Adam Taylor

Also, new mums, the baby can hear the maternal heartbeat, but it's certainly also to do with seeing the left side of the mum's face.

It's why also old school portraits are much more likely to feature the left side of the face.

Think of the Mona Lisa.

Again, left side of the face, lots of portraits.

Interestingly, when portraits aren't designed to show emotion, for example, portraits of stuffy scientists, there is no leftward bias.

So when you don't want to show emotion, you don't preferentially show the left side of your face.

I don't know if there's been research on that.

One thing about this left-sided bias is that it's sort of unconscious.

We don't know that our left side of our face is more emotionally expressive, but we unconsciously know it.

So whether we would admit to it, I genuinely don't know.

But we are attuned to it and have been since birth because, as I said, of the way our brain controls our face.

Yeah, certainly.

We are awesome throwers, and throwing is a superpower that sets us apart from other animals.

Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, can chuck a ball at about 19 miles per hour, 30 kilometers an hour.

An eight-year-old baseball pitcher can reach more than double that.

And throwing is one of the reasons why we are what we are today.

It was critical to our evolutionary success.

You know, we, unlike lions and wolves and dogs, we don't run fast, we don't have claws or fangs.

So we would struggle in a fist fight, as it were, with a lion, but we can throw a rock or a spear.

And that gave us a huge advantage in evolutionary terms.