Something You Should Know
Strange Secrets of the Human Body and Why Your Brain Requires Friends
10 Nov 2025
Chapter 1: Why does other people's skin feel softer than your own?
Today on Something You Should Know, why other people's skin usually feels softer than your own. Then, strange things about the human body, like why you intuitively know to show the left side of your face.
In fact, research shows that selfies on social media are much more likely to be left-sided than right-sided. And also, interestingly, pictures of left-sided faces get more likes on social media because the left side of the face is more emotional.
Also, the research that shows how a glass of water helps people lose weight. And the very latest on our need for friends and the dangers of social isolation.
And that's probably because in an ancient world where being in groups made us survive, being alone meant you're closer to death. And so when we are isolated, it basically triggers a stress response. Our brains and bodies react as if there is an imminent threat.
Chapter 2: What strange things about the human body do we often overlook?
All this today on Something You Should Know.
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I don't know if you've ever noticed this, but something kind of strange happens when you touch someone else's skin. And that's what we're going to start with today on Something You Should Know. Hi and welcome. I'm Mike Carruthers. If you've ever noticed, when you touch someone else's skin, it often feels softer than your own. And it's not your imagination, but it is an illusion.
In a fascinating study, researchers found that people consistently rated another person's skin as softer and smoother than their own, even when there was no physical difference at all. The scientists believe this social softness illusion exists to encourage human bonding, that is, to make physical touch feel rewarding to both people involved.
What's even more interesting is how specific this illusion is. It's strongest when the touch is intentional and gentle, the kind of slow stroking that typically feels pleasant to the person being touched. In other words, our brains are wired so that it literally feels good to touch someone else, which helps us form and strengthen our social connections. And that is something you should know.
The human body is full of surprises. There are things going on inside you right now that would probably amaze you if you knew. Strange quirks, clever design features, and a few downright weird facts that most of us never learned. My guest, Adam Taylor, has collected some of the most fascinating insights about how our bodies really work.
And he put them in a book called Bodypedia, a brief compendium of human anatomical curiosities.
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Chapter 3: How does the left side of the face express emotions differently?
He's a writer and journalist who is here to share some of the most surprising and delightful things you never knew about you. Hey, Adam, welcome to Something You Should Know.
Hi, nice to speak to you.
So first, explain why you decided to look at all these anatomical curiosities. Why?
Inside us is an amazing machine, an amazing piece of art.
Chapter 4: What role does friendship play in our health and longevity?
And almost none of us have any idea, really, what it's made of, how it works, how it was named. So I wanted to bring it and its stories to light.
And so let's start with goosebumps, because I think everybody has experienced goosebumps in some situation or another, and I've never understood why. What's the purpose?
Well, goosebumps are made by tiny muscles in our skin called erector pili.
Chapter 5: Why is social isolation considered a health threat?
And these erector pilar muscles attach to hair follicles. So when they contract, they pull the hairs up and away from the skin. So the skin bunches up, making the goose flesh. Hence erector pilar's name. Pilar is hairs in Latin, and erector means how it sounds. Something that erects things.
But the strange thing about our goosebumps is that they don't really have a function at all, other than to remind us that we're descended from animals. Animals have hair that sticks up on end when they're scared or for protection, like a porcupine with its quills sticking up. A porcupine's quills are actually hair.
Animals' hair also sticks up when it's cold to keep them warm, a bit like the way air inside a down puffer jacket insulates. But our goose bumps are also triggered by terror and cold, but we don't have quills to protect us or a thick coat of fur to trap air for insulation. So our goose bumps don't serve any purpose. They're just a relic of our evolutionary past.
Well, it's interesting that you get them when you're cold. And as you say, you get them maybe when you're terrified. But you can also get them in a good way, right? You can hear somebody say something and get goosebumps by what they said.
Yes, they're sort of emotional. We get them in response to the chills, very strong emotion. And I guess that's similar to terror. Again, it serves no purpose in us. Why should goosebumps... help us in any way when we feel moved by music or what someone says or extremely emotional. It's just, again, something inside us that we've inherited from our ancestors.
I love what you say about the left side of the face because I have never even thought about this. But the left side of the face is different than the right side of the face, and we treat it differently and have throughout history.
Yes, our face's left side is more emotionally expressive than the right side. In other words, the left side of your face is better at showing feelings. And this hugely influences how you show yourself to the world. For example, when you pose for a selfie, you will very lightly angle your head to show more of the left side of your face to the camera.
In fact, research shows that selfies on social media are much more likely to be left-sided than right-sided. And also, interestingly, pictures of left-sided faces get more likes on social media than right-sided snaps because the left side of the face is more emotional. And this is all to do with the way your face's muscles are wired.
Muscles that make expressions on the face are controlled by the opposite side of the brain. So the left side of the face is mostly controlled by your brain's right side. And that right-sided brain happens to be the more emotionally competent side of the brain. So hence, the left-sided muscles are more emotionally competent, more emotionally expressive.
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Chapter 6: What surprising facts about hiccups should we know?
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. And that's because of our specialized throwing apparatus in our arm and our shoulders. And that gave us, yes, this advantage.
And throwing is, as I said, the way we throw is a uniquely human thing. And it's a very incredibly complicated thing. And it's rather like cocking a crossbow, a hunter cocking a crossbow. When we pull our arm back, we store a huge amount of energy inside. in tendons and ligaments and muscles. And then when we pull the trigger of our throw, we release that energy.
And that does some pretty incredible things in our arm, including producing the fastest movement our body produces, which is rotation of the humerus bone in our upper arm. And yes, so that's our sort of amazing superpower throwing. One reason why we've evolved to be the so-called superior beings that we are today.
But when you hear people talk about, you know, why humans are at the top of the food chain and why we are superior beings, you never hear that. You never hear people say, and it's all because we can throw a ball. But it is partly because we can throw a ball or a spear or a rock.
We take it for granted. And I think people who aren't baseball pitchers think that they're bad throwers. They're not. They're incredible throwers. All of us are incredible throwers. And we take skills like that for granted and don't really understand how and why it happens. As I said, we just chuck something.
A chimpanzee, you know, as I said, a chimpanzee can't do half of what an eight-year-old baseball pitcher can do, and that's an eight-year-old. So even poor human throwers are vastly superior to the best animal.
So we all learned in biology class how we make a baby, but you talk about how sperm has a long way to go to get where it needs to.
When I say a long way to go, seven meters. Seven meters from the testicle where it's made to the woman's fallopian tube where it fertilizes an egg. Seven meters is four times the height of the average American man, an astonishing distance for the tiny sperm cell. And yet when you do the math, things don't seem to add up. I'll just explain the journey that sperm take.
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Chapter 7: How can having a pet improve your mental health?
Your philtrum is above your lips, that sort of shallow depression with two ridges on either side that runs below your nose to your lip. Philtrum, again, is a lovely word because it means love potion in Greek. the ancient Greeks considered the philtrum to be a particularly erogenous zone, hence philtrum, love potion.
In fact, in English, love potions are filters, and you'll find filters in fairy tales and Harry Potter movies and Shakespeare plays. You drink it and you fall in love with the person you next see. Strangely, though, for such a prominent body part, we're fairly ignorant about what the philtrum is for. expressive part of our face, but we don't really know what it does.
People think maybe it helps us express ourselves by providing a store of skin that can be called upon when our mouth needs to move in a way that stretches our upper lip like smiling or crying, but we're not really sure. What is for sure, though, is that philtrum is very important in determining attractiveness.
Researchers have taken digital photographs of people and reduced the contours of people's philtrums. And when they do that, the people in the pictures are rated as being older and less attractive than the original. So it's a hugely important part of our face that tells us a lot about how attractive we may be or how young we may be. And it's all about love because it's named after love potion.
But, yeah, we don't really know why it's there or what it does for us.
Well, one thing people have a sense of anyway is the power of the thumb, that the thumb is a pretty amazing thing. So talk about that.
Yes. Well, again, the thumb is one of our sort of superpowers, I suppose. We've got five digits on our hand, but our thumb – provides up to 50% of hand function. And that's because we have really long thumbs and the way the joints are arranged, but especially to do with the muscles that move them.
And those muscles make up something called the thenar eminence, which is the bulge at your thumb's base. And inside that bulge, there are three muscles that give the thumb its astonishing dexterity. So this thena eminence, that bulge in our thumb, is the thing that make us what we are today. And again, very important in evolutionary terms.
You know, our thumbs originally, our hands were essentially, you know, weight bearing. We strode around on all fours. When we progressed to walking on two feet, it freed up our hands and our thumbs to develop into precision instruments. And so it allowed our thumbs and our thena eminences to become tools for building, tools for making weapons, tools to help us write.
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