It’s a stomach-churning video – a young woman turning a silicone buttock implant around and around under her skin and wondering out loud if this could possibly be right.

It’s not, says Dr. Anthony Youn, a Michigan-based plastic surgeon who runs the blog Celebrity Cosmetic Surgery. “It’s pretty shocking,” Youn says.

NBC News was unable to contact the unidentified woman in the video, but Youn said he thinks it’s for real. “When she moves the implant around, it’s shaped like a real buttock implant,” he says.

An increase in the demand for such procedures means surgery-gone-horribly-wrong cases are almost certain to be on the rise, Youn says.

“A lot of people want it but they don’t have the money, so they take it upon themselves to inject substances like silicone,” Youn said in a telephone interview.

“If it’s not performed almost perfectly, you could have major problems.”

“Major problems” can include death. In Feb. 2011, a 20-year-old British woman died in Philadelphia after getting a bargain-basement buttock enhancement procedure in her hotel room. Just weeks before, 36-year-old Whalesca Castillo was arrested for operating without a license and injecting women’s breasts and buttocks with liquid silicone from her home in the Bronx. She was sentenced to a year in prison after pleading guilty this past June.

In July, Oneal Ron Morris of Miami was charged with manslaughter in the death last March of Shatarka Nuby, 31. Morris was already facing charges of practicing health care and without a license and causing serious bodily injury for allegedly injecting at least two women with a toxic mixture of Fix-a-Flat tire sealant, mineral oil and cement in a backroom attempt at buttock enhancement. Nuby died after receiving injections to enlarge her breasts, allegedly from Oneal.

The American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery has a long list of such incidents. “Disturbing reports of patients being injected with everything from liquid silicone to baby oil and other unapproved products are appearing in the press on a regular basis," the group says on its website. "Make sure your clinician is using only FDA-approved products purchased within the United States. If he or she refuses to give you this information, seek another clinician.”

Gluteal enhancement – known colloquially as “butt implants” -- are among the more unusual cosmetic procedures that people ask for but are becoming more common, according to the American Society for Plastic Surgeons.

Its data shows that in 2011, 1,149 people got buttock implants, compared to 806 in 2010. There are no statistics for earlier years. That compares to 4,546 people who got buttock lifts in 2011, and 301,000 who got breast augmentation. The  American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery counted 2,100 buttock augmentation procedures in 2004.

When so many people are trying to lose weight, why the pursuit of a larger derriere? “It really started with J-Lo,” says Youn. Singer Jennifer Lopez is known for her curves – especially her shapely bottom. “Part of it is cultural, I think,” added Youn. “We have a popular culture that puts an emphasis on the size of the buttocks.”

He points to Kate Middleton’s younger sister Pippa, whose profile in a tight dress grabbed attention at Middleton’s 2011 wedding to Britain’s Prince William -- but the phenomenon goes back even farther, to Sir Mix-a-Lot’s 1992 hit “Baby Got Back,” which starts with the line “I like big butts”.

For people who want such enhancements, it’s important to go to a professional with a lot of experience, Youn says. Board certified plastic surgeons are members of the American Society for Plastic Surgeons or the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, or both. “And you want to make sure they do a lot of these every year. It’s not for the novice doctor,” Youn advises.

Youn says he won’t do buttock implants, but will inject fat to enhance various body areas. A lot can go wrong, he said.

“One reason it is fraught with complications is the area where you put the implant, we consider it a dirty area,” Youn said. “Implants, if they get any type of bacteria on them, can get infected very easily.”

And that can cause a complication no one wants. “When implants get infected they can literally extrude. The body can open the incision and try to push it back out,” he said.

Second, the gluteus maximus is the largest muscle in the body, and needs big blood vessels to supply it. If silicone gets into the blood, it can cause embolisms, which are painful and potentially deadly if they end up in the heart or brain.

The operation itself isn’t fun. “It is a painful operation because you have to sit on that area,” Youn said. “You have to literally avoid sitting on your bottom for weeks afterward.”

Or something might happen like the YouTube video shows.  

“If the pocket that the implant was put in is too big, then the implant will move around like that,” Youn says. “I have seen it with breast implants. You can literally flip the implant around in your breast.”

Buttock implants are shaped with one rounded side and one flat side, Youn said, “You want to put it in the buttocks like a hand in a glove where it really doesn’t move.”

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Trying to figure out if your partner's angry? Look at his or her body, not face.

When people are at the peak of joy or despair, their body language is a more reliable indicator of their emotions than their face, a new study finds.

"You can't tell from the face alone if something good's going on or bad going on. When people see the faces alone, they're kind of lost," said study co-author Hillel Aviezer, a psychologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. "The body maintains a clear signal of positive and negative."

The findings are detailed today (Nov. 29) in the journal Science.

Most research on reading emotions has focused on the face. A few studies had shown that people rely on body language to read emotion when it clashes with someone's facial expression, but those studies used trained actors in poses, Aviezer told LiveScience.

His research team wanted to see how people use body language to read intense emotions. To do so, his team gathered dozens of images of elite tennis players at the moment they won or lost critical points in high-stakes competitions like the U.S. Open.

"There is lots of money involved, it's lots of ego involved, it's very high stakes. You have a lot of points in the game where people could have very positive emotions or negative emotions," he said.

They showed three groups of 15 participants images of just the face, just the body, or both together, and asked the viewers whether the image showed positive or negative emotion.

People who saw the body — with or without the face — accurately guessed whether the player was happy or distraught. Those who viewed just the faces failed to distinguish between happy and unhappy players.

The team also morphed winning faces onto losing bodies and vice versa, and found that the body cues dictated whether or not viewers thought the players had won.

The findings don't rule out the face from all emotional cues, he said.

"But when things become very intense, the good and the bad merge together, and it's hard to tell if it's positive or negative," he said.

Interestingly, when people saw a body and face together, they said they made judgments based on facial expression — even though they were actually using body cues to interpret the pictures.

"People use information from the body and then they read it into the face," Aviezer said.

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Cellphone use is ubiquitous, and new research shows it may be socially contagious, too. People are more likely to pull out their phones to check their text messages or email if they're with someone who has just done the same, the study found.

Researchers at the University of Michigan watched students in dining halls and coffee shops around campus between January and April 2011. They unobtrusively observed pairs of students sitting at tables for as long as 20 minutes and documented their cellphone use at 10-second intervals.

Overall, the students used their cellphones in an average of 24 percent of the intervals, the researchers found. But they were significantly more likely to use their phones (39.5 percent) when their companion had just done so in the previous 10-second interval than without the social cue, the researchers said, adding that this behavior was often repeated.

"Some of this could be people being primed to check their e-mail or phone messages, but this contagious use was happening several times in a 15-minute interaction," study researcher Daniel Kruger said in a statement. [ The 10 Most Disruptive Technologies ]

Kruger believes this pattern could be related to the effects of social inclusion and exclusion. If one person in a pair engages in an external conversation through their phone, his or her companion may feel excluded. That companion then might be compelled to connect with others externally so as not to feel left out.

The researchers note that they might not observe the same results in a study of different demographics — for example, in older adults, who may not use cellphones as habitually.

Their findings were detailed in the Human Ethology Bulletin earlier this year.

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Mike Eagle might be in the car or the shower or on stage when it hits him. A thought evolves into a freestyle rap and the rapper, better known as Open Mike Eagle, follows the lyrical trail. Freestyle, a spontaneous rap either in the middle of a written rap or on its own, remains one of the few unscripted lyrical art forms. While freestyle allows rappers to show off skills and entertain, it is also helping researchers understand how creativity works in the brain.

“Freestyle is highly prized in the hip-hop community and it is not that common and takes particular skill,” says Dr. Allen Braun, a senior investigator at the National Institutes of Health. “The main goal … is to understand the creative process and the brain mechanism underlying it.”

Braun and his colleagues at the NIH asked 12 rappers, who had experience freestyling, to rap in an fMRI machine. Each rapper memorized a few lines of a rap written by a friend of Eagle’s, N/A, and performed it for about a minute. Then they freestyle rapped for a minute. The researchers compared the brain activity between the freestyle and conventional performances. Eagle and his friend Daniel Rizik-Baer, a producer, participated in a pilot trail, helping researchers modify the fMRI to accommodate performances. Eagle admits it was tough rapping in the narrow tube because he normally moves when he raps; also, MRIs make a lot of loud noises. 

“It was challenging,” Eagle says. “One thing I learned in the course of doing this study [is that] freestyle rapping is a body intensive and there is movement restriction in [the fMRI].”

And freestyle rappers often rap about their surroundings so the researchers listened to quite a few rhymes about fMRI machines.

Restrictions aside, the researchers discovered important information about creativity. When the rappers freestyle rapped, activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (which is responsible for self-interested behavior) increased, while activity in the dorsolateral cortex (which regulates executive function), decreased. Also, while the rappers freestyled, the medial prefrontal cortex networked with other areas, including regions responsible for language and the amygdala, which plays a role emotions. And even though Eagle associates movement with freestyling, the brain did not show any increased activity in areas responsible for motor activity.

“We think there is a stronger coupling between motivation, action, language, and emotion,” Braun explains.

The researchers also looked at brain activity at the beginning of the eight bar freestyle and the end. They found that the dorsolateral cortex works more at the end, indicating that executive functioning is needed when someone tries to complete a creative work.

The researchers also asked Eagle and Rizik-Baer to rate the freestyle raps. The two evaluated each performance on lyrical creativity and rhythmic complexity. The more innovative rappers showed more activity in the language areas of the brain.  

“The innovative quality was strongly correlated with the left temporal areas, which is the lexicon areas. But also the quality is strongly correlated with the medial prefrontal cortex,” Braun says.   

While the study, which appears in the journal Scientific Reports, focuses on freestyle rapping, Braun believes neurological activity will look the same in other artists.  

“We think that this might generalize to all forms of artistic creativity and even some scientific creativity.”

Below, check out a video of Eagle in action. 

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Dan Joling / AP

A nearly full moon sets over waters of Cook Inlet and a children's whale slippery slide just before sunrise on Tuesday, at Elderberry Park in downtown Anchorage, Alaska. Anchorage's next full moon is Wednesday.

When there's a full moon (like the one Wednesday), there's a tendency to blame some people's strange behavior on it. But a new Canadian study dismisses this popular belief and suggests that more people with psychological problems do not show up at hospital emergency rooms during a full moon.

Researchers found little evidence that the moon's lunar cycles were linked to an increased incidence of mental health concerns. 

In other words, the moon's behavior seems to have no effect on human behavior on planet Earth. Sure, the word "lunatic" derives from the Latin word "luna" for "moon," but science has found little connection between the moon and madness.

Even so, that won't stop some of us from thinking that lunar cycles can influence psychological symptoms. By one estimate, 80 percent of nurses and 64 percent of doctors who work in the emergency department believe it affects patients' mental health.

In the study, which will appear in the journal General Hospital Psychiatry, researchers reviewed medical records from two hospitals in Montreal over a three-year period. They looked at nearly 800 patients who came to the emergency room for unexplained chest pains, meaning doctors aren't sure what caused their heart trouble.

Researchers studied unexplained chest pains because people with this complaint often suffer from many psychological difficulties, including panic attacks, anxiety and mood disorders, and suicidal thoughts.

They also investigated this topic because the research team was already conducting a study on panic attacks and unexplained chest pains. And the emergency department personnel would often make comments, such as "This would be a good night for research because it's a full moon," says study researcher William Foldes-Busque, PhD, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Quebec in Montreal, Canada. So, experimenters knew some health professionals already had this perception in their heads, but they wanted to see if the idea had any truth to it.

After patients completed a mental health evaluation, scientists then analyzed data to find out if their psychological symptoms revealed any seasonal patterns or lunar phase influence. Researchers were able to determine which one of the moon's four phases -- new moon, first quarter, full moon, or last quarter -- was present on the day each patient came to the emergency room.

The study found that lunar cycle had no influence on the occurrence of psychological problems, such as panic attacks, anxiety and mood disorders, or suicidal thoughts. The only exception was a 32% drop in the frequency of anxiety disorders during the moon's last quarter. 

"We don't know for sure why this happened," says Foldes-Busque.

Other studies have looked at admissions to psychiatric hospitals, calls to crisis hotlines, or homicide rates, and also failed to turn up a link between the moon's illumination and behavior changes. But if you talk to health professionals or police officers, they may think there's more nuttiness and craziness during a full moon. 

It's possible that people are more prone to notice -- and remember -- a full moon, so they may link any strange behaviors they see that day to it. And perhaps when people act odd during other times of the month, they're just considered weird -- no further explanations given.

Foldes-Busque says it's possible the moon affects mental health in other ways. "I've heard that the full moon may affect sleep, mostly because of increased luminosity," he says.

What's his advice for today's full moon? "Don't do anything special or change anything because of it."

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“My bed was my home,” says Anna Summer. “I would hit a point in the day where I thought, if I don’t go to sleep right now, I will literally not survive.”

Summer, a lawyer in Georgia, suffers from a mysterious disorder that caused her to sleep for up to 18 hours a day, reports TODAY’s Gabe Gutierrez.

"It was like an addiction," she told TODAY.

And yet she never felt rested. Summer took a leave of absence and began treatment at Emory University. After determining that she didn’t have a thyroid problem or depression, doctors discovered the problem that was ruining her life -– Summer had a major sleeping disorder that most often affects women. Emory researchers had found it in 31 other patients like Anna.

"We've discovered in a large number of these folks the body seems to be producing a substance that acts very much like a sedative, hypnotic drug,” neurologist Dr. David Rye told TODAY.

The condition makes patient response times as slow as people who are legally drunk. Researchers aren’t sure of the cause, but they estimate the disorder could affect 1 in 800 people.

The Emory researchers are testing a drug called flumazenil, normally used to help surgery patients wake up from anesthesia. Patient Vicki Rusk got the IV drug during Emory’s research.

“The fog was lifted,” Rusk told TODAY. “You felt like you were awake.”

So far, Summer is the only patient taking flumazenil in pill form, thanks to a donation from a pharmaceutical company.

“I was existing before treatment, but I wasn’t living,” she says.

Her supply of medicine runs out next year. She and her doctors are trying to convince the pharmaceutical industry to mass produce the drug, the only effective treatment of the disorder.

The research was just published in the medical journal Science Translational Medicine.

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All those holiday shoppers...and all that holiday music. Can your brain handle it?

Shana McGough likes Christmas music, until she hears too much of it.

"I think at first Christmas music is nice, it's nostalgic, and it gets me into the holiday spirit," says the writer from Escondido, Calif. Then, "it gets old, and it can start to feel like a part of a giant sales machine trying to bleed me dry."

She also suspects that for anyone of a different faith who doesn't celebrate Christmas,"holiday music must be beyond annoying, right into offensive."

If it’s not started already, by the time the Thanksgiving meal is devoured and the stores open for Black Friday, Christmas music will be inescapable. After hearing 'Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree' and 'Frosty the Snowman' for the umpteenth time, you might be hoping for a silent night.

Earlier this month Canada's top pharmacy chain Shoppers Drug Mart Corp. heeded shopper complaints and put the holiday music on pause until later in the season. Even for people who celebrate Christmas, listening to the same seemingly inescapable seasonal songs over and over again may be incredibly irritating.

Endless loops of “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer” or any tinsel-y tune can have a psychological impact known as the 'mere exposure effect,' says Victoria Williamson, Ph.D, who conducts research on the psychology of music at Goldsmiths, University of London. There's a U-shaped relationship between the amount of times we hear music that we like and our subsequent reaction to it, she says.

As Williamson puts it, at first we like music a bit, then we like it more and more until it hits a peak. And then we crash down -- we have overheard it. That's when boredom and annoyance at the repetition of the same sound hits home. "Anyone who has worked in a Christmas store over the holidays will know what I'm talking about," Williamson says. When asked why holiday music seems to have a polarizing effect, driving some people crazy while others like, or at least, can tolerate it, Williamson suggests that music's effect on us in any situation depends on our own psychological state.

People who are already stressed out about the holidays -- worrying about money, traveling, or seeing relatives -- may find the musical reminder of the cause of their stress very unwelcome, she says. But those who approach the holidays in a receptive, relaxed state are more likely to get a boost from the happy associations -- childhood memories, family gatherings, or the holiday's religious meaning -- triggered by holiday music.

Of course, the reason Christmas music is played in every department store, supermarket from Thanksgiving through December. Music can put us in the mood to spend money, research suggests.

"We've shown that 'holiday appropriate' music combined with congruent 'holiday scents' can influence shoppers by increasing the amount of time they spend in a store, their intention to revisit it, and intention to purchase," says Eric Spangenberg, Ph.D, dean of the College of Business at Washington State University in Pullman, who has studied the  influence of music on holiday shopping.

He says that some types of music work better than others. "Slower tempo music slows down shoppers, and they spend more time and money in a store," Spangenberg explains. Faster-paced pieces move people through the store quicker than retailers would like.

For Charlie Muldoon, only certain types of holiday music can put him in a good mood.

"I find the traditional songs sung by the great artists of the 50s and 60s or the funny songs about 'Grandma Getting Run Over by a Reindeer' put a smile on my face," says the Washington, DC-based professional polo player. 

"But those remakes by commercial singers and rappers make me want to go postal," Muldoon confesses. And some sounds make him forget the season's peace on earth, goodwill toward men sentiment. "Those 'elevator' versions of holiday music make me want to take a bat to the machine that plays them," he says.

As long as Christmas songs are played after Thanksgiving, Mary Leach, a public relations professional who lives in Cambridge, Mass., doesn’t mind. To her, "Christmas [music and decorations] much prior to Turkey Day is just plain wrong."

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For some people, it’s somewhere between the third or fourth cup of coffee when they begin feeling human. While people commonly guzzle a cup of joe to perk up, it turns out caffeine can do more than simply wake people. Researchers found that caffeine helps the brain process positive words faster. 

Caffeine indirectly boosts dopamine transmission—a neurotransmitter that aids in reward-based learning—and Lars Kuchinke, a junior professor at Germany's Ruhr University, suspected this might lead to better acumen with word recognition by enhancing activity in the brain’s left hemisphere, which controls language. Researchers already know that people who consume normal levels of caffeine perform better at basic cognitive tasks.  

To discern whether a link existed between dopamine and word recognition, Kuchinke asked 66 people to participate in a word test. Thirty minutes prior to the study, half of the participants took a pill, containing about 200 milligrams of caffeine, which equals two or three cups of coffee. The other half ingested a placebo. Then the participants watched a string of letters pop up on a computer screen and quickly had to decide whether each was an actual word or not. Researchers have long known that most people have a natural tendency to recognize positive words faster than neutral or negative words.

“Either positive words are better interconnected in the brain and it is, therefore, easier to recognize them or [the brain] receive[s] some kind of 'positive' or rewarding feedback during this process,” says Kuchinke. He also theorizes that negative words might cause the brain to pause, balking at the negative association, meaning a person would not identify it as quickly. 

The caffeinated subjects correctly selected more positive words than the people in the control group. Kuchinke theorizes that when caffeine is added to the body it regulates the dopamine transmission in the regions that control decision-making and word comprehension.  

 “Caffeine may either strengthen connections to regions where positive information and positive feedback are processed so this information is more easily available during the process of word recognition,” he explains. “Or caffeine may simply facilitate the decision process.”

He believes that caffeine specifically impacts the striatum in the basal ganglia, which helps us process positive words and make decisions. But his findings also indicate that dopamine aids in language comprehension.

The findings were published online this month in the journal PLOS One. 

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It took almost two years for Nicole Delien’s family to find someone who could explain the mysterious illness that was making their little girl “sleep” for as long as 64 days. During those excruciating 21 months doctors diagnosed everything from West Nile to epilepsy.

Some even suggested that Nicole’s parents might be drugging her or somehow manipulating her sleep – an accusation that led to a report to Child Protective Services.

Finally, when the family was at their wits end, they found Dr. Michael Rancurello at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh, who diagnosed Nicole, 17, with an exceedingly rare disorder called Kleine-Levin Syndrome. Rancurello wasn’t an expert in the syndrome, but by chance he’d already treated several patients with the disorder that periodically sends patients into a strange state in which they alternate between long stretches of actual sleep and periods of semi conscious delirium.

Nicole was 6 years old when contracted a virus that seems to have sparked her condition.

“In the beginning we thought she had the flu because she had flu-like symptoms and a high fever,” Vicki Delien, Nicole’s mom, told TODAY’s Savannah Guthrie. “But then she just became, as the days progressed, more confused and lethargic. We didn’t know what was going on. “

No one knows exactly what is going wrong in the brains of KLS patients. What experts do know is that it strikes more than twice as many boys (70 percent) as girls and that patients can abruptly drop into a state in which they will sleep for as many as 20 hours a day - Nicole sometimes sleeps for 19 hours in a row - and then for a few hours pop into a sort of twilight state that is similar to what sleep walkers experience.

Rancurello describes this state as more of a delirium than a true period of wakefulness.

“It’s not really sleeping,” he told Guthrie. “If anybody’s come out of anesthesia or had an elderly family member who has had surgery and gets confused and talks out of their mind, that’s basically what this is. It is a delirium.”

Affected teens and their families are advised by the National Institutes of Health to wait out the syndrome, since it has been shown to resolve on its own in most cases. “Episodes eventually decrease in frequency and intensity over the course of eight to 12 years,” the NIH webpage on the disorder notes.

Once Rancurello was on the case, the family at least had a diagnosis and some help in managing the syndrome. But it hasn’t been easy for Nicole or her family.

While Nicole “sleeps” life continues to fly by. One of her greatest disappointments is that she missed being with her grandfather before he died. When an episode struck, he was alive. When she came to again, her parents told her that he had died.

“I was so close to him,” Nicole said. “I missed the last two months of seeing and talking to him.”

Compounding the problem is the unpredictability of the episodes.

“Sometimes,” Nicole said, “Sometimes I’m afraid to go asleep at night.”

The syndrome has been taxing for Nicole’s family, too.

When she’s experiencing an episode, she never truly conscious even during the periods when her eyes are open and she’s managed to get out of bed to go to the bathroom.

Sometimes she feeds herself when in this twilight state, but her family has to take her to the hospital from time to time to get her rehydrated and fed through an IV tube.

Making matters worse, she remembers nothing from the episode, even from those times when she was actually talking to her parents.

And that, perhaps, is the toughest thing for Nicole, who hopes that by speaking out she’ll help educate the public.

“I would want people to know that it’s not fun,” she said, “because you miss a lot.”

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This is no laughing matter (or maybe it is): A small British study has found that laughter can increase your tolerance of pain. It seems that cracking up in the company of other people releases endorphins, the same feel-good brain chemicals triggered while exercising.

Laughter is helpful when you're hurting because it's hard work for the body. A hearty, sustained laugh is a good workout for muscles in the chest and lungs, and this can trigger the release of endorphins to mask the pain, says Robin Dunbar, PhD, a professor of evolutionary psychology at Oxford University, who led the study. When endorphin levels increase, a person's pain threshold rise, he explains. 

For the study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, scientists ran a series of six different experiments in the lab and one in a real-world setting, during live stage performances at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Many of the tests were done in small groups because other research has shown that laughter is 30 times more likely to occur in a social situation than when you're alone.

In some studies, half of the volunteers watched a comedy video -- ranging from episodes of "South Park" and "Friends" to "Mr. Bean" and "The Simpsons" -- while the others viewed a documentary on dull stuff like golf instruction, pet training, or a nature show. 

Each participant's individual pain threshold was tested before and after watching the videos, using such pain-inducing techniques as an increasingly tighter blood pressure cuff around the upper arm or a frozen wine cooler sleeve placed on the forearm and held there until the person couldn't take it any longer. Pain tolerance was considered a proxy measure of endorphin levels.

Researchers also recorded the amount of time participants spent laughing. But polite titters wouldn't cut it; only relaxed social laughter that stretched smile muscles in the face counted.

Pain tolerance was shown to be higher in men and women who watched funny videos, but they stayed the same or were lower in those who didn't. Scientists were also able to tease out that a person's ability to handle more pain was due to the laughter itself and not just because it put someone in a better mood.

Laughter is definitely some of the best medicine for pain, says Dunbar. It seems that endorphins tune up the immune system, so triggering their release through laughter helps you recover from disease and allows the body to resist infection, he explains

Would some comic relief help those suffering from chronic pain? Presumably, the more you engage in social events that involve laughter, you'll be better able to bear chronic pain, Dunbar says.

"No doubt the pharmaceutical companies won't like it, but laughter would save on hospital bills," he points out.

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Do you see a face in the back of this train? It's one of the images used by researchers to figure out which people are most inclined to see faces in objects.

People have claimed to see Jesus in their burnt toast. Others have spotted the Virgin Mary in a 10-year-old grilled cheese sandwich, or seen a vague resemblance to Elvis in an oddly shaped potato chip. 

Courtesy of Tapani Riekki

Is this rock looking at you? Researchers showed subjects a group of images, like this one, to find out who was most likely to see faces on inanimate objects.

These folks aren't wacky or crazy, and they don't need their eyes examined. They're experiencing what's known as the illusory face perception, a tendency to see face-like areas in non-human things. They may see facial features in nature (in cloud formations or rock ledges) or inanimate objects (food or household items).

Now, a small study from Finland, published in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology, has attempted to find out what types of people are most likely people to pick up on these visual perceptions.

"An ability to see faces is more common in some people than others due to differences in how our brains process information," says study author Tapani Riekki, a doctoral student in the division of cognitive psychology and neuropsychology at the University of Helsinki. "It's normal, and actually fun, that our mind plays tricks and triggers the face perception when no actual faces are present," he suggests.

Researchers wanted to determine if religious and paranormal beliefs played a role in a person's ability to perceive a face when no face is truly there. So they recruited 47 men and women, and they compared 19 people who had a favorable opinion of paranormal powers -- such as clairvoyance and astrology -- to a group of 20 participants who were skeptical of these phenomena.

A second analysis compared results from 20 people who considered themselves religious to 19 non-religious individuals.

NBCNews.com

In 2004, a Florida woman sold this grilled cheese sandwich, which some say features the face of the Virgin Mary, for $28,000 on ebay.

In the study, researchers had volunteers complete a detection task: Participants viewed 185 color photos on a computer screen (98 had face pictures, 87 did not) and they had four seconds to determine if they could detect a face-like area with eyes and a mouth within each picture. If they saw a face, they were asked to point to its location.

The images included landscapes and nature scenes as well as buildings and objects. Some face-like features were staged (an arrangement of tools on a table), while others were found naturally in the real world (in rock formations or tree trunks).

The researchers purposely chose "face" photos that were harder to detect to better show the individual differences between all four experimental groups.

The study found that religious people and paranormal believers perceived more face-like areas when some were present compared to non-religious individuals and skeptics.  But believers also saw more face-like patterns in pictures when none were there.

"Our results show that the difference between the groups is not at the perception level but at the level of interpreting," says Riekki. More specifically, they found that the difference was in how much information was needed to raise the perception of "something face-like" in the image.

Citrus Christ? Cheesus? 13 religious sightings

Paranormal and religious believers had a lower criteria for believing they saw a face, and they also rated faces as more face-like and showing stronger emotions. These findings imply believers may be more susceptible to the suggestion that faces may be present in the images.

"Even a small amount of information, perhaps just two dots that slightly resemble eyes may trigger the idea that this could be face-like," Reikki explains.

"In other words, the believer groups found more meaningful patterns in ambiguous pictures," he points out.

See more religious sightings

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For some people, hearing about a bug bite or a rash is enough to cause them to furiously dig at their own unaffected skin. Even some doctors who treat people with shingles report feeling itchy after witnessing their patients scratching. And we'd bet many of you readers are feeling itchy right this very second. 

It seems humans commonly catch itches from one another, but scientists hadn’t proven it—until now. Researchers found that itching is contagious much like yawning and laughing.

“With itching, there [was] only anecdotal evidence that watching [a person] itch induces itching,” explains Henning Holle, a lecturer in the psychology department at the University of Hull in England. “We wanted to know whether contagious itch would effect everyone.”

Holle asked 51 adults to take a personality test that ranks the Big Five personality traits of openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. Then using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI (a technique that detects brain activity by monitoring blood flow in the brain), the subjects watched either a video where someone was scratching herself or tapping her arm or chest. The fMRI allowed the researchers to see the subjects’ brain activity as they responded to the video images.

Two-thirds of the people who saw the scratching video scratched themselves. This finding mirrors what experts know about other socially contagious behaviors such as yawning and laughing: most of us "catch" yawns and laughter. 

“Most people tend to experience contagious itch—some are more prone to it than others,” Holle explains. “I was really surprised by the amount of people who spontaneously scratched.”

Watching an itch sparks activity in the anterior insular, primary somatosensory area, and the prefrontal and premotor cortices. These regions, part of the itch matrix, also activate when a person actually feels an itch, meaning that watching someone scratch makes the brain think it is experiencing an itch.

After establishing that itching spreads socially, Holle wondered what caused it. He suspected itch might spread because of empathy. There is some evidence that people feel pain empathetically: When someone sees a family member receive an electric shock, the observer also feels pain (as this is in a lab setting the people aren’t actually receiving the shock). It turns out that people who exhibit more empathy do not scratch more than those who are less compassionate. But people who are more neurotic, those who experience the biggest mood swings and exhibit anxiety, depression, jealousy, and guilt, are more susceptible to contagious itch than others. The neural activity in the prefrontal cortex reinforces the self-reported data indicating that people with neurotic tendencies are more likely to catch an itch.  

“This introspective awareness might explain why people are more prone [to contagious itch],” he says.

The paper appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Related:

Spiders! Ants! Did that make you itchy? Here's why

Man's itchy ear turned out to be crawling mites

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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.

By Naomi Piercey, Women's Health

Feeling stumped? Move on to an easier task and let your thoughts wander. Distracting yourself with a mindless activity will help you feel more inspired, as well as improve your problem-solving skills, according to research published in the journal Psychological Science.

In the experiment, participants were asked to perform an "Unusual Use Task," listing as many unusual uses for an item as possible. The participants were then divided into four groups. The first group was asked to perform a demanding task, the second was asked to perform an undemanding task, the third was allowed to rest for 12 minutes, and the fourth group was not allowed rest. They were then given the "unusual use task" a second time.

Of all the groups tested, only the participants that were assigned the undemanding task improved their score on the second listing test.

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Why the better performance? Study author Jonathan Schooler, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at the University of California department of psychological and brain sciences, says it's all in the mind wandering. "It seems if you have a non-demanding task, it sort of breaks things up and prevents you from getting immersed in one train of thought," he says. That's why the group that got to rest for 12 minutes didn't see any improvement--it's possible they were ruminating or obsessing, and not giving their brains a break.

Suddenly, a reason to celebrate the mundane tasks in our own lives. "There are certain kinds of activities that we thought were a waste of time, like taking a shower, or gardening, but these non-demanding tasks can be a fertile period to allow creative incubation to take place," says Schooler.

Other non-demanding tasks that will help you clear your head without rumination: Going for a run, listening to music, or putting on your favorite podcast of a person who inspires you, says Laurie Gerber, life coach and president of Handel Group Life Coaching. And, if you have the self-control, meditation with a focus on your breath can also work wonders, says Schooler.

Need help scheduling a mental break? Follow these tips for squeezing a mini meditation into your day.

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

To the math-minded among us, tackling something like the Pythagorean theorem is easy, even fun. To others, anything with numbers and letter causes sweating, teeth gnashing, broken pencils, and a general feeling of dread. Now, a new study shows when number-phobic people anticipate math, their brains believe they are feeling physical pain.

“People often walk around talking about how awful math is,” says Sian Beilock, psychology professor at the University of Chicago and author of the book, “Choke: What The Secrets Of The Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To.”  

“In our society it is common to hate math," Beilock says. "You don’t hear people walking around bragging about how they can’t read.”

Beilock and doctoral student Ian Lyons asked 14 adults with math anxiety to verify the results of an equation such as  (a*b) −c = d or work on word puzzles -- where subjects discerned whether a string of letters makes an English word if the spelling is reversed --while in a fMRI. Beilock and Lyons found when people with high levels of math anxiety anticipated equations, their brain reacted much like they would if they were in physical pain. The higher the person's anxiety, the more the posterior insula flashed with activity. (The posterior insula is what springs into action when one burns her hand or stubs her toe.) The researchers also found activation in the cingulate cortex, which also serves in the brain’s pain center.

 “We have this evolutionary ancient, pain system that responds when we burn our hands on the stove and are in physical pain … when people are anxious and anticipating the math test, (our brains) activate the same system,” Beilock explains.

Beilock, who views math positively as a challenge and puzzle, was surprised to learn that people reacted as if they were in pain only when they anticipated math, not while working on the equations.

“We weren’t necessarily expecting to see the activation in the anticipation and thought that was interesting,” Beilock says. She believes that when people actually started the math problems, the pain and anxiety subsided because they focused on the task at hand.

While people don’t actually feel pain—there aren’t any mysterious burning or pricking sensations while thinking about numbers—the brain reacts as if the hand is being burned. 

“The brain isn’t making a clear distinction (between physical and mental pain),” she says. “People talk about math as if it is actually painful.” And it is. Because of this, people anticipating math might also feel the same physiological symptoms that a person who stubbed her toe, such as sweaty palms and increased heart rates.

Some of these unpleasant math side effects can be reduced. Beilock has evidence that if math anxious people spend 10 minutes writing about their fears, they purge their anxiety and perform better—and reduce any physical reactions.

The paper appears in the online journal PLOS ONE.

Related:

Bad at math -- or is it dyscalculia? 

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By Keely Savoie, Prevention

Sure, bad posture can make you neck creak and your shoulders ache, but recent research shows that your slouch might be making you a grouch. Heads-up! Here are some weird ways posture can affect you—and how you can get out of the slump.

1. Deepens depression

In a recent study from San Francisco State University, students were told to either walk down a hall in a slouched position or to skip. The slouchers reported increased feelings of depression and lower energy than skippers.

That’s no surprise to posture expert Carol Krucoff, a yoga teacher and author of Healing Yoga for Neck and Shoulder Pain and founder of healingmoves.com. “Even our language reflects this connection between proper posture and emotional affect—someone weak is called spineless and someone proud has backbone,” she says. 

The fix: Imagine there’s a headlight right in the middle of your chest at the sternum (breast bone), says Krucoff. Sitting or standing, your headlight should always shine forward. Now, keeping your head centered over your shoulders, extend your head toward the ceiling without lifting your chin.

2. Causes career problems

Slouching doesn’t just hurt your attitude—it can affect how people see you. “You don’t want to walk into somebody’s office slouching and bent over, because people really do perceive you as not as vital,” says Janice Novak, author of Posture, Get it Straight and director of improveyourposture.com. “To improve posture long term, you need to strengthen muscles mid-back,” she says.

The fix: To avoid being a slouch on the job, Novak recommends doing this exercise at your desk: Lift the bottom of your ribcage an inch or two off your hipbone, pulling your shoulder blades back and down. To make sure you maintain the position, pin a ribbon to top and to bottom of your shirt and keep it taut for 10 minutes at a time.

4 Ways Body Language Can Hurt Your Career

3. Backs you up

“When you sit in a crunched position, your viscera (intestines) are folded up, too,” says Steven Weiniger, author of Stand Taller, Live Longer and founder of BodyZone.com, which integrates chiropractic, exercise, massage and other therapies that promote healthy posture. “That can slow everything down.”

The fix: Yoga and pilates are great exercises to strengthen your core and help get things moving, says Weiniger. One pose that can rev up a sluggish gut is the Cobra: Lie on your belly while resting your head on your lower arms. Raise your forehead and look upwards, letting your weight rest on your chest. Letting your head fall back a little, move your belly further off the mat as if someone is pulling your arms.

4. Increases risk of death and disease

A recent Australian study found that after the age of 25, every single hour of television—i.e., slouching on the couch—reduced the viewer’s life expectancy by 21.8 minutes. Plus, when English researchers cross-referenced sitting time with health outcomes in a different study, they found that those people who sat the most more than doubled their risk of developing diabetes and had a 147 % increase in their risk for cardiovascular disease, even if they exercised.

The fix: Don’t let the box beat you. Novak suggests doing the TV Stand: Stand up from chair without using arms and sit down in a smooth and controlled motion. “Just doing this simple move can keep your lower body muscles very strong,” says Novak. (Stuck sitting at work? Here’s how to build your own standing desk.)

5. Makes you look heavier

Does this chair make me look fat? Well, yes, says Novak. “We’ve become a nation of professional sitters,” she says. “But when you are slouched over, your internal organs have nowhere to go but down and out—you immediately look fatter.”
    
The fix: The solution for this one is simple. “Get up and move,” says Novak. “When we stand as opposed to sit, we burn 20% more calories and strengthen our muscles, boost metabolism and increase bone density.” (Check out these easy ways to move more at work.)

6. Cuts off your circulation

“Our bodies are machines that move fluid and gases back and forth,” says Weiniger. Prolonged sitting, especially with your legs crossed, can cut off the flow, increase pressure and even cause spider veins.

The fix: To get blood flowing to your lower body, Weiniger says to stand up and find your best posture (these six tips can help you figure it out), then lift one leg up so your thigh is horizontal to ground. Keep your standing leg locked (not hyperextended) and hold for five strong breaths, pushing your breathing down to your diaphragm. Repeat on the opposite side.

7. Stresses you out

A recent study from Harvard showed that when people who adopted powerful postures (open shoulders and straight spines) had a 20 percent increase in testosterone levels and a 25% decrease in cortisol levels—but people who slouched had a 10% decrease in testosterone and a 15% increase in cortisol. That translates into low self-confidence and high stress. And sitting slouched over can compound the problem, says Krucoff. “Shallow chest breathing strains the lungs, which must move faster to ensure adequate oxygen flow, and taxes the heart, which is forced to speed up to provide enough blood for oxygen transport. The result is a vicious cycle, where stress prompts shallow breathing, which in turn creates more stress,” she says.
    
The fix: Krucoff suggests taking everyday cues—a ringing phone, a stoplight—as reminders to take relaxed abdominal breaths to combat stress. Here’s how to make sure you’re breathing deeply: Rest your hand below your belly button; you should feel your belly expand as you inhale. “Invite the air all the way down to the deepest portion of the lungs, where oxygen exchange is most efficient,” says Krucoff. As you exhale, you should feel your belly contract again and stress leave your body.

6 Weird Signs You’re Way Too Stressed

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• 10 Questions for Candy Crowley, Presidential Debate Moderator
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• You Being Beautiful is your guide to looking fitter, healthier, and Younger—FAST!

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