The other day, a few media outlets in the New York region covered the story of a woman who can’t seem to stop having orgasms, which would seem joke-ready but can actually be a nightmare.

While the New Jersey woman’s condition has not been formally diagnosed, it appears she has persistent genital arousal disorder (PGAD), something we explored years ago. 

The syndrome usually manifests as a constant blood engorgement of the female genitals, mainly the clitoris. This creates a sensation of needing “relief.” Cue the jokes. But imagine constantly sensing the need for orgasm at work, on the bus, while visiting with friends, and then finding no relief, or only very temporary relief, if you masturbate. Genitals can become highly sensitive, and sore. Sufferers describe feelings of isolation and mental anguish.

Unfortunately, nobody is quite sure what causes it or how to treat it, but, according to Jim Pfaus, a researcher at Montreal’s Concordia University who studies the neuroscience of sexual response, and who is currently engaged in studying persistent genital arousal, there are enough clues to develop a working theory.

“The root cause,” he explained, “may be an irritation of the clitoral sensory nerves.” The brain interprets this sensation and sets off a cascade of events.

A brain region called the pro-optic area responds to dopamine signaling by sending out instructions for the body to prepare for sex, as if a woman has been engaged in foreplay when, in fact, she’s not remotely in a sexual context. Blood flows to the genitals. “So we think that this blood flow is in a state of hyperarousal in women with PGAD,” Pfaus said. “They get engorgement quickly, reach orgasm quickly when they try to relieve themselves. It shares features with premature ejaculation and priapism” in men.

That’s consistent with observations others have made. For example, Barry Komisaruk at Rutgers University found that of a group of 18 women with PGAD, 12 had cysts on nerves in the sacral region of their spines. The cysts may be stimulating clitoral nerves.

A variety of drug therapies (there’s even one report of a physical therapy involving manipulation of muscles in the region) have shown to help. SSRIs, commonly used for depression, seem to provide some relief. But Pfaus believes the drug varenicline (Chantix, commonly used for smoking cessation) is most promising. It works by interrupting the signaling that leads to dopamine release. Blood stops flowing.

While the therapy has worked in scores of women, Pfaus said, the drug isn’t perfect. “Unfortunately it comes back when they go off it.” 

Brian Alexander (www.BrianRAlexander.com) is co-author, with Larry Young PhD., of "The Chemistry Between Us: Love, Sex and the Science of Attraction," (www.TheChemistryBetweenUs.com) to be published Sept. 13.

Want more weird health news? Find The Body Odd on Facebook.

You may have heard about the 31-year-old Idaho woman who last week woke up after “sleep swimming” in the Snake River. She was found, suffering from hypothermia, along the shore. It was the second time she’d done it this summer.

Sounds ridiculous, right? Sure, we’ve all heard of bizarre cases of “sleep driving” and “sleep eating” and even “sleep sex,” but sleep swimming? In a cold river? (I’ve been in the Snake River in Idaho, and I can tell you, it’s cold.) Surely, even if you could walk to the river in your sleep, that first splash of icy water would wake you.

Not necessarily. 

The problem with that popular notion, explained Dr. Mark Mahowald, visiting professor at Stanford University’s parasomnia clinic (parasomnia refers to sleep disorders involving behavior), is that “sleep” doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing affair.

Parts of your brain can be “asleep” while other parts are “awake.” Brain regions, mainly the frontal cortex, responsible for self-control, reasoning and laying down memories can be happily snoozing while parts of the deep brain, like the stem, can be “awake.”

Because deep brain regions have been equipped with what Mahowald calls “central pattern generators,” patterns of physical acts, something like one of those dance steps instructors lay down on a floor, “you can have somebody who is sleepwalking, and be capable of performing extremely complex behaviors.”

He likens it to a chicken that goes under the hatchet and then starts running around, headless, through the barnyard. The chicken doesn’t have any brain at all, and yet, because its spinal cord has complex pattern generators in it, the chicken runs.

“In humans,” he explained, “there is good evidence that complex behaviors like running, screaming, shouting, sex acts, are all pre-packaged central pattern generators,” either learned or instinctive, that are let loose while the rational brain is sleeping.

You’d have to know how to swim in order to swim in your sleep, of course -- you can’t just start playing Chopin in your sleep if you don’t already know how -- but this explains why people can drive, sometimes long distances, and not recall ever doing it.

People have actually committed murder while sleeping, as documented on a website run by Mahowald and colleagues.

The cold water of a river wouldn’t necessarily wake the sleeper because sleep is like being in a state of anesthesia. We tend not to feel pain or discomfort while sleeping, only after the event is over.

“We had a case in Minnesota where a guy sleep walked outside, at 20 below zero, and sustained incredible frostbite on his feet,” Mahowald recalled. “He wasn’t aware until he woke up and saw the blisters.” 

The causes of sleep walking vary, but may have a genetic component, explained Dr. Steven Poceta, a neurologist affiliated with the Scripps Clinic Sleep Center in San Diego who has documented cases of sleep eating, driving, and cooking among other behaviors.

While science hasn’t figured out why many children sleep walk, but outgrow it, it does appear that the habit can return during times of stress. “That’s a very common scenario,” Poceta said.

Sleep deprivation caused by apnea, or restless leg syndrome, can lead to sleepwalking. So can drugs like zolpidem (Ambien), which became infamous for leading to sleep eating. As for how often that happens, Poceta said, “we think it is more common than is fully appreciated.”    

Brian Alexander (www.BrianRAlexander.com) is co-author, with Larry Young PhD., of "The Chemistry Between Us: Love, Sex and the Science of Attraction," (www.TheChemistryBetweenUs.com) to be published Sept. 13.

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Want more weird health news? Find The Body Odd on Facebook.

In the classic movie White Christmas, Bing Crosby jokingly tells Rosemary Clooney that by eating the right sandwich before bed, he can make sure he dreams about redheads, or blondes. If only we could all influence the content of our dreams so easily.

Well, a dream researcher in Hong Kong named Calvin Kai-Ching Yu, of Shue Yan University, says we can, at least a little.

For a study released last week in the journal Dreaming, he sampled 670 people, mostly university students, two-thirds of whom were females. He had them complete surveys about the intensities of their dreams, how often their dreams contained specific themes (such as flying, being chased, suffocation, and so on), and personality traits. They also indicated how often they slept on their sides, face up (supine), or face down (prone) on a five point scale from “never” to “almost every time.”

When he analyzed the numbers, he found that the prone sleepers, as a group, were much more likely to score highly on what he calls the Dream Motif Scale (DMS), regardless of their personality type. Motifs like “persecution,” “erotomania,” and “sex” appeared significantly more frequently.

He concluded that “this study provides the evidence that dream experiences, and in particular dream content, can be influenced by body posture during sleep.”

In other words, sleeping face down is more likely to give you intense dreams featuring several common themes. Among the persecution motifs, for example, people reported “being tied up,” “being locked up,” and “unable to move.”

But why would position so influence the content of our dreams? Kai-Ching Yu believes that the prone position provides more intense physical stimulus, making it tougher to breathe, for example, and making our bodies feel more constricted.

“The unconscious brains of the dreamers try to make sense, and even make use of, the external stimuli,” he told NBCNews.com.

It’s something like the dreams we have – common across cultures – when we have to urinate. We’re sleeping, but the pressure begins influencing our dream content so we start dreaming about bathrooms, or having to go. Also, when we’re face down, our genitals are receiving more stimulus from the bed and sheets, he speculates, so our brains incorporate that into sex-related dreaming.

He may be right, but there are reasons to be skeptical. First, a common problem in dream research is that people often don’t accurately recall their dreams even when they’ve just awakened. Also, while many people may think they know what position they sleep in, they’re often wrong. The dream scales Kai-Ching Yu used in his study were invented by him and, he said, they have not been validated by other researchers, though he has used them in many studies and gotten consistent results.

But the biggest reason for skepticism is that other scientists argue we’re cut off from the external world when we’re asleep. We’re in a completely internal realm – at the mercy of what sleep researchers from Harvard have called “a virtual reality system” without meaningful responses to the outside world, like the touch of sheets or the pressure of our bodies laying face down.

He doesn’t completely disagree, but said “I believe that the brain during sleep is not at all totally detached from the external world, and somatosensory stimuli, including those stemming from the environment, are probably incorporated into dream content more often than people observe or are aware of.” This is especially true, he thinks, at the unconscious level. That’s where our brains try to make sense, even if distorted, of what the body’s feeling.

Brian Alexander (www.BrianRAlexander.com) is co-author, with Larry Young PhD., of "The Chemistry Between Us: Love, Sex and the Science of Attraction," (www.TheChemistryBetweenUs.com) to be published Sept. 13.

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Darren Green

Everybody knows too much stress and anxiety is bad for you. It dents the immune system, the cardiovascular system and may even contribute to cancer. Now it appears that one common source of stress -- our jobs -- could be having damaging effects on critical DNA in our cells. And that could lead to early aging, and the diseases and conditions that go along with it.

A study led by Kirsi Ahola of the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health measured the length of DNA sections called telomeres and how the lengths varied in association with job stress. It found that people with the most job stress tended to have shorter telomeres.

That matters because telomeres, located at the ends of chromosomes, serve as a kind of protective cap to the ropy strands, helping assure that the genetic instructions carried by genes on the chromosomes are accurately translated so cells get the right messages. Telomeres become shorter with age, oxidation and chemical insults. Often, when telomeres reach a critically short length, the cell dies in a process called apoptosis. Some cells don’t die. They become what scientists call “senescent.” They sputter along, making genetic errors and causing damage.

In their study, published this month in the journal PLoS One, Ahola and her co-workers looked at blood cells called leukocytes, a group of cells critical for immune function and a common subject of telomere experiments. They found that workers who experienced “severe exhaustion” from job stress had significantly shorter leukocyte telomeres than workers who were not exhausted from stress. 

As a result, those workers could face the diseases of aging sooner than they might otherwise. Telomere shortening has been associated with Parkinson’s, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer. In short, a constantly stressful job could make you old before your time.

“I think that these results should be used when considering health hazards and work place legislation,” Ahola told NBC News. “Chronic work stress can become a health risk and should be prevented.”

She acknowledged that “both individual and environmental factors affect the experience of stress,” so the same objective workplace conditions could have greater or lesser effects depending upon a number of personal traits.

That’s why, suggested Aoife O’Donovan, a research fellow at the University of California San Francisco, who studies the relationship between telomeres and stress, science can’t yet make definite cause and effect statements about telomere length, stress, aging and disease.

A number of life stressors aside from work, such as marital troubles, poverty, early childhood experience, gender (males tend to have shorter telomeres) -- as well as genetic makeup and health behaviors like smoking and diet – also appear to affect telomere length. For example, people who have experienced childhood trauma tend to be less able to cope with stress later in life and also tend to have shorter telomeres. The Finnish researchers adjusted their findings to take some of these factors into account, but it’s not possible to filter them out completely.

Still, O’Donovan doesn’t doubt the validity of the link between work stress and telomere shortening. “When you get a high enough dose of stress, hardly anyone is resilient,” she explained. “People can be resilient to one or two types of stressors in certain periods of time, but once it becomes cumulative, across domains, it’s rare to find resilient people.”

Stress builds on itself, she said. “Chronic stress begets chronic stress.”   

But despite the ample evidence that stress is damaging, O’Donovan said, “It’s amazing how much we talk about it, and how little we’re are doing about it.”  

Brian Alexander (www.BrianRAlexander.com) is co-author, with Larry Young PhD., of "The Chemistry Between Us: Love, Sex and the Science of Attraction," (www.TheChemistryBetweenUs.com) to be published Sept. 13.

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Chris Newton / Getty Images stock

“A physician who treats himself has a fool for a patient,” Sir William Osler, a founding faculty member of Johns Hopkins Hospital and its famous school of medicine, once said. Yet we often try to diagnose ourselves using Dr. Google.  

Now, new research from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology helps explain why that’s a very bad idea: The closer we are to the subject -- and when we’re diagnosing ourselves we’re very close indeed -- the more likely we are to over- or under-estimate the chances we’ve got something.

Marketing PhD candidate Dengfeng Yan, who will assume a teaching post at the University of Texas at San Antonio this fall, and his department chairman, Jaideep Sengupta, conducted a series of experiments showing how our cognitive brains are subject to biases that affect judgment of disease risk.  

Building on past research, they explored self-positivity and self-negativity biases. Such research has shown, for example, that symptoms we perceive to be indigestion in a stranger are often thought to be a possible heart attack in ourselves (self-negativity). Conversely, we can underestimate our risk for many common conditions like sexually transmitted diseases (self-positivity).

Using hundreds of university students, they presented a variety of scenarios involving diseases like flu, hepatitis C, breast cancer, osteoporosis. They provided different sets of information (high or low) on the “base-rate” -- meaning the incidence of a condition in the population -- and “case-risk” -- one person’s profile of behaviors or symptoms. Sometimes the person was a stranger, sometimes themselves.

The experiments showed that social distance mattered. The less familiar the person in the scenario was, the more heavily the test subjects relied on base-rate information. The closer to the subjects, including themselves, the more they relied on individual case information.

“We found the effect to be quite strong, as evidenced by the fact that we replicated our findings using different manipulations of psychological distance, and across five different types of health risks,” Yan told NBC News.

For example, subjects were given differing sets of data about the rate of HIV in Hong Kong, and then given case information including a scenario about themselves or about a stranger. They were asked “How likely are you [or how likely is the stranger] to engage in risky behaviors by which HIV is transmitted?”

When told the disease base rate was high, but risky behavior likelihood was low, the subjects said they were less vulnerable to risk than others (who engaged in the same behaviors) were. That’s a self-positivity bias. But when told the base rate of HIV was low, but risky behavior likelihood was high, the participants judged themselves more vulnerable than others. That’s self-negativity.

Another test used two strains of flu, one mild and one more dangerous. Again, they tended to either underestimate their own risk when told that the base rate of mild flu was high but they had only one symptom, and overestimate their risk for dangerous swine flu when told the base rate was low, but they themselves had multiple symptoms, though those symptoms could also apply to the common cold or allergies.

Though he tested people of undergraduate age, Yan believes his results would hold for people of any age.

His findings, published this month in the Journal of Consumer Research, show that the advantage of seeing a real doctor isn’t just because he or she is an expert. It’s also that they aren’t you.      

Brian Alexander (www.BrianRAlexander.com) is co-author, with Larry Young PhD., of "The Chemistry Between Us: Love, Sex and the Science of Attraction," (www.TheChemistryBetweenUs.com) to be published Sept. 13.

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featurepics.com

It's not that he's untrustworthy, it's just that he's thinking.

Whenever I’ve watched video of myself on TV, I think I look shifty-eyed. I’m asked a question and my eyes dart away from the camera into which I’ve been told to look. At the time, I don’t know I’m doing it, but I am.

Psychology professor Howard Ehrlichman of Queens College, City University of New York, has been studying eye movement since the 1970s. In a recent article in Current Directions in Psychological Science, he reviewed some of his work, including recent findings, and argued there’s robust evidence that I’m not being shifty-eyed at all. I’m just thinking. More specifically, I'm accessing long-term memory.

“There’s no way to prove this is universal,” Ehrlichman says. “But I can say that you can see it just by looking at people on TV, and in interviews. I am convinced it is universal.”

Ehrlichman is referring to saccades, rapid eye movements that disengage the focus of one’s vision, often moving down and away from, say, the eyes of a person to whom you are talking. Or a TV camera.

Over the years, there have been a number of seemingly logical explanations for the darting eye phenomenon. Humans place great importance on the eyes of others -- it’s part of how we determine friend from foe or intuit what others are thinking. Because this requires brain power and focus, many believe we have to disengage in order to direct our thoughts elsewhere. Another theory suggests that the direction of eye movement is related to the hemisphere of the brain we're accessing. That idea even showed up as a plot point in an episode of “The Mentalist.”

Sadly, Ehrlichman, says, “people in law enforcement do believe that,” and think they can tell if somebody is telling the truth or not. But during his work for his Ph.D. dissertation he found little evidence to support the idea.

In fact, Ehrlichman’s research shows that these eye movements have nothing at all to do with vision or hemispheres. He speculates the intermittent eye movements are an evolutionary holdover.

Most animals are what Ehrlichman calls “sensory/motor machines.” They are constantly scanning and reacting to the environment, looking for food, say, or trying to avoid danger. When they find what they are looking for, they fixate on it.

Our brain’s long-term memory is like an internalized landscape. We don’t need our eyes to scan it, but “our eyes go along for the ride,” Ehrlichman says, even if we’re not looking for anything visual.

Ehrlichman and his colleagues proved the saccades are unrelated to actual vision by putting people in dark rooms, alone. “We see this effect even if they have closed eyes and they have nothing to disengage from,” he says. “The pattern is the same as when people are sitting with their eyes open.”

In one experiment, subjects were asked to name things according to visual properties, like “green” or “triangular” versus naming words meaning the same as “pleasant.” The visually-related items like “green” evoked no eye movement. But when subjects searched their brain data banks for words matching pleasant, the saccades were obvious.

Similarly, when subjects were asked to visualize their living room and describe it, which you’d think would lead to lots of eye movement as they mentally scanned the room, there was virtually no saccade activity.

“We think once they retrieve the image, they can move through it without searching long-term memory,” Ehrlichman explains.

On the other hand, when an answer to a question is right in front of us, say if we’ve just rehearsed a Q and A, we don’t need to scan our internal memory landscape. We can pop out an answer to a question and maintain our focus.

So rather then being shifty, eye movements could actually mean somebody -- including yours truly -- is simply being thoughtful. 

Brian Alexander (www.BrianRAlexander.com) is co-author, with Larry Young PhD., of "The Chemistry Between Us: Love, Sex and the Science of Attraction," (www.TheChemistryBetweenUs.com)  to be published Sept. 13.

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Just when you thought those annoying Kardashians couldn’t mess with your head any more than they already do, consider “Mr. A.” When he first saw the psychiatrist, he demanded to speak to “the director” of the reality show in which he was starring.

When “Mr. B.” met psychiatric workers, he informed them that he was being continuously taped for national broadcast. “Mr. D.” really was working on a reality show -- until he came to believe that he was the actual star.

All these people, and others, suffered from the delusion that they were serving as entertainment for others. All of them specifically cited the 1998 movie “The Truman Show,” written by Andrew Niccol, directed by Peter Weir, and starring Jim Carrey. In the movie, Carrey plays an insurance man living in a town that’s actually a TV set and populated by actors he thinks are his friends, family and neighbors.

Psychiatrist Joel Gold, in private practice and a professor of psychiatry at New York University, and his brother Ian Gold, a philosopher of psychiatry at McGill University, writing in the most recent issue of the journal Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, dub this the "Truman Show" delusion. They ask “Can a case be made that the phenomenon of reality television might interact with the expression of psychotic symptoms?”

The answer, they argue, is most definitely yes.

They suggest that “reality television resonates with a common anxiety about one’s position in the social hierarchy…. Someone who is particularly anxious about their social status, therefore, might experience reality television as presenting a significant social threat, or a tantalizing possibility of success, or both. In the life of such a person, reality television might act as a significant stress, the effects of which might include a persecutory or grandiose delusion of the Truman Show type.”

It’s not that watching lots of reality TV causes a mental illness (believe it or not). Rather, an existing or nascent illness, like schizophrenia, interacts with the cultural pervasiveness of reality TV to give form to the delusion. It’s a little like those unstable people who go to Jerusalem and experience “Jerusalem Syndrome,” the belief that they’re characters from the Bible.

The Golds wrote the paper because they think the environmental associations with psychosis don’t get enough attention. “We think in North America that it’s overlooked,” he said in an interview.

“We are interested in the way society as a whole has changed,” he said, “With the advent of reality TV and closed circuit TVs in cities such as London where people are truly observed, and the Internet with YouTube, what impact might that have on people otherwise predisposed to grandiosity and paranoia?”

As the Golds point out, delusions fall into a limited number of standard types no matter where the sufferer lives. People from Saudi Arabia tend to have delusions about being covered in sand. People in the U.S. tend to have delusions about being followed by the CIA. The specific content of the delusion can be culturally based.

For example, in this month’s issue of the International Journal of Social Psychiatry, researchers from Maywood University studied records from a state psychiatric institution across the last century and found that while the categories of delusions were the same as today -- such as persecutory, religious or grandiose -- the content of the delusion depended on whatever was happening in the culture at the time.

At the moment, we’re steeped in “reality” television, so it’s no wonder, the Golds suggest, that people with a mental illness might get the idea they’re the next Bethenny Frankel.

Science has not yet pinned down the root biological causes of delusions. A leading theory involves the way the chemical dopamine activates motivational brain circuitry. A person suffering from a delusion may not just notice that there’s an anchorman on TV is wearing a yellow tie, he might attach enormous importance to that fact, and come to believe that the yellow tie is communicating some vital message. The social brain may also be impaired. What scientists call “Theory of Mind” -- the ability to figure out what others are thinking and feeling -- may be misfiring. The brains of the delusional may also be too quick to jump to conclusions about common experience.

“If a car is bearing down on you, you see it as a threat,” Gold explained. “You better get out of the way. Well, there are two blue cars parked outside my home, and two days ago, there was also a blue car. Is there something to that? Is it a threat? You could build a delusion around that.”

Brian Alexander (www.BrianRAlexander.com) is co-author, with Larry Young PhD., of "The Chemistry Between Us: Love Sex and the Science of Attraction," (www.TheChemistryBetweenUs.com)  to be published Sept. 13.

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We’ve all heard about the amazing ability of some blind people to hear, smell, or touch with such a high degree of acuity that they become almost savant-like. Daniel Kish, for example, has become famous for his ability to use echolocation, like bats or dolphins, to navigate the world.

But Kish was blinded at the tender age of 13 months, and many other blind people with hyper-ability in other senses were born that way. What about the rest of us? Do we have innate abilities we almost never use?

At this week’s Acoustics 2012 scientific meeting in Hong Kong, a team of Canadian researchers from the auditory neuroscience lab of François Champoux at the University of Montreal presented a study they conducted with sighted people. According to Simon Landry, a graduate student, the researchers exposed subjects to a harmonic tone. Such tones sound like a single note, but they actually have layers of “harmonicity.” So the team slightly altered one layer until the subjects could notice it.

All sighted subjects were about the same in their ability to distinguish an altered layer. But in a second round of testing, those who spent just 90 minutes blindfolded performed significantly better than non-blindfolded participants, and better than they themselves did the first time around.

How the brain can do this hasn’t yet been fully established, but, Landry explained, “the idea is that the brain doesn’t actually change, but vision no longer suppresses the processing of other modalities, which have existing pathways, in the visual cortex.”

By “modalities,” Landry means types of sensory input. He’s using the language of Alvaro Pascual-Leone, a Harvard behavioral neurologist who has spent years studying how the brain processes information.

Pascual-Leone refers to the brain as “metamodal.” He sees the results of the Montreal researchers as “amazingly remarkable…. This is one more illustration” of the metamodal hypothesis “and the implication to me is that clearly there is a cross-talk betweens the senses that goes well beyond what we thought. We have been thinking of these systems as silos, independent of each other, and that is definitely not the case.”

In Pascual-Leone’s hypothesis, parts of the brain aren’t firmly predestined to translate vision or touch or sound, they are simply biased toward one or another by the way they develop. Then, when we open our eyes as newborns, the visual information tends to be translated by the occipital cortex because it’s best suited for the job, not because it’s the only region that can do it, nor because that’s all it can do. All that visual information streaming in just overwhelms information from our ears or our fingers. In his view, the sensory pats of our brains aren’t silos, but a web.

“Why do you close your eyes when you go to a concert?” he asks. “You are suppressing the visual input. That disinhibits the connection between the visual and auditory cortices” so information can flow between them. “It makes more of the brain able to process sound.”       

Take, for example, the case of a Spanish woman who was blind since birth. She worked as a Braille proof reader for the Spanish Organization for the Blind. At age 62, she suffered a stroke that resulted in a coma from which she recovered. But she was no longer able to read Braille. Her stroke had injured her occipital cortex, the center of vision. Her sense of touch was unimpaired. Though she had ever been able to see, her occipital cortex was instrumental in making sense of what she touched and turning it into language.

Pascual-Leone pointed out that the Canadian experiment underscores the difference between those blind from birth and those who become blind later in life. Those who have experienced vision “have a brain that’s been calibrated with vision.” They have, metaphorically speaking, acquired a library of references that have physically reshaped their brains. A congenitally blind person knows what, for example, a cube and a sphere feel like. But if they gain sight later in life, and see a cube and sphere together for the first time, they can’t tell which is which “unless they can match the visual with the tactile,” he said. After that integration, they do fine.

“What we find with sighted, blindfolded people,” he said, “may be showing us something about what it is to see, rather than to be blind.”  

Brian Alexander (www.BrianRAlexander.com) is co-author, with Larry Young PhD., of "The Chemistry Between Us: Love Sex and the Science of Attraction," (www.TheChemistryBetweenUs.com)  to be published Sept. 13.

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Good news for those of you who are so self-conscious about gesturing when speaking you issue that “I use my hands when I talk” line: You can stop apologizing. 

As Spencer Kelly, the co-director of Colgate University’s Center for Language and the Brain will tell The Acoustics 2012 Hong Kong scientific conference later today, gesturing is integral to language. In fact, he argues, it’s “innate.”

“Blind people gesture, even if they are blind from birth,” he explained in an interview. “They often gesture even when talking to other blind people. So there is some kind of predisposition to using our hands.”

A recent experiment he conducted shows that gesturing as speech is different from actions upon real objects. It’s more like language.

He placed EEG devices on the heads of subjects to monitor the electricity inside their brains as they viewed videos of people speaking. In some, people used gestures. In others, people took a real action on a real object. For example, in one scene, people pantomimed stirring a cup of coffee, in another, they stirred an actual cup of coffee. Scenes also depicted both gestures, and real use of an object, that were incongruent with the words so that, say, “He found the answer” was accompanied by a gesture indicating stirring something in a cup.

As the subjects viewed the videos, Kelly and colleagues looked for a specific electrical signal that indicates how strongly the brain is integrating one piece of information with another.

The results indicated that test subjects had more difficulty integrating words and real actions, than they did words and gestures. They also had more trouble integrating words with incongruent gestures than they did real actions.

So real actions tended to interfere with understanding speech, while gestures helped, but incongruent gestures interfered with understanding words while there was no difference between the amount of difficulty real actions posed whether they were incongruent or not.

That means, Kelly believes, that the brain views gestures as speech, but actions on objects as unrelated to speech. “That is kind of a controversial theory,” he said, “but my work and that of colleagues interested in testing it shows that gesture is more part of language than actions on objects.”

Gesturing, he thinks, has evolved. “I think it started with concrete interactions with objects,” he explained. “If I wanted to show you how to build a fire, I would bang two rocks together.” Over time, the real action was replaced by symbolic gestures and words. “Language is the ultimate abstraction,” he said. “Gesturing is a sort of middle ground between doing something and talking about something.” 

Other experiments have shown that gestures are interpreted by the auditory cortex of the brain, like speech. And, interestingly, people with Broca’s aphasia, which can be caused by a stroke that damages the frontal gyrus, which pays a role in speech production, also have trouble gesturing.

So gesturing really does appear to be important for making ourselves understood. “The cool thing is,” Kelly said, “that if you’ve not thought about it, and then you start, you see it all the time. In fact, I’m talking to you right now on the phone and I’m gesturing.”

Brian Alexander (www.BrianRAlexander.com) is co-author, with Larry Young PhD., of "The Chemistry Between Us: Love Sex and the Science of Attraction," (www.TheChemistryBetweenUs.com)  to be published Sept. 13.

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Call it the great one-day (we hope) lazy eye panic.

It started, apparently, with a story in the Australian tabloid Daily Telegraph, which quoted an Aussie eye doctor as indicting the hair-over-one-eye hairstyles of Cameron Diaz and Nicole Richie (those of us into old movies prefer Veronica Lake), and countless emo boys and girls, as causing lazy eye, or amblyopia.   

Then the story made its way to The Huffington Post. By the time msnbc.com contacted Dr. Leonard Press, the New Jersey eye specialist who co-authored the clinical practice guidelines on amblyopia for the American Optometric Association, the assistant who picked up the phone said “You mean the hair-over-the-eyes thing?”

Press could barely suppress a chuckle.

Amblyopia, a condition of reduced vision in which the brain does not recognize some or all of the information the eye sees, is indeed a serious eye problem, he said, and one of the reasons it’s serious is that, if left untreated in children younger than 7 years old, a very concerted, sometimes difficult, effort has to be made to correct the lazy eye. That’s because after about age 7, the neural and optical mechanisms involved have been well established, and changing them is tough going.

That’s exactly the reason why Nicole Richie is safe.

“The story would only be true,” he explained, “if you had somebody young enough, and if that person never looked out of that eye -- if it was blocked 24-7. The reason it’s false is that you don’t have that constant deprivation.”

The visual system, Press said, “is so well-established” after childhood, that “combing your hair over your eye will not do anything to that system.”

So don’t worry all you emo boys and girls. By the time mother and father give in to whatever hairstyle you want, any eye problems won’t be the result of your comb-over. Laser lights, well, that could be another story.

Brian Alexander (www.BrianRAlexander.com) is co-author, with Larry Young, PhD., of "The Chemistry Between Us: Love Sex and the Science of Attraction," (www.TheChemistryBetweenUs.com)  to be published Sept. 13.

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Rookie Bryce Harper of the Washington Nationals is a polarizing figure in baseball today, mostly due to his attitude. But recent discoveries in social psychology suggest our perceptions of Harper may be shaped by something a little hairier: the kid's facial hair.

Rookie Bryce Harper, all of 19 years old, has such a poor rep already in Major League Baseball that Cole Hamels felt justified in hitting him with a fastball, and then bragging about it afterwards, as Jelisa Castrodale of NBCSports.com points out.

Apparently there could be a number of reasons to explain the visceral reaction to Harper, including a propensity toward arrogance. But could the kid’s facial hair have anything to do with it?

Sounds bizarre, but maybe.

Last January, in the journal Behavioral Ecology, two researchers, Barnaby Dixson of Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, and Paul Vasey, of the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, released a study on reactions to men’s beards.

They pointed out that beard growth is under genetic control, and that it may serve as a sexual signal between men. In tests, women in both Samoa and in New Zealand did not rate bearded men as any more attractive than the same men pictured without beards, so beards weren’t helping the guys get girls. But other men (women, too) viewed bearded male faces as more threatening when the pictured males adopted an angry look.

Facial hair, the authors wrote “may intimidate rival males by increasing perceptions of the size of the jaw, overall length of the face, and by enhancing aggressive and threatening jaw-thrusting behaviors ... . The current study is the first to show that the beard augments a threatening behavioral display as bearded men with angry facial expressions received significantly higher scores for aggressiveness compared with clean-shaven faces ... . This suggests that the beard plays an important role in intermale signaling of threat and aggression.”

Other, past studies, have shown that when mock juries are presented with pictures of men accused of crimes like rape, the juries are much more likely to believe the bearded man is guilty. A 2004 study from researchers at Montclair State University in New Jersey asked 371 people to “sketch the face of a criminal offender. Eighty-two percent of the sketches contained some form of facial hair.” Yet beards have often been seen a sign of maturity, education, and competence. So what’s up?

A man’s facial features have been shown to reflect both his androgen status -- how much testosterone and related hormones he’s making -- and physical strength. Beards, themselves dependant upon androgens, can frame and accentuate those features.

This could be positive. “Both men and women ascribe positive attributes such as intelligence, courage, confidence and social maturity to beards,” Dixson explained in an email. But in his study, he included the angry expressions, and then, the beards made the men look threatening and meaner than when the same men were clean shaven.

So it’s all the above, suggested Dixson. “Beards appear to be linked with perceptions of elevated age (maturity), social status, dominance and threatening facial displays.”

Whether or not it’s deliberate strategy, the rash of beards among athletes, most famously Brian Wilson of the San Francisco Giants, is one way to intimidate the opposition. The callow Harper is just playing along.  

Brian Alexander (www.BrianRAlexander.com) is co-author, with Larry Young PhD., of "The Chemistry Between Us: Love Sex and the Science of Attraction," (www.TheChemistryBetweenUs.com)  to be published Sept. 13.

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A hard-boiled news editor here at msnbc.com was recently amazed by the way the mood and sound of an entire newsroom changed when a baby appeared. Somebody brought the infant into the offices, and suddenly cooing, high-pitched voices, replaced the chatter and hum of reporters.

Which, naturally, led to a question: What’s up with that?

It’s not just squiggly, bright-eyed babes that can induce this reaction, but tiny baby clothes, or even non-human babies, like puppies and kittens. We all know we do this -- we’ve seen and heard it hundreds of times -- but why?

The short answer is that we like “cute.” Cute makes us feel good, and, in reaction, we want to approach whatever it is that’s cute, so we speak in higher voices, say gentle, soothing things, and are easily distracted from, say, reporting a story about politics or food safety.

In 1943, the famous ethologist Konrad Lorenz created a term he called “baby schema.” The baby schema is how a baby appears, with chubby cheeks; big, round eyes; soft chubby body; a head that seems far too big for its body. Babies are helpless. The only tool they have to motivate others to care for them is cuteness, and they wield the tool with amazing effect.

In 2009, a German-American team led by Melanie Glocker of the University of Muenster put adult women who had never given birth into an fMRI machine to look at their brains. They exposed the women to images of babies, and they manipulated the images to make the babies appear to be closer to, or further from, the ideal baby schema. (In other words, they uglied up the babies.)

The images that most adhered to the baby schema were deemed “cuter” by the women. All the images activated key brain regions involved in face processing and reward, especially the nucleus accumbens, a key reward region, but the higher the baby schema, the more powerful the accumbens activation. The cuter the baby, the better the women liked it, the more motivated they were to approach it. 

Other studies have shown that men react this way to babies, too, just not as powerfully as women. And one experiment showed that when adults looked at “very cute” images of puppies and kittens, or grown dogs and cats, those who looked at the puppies and kittens performed better on the kids’ game “Operation” indicating, the researchers said, that “human sensitivity to those possessing cute features may be an adaptation that facilitates caring for delicate human young.” 

In a fascinating study of how well cute sells, marketing researchers led by Curt Dommeyer of California State University Northridge, positioned themselves outside a Los Angeles grocery store and asked store patrons to stop and complete a survey about organ donation. Half the time, they displayed a picture of a baby boy dressed in a tiny tropical flower shirt on the table.

Without the picture, 26 percent of passersby agreed to complete the survey. With the picture, 49 percent did. A similar test, using a puppy this time, also got a higher response rate, though the difference wasn’t as big. In both tests, women were more likely to complete surveys than men, showing a stronger effect of cuteness on females.

No studies seem to have documented the raised voice pitch when we encounter babies, but it seems likely it’s the result of our brain’s motivating us to nurture. Evolution has wired our brains to be drawn in by cuteness which is why Knut, the baby polar bear, sparked nationwide love across Germany, while, say, the Hungerford’s Crawling Water Beetle goes unloved.     

Brian Alexander (www.BrianRAlexander.com) is co-author, with Larry Young PhD., of "The Chemistry Between Us: Love Sex and the Science of Attraction," (www.TheChemistryBetweenUs.com)  to be published Sept. 13.

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Want more weird health news? Find The Body Odd on Facebook.