By the time you read this article, the two hottest ice piers in the official Olympic flagship online store have been sold out.

In 2022, Bingdun, the mascot of the Beijing Winter Olympic Games, really became the top stream, captivating a large number of athletes and journalists, and then making a hot search with "Carmen" and "shaking Snow". Obviously, in the cold winter, no one can refuse a "rock candy roll". But why can the ice pier be so cute "straight to the heart"?

In English, the word "cute" first appeared as an abbreviation of the word acute, which originally meant "smart, intelligent or shrewd". In the early 19th century, primary school students in the United States began to use the word cute to describe something lovely or attractive. But in some contexts, cute also means fragile: the French word "cute" is mignon, but the word also means "petite and beautiful". Its etymology comes from the English word minion, which means servant or subordinate. The Japanese word for lovely "Kawaii" has a similar meaning-the word first appeared in the 11th century to mean "poor".

Obviously, the loveliness of Bingdun is not created by the pitiful image, we prefer to call it "naive": big eyes, short hands and short legs and disproportionately big head-these baby-like features, so that the vibrant mascot of the Winter Olympic Games can also appear naive, lovely and likable.

Baby schema

It was not until the 20th century that Nobel laureates Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen described what people thought to be cute or lovable features: the "infant schema": round eyes, fat cheeks, high eyebrows, small chin, and the proportion of big head and small body. These traits are critical to human evolution because they help the brain identify weak babies and give them attention and care to help them survive.

From the outside, many "cute things" are fragile and vulnerable, but the characteristic of "cute" is very powerful. In 2016, Morten L. of Oxford University. Morten L. Kringelbach et al. published a review of "cuteness" in Trends in Cognitive Sciences. In the article, they say that "loveliness" is "one of the most basic and powerful forces that can shape human behavior."

In fact, the judgment of "cute" may be necessary for human beings. Klingelbach's team conducted an experiment in which they showed the faces of babies and adults and examined the brain activity of subjects when they saw the images. They found that the brain reacted less than 1/7 seconds 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's network of compassion and empathy comes into play.

The master key of the brain

If loveliness is such an important key, can the locksmith forge a master key? decades ago, Lorenz and Tinbergen introduced the concept of "supernormal stimulus", a stimulus that is more prominent or intense than natural stimulation. In a classic experiment, Tinbergen found that if you put a real goose egg with a white volleyball, geese are more likely to roll the volleyball back to their nest. In the eyes of these geese, the larger, more round white volleyball is obviously more attractive than the real goose eggs. Here, volleyball is a kind of extraordinary excitement.

Similarly, the chilled baby may be more prominent than the real baby, which makes it an extraordinary thrill: too cute, irresistibly cute, and not as difficult to serve as the real baby. This kind of "cuteness" doesn't really make us want to raise an ice pier or a giant panda, but our brains are still hijacked by the giant eyes and two-headed bodies of these lovely images. It's as if we evolved the ability to perceive sugar in food just to get better energy, but now it makes us fall in love with sweets.

Cute cartoon characters, like supernormal stimuli such as high-sugar foods, stimulate our brain's nucleus accumbens (nucleus accumbens), a neural structure that is crucial in the brain's reward circuit. Neurons in the nucleus accumbens can release dopamine, the "source of happiness". Studies have shown that paranormal stimulation activates the nucleus accumbens, causing the brain to focus all its attention on the reward response. A team of international researchers studied the phenomenon by artificially manipulating pictures of babies to make them "cuter" or "less adorable" than normal babies to screen out facial features that are thought to be paranormal stimuli. The researchers showed real and processed images to female subjects and scanned their brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). As the researchers envisioned, the increase or decrease in cuteness had a significant effect on the metabolic activity of the nucleus accumbens, suggesting that this area of the brain can respond to paranormal stimuli and stimulate altruistic and parenting behavior in babies.

Other paranormal stimuli such as sugar activate the brain's reward circuits in a similar process. One study showed that dopamine activity in the nucleus accumbens of laboratory rats was related to the amount of sugar consumed. Similarly, researchers in Oregon showed that obese teenage women showed abnormal brain activity in the caudate nucleus (the brain area adjacent to the nucleus accumbens, also associated with the reward mechanism) when they ate Chocolate Milkshake. It seems that whether it's a baby's cuteness, sugar, or other reward stimuli, it seems to have the privilege of being the first to turn on the brain's attention system. For the brain's reward circuit, an ice pier is the same as a cup of hot chocolate.

"superficial love"

The science of "loveliness" has both intuitive and puzzling parts. Two hundred years ago, "cute" was probably just an emerging linguistic concept. Today, it has become a quick way to get our attention, love and care and other key neural resources.

Our love for ice piers may instead reveal the "superficiality" of human emotions: why love is triggered by such shallow physical characteristics. Klingbach and his colleagues want to know more about these "algorithms" of the brain rather than by deeper criteria. In any case, as people's cultural awareness of loveliness deepens, big eyes or round faces may become more popular.

Xue Rong Rong: blame my eyes for being small