countries.

And the bottom line finding is that there is no culture that doesn't have forms of touch, but then there's variation among those countries. And in the survey, which is so cute because they actually have these cartoons, because when you ask people like in the last week, have you done this kind of touch? They use a cartoon to show it.

Right, you have to show people what you mean by embrace. So there's this little picture of these faceless, hairless mannequins who are... It's getting worse. You know, you're like, I'm so glad it was not one of the 14,000 people in this study. But they have four categories of touch that are of central interest. So one is the side hug, you know, embrace, the one arm. The second one, sorry, close your ear, stroke. They literally have a picture of one hand on another

and like an arrow going back and forth to show stroking. You rub someone's arm. I don't understand. Yeah. Have you never done that? Have you never gently... Maybe? Stroked another person's forearm? Never? I hope not. There's something about the moving back and forth that's freaking you out.

Yeah, let's just move on to the next one. Okay, we'll move on. So the third one is Kiss, and they have, again, these like mannequin heads kissing the other with their lips, which you experienced a lot of during your time getting your master's degree at Harvard. Yes. And then Hugging. I love this cartoon the most because like one person has the other person in their arms with their hands touching each other on their back and the other person has their head on

that mannequin's shoulder. It's a very cute cartoon. Hard for me to explain in words. But then you just fill out the survey and you're like, okay, for each kind of touch, just indicate yes or no, whether or not in the last week, you have touched each of these kinds of people in this way from your romantic partner all the way to like strangers. So it's like, you know, friends, children, etc. Obviously, it's not relevant for some people, like if they don't have children. But what the research finds is that China, I mean, my eyes go right to this row in the table,

because it's like really low ratings. There was so much an outlier in that the rate of touching was so low, they had to exclude China from analyses because otherwise they would like... Draw down the average? Exactly. They would like kind of deform the statistical model because they were so far off the mean. And I have to say, this explained so much compared to the United States, compared to Austria, compared to all these other countries,

China was extremely low touch. So you know what's interesting? I looked at a different study. It had 40,000 responses across 112 countries and it happened right before the pandemic. And it was an online survey developed by psychologists at Goldsmiths University of London for use by the BBC, called the touch test.

And almost half of the typical adult felt that society did not enable us to touch enough. And this is before the pandemic. Before the pandemic. This was not a reaction to social distancing, right? Isn't that interesting? Yeah. 72% of people reported a positive attitude toward touch.

This is the dumbest but best line in the survey. The leading reason people gave for why we do not touch enough was consent. And I'm like, yeah, good. Get consent. That is a good thing. Consent is good. We're thumbs up on consent. But the three most common words used to describe touch were comforting, warm, and love. There is this study that I found once, read it, had my mind blown and have not been able to find it since, and it's totally driving me crazy. But I remember it was from decades ago and I was like, that study would totally not be able to be run today.

And it was about light physical touch, just sort of like the hand on the forearm. And this random assignment study was that professors were either assigned to lightly touch the forearms of their students as they were entering or exiting the room, like the lecture hall, versus not. And I think the finding was that the students had, I guess, higher ratings for the course, or they felt more engaged, or closer to the professor, etc. And I have to say, Mike, I know that we can't run this study. I certainly am not going to run the study.

Like I randomly assigned professors to touch their students. Right, right, right. I'm not going to run that study. But I think there is a basic need for us to not just see each other and not just hear each other, but yeah, touch each other. And I actually hug my students with great frequency. At the end of my class, like the very last day of the semester, there's like a hug line and you get in the line or you don't want to get in line and I just want to give you

one last hug because I like I've hugged you all semester and I tell them if they ever see me on the street they need to make a beeline over to me and then they have to remind me who they are because I have terrible eyesight and poor facial recognition and then if they want to but I would like it come give me a hug and Of course, you know, it's up to students, so it's completely their choice. But for me, even though I'm a professor at a university, I'm not like a kindergarten teacher, I think it's so elemental. Like I wanna show them my love.

I wanna embrace them. So here's something interesting, and maybe not super scientifically based, but I think interesting in terms of what you're talking about. First, there was this world renowned family therapist named Virginia Satir, and she would always advocate, we need four hugs a day for survival, we need eight hugs a day for maintenance, and 12 hugs a day for growth.

That was kind of her thing. Wait, is this like in the old days? Is she contemporary? I haven't heard of her. She died in 1988. Ah, okay, okay. Four, eight, twelve. Four for survival, eight for maintenance, twelve for growth. Now, here's a more contemporary person, Christy Kane, who is a keynote speaker and clinical mental health counselor. So again,

I don't know if there's a ton of science, but just her experience. She talks about the need for eight second hugs, eight times a day. And she specifically talks about this mostly between parent and child. Interesting. And there was a journalist named Carmen Rasmussen Herbert who went and heard Christy Kane speak and then started this experiment of trying the eight-second hugs eight times a day with her kids. And this is what she wrote in the end. She said, I feel I'm behind and lacking in so many areas, particularly when it comes

to parenting. I get frustrated and tired and burned out and I wonder if what I'm doing is making a difference. But when I'm holding my children, that all goes away. I don't think about my insecurities, my failures or my worries. During those eight seconds, all I feel is comfort, contentment, and concern for that person and connection. And so I love this concept. Again, I don't know the science behind it, but with or without it, I think that's kind of beautiful.

You're like, I don't even care if there's science. I don't care if it's true. It works. Okay, there is some research, actually, there's a lot of research on physical touch and relationships. And there is so much research that just this year there was a meta-analysis. It's like a systematic review. You kind of like average together all the statistics that have been accumulating across all these different studies. And it was published in Nature Human Behavior, which is a tippy top journal.

So it's extremely credible. And in total, there were about 13,000 people involved in interventions, actually. They're called touch interventions. I don't think the eight seconds, eight times a day hug intervention was studied. In fact, most of the interventions lasted five minutes or more. Wait, a five-minute hug? That's called cuddling. Exactly.

I was like, wait, we need another word for that. But they were mostly not hugging interventions. It actually spanned the entire lifespan too. So you can look at the importance of touch through these experimental interventions. Because the whole point of these interventions was just to see, is there really a causal role of touch? Right. Is it just this thing that people are doing or is it actually doing something to you?

So you can look at babies, you look at adulthood and the typical adult touch intervention was massage, like a 20-minute massage for example. And I was like, yes, please. I was like, oh, now these findings make sense. 20 minutes, 60 to 90 minutes, please. I know, right. What are you talking about? Anyway, I will just say that the most common intervention

for adults was massages of reasonable duration. And then for babies, it was kangaroo care. Yes. You know what that is, right? Kangaroo care? Yeah, so can I just say that I was talking to my niece, and this is hilarious, because we were talking about physical touch, and she's 16 years old.

And I said, yeah, have you ever heard of kangaroo care? And you know what she went to immediately? She's like, yes, there was an episode of Grey's Anatomy where there was a premature baby whose parents had died, and Alex Karev, who's a doctor in Grey's Anatomy, took off his shirt and held the baby skin to skin and da da da. And I said, did you like it because you learned about kangaroo care or because Dr. Karev took his shirt off?

And she started blushing. She's like, well, I mean, it didn't hurt that Karev took his shirt off. Anyway. Yeah, a little both. But it's this idea of skin to skin touch with a caregiver, right? Yeah. So not as fun to think about as a doctor on Grey's Anatomy taking their shirt off, but in these random assignment experiments, I have to say the magnitude of the effects

are really large. Like they're a lot larger than anything that I've ever gotten out of an intervention study. And so there is this highly reliable, sizable effect of being touched. And what was interesting to me is there was about the same benefit for babies and adults. Oh, what? I know, right? I mean, what they were looking at in babies was different from adults. So typically in adults, they were looking at feelings of depression or anxiety or I

think there was also feelings of pain. But with babies, they were looking at, for example, how much the baby gained weight and then also I think levels of stress hormones. Anyway, it's not exactly apples to apples, but the effect of touch was comparable. I mean, really that bowled me over because I guess I would have thought it did matter more for younger. I would have thought so, for sure. Like, do we outgrow our need for touch? Like, of course, we get grown up, but maybe not.

I was reading something by the World Health Organization, which they published in 2022 with these new guidelines to improve the survival and health outcomes for premature babies. And they actually talk about now, the recommendation is to go immediately to skin-to-skin care, even before putting a child in an incubator or anything else.

And they are saying that that shows greater outcomes for children than even going into an incubator. And so they've kind of changed the guidelines for premature babies to go immediately to skin to skin care. Well, this explains so much because I did go, I'm just kidding, but I did go directly into an incubator. So I have this photo that my parents must have taken like through the plate glass of the hospitals.

I was a breech birth, like you're supposed to come out head first and I was feet first. This is 1970, so I don't know, maybe we've gotten better at these kind of births. But I aspirated the amniotic fluid, and so I had pneumonia, like immediately, because it flew into my lungs. I wasn't a preemie, but I had to go into this incubator, I'm guessing, like immediately. I'm not saying this is why my parents didn't touch it, I think it's more that they grew up in China, which is an outlier in low touch. But that new practice of immediately when a baby is born, whenever possible, you put

them directly on the mother's chest. That's what happened when Amanda and Lucy were born. And I think the arguments are that all kinds of hormones start cascading when you have that skin-to-skin contact. It's like a programmed script of sort of like, you're safe, you're loved. And I have to say, there is that speculation that even among adults, there's a kind of like oxytocin flow and there's a bonding. Like my therapist once was like,

hey Angela, I'm going to remind you that you have a body below your neck. And I think the reason why my therapist wanted to remind me of this was like, I can be a little cerebral, and it's like thinking, thinking, thinking, and just— You? No. Me? What? I don't know what you're talking about. But you know, touch is like a basic sense. We have sight, we have hearing, we have smell, and we have touch. When we touch another person, it is a signal that, again, the kinds of touch we're talking

about, like you're safe, you belong, you're loved. So it in a way makes total sense that even from the very first moment of life, you would need it. Maybe what we need reminding is like, turns out we need it the rest of life too. It never goes away. Well Mike, I think you and I would both love to hear how NSQ listeners feel about the significance of physical touch. Record a voice memo in a quiet place with your mouth close to the phone and email us at nsq at Freakonomics.com. Maybe we'll play it on a future episode of the show. And if you like the show and want to support us,

the very best thing you can do is to tell a friend about it. You can also spread the word on social media or leave a review in your favorite podcast app. ["The Daily Show"] Still to come on No Stupid Questions, why does touch have such a positive impact on wellbeing? Oh, I'm loved. Got it.

Now back to Mike and Angela's conversation about physical touch. Angela, I want to share with you, I actually don't want to share with you, but I'm going to share with you a slightly vulnerable story about a hug. I love it when you get vulnerable, Mike, because I don't think you really like getting vulnerable. I know, and maybe my version of vulnerable is different than other people's, but it feels vulnerable to me. So the Utah Jazz hosted the All-Star game in 2023. And during that week, it's absolute madness the entire time. We're running from event to event to event. You have

no downtime because it's just that busy. And it's, you know, an All-Star weekend, so it's several days, plus it's months and months preparing for it. And right before the actual All-Star game on Sunday, there was the first time I really had, there's like a two hour break or something. And I met up with a few friends and we were gonna head over to the All-Star game. And one of my friends gave me a hug and then continued to hold me and squeeze me very tightly.

And I had never had this experience before, but I realized in that moment, I felt like everything in me was falling apart. Like I was barely hanging on. I'd made it to the end of months of preparation and this incredibly grueling week. And I got this, again, very platonic hug from someone who's like a brother, but it felt like he was actually like holding me. Like physically holding you together. Putting me back together.

Yeah. Yes. So interesting. And I'd never had that physical or emotional response before. And it honestly changed how I viewed a hug because I literally in that moment remember thinking, oh my gosh, this isn't just a hug or like a hey buddy or whatever. I am being physically held together when I feel like I'm about to fall apart. But it was not like a two minute hug. This is probably like 20 seconds, but it was enough that it had that both physical and mental experience for me.

Well, I do want to say of that meta-analysis that was published, that includes like all of the touch interventions, that what they found was the driver of how much of a benefit you would get was less about the duration and more about the frequency. So just translating this into practical advice, it's like hug often, but not necessarily for longer. That said, the kind of thing that you're talking about, and I know what you mean. It's not happened to me very often at all,

but very occasionally someone will hug you longer than the socially normal. Yes, yes. Because a hug is usually like what? Like a second or something? It's like hug, over. I'm thinking about a funeral that I went to when I think it was my first funeral, I was,

I think in second grade or third grade, like old enough to be taken to a funeral. It was like a friend of the family and they had lost a child that was around my sibling's age, so older than me. And I'm standing in line and we're all like reading the family and I remember the father hugged me and was sobbing but held me longer than a second or two and just kept holding. Of course, I couldn't process what was going on, but I never forgot it. And so these hugs of slightly longer duration can be extremely meaningful because they are, I think, signaling something from one person to the other. They're not just random. I feel like what researchers

need to do is a more systematic study of the kind of thing that we normally think about. I couldn't find research on like eight-second hugs versus two-second hugs, and I actually couldn't find a lot of hugging interventions. Most of these are like massage for adults or kangaroo care for babies. I think it's a really interesting idea. Have you heard of this concept of skin hunger? No.

So I was reading some stuff by a journalist named Shirin Kala about what some psychologists term skin hunger. And it's this need for physical human contact, not a sexual need, but just need for physical human contact. And the elderly have this debilitating effects of skin hunger because they may need prolonged physical contact more than younger generations, because the older you are,

the more fragile you are physically. So contact becomes increasingly important for good health. You know, if you were like, oh, we need to be more connected. I mean, this is the most primitive way in which people can connect like physically. Yeah, and I was going to say if you're short on your eight hugs, maybe go to a long-term care facility where people need physical contact and you can do service as well. I think what we're saying is, you know, maybe from birth to death, we need to touch and be touched with consent. I mean, the study that leaps to mind in terms of this elemental need to be in contact with

each other, it was done a while ago. So there were only 109 men and 74 women in it. So it wasn't like the hugest study ever. But what they did was they brought people into the lab and you were randomly assigned to one of two conditions. So these are all adults and they were actually brought into the lab as couples. And half of the couples were asked to hold each other's hands for 10 minutes and watch a romantic video together.

And then you were asked to hug your partner for 20 seconds. Okay, so long duration. So that's the treatment condition. And the control condition is that you and your partner sit quietly and rest for 10 minutes and 20 seconds. So no video, no hand holding instructions, and no 20 second hug. So that's the experimental design. And then what happens is that you're asked to do a public speaking

task, which for most human beings, present company excluded perhaps, but for most human beings, it's like very stressful. It's like a classic way of inducing stress in people in psychology. You just ask them to stand up and give a speech. And then what they recorded was blood pressure and heart rate. And they were looking to see what is the effect of warm contact with your romantic partner. And what they found was that for both men and women, this hand holding and the hug kind of inoculated you against the stress because they could see these people in the high touch condition had less of a heart rate increase, you know, their blood pressure didn't go up as much. It's not that they didn't feel

stress at all. And it did make me realize that, you know, like when you watch in these movies and the mom hugs the athlete before they go out on the field. I really do think there is this very primitive kind of like, Oh, I'm loved. Got it. Now I can go off and do something hard or be in an uncomfortable position. You know what I think is interesting is this evolutionary idea. There is a professor named Corey Floyd, who's a communications professor at university of Arizona, but he talked about through an evolutionary lens,

if we look at how dangerous it was to be shunned from your community or separated from the pack, it just makes sense that any sort of touch deprivation would register as a threat where anything like you're talking about this comforting, unifying, loving touch, registers as security, which then you go out into the stressful environment and you're not faced with the same level of response in the body.

So there's some evidence of that from primates. Have you ever heard of Harry Harlow? No, but it's a great name, alliterative and wonderful. Harry Harlow, professor of psychology at University of Wisconsin. So Harry Harlow was the mastermind behind these very creative experiments on primates like monkeys. Now, I have to say that in present day, Harry Harlow might have been canceled because he was really interested in the nature of love.

And actually his most famous article is called The Nature of Love. And it's not a study of people, it's a study of infant monkeys. So what Harry Harlow did was he raised these infant monkeys in rooms in isolation of their moms. I think also in isolation from each other. So it's sort of like solitary confinement childhood for these infant monkeys. And he made two moms, like mom dolls, one out of wire, but the mom that was made out of cold metal wire had the milk. So there was like a little bottle that the infant monkey could nurse from. And so that was the mom that represented

meeting your basic survival needs. And then there was another mom who had nothing to give you in terms of nutrition, but was covered with like soft terry cloth. And the question was when you observe these infant monkeys, what do they do? Well, indeed, the monkeys go to the wire mom that has the milk, you know, they go and like they feed. And then they go right back to the comforting mom who has nothing to give you other than their soft quote unquote embrace. And what Harry Harlow concluded was that we don't just need our basic needs, we met there is a primitive instinct for love. We want that tenderness. And now we know that it's elemental. So that very early study was about not exactly hugs and embraces, but there was this idea

that touch is like the most primitive way that we know that we are in a safe place and that we are cared for. I told you that in my own childhood, I didn't get a lot of it. For me, it was not a normal. But when I had Amanda and Lucy, I have to say that when they were really little, they were babies, right? So you're touching them all the time.

You're like literally holding them, right? Right, right. Then when they got older, I did notice that these other moms hugged their kids more. I mean, Jason hugged them more. I was like, hmm, maybe I should hug my kids more. And as they got really old, like as in they're young women now, I do hug them a lot, but it's not how I was raised.

So it is a little bit like, I'm now going to hug Lucy. Now I'm going to hug Amanda. It's not as instinctive to me, given my own upbringing. I also read something about touch that kind of goes along with this, which is that in all of the senses that we have, we tend to, and I don't know if this is, again, scientific, but suggested by this professor of philosophy and cognitive neuroscience, Ophelia DeRoy, that there's a truthfulness in touch, that we actually believe touch. You always say, like, I couldn't believe my eyes, right?

I wasn't sure if I saw that exactly. But we actually believe touch more. And so, whether that's the hug of a parent to a child, you can say, I love you, but there's a truthfulness to touch where I feel that love in the hug. Tangible evidence is a phrase we use, right? Tangible means touch. And I took this one class when I was an undergraduate called sensory transduction, and that is just a very fancy, multi-syllabic way of saying that all organisms, even the most primitive,

have to sense the world. Like am I in danger? Am I in safety? Is there food here? Like, is that food here, like is that a predator, what's going on? And this is true for human beings, but also it's true of like a single-celled organism. It also needs to know like what's going on, should I be over here or over there? So this class was really

interesting because one of the senses that all living organisms have is touch. Even the most primitive single-celled organisms, like a paramecium, it knows when it runs into an obstacle. So this idea that touch is honest information about the world, you know, we have this expression, seeing is believing. Maybe we should have it kind of like touching is believing. Right, touching is the thing maybe

that we trust the most out of all of our senses. Mike, to close out this conversation, going back to Kristin's question, you know, can babies die if they don't receive physical touch? Is physical touch a basic need for adults as well? I have to say that, Kristin, there's not a lot of research on whether babies will die if they're not physically touched because there are no babies who get no physical touch. But I think the kangaroo care research is really clear that it's really a good thing for us from the very first moment of existence to be in skin-to-skin contact with other people, especially parents, it turns out, research shows, but a doctor from Grey's Anatomy ripping off their shirt to expose their well-developed pecs probably also doesn't

hurt. And to me, the most striking finding that only you led us to, Kristin, was just this idea that we needed even after we're babies. My gut intuition says that if you just think about our normal diet of touch, where you probably don't get the prolonged hug, I think I wouldn't myself recommend a certain duration, but I do think like a memorable prescription and that's the beauty of a number like eight. You tell people like, oh, you should hug a lot. They're like, okay, whatever.

But if you're like eight hugs a day, it gives them like a really specific goal. Right. We love to measure things. We love to feel successful because we check it off the list. We love goals that have numbers. Yes, exactly. We love like feel successful because we check it off the list. And we love goals that have numbers. Yes, exactly. We love like seven day challenges. I don't know, the eight hug a day challenge?

I'm willing to do it, Mike. Are you willing to, well, hey, first of all, do you think that would be a good thing? Like if you got hugged eight times a day? Because I would literally get a piece of paper and a pen and make a little chart, and I'd be willing to challenge you and myself to get eight hugs a day. I mean, if we wanna be all catchy,

maybe like the eight hug a day, eight day challenge. For eight seconds, are we going 888? Oh, God, eight seconds. I don't really wanna have an eight second hug. I don't either. It's a little long for me. I mean, I do if it's with someone that I love, but that's weird elsewhere.

I just think my mind would wander. I would be like, oh, you smell. How about we say a hug of any duration? Because we're in charge, right? Like we're making the rules and there's no science. Like eight hugs a day for eight days. What do you think about that? I'm in. Would that be a challenge for you? Or are you already getting eight hugs a day? No, I'm probably not. I don't know. I'll do it. Can we make the ground rule that it doesn't have to be eight different people? Yes, of course. And we'll make the ground rule that it is always with consent.

Okay, good. And then finally, you know how like people, because they want to get their 10,000 steps in, walk around in circles in their basement at the end of the night? Right. You can't just hug Jason eight times really quickly. I want to put another ground rule in is there has to be a separation in time of like I don't know what this is going to mean, Mike? We're going to have to hug people that we don't know super well sometimes. Yeah. And I think that challenge starts now. Today.

Hugs away. And now here's a fact check of today's conversation. Mike refers to Carmen Rasmussen Herbert as a journalist. On her LinkedIn profile, Rasmussen Herbert identifies as a speaker, singer, songwriter, columnist, author, and reality show survivor. The reality show she survived is American Idol. Rasmussen Herbert finished sixth in the second season of the show in 2003. That year's winner was Ruben Studdard. Finally, in describing Harry Harlow's study of infant monkeys,

Angela gets a detail wrong. Some of the monkeys only received milk from the wire mother. Another group only received milk from the cloth mother. However, Angela was correct that all of the baby monkeys preferred the cloth mother to the wire mother outside of nursing time. That's it for the fact check. Before we wrap today's show, let's hear some thoughts about last week's episode on discomfort.

Hi, this is Marissa from Wisconsin, but now living in Norway. When I was 16, I chose to be an exchange student with AFS for one school year in Norway. The first few months was spent in a blur of confusion and discomfort as I didn't know a lot of the cultural norms and I couldn't speak or understand the language. But it was during that year when I persevered through the discomfort and took risks that I learned just how capable I am as a person. I now live in Norway with my Norwegian husband and our three kids, and I work a job where I publicly speak in Norwegian every day.

On days when I feel like I can't communicate as well as I'd like, I remind myself that having an accent is not a sign of lack of intelligence, but is instead a mark of bravery. Hi Angela and Mike. My name is Megan and I'm from Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Tree planting in Canada is a very difficult, uncomfortable, grueling job. You live out in the wilderness with no cell service, no running water, nothing, and it really pushes you to your limits. I never thought I'd be able to plant 4,000 trees a day,

and I managed to do that when I leaned into the discomfort. However, I have a chronic shoulder injury now because I leaned a little bit too hard and I didn't listen to when the discomfort turned into pain. So discomfort, I do think, is a good thing for us to endure, but we gotta listen when it turns into pain. That was, respectively, Marissa Reinholz and Megan O'Sullivan. Thanks to them and to everyone who shared their stories with us.

And remember, we'd love to hear your thoughts about the importance of physical touch. Send a voice memo to nsq at Freakonomics.com and you might hear your voice on the show. Coming up next week on No Stupid Questions, what are the effects of complete isolation on human behavior? There is no end and no beginning. There is only one's mind, which can begin to play tricks. That's coming up on No Stupid Questions. No Stupid Questions is part of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which also includes Freakonomics

Radio, People I Mostly Admire, and The Economics of Everyday Things. All our shows are produced by Stitcher and Runbud Radio. This episode was produced by Julie Canfer. The senior producer of the show is me, Rebecca Lee Douglas, and Leric Vaudich as our production associate. This episode was mixed by Greg Rippon. We had research assistance from Daniel Moritz-Rapson. Our theme song was composed by Luis Guerra. You can follow us on Twitter at NSQ underscore show and on Facebook slash NSQ.

Thanks for listening. Yep, I wore my underwear on the outside. The Freakonomics Radio Network. The hidden side of everything. Stitcher. Radio Network, the hidden side of everything.