Pat

Range of Interests

[Pat @NerdNeuro]

Holy shit, that comeback.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A German psychologist spent her career proving that the embarrassing habit of talking to your dog is one of the most powerful stress-regulation tools the human nervous system has, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.

Her name is Andrea Beetz.

She works at the University of Rostock in northern Germany, in the Department of Special Education.

In 2012 she co-authored a paper in Frontiers in Psychology with three other European researchers, and the finding inside it should have changed how every doctor on Earth thinks about loneliness, stress, and the strange habit human beings have of narrating their lives to animals who cannot speak back.

The paper was not a single experiment. It was a review of 69 separate peer-reviewed studies on what happens inside the human body during interactions with pets, all of which met strict criteria for sample size, research design, and scientific rigor.

Her co-authors were not minor names either. Kerstin Uvnäs-Moberg is the Swedish physician who spent decades mapping how oxytocin works in the human bloodstream. Kurt Kotrschal runs the Wolf Science Center in Austria and is one of the most respected animal cognition researchers in Europe. Henri Julius studies attachment between humans and animals. Together they assembled the cleanest summary of what science actually knows about why being around a pet changes a person.

The results across the 69 studies were almost embarrassingly consistent. When a human being interacts with an animal they have any bond with, the same physiological cascade happens almost every time. Cortisol drops, which is the primary stress hormone in the bloodstream. Blood pressure drops, both systolic and diastolic. Heart rate slows. Self-reported anxiety decreases. Mood improves measurably on standardized scales.

And underneath all of it, the hormone called oxytocin rises in the human bloodstream.

Oxytocin is the molecule that floods a mother's body during childbirth and breastfeeding. It is the same chemical released during orgasm, during a long hug with someone you love, during the deep eye contact between a parent and a newborn.

It is the hormone the human body uses to mark another living being as safe, familiar, and worth bonding with. It widens the blood vessels, slows the heart, suppresses the production of cortisol, and quietly tells the nervous system that the threat level in the environment is low enough that the body can repair itself instead of bracing for danger.

The 69 studies the team reviewed found that the same molecule rises in the human bloodstream when you pet your dog, hold your cat, watch your fish, or talk softly to a parrot that does not understand a single word you are saying.

The strangest finding in the whole paper is that the animal does not have to understand you for the system to work. The mechanism is not based on actual comprehension.

It is based on the act of directing social attention toward a living presence and feeling, on some level, that the presence is paying attention back. The brain only requires perceived reciprocity. It does not require real reciprocity.

In 2015, a Japanese research team led by Miho Nagasawa published a study in the journal Science that pushed the finding even further. They measured oxytocin levels in 30 dog and owner pairs before and after the dogs and owners interacted for 30 minutes.

When dogs and owners exchanged long periods of eye contact, oxytocin rose in both species. Not just in the human. In the dog too. And the longer the gaze, the bigger the spike on both sides of the leash. The same study tried the experiment with hand-raised wolves and got nothing. The loop was specific to the bond that domestic dogs and humans had spent 15,000 years building together.

What Beetz and her team had identified through 69 studies, Nagasawa proved with direct hormone measurements in a controlled lab. The act of looking into your dog's eyes and talking to it is running the same neurochemical program that a mother runs with her newborn baby. The brain treats the interaction as social bonding because, biologically, it is.

The implication is the part that should change how you live. People who narrate their day to their dog are not lonely or strange. They are using one of the oldest stress-regulation systems the human nervous system has ever built. The habit looks embarrassing from the outside and feels completely natural from the inside because it is doing exactly what the body evolved to do when a safe presence is nearby.

The research was clean enough that the entire field of Animal-Assisted Therapy was built on top of it. Therapy dogs now work in hospitals, psychiatric wards, schools for children with autism, prisons, hospice care, and disaster relief sites across more than 30 countries. The protocols are formal. The interventions are measurable. The science behind why a dog in the room lowers a patient's blood pressure during chemotherapy is the same science Beetz and her team summarized in 2012.

The most haunting line in the paper is the one near the end where the authors point out that the oxytocin pathway evolved long before language did. The system was already in place when our ancestors lived in caves and the first wild dogs started circling human fires. The hormone never required words. It just required a body next to a body.

When you talk to your cat about your day, the words are doing almost nothing. The animal hearing your voice while you direct attention toward it is doing almost everything.

You can run the experiment yourself the next time you feel your nervous system tightening up. Stop scrolling, put the phone down, and sit on the floor with whatever animal is in your house. Talk to it. Look at it. Pet it. Let your shoulders drop.

The hormone the rest of the world is selling in podcasts and supplements is already inside you, waiting for the signal.

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

The World Cup begins tomorrow, and many will watch the matches. Soccer reminds us of something we must not forget: life is not a race to show off on our own, but a path we learn to walk together. Anyone who does not know how to pass the ball, even if they have talent, has not yet understood the game. Anyone who does not know how to live with and for others has not yet understood life. #ApostolicJourney

[Adam Klasfeld @KlasfeldReports]

"Do you have unlimited tries?" grand juror to Trump DOJ prosecutor in the now-dismissed "Broadview Six" case.

Prosecutors failed to disclose that the grand jury "no true billed" the first indictment.

Remarkable exchange

[Pat @NerdNeuro]

Vale Richard Scolyer. A pioneer who was always willing to give it a crack.

[VoteHub @VoteHub]

VoteHub projects Nithya Raman to advance from the Nonpartisan primary for Los Angeles Mayor.

[Bryan Armen Graham @BryanAGraham]

Lauren and I went to Rikers Island to watch Game 1 of the NBA finals. https://t.co/nHuUxAB8fK

[NowThis Impact @nowthisimpact]

From underground ballrooms to City Hall — with all five boroughs bringing their own reps

[Daniel Sugarman @Daniel_Sugarman]

The Norwegian squad's World Cup photo, taken by David Yarrow, is quite something

[Marina Hyde @MarinaHyde]

My column on Nigel Farage’s conduct in the wake of three murders that horrified the nation

https://t.co/reI7oQbjVc

[Pat @NerdNeuro]

@TylerDinucci @BlackLanterrn “Just a day guy who tweets” the start of an epitaph

[ABC News @abcnews]

#BREAKING: Three neo-Nazis who booed during a Melbourne Anzac Day dawn service in 2025 have been found guilty of offensive behaviour. https://t.co/gkfRgVphOS

[Zachary Donnini @ZacharyDonnini]

Stanford University is emerging as one of Steyer’s strongest precincts in California based on the results reported so far.

[Dylan Byers @DylanByers]

New statement from Scott Pelley:

There has never been anything in America like 60 Minutes.

The Sunday tradition is the most successful program of any kind in history. For more than a decade, its innovative growth on every major online platform has extended its reach to countless millions around the world. This spring, at the end of our 58thseason, 60 Minutes grew rapidly with an unheard-of 9% jump in viewers on CBS.

“60” has been the number-one program in America for decades because our beloved audience finds integrity, quality, and humanity in our stories. When stewardship of the program passed to my colleagues and me, our responsibility was to expand energetically into a new age of media technology while preserving the values our audience expects. Now, the new owner of our network is casting this legend aside, apparently to curry a moment of favor with the Trump administration.

The waste is heartbreaking.

Last month, 60 Minutes lost its DNA when our entire senior leadership and two of our best on-air correspondents were cruelly fired without cause. Good people were silenced because they stood up for our audience. They stood for fairness against the forces of political bias; they stood for professionalism against chaos.

For my part, new management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story. I’ve been told to include assertions that are unverified. To date, in every case, I have managed to ignore these instructions or refuse them. Recently, politicians have been invited to choose correspondents for interviews on the broadcast. Giving politicians control over 60 Minutes interviews is not how this is done. Finally, incompetence and unprofessionalism in the new management have wreaked havoc. In a case involving one of my stories, the entire program came within 19 minutes of not getting on the air at all.

At 60 Minutes, we have fought harder than anyone knows to save the program that became an American icon. We owed that to our millions of viewers. I am deeply moved by the thousands of wishes we have received to “keep up the good fight.” Most of the men and women of CBS News are still in that fight. But now the collapse of values at the top has become untenable. The leadership of 60 Minutes is no longer recognizable. The principles I hold dear are gone, and so I must leave as well.

I depart after 37 years at CBS with one emotion—a heart brimming with gratitude for the men and women of CBS News who encouraged and enriched my work, very often at the risk of their own lives. I pray for a day when those people and their ideals are honored again—a day when sanity, competence, and courage return.

Scott Pelley

[Franklin Leonard @franklinleonard]

I feel bad for every stand up who's going to watch this video and have to reckon with the fact that they're never going to kill as hard as Samuel is killing in this show and tell set.

[Kyle Cheney @kyledcheney]

BREAKING: D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals rules that Hegseth policy barring military service by transgender people is fueled by unconstitutional animus.

2-1 decision bars military from removing some currently-serving transgender service members.

https://t.co/jWLzjEzHx9

[Ben Davison @Ben_Davison1]

The barefoot investor thinks that the budget changes don’t impact the VAST majority of people’s current savings & investment plans

As for those it does? They’ll be fine

“The wealthiest people in the country. Living in one of the wealthiest countries in the world…life is good.”

[Robert Faturechi @RobertFaturechi]

New: A top White House aide intervened to get a $620 million Pentagon loan for a company tied to Donald Trump Jr.

“The call came from the White House: We have to get this done,” said one person involved.

https://t.co/duvJ0cQ9bH

[Michael M. Grynbaum @grynbaum]

Cecilia Vega, who was fired today by CBS, tells me: “I very much fear what comes next for and the future of” 60 Minutes.

Her full statement below:

[Ashley Parker @AshleyRParker]

Trump likes women, and has, in fact, been married to three of them. BUT there’s also little doubt that Trump has unabashedly embraced the aesthetic—the je ne sais quoi—of a certain kind of gay man. My look at the King of Queens:
https://t.co/Zf4ZV6rRAB