There's no place like home!

Years ago, when my daughter came home from college, she put her bag down and said, "give me a couple of minutes, I need to drop the kids off at the pool."

In case you don't understand what she was referring to, well, it is scatological, dear reader! ;)

Coming home apparently makes us poop.  For some, it is right away.  There are plenty, like me, who believe that there is no place like home when it comes to shitting:

“This is indeed a very familiar story,” says Nick Haslam, a professor of psychology at the University of Melbourne and author of Psychology in the Bathroom. “Most people feel more comfortable going to the bathroom in familiar—and private—surroundings.”

Imagine that--a professor has written about the psychology in the bathroom!

The author then spoke with "Jack Gilbert, a professor of surgery at the University of Chicago, and the director of the university’s Microbiome Center":

to understand whether there is a physical call-and-response between my home and my body that might trigger the need to make a deposit in the porcelain bank. Or is it simply that I feel more comfortable at home?

Good question, right?

BTW, how did you like her phrasing this as "make a deposit in the porcelain bank"?  A good one, right?

So, what does Gilbert have to say?

“When you get back into your home, your glucose tolerance will change,” he continues. “Your adrenaline pumping will change, and the energy sensors of your muscles will change, altering your actual respiration, how much energy your burn, and how much fat you deposit. When you get back into your home your sleep patterns will change, because the hormones that control sleep will be altered. All of these factors influence how quickly food moves through your gut.”

Anything else?

“We are essentially automata responding to environmental cues,” Gilbert says. “I’m pretty sure I can train you as a human being to pee when you smell peppermint. That’s an example of how much of an automaton you are. It would be technically possible to do that.”

We have been programmed that way; we are automata!  Like how even adults feel like they want to pee when you make a slow hissing sound--as kids, they were toilet-trained that way.

The craziest thing in that essay? The sentence that the author, Julie Beck, writes to wrap up her essay on pooping at home:

Think about that the next time you drop the kids off at the pool.

"drop the kids off at the pool" is perhaps the lingo of that generation of, ahem, kids ;)

(If you want, you can also check out these related posts: One; two; three)

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