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Hi, I'm Anne Strain Champs. It's to the best of our knowledge. And let's begin with an experiment.

Think of something really disgusting.

Human feces, vomit.

The bodies of dead animals, the bodies of dead animals that are in your food,

stinky, smelly, people, bad hygiene habits, dirty toilets.

Is that enough?

You feel sick enough?

Yes.

Okay, that is pretty disgusting.

And I'm sorry, I promise.

I'm not trying to gross you out just for fun. There's a point here.

I didn't actually show you any of those things. You didn't have to smell them or touch them or see them.

But if you're like me, just thinking about them made you feel a little sick.

That's the power of disgust. It's one of the most primal emotional responses and it's so

easy to elicit that I can make you feel queasy just with words. How is that even possible?

Disgust has that almost magical power to go beyond mere words and take you to another place, take you to a place of emotions,

to a place of strong feelings, where you're conjuring up things that you desperately want to

avoid. And the work I've been doing has been trying to provide a story to explain why all of those strange things

are disgusting. This is Valerie Curtis. She's a public health scientist at the London School of

Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and she's part of a growing network of disgustologists, researchers

...