It’s dark. Suddenly, someone -- or something -- lurches forward, grabbing you with a decaying hand. A scream erupts from your throat, but then you realize this zombie isn’t part of the apocalypse; it’s just an actor at the local haunted house.

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Haunted houses like the House of Shock in New Orleans are getting even more elaborate and more popular. It's a safe thrill, experts say.

Every Halloween, scores of people watch bloody monster movies or trek through haunted houses all to scream like a little child. What possesses people to seek horror movies and haunted houses?

“It is a safe way to trigger an arousal response and some people find that pleasurable and enjoyable—and some people find it annoying,” explains Joseph LeDoux, a professor at the Center for Neural Science at the Emotional Brain Institute at New York University.

“It’s not the haunted house itself, it’s what you experience and what you bring to that and how you can interpret it cognitively.” 

Horror movies, often referred to as torture porn, and haunted houses are becoming more and more terrifying. Blackout Haunted House in New York and Los Angeles requires patrons to sign waivers—and everyone walks through the house alone. Patrons receive a safety word that they can shout out if the tour becomes too horrific.

LeDoux studies how the brain processes fear. When a door creaks loudly, the body reacts. The brainstem triggers a startle response, heighted alertness, which could lead to jumping or freezing to protect yourself (you also blink more to shield your eyes).

“The startle is caused by a sudden stimulus not because it is scary because it is rapid and quite loud,” LeDoux says. Because the brainstem, not a higher functioning part of the brain, controls this, most startle responses are purely reflexive.

Then the amygdala spurs fixed body actions, more complicated movements that enable people to deal with dangerous situations. Finally, your voluntary responses kick in—when you choose to run away or hide from the saw-wielding surgeon.  

“You’re going to put yourself in the situation where the goal is to activate your bodily responses,” he says.

And all these responses cause arousal. Basically, watching a horror flick or wandering through a haunted house provides a rush.

Frank Farley, a psychology professor at Temple University, agrees, adding that it is humans’ fascination with macabre that drives people to scare themselves. 

“Throughout our history we have been enamored by the dark side,” he says.  For some, watching a gory movie or going to a haunted house helps them explore the horrors that occur in life. Zombies remain ubiquitous, Farley suspects, because they embody humans’ fear of death—and the unknown—as well as exploiting the horror of life. The reanimated corpses just continue coming after victims, no matter what happens.

Ultimately, wanting to be scared provides an accessible thrill. So few people will jump from a capsule in space or even leap off a cliff and scary movies and spooky attractions give everyone a chance to feel the high.

“Basically, you are getting a rush of physiology,” LeDoux says.

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When Dr. Josef Parvizi of Stanford University asked Ron Blackwell to look around his hospital room, everything seemed fine. His vision was normal. The TV looked like the TV and the “get well” balloons looked like balloons. Parvizi looked just like himself.

“Then they said ‘What do you see now?’” Blackwell recalled to NBCNews.com. “And then colors appeared and I thought that was so amazing. I said ‘How did you do that?’ Then he said ‘OK, what now?’ and I didn’t see anything different, and then he said ‘Look at my forehead,’ and his face changed. His eyes dropped, like, two inches, his nose skewed to his left." When Parvizi asked Blackwell to look at a female assistant in the room, the woman's face appeared to lift upward. 

Nothing else changed. The TV looked normal, Parvizi’s shirt and tie looked normal. Only faces changed.

As Parvizi and a Stanford colleague, Kalant Grill-Spector, detail in an article published this month in the Journal of Neuroscience, that’s because Parvizi had sent tiny jolts of electricity into a part of Blackwell’s brain called the fusiform gyrus.

Scientists have known for a while now that people, and at least some primates, have an area of the brain that’s responsible for processing faces specifically. We’ve evolved it, Grill-Spector explained in an interview, because we’re social beings. We need to know who our friends and enemies are, who’s a family member, who we can trust.

If the fusiform gyrus, located in the temporal lobe, is injured, people can lose the ability to recognize faces, even of people they’ve known for a long time. This is called prosopagnosia. People can also be born with prosopagnosia. The neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks, for example, has written about his own struggles with the condition.  

People with prosopagnosia, which can be mild to severe, can have difficulty maintaining social relationships. For example, Grill-Spector recalled a young female student who has taken part in her lab studies.

The student had a boyfriend. One day the boyfriend stopped by her room, but he’d just come from playing sports, and was wearing clothes she’d never seen. He was also wet. Missing her usual cues, she didn’t recognize him, and he realized it. That was OK, but his girlfriend thought this stranger was pretty cute and began flirting.

Blackwell doesn’t have prosopagnosia; the experiment was a bit of serendipity. The 47-year-old applications engineer for an electronics company has suffered from epilepsy since childhood. When his seizures became worse in 2010, he consulted with Parvizi.

They decided brain surgery might help. First, though, doctors had to locate the precise origin of the seizures. To do that, they implanted electrodes through Blackwell’s skull and into his brain, including the fusiform gyrus. The idea was to use the electrodes to map the location.

The diagnostic worked, but the surgery couldn’t be done because the originating area was too close to vital tissue.

But Parvizi and Grill-Spector, knowing electrodes were located in and near the fusiform gyrus, wondered if, before they were removed, the devices  could be used to map the nerve bundles responsible for face recognition.

“We need a better understanding of the neural basis of prosopagnosia,” Grill-Spector said. “If we can understand the circuit, maybe there’ll be some way in the future to stimulate them in a positive way.”

Blackwell wasn’t told what the experiment was for, so there’d be no risk he’d be “coached” into seeing facial changes. “I figured it was just more testing,” related to the epilepsy, Blackwell said.

After a series of trials, including sham stimulations that produced no effects, and stimulations of two nearby electrodes that did not cause the same kind of facial distortion effects, Parvizi and Grill-Spector concluded they’d located two critical areas in the mid and posterior fusiform gyrus responsible for accurate face viewing. They dubbed them “mFus- and pFus-faces.”

In the end, things worked out for Blackwell, too. He’s on a new drug regimen that has controlled his seizures and, he says, he’s doing “perfectly fine.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story indicated Dr. Kalanit Grill-Spector was in the room at the time of the procedure. She was not. 

Brian Alexander (www.BrianRAlexander.com) is co-author, with Larry Young Ph.D., of "The Chemistry Between Us: Love, Sex and the Science of Attraction," (www.TheChemistryBetweenUs.com), now on sale.

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From the time he was a young boy, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart could identify musical notes simply by hearing them played on a piano. Mozart possessed absolute or perfect pitch, a trait that has long mystified scientists who study this sort of stuff: Are people born with it? Or do they learn it? 

Now, researchers from the University of California, San Diego, have identified another clue to solving the mystery of perfect pitch: Whether or not you know the note might be down to your genes. 

“I have always been sort of wondering why I developed perfect pitch," says Diana Deutsch, a professor of psychology at UCSD, who remembers being able to instantly identify musical notes when she was as young as 4 -- despite having minimal musical training. "Even the grown-ups had to look and see what note was being played on a piano,” she recalls. 

Deutsch and her colleague Kevin Dooley -- who, incidentally, also has perfect pitch -- presented their findings this week in Kansas City, Mo., at the Acoustical Society of America's annual meeting. 

The debate over perfect pitch has long focused on nature versus nurture. People who speak tonal languages -- which rely heavily on inflection to differentiate between words -- are more likely to possess absolute pitch than non-tonal language speakers. For example, in Cantonese, “ma” can mean either "mother" or "horse," depending on how the speaker says it. Even though tonal language speakers are more likely to possess perfect pitch, non-tonal language speakers sometimes have it if they start musical training at a young age. But there are plenty of musicians without absolute pitch.   

Deutsch developed perfect pitch without training, which is true for many with perfect pitch -- and that suggests a genetic correlate, she explained. She wondered if it was related to an unusually large auditory memory, and so she and Dooley designed an experiment to see how pitch correlated to short-term visual and auditory memory.

They asked 27 English-speaking students or recent college graduates, seven of whom possessed perfect pitch, all of whom had started music lessons at age 6 or younger, to participate in a memory exercise, testing digit span. Digit span looks at how well people remember a series of numbers when they see them on a computer screen or hear them. 

Both groups of students—those with absolute pitch and those without—listened to strings of numbers, followed by a visual digit span test. In the auditory test, those with perfect pitch recalled 10 digits, while those without remembered 8.1. (The perfect pitch-ers were also slightly better at remembering the numbers from the visual test than the non perfect pitch-ers, but only marginally so.) The ability to recall a string of numbers after hearing them has been linked to a person's genetics, and because Duetsch found that people with a large auditory digit span also possessed absolute pitch, she believes there might be a genetic link for pitch, too.  

Up next, Deutsch plans to continue her research, perhaps looking at the non-musically trained family members of the subjects with perfect pitch to see how they rank on the digit span test. 

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By Tia Ghose, LiveScience Staff Writer

Men are finally catching up to women, at least when it comes to body-image issues. 

For the first time, doctors in Mexico have used a silicone chin implant to give a man's testicles a more symmetrical look.

The new surgery is a safe way to boost the body image of the growing number of men who have issues with their genitalia, researchers say in the new study.

"We are starting to have the same kind of problems that the ladies have with body image," said urologist and lead author Fernando Ugarte of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. "There are many people who are probably not feeling satisfied with their testicular size, and now they have a new option."

The 45-year-old man was born with a tiny right testicle that never descended, a condition called cryptorchidism. The doctors in Mexico originally removed that testicle, which was not functional, and replaced it with the "largest implant on the market," Ugarte told LiveScience. [ Macho Man: 10 Wild Facts About His Body ]

But that left his other testicle looking meager in comparison.

The man was plagued by body-image issues and diagnosed with body dysmorphic disorder, a preoccupation with a specific physical defect more commonly seen in those with anorexia or bulimia, Ugarte said.

So to even out the pair, in 2011, Ugarte and his colleagues made a small incision in the man's groin and placed a silicone chin implant between the left testicle and several layers of tissue. Plastic surgeons frequently use this type of implant, a piece of silicone about a quarter of an inch thick (6 millimeters), to plump up the chin or the cheekbones.

The patient resumed sexual activity about a month after surgery. The surgery is safe and doesn't reduce fertility or sexual function because it doesn't touch the testicle at all, Ugarte said.

"After one year, his testicular function is perfect. And he's feeling all right," Ugarte said.

Since then, two other men have had the surgery.

The researchers, who published their findings online Oct. 22 in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, say they wanted to get the word out because more men are contacting them with body-image issues, he said.

"It's very well-known that most of the men's magazines have techniques or pills or products" for penis enhancement, Ugarte said. "But now, patients also want to have bigger testicles, not just the penis."

Follow LiveScience on Twitter@livescience. We're also onFacebook &Google+. 

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Your eyes are growing heavy ....

You could say it’s a nightclub hypnotist’s nightmare. He calls a willing victim up to the stage, asks him to stare at the pocket watch, and then informs the audience member that he’s now a chicken.

But instead of clucking, or doing that arm flap thing, the smart-alecky subject winks at the audience and refuses to cooperate. But why are some people tough to hypnotize, while others seem to fall under the spell lickety-split?

David Spiegel, a physician in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University, and a team of colleagues, think they’ve discovered an important difference between people who are easy to hypnotize and those who aren’t.

According to the team’s study of 24 individuals, presented in the Archives of General Psychiatry, people with a low barrier to hypnosis have more functional connectivity between two areas of the brain: the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex -- a region vital for executive functions – and the “salience network” – parts of the brain including the anterior cingulated cortex, amygdala, ventral striatum – that assigns importance to emotional, autonomic and somatic information.

In other words, parts of the brain that are constantly on the lookout for signals, and attaching emotional meaning to the input, and part of our prefrontal cortex that develops “action plans” about how to react to such signals, are communicating with each other more powerfully.  

Spiegel used an example to explain what this means in real life. For example, a high hypnotizable person might sit down in the university library stacks to study, and lose all track of time because he’s so absorbed in the work. Or, when watching a movies, a high hypnotizable person might become so absorbed in it, he forgets it’s even a movie. 

“It’s that when you are tracking something, you’re not worried about tracking something else,” Spiegel explained.   

To figure this out, the researchers used 24 adults, mainly Stanford students, who, using a standard test called the Hypnotic Induction Profile, scored as either high or low hypnotizability.

Both groups were examined in a functional magnetic imaging (fMRI) machine. They were given no specific instructions regarding what to think about while in the machine, a “resting state.” There were no differences in physical brain structure or in the volume of various brain regions.

But there was a difference in function: The brains of people who were “high hypnotizable” showed that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex was being functionally incorporated into the “salience network.” This didn’t happen in the low hypnotizable group.

“Normally, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is thinking, planning, deciding what to do next. And the anterior cingulate cortex is telling you what to be worried about,” Spiegel said. “In high hypnotizable people, these two tend to be functionally connected.”

The fact there wasn’t any difference in brain structure leads Spiegel to suggest that brain signaling chemicals might be responsible for the difference. People have different gene variants, called polymorphisms, that carry instructions for the way dopamine works in the brain. Previous studies have found that some polymorphisms are correlated with hypnotizability, cognitive function, alertness. So Spiegel thinks that’s a likely candidate to explain the difference in function between the two groups.

The study has its limitations, Spiegel admitted, like the low number of subjects, and the fact they weren’t hypnotized while in the fMRI. But the work is important, he said, because hypnosis is now often used for pain relief, to dampen anxiety in cancer patients undergoing treatment, and in psychotherapy. Knowing who’s likely to benefit could go a long way to making it an even more valuable tool.

Brian Alexander (www.BrianRAlexander.com) is co-author, with Larry Young Ph.D., of "The Chemistry Between Us: Love, Sex and the Science of Attraction," (www.TheChemistryBetweenUs.com), now on sale.

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Got a bad memory? The brain has a unique way of helping you forget.

Say you’re on a date and you trip and fall so your dress rides up and he sees your underwear. Or your boss tells you that for the third year in the row there will be no raises. Both of these experiences feel uncomfortable, but what do you do to forget these awkward memories? Researchers found that we use two different ways -- suppression or substitution -- to avoid thinking of uncomfortable or unhappy memories.

“We assume that, in everyday life, healthy people will use a mixture of both mechanisms to prevent an unwanted memory from coming to mind,” says Roland Benoit, a scientist at the Medical Research Council, Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at University of Cambridge, via email. “We did not know whether the processes of direct suppression and thought substitution can be isolated, and which, if any of them, would actually cause forgetting.” 

Roland and his co-author, Michael Anderson, asked 36 adults to participate in a memory exercise where half suppressed memories and the other half substituted new memories. The researchers hoped to understand how we voluntarily forget and how it affects general memory. The subjects were tested during magnetic resonance imaging procedures, or MRIs, allowing the researchers to observe how the brain works during suppression and substitution.

While both processes cause forgetting, a different region of the brain controls each one. When people suppress memories, the dorsal prefrontal cortex inhibits activation in the hippocampus, which plays an important role in retaining memories.

“It thus effectively breaks the remembering process. This, in turn, disrupts the memory representations that would be necessary for recalling the unwanted memory later on,” Benoit explains.

When it comes to substitution, the brain works a bit differently -- the caudal prefrontal cortex and midventrolateral prefrontal cortex form a network of sorts that works with the hippocampus to swap out new information with details people would soon forget.

“By just looking at how well people forgot memories, you couldn’t tell whether they had done direct suppression or thought substitution,” Benoit says. “These mechanisms are based on different brain systems that work in opposite fashion: One (direct suppression) by ‘slamming the mental break’ to stop the remembering process and the other (thought substitution) by steering the remembering process towards a substitute memory.”

Even though people exploit both to forget those nagging, unwanted memories, actively overlooking unpleasant events can negatively impact how we remember. But Benoit notes that learning how people deal with unwanted memories helps them understand how people with traumatic memories, such as PTSD sufferers, cope with remembering. 

“It is perfectly natural for people, upon encountering an unwelcome reminder, to try to put the unpleasant reminding out of mind. We all have experienced this.  Intuitively, it feels as though we solved this problem.”  

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Screeech! The sound of nails on a chalkboard are in the top 5 worst sounds, according to a new study.

Which sounds drive our ears absolutely bonkers?

A British study rated the screechy scrape of a sharp knife along the surface of a ridged metal bottle as the most unpleasant sound. It earned the top spot in a recent ranking of 75 different sounds.

A steel fork scraping along a glass finished a close second among the nastiest noises heard by 50 college students during the research. And the annoying squeal of chalk on a blackboard was the third most awful sound in this small experiment , in which listeners rated each sound on a nine-point scale from 0 for least unpleasant to 9 for most unpleasant.

The study volunteers all had good hearing and used headphones to listen to a variety of natural and man-made sound recordings, which ranged from a cat screaming and a clarinet squeaking to a fire alarm blaring and an engine revving.

Interestingly, the always cringe-inducing sound of fingernails on a blackboard came in fifth on the rankings -- behind a ruler on a bottle but ahead of a woman's scream.

"It was a bit surprising that a female scream and a baby's cry were rated lower than the scratchy sounds, such as a knife on a bottle," says study author Sukhbinder Kumar, Ph.D., a neuroscientist at Newcastle University Medical School in the U.K.

He says the reason the scratchy sounds may have scored higher may have to do with the acoustic structure of sounds that result from scraping actions. Scratchy noises, like knife on glass, may be the most unpleasant because more of the sound's energy is concentrated in the frequency band of 2000 to 5000 Hz, where our ears are most sensitive. (Screams also have energy in the same frequency band, but its concentration is less.)

In a new study published in The Journal of Neuroscience, Kumar and his colleagues built upon this earlier research to understand the brain mechanism behind why people perceive certain sounds to be so unpleasant.

They asked 13 healthy adults to listen to the same sounds as they previously tested while in a functional MRI machine. Volunteers rated the sounds on a scale from 1 (least unpleasant) to 5 (most unpleasant).

This time, study participants rated chalk on a blackboard at the worst sound while they found bubbling water to be the most soothing. Kumar suspects that the noisy and confining quarters of the MRI machine and the smaller number of participants may have contributed to the slight differences in results between this research and the earlier study.

The brain scans allowed the scientists to see the interaction between the sensory (auditory) part of the brain, involved in hearing, and the emotional part of the brain (the amygdala) in response to the various noises. 

What they found was that the emotional part of the brain modulates, or changes, the activity of the sensory part of the brain based on the emotional value of the sound. Kumar says that if a sound is "highly unpleasant," which may have the potential to cause harm, the emotional part of the brain heightens up the response of the sensory cortex, which provokes a negative reaction to its perceived unpleasantness.

Kumar suggests that these new findings may help shed light on the brain's reaction to disorders such as migraine and tinnitus (ringing in the ears), in which people are super sensitive to the unpleasant aspects of sound.

Want to test your reaction to some of the sounds used in both studies? Listen to some of the sounds here:

The 10 worst sounds based on both studies were:

1.  Knife on a bottle

2.  Fork on a glass

3.  Chalk on a blackboard

4.  Plastic ruler on a bottle

5.  Nails on a blackboard

6.  Female scream

7.  Angle grinder tool used on a hollow metal pipe

8.  Bicycle breaks squealing

9.  Baby crying

10. Electric drill running at a range of speeds

The 4 least unpleasant sounds were:

1.  Applause

2.  Baby laughing

3.  Thunder

4.  Water flowing

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New England Journal of Medicine, copyright 2012

This man's deep skin folds that resemble the surface of the brain are the result of a rare condition called cutis verticis gyrata.

The strange folds and furrows covering a Brazilian man's entire scalp was neither a funky new look nor a hipster trend. Rather the 21-year-old's bizarre looking scalp with its deep skin folds in a pattern said to resemble the surface of the brain is a sign of a rare medical condition known as cutis verticis gyrata.

In this week's New England Journal of Medicine, two Brazilian doctors describe this young man's case and share a picture of its odd appearance. When he was 19, the skin on his scalp started to change. It grew thicker, forming many soft, spongy ridges and narrow ruts.

Even his hair had an unusual configuration. It was normal in the furrows but sparser over the folds as is common for this strange scalp condition. No doubt, visits to the barber shop as well as washing his squishy scalp and combing his hair were peculiar experiences.

Despite the extent of his scalp affected, "the patient did not have the habit of covering his head," with a hat, for instance, says Dr. Karen Schons a dermatologist at the Hospital Universitario de Santa Maria, who examined the patient and co-authored the case study. In fact, the case study reports that "the condition did not bother him cosmetically."

Cutis verticis gyrata occurs much more commonly in men, and it typically develops not long after puberty occurs. Doctors aren't sure exactly what causes the scalp changes that lead to its weird appearance.

In this Brazilian man's case, no one else in his family had the condition, and he did not have any symptoms because of it. He was intellectually impaired and had performed poorly in school, but this was not linked with the skin folds and furrows on his scalp.

In fact, his doctors found he had no symptoms of neurological or psychiatric disorders, even though cutis verticis gyrata has sometimes been associated with cognitive disabilities or other brain-related disorders, such as schizophrenia and seizures.

"It's a benign and essentially aesthetic condition," explains Schons. Although his head probably attracted some curious stares, this man wasn't self-conscious about it. He needed no treatment.

Schons says there are surgical methods that can correct some of the disfigurement, but it may not be a good option for patients with extensive scalp involvement.

Doctors saw the young man a year after he was diagnosed, and his scalp looked the same and he continued to have no health concerns or concerns about his appearance. 

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Prince Harry approves of this important research.

When it comes to a man’s hotness quotient, there are the usual shallow suspects. But let’s just blame evolution for a woman’s fondness for broad shoulders and a v-shaped torso.

Now, a new study published in the journal Evolutionary Psychology finds that women like their men to have a little blush to their faces. Who knew? But that could explain why so many women find Prince Harry and Bill Clinton so darn yummy; their rosy faces may actually discount the fact that one is, well, a prince and the other, a former U.S. president. Or maybe not. 

In any case, red really does rule, eliciting a range of emotions and behaviors in humans and other species, according to newly published research in the journal Evolutionary Psychology.

Among some male birds, fish and primates, the color red acts as a kind of beacon, broadcasting social dominance, testosterone levels and influencing mate selection. Humans actually show physical avoidance reactions (they move their bodies away) from red-covered IQ test booklets rather than green or grey ones. We even perform worse on cognitive tests after exposure to red when compared to other colors. But it can help us hook up. Women who wear red are more attractive to men. And men who wear red get a second look from more women. Red even influences athletics. If you want to be on a winning sports team, wear a red jersey.

The mystery, it seems, was whether women found that facial redness actually makes a man seem more attractive or dominant.

In the (small) study, 45 Caucasian women were shown photos of 21 Caucasian men, all with neutral expressions. The women could then manipulate the complexions of the men, adding red or yellow tones, to make them appear as aggressive, dominant or attractive as possible. Dominance, aggression and attractiveness were not defined for the trial participants.

What the women did was increase redness, while holding lightness and yellowness constant, when asked to make the men look dominant. They added even more red when asked to make the men look aggressive.

But when it came to attractiveness, think a little pink. It’s a rosy glow that women deemed smokin’ hot.

Researchers speculate that slight degree of ruddiness, which doesn’t make a man look too aggressive or too dominant, may be viewed as a sign of good health and fitness, a turn-on in any species.  

But getting too red in the face is just one big sexual buzzkill.

The researchers found the uber-red of aggressiveness puts a big damper on a man’s perceived attractiveness. In other words, the benefit of being with a man who is healthy and dominant outweighs the potential risks of being with a man who is perceived as too aggressive.

In other words, guys, a little rosy can go a long way.

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It creeps up on you as you sit at your desk. You yawn, scan the web, check Facebook but still the ennui lingers. At some point almost every day we feel bored, at least for a little while. We’ve all experienced that feeling of listlessness, but what is boredom? Is it not having something exciting to do? Is it being unable to pay attention to what you’re doing? 

One team of Canadian researchers was apparently interested enough in boredom to find out.

“Intuitively, it is pretty clear that boredom is a common human experience and little research has been done to bear out that fact,” says John Eastwood, an associate professor of psychology at York University in Toronto.  

Eastwood and his colleagues observed that people believe boredom relates to their environment: We think if a lecture or a conversation is boring, we can simply change topics to avoid the dullness.

“We attribute [boredom] with problems in the environment rather than the problems with ourselves,” explains co-researcher Mark Fenske, associate professor of neuroscience and applied cognitive science at the University of Guelph and co-author of the book, “The Winner’s Brain.”

But boredom might have more to do with us than uninspired surroundings.

Eastwood and Fenske reviewed descriptions of boredom from existentialist philosophy, psychology and literature and also conducted a study with subjects, where they described how they feel when experiencing ennui. The researchers then crafted a definition encompassing the overlapping ideas from the literature and study. Boredom occurs when we have trouble paying attention to internal and external stimuli needed to enjoy an activity, we realize we struggle to pay attention, and we blame the environment for our lack of enjoyment.

“Our approach is to link [boredom] to attention,” says Fenske. “The fact that we’re able to talk about boredom in terms of attention [means] we’ve already changed the focus.”

Framing ennui in terms of attention is significant because psychologists know how treat attention problems, meaning experts can help people experiencing chronic boredom.

Fenske and Eastwood agree that most people think of boredom as trivial and commonplace, perhaps it’s why researchers haven’t studied it. But boredom can be a sign of more serious problems. 

“Boredom can have some horrible effects and we see it associated with pathological states. [There’s a] strong association with depression and boredom and traumatic brain injury and boredom,” notes Fenske. He adds that drug and alcohol abuse counselors know that patients relapse when faced with boredom.

“I think that you can think about it in two ways … boredom is related to addiction, gambling, eating problems … or you can think of chronic, protracted boredom as a problem in its own right,” Eastwood says.

While friends often tease the researchers about their boring research, the two believe their findings provide new areas of study.

“I have no data to support this, but I speculate that people might experience a lot of boredom in modern times because we are experiencing intense entertainment.  We’re used to being passively entertained and that constant stimulation puts us at risk for [more] boredom in the future,” Eastwood says.  

The paper, “The Unengaged Mind: Defining Boredom in Terms of Attention,” appeared in Perspectives on Psychological Science. 

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Wine goes with cheese. Meat sandwiches go with a pickle. Green tea goes with Asian food. Sushi goes with pickled ginger. Oil goes with vinegar. Soda goes with chips. Many of the world's most beloved food combinations pair an astringent food, which causes the mouth to pucker up, with a fatty food, which makes the mouth feel slippery.

But why? "The kernel of this idea of pairing astringents with fats is found in gastronomies all over the planet, but it's never been clear how or why these pairings work," said Paul Breslin, an experimental psychologist at RutgersUniversity and Monell Chemical Senses Center who studies taste perception.

In a new paper published online Oct. 8 in the journal Cell, Breslin and colleagues propose a theory of food pairings that explains for the first time how astringent and fatty foods oppose one another to create a balanced "mouthfeel."

Because fat is oily, eating it lubricates the mouth, making it feel slick or even slimy, Breslin said. Meanwhile, astringents, chemical compounds such as the tannins in wine and green tea, make the mouth feel dry and rough. They do this by chemically binding with lubricant proteins present in saliva, causing the proteins to clump together and solidify, and leaving the surface of the tongue and gums without their usual coating of lubrication. [Tip of the Tongue: The 7 (Other) Flavors Humans May Taste]

We don't like slimy, but we don't like puckered up, either. "We want our mouth to be lubricated but not overly lubricated," Breslin told LiveScience. "In our study, we show that astringents reduce the lubricants in the mouth during a fatty meal and return balance."

Although this food-pairing idea had been proposed before, it was a mystery how that balance might actually be struck, because wine, green tea and the other widely consumed astringents are only mildly astringent. No one knew how they managed to cut the fat as well as they do. [Will People Really Be Forced to Stop Eating Meat?]

The researchers discovered that astringents have a stronger effect each time the mouth is exposed to them. Every time study participants took a sip of green tea, for example, they perceived it to be more astringent than during the previous sip, indicating that the astringents were reacting more strongly with the lubricating proteins in their mouths upon each exposure. This growth in astringency is why, even though tea and wine have only a weak effect at first, sipping them throughout a fatty meal eventually enables the astringents to counterbalance the strong lubricating effect of the fat.

A second experiment supported this conclusion. When the study participants alternated their sips of tea with bites of salami, the perceived slipperiness of their mouths (caused by the fatty salami) gradually decreased as they took more sips. When they sipped water, by contrast, the slimy feeling in their mouths continued to build.

The importance of repeated exposure explains why we don't tend to gulp down an entire glass of wine then eat our entire steak. Nor do we polish off our whole pickle before setting into our sandwich. The new research justifies the widespread use of astringent foods as "palate cleansers" that people sample throughout a meal.

This general principle of yin and yang food pairings goes part of the way in explaining gastronomy, but what about the specifics? Why do we pair sushi with pickled ginger rather than with a soda, despite the fact that they're both astringents? And why does cheese seem to taste better with red wine than with green tea?  As Breslin put it, "Is there something to the idea that a particular astringent and a particular fatty food go together?"

The famous pairings could simply be cultural accidents — a matter of which foods were available in which regions. But Breslin said it's also possible that cultures have unknowingly worked out the most balanced pairings based on the chemical properties of the foods.

"Different kinds of astringents give rise to different rates of growth of astringency. As you repeatedly sample them, one will have a steep rise and the other a shallow rise," he said. "It could be that there's a particular mixing of an astringent and a fatty food that determines how strong the astringent is going to be and how quickly it gets there. This is a mystery of gastronomy."

More from LiveScience:

• 7 Perfect Survival Foods
• 5 Wacky Things That Are Good for Your Health
• What If You Ate Only One Type of Food?

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

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

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

On a dare, a kid in New York City licked an entire handrail at the entrance of the subway for a dollar -- and presumably all the benefits of YouTube stardom. This, it goes without saying, is gross. But we wanted to know exactly how gross it is. 

“If anyone dares you to lick anything in public, lick a toilet seat,” says Charles P. Gerba, a microbiologist at the University of Arizona. “It would be safer to lick a toilet than a handrail on a bus.”

Gerba has examined levels of germs in public places such as bus seats, bus handrails, indoor handrails and toilet seats. He found that about 50 different microorganisms live on a toilet seat while a handrail provides refuge for hundreds of thousands of germs.

“Americans are terrified of butt-borne diseases,” he says, explaining why toilet seats are so clean. Most people wipe off toilet seats or use seat covers, but we give little thought to the condition of railings. 

“We’ve studied the microbiology on public buses,” Gerba says. “The handrail is fairly bad.”

Gerba found e-coli (a bacterium often responsible for food poisoning); MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, a staph infection that’s resistant to most first-line antibiotics); and fecal matter on handrails. Fecal matter is on 50 percent of all handrails (people, it’s time to seriously wash your hands after using the bathroom). It’s not uncommon for handrails to have flu, staph bacteria, and respiratory and cold viruses, as well. Previous research in England found that people are more likely to get a cold from handrails than any other public surfaces.   

After all, as Gerba reminds, "you don’t know if the last guy washed his hands after using the toilet.”

He recommends that public transportation riders apply hand sanitizer after arriving at their destination.   

Even though the rail licker exposed himself to as many as 300,000 microbes, he probably won’t get sick.

“I think the likelihood that he will get ill is very low. We all have bacteria in our mouth that are normal that will provide us with protection,” says Mary Jo Kasten, an assistant professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic. “If [the railing] has fecal matter on it, maybe [he] could get hepatitis A or another infection.”

As disgusting as it looks, licking a railing isn’t the best way to transmit infectious diseases. “Licking an inanimate object is not a way that I think of people getting infected. He’s more likely to transmit a virus if he actually kissed someone,” Kasten says. (The existence of this video exponentially decreased his chances of actually kissing anyone).  

Gerba says that no amount of money would entice him to lick a handrail (he’s not interested in licking toilet seats either, despite knowing they’re cleaner). Is there anyway he’d ever lick a handrail? “I’d have to drink a lot,” he jokes.

Related:

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Zit-zapping virus may be living on your face

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While most of us have trouble remembering the details of even the most important days of our lives, college student Aurelien Hayman can recall every moment of his life, no matter how mundane.

Give him a year and a date and he can tell you what day of the week it was, what the weather was like -  even what he ate for breakfast.

“I can just remember these sorts of things without even trying – and without them having any importance,” Hayman told TODAY. “I just remember them.”

Hayman is one of a small group of people who have extraordinary ability to recall specific details of events, even ordinary days, that happened years ago. TODAY has interviewed several of them over the years, including actress Marilu Henner, who stunned Meredith Vieira in an interview with the vivid recall of the last time they’d brushed past one another.

Though the phenomenon has only recently been identified, scientists have given this special kind of memory a name: Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory, or HSAM.

Because it’s so new, there’s been little research on the topic. But in July of this year a study of 11 people with HSAM was published in the journal Neurobiology of Learning and Memory.

Researchers from the University of California, Irvine, interviewed  11 people with HSAM and scanned their brains. And while the researchers did identify nine brain areas that seemed to be different in size and shape from those of volunteers with typical memories, what really caught the researchers’ attention were the differences in behavior.  

People with HSAM tend to obsess over events (even mundane ones) more than the average person. They ruminate over what happened during the day and organize everything in their minds over and over again.

In fact, they often report “habitually recalling their memories, a seemingly compulsive tendency,” noted Aurora K.R. LePort and her colleagues. “Every night before bed one participant recalls what occurred on that day X number of years ago. Another recalls, while stuck in traffic, as many days as possible from a certain year.”

Memory expert Dr. Gary Small believes we should study people like Hayman and Henner to help people who are losing their memory due to disease or old age.

“We are involved in memory training techniques to teach people to try to improve their memories – and of things that individuals with extraordinary biographical memory seem to do instinctively,” said Small, director of the Longevity Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of “The Alzheimer’s Prevention Program: Keep Your Brain Healthy for the Rest of Your Life.”

“I think that probably their brains are wired so that they can naturally do what we teach others to do to improve their memories: focusing attention, creating associations and giving those associations meaning.”

While a perfect memory might seem like a gift, some people find it a real burden.

Jill Price, 46,  wishes she couldn’t remember everything quite so well. She is plagued by her inability to escape unhappy memories that are so detailed that they feel like they just happened.

“Thinking about something from 20 years ago that means absolutely nothing to me today, but still bothers me or still upsets me,” Jill said.  It’s like yesterday. It really is.”

But for Hayman and most of the people in the new study, HSAM is a gift.            

“As a group they view their autobiographical memory ability as a positive attribute,” LePort and her colleagues concluded.

Hayman himself only recently realized that his memory was out of the ordinary.

“Now that I know it’s something special, I think I’ll sort of value it more,” he told TODAY.

Related stories:

Where are my keys? Expert tips for remembering

Joy Bauer's memory-boosting smoothie

Marilu Henner talks about her steel-trap memory

By MyHealthNewsDaily staff

An 11-year old girl in Italy experienced hot flashes after taking a commonly used herbal medicine, according to a new report.

The herb, called saw palmetto or Serenoa repens, is most commonly used to treat symptoms of an enlarged prostate in adult men, but has also been used to treat baldness.

The girl had been taking daily doses of an oral supplement containing saw palmetto to treat a condition called telogen effluvium, a common cause of hair loss in children.

During the second month of treatment, the girl experienced hot flashes several times a day for many days, according to the researchers at the University of Messina in Italy who evaluated her case. Because of her symptoms, the girl stopped taking the supplement, and her hot flashes went away.

Shortly afterward, the girl had her first period. Her periods were abnormal, with heavy bleeding that lasted 15 days, the researchers said. These abnormal periods continued for about a year.

Saw palmetto is known to decrease estrogen levels in the body, and so a relationship between the herb’s use and hot flashes is plausible, the researchers said.

The supplement is generally thought to be safe, and when people do experience side effects, the symptoms are usually mild.

However, most studies on the herb's safety have been conducted in adult men, the researchers said. Little information exists concerning side effects in women or children.

The researchers said they can’t say for certain that the young girl's hot flashes were indeed caused by taking saw palmetto. However, she was not taking any other medications, did not have any known hormonal disorders, and her symptoms stopped when the supplement was discontinued — all signs that point to the herb as the culprit, they said.

The researchers called for more research into the herb's effects on young people. Although generally used by adult men, saw palmetto is available in health food stores, the researchers said, so anyone can buy and use it.

The report is published today (Oct. 1) in the journal Pediatrics.

More from MyHealthNewsDaily:

Myth or Truth? 7 Ancient Health Wisdoms Explained

7 Embarrassing Health Problems

The Truth About Herbal Supplements for Stress

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Nick Hilton watched in horror as his wife Jamie stepped backward and tumbled 12 feet down into a culvert, hitting her head hard on a boulder at the bottom. Looking down at his motionless wife, Nick knew she’d suffered a severe injury.

“I wasn’t sure if I was screaming her name out loud or just in my mind,” Nick told TODAY’s Savannah Guthrie. “But I just kept screaming her name over and over again. As I looked down on her I realized I had to get down there as soon as I could.”

TODAY

Jamie Hilton, recovering from a brain injury. Doctors removed part of her skull and stored it in her stomach for 42 days to let her brain heal.

Nick picked her up as she took a gasp of breath.  

The couple had been fishing in the wilderness of Hell’s Canyon, along the border of Idaho and Oregon, and they were far from any help -- or roads.  A boat took Jamie to an ambulance, which then met up with a helicopter that airlifted her to the emergency room at Saint Alphonus Regional Medical Center in Boise. In all it took three hours.

At the hospital, doctors told Nick that his wife's brain was badly injured and she had only a 50/50 chance of surviving. They told him that her brain was rapidly swelling and the only hope was to remove part of her skull to allow the brain to expand without being crushed against the hard, unforgiving bone. They stored the skull fragment in her abdomen for safekeeping.

That was back in June. Today the former beauty queen has almost no after-effects from her accident. She remembers little of what happened after stepping back to reel in the fish that her husband had hooked for her.

“You know, I don’t remember much,” the former Mrs. Idaho told Guthrie. “I remember he cast the line and handed me the pole. I remember the fish on the line and pulling back and that’s it. I don’t remember falling. I don’t remember landing.”

Jamie remembers waking up in the hospital room.  “When I woke up I was surrounded by my family and Nick,” she told Guthrie. “There was a great feeling in the room.  A peace and a joy. I could feel their joy when I opened my eyes."

TODAY

When Jamie Hilton woke up in the hospital, first she saw her family surrounding her and felt their love and joy. Then, she looked down and saw this in her abdomen... part of her skull, stored there while her brain healed.

Then Jamie started to explore the damage she’d sustained.

“I remember lifting my gown and looking down and just seeing this huge bulge in my stomach and thinking, ‘Is this real?’” she told TODAY. “Obviously it was not a dream. They had put the skull in my stomach.”

Jamie’s surgeon, Dr. Thomas Manning, explained why they decided to store the piece of skull in her abdomen.

“The body takes care of it,” he told TODAY. “The body keeps the bone sterile. And then when you’re ready to put the bone back you have it right there.”

And 42 days after the bone was removed, doctors reattached it to Jamie’s skull with titanium screws. Then they sewed her scalp back together. Today there is an inch-long crop of hair covering the scars.

Turns out the procedure Jamie had is commonly used for patients with severe brain injuries.

TODAY

When his wife Jamie was injured, Nick Hilton prayed that she would wake up -- whatever shape she would be in. Today, she's made a full recovery.

“It’s relatively routine,” explained Dr. Ted Schwartz, a professor of neurology at New York Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center.  “The surgery that Jamie had is called a hemicraniectomy. When there is severe trauma to the brain, the brain swells and the skull is a closed cavity. So when that swelling occurs, the pressure goes up inside the head and it can be dangerous.

“So we remove part of the skull – about 25 percent. And we then need a place to keep it. And there are a couple of different options, but one of the best options is to plant it in the abdomen. It is not only sterile, but it travels with you.”

In fact, the very same procedure was used when TV anchor Bob Woodruff suffered a brain injury while covering the war in Iraq.

“Bob Woodruff had a hemicraniectomy done in Afghanistan and he was able to travel with the bone in his belly and then they could put it back in the United States,” Schwartz told Guthrie.

Looking at video and photos of her husband cradling her body while they waited for help, Jamie started to tear up. “It’s so touching to see Nick taking care of me,” she told Guthrie.

Though she’s healthy today, Jamie says the accident has made a lasting difference.

“We all face the morning and decide how we’re going to handle today,” she told Guthrie with a cracking voice. “I think the biggest thing that has changed is it’s not really a decision anymore. I am so grateful the minute my feet touch the ground. I get to go make breakfast, take my kids to school. Things that seemed so mundane before are not mundane anymore. I am just so thankful and happy." 

TODAY

Jamie Hilton told TODAY her near-death experience has given her greater appreciation for everyday moments like taking her three children, pictured here, to school.

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Bringing Andrea back: A father's story of his daughter's brain surgery