Supernormal stimulus

The variable, unpredictable reward is way more compelling than a predictable one.

And she calls our phones supernormal stimuli.

Like, there's this bird experiment where a bird would rather sit on a giant, brightly colored plaster egg than its own real egg.

Our phones are like a supernormal stimulus for social connection.

I'm the old Nicole Shane, aka the original Shane Squatch, and today for you guys, I have Paranoid American here to explore how comics, animation, and psychological warfare can all be part of the same influence machine.

From MKUltra and conspiracy culture to supernormal stimulus and the strange pull of cartoon imagery, this episode digs into how taboo ideas become art and how art shapes belief.

But before we get into this fascinating episode, just one piece of news and updates.

If you guys didn't catch it earlier this week, we will be doing two live episodes of Bizarre Inquiries for the month of August, and that next live episode will be on August 31st at about 7.15 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, which is this coming Monday.

But basically her legs spread as she's falling out of the car and the animators drew pretty detailed version of what that would look like.

thinking that either they were going to get it um passed or the conspiracy theory here is that they created it just so that they could remove it just so they could re-release it as like an uncut thing so that they'd have like three different versions that they could schlock to people anyways the rabbit hole that sent me down was like What makes a human being attracted to a cartoon character? Like, how does that even work? Like what, what part of our brain is like, I see an illustration on the screen or on paper and now it's making like changing physiological response right now.

Like what mechanism is that? So what, The deep dive research I went into is something called supernormal stimulus.

And the really fascinating part of this is that the exact same premise of why someone might find a cartoon character attractive, pin up art and all this stuff.