There’s something ironic about going down an Internet rabbit hole that is actually full of rabbits, but when there are baby animals involved, it turns out you may not have a choice — your brain is wired to love every baby mammal you run across.
That’s right, if you’re ever spent hours scrolling through baby animal photos on 500px, you now have a scientific excuse for why that is. According to an article in The Wall Street Journal that references studies performed at both Emory University and the University of Bern in Switzerland, our brains don’t differentiate between human babies and babies of other mammal species.
In other words: you can’t stop looking at photos of adorable puppies because, somewhere in your brain, those puppies remind you of the human babies you’ve evolved to love so you don’t… you know… yell at them when they wake you up at 3am every night for a month.
So this guy, you’ve evolved to find extremely cute and want to care for:
But these little guys trigger the same circuitry in your brain:
As Robert M. Spolasky put it in his WSJ article, “It’s not as if we’ve had to evolve distinctive safeguards against parenting the wrong species. The brain as a whole has no problem distinguishing human from nonhuman, cute or otherwise.”
The pleasant side-effect of all this? “…among humans, when it comes to adorableness, on a certain neurobiological level human baby = puppy = calf = fawn = piglet.”
We’ll take it… now let’s waste some time looking at photos of puppies and kittens and fawns and piglets!
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