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On "Arrested Development," psychotherapist-turned-actor Tobias Funke, played by David Cross, is pathologically afraid of being naked, even in front of his wife.

Of the many wonderfully nonsensical things the TV show “Arrested Development” has introduced us to – the mayonegg, hot ham water, each family member’s interpretation of the chicken dance – one of the most notable is the "never-nude".

On the show, which returns May 26 for a much-anticipated fourth season on Netflix, psychotherapist-turned-actor Tobias Funke suffers from the psychological condition and is pathologically afraid of being naked. He wears denim cut-offs at all times, even in the shower.  

But it's not just a made-up quirk played for laughs. There really are people with a crippling fear of nudity, a condition called gymnophobia.

“There are people who are not comfortable being naked in front of other people — and there are other people who are not comfortable looking at themselves naked,” said Martin Antony, professor of psychology at Ryerson University in Toronto, and author of “The Anti-Anxiety Workbook.”

People can develop phobias – an extreme, irrational fear that negatively impacts a person’s ability to lead a normal life – of just about anything. There are the common phobias like arachnophobia or claustrophobia, but there’s also coulrophobia (fear of clowns), nomophobia (fear of being out of cellphone service) and sesquipedalophobia (fear of long words).

Phobias often develop after a negative experience. A gymnophobic may have been bullied while changing in the middle school locker room, for example. Most people who are afraid of nudity suffer from other anxiety disorders and body image problems.

Some people who are afraid of being naked suffer from eating disorders or body dysmorphic disorder, a mental condition where people believe they are ugly or fat or imperfect when there is little truth to it. People with this disorder often obsess over their appearance, hiding their bodies from themselves or others. Others could simply feel they do not measure up to media images of beautiful bodies and feel nervous about showing off their bodies.

“[It’s] more a general anxiety of their own body image as a comparative basis. We are an increasingly obese nation so the comparison could be stressful, anxiety producing, negative for one’s self-concept and could affect one’s own willingness to expose one’s self in privacy in a relationship,” said Frank Farley, a professor psychology at Temple University.

Also, people with extreme forms of anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) can sometimes feel uncomfortable about being naked in front of other people, due to the intrusive, compulsive thoughts that accompany the condition.

Experts say they would treat a nudity phobia like other phobias, such as claustrophobia or agoraphobia. They encourage exposure to the feared item in a safe, controlled way. If someone were afraid of being naked in front of a partner, Antony would recommend that the patient try wearing only underwear (cut-offs -- Funke's cover-up of choice --  are also acceptable) and work his or her way to full nudity. Antony also says that therapists would work on cognitive modification, changing the way someone thinks about their own nudity. 

“Most people are not ‘never-nudes,’ but they are ‘not-usually-nudes.’ A lot of people would feel somewhat self-conscious about being naked,” Antony said.

Related stories:

• 3 things we know about the new season of 'Arrested Development'
• Seth Rogen, Kristen Wiig join 'Arrested Development'
• Fear of clowns is no laughing matter

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Don Draper is an incredibly sexy (if fictional) man, with his square jaw line and strong chin. And that isn’t just personal opinion. Research has shown that chiseled jaws and strong chins appear more masculine and are considered universally attractive. But a new study challenges the idea of universally attractive features -- and finds that there is no one chin that is sexier than others.

“Chins are kind of a funny thing. It seems like a random thing to look at, but chins are like a hallmark of modern human anatomy,” says Seth Dobson, an assistant professor in the anthropology department at Dartmouth College. “No other animals have chins.”

For years, Dobson has speculated about why only humans have chins and what purpose they serve. While he hasn’t come to any concrete conclusions, he wondered if chins impact how we select mates. Some experts believe that we pick partners based on universal facial attractiveness—a set of traits, such as symmetrical facial features, that are overwhelmingly deemed hot (and biologically superior). Dobson thought that if women mated with men who had strong chins and men bred with women with smaller, weaker chins that skeletons would show this.

“We reasoned that if they are universal [then] the preferences actually influence [skeletal] evolution and that people would have the same chin shapes,” he says. “That is not the case.”

Dobson looked at 180 male and female skeletons that originated from nine different Old-World geographic locations including, Australia, Eastern and Southern Africa, Southeastern, Central, and Eastern Asia, and Northern, Eastern, and Western Europe. After creating contour tracings of the chins, a computer analyzed their shapes. Dobson found there isn’t one dominant preferred chin shape for men or women in any region.    

“The preferences aren’t actually universal,” he says, but adds a caveat: “I don’t think that our result undermine that there is strong preference [for certain chins].”

These results might mean that people don’t pick partners based only on universally attractive traits, he explains. Sure, a strong chin might seem sexier, but the man who owns the chin might not have a great personality. And we can’t all marry men with Don Draper chins.

“[A woman] may express a preference for a chin, but if you look at who she is actually choosing as a partner his chin may look different. In the real world, people choose their partners for a wide variety of reasons that may not be entirely clear,” says Dobson. “There is physical attractiveness as a sense that you have that you cannot really explain.”

Also, the skeletons are all between 100 and 200 years old, meaning they lived long before Western ideals of beauty became pervasive.     

“One thing is possible, this is speculation, it is possible that the preferences that look to be universal cross culturally today maybe weren’t important in the past,” Dobson says. “But they may be important in the future.”

The paper was published online earlier this month in the journal PLoS One. 

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Need to remember some important facts for that big presentation at work? Clench your right hand while preparing to remember. When giving that talk, ball up your left hand and you’ll call to mind those details, no problem.  

That’s the finding from a new study authored by Ruth Propper, an associate professor and director of the cerebral lateralization laboratory at Montclair State University. Propper has long been intrigued by how body movements impact how the brain works. While most people realize that the brain influences the body (the brain tells your arm there is an itch, and you feel it), less is understood about how the body sways the brain.

Past research suggests that clenching our hands can evoke emotions. When people ball up their right hands, for example, the left sides of their brains become more active, causing what’s known as “approach emotions,” feelings such as happiness or excitement. By squeezing the left hand, people engage the right side of the brain, which controls “withdrawal emotions” such as introversion, fear, or anxiety. (It probably seems like these might be less useful, but they come in handy in dangerous situations.)

Propper theorized that if clenching hands impacted feelings, these gestures might influence the brain in other ways.

To learn how hand clenching influenced memory and recall, she asked 51 right- handed subjects to memorize 72 words and randomly assigned each person to one of five hand-clenching groups or a control group that did nothing. Only righties were included because lefties exhibit better episodic memory overall so they’d have an unfair advantage. She found the perfect combination for better memory and recall occurs when a subject clenches his right hand while memorizing and balls up his left hand while trying to recall the memory. 

“It is interesting to compare to not clenching at all. It’s almost 15 percent better [to clench right then left] than sitting there,” she says. 

While a 15 percent improvement is on the edge of being statistically significant, Propper notes 15 percent can be the difference between an A and a C on test.

Propper admits that more research needs to be conducted on how bodily movements enhance brain function, but she recommends that people try squeezing their hands to aid with memory.

“I would say that it would be worth trying,” Propper says. Take parking your car in the parking lot.  “(A)s you park you can clench your right hand and when you are trying to find it, clench your left hand.”

The paper appears in PLoS One. 

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As a neurologist, Dr. Sam Berkovic sees many patients who frequently faint. These people say they feel weak in the knees after experiencing something unpleasant, perhaps seeing blood or being dehydrated. He began suspecting that fainting, also known as vasovagal syncope, runs in families.

And he appears to be on to something. A study by Berkovic, published today in the journal Neurology, finds that fainting may be genetic, and for some families only one gene causes it.

On average, about a third of the world’s population are frequent fainters. ”(I)t’s usually trivial, not a serious health issue,” says Berkovic, a laureate professor in the department of medicine at Austin Health at the University of Melbourne in Australia.

People who suffer from vasovagal syncope faint after encountering a trigger, which can be something like seeing blood, being dehydrated, feeling stress, or experiencing pain. While losing consciousness feels scary, vasovagal syncope is normally harmless. But Berkovic believes that understanding why people swoon might mean researchers can someday prevent them, saving fainters from accidents—and embarrassment.

To determine genetic underpinnings, Berkovic and his colleagues recruited 44 families with members who shared a history of fainting. Six of these families had a large number of fainters, bolstering the researchers’ belief that fainting was genetic. One family had 14 members who experienced vasovagal syncope and another had 30 individuals from three different generations.   

The researchers gathered DNA samples and also asked the family members to answer questionnaires about their general health, the onset of fainting, and what triggers their swoons. After analyzing the DNA, the researchers found that six of the 44 families showed strong evidence of a genetic link. And, the family of 30 fainters all shared a strong linkage to one chromosome, 15q26. These results show that a vasovagal syncope is genetic.  

While discovering a genetic link for fainting wasn’t a surprise, Berkovic admits he was amazed to learn that the triggers differed among family members. If a mother faints at the sight of blood, for example, her son might swoon when dehydrated. Berkovic says we don’t fully understand how triggers work, but this paper suggests it doesn’t seem to be controlled by genetics.

He hopes that future research will shed light on what controls the triggers, allowing for a better understanding of vasovagal syncope. Some people’s aversion to blood, for example, is so severe they refuse blood tests because they fear fainting. By understanding the triggers, researchers might be able to treat them.

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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:

Allergy season will be even worse this year

Does the sun make you sneeze? It's not just you

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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:

Eat asparagus, and more questionable ways to ease your hangover

Why do hangovers seem so much worse as we get older?

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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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Put down that razor. Step away from the wax. That Brazilian might be causing the spread of a sexually transmitted infection, according to a new study.  

A dermatologist in Nice, France, observed more and more patients coming to his office with molluscum contagiosum virus (MCV) outbreaks in their nether regions (molluscum contagiosum, incidentally, sounds more like a “Harry Potter” spell than a virus). About 93 percent of these 30 patients, both male and female, shaved, waxed, or clipped their pubic hair. This made Dr. Francois Desruelles, MD, wonder about the relationship between grooming downstairs and the spread of MCV.  

“Pubic hair removal is a body modification for the sake of fashion, especially in young women and adolescents, but also growing among men,” writes Desruelles in a letter published online in the British Medical Journal. “Anyway, pubic hair removal may be a risk factor for STMC [sexually transmitted MCV] or perhaps other STIs …”

MCV, a pox virus, spreads by skin-to-skin contact, from sharing items such as towels or clothes, or sexual contact. It causes pearly papules with dimples in the middle. While MCV looks unsightly, it is not painful and often goes away without treatment. Although a few bumps might be an inconvenience, some people develop hundreds of these papules, which can be embarrassing and disfiguring.

After looking at cases of sexually transmitted MCV, Desruelles believes that people are self-inoculating, meaning they are giving themselves pubic MCV from grooming. A person might shave a papule on her leg, for example, and the virus remains on the blade, which transfers it to her lady parts.

This is a common way to spread bacteria or viruses, explains Dr. Robert T. Brodell, MD, a professor and chief of the division of dermatology at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. People often spread warts this way.  

“You cut through a wart … and pull [the HPV] along a line so you end up with warts in a line. You have the original wart and nine more.”

Brodell, who did not participate in the study, believes there are a few other reasons why pubic hair grooming might cause the spread of MCV. People may share razors—so one person with MCV might pass it onto his roommate because they used the same razor (ew, people, get your own razors, especially if you are using it to trim your business). Or tiny abrasions from shaving makes it easier to contract MCV from a paramour.   

“You have sexual contact with someone who has it and it is easier to pick up the virus,” Brodell says. He recommends that people abstain from sex with someone who has an outbreak of MCV. If people suspect they have MCV or warts they should shave around the bumps, not through them, he adds.

While grooming likely increases the spread of sexually transmitted MCV, it doesn’t mean we must go au naturel. Brodell notes there is nothing inherent about pubic hair that protects people from MCV or STIs. “The hair itself is not a defensive barrier.”    

Related:

Pubic hair grooming injuries on the rise, researchers find

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Ed Jones / AFP-Getty Images file

As the drums beat at machine gun speed and the guitars shred lightning fast, dozens of moshers flock to the center of the room and slam into one another. It looks like chaos as their bodies collide madly. 

Like others, Jesse Silverberg believed that mosh and circle pits were random groups of people dancing wildly (and a bit violently). But five years ago, he took his girlfriend to her first (and last) heavy metal concert. Instead of jumping into the mosh pit at the In Flames show, he stayed with her on the outskirts. As the band played louder and the moshers presumably got drunker, Silverberg observed a pattern. One person would bump into another and the movement would ripple across the mosh pit.

“The collision went from one side to the other,” he says, adding it looked like moshers followed the rules of collective motion. “I had a hard time focusing on the music for the rest of the evening.”

Several years later in a statistical mechanics class with James Sethna, professor of physics at Cornell, Silverberg recalled the ripple-like movement in the mosh pit and thought studying it might make an interesting experiment. With the help of a fellow graduate student, Matt Bierbaum, Silverberg examined whether humans in mosh pits and circle pits truly followed the rules of collective motion, which describes phenomena such as flocking as seen with birds or schools of fish. (In mosh pits, people bounce off one another and in circle pits they rush around in a circular motion.)

They watched and analyzed about 100 videos from YouTube of people participating in either mosh or circle pits.   

“I watched with pleasure,” says Silverberg. When he examined the dancers in mosh pits he realized that they behaved like gas particles bouncing around in the air in unpredictable ways. People in circle pits, on the other hand, dance in an ordered pattern, like flocks of migrating birds.

In addition to watching YouTube videos, the researchers used a computer simulation that measures collective behavior to see how moshers act. In the simulation, they created a fake concert venue and added a few conditions and Mobile Active Simulated Humanoids (what they call MASHers) —solid objects to resemble humans that enjoy dancing wildly to resemble moshers—to mimic real life concerts.

“If you just distribute the MASHers in the crowd they will [gravitate toward each other and begin moshing],” explains Bierbaum.   

One MASHer follows the behavior of the neighboring MASHer, moving collectively, which is exactly what happens to moshers. “You can mix a bunch of people who want to dance wildly and people who do not [throughout the room] and the moshers end up in the center,” says Sethna.

Silverberg believes that understanding collective motion of moshers helps experts understand how people behave in emergencies such as fires or riots. Researchers can’t put people in a dangerous situation to learn how they evacuate in a panic. When they try simulating such events with the participants’ knowledge, people file out calmly, which is certainly not how they act in emergencies. 

“Mosh pits become a lens to look into extreme situations,” explains Silverberg, who funded the study himself (read: he bought all his own concert tickets).

The paper has been submitted for publication, but is available as a preprint online. 

Related: 

Why the whole bar sings along to certain songs

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After a restless night of sleep, filled with nightmares where velociraptors and chainsaw-wielding maniacs chase you down, you wake up and wonder what caused such vivid, frightful dreams. Could it have been that spicy Thai food you had before bed?

Actually, there is some evidence that eating a spicy meal shortly before going to sleep can lead to some wacko dreams. In fact, eating anything too close to bedtime can trigger more dreams, because the late night snacks increase the body’s metabolism and temperature, explains Dr. Charles Bae, MD, a sleep medicine doctor at Sleep Disorders Center at the Cleveland Clinic. Heightened metabolism and temperature can lead to more brain activity, prompting more action during rapid eye movement sleep, or REM.

About every 90 minutes people experience rapid eye movement sleep as they cycle through the stages of sleep. In REM, when people dream the most, the body’s muscle tone slackens. During REM the brain becomes active, like it does when awake, and the eyes flutter behind the lids. Nightmares only happen during REM and while nightmares are simply dreams with negative emotions, they stand apart because they rouse the sleeper. It’s one of the reasons why it’s easier to recall nightmares than run-of-the-mill dreams. While little is understood about nightmares, experts know that frequent nightmare sufferers often show dysfunction in the frontal lobe and it fails to control the amygdala, which regulates memory and emotions. Disturbances in these regions might impact people without problematic nightmares, contributing to vivid dreams.

So can that extra spicy Pad Thai lead to velociraptors tearing through your dreams?

Lisa Medalie, a clinical associate of psychiatry at University of Chicago Hospitals writes via email: “If our bodies are working hard to digest heavy or spicy foods, it interferes with sleep continuity. We typically advise patients to avoid heavy or spicy foods within [two to three] hours of their bedtime.”

It’s not a subject that has been studied often, but one Canadian report suggested that 8.5 percent of the 389 study subjects blamed bad dreams on food.

“It is … possible that spicy foods—or other foods such as dairy or greasy fast foods—at least occasionally induce nightmares or other bizarre dreams. It might be that some people are sensitive to the chemical composition of certain foods,” writes Tore Nielsen, professor at the Université de Montreal and director of the dream and nightmare laboratory at Sacré-Coeur Hospital, via email.

Related:

Sleep on your stomach and have sexier dreams?

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While reading “Life of Pi,” a reader might feel as if she is Pi, staring down the Bengal tiger, Richard Parker, on a small life raft, wondering when Richard might make a snack of her. If that sounds like the way you read fiction -- losing yourself in the story rather than simply reading it -- new research suggests you're more likely to be empathetic.

“I am a book lover, and for a long time I have been thinking about how books (and films) could influence our lives,” explains Matthijs Bal, an associate professor of organizational behavior at VU University in Amsterdam, via email. “I started with my basic idea that reading books might enhance our understanding of other people.”  

To comprehend how reading might impact empathy, Bal asked subjects to participate in one of two studies. In the first experiment, 36 students read the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle short story, “The Adventure of the Six Napoleons,” or newspaper articles about riots in Libya or the nuclear disaster in Japan. In the second, 50 subjects read an excerpt from Jose Saramago’s book “Blindness,” while 47 people read articles about riots in Greece and Liberation Day in the Netherlands. Bal says they selected fiction that would easily engross the readers.

After the participants finished reading the fiction or nonfiction, Bal measured what experts call emotional transportation—how emotionally involved someone is in a story; how much she sympathizes with the characters; and how removed she is from the real world when reading (all measuring how lost she is in the story). Also, the researchers measured empathy prior to reading, immediately after finishing the text, and a week after.

People who lost themselves in the fiction showed more empathy than people who did not become as involved in fiction or read nonfiction. 

“[W]hen we get lost in a book, we are in another world, in which we can freely experience the character’s feelings and thoughts as if they were our own, through which we ‘learn’ how other people think and feel about problems in life. This again can be transferred to real life, so by reading a book and getting involved in the story, we are able to sympathize with other people,” Bal says.

While it seems as if reading about real life situations might also breed empathy, Bal says that isn’t the case. He speculates that real stories make people feel guilty—and obligated to try to help. Not experiencing empathy for real events might be how people protect themselves from feeling helpless.  

But readers’ emotional involvement in fiction really struck Bal.  

“What most surprises us was that it was totally the emotional and not the cognitive involvement that mattered,” he says. “So pity for characters in a book who experience something nasty is something we have to really feel and not just think, ‘oh how sad for him’ without genuinely experiencing the emotion yourself.”

The study appears in the online journal PLoS ONE.

Related:

You are what you read, study suggests

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In some James Bond films, the spy and his enemies undergo various biometric screenings, such as retinal and handprint scans, to access important info or gain control a super secret weapon. The next time we see Bond, he could get a knee MRI to learn a covert code to stop a rogue evil weapon.  

Wait, what? A knee MRI could identify someone much like a fingerprint or eye scan? It's true - Lior Shamir, a professor of computer science at Lawrence Tech University, has discovered that people’s knees are as unique as our fingerprints or eyes.

“I used to work on genetics [research] and with genetics you start thinking about what makes people different,” he says. “[This could be] something, like a fingerprint and iris, [that] is so different—our external as well as our internal [traits are unique].”

Using an algorithm, Shamir looked at a database of knee MRIs from 2,686 patients. Each person received a baseline MRI scan and a second image two years later. The algorithm looks at the pixels that make up each MRI and each scan’s unique texture and compares it to the database of images. Even though the program looks at the images at a minuscule level, Shamir notes that in some cases, even an untrained eye can match some of the knees. The program, of course, is much more reliable than the naked eye, assuring 93 percent accuracy in matching a person’s first knee image to the second.

“The accuracy cannot compete with fingerprints and iris [scans],” he says. “It’s visionary … internal body parts can be [used in] biometrics.”

Even though knees change over time, with cartilage, meniscus, and ligaments wearing down, the algorithm can still match the original picture of the knee with its newer version. While Shamir was unable to compare the knees after longer periods of time, say like what might happen over a 20-year period, he thinks that it is more difficult for people to drastically modify their knees. He believes that using a knee to definitively identify a person could be more effective in cases where people were trying to dupe the system. Anyone who has seen the movie “Seven” remembers that the serial killer sheers off all his fingertips to avoid leaving prints at the scene. While this is an extreme case, there are ways that people can trick current biometrical technology—it’s much harder to modify knees without surgery.

“The knee needs to change substantially to trick the algorithm and that is not easy to do because it involves an invasive procedure. It is not like wearing gloves or wearing sunglasses,” he explains.

While MRI identification of internal parts isn’t currently practical, if MRI technology advances quickly and becomes more affordable, it could be used to identify people at airports, for example.

The study appears in the International Journal of Biometrics.

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