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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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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• Waking a sleepwalker is totally safe -- for them
• Study: Sleepwalking more rampant than thought

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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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• Your doc's sick sense of humor is good for your health
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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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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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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. 

Related:

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• Suicide while sleepwalking is a real nightmare
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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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