Scientific Revol(u)tion
Think of the things that are gross. You probably try to avoid these things as much as possible. You probably don’t want to think about them. So spare a thought for Dr Val Curtis, director of the Hygiene Centre at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Her job is to not only think about but also to talk about and study those things that make everyone else go ewww.
Dr Curtis studied engineering, epidemiology and anthropology. With so many different specializations The Word asked how she became interested in disgusting things.
“I was working on trying to understand why people would wash their hands, why they would avoid disgusting stuff – they didn’t want germs on their hands, but they also didn’t want germs in their bathrooms, or on their clothes,” she said. “I kept asking why – it’s yucky – why – but they couldn’t explain, and I realized I couldn’t explain it either.”
So she started making lists of what people all over the world thought were disgusting. The results showed a random collection of ideas. Then she realized the things were in an index of a book on infectious diseases. From this she got a theory.
“There was a pattern, disgust evolved to protect us from infectious disease.”
Dr Curtis is interested in how behavior evolved. Fear protected us from predators. Disgust protects us from disease.
“Disgust is parallel to fear, disgust is very much like fear, we try to avoid tiny predators that can eat us from the inside versus large predators that eat us from the outside,” she said. “Disgust is the little brother of fear.”
Dr Curtis has just published “Don’t Look, Don’t Touch” which looks at the science behind revulsion. Since Dr Curtis researched people all over the world, is there such a thing as ‘global disgust’ – stuff everyone thinks is repulsive?
“We found seven components of disgust,” she said. “The themes are the same everywhere but the details vary from society to society.”
The seven areas which cause disgust relate to the body, especially what it produces; food, though this is different in each culture; sickness and deformity; dirt; sexual disgust and moral disgust.
Disgust could be more than protection. It could make us human.
“Disgust is fundamental to the human condition and it is so important to understand it, it’s a model for other emotions that are also good for survival,” she said. “Disgust matters because it is important to understand what drives us.”
Original article by Jacy Meyer – Phoenix, Arizona. Text edited by The Word’s methodology team