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Are you reading this post instead of doing your damn taxes already? You are, aren't you? 

This means I can make a few educated guesses about you: You are perhaps a) not very conscientious -- procrastinators are less likely to be organized, dutiful or self-disciplined. Or maybe you're b) impulsive or easily distracted. It could also easily be that you're c) a perfectionist and have put off your taxes because it seems so very complicated and you're afraid you'll do it all wrong. Or maybe you owe money on taxes this year, in which case, no one blames you for putting them off. 

Meanwhile, your smug friend informs you (smugly) that she finished hers in February. Why do some of us suck it up and file our taxes promptly, and others put it off?

An estimated 20 to 25 percent of adults are chronic procrastinators, says Joseph Ferrari, a psychology professor at DePaul University in Chicago and the author of the 2010 book "Still Procrastinating: The No Regrets Guide to Getting It Done." (Procrastinators who intended to use Turbo Tax got a surprise last night when the site went through intermittent service outages.)

The number one reason we procrastinate is obvious: we put off things we consider "aversive," which is the academic's way of saying we put off things that sound boring or complicated or generally unpleasant. Things like taxes.

"Nobody likes them! They're complicated, they require you to dig up things and you can't remember where they are, you fear you're not doing it correctly. Or you may be paying money! I think it's pretty normal for someone not to go get right down on their taxes," assures Tim Pychyl, a psychologist who studies procrastination. Pychyl writes the procrastination blog Don't Delay for Psychology Today, and is the author of the 2010 book "The Procrastinator's Digest: A Concise Guide to Solving the Procrastination Puzzle." 

Smug Friend, he says, may even have done her taxes early because she was putting off something else, a behavior psychologists refer to as structural procrastination. (As students, these kind of procrastinators might have organized a desk drawer instead of writing their term paper.) Maybe she had some truly terrible things on her to-do list in February, "so she did her taxes instead," suggests Pychyl. "It may not be the virtue (you) imagine it to be."

An early filer might also be what's called a defensive pessimist -- someone who imagines the worst possible situation and prepares as if it's bound to happen. A defensive pessimist envisions the last minute deadline panic and uses that anxiety to motivate himself or herself to do everything to avoid it. 

It's also possible that Smug Early Filing Friend is rightfully smug. "Some people are just wise enough to know that they're not going to feel more like doing it tomorrow. They recognize it for what it is, and they just get started," Pychyl says. One way to embrace this mindset next year, or for other projects you're likely to procrastinate on, is to just ask yourself, "What's the first thing I need to do?" Just a little bit of progress on step one will make you feel accomplished, which can be enough to fuel the next steps, says Pychyl.

"Just getting started is quite magical in its own way," he says. "Once we get started on an avoided task, we often scratch our heads and say, 'Why did I put this off?'" 

One last insight: We are really quite awful to our "future selves," according to a report Pychyl and a colleague just published in the journal Social and Personality Psychology Compass. Our weird minds create a disconnect between our "current self" and our "future self" -- it's like we imagine the latter to be a separate person, unrelated to our actual, current self. (There's actually a great example of this on the CBS sitcom "How I Met Your Mother" where Ted and Marshall put off a complicated conversation by deciding they don't need to do it now; it's Future Ted and Future Marshall's problem. "Let's let those guys handle that," current Marshall says.) 

Pychyl says we could cut down on procrastination "if we could just start to imagine 'future self' as 'self.'" 

"If I can start to think of 'future self' a little bit more kindly, I can start getting more things done," he says. 

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One whiff of budding flowers and the pressure in your chest starts to build. Your nose feels twitchy, your eyes snap shut and a-a-a-a-c-hooo -- a sneeze rockets out at 75 to 100 miles per hour. And with a long, miserable allergy season ahead, that's going to be happening a lot.

We all know how a sneeze happens. What we don’t know is why our eyes automatically close when we do it.

School kids will tell you it’s prevent your eyes from popping out, an urban legend – at least for the most part. There has been at least one report of this actually happening.

Dr. Rachel Vreeman, co-author of Don’t Swallow Your Gum! Myths, Half-Truths, and Outright Lies About Your Body and Health says she discovered an 1882 story in the New York Times about a woman whose eyeball popped out (known as eyeball subluxing) after sneezing.

According to the story, published on April 30, 1882, a woman “met with a singular accident day before yesterday. While riding on a street car, she was seized with a sudden fit of sneezing and burst one of her eyeballs, from which she has since been suffering the most intense pain.”

Vreeman says there is no modern medical evidence of eyeball subluxing from sneezing, although she admits it has happened to people who violently vomit. Usually, though, this only happens to people who suffer from eye muscle problems.

Interestingly, those same muscles provide a bit of ammunition to shoot down the eyeball-popping urban legend.

“There is no way that keeping your eyelids closed can prevent [your eyes from popping out],” says Dr. Robert Naclerio, a professor of surgery and section chief of otolaryngology at the University of Chicago Medicine. “It’s not like the muscles are strong enough.”

Of course, just because the eyelid muscles don’t have the strength to hold your eyes in, it doesn’t mean they’ll explode out during a violent sneeze.

Optometrist Bert Moritz of the Mayo Clinic Health System in Eau Claire, Wis., explains that six extra-ocular muscles firmly hold the eye in the socket, making it almost impossible for eyeball subluxing (what a relief!).

And though it may feel as if pressure builds in your entire face before you sneeze, it doesn’t increase in your eyes.

“The nasal passage, where the air comes through, is separated from the eye by some bones and membranes,” says Naclerio.

So why then do we clamp our eyes shut when we sneeze?

“This is an involuntary reflex,” explains Moritz. “When our brain sends this muscle message, one part of the message is to close our eyes. It’s similar to a deep tendon reflex.” 

A deep tendon reflex is what happens when a physician taps on your knee with that tiny hammer and your knee jerks. It’s simply an uncontrolled body response. Sneezing with your eyes open feels impossible without using your fingers to pry them open.

Which has certainly been done, by one of the guys on Mythbusters and countless others.

“It is certainly possible to keep your eyes open if you try while you are sneezing … but it requires working against the reflex,” says co-author Vreeman, assistant professor of pediatrics at Indiana University School of Medicine. “It’s a very strong response. The body puts as much force as it can muster into cleaning out its airways.”

Others have theorized that we shut our eyes when sneezing to shield our eyes from whatever we’ve expelled, says Moritz. Generally, when we sneeze we’re protecting ourselves from allergens and the reflex to shut our eyes might have developed as a further defense.     

"Some biologists think that when we expel our mucous and things [we close our eyes because] we don't want that stuff to get in our eyes," he says.

Related:

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If you’re a college student thinking of cramming for finals, you might want to adopt a more restful strategy.

Scientists have shown that sleep plays a crucial role in memory. As the brain goes down for the night – or even for a nap – what’s been experienced during the day is carefully sorted through and then filed away in permanent storage for easy access later.

Building on that discovery, German researchers have shown in an intriguing experiment that the improvements in memory that we get during our slumbers be boosted even further if we’re exposed to a very specific kind of sound when we’re in deep sleep.

The researchers suspected that little clicking sounds played in synchrony with our brain’s natural oscillations during deep sleep might pump up the oscillations, thereby improving sleep – and also memory.

“Imagine the sleeping brain as a swing which oscillates slowly back and forth,” says study co-author Jan Born, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Tubingen. “The auditory stimulation acts as a gentle nudge of the swing at its highest point [to enhance] the down swinging direction.”

For the new study, Born and his colleagues asked 11 volunteers to memorize 120 word pairs. The words in each pair were related to one another to make them easier to remember, so, for example, “brain” might be paired with “consciousness” and “problem” with “solution.”

In the evening, the volunteers were tested. A researcher would say one of the words from the pair and the volunteer was to try to remember the other.

Then the volunteers were sent off to the sleep lab where their brain activity was monitored throughout the night.

In the first part of the experiment, clicking noises were played through headphones when volunteers reached deep – or slow wave – sleep. In the morning, they were again tested on how well they remembered the word pairs.

A week later the volunteers were again brought into the lab and the experiment was run exactly as it had been the first time, except that there were no clicking sounds during the night.

To see whether the sounds had improved memory, the researchers subtracted the scores from the evening tests (taken before sleep) from the scores from the morning tests.

In both parts of the experiment, morning scores were improved over evening ones. When there was no clicking during the night, people, on average, remembered 13 more word pairs in the morning than in the evening. But the biggest difference was when people were exposed to clicking during the night. They remembered 22 more word pairs in the morning than they had in tests the evening before. That’s almost double the improvements brought on by sleep alone.

So, will college students be rushing out to buy new-fangled headphones that click in the middle of the night?

Not just yet, Born says.

“The creation of head phones that automatically apply auditory stimuli following the stimulation protocol presented in our publication is possible, [but] not so easy,” he explains. “There is ongoing work on these applied frontiers and therefore the development of such devices in the long-term is not so far-fetched.”

One big hurdle to developing a memory enhancing device is that the clicking sound must be in rhythm with the brain’s oscillations. And that, currently, requires the sleeper to be hooked up to an EEG in a sleep lab so brain waves can be monitored.

In the meantime, specialists may want to use the new method to improve sleep quality in people who are restless during the night, Born says.

“The most obvious application for our finding is in clinical settings, in order to enhance the slow oscillation sleep rhythm and thus improve slow wave sleep in certain forms of insomnia,” he explains. 

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Everyone seems to have a go-to hangover remedy. Some people swear a Prairie Oyster—raw egg, Worcestershire sauce, and a splash of hot sauce—makes the nausea and headache subside (or maybe the beverage is so disgusting people forget they’re hung over?). Others believe a greasy breakfast makes them feel OK again. Still some crack open a beer, believing that only the hair of the dog can help them. But are all these efforts useless? Is it even possible to get rid of a hangover?  

The only sure way to avoid a hangover is, of course, to abstain from drinking. But there are at least some science-backed ways to make the symptoms more bearable, says Alyson Mitchell, a professor and John Kinsella Chair in the department of food science and technology at the University of California, Davis. 

Every year U.S. companies lose an estimated $148 billion on hangovers, says Alyson Mitchell, but experts know little about them. Hangovers cost so much because so many people miss work and if they do show, they flub basic tasks because being hung over makes people a bit, well, stupid. That's just one example of why we need more research on hangovers, Mitchell argued during a presentation at the American Chemical Society's annual meeting. 

“The interesting thing about a hangover is that really it is a metabolic storm that is going on,” says Mitchell, a professor and John Kinsella Chair in the department of food science and technology at University of California, Davis. Hangovers involve a variety of systems, causing headaches, stomach discomfort, and immune responses like out-of-control inflammation. 

Mitchell notes that there a wealth of research on alcohol and alcoholism, but there is little research on hangovers (PubMed has more than 700,000 articles on alcohol and only 400 on hangovers). While she believes researchers might shy away from studying hangovers because finding a hangover cure might encourage excessive drinking, she thinks that examining hangovers can improve our understanding of how the immune systems, metabolisms, GI systems react to alcohol. 

“We really don’t know much about a hangover and it is an incredibly puzzling response—the symptoms only show up after all the alcohol is metabolized and gone from the body. And that in itself is amazing,” says Mitchell.  “The fact that something is the most toxic after it has been eliminated from the body [is unusual].” 

On to the “cures”: One way to avoid hangover symptoms is to drink water while you’re drinking alcohol. Alcohol works as a diuretic causing that achy head (so does caffeine; consuming alcohol and an energy drink will double that hangover). 

“You lose a lot of liquid through urination—four times as much water is lost as you take in,” Mitchell explains. “Ethanol is also a vasodilator and that [also] causes some of the headache issues.”  

People can also treat that icky hangover feeling by drinking fruit juice, which helps us hydrate and replace carbohydrates lost from drinking.  It’s also why eating toast or crackers sometimes makes us feel better.

Prior to drinking, people should eat a high fat meal, something that includes olive oil, meat, or dairy. The fat coats the stomach, meaning it takes the body longer to absorb the alcohol. The day after drinking, eating eggs helps replace cysteine, an amino acid, lost from alcohol consumption. Our bodies don’t easily replenish the amino acid and cysteine-rich eggs help restore it.  

”Hangovers are so common and prevalent in every society,” she says. “[Yet] I found it to be almost shocking that there is so little real research done on hangovers.” 

Related:

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From time to time Dr. Oliver Sacks is haunted by musical symbols: notes, clefs, staffs and bar lines all fly by his eyes uninvited and in rapid succession. The celebrated neuroscientist can “see” the imaginary scores despite, or perhaps because of, his partial blindness.

As it turns out, Sacks is not alone. People from around the world have been writing him letters describing the music-oriented hallucinations that come unexpectedly and unbidden.  He’s described their experiences in a new report published in the journal Brain.

“When they happen you’re startled,” says Sacks, a professor of neurology at New York University and author of the 2012 bestseller, “Hallucinations.”

“It’s different from imagination. When you imagine something, it’s yours because you have imagined it. But when this happens to you, you’re startled. You wonder, ‘Who ordered this up? Where did it come from?’”

More often than not, people who are visited by these hallucinations of musical notation have problems with their eyesight like Sacks, but the visions can come to people suffering from Parkinson’s disease or even just a fever, he says. While they often come to people who are musically oriented, they can also appear to those who can’t read a note.

Sacks describes the case of 75-year-old Ted R., who developed Parkinson’s in his early 60s. Despite the disease, Ted is still an active scholar and writer - and a gifted pianist who’s been having musical hallucinations for the last two years.

The first time the musical notations appeared, he’d been reading a book. He turned away from it for a few seconds, and when he glanced back at the pages in front of him, the text had been replaced by a musical score.

Ted wondered whether the score was actual music and has tried many times to either transcribe or to perform it, but so far has found that “the music is scarcely playable because it is highly ornamented,” Sacks writes.

But Ted perseveres. Having discovered that he can summon up the hallucinations by staring at a text on a printed page, he will put a newspaper on his music stand and wait for the notes to appear. Hampered by their complexity and the speed with which they disappear, he’s had little success and so far, no great symphony has arisen from the elusive illusions.  

Another letter writer, whom Sacks calls Arthur S., finds the hallucinations to be irksome rather than entertaining. Arthur is a surgeon and an amateur pianist who is losing his eyesight to macular degeneration. “He was quite annoyed, as they would appear on a letter he was trying to write or something he was trying to read,” Sacks says.

The hallucinations may offer scientists more than merely some entertaining stories about brain quirks. Sacks hopes they will teach us something about the networks that process musical scores. Researchers have already scanned the brains of people who hallucinate faces, Sacks says. “One finds that the part of the brain in the back of the right hemisphere that is normally responsible for recognizing faces, has taken on a life of its own,” he says.

Scanning people who suffer musical hallucinations might be even more interesting.

“A musical score is a complicated sort of thing,” he explains. “It might show us how many parts of the brain can be integrated together as they are in reading music – and also presumably in hallucinating about it.”

Sacks hopes his article will spark more research and prompt scientists to scan the brains of people in the midst of a musical hallucination. “One of my reasons for publishing this in ‘Brain’ is to say to my colleagues, ‘Hey guys, this is something interesting. Take it and run with it.’”

Related:

Head injury turns man into musical savant

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By Glenn McDonald, Discovery News

In the realm of baseball broadcasting, maybe the single most famous call in the history of the game happened on Oct. 3, 1951, when New York Giants outfielder Bobby Thompson hit a game-winning home run in the bottom of the ninth inning against the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Known as "The Shot Heard 'Round the World," the home run capped a historic comeback by Giants over their longtime rivals and inspired the famous radio call by Giants broadcaster Russ Hodges:

"There's a long drive … it's gonna be, I believe … The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!"

Baseball fans have long appreciated that announcers like Hodges in "the good old days" -- the era of the 1950s and before -- have a very specific style and cadence to their speech. It's a clipped, carefully enunciated manner of speaking that can also be heard in the films, TV shows and newsreels of the day.

But did everyone really talk like that in the 1950s? Or is that mannered speaking style we're familiar with really a pop cultural construct -- an artifact of the performance styles and broadcaster techniques of the time?

"That tinny, clipped tone of yesteryear is called Transatlantic speech," said Jay O'Berski, assistant professor of the Practice of Theater Studies with Duke University.

Transatlantic is a specific style of speaking, or dialect, that is still taught in acting schools and was part of the curriculum for performers and broadcasters in the early days of mass media. "It's an effort to neutralize regional dialects and consciousness of a particular class," O'Berski said.

That high-end, nasally quality, also associated with speech from previous eras, is a very real phenomenon, although it may have more to do with technology than performance technique.

"My understanding of the high-end, all-treble sound is that it's a holdover from radio and the first talkies when they had very little bass technology in receivers," O'Berski said. "You literally could not hear bass tones before stereo technology."

So what we think of in popular culture as "that 1950s" voice is partially the result of performance techniques and technology of the day. The artifacts we have from that era are, to a large degree, recordings of professional performers and broadcasters – film and TV actors, news readers and sports announcers.

But if you were to stop a random person on the street in 1955, in a random town in America, you'd get the full spectrum of regional dialects that continues to change and evolve to this day, says Dr. Robert Leonard, Director of the Institute for Forensic Linguistics at Hofstra University in New York.

Proof of this is just a few clicks away in the age of YouTube and archived, digitized video, Leonard says. "It is quite possible to find 'man-in-the-street' interviews from 50 years ago. Unless these are staged, and it should be pretty obvious, you will be hearing the 'real' dialects of the times."

Sportswriter Jason Turbow, author of the 2010 book "The Baseball Codes," recently finished work on his latest project -- "Baseball Forever!," a compilation of game broadcasts from the Golden Age of radio. Turbow says recordings from that era can illustrate the range of speaking styles in the era -- often in a single exchange of dialogue up in the press box.

"The play-by-play guys are usually professional broadcasters, and you can hear the difference right away between them and the color (commentary) guys, who are often ex-ballplayers or managers," Turbow said. "It's the same as today, really."

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Tim Sloan / AFP - Getty Images file

An actress portraying a zombie poses for a picture to promote "The Walking Dead."

A figure, mouth agape, staggers across a barren landscape, moaning incoherently. Add some jerky movements and a dazed expression, and we recognize it as a zombie.

Or is it someone infected with rabies? If Brandon Brown has his way, our current national obsession with zombies will help us learn more about public health issues like rabies and other little understood conditions.

“You can almost see zombies as a link or metaphor,” explains Brown, author of the paper “Zombies—A Pop Culture Resource for Public Health,” which was published online in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.

It’s not the first time zombies have been used as metaphor for public health issues. Back in 2011, Dave Daigle and colleagues wrote a wildly popular blog post about preparing for the coming zombie apocalypse as a way to encourage the public to think about disaster preparedness. So many people clicked, the CDC website crashed. “Zombies are a lot sexier than our typical health topic,” explains Maggie Silver, one of the brains behind that zombie campaign.

Brown stumbled across that post, which got him thinking about other ways zombies could educate people about public health.  

“I had previous interest in zombies because of ‘The Walking Dead’ and ‘Night of the Living Dead,’” Brown says. “I thought I could build upon it and look at other public health related issues.”

He examined the history of zombies and soon realized the walking dead share similarities with rabies. “With both of them, there is a stage where you are trying to bite people,” deadpans Daigle.

While rabies accounts for few, if any deaths, in the United States due to prophylaxis and vaccinations, it remains a scourge in developing countries. While Brown writes that what we know about how the zombie virus moves through the body is, sadly, fictional, we know that rabies proliferates after an infected creature bites someone and the virulent saliva spreads through the blood stream. Both zombies and rabid people tend to be slack-jawed and rabid people salivate a lot, making it easier to spread the disease. And both can become violent and aggressive. Rabies makes it difficult to swallow, meaning victims’ voice boxes spasm and they cannot talk. Most zombies typically groan (though some have been known to wail “braaaaains”).     

Brown also recognized that zombies could help explain often misunderstood neurological conditions such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. Using the zombie example to explain the neurodegenerative disorders could help people better understand these complex and frightening diseases. Both zombies and Parkinson’s patients experience muscle rigidity, tremors and slowness, for example, and the changes someone undergoes with such a disease can seem as terrifying as fictional monsters.

“I think one of the major issues with understanding Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s is that there is a real lack of interest unless people have it in their own lives … I think it’s the same with rabies,” he says. 

Of course, Brown adds that with this tactic, public health administrators must take great caution not to stigmatize those with Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s. “I think we can stigmatize zombies all we want, but have to be careful with others,” he says.  

Related:

How to prepare for the zombie apocalypse? CDC has you covered

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Karen Rowan
MyHealthNewsDaily

A man in Austria developed a cataract shaped like a star in his eye after he was punched, according to a report of his case. 

The 55-year-old went to his doctor because his vision in that eye had progressively worsened over the previous six months, according to doctors who treated the man.

The patient said he'd been punched nine months earlier, the doctors wrote in their report.

"Nature has made a beautiful cataract," said Dr. Mark Fromer, an ophthalmologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, and eye surgeon for the New York Rangers hockey team, after he saw the image. "Most aren't so pretty," he said.

It's very common for cataracts to form after the eye takes a hit, Fromer said. Punches and the balls used in sports are most often the cause, but bumps from air bags and steering wheels have also created cataracts, Fromer said.

When the eyeball is struck, the energy of the blow sends shock waves through the eye that can disrupt the nature of the eye's lens, causing it to become opaque in regions, he explained. In most cases, cataracts look more like a vaguely shaped cloud, and can be white or yellowish.

The man in Austria was treated with a procedure called "phacoemulsification," which involves using sound waves to break up the opaque part of the lens, and then removing it with a vacuum. The lens is then replaced with an artificial lens, Fromer said. In fact, such cataract surgery is the most widely performed surgery in the world, with 2 million procedures done in the U.S. yearly.

Trauma to the eye is one reason why doctors emphasize the importance of wearing protective eyewear during sports, Fromer said. 

The case is reported Thursday (April 4) New England Journal of Medicine.

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