Keegan-Michael Key is very excited about ‘Brain Games’

Keegan-Michael Key loves learning new things.

We were in a warehouse in South Brooklyn on a hot August day and Key was enthusiastically dishing on the upcoming, reimagined season of Brain Games that he’s hosting. Despite a long day of shooting promos going over schedule, Key had an electrifying enthusiasm for the educational National Geographic show.

“It’s a television show about how the brain works, why the brain works the way it does, what the brain does in certain situations,” Key said. “It’s fantastic.”

Brain Games returns Jan. 20 after an almost four-year-long hiatus to delve back into the human brain and dazzle us with interesting experiments, mind-bending illusions, and fun games. There are tons of fun celebrity guests, such as Ted Danson, who you can see in this exclusive clip trying to figure out which one of these bluffing masters is lying.

Along with Key and all the celebrity guests (including folks like Tiffany Haddish, Jack Black, Kristen Bell, and Dax Shepard) and celebrity cameos (Jordan Peele, Gillian Jacobs, and Tom Hanks, to name a few), the new season of Brain Games will feature world-renowned mentalist Lior Suchard, whom Key described as “amazing” and “absolutely unbelievable.”

Over the eight-episode season, Brain Games will tackle topics like music and how it affects our brains, the ways kids’ brains and adults’ brains differ, and the science behind attraction.

The attraction episode has a segment that stuck out as one of the most interesting things Key learned on the show.

“There was a picture of a woman and there was a slider at the bottom of her image, and as the slider moved, her eyes got larger and larger and larger,” he explained. “And the question of the experiment was, when do you find this woman most attractive?”

The viewing audience on the show had to choose when they found her most attractive, and interestingly, it correlated to whether or not they were hungry at the moment.

“If you found her most attractive when her eyes were small, it meant that you were probably hungry,” Key said. “If you found her most attractive when her eyes were larger, you probably found her more attractive when you were not hungry. So I was like, all right, that’s awesome, why is that?”

Image: Eric McCandless / NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

It stems from our primal instincts.

“When you see small eyes, it connotes an adult, a grown person, and that person will be able to help you find food,” he explained. “A baby cannot help you find food. So if you’re satiated, you’ll find the person with the larger eyes more attractive.”

To be clear, this doesn’t mean people who just ate are attracted to children. The woman was still an adult. It’s just one of those odd instinctual parts of human nature that we aren’t actively aware of that affect the way our brain works.

The newest season of Brain Games premieres on National Geographic on Jan. 20 at 8 p.m.