Breakup songs substitute for empathetic friends. (Flickr/Nathan Heeney)

Humans have pretty low emotional pain tolerances, and research has shown that people instinctively seek out distractions away from sources of whatever unpleasantness ails, hence the indefatigable sales of alcohol and ice cream.

But when trouble arises in interpersonal relationships, the heartbroken also often spend time wallowing in the negativity, perhaps playing Bon Iver’s “For Emma” on repeat as though intentionally keeping the waterworks faucet turned up to full blast (not that I’ve ever done anything like that ever…).

Caroline and I talked about the peculiar appeal of breakup songs in a Stuff Mom Never Told You episode. In it, we cited a Scientific American post about how the doleful tunes actually gird us up by neurologically diminishing our perception of painful stimuli. Since music has been shown to stimulate dopamine release in brain’s “reward system,” which is hurting the most following a breakup, dreary albums that we indulge in actually can help us begin to move on.

A new study in the Journal of Consumer Research also puts forth another theory on why it’s common for us to listen to sad music when we’re sad about a relationship (“mood-congruent stimuli” in fancytalk), since it contradicts humans’ tendency toward mitigating rather than amplifying pain. As described over at The Huffington Post Women, Berkeley marketing PhD candidate Chan Jean Lee explored how participants responded to a series of hypothetical unpleasant events (i.e. “lost someone you love,” “failed an exam,” etc.) and found that when dealing with interpersonal hardship, folks overwhelmingly wanted either sad music or an empathetic friend. Therefore, Lee theorized that sad music serves as a symbolic shoulder to cry on. In other words, when people make us sad, we want to relate to another person feeling sad, which evolutionary biologists would likely explain as our ingrained resistance to isolation.

Now, what I’d like to know is how much is too much when it comes to breakup songs. Is there a point at which sad songs lose their potential to help us out and only exacerbate our blues? I’m guessing it might correlate to how much we’re funding those ice cream and alcohol sales I mentioned at the top of the post.

(iStockphoto/ThinkStock)

We hadn’t been working on the podcast long when listener Karissa asked us to talk about India’s Karni Mata temple, which is home to 20,000 rats. I wasn’t expecting “rat temple” to take us to the legend of a goddess’ fight against a buffalo demon, but it did. I also wasn’t expecting it to touch on chaste marriages and medieval mysticism, which we’ve talked about before in our episode on Margery Kempe. Multiple surprises for me in this episode. It’s about a whole lot more than rats.

Here’s a gallery of the temple (and some of the other Indian culture tied to it).

Today’s listener mail is some more on our Loving v. Virginia episode (parts one and two). They’re from Alexandra, who writes about anti-miscegenation laws in California. Tom writes about the “Pocahontas exception,” which we didn’t get into in the episode.

Episode link: India’s Karni Mata Rat Temple

Here’s where our facts came from:

• “Max Harcourt (1993): The Deshnoke ‘Karni Mata’ temple and political legitimacy in Medieval Rajasthan, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 16:s1, 33-48
• National Geographic Education. Rat Temple. http://www.natgeoeducationvideo.com/film/547/rat-temple
• India TV News. “India’s Temple of Rats: Karni Marta Temple.” 3/21/2013. http://www.indiatvnews.com/news/india/india-s-temple-of-rats-karni-mata-temple-18902.html
• Budak, Alex. “Making New Friends at the Indian Rat Temple.” Huffington Post. 6/14/2011. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alex-budak/making-new-friends-at-the_b_876454.html
• Guynup, Sharon and Nicholas Ruggia. “Rats Rule at Indian Temple.” National Geographic. 6/29/2004. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/06/0628_040628_tvrats.html
• Travel India. “Karni Mata Temple of Deshnok in Rajasthan, India.” http://rajasthantourism-india.com/rajasthan_pilgrimages/karnimatatemple.html
• Tomczyk, Thomas. “Rat Temple of Karni Mata.” Dubitus. 12/15/2012. dubitus.com/rat-temple-of-karni-mata-20130105/
• WildFilmsIndia. “Karni Mata Mandir – Temple of Rats!” YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxWX7wgTj9E
• “Durga.” Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online Academic Edition. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2013. Web. 29 Apr. 2013. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/174252/Durga.
• Tribune India. “Rat Reverence.” 12/5/2010. http://www.tribuneindia.com/2010/20101205/spectrum/main7.htm
• Tribune India. “A Temple Abounding in Rats.” http://www.tribuneindia.com/1998/98aug30/nation.htm#3

You can listen to Stuff You Missed in History Class via iTunes, Stitcher or the Stuff You Missed in History Class RSS feed. Follow us on Twitter at @missedinhistory, and you can keep up with us on the official Stuff You Missed in History Class Facebook page. We’re also on Tumblr  and Pinterest.

Mayonnaise has been improving sandwiches since 1756. (Flickr/bradleypjohnson)

Oft-maligned mayonnaise, mustard scene-stealer and dry sandwich cure-all, is a major money-maker. Each year, Americans spend $1.87 billion-with-a-”b” on the humble eggs and oil combo that sandwich eaters tend to either love or loathe. (That doesn’t include, however, Kraft Miracle Whip purchases since it doesn’t meet the FDA qualifications for mayonnaise, as I learned in an Associated Press article highlighting the 100-year anniversary of Hellmann’s brand mayo. By FDA standards, government-sanctioned mayo “contains not less than 65 percent by weight of vegetable oil,” and Miracle Whip wasn’t oily enough to make the mayo cut.)

In addition to finding out that the FDA has devised a mayonnaise checklist, which is one of the greatest artifacts of bureaucracy mine eyes have ever beheld, I also learned that mayo has been around since the 1700s. Paula Deen would’ve been right at home in the 18th century, y’all! AP reporter Mae Anderson wrote that it “originated in France…when a chef seeking to make a creamy sauce combined oil and egg.”

What happened was, as a I learned thanks to TLC, in 1756 the French were duking it out (get it?) against the British at Port Mahon on picturesque Majorca. At the time, the island nation was under British rule, but France and Spain both took turns trying to wrest it away, and in this 1756 skirmish, the French troops won. Victoire! The Duke of Richelieu who led the French troops called for a victory feast, but when the chef went to make a sauce with cream and eggs, there was no battlefield cream to be had, and the rest is mayonnaise history. And why is it called mayonnaise? To commemorate the victory at Mahon.

Now, the only thing that could possibly make the history of mayonnaise any better is if the Duke of Richelieu was pen pals with the Earl of Sandwich.

Are girls primed to have superior penmanship? (Flickr/Pink Sherbet Photography)

In April, Washington officially struck the word “penmanship” from any state statutes and replaced it with “handwriting” in an effort to use only gender-neutral language. To me, it’s funny that “penmanship” is a male-gendered noun since there’s a common assumption that women have neater handwriting than men. A lefty lady with chicken scratch-screwing handwriting, I’ve been particularly aware of that stereotype as I’ve never much fit the mold.

It also reminds me of being in tenth-grade chemistry class and fascinated by my jock desk neighbor’s impeccably written notes.

“You write like a girl,” I told him one day as a compliment (and probably also a poor attempt at flirting).

“Whatever,” he responded, clearly unwelcome to such an uncool compliment (and probably also to a terribly awkward attempt at flirting).

In her book “Handwriting in America: A Cultural History,” Tamara P. Thornton noted a 1910 handwriting expert’s study on identifying sex differences in penmanship, which concluded that confident, original script is interpreted as masculine, whereas neat, conventional and circular are considered feminine. As a result, contemporary studies find that people are pretty good (usually better than 60 percent) at guessing whether a handwriting sample came from a man or a woman. In fact, a 2005 study out of the University of Leicester on sex hormones and handwriting noted that biological sex is the only consistent correlate with handwriting — although I would argue that upon graduating from medical school, doctors are magically endowed with unintelligible-to-all-but-pharmacists penmanship. And since his-hers handwriting differences exist across cultures, could there be a biological explanation for them?

Writing for Parenting, Kristin Kane attributes handwriting disparities to the pace of brain hard-wiring. “During the early school years, when kids are learning to shape letters, the nerve fibers that control fine motor skills in boys’ brains typically haven’t matured as much as girls’ have,” Kane writes. Of course, boys’ brain eventually catch up girls’, but their stereotypically messier handwriting may be a holdover from that slight lag.

Those University of Leicester researchers turn the clock back beyond early childhood to prenatal development. Their theory maintains that exposure to female sex hormones in utero accounts for girls’ typically neater handwriting. They implicated progesterone in particular as the chemical that, in the process of fostering more traditionally feminine characteristics including sociability and nurturance, guides girls’ primmer penmanship.

Interestingly though, fetal exposure to testosterone doesn’t appear to have the opposite effect of messing up handwriting; the prenatal hormone connection only held for females. And given that, it really does seem like good handwriting is more of a girl thing — just not for this left-handed girl who maybe didn’t get enough progesterone exposure in the womb (thanks a lot, mom!).

Dowager Empress Cixi (© Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS)

Cixi started out as one of Emperor Xianfeng’s many concubines, but she wound up ruling China from behind a screen for more than 45 years. Her decisions toward the end were factors in the eventual collapse of the Qing dynasty. But in spite of her long and notorious rein, much of what we know about her boils down to rumor and gossip.

Our listener mail today is a listener request and PSA from Lily Ann, reminding us of the importance of giving blood (or of giving in some other way, if you cannot give blood).

Episode link: China’s Empress Dowager Cixi

Holly did the research on this one:

• Bensen, Amanda. “Cixi: The Woman Behind the Throne.” Smithsonian. March 1, 2008. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/da-cixi.html
• Cultural China. http://www.cultural-china.com/
• Edwards, Owen. “Presenting China’s Last Empress Dowager.” Smithsonian. October 2011. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/Presenting-Chinas-Last-Empress-Dowager.html
• Gao, James Z. “Historical Dictionary of Modern China.” Scarecrow Press. 2009. http://books.google.com/books?id=dVzLG1aqlNkC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
• Kwong, Luke S.K. “Chinese Politics at the Crossroads: Reflections on the Hundred Days Reform of 1898.” Cambridge University Press. Modern Asian Studies. Vol. 34, No. 3. pp. 663-695. July 2000. http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/313144?uid=3739832&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21102218078327
• Lim, Louisa. “Who murdered China’s emperor 100 years ago?” NPR. Nov. 14, 2008. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=96993694
• Qi, Lin. “The Poisoned Palace — Mystery of Last Emperor’s Death.” China Daily. Nov. 21, 2008. http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2008-11/21/content_7226663.htm  
• Scott, Dr. Howard. “The Second Opium War 1856-1860.” http://www.howardscott.net/4/Shameen_A_Colonial_Heritage/Files/Documentation/Second_Opium_War.pdf
• Sit, Tony. “The Life of Empress Cixi.” China Now. 2001. Republished by the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding. http://www.sacu.org/cixi.html

You can listen to Stuff You Missed in History Class via iTunes, Stitcher or the Stuff You Missed in History Class RSS feed. Follow us on Twitter at @missedinhistory, and you can keep up with us on the official Stuff You Missed in History Class Facebook page. We’re also on Tumblr  and Pinterest.

Writing the cursive alphabet is good for the brain, studies suggest.(Flickr/Evelyn Saenz)

Earlier this spring, North Carolina passed an international headline-garnering bill that requires public schools to teach multiplication tables as well as cursive handwriting. Although most people would probably agree that “times tables” are useful learning tools for kids, there’s much less of a supportive consensus over cursive. In fact, the recently amended Common Core State Standards for U.S. public education have officially made cursive handwriting curriculum optional in order to free up more teaching time for other skills, such as the much less aesthetically pleasing art form of typing.

In a New York Times Room for Debate segment on cursive in the classroom, University of Southern California education professor Morgan Polikoff argued that since few adults regularly employ it and most workplace communication is conducted via keyboard, teaching penmanship only gobbles up valuable classroom minutes. Speaking to NPR, a New Jersey school principal said bluntly, “It’s just that with all the state mandates, we don’t have time.” Most kids are bored with abandoning cursive, not surprisingly; in reporting on public schools’ collective move away from cursive, The Wall Street Journal cited a Scholastic survey, which found that 79 percent of middle schoolers polled dislike the fancy handwriting.

States like North Carolina and California, which have preserved a cursive requirement, see a value in kids mastering those curliques and flourishes beyond them forging a Declaration of Independence-worthy signature. Like many cursive supporters, California occupational therapist Suzanne Baruch Asherson says, over at NYT’s Room for Debate, that cursive is good for children’s developing brains:

“Putting pen to paper stimulates the brain like nothing else, even in this age of e-mails, texts and tweets. In fact, learning to write in cursive is shown to improve brain development in the areas of thinking, language and working memory. Cursive handwriting stimulates brain synapses and synchronicity between the left and right hemispheres, something absent from printing and typing.”

At Psychology Today, Texas A&M neuroscience professor William Klemm similarly decried the downfall of cursive education. Brain studies on younger children suggest that cursive simultaneously stokes the brain’s visual, tactile and fine motor circuits and helps optimize how efficiency they work. The sometimes painstaking process of learning cursive, by that logic, is healthy for kids over the long-term, regardless of how often people encounter situations that demand classy penmanship.

And I have a feeling that few, if any, educators would argue that cursive handwriting has no positive effect on the brain. It seems most of the motivation for making cursive optional has to do with prioritization and time management — a slightly ironic move since cursive ultimately speeds up (and sloppies up, for yours truly) one’s writing pace. Consequently, the decline of teaching cursive disappoints me, not so much because fewer children will be learning an increasingly rare handwriting style, but because the decision to do away with it seems largely based on not having enough hours in the school day to squeeze it in. This is also coming from a former kid who felt incredibly grown up and dignified after mastering cursive, hence I’m subjectively biased. At least I can take heart that for interested boys and girls out there — and they do exist! — cursive clubs are beginning to pop up to preserve what may very be a relic of a bygone penmanship era a generation from now.

This August 2012 photo shows four shallow chops to an incomplete skull excavated in James Fort, Jamestown, Va., by William Kelso. (Photo by Don Hurlbert, Smithsonian)

When news broke that researchers had found actual physical evidence of cannibalism at Jamestown, it seemed like just about everyone in the Internet sent us the link. Along with all those links, we got a hefty chunk of requests for an episode. So here it is.

Our listener mail is two letters on The Princess who Swallowed a Glass Piano, from Laurie and Molly.

Episode link: Cannibalism at Jamestown

Here’s where our facts came from:

• “The Starving Time”: John Smith Recounts the Early History of Jamestown, 1609. http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6593
• Hume, Ivor Noel. “We are starved”. Colonial Williamsburg. http://www.history.org/Foundation/journal/Winter07/starving.cfm
• “Jamestown Colony.” Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online Academic Edition. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2013. Web. 06 May. 2013. <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/300134/Jamestown-Colony&gt;.
• Wade, Lizzie. “Jamestown Bones Show Signs of Cannibalism.” http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2013/05/jamestown-bones-show-signs-of-ca.html
• Smithsonian. “Smithsonian and Preservation Virginia Reveal Startling Survival Story at Historic Jamestown” http://newsdesk.si.edu/releases/smithsonian-and-preservation-virginia-reveal-startling-survival-story-historic-jamestown
• Historic Jamestowne. “History of Jamestown.” http://www.apva.org/history/
• Historic Jamestowne. “Captain John Smith.” http://apva.org/rediscovery/page.php?page_id=25
• Historic Jamestowne. “Virginia Company.” http://apva.org/rediscovery/page.php?page_id=22
• Historic Jamestowne. “Jane’s Story.” https://www.historicjamestowne.org/jane/jane.php
• National Park Service. “Smith, Powhatan & Pocahontas.” http://smith.npschesapeakebay.net/native-americans/indians-smith/smith-powhatan-pocahontas

You can listen to Stuff You Missed in History Class via iTunes, Stitcher or the Stuff You Missed in History Class RSS feed. Follow us on Twitter at @missedinhistory, and you can keep up with us on the official Stuff You Missed in History Class Facebook page. We’re also on Tumblr  and Pinterest.

During pregnancy, many women experience a period of forgetfulness or absentmindedness nicknamed “mommy brain,” and as I detailed in How Motherhood Works, those might be inconvenient symptoms of brain remodeling underway. In 2010, when some Yale scientists examined fMRI scans of new moms’ brains, they discovered small but significant structural changes the hypothalamus, amygdala and prefrontal cortex — areas specifically involved with motivation and reward. As I explain in the delightful video below, those alterations offer evidence that what we think of as “maternal instinct” might be neurologically hardwired into new mom’s brains:

Speaking to Smithsonian magazine, mom brain researcher Adam Franssen of Longwood University explained how he thinks that moms not only have different, but also smarter, noggins. Longwood and his colleague Craig Kinsley of the University of Richmond have conducted multiple experiments on female rats and found a number of stark differences between those with and without offspring. On top of rat moms having larger neurons that sprout additional “neuronal branches” that speed up communication among brain cells, they’re also:

• Better at problem solving, as demonstrated in maze navigation tests.
• Better at managing stress
• Better at recognizing emotions
• Better and more efficient at food foraging
• Better at memory tasks, particularly for prospective memory (i.e. packing a raincoat in a child’s backpack since there’s a chance of afternoon rain)
• Better at defending their offspring

Granted, these results are based off rat brains, but the implications for human moms are compelling. It makes sense that nature possibly sharpens new moms’ brains to prepare them for what many call the toughest job in the world. What mom brain researcher and relatively new father Adam Franssen still wants to know though, he told Smithsonian, is how paternal brains can get a parenting boost as well.

A classic flapper bob on American actress Peaches Browning. (Flickr/Library of Congress)

America’s got flapper fever, thanks to Baz Luhrmann’s Art Deco-drenched “The Great Gatsby” remix. And even though Carrie Mulligan makes for a dazzling Daisy Buchanan, the film flapper extraordinaire is a bit of highly revisionist history. As sociologist Lisa Hix notes over at Collector’s Weekly, F. Scott Fitzgerald portrayed the New Woman flapper of the early 1920s as little more than a dizzy drunks, obsessed with fashion, speakeasy hijinks and breaking men’s hearts. And while Gatsby on screen might be a sumptuous Vogue-ready feast for the eyes, it skips right over the cultural significance of the flapper who openly defied the rules for how young women should conduct themselves. Sure, they dressed differently, smoked, danced and drank, but flappers also were turn-of-the-century feminists.

So if you’re reading (or re-reading) “The Great Gatsby” or going to see the movie spectacle, here’s some recommended reading to understand who the real Daisy Buchanan and her drop-waist dress-sporting gal pals might’ve been:

How Flappers Worked (by me!) — “In 1915, two years before the United States became involved in World War I, H.L. Mencken introduced the word “flapper” into popular media. The term traces back to British slang for a teenage girl, but Mencken reclaimed it with more specificity. Writing for the literary magazine, “The Smart Set,” he described a new sort of female identity emerging in the United States: a woman who consumed music, literature and periodicals voraciously, taking her cues for behavior and style from the media in front of her, rather than the moral codes of decorum.”

‘The Great Gatsby’ Still Gets Flappers Wrong (Lisa Hix) — “The flapper movement wasn’t simply a fashion trend, as Emily Spivack at Smithsonian.com’s Threaded blog explains; it was a full-blown, grassroots feminist revolution. After an 80-year campaign by suffragists, women were finally granted the right to vote in the United States in 1920, when the Nineteenth Amendment was passed. When the U.S. entered World War I in April 1917, many women entered the workforce, and when the soldiers returned in November 1918, their female counterparts were reluctant to give up their jobs. As a result, young, unmarried women experienced far greater financial independence than they’d ever had before.”

The Flapper: The Heroine or Antagonist of the 1920s (NYU) — “As Ford mass-produced cars via the assembly line and gained competition, automobiles became more affordable to even the newly working young women. Not only did the automobile allow the Flapper to go wherever men could and to share in all their enjoyments, but it also spawned what would become a great shift in traditional courtship and dating. “In other days the boy paid court to his ‘girl’ on an ivied porch or in a cosy parlor, under the watchful eyes of a mother or the stricter vigil of a maiden aunt”. In the twenties, however, couples drove away from home, “indecently” as the parents believed. “By 1927 more autos were enclosed… creating new private space for courtship and sex”. This more intimate setting combined with the close dancing habits of the Flapper altered women’s perspective on, and openness to, sexual behavior.”

A Flapper’s Dictionary (Bookflaps) — “The dictionary went into some detail, listing the group’s slang and providing definitions. In the process, it also provided an insight: through the slang we can begin to discern attitudes and priorities and the mindset of the adherents. And the adherents, after all, were our grandmothers and great-grandmothers. Who knew?”

1920s Fashion History (Fashion Era) — “High fashion until the twenties had been for the richer women of society.  But because construction of the flapper’s dress was less complicated than earlier fashions, women were much more successful at home dressmaking a flapper dress which was a straight shift.  It was easier to produce up to date plain flapper fashions quickly using flapper fashion Butterick dress patterns.  Recorded fashion history images after the twenties do reflect what ordinary women really wore rather than just the clothing of the rich.”

Emblazoned on the bodies of so many sweaty (Always sweaty! Should be called “sweatspo” if you ask me, but nobody did.) are pithy sayings that range from the genuinely inspiration — “Be positive, patience and persistent” — to the sinister –”It’s always too early to quit.” And mostly, the fitspo that I found motivates with body-shaming threats that twist exercise into a constant state, rather than a healthful retreat. For instance:

via Pinterest

One thing that struck me, too, about the fitspo ethos is how much it echoes the hallmarks of compulsive exercise. This compulsive exercise checklist comes from Dr. Suzanne Girard at UC Berkeley.

• Preoccupation with exercise or intrusive thoughts about exercise
• Finding time to exercise — at any cost
• Exercise substitutes social life
• Feeling overly anxious, guilty or angry if you can’t exercise
• Exercise driven primarily by a desire to control weight, shape and body composition
• Exercise as “punishment” for eating “bad” food
• How you feel about yourself is based on the amount of exercise you get
• Constant dissatisfaction with physical achievements

Those are precisely the types of unhealthy behaviors rooted on by fitspo: that you should feel guilty if you don’t workout, that your figure isn’t adequate, that there’s no excuse to not push yourself to the limit. And since it’s connected to cleaner diets and exercise, fitspo gets a pass as being good for folks, escaping the degree of censure social media outlets like Pinterest have brought down on thinspo. Yet the clinical signals hallmarks of a disordered relationship with one’s body are still there: anxiety, obsession and perfectionism. Is that really the wind we want at our backs pushing us as we spring toward the top of the hill?