Make your post-Thanksgiving food coma work for you: New research suggests that eating a big turkey dinner may keep you from spending impulsively on holiday sales.

The study, published in the December issue of the Journal of Marketing, builds on the turkey-tryptophan trope that we all hear this time of year -- it's practically guaranteed that somebody at your Thanksgiving gathering will say,"Did you guys know that turkey makes you sleepy?" That's only kind of true -- an amino acid called tryptophan is found in turkey, and it does work as a natural sedative, but we really don't eat enough of it, even at Thanksgiving, to be affected. Our after-dinner lethargy is more likely caused by overindulging on delicious carbs and cocktails.

But the body uses tryptophan to produce serotonin, and serotonin is known to inhibit impulsive behavior, which made researchers from the University of Utah curious: How might Thanksgiving dinner affect Black Friday binge buying?

To find out, they recruited 170 volunteers and instructed them to fill out an online survey on Thanksgiving evening in 2007. They rated how likely they were to buy popular items at a deep discount -- such as a Dell laptop marked down to $499. Those who had consumed a traditional Thanksgiving dinner were less likely to splurge on any of the marked-down items, say Arul Mishra and Himanshu Mishra, the University of Utah marketing professors that co-authored the study. (Fun fact: They're also husband and wife.)

Of course, as Himanshu Mishra points out, "The influences are not going to be there after 12 hours. If someone is going out shopping tomorrow morning, probably the person will not see that effect." So here's how to make these new findings work for your wallet: Either skip the shopping on Friday and do your holiday shopping online Thursday night, or load up on leftovers before heading out to the stores on Friday.

Would you give this a try? Or is impulse shopping on Black Friday half the fun?

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If you feel a little snobbier when behind the wheel of a BMW, or a little more outdoorsy when you slip on a North Face fleece, or a little hipper when using your new MacBook Air -- you're not alone, as they say. It's widely known that a product's brand image has a profound impact on our own self-image, but a new study finds that we may actually change our personality to match the "personality" of a brand.

"For example, if I want to convey an image of being adventurous, I might buy a Harley-Davidson motorcycle or wear casual clothes from outdoor adventure companies such as REI," says Deborah Roedder John, a marketing professor at the University of Minnesota and one of the authors of the study published in the December issue of the Journal of Consumer Research. (You can find the report here, but a subscription is required.)

John continues, "But our prior research didn't delve into the question of whether consumers actually 'took on' the personalities of these brands they selected to boost their self-images: If you buy a Harley motorcycle, will you really see yourself as more adventurous?"

For one part of the study, the University of Minnesota researchers recruited about 100 volunteers -- all women, all between the ages of 18 to 34 -- at a mall, asking each of them to carry around for an hour the shopping bag of their choice: a bag from Victoria's Secret, Old Navy or Limited Too. Every participant chose the pink Victoria's Secret bag. When they came back from an hour of shopping, Victoria's Secret shopping bag in tow, they were asked to take a survey rating how they felt about themselves. The researchers found that the "personality" of Victoria's Secret -- sexy, glamorous, feminine -- actually did make some of their volunteers feel sexier, more glamorous and more feminine. (No word on whether carrying around a bag from Victoria's Secret made some feel a little like a 15-year-old.)

The same researchers did a similar experiment instructing participants to write with a pen with an MIT logo on it, with similar results -- some of the participants really did feel smarter when using their MIT pen. (The researchers conducted four separate studies, involving more than 200 participants in all, John says.)

The trick is this: If you're the kind of person who thinks a particular brand will make you more feminine, or more glamorous, then it will. That's called "entity theory," and it means you're the kind of person who seeks out products to make you feel a certain way about yourself. But if you're not the kind of person who feels that way about the brands you buy, well -- then you won't feel much of anything after using a particular brand. That one's called "incremental theory." You might think you're staunchly one way or the other, but these researchers primed their participants to identify with one of those theories by having them read an article promoting it.

The study results shed light on how those "entity theorists" and "incremental theorists" experience brands differently. An entity theorist is -- well, let's just let the experts explain it, as John and her colleague Ji Kyung Park write in the report:

Individuals who endorse entity theory view their personal qualities as something they cannot improve through their own direct efforts; instead, they seek out opportunities (such as brand experiences) to signal their positive qualities to the self or others. Conversely, individuals who endorse incremental theory view their personal qualities as something they can enhance through their own efforts at self‐improvement, reducing the value of signaling opportunities through brands.

"For consumers, our study could help them understand how brands really affect them -- just carrying a shopping bag with the Victoria's Secret name makes you feel more glamorous, feminine, and good-looking (at least for a good deal of people we call 'entity theorists')," John says. "So, you don't really need to buy and use the brand--just have some association with it. Maybe this is a money-saving tip for anyone strapped for money during these recessionary times?"

What do you think? How does the stuff you buy influence the way you feel about yourself -- or does it at all?

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Why did the cookie go to the hospital?

Because he felt crummy.

What did one snowman say to the other snowman?

Smells like carrots.

Why does Snoop Dogg carry an umbrella?

Fo' drizzle.

Terrible jokes? Or a sign of a brain disorder? Actually, sometimes it's hard to tell.

Witzelsucht (the Germans just have the best words for everything, don't they?) is a brain dysfunction that causes all sorts of compulsive silliness: bad jokes, corny puns, wacky behavior. It's also sometimes called the "joking disease," and as Taiwanese researchers phrased it in a 2005 report, it's a "tendency to tell inappropriate and poor jokes." We've covered all sorts of strange disorders of the mind in earlier Body Odd posts: one disorder makes you believe your loved ones are strangers, another convinces you that your hand has taken on a life of its own. Now, we give you a brain disorder that actually causes a poor sense of humor.

It's a symptom of an injury to the right frontal lobe, which could be caused by brain trauma or a stroke, tumor, infection or a degenerative disease. "Patients who have disease of the left frontal lobe often are sad, anxious and depressed," explains Dr. Kenneth Heilman, a neurologist at the University of Florida College of Medicine in Gainesville, Fla. "In contrast ... patients with right-hemisphere disease often (appear) indifferent or euphoric and have inappropriate jocularity."

Heilman says he sees several cases of Witzelsucht each year. "One of the most dramatic cases (that I've seen) appeared to be attracted to my reflex hammer," Heilman says. "After I checked his deep tendon reflexes and put my hammer down, he picked up the hammer and started to check my reflexes, while giggling."

A 2005 case study describes a 57-year-old woman who suddenly morphed into a more gregarious version of herself. "She had become the life of the party and would laugh, joke, and sing all the time. The patient had decreased self-care and hygiene and wore the same clothes every day," according to the report. Her doctors believed dementia that damaged the front temporal lobes of her brain was to blame for her change in personality.

The Taiwanese case study mentioned earlier describes a 56-year-old man's symptoms, and introduces an interesting conundrum found in some Witzelsucht sufferers. Although they're constantly making others laugh, some patients don't seem to get the joke themselves. "On some occasions, he showed no smiles or laughter to the jokes ... which made everyone laugh loudly, while on other occasions, he was not able to appreciate jokes from the others," according to the report.

When it's possible, doctors attempt to treat the underlying disease or injury that's causing the Witzelsucht symptoms. Some physicians may prescribe mood stabilizers such as antipsychotic medications, but often they'll attempt to use behavioral strategies to rein in the giggles. But as Heilman explains, the jokiness "can be annoying to family and caregivers, (but) it is usually not a terrible problem."

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You know that saying "the left hand doesn't know what the right is doing"? For people with a strange disorder called alien hand syndrome, that's literally true -- the neuropsychiatric condition makes them feel as if one of their hands has taken on a mind of its own.

"An alien hand is an arm and hand that moves when the person to whom that arm belongs does not intend it to move," says Dr. Ken Heilman, a neurologist at the University of Florida College of Medicine in Gainesville, Fla. Heilman goes on to note that there are many neurological conditions that cause an arm to move unintentionally -- like seizures or tremors, and movement disorders such as chorea, dystonia and athetosis. Here's the difference: In each of those cases, if the arm moves, it's pretty much just flailing about purposelessly, "but with an alien hand, the movement appears to be purposeful." Creepy.

Heilman recalls one patient whose hands actually fought over fashion: Her right hand took a pair of red shoes out of the closet. Her left hand -- the "alien" hand -- pulled the red shoes out of her right hand, put them back and picked up a pair of blue shoes. When the right hand went again for the red shoes, the left hand slammed the closet door on the right hand.

A German neurologist and psychiatrist named Kurt Goldstein was the first to report a case of alien hand syndrome in 1908. His patient's left hand seemed to do whatever it pleased, including, at least once, an attempt to throttle its owner. It's most commonly the result of an injury to an area of the brain called the corpus callosum, which is, as Heilman describes it, "the major cable connecting the two hemispheres." (The injury often happens during surgery, such as an attempt to curb seizures, but it can also happen in stroke victims.) That injury prevents the two hemispheres from communicating, and because each side controls different behaviors and different hands, the confusion begins.

Usually, it's the left hand that is thought to be "alien," because that's the one controlled by the right hemisphere; the left hemisphere has no control over that hand, but it does control language, which gives the person the words to think, What is happening to my left hand?!

And it's always an alien hand, never an alien leg or foot. The brain has more bilateral control over the legs than it does the arms, Heilman explains. "The hand is this thing that does purposeful movement," he says. "We don't do a lot with our feet."

In one recorded case of alien hand syndrome, while a 67-year-old man slept, his hand did not; as a 1997 medical journal article reports, his hand "crept and crawled, especially at night, which caused him to awaken by grasping his collar." He solved his problem by wearing an oven mitt as he slept. But that guy had it easy. According to a 2000 journal article, a 73-year-old man's alien hand had a humiliating favorite hobby: masturbation.

Another more common (but less creepy) version of alien hand syndrome is an uncontrollable grasp reflex, which causes a patient to reach out and grab whatever is set in front of him, just like a baby would. (It's caused by an injury to the frontal lobe, which suppresses that grasping reflex as we mature.)

Alien hand syndrome is an extremely uncommon phenomenon -- most physicians have never even heard of it, says Heilman, who has only seen two patients exhibiting the more extreme kinds of symptoms. But it's popped up from time to time in pop culture.

The condition is sometimes known as "Dr. Strangelove syndrome," named for the titular character in Stanley Kubrick's famous 1964 film, in which Dr. Strangelove's right arm repeatedly tries to give a Nazi salute, and he must beat it down again and again with his left arm. More recently, "30 Rock's" live episode on Oct. 14 took on the spirit of the alien hand idea, featuring Jon Hamm in two fake, "Saturday Night Live"-style "commercials" for hand transplants gone totally wrong. (The late-1990s horror flick "Idle Hands" also nodded to the creepiness of the uncontrollable hand concept, but unless you, too, were a 14-year-old 8th grader in 1999 with a giant crush on Devon Sawa, you probably don't remember that one.)

In the real world, there isn't anything that can "cure" or even treat alien hand syndrome, Heilman says. Patients usually just come up with creative ways to keep their own appendages in check. "I had a patient who sat on his left hand," he says. "Many others treat their alien hand as if it were a disruptive child."

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One January day in 2007, a terrifying idea seized a 45-year-old wife and mother in Omaha, Neb.: Her husband and teenage sons were not, in fact, her husband and teenage sons. Strangers who happened to be identical to her family members had taken over her home, and to fend them off, she armed herself with a fireplace poker, called her neighbors -- and 911.

It sounds like something out of the 1956 sci-fi film "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," but the Nebraska mom actually was suffering from something called Capgras delusion, a rare psychiatric disorder in which a patient believes her friends or family members are not who they say they are -- and that the real people have been replaced by identical-looking impostors.

Normally, we recognize faces thanks to a part of the brain called the fusiform gyrus, which is located in the temporal lobe. It processes the faces we see, and sends that information on to another part of the brain, the amygdala, which processes emotions. But in patients with Capgras, there's a disconnect between that visual center and the emotional center, explains Dr. Mariam Garuba, a New York psychiatrist who treated the Nebraska woman when she was admitted to an Omaha, Neb., emergency room three years ago. (Garuba wrote about the unusual case, referring to the patient only as "Ms. A," in a clinical psychiatry journal last year.)

In other words: Ms. A knew that these people standing in front of her looked, talked and acted like her husband and her children, but they didn't make her feel the way she usually did when she saw them.

It's worth noting that if Capgras patients talk to a loved one on the phone, they will recognize the voice. But if that loved one enters the room, the patient will accuse his friend or family member of being an impostor; that's because hearing and sight take different pathways to reach the brain's emotional center. (Extra credit: Watch neurologist V.S. Ramachandra deliver a fascinating speech on Capgras and other brain disorders at a 2007 conference.)

In some cases, that disconnect that is thought to cause Capgras is brought on by a head injury; in others, it's related to an existing psychiatric or neurological disorder. Ms. A falls in the latter group, as a longtime bipolar disorder patient who'd also been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Although she'd taken drugs to treat the bipolar disorder in the past, she was taking none in January 2007; she was also not taking any medication for her MS. Her physicians, including Garuba, believed the Capgras delusion occurred because of a relapse of Ms. A's MS. She was treated with antipsychotics, and after a few days, she gradually stopped believing that her doctors were trying to poison her; after nearly a month in the hospital, she stopped believing that her family members were impostors.

The rare disorder is named for Joseph Capgras, a French psychiatrist who was the first to write about the delusion in 1923, after treating a woman who became convinced that her husband and others she knew were actually body doubles. Similar cases to Ms. A's in recent years include a 24-year-old woman who, after some complications with pneumococcal pneumonia led to epileptic seizures, began to believe that some of the ICU physicians had been replaced by impostors. And in the UK, a 42-year-old woman claimed that while she was in the ICU for pneumonia in 1999, each of her family members except for her mother were replaced by aliens.

Of course, we don't know exactly how these patients voiced their suspicions, but it must have at least carried the spirit of this quote from the 1950s "Body Snatchers" trailer: "Listen to me! Please, listen! If you don't -- if you won't -- if you fail to understand -- then the same incredible terror that's menacing me will strike in you!"

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Considering copying Lady Gaga's meat dress, which she wore to last month's MTV Video Music Awards, for your Halloween parties next week? A new video from the Newark, N.J.-based Star-Ledger explains why this is a terrible idea.

1. You will spread gross bacteria everywhere.

2. You will drip blood everywhere. As one New Jersey butcher told the reporter, "If it's fresh meat you're going to get blood, juice over everything you touch or sit on so it's not very hygenic."

3. It's surprisingly expensive! It'll take about 50 pounds of meat to cover you, costing you $250 or more.

4. You will be very cold, as there is "no insulating value at all," one of the butchers says.

5. You will be even colder when your whole costume falls apart. Another of the butchers remarks, "Beyond the sanitary aspects, there's the question of connective tissue. I mean, if you're sewing something like this together there's a very good possibility it's going to split through the grain and fall apart."

Luckily, you still have about a week and a half to think of a non-gross costume idea -- our friends at TODAY have a handy costume guide ready to go.

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It's not like we expect a McDonald's Happy Meal to be the pinnacle of health food. But this is astounding. (That is, if it's true.)

A New York City artist named Sally Davies bought a Happy Meal -- a hamburger and french fries -- in April. She put the food on her living room table -- and decided to watch what happened: not much, actually. She's taken a photo every day since, and the burger and fries look almost exactly the same as the day they were "fresh."

Davies is recording her science-experiment-meets-art-project on her Flickr, and bloggers can't get enough of it.

We can't say for sure whether this isn't a hoax, as a McDonald's spokeswoman is claiming. (And, as it turns out, the lengthy shelf life of the Twinkie is a hoax!) But it's certainly something to chew on. (Sorry.)

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Does Tyra Banks know this? Models with gap-toothed grins are in -- that's what the Wall Street Journal (arbiter of all things hip) is reporting. The diastema, according to the newspaper, is one of the most sought-after physical features at this year's fashion week in New York.

A gap-toothed smile can be "fixed" with braces, dental bonding or even porcelain veneers. Of course, that's only necessary if you consider it a flaw. A handful of celebrities sport gappy grins, like Madonna, Elton John and "True Blood's" Anna Paquin. And it's said that all the hottest ladies in the 14th century had gaps between their two front teeth; it was considered was a symbol of lustfulness, and the fictional poster lady for it is Geoffrey Chaucer's "gap-toothed wife of Bath" in "The Canterbury Tales."

As turns out, those kids with their gapped teeth from tongue piercings may have been onto something.

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Did your grandpa ever tell you that if you swallowed a watermelon seed, a watermelon would start to grow in your stomach? This guy's got a better story than that. Ron Sveden, of Massachusetts, apparently swallowed a pea that went down the wrong pipe a few months ago -- and then the pea sprouted and started growing. In his lung.

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When Daniel Bocchino was 16, he started stretching his ear lobes, expanding them until he had an inch-wide hole in each lobe. But by the time he was 19, he was so over the piercing trend known as ear gauging.

He removed the thick plugs from his lobes and slathered the holes with all kinds of weird ointments and creams, hoping the stretched-out skin would just shrink back up. But that's not how it works -- once that hole is stretched any wider than 6 millimeters, there's no going back.

Bocchino, who's now 20 and lives in Hackettstown, N.J., ended up just walking around with a drooping, flappy hole in each ear for six months, until finally seeking advice from a plastic surgeon, Dr. Brian S. Glatt.

Glatt, a board-certified plastic surgeon in Morristown, N.J., says he's seeing more people -- mostly young people, and mostly men -- who started gauging their ears as teenagers and are now joining the military, seeking a professional job or, like Bocchino, are simply over the fad, and are trying to figure out how to fill that hole back up.

“There is no established way to do it, and each case is different,” says Glatt, who sees about one young guy a month who regrets the hole in his ear. “It’s like a puzzle; you have to figure out how to put these kids back together properly.”

Glatt says he essentially has to reconstruct the whole earlobe. He cuts around the hole -- "you're almost taking out the core," he explains. Then he slices the earlobe into two pieces, trims away excess skin and sews the pieces back together. He says the surgery leaves a scar down the earlobe right to the edge of the lobe.

He adds: "A lot of these kids are smokers, and smokers tend not to heal as well, just to add insult to injury."

To distract from the scar, some of his patients have repierced their ear, which he says is safe to do.

But regauging their lobes is out of the question: "They'd run the risk of literally tearing their earlobe apart. It wouldn't withstand the stretching, and they'd have two little pieces." Eww.

The surgery takes about half an hour per ear, and costs anywhere from $1,500 to $3,000, which Bocchino paid for himself with the money he makes as a tattoo artist. He says he's happy about the results -- the worst part of it all was probably telling his parents he regretted gauging his ears in the first place.

"They were like, we told you so," he says.

Do you have any piercings or tattoos you regret? Tell us about them in the comments.

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We've done stories before on dogs sniffing out diseases their owners didn't even know they had. Now a little terrier named Kiko has one-upped all of them: He went ahead and performed surgery. Kind of.

According to a bizarre story reported in The Grand Rapids Press, Kiko smelled an infection in his owner's right big toe and set about "amputating" it. Which in doggie terms, of course, means he ate it. All the while, Kiko's owner, Jerry Douthett of Rockford, Mich., lay passed-out drunk in his bed. (We told you it was bizarre.)

Video: Thanks to 32-ounce margarita, Jerry Douthett says he felt 'no pain'

Douthett awoke to find a bloody stump where his big toe used to be, and he and his wife rushed to Spectrum Health in Grand Rapids, Mich. There, they discovered Douthett actually had type 2 diabetes and was suffering from a dangerous infection in his big toe. Doctors finished the job Kiko had started, and amputated what was left of his toe.

Douthett's wife, Rosee, a registered nurse, had actually suspected her husband had diabetes and insisted he get checked out. But before he did so, he had a few beers. And then a few margaritas. After that, he went home, passed out, and Kiko got to work. Weird story, but Bruce Rossman, a media relations manager at Spectrum Health, confirms that it's true.

Do you credit your own pet with saving your life? Tell us about it in the comments.

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