Mirror neurons were discovered accidentally at the University of Parma in Italy. They activate when you perform a specific action and when you see another person perform that same action. Early experiments using monkeys showed that the same neurons activated when the monkey picked up a piece of food and when he or she saw an experimenter pick up the food.
A small percentage of people don’t need iTunes or Windows Media Player to see visualizations to their music. Sound-colour synesthesia makes people “see” music as lines on a screen in front of them. The lines, which move like those on an oscilloscope, have varying colours, height, width and depth.
A study by Kyle Steeland and James Deddens found that NBA teams did four points better when travelling west to east compared to east to west. The study, entitled Effect of travel and rest on performance of professional basketball players, suggested that lack of physical recovery time, rather than disruption of circadian rhythms (jetlag), contributed to decreased performance.
Male weightlifters, like models, have to care about their appearance. The overwhelming desire to be large, however, can be a symptom of a body dysmorphic disorder called muscle dysmorphia. First labeled “reverse anorexia” or “bigorexia,” the disorder is characterized by the pathological obsession with building muscle.
Alice in Wonderland syndrome (AIWS) is a neurological disorder that causes sufferers to experience visual distortions analogous to those experienced by Alice in Lewis Carroll’s novel. Symptoms of AIWS include object size distortions, such as perceiving objects as being much smaller (micropsia) or much bigger (macropsia).
The earthworm has an exceptionally small brain in proportion to the rest of its body. The brain (or cerebral ganglion) is actually a nerve bundle found at the front of the worm. Responsible for sensing light, among other environmental conditions, the brain is a relatively useless organ — so much so that, were it removed, the worm’s behaviour would appear unchanged.
A study by Richard Stephens has shown that swearing can get people through intense bouts of pain. Stephens made participants put their hands in buckets of cold water. They were divided into a swearing-accepted group and swearing-prohibited group. Members of the swearing group endured the discomfort longer than those in the group forced to keep their dialogue rated G.
