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

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

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

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

The answer, they argue, is most definitely yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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No matter how much you try to hide your age, you can’t nip-and-tuck your scent away. People will still be able to figure out how old you are simply by taking a sniff.

Researchers have determined that there really is an “old person smell” -- and a young person smell and a middle-aged smell -- according to a study published Wednesday in PLoS ONE.

“This study shows you can’t fake it,” says study co-author Johan Lundstrom, an assistant professor at the Monell Chemical Senses Center and at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute. “If you walk around a corner, you don’t have to look at someone to know they’re older; you can just sniff them out.”

At a time when we spray, spritz and anxiously try to scrub away and cover up our natural body odor, the new research should be reassuring to our noses. But our paranoia that we turn into pungent, musty moth balls as we age turns out to be completely wrong. Older people, in fact, have less intense -- and more pleasant -- scents than their younger counterparts, the new research indicates.

Scientists have long known that our bodies give off scents that contain a variety of chemicals and that those chemicals can convey a lot of information. But they didn’t know whether body odor changed with age in an easily detectable way. 

Though this is the first study to document that an “old person smell” exists, it’s recognized in many cultures around the world. The Japanese, in fact, have a special word to describe how old people smell: Kareishu.

Earlier studies in animals showed that body odor changes with age, Lundstrom says. He wondered whether that might be true for people, too.

To see if people could accurately identify a person’s age through smell, Lundstrom and his colleagues asked 41 volunteers to wear a special T-shirt to bed for five nights, after bathing and washing their hair with unscented products.

Each of the unscented shirts contained underarm pads which, by the end of five days, were steeped in the volunteer’s body odor.

Pieces of the pads were then dropped into glass jars, which were grouped by age: Some jars contained scents of 20- to 30-year-olds, some the scents of 45- to 55-year-olds, and some the scents of 75- to 95-year-olds.

The researchers then rounded up another 41 volunteers and had them sniff the jars. The volunteers were then asked to guess the age group associated with the scent in each jar and to rate the intensity of each scent and its pleasantness.

The volunteers were pretty good at figuring out the ages -- better than would be predicted by chance. But they were even more accurate when they were simply asked to group together all the jars that smelled like old people. Which means that they could detect the old person smell the best.

Intriguingly, the volunteers scored old people’s odors highest for pleasantness and lowest for intensity.

Lundstrom doesn’t know why our scents change with age. But he’s got a theory that it’s got to do with reproduction.

Other studies have shown that people often choose mates that are unlike them genetically. In fact, those who marry third cousins, have the highest reproductive success, Lundstrom says. And it’s by smell that we determine how closely related we are to the person sitting next to us, even if we’re unconscious of it.

Similarly, Lundstrom suspects that some women might seek out older men because they’ve proven that they’ve got longevity genes.

“We favor the older individuals because they are survivors,” he explains. “Of course, when that developed many thousands of years ago, we didn’t get that old. So, it’s not like we’re favoring 80 year-olds.”

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• Extroverts live longer, study of centenarians shows
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Before the thunder rolls in or the first drop of rain falls, some people predict showers even without consulting the forecast -- they know it will rain because their joints ache.

Rheumatologist Dr. William F. Harvey treats many patients suffering from some form of arthritis and almost all of them recall extra pain when it is rainy or cold. It’s so common it seems everyone knows someone who predicts the weather by saying her joints throb, but it’s not an old wives' tale. Weather pains exist.

“It’s a very widely held belief. I am not sure I remember any patients who did not feel [pain during weather changes],” says Harvey, who works at Tufts Medical Center in Boston.

According to the Arthritis Foundation, as many as 27 million Americans live with osteoarthritis, what’s considered old-age or wear-and-tear arthritis (though there is about 100 different varieties of the condition). By 70, most people have osteoarthritis.  

“It is fairly well accepted that changes in weather do affect patients’ joints,” says Dr. Greg Deirmengian, an orthopedist at the Rothman Institute at the Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia. (Although some people who had broken bones also complain of weather pain, Deirmengian suspects the pain originates from arthritis in adjacent joints.)

Researchers have attempted to study weather-related arthritis aches with varied success (they can’t ask patients if they feel more pain during rain or cold because the question is leading). Harvey points to a study -- conducted by a colleague at Tufts, Dr. Timothy McAlindon, published in 2007 in the American Journal of Medicine -- that looked at barometric pressure and joint pain. McAlindon called people with osteoarthritis in their knees, asking them about their pain and how they manage it. Then he compared their pain with weather in their area during the day of the call. He found that subjects experienced more discomfort on days when barometric pressure and ambient temperature shifted, what occurs with rain.

“What it showed was that changes in barometric pressure and different temperature did affect their perception of pain,” Harvey says.

Understanding the exact reason why this occurs puzzles doctors, but there are several theories.  

Most experts believe joints ache during stormy weather because atmospheric pressure changes cause additional pressure in the body. Arthritic joints, which lack enough cartilage to properly cushion them and are often surrounded by extra fluid, feel these changes more intensely than healthy joints. Also, Harvey says arthritic joints are under more pressure than healthy ones, contributing to added pain during weather changes. Studies conducted on scuba divers with arthritis show that added pressure increases pain.

Harvey also notes that how blood vessels act in cold weather could contribute to pain. Blood vessels dilate, causing muscles and joints to tense and stiffen and adding to pain. Cold temperatures also could cause the fluid that lubricates joints to be less viscous, preventing joints from moving smoothly.  

Also, nerves could play a role, says Deirmengian. Everyone has nerves in their joints, which help them move, but arthritic joints are more sensitive. When the outside pressure changes, these already twitchy nerve endings might feel the swing more acutely.    

Anyone experience more arthritis discomfort during weather changes should try home remedies such as taking anti-inflammatories, icing or heating the joint, or using a brace. 

“Patients get flair of arthritis; ups and downs,” says Deirmengian. Weather causes some of those flairs.

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By Stephanie Pappas

CHICAGO — Black-and-white judgments may be more literal than you might expect. A new study finds that people who view information on a black-and-white background are less likely to see gray areas in moral dilemmas than those who get the information alongside other colors.

The background, which participants weren't aware was of interest in the experiment, did not push people to become either more lenient or more severe, researchers reported Friday (May 25) here at the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science. Instead, it took people's natural tendencies toward leniency or severity and intensified them — in other words, their judgments became more black-and-white.

The findings add to a number of studies that find metaphors can often translate to literal, real-world behavior. For example, people who are holding a warm beverage view strangers as warmer. And when people remember a time they got the cold shoulder, they feel, you guessed it, physically colder.

"We now find that judgment style can also be influenced by metaphors such as black-and-white thinking," said study researcher Simone Schnall, a psychologist at the University of Cambridge. [Top 10 Mysteries of the Mind]

Schnall and her colleagues conducted a series of five experiments investigating both the black-and-white metaphor and the effect of "balance." In the first, they recruited 111 participants online through Amazon's crowd-sourcing website Mechanical Turk. Each participant read the fictional story of Heinz, a man forced to steal life-saving medication for his wife's cancer because he couldn't afford the drugs. After reading the story, the participants rated how moral Heinz's actions had been.

In some cases, participants saw this tale bordered by a black-and-white checkerboard. Others say a gray border. A third group saw a yellow-and-blue checkerboard.

The results revealed that people reported stronger judgments — both on the moral and immoral sides of the rating scale — when they had read the story against a black-and-white background. There was no difference between the gray and the colorful checkerboard.

"People gave more polarized judgments when they saw some black-and-white checkered background that was in principle irrelevant and incidental," Schnall said.

In a second study, the researchers used the same checkerboard backgrounds and asked questions about the morality and immorality of various behaviors, such as smoking. A new group of 130 online volunteers participated. They, too, made stronger judgments when they answered the questions against a black-and-white background.

In the final three studies, Schnall and her colleagues turned to another metaphor: thescales of justice. They were interested in whether subtle clues of "balance" would likewise skew people's judgments. This time, they asked participants questions about fairness as well as neutral questions. For example, one question had participants read a story about an athlete who gave blood for research and was promised anonymity. The athlete was then prohibited from playing when a banned drug was found in the blood. Participants had to say how fair the punishment was.

In some cases, the researchers subtly tilted the words on the screen, so the questions looked like they came from a subtly skewed photocopy. In other cases, the words were nicely parallel. [Gallery of Visual Illusions]

As with the black-and-white background, the imbalanced words triggered stronger judgments, either pro or con, for the fairness stories. This polarization did not occur in response to morally neutral questions, suggesting that something about the balance and imbalance was prompting people to make firmer judgments.

The research still has to undergo peer-review before publication in a scientific journal, but it meshes with earlier research that suggests our symbols can influence our behavior. For example, multiple studies have found that physical cleanliness and morality are linked in people's minds.

Schnall said that in a less-controlled environment than an experiment, lots of different cues might subtly feed into people's moral judgments. Something like whether you read a news story on a black-and-white website versus a colorful one — or whether you hear a slogan like Fox News's "Fair and Balanced" before watching the news — would likely have only subtle effects, she said. Nonetheless, Schnall said, all these little hints might "add up" to sway our judgments in ways we don't even notice.

More from LiveScience:

• Inside the Brain: A Journey Through Time
• Understanding the 10 Most Destructive Human Behaviors
• 7 Things That Will Make You Happy

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• Why do negative political ads work? 
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The more outgoing and optimistic you are, the longer you may live, a new study suggests. Researchers have found that personality traits like being outgoing, optimistic, easygoing, and  enjoying laughter as well as staying engaged in activities may be an important part of the longevity genes mix.

"When I started working with centenarians, I thought we'd find that they survived so long in part because they were mean and ornery," study researcher Nir Barzilai, of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, said in a statement. "But when we assessed the personalities of these 243 centenarians, we found qualities that clearly reflect a positive attitude towards life."

The study is a part of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine's Longevity Genes Project, which includes more than 500 Ashkenazi Jews ages 95 and older, and 700 of their kids. This small subset of Eastern European Jews is genetically very similar to each other. In addition, some members of the population are extremely long-lived, so it's easy to compare their genes to the genetics of members of the population who don't fall into that category. [ 7 Ways the Mind & Body Change With Age ]

By analyzing the genes of these people, researchers are discovering why some of them live so long, and others don't.

Previous studies of this population have found other genetic reasons for their longevity, including genes related to cellular repair mechanisms. Another study found that these centenarians don't necessarily behave any better than the general population when it comes to health habits: They smoke, drink and eat just as badly as the rest of us.

So why look at personality? A person's level of shyness or how open they are to new experiences, say, arise from underlying genetic mechanisms, which may also affect health, the researchers said. So Barzilai and colleagues developed a brief measure of personality, which they gave to 243 of the centenarians in the study (average age 97.6 years, 75 percent women).

"Most were outgoing, optimistic and easygoing," Barzilai said of the centenarians. "They considered laughter an important part of life and had a large social network. They expressed emotions openly rather than bottling them up."

In addition, the centenarians had lower scores for displaying neurotic personality and higher scores for being conscientious compared with a representative sample of the U.S. population.

"Some evidence indicates that personality can change between the ages of 70 and 100, so we don't know whether our centenarians have maintained their personality traits across their entire life spans," Barzilai said. "Nevertheless, our findings suggest that centenarians share particular personality traits and that genetically based aspects of personality may play an important role in achieving both good health and exceptional longevity."

The results were published May 21 in the journal Aging.

More from LiveScience:

• Extending Life: 7 Ways to Live Past 100
• 5 Ways Your Cells Deal With Stress
• 7 Things That Will Make You Happy 

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• Why do we twitch as we're falling asleep?
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By Sara Cann
Men's Health

Chomping on gum all day long won't just annoy your cube mate--it'll muck up your memory, too. Researchers at Cardiff University in the U.K. found that people who chewed gum had a harder time memorizing lists of letters and numbers than those who didn't chew.

Why? Researchers believe that the motion involved in chewing impedes your brain's ability to memorize serial lists. Just like tapping your finger or foot may distract you from accomplishing the same task, continual movements like gnawing on gum can also interfere with your short-term memory. Let's test how good your short-term memory is. Memorize the following words: Nun, teddy bear, professor, pencil, banana, friend, soup.

In 10 minutes, see how many of the words you can recall. If you can't get all seven, then follow this expert-approved plan to boost your short-term memory--no gum needed. Use these tricks to memorize that hot girl's digits, directions to a buddy's place, or the names of your new coworkers. (For more great tips, read How to Remember Everything.)

1. Pay attention
It takes about eight seconds of intense focus to process a piece of information into your memory, says Men's Health Mentalist Marc Salem, author of The Six Keys to Unlock and Empower Your Mind. So make sure you're not texting or checking Facebook when you're being introduced to someone or need to remember something. "If you're easily distracted, pick a quiet place where you won't be interrupted," says Salem.

2. Create a mental picture
Your brain is hardwired to remember things visually, says Gary Small, M.D., author of The Memory Bible. So soak in the context of your conversation: The clothes the person is wearing, the characteristics of their face or body, and the atmosphere of your location. "Context gives information more meaning," Small says. All of these clues may help you put together pieces of information later. (Learn 10 more ways to sharpen your mind.)

3. Tell a story
Using the contextual clues you've gathered, create a story around the info you're trying to remember. Take the words up top: Did you just try to repeat each word to sear it into your memory, or did you link the words with a story? (For example, the professor pointed with his pencil to a picture of a nun drawing a teddy bear who was eating soup with his friend, who had a banana.) The more emotional you can make your story (like linking a stranger's name to a family member's), the more likely you'll remember it, says Small.

Related: 27 Ways to Power Up Your Brain

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• 7 Strategies to Avoid Distraction at Work
• The Brain Fat Survival Guide
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You're drifting off to sleep, when suddenly you feel like you're plunging off a cliff -- and you jerk awake. The jolt is disorienting, and you must try again to fall asleep.

As many as 70 percent of people experience sleep starts or hypnic jerks while falling asleep, says Dr. William Kohler, medical director of the Florida Sleep Institute and director of the pediatric sleep services at Florida Hospital, Tampa.   

“A hypnic jerk or sleep starts are a perfectly normal occurrence that is almost universal,” explains James K. Walsh, executive director and senior scientist at St. Luke’s Sleep Medicine and Research Center in St. Louis.

“It involves a total body experience where your muscle contracts therefore your limbs jerk or your body twitches. They generally occur during the transition between wakefulness and sleep. All of these things are very, very brief, lasting a half second or less.”

Hypnic jerks are myoclonus twitches, or involuntary muscle spasms, but sleep starts occur during hypnagogia, the stage when the body is falling asleep. 

While most people have felt hypnic jerks, a small number of people experience the frightfully-named exploding head syndrome, the sensation that there is an explosion, crashing cymbals, or thunder near (or in) one’s head. Exploding head syndrome is so rare that it is mostly reported by individual case studies. While exploding head syndrome distresses people with it, both Walsh and Kohler stress that this, too, is normal and not a sign of any problem, physical or mental.

“They’re healthy people with a very unpleasant experience,” explains Walsh.

Movement plays a role in sleep — involuntary twitches commonly take place during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, but these jolts occur with dreams whereas hypnic jerks occur before the body can dream.

“Some people think [hypnic jerks] might be associated with anxiety and stress or with unusual or irregular sleep schedules. The exact nature of why it occurs is not really clear,” says Kohler.

While the cause remains unknown and little research is done on hypnic jerks (they are considered harmless and normal and are often too fleeting for observation), sleep doctors and researchers theorize about why they occur. 

Walsh says that he, like others in the field, speculate that as the body falls asleep it goes through mini-REM-type periods where the muscles slacken and dreamlike feelings might start.  

Brainwaves occurring during hypnagogia resemble brainwaves during REM sleep, which could explain the physiological changes that occur when falling asleep. During REM our heart rate, breathing, and nervous system act erratically and if the body experiences flashes of REM while entering sleep, these irregularities could contribute to twitches. Most assume the hypnic jerks occur because the body begins relaxing.   

While the visceral sensation of tumbling out of bed or plummeting off a cliff feels scary as it occurs, most people do not experience sleep starts frequently enough to seek medical treatment. Kohler says if hypnic jerks inhibit sleep, a person should consult a sleep medicine doctor. He adds that a better sleep routine -- such as having a resting period prior to bed; avoiding food, smoking, and caffeine; and going to bed and waking at the same time -- improves overall sleep.   

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As a some-time stand-up comic, Robert Lynch wondered why some people in the audience howled with laugher, while others sat stony-faced. Research and anecdotal evidence have found that people look for friends and mates with senses of humor, but he couldn’t grasp why some people got it and others seemed puzzled.

“It had to be something pretty fundamental about humor,” says Lynch, a doctoral student in evolutionary anthropology at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

At the time, his advisor and co-author, Robert Trivers, was writing a book about self-deception, so Lynch decided to look at how self-deception -- basically, lying to yourself -- influenced sense of humor. He found that the more someone practiced self-deception, the less likely they were to genuinely laugh.

Lynch asked 59 college students (33 female, 26 male) to watch a 28-minute video of comedian Bill Burr’s stand-up. (This is a departure; most humor research uses jokes from joke books, which, let’s face it, only people without senses of humor and your weird uncle find funny.) Each subject watched the show alone while the researchers videotaped the reactions. Participants also filled out a survey to reveal whether they practiced self-deception and then answered some additional questions about mood, extraversion, and whether they enjoyed the comedian.

“Humor is intrinsically difficult to study. Robert's genius was to measure  it precisely via FACS, a facial identification system that can isolate different kinds and intensities of laughter,” says Trivers, professor of anthropology and biological sciences at Rutgers University.

Lynch examined the videos and coded each person’s reaction using FACS, or facial action coding system, which links slight facial changes to emotions. He recorded the actions per frame, noting the duration and intensity of each. Specifically, he looked at the lips to see if students smiled with a Duchenne smile, which is an involuntary and genuine grin. Also, he watched the eyes. People can fake a guffaw or a smile, but FACS ensures he could tell if students genuinely smiled or forced it.   

“Real smiles come from the eyes,” Lynch says, noting it’s impossible to fake an authentic laugh.  

Self-deceivers were less likely to laugh at the stand-up comic than those who were more honest. Lynch suspects that it’s because comedians often joke about taboo topics, and those who are lying to themselves can’t chuckle because they feel it would be too revealing.  

 “[Laughter] is an honest, involuntary emotional signal and it is signaling enjoyment. People who are self-deceptive could be more concerned with honest signaling. It’s a little bit dangerous for them to be laughing because they don’t get it themselves and there are concealing the truth to themselves and they are concealing it to others,” Lynch says.  

The paper, “Self-deception inhibits laughter,” is available online at the journal Personality and Individual Differences. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Vendors offer organically grown produce at the Union Square farmers market in New York City.

Renate Raymond has encountered her fair share of organic food snobs, but a recent trip to a Seattle market left her feeling like she'd stumbled onto the set of "Portlandia."

"I stopped at a market to get a fruit platter for a movie night with friends but I couldn't find one so I asked the produce guy," says the 40-year-old arts administrator from Seattle. "And he was like, 'If you want fruit platters, go to Safeway. We're organic.' I finally bought a small cake and some strawberries and then at the check stand, the guy was like 'You didn't bring your own bag? I need to charge you if you didn't bring your own bag.' It was like a 'Portlandia skit.' They were so snotty and arrogant."

As it turns out, new research has determined that a judgmental attitude may just go hand in hand with exposure to organic foods. In fact, a new study published this week in the journal of Social Psychological and Personality Science, has found that organic food may just make people act a bit like jerks.

"There's a line of research showing that when people can pat themselves on the back for their moral behavior, they can become self-righteous," says author Kendall Eskine, assistant professor of  the department of psychological sciences at Loyola University in New Orleans. "I've noticed a lot of organic foods are marketed with moral terminology, like Honest Tea, and wondered if you exposed people to organic food, if it would make them pat themselves on the back for their moral and environmental choices. I wondered if  they would be more altruistic or not."

To find out, Eskine and his team divided 60 people into three groups. One group was shown pictures of clearly labeled organic food, like apples and spinach. Another group was shown comfort foods such as brownies and cookies. And a third group -- the controls -- were shown non-organic, non-comfort foods like rice, mustard and oatmeal. After viewing the pictures, each person was then asked to read a series of vignettes describing moral transgressions.

"One vignette was about second cousins having sex," says Eskine. "Another was about a lawyer on the prowl in an ER trying to get people to sue for their injuries. Then the groups made moral judgments on a scale from one to seven."

In another phase of the study, the three groups were asked to volunteer for a (fictitious) study, with each person writing down the amount of time -- from zero to 30 minutes -- that they would be willing to volunteer.

The results did not bode well for the organic folks.

"We found that the organic people judged much harder compared to the control or comfort food groups," says Eskine. "On a scale of 1 to 7, the organic people were like 5.5 while the controls were about a 5 and the comfort food people were like a 4.89."

When it came to helping out a needy stranger, the organic people also proved to be more selfish, volunteering only 13 minutes as compared to 19 minutes (for controls) and 24 minutes (for comfort food folks).

"There's something about being exposed to organic food that made them feel better about themselves," says Eskine. "And that made them kind of jerks a little bit, I guess."

Why does eating better make us act worse? Eskine says it probably has to do with what he calls "moral licensing."

"People may feel like they've done their good deed," he says. "That they have permission, or license, to act unethically later on. It's like when you go to the gym and run a few miles and you feel good about yourself, so you eat a candy bar."

Eskine says he was surprised by the findings ("You'd think eating organic would make you feel elevated and want to pay it forward," he says) and hopes to do additional studies that look at conditions that might prompt people to act differently.

Until then, organic eaters may want to rein in those self-righteous stink-eyes.

"At my local grocery, I sometimes catch organic eyes gazing into my grocery cart and scowling," says Sue Frause, a 61-year-old freelance writer/photographer from Whidbey Island. "So I'll often toss in really bad foods just to get them even more riled up."

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Courtesy of Dana Marie Flores

Dana Marie Flores, a 42-year-old mother of two from Phoenix, has struggled with the compulsive urge to pick at her skin for years.

From time to time, everyone picks their skin, whether it's squeezing a pimple or removing peeling skin. But for people with compulsive skin picking, "We just take it to a whole new level," says Dana Marie Flores, who has struggled with this disorder for 30 years.

Flores started by picking at pimples on her face when she was 12 or 13. She'd spend hours with her face an inch away from the bathroom mirror picking at any acne bumps she saw and using her pinky fingernails to squeeze out the pus.

To her, picking served a useful purpose. "When I first started to pick, it was self-soothing," admits Flores.  "If something came out [like pus], it's affirmation that something was in my skin." There was a feeling of satisfaction and relief.

Flores said picking at her face then evolved to picking at any bump she'd find on her arms or legs. "I'd think of it as fixing a problem, removing an ingrown hair, evening things out on my skin," she recalls.

When doing it, Flores says her mind enters a trance-like state. "It's really an escape, like a drug. It's so self-soothing you lose track of time," she explains.

Although the urge to pick is incredibly strong and it can seem hard to fight, the 42-year-old mother of two from Phoenix eventually recognized her behavior was "a grooming habit gone terribly wrong."

Compulsive or pathological skin picking, which is also known as dermatillomania, falls under the umbrella of a "body-focused repetitive behavior," says Dr. Ted Grosbart, PhD, a Boston-based clinical psychologist who specializes in dermatology.

People with this impulse-control disorder have a strong urge to pick at their skin over and over again to a significant enough degree that it does noticeable tissue damage and they experience it as a problem, Grosbart explains.

He says the condition, which is more common in women, has a genetic basis. And there's often an emotional stressor or hormonal trigger (like puberty), which touches it off.

"Skin picking is not a character flaw, and it's not a bad habit," Grosbart points out. "It's a real medical condition with a biochemical underpinning." Researchers are also noticing slight variations in brain structure and function in people with the condition.

According to Grosbart, skin picking is a "hidden epidemic." "We used to think it affects 3 to 4 percent of the population, but the latest studies suggest the lifetime incidence may be closer to 15 to 16 percent," he says.

Sufferers may at first rationalize the picking as a type of skin care but it then crosses the line into a form of skin abuse.

"The shame is huge," says Flores. "You assume you're the only person doing this, and you feel like a freak.

"The shame felt is often more damaging than the physical damage done to the skin," she adds.

Many skin pickers feel so ashamed they hide the behavior from their family members, spouses and friends. They conceal any scabs under clothing, or by wearing Band-Aids, or with makeup.

They might pick skin in less noticeable places, like the scalp or chewing the insides of their mouths. Or they make up excuses: A bad reaction to a new medication or an attack by mosquitoes.

If they finally open up and confide in someone, that person may have difficulty understanding why pickers just can't stop.

As Flores put it, "The 'just-stop theory' sounds great." But your skin is always available and you can't exactly get away from it, she says.

Flores makes the analogy that the strong temptation to pick her skin is like being a recovering alcoholic with hundreds of bottles of beer and booze tied to your body. With 24/7 access to her skin, picking is an easy behavior to fall into when she feels angry or stressed.

Flores' path toward healing began seven years ago when she saw a TV news story about people who compulsively pull out their hair, or trichotillomania. The story referred her to a website for the Trichotillomania Learning Center, a nonprofit educational organization, where she finally discovered information about skin picking.

"After 23 years of doing this, I could not believe there were other people out there like me," admits Flores. She joined a local support group, attends their annual retreats, and serves on their Board to help get the word out. 

She's learned new tools for keeping her hands busy -- playing with bubble wrap to give her the same tactile sensation of popping pimples -- to help curb the behavior. Still, it remains an ongoing struggle to battle the impulse.

"I don't base my recovery on how my skin looks, but on how I feel inside," Flores says. "And that has changed 1,000 percent."

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Do you ever pick up something off the floor and eat it, citing the all-powerful five-second rule?

Well, that may be grosser than you think, depending on what kind of food it is. Between ham, a PBJ and pasta, which do you think soaks up the most bacteria in five seconds?

If you guessed the pasta, you're right. Foods with higher salt content are less likely to pick up bacteria, Kathie Lee shared, after one of each was tossed onto the studio floor. 

Then, she brought up a good point.

"Who's gonna eat pasta off the floor?" she asked.

Hoda said she wouldn't, but she might, if it was an Oreo.

Julieanne Smolinski is a TODAY.com contributor. She'd chase an Oreo into a live volcano.

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To a very vocal online contingent, cilantro is the very worst.

On "I Hate Cilantro" websites and Facebook pages they gripe that the herb tastes like soap, mold, or dirt. Cilantro haters not only despise its flavor, they also detest its smell. Stories in publications as serious as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and, yes, even msnbc.com have even covered the sharp divide in taste preferences when it comes to this particular herb.  And when a study of identical twins found an aversion to cilantro stems from a genetic glitch, the herb's bashers finally had a good reason why they found the leaves of the Coriander plant so offensive.

But who are these people in the anti-cilantro community? No one had a clue -- until now.

There has been no attempt to quantify which people hate the herb until two nutrition experts from the University of Toronto took a stab at it. They recently published their findings in the journal Flavour. In the study, they surveyed nearly 1,400 young adults ages 20 to 29 in Canada. 

Volunteers completed a 63-item preference checklist in which they rated each food on a 9-point scale from 1 (dislike extremely) to 9 (like extremely). They could also select "never tried" or "would not try."

Researchers found an aversion to cilantro ranged from a low of 3 percent to a high of 21 percent among six different ethnic groups.

Young Canadians with East Asian roots, which included those of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai and Vietnamese descent, had the highest prevalence of people who disliked the herb at 21 percent. Caucasians were second at 17 percent, and people of African descent were third at 14 percent. 

Among the herb's fans, the group with the fewest number of people who disliked cilantro were those of Middle Eastern background at 3 percent, followed by those of Hispanic and South Asian ancestry at 4 percent and 7 percent respectively.

Exposure to the herb at an earlier age and with greater frequency in Mexican, Asian, and Indian cooking likely helps shape a positive flavor preference. Another possibility is that genetic differences among the cultural groups might influence someone's taste perception of the herb.  

Although researchers have yet to evaluate all 63 items on the food-preference checklist, study author Ahmed El-Sohemy, PhD, is sure of one thing: "Cilantro is perhaps the most polarizing with large numbers either loving it or hating it." The paper calls this the "unusual divisive nature of cilantro."

"People who dislike cilantro extremely describe it very, very differently from those who love it," explains El-Sohemy, an associate professor of nutrition at the University of Toronto. The reason? "These individuals live in very different sensory worlds and are not perceiving the same thing," he says.

As for El-Sohemy's opinion of cilantro, count him among the lovers. "I remember loving the taste as a child," he says. "I distinctly remember my mother's Egyptian cooking, which used cilantro frequently."

The study is a first step in determining how widespread a dislike for cilantro is, at least in a sample of young Canadians. It's unclear whether older Canadians feel similarly or how much the herb is despised by people in other countries.

Eventually, the Toronto scientists hope to pinpoint the genetic basis for why cilantro is an herb some people love to hate.

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Wake up, folks: There is no health risk in rousing a sleepwalker from their somnambulistic stroll. Well, no risk to them, anyway. You, on the other hand, might suffer a swift, roundhouse kick to the dome.

Long-repeated medical myths have held that if you forcibly snap a sleepwalker back to a wakeful state it will A) induce a state of shock or possibly even insanity, B) give them “lockjaw,” and, C), our personal favorite, cause their soul to become trapped outside their body. The truth matters now more than ever: On Monday, the Stanford University School of Medicine released new research estimating that 8.5 million U.S. adults (3.6 percent of the grownup population) went sleepwalking during the past year -- a far higher rate of nocturnal wanderers than previously thought by doctors. 

“It’s not dangerous for the sleepwalker to wake him up,” said Dr. Mark R. Pressman, a psychologist and sleep specialist at Lankenau Hospital in Wynnewood, Pa. “You’re not going to do them any harm.”

But there are two potential pitfalls in attempting to yank them back to the conscious world. First, sleepwalkers take their short journeys with eyes open yet without turning on a key part of their brain -- the frontal lobe, a portion that controls social interaction. They are momentarily trapped in an altered, gray state that falls between alertness and full sleep, making them quite difficult to bring back to the real world, Pressman said.

“You just can’t talk to them and say ‘Hey!” and have them wake up,” Pressman said. “I’m not even sure where that myth began that you shouldn’t wake them. But the more you dig back (to try research that legend), the more you’ll find that sleepwalking once was thought to be mixed in with spirits and demonic possessions.”

Most sleepwalking episodes last only seconds or a few minutes, ending with the person either sitting or lying on the floor and returning sleep or eventually trudging back to bed.

“It’s very likely to go away on its own while the family is watching,” Pressman said.

You can try to verbally redirect a sleepwalker -- especially a child -- by standing a short distance away and speaking to them in short, easy commands: “Stop, turn around, go back to bed.” But don’t expect them to answer or even to recognize you, Pressman said. Those particular neurons are still snoozing. “Hopefully they turn around and go the other way.

“There’s really no reason to dive in and stop it unless the sleepwalker is about to climb out a window or fall down some stairs. If that’s the case, the family member doesn’t really have much choice,” he added.

If you do approach a sleepwalker -- especially if you physically block or grab one -- they may flash some "defensive aggressiveness,” Pressman said. “This is a very primitive response to what they see as a potential attacker. They may become violent.

“The first thing, obviously, is you have to protect them anyway you can. That’s the bottom line: safety. So you may have to be prepared to take a punch or kick.”

Just don’t expect your zombified loved one or housemate to offer an apology. 

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By MyHealthNewsDaily.com

Looking away while you're getting an injection really does make it hurt less, a new study from Germany suggests.

Study participants who received a mild electric shock on their hand rated their pain as more intense when they watched a video of a hand being pricked by a needle, compared with when they watched a hand being touched by a Q-tip.

"We’ve provided empirical evidence in favor of the common advice not to look at the needle prick when receiving an injection," study researcher Marion Höfle, a doctoral student at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, said in a statement.

Our perception of pain is based on our past experience. "Throughout our lives, we repeatedly learn that sharp objects cause pain when penetrating our skin," the study researchers wrote.

But it's also based on our expectations in a given situation, they said. For example, a health care professional may influence our pain by telling us what to expect before they administer an injection.

In the study, 25 people, mostly university students, were given electric shocks designed to "evoke a stabbing and sharp sensation" in their left index fingers. Prior to the experiment, researchers measured each participant's pain threshold and adjusted the intensity of the shock accordingly.

During the experiment, each participant sat with his left hand, palm-up, beneath a screen in front of him, as a video of a hand in the same position was played on the screen — this gave the impression that they were looking at their own hand, the researchers said. The hand in the video was either pricked with a needle, or touched with a Q-tip. As a control, participants were also shown a hand alone.

Participants rated the pain they felt, and the unpleasantness of the sensation, on scales from 0 to 100.

Results showed that participants reported slightly worse pain, and significantly more unpleasantness, when they watched the video of the needle, compared with the video of the Q-tip. 

The findings suggest that people's expectations regarding a pain they are about to feel affect their perception of the pain's intensity, the researchers wrote in their conclusion, published in the May issue of the journal Pain.

The results are in line with those of previous studies, the researcher said. For example, people who are given cues that a stimulus will be very painful rate their pain as stronger, compared with people given the same stimulus but given cues that the pain will be mild.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Press could barely suppress a chuckle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This, finally, may explain our cultural obsession with zombies: Long after dark, millions of Americans basically become one.

Without warning, they suddenly rise from their silent, supine states then roam aimlessly, eyes open and mouths sputtering gibberish.

About 8.5 million U.S. adults -- or 3.6 percent of the grownup population -- have taken at least one sleepwalking jaunt during the past year, according to research released today by the Stanford University School of Medicine. That figure, calculated via a survey of nearly 20,000 people, means there are far more nocturnal wanderers than scientists previously suspected.

“It’s something, we were thinking, that was not frequent among the general population. And here, big surprise, it is,” said Dr. Maurice Ohayon, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford and lead author of the paper. A previous report done a decade ago in European adults showed that 2 percent of that population were sleepwalkers. “It’s astonishing.”

The finding offers American doctors their first, solid sleepwalking benchmark, Ohayon said. Earlier speculation on how often the phenomenon occurred were based on anecdotal clinical reports as well as court cases and media tales of people who had gone sleep-driving, sleep-shopping or sleep-eating. Typically, those more sensational examples were linked to Ambien use.

But Ohayon and his colleagues found no significant link between prescription sleeping pills and increased sleepwalking. What they did discover: Folks who take certain anti-depressants (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs) are three times more likely to also take a snoozy stroll than the general population, and people who swallow over-the-counter sleeping pills have a higher likelihood of experiencing sleepwalking episodes at least twice a month month.

Brand names for anti-depressants in the SSRI category include Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Lexapro and Celexa. Non-prescription sleep aids linked to increased sleepwalking by the Stanford team contained diphenhydramine. Products laced with that chemical include 40 Winks, Simply Sleep, Sleep-Eze, Sominex, Unisom Sleep, Advil PM, and Tylenol PM, according to the National Institutes of Health. 

Chronic sleepwalking also runs (rambles?) within certain families, Ohayon learned: Nearly one-third of individuals who often do it can point to parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts or siblings who have a history of shuffling while slumbering.

To assess the sleepwalking rate in America, Ohayon and his Stanford colleagues used phone interviews conducted with 19,136 randomly selected individuals from 15 states. The participants offered baseline information on their mental health, medical histories and use of medications. They were quizzed on the frequency of any sleepwalking episodes as well as whether they had ever suffered any inappropriate or possibly perilous behaviors while asleep.

What's more, participants were asked if they'd sleepwalked when they were kids and if any family members were known to take unintended, nighttime strolls. In addition to the more more than 3 percent of the U.S. population who sleepwalk chronically, the researchers found that 29.2 percent of the test sample had gone sleepwalking at least once during their lives. 

photaigraphy

Robert Budd, a personal trainer from Southern California, takes sleeping strolls about once a month, as do almost all the men in his family.

Personal trainer Robert Budd figures he sleepwalks about once a month. When he gathers with his kin, sleepwalking lore is a common topic: while seemingly in dreamland, his grandfather once urinated in a friend’s drawer, his uncle often meandered the decks of navy boats, and his dad dismantled tents and ceiling fans.

“All the boys in the family do it,” said Budd, who operates a gym called PHYZYKS in Encinitas, Calif. “I've done it since I was a kid. I would walk out the door and my parents had to grab me and get be back inside. The commonality with my family and myself is it seems to happen when we’re really tired, really drained. When you really need sleep, that’s when you get up and sleepwalk.”

Budd has sleepwalked out of a tent at the Grand Canyon (on the floor, not near the rim). His friends spotted him heading off alone -- apparently wide awake -- but he remembered nothing the next day. While dozing, he once packed for a vacation, even remembering his toothbrush. And there was the night he tried to climb out a second-floor window only to be stopped by the woman who is now his ex-wife.

Was that intended exit possibly symbolic, even for a sleeping man? “It might have been,” Budd said with a laugh.

“It drives my girlfriend drives nuts because sometimes we have conversations and she doesn’t know if I’m awake. Like, I can’t be accountable in the middle of the night.”

Sleepwalkers typically have their eyes open and may speak, making detection tricky. But Ohayon isn’t certain, he said, if they are actually seeing what’s in front of them or if sleepwalkers’ brains have simply mapped out their homes in their minds, allowing them not to bump into walls or furniture. He is sure they’re not dreaming, though, because sleepwalking coincides with a period of “slow-wave sleep” or SWS when brain activity is diminished.

During another sleep phase called REM (rapid eye movement), brain neurons are firing as if a person is awake. This is when you dream. A mechanism within the brain blocks stirring and shifting when you’re in REM sleep, Ohayon said.

“During slow wave sleep, you can move,” he added. “This is an old function of our brain, (possibly a evolutionary leftover). You know, when birds fly, they can sleep with one half of their brain, while the other half is analyzing the flight.

“That is why you see the bird going for thousand of kilometers without any problem. They sleep when they fly.”

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Lionsgate

Novels may have a lot more power than we think.

When you identify with a literary character, like Katniss Everdeen of the "Hunger Games" books, there’s a good chance you’ll become more like her, new study shows.

Researchers have found that when you lose yourself in a work of fiction, your behavior and thoughts can metamorphose to match those of your favorite character, according to the study published early online in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 

The researchers believe that fictional characters can change us for the good.

So, if you bonded with Atticus Finch in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” you might become more focused on ethical behavior, says the study’s lead author, Geoff Kaufman, a post-doctoral researcher at Tiltfactor Laboratories at Dartmouth College.

But the fiction-effect can have a dark side. “Think of 'American Psycho,'” Kaufman says. “The character is very likable and charismatic. But he’s a serial killer. To the extent that you connect with him, you may try to understand or justify the actions he’s committing.”

Kaufman and his co-author Lisa Libby of Ohio State University suspected that when people read a fictional story they vicariously experience their favorite character’s emotions, thoughts and beliefs in a process that’s been dubbed “experience-taking.”

Kaufman and Libby found that experience-taking can lead to real changes in the lives of readers. What the researchers can’t say yet is whether those changes are brief or long-lasting.

Kaufman suspects novels can sometimes be life-changing. “If you’ve got a deep connection with the characters, it can have a lasting impact,” he says. “It can inspire you to re-read something. And then the impact can be strengthened over time.”

The researchers ran several experiments to look at how we react to fiction. In one, they found that people who strongly identified with a fictional character who overcame many obstacles in order to vote were significantly more likely to vote in a real election days later than volunteers who read a different story.  

In another experiment, the researchers compared two groups of volunteers who read different versions of a story in which the protagonist was gay. In one version, readers didn’t learn till the end that the character was gay. In the other, they learned that detail right at the beginning.

Study volunteers who learned about the sexual orientation of the hero at the end of the story expressed more positive feelings towards gay people when they were questioned later on.

That’s because they got to know the character and connect with him before they had a chance to cloud their impression with gay stereotypes, Kaufman explains. Those who learned about the character’s sexual orientation early on didn’t relate to him as much because their stereotypes put distance between them and the character.

Kaufman believes that the fiction-effect only comes with written works. “When we watch a movie, by the very essence of it, we’re positioned as spectators,” he explains. “So it’s hard to imagine yourself as the character. I suspect that if you read the screenplay it would be more powerful as far as experience-taking goes.”

So, who is Kaufman’s favorite fictional personality? Anna Karenina, the protagonist in Leo Tolstoy’s novel of the same name.

“My identification with her might have inspired my research,” Kaufman muses. “It’s the connection with a female character and understanding her struggles and difficulty in adapting to life and society. Looking back, I think a lot of my favorites are strong, complex female characters struggling in society.”

What literary character do you most identify with, and why? Let us know in the comments here, or over on our Facebook page -- we may use you in an upcoming msnbc.com post! 

Related: 

• Why books and movies are better the second time
• Sorry, guys: We judge you by your facial hair
• Creepy people literally give us chills, study finds

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

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

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

Sounds bizarre, but maybe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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In the movie “No Country for Old Men,” Anton Chigurh immediately makes people feel uncomfortable with his strange mannerisms and gait along with his awkward gaze. Even without knowing he is a killer, it's clear Chigurh is a creep.

People feel uncomfortable -- to the point of experiencing chills -- when they’re around creepy people, a new study confirms. Researchers believe an inability to correctly mimic nonverbal cues, such as hand gestures and eye contact, makes someone creepy.   

Mimicry occurs when one person copies the body language of another, explains Pontus Leander, co-author of the study and associate professor of psychology at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.

Humans mimic all the time, starting in infancy. Children learn by observing adults and doing what they do -- think of peek-a-boo. As we age, most adults unconsciously mirror others as a part of normal interactions.

Leander and his colleagues created experiments to look at how people react to mimicry.

In one trial, a researcher attempted to be friendly with participants as if they were peers. Sometimes the researcher moved like the subject; if the participant touched his nose, the researcher would gesture similarly, such as scratching her head. But in other cases, the researcher would not mirror the subject’s actions. And this caused the participants’ skin to crawl -- if the researcher did not mimic the right cues, the subjects reported feeling colder. Creepers give us the chills. People believed the room temperature dropped to 68 when it remained at a steady 72.

“In the friendly situation, if you do not mimic, that’s when people’s coldness spikes,” Leander explains. “If you start feeling cold it could be an early warning sign.”

When people violate social norms, our bodies react with chills. Feeling cold is linked to a threat such as being forgotten (think left out in the cold") and the region of the brain that controls goosebumps also regulates feelings of trust and betrayal. The chills warn that something is off about a person who cannot follow social norms.  

“It is about expectancy violations. That’s what particularly novel [about this research],” says Geoffrey Leonardelli, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto department of psychology and Rotman School of Management.

Leonardelli did not participate in this study, but he wrote a pivotal paper about social embodiment, feeling a physical sensation such as chills when experiencing emotions such as sadness or loneliness. His paper “Cold and Lonely: Does Social Exclusion Literally Feel Cold?” showed that people who feel lonely also feel colder and crave warmth.  

“We just don’t expect that [feelings] would affect us physically,” Leonardelli says. “Exclusion leads to lower body temperature.”

In another experiment, Leander and his colleagues looked at how people react to mimicking in professional situations. When the subjects participated in mock professional setting they felt unnerved if the researcher used too much mirroring. But if the researcher reduced the mimicry, they felt more comfortable. 

“If you start mimicking in a situation where it is not expected,  it can be draining,” Leander says. “If there is mimicry going on when people aren’t friends it can be problematic.”

The third trial examined mimicry between white and non-white subjects. If a white researcher mirrored the behaviors of a non-white participant, the subject reported feeling colder, indicating social norms among races is constantly evolving. 

More importantly, it shows that communication is nuanced. Leander notes that participants who reported being more independent felt uncomfortable by mirrored behavior.  

“We are surrounded by people day in and day out and we’re building up this bank of information about what sort of nonverbal behavior is linked to certain cues. We all get some intuitive sense for it,” Leander says.

The article is in press at the journal Psychological Science. 

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