Scientists have split the atom, put men on the moon and discovered the DNA of which we are made, but there are 10 key mysteries of human behaviour which they have failed to fully explain.
The New Scientist magazine compiled a list of the everyday aspects of life which continue to confound the world’s greatest brains, including the reasons behind kissing, blushing and even picking your nose.
Here are some theories on why we do those things we do and some of the problems:
Blushing:
Charles Darwin struggled to explain why evolution made us turn red when we lie, which alerts others. However, some think it may help diffuse confrontation or foster intimacy by revealing weakness.
Blushing and embarrassment go hand in hand. Feeling flushed is such a natural response to sudden self-consciousness that if it weren’t part of an emotionally crippling experience, it could almost be overlooked. But blushing is unique, which is why scientists want to know more about blushing. While the psychology of blushing remains elusive, we do understand the physical process involved. Here’s how it works.
Blushing from embarrassment is governed by the same system that activates your fight-or-flight response: the sympathetic nervous system. This system is involuntary, meaning you don’t actually have to think to carry out the processes. In contrast, moving your arm is a voluntary action; You have to think about it, no matter how fleeting the thought is. This is good, because if moving your arm was involuntary, people would end up buying a lot of stuff they don’t want at auctions.
When you’re embarrassed, your body releases adrenaline. This hormone acts as a natural stimulant and has an array of effects on your body that are all part of the fight-or-flight response. Adrenaline speeds up your breathing and heart rate to prepare you to run from danger. It causes your pupils to grow bigger to allow you to take in as much visual information as possible. It slows down your digestive process so that the energy can be redirected to your muscles. All of these effects account for the jolt you feel when you find yourself embarrassed.
Adrenaline also causes your blood vessels to dilate (called vasodilation), in order to improve blood flow and oxygen delivery. This is the case with blushing. The veins in your face respond to a signal from the chemical transmitter adenylyl cyclase, which tells the veins to allow the adrenaline to do its magic. As a result, the veins in your face dilate, allowing more blood to flow through them than usual, creating the reddened appearance that tells others you’re embarrassed. In other words, adrenaline causes more local blood flow in your cheeks.
Some people opt to undergo surgery to limit their blushing response. Erythrophobia is the fear of blushing and it can be enough that it could lead to a person choosing to have the tiny nerves at his or her spine, which control blushing, snipped. This surgery — called endothoracic sympathectomy — has been shown to limit blushing.
Laughter:
Mood-improving endorphins are released when we laugh, which seems an obvious reason to do it but a 10-year study muddied the waters when it found more laughter is produced by banal comments than jokes.
Some scientists believe that laughter was used as a way for humans to relate to one another millions of years before they developed the lung strength for language. The mechanism of laughter is so ingrained in our brains that babies as young as 17 days old have been observed doing it. In fact, children born blind and deaf still have the ability to laugh. (Reader’s Digest)
In his book, Laughing: A Scientific Investigation, Robert R. Provine, professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, describes an intriguing study about laughter—and it didn’t take place at a comedy club. Provine and some graduate students listened in on normal conversations at local malls. They found that out of 1,200 “laugh episodes,” only about 10 percent were generated by a joke. “Laughter really has a bonding function between individuals in a group,” says Provine.
Kissing:
The explanation for kissing is unlikely to be genetic as not all human societies do it. There are theories that it is associated with memories of breastfeeding and that ancient humans weaned their children by feeding them from their mouths, which reinforced the link between sharing saliva and pleasure.
All the making out facts you were afraid to ask.
Making out. Puckering up. Smooching. Snogging. Lip-locking. Tongue-wrestling. Rounding first base. Sucking-face (ahh, gotta love ’90s lingo). Whatever you call it, kissing is one of our favorite parts about falling in love
Your kissing style originates in the womb.
See a kiss in any Hollywood movie, painting, or sculpture and more often than not, you’ll see couples leaning in to the right. Why is that? A German researcher observed over 100 couples and noted that two-thirds of them tilted their heads to the right. The scientific community at large theorizes that this instinct originates from the womb when we naturally tilted our heads to the right.
Kissing takes serious muscle power.
One kiss requires 146 muscles to coordinate, including 34 facial muscles and 112 postural muscles. A team of British researchers — Elaine Sassoon, Annabelle Dytham, Robert Scully and Professor Gus McGrouther from the Rayne Institute in University College, London — studied kissing couples under an MRI scanner and found that a kiss mostly involves the orbicularis oris (the muscle around your mouth).
“Not only do you use your facial muscles in kissing, but approximately 112 postural muscles as well,” Professor McGrouther said to The Telegraph. Yikes, sounds like a serious facial workout!
Our love of kissing comes from … rats?
Kazushige Touhara and colleagues at the University of Tokyo believe that our affinity for kisses descends from an ancient rat. Mice and men have a surprisingly similar genetic makeup — sharing a common ancestor that lived sometime between 75 and 125 million years ago. This ancient rat-like creature went by the name of Eomaia scansoria (Eomaia, Greek for “ancient mother,” and scansoria,Latin for “climber”). The science team theorizes that this creature would rub noses with a mate to sample his or her pheromones and signal desire. So, basically, human kissing is really rodent behavior. Who knew?
French kissers caused commuter headaches.
Oh, the French. Apparently in the early 20th century, so many French commuters were getting frisky on the train that they had to ban kissing altogether. So whenever you feel the train slow to a stop and hear the conductor’s drone voice call out over the intercom that the train has stopped “due to a sick passenger aboard the train ahead”… you might have an idea of what’s up.
–http://www.yourtango.com/2014216719/love-sex-facts-you-didnt-know-about-kissing-making-out
Dreaming:
Sigmund Freud’s theory of dreams expressing our subconscious desires have been generally discredited and it is recognised that they help us process emotions, but the reason why we see such strange visions has not been properly explained.
Dreams. Mysterious, bewildering, eye-opening and sometimes a nightmarish living hell: dreams are all that and much more. Here are 20 amazing facts about dreams that you might have never heard about.
If you are unsure whether you are dreaming or not, try reading something. The vast majority of people are incapable of reading in their dreams. The same goes for clocks: each time you look at a clock it will tell a different time and the hands on the clock won’t appear to be moving as reported by lucid dreamers.
There is a whole subculture of people practicing what is called lucid or conscious dreaming. Using various techniques, these people have supposedly learned to assume control of their dreams and do amazing things like flying, passing through walls, and traveling to different dimensions or even back in time.
Dreams are responsible for many of the greatest inventions of mankind. A few examples include:
- The idea for Google -Larry Page
- Alternating current generator -Tesla
- DNA’s double helix spiral form -James Watson
- The sewing machine -Elias Howe
- Periodic table -Dimitri Mendeleyev
…and many, many more.
There are some astounding cases where people actually dreamt about things which happened to them later, in the exact same ways they dreamed about. You could say they got a glimpse of the future, or it might have just been coincidence. The fact remains that this is some seriously interesting and bizarre phenomena. Some of the most famous premonition dreams include:
- Abraham Lincoln dreamt of His Assassination
- Many of the victims of 9/11 had dreams warning them about the catastrophe
- Mark Twain’s dream of his brother’s demise
- 19 verified precognitive dreams about the Titanic catastrophe
Sleepwalking is a very rare and potentially dangerous sleep disorder. It is an extreme form of REM sleep disorder, and these people don’t just act out their dreams, but go on real adventures at night.
Lee Hadwin is a nurse by profession, but in his dreams he is an artist. Literally. He “sleepdraws” gorgeous portraits, of which he has no recollection afterwards. Strange sleepwalking “adventures” include:
- A woman having sex with strangers while sleepwalking
- A man who drove 22 miles and killed his cousin while sleepwalking (how is this even possible?)
- A sleepwalker who walked out of the window from the third floor, and barely survived
As we mentioned before, dreams are responsible for inventions, great artworks and are generally just incredibly interesting. They are also “recharging” our creativity. In rare cases of REM disorder, people actually don’t dream at all. These people suffer from significantly decreased creativity and perform badly at tasks requiring creative problem solving.
Many people claim that they don’t dream at all, but that’s not true: we all dream, but up to 60% of people don’t remember their dreams at all.
Blind people who were not born blind see images in their dreams but people who were born blind don’t see anything at all. They still dream, and their dreams are just as intense and interesting, but they involve the other senses beside sight.
As much as 12% of people only dream in black and white.
(20 Amazing Facts About Dreams that You Might Not Know About)
Superstition:
Unusual but reassuring habits make no evolutionary sense; however, ancient humans would have benefited from not dismissing a lion’s rustle in the grass as a gust of wind. Religion seems to tap into this impulse.
Superstition is the belief in supernatural causality—that one event causes another without any natural process linking the two events—such as astrology and religions, like omens, witchcraft, and prophecies, that contradict natural science.
6 – Picking your nose:
The unappealing but common habit of ingesting ‘nasal detritus’ offers almost no nutritional benefit, so why do a quarter of teenagers do it, on average four times a day? Some think it boosts the immune system.
Scott Napper, a biochemistry professor at the University of Saskatchewan believes nature pushes humans to behaviours that benefit survival in some way.
He hypothesises that humans eating their own boogers has some sort of yet-to-be-discovered benefit.
Napper wants to explore the idea that consuming pathogens caught within sinus mucus can be a way to teach our immune systems about what it’s surrounded with.
His proposal seems to make sense from an evolutionary standpoint.
“From an evolutionary perspective, we evolved under very dirty conditions and maybe this desire to keep our environment and our behaviours sterile isn’t actually working to our advantage,” he told CBC News.
(Nose Picking Good for You?: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know)
Adolescence:
No other animal undergoes the stroppy, unpredictable teenage years. Some suggest it helps our large brain reorganise itself before adulthood or that it allows experimentation in behaviour before the responsibility of later years.
They are dramatic, irrational and scream for seemingly no reason. And they have a deep need for both greater independence and tender loving care.
There is a reason this description could be used for either teens or toddlers: After infancy, the brain’s most dramatic growth spurt occurs in adolescence.
“The brain continues to change throughout life, but there are huge leaps in development during adolescence,” said Sara Johnson, an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who reviewed the neuroscience in “The Teen Years Explained: A Guide to Healthy Adolescent Development” (Johns Hopkins University, 2009) by Clea McNeely and Jayne Blanchard.
And though it may seem impossible to get inside the head of an adolescent, scientists have probed this teen tangle of neurons. Here are five things they’ve learned about the mysterious teen brain.
Due to the increase in brain matter, the teen brain becomes more interconnected and gains processing power, Johnson said. Adolescents start to have the computational and decision-making skills of an adult – if given time and access to information, she said.
But in the heat of the moment, their decision-making can be overly influenced by emotions, because their brains rely more on the limbic system (the emotional seat of the brain) than the more rational prefrontal cortex, explained said Sheryl Feinstein, author of “Inside the Teenage Brain: Parenting a Work in Progress” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2009).
“This duality of adolescent competence can be very confusing for parents,” Johnson said, meaning that sometimes teens do things, like punch a wall or drive too fast, when, if asked, they clearly know better.
“Puberty is the beginning of major changes in the limbic system,” Johnson said, referring to the part of the brain that not only helps regulate heart rate and blood sugar levels, but also is critical to the formation of memories and emotions.
Part of the limbic system, the amygdala is thought to connect sensory information to emotional responses. Its development, along with hormonal changes, may give rise to newly intense experiences of rage, fear, aggression (including toward oneself), excitement and sexual attraction.
Over the course of adolescence, the limbic system comes under greater control of the prefrontal cortex, the area just behind the forehead, which is associated with planning, impulse control and higher order thought. [Top 10 Mysteries of the Mind]
As additional areas of the brain start to help process emotion, older teens gain some equilibrium and have an easier time interpreting others. But until then, they often misread teachers and parents, Feinstein said.
“You can be as careful as possible and you still will have tears or anger at times because they will have misunderstood what you have said,” she said.
(Adolescent Angst: 5 Facts About the Teen Brain)
Altruism:
Giving things away with no certain return is odd behaviour in evolutionary terms. It may help with group bonding or simply give pleasure.
Altruism is selfless concern for the welfare of others.
It is a traditional virtue in many cultures, and central to many religious traditions.
In English, this idea was often described as the Golden rule of ethics.
Some newer philosophies such as egoism have criticized the concept, with writers such as Nietzsche arguing that there is no moral obligation to help others.
Altruism can be distinguished from a feeling of loyalty and duty.
Altruism focuses on a motivation to help others or a want to do good without reward, while duty focuses on a moral obligation towards a specific individual (for example, God, a king), a specific organization (for example, a government), or an abstract concept (for example, patriotism etc).
Some individuals may feel both altruism and duty, while others may not.
Pure altruism is giving without regard to reward or the benefits of recognition.
The concept has a long history in philosophical and ethical thought, and has more recently become a topic for psychologists, sociologists, evolutionary biologists, and ethologists.(Altruism)
Art:
Painting, dance, sculpture and music could all be the human equivalent of a peacock’s tail in showing what a good potential mate someone is. However, it could also be a tool for spreading knowledge or sharing experience.
Art has been around for many thousands of years. From the cave paintings and carvings of the ancient peoples to more modern art from the Abstract and Renaissance era. Below are some interesting facts and information about the history of art and its origins.
- Nobody knows specifically when the first people starting producing art, but it is believed that art has been created as far back as 100,000 years ago
- The earliest art work comes from Africa in the form of stone carvings. There are many examples of cave paintings and carvings from both Africa and Europe, dating back to 32,000 BC.
- Somewhere around 9,000 BC, people began to change from being traveling nomads to settling down in villages. At this time the art began to evolve into larger pieces. In West Asia and Egypt the first stone and clay statues were created and this is also when artists began to create decorated pottery.
- Around 3,000 BC, people learned how to work with metals and began to create small pieces of art from bronze – often small statuettes. This was the era when people in Greece and India began to create art and in Egypt sculptors were creating large, lifelike stone statues which were painted realistically and were life-size.
- The Dark Age around 1,100 BC in East Asia and the Mediterranean Sea led to most people being unable to afford to buy art. Artists stopped creating their pieces for several hundred years.
- After the Dark Age, it was in Greece that the Archaic and Classical sculpture was started, along with the black-figure and red-figure vase paintings.
- The Etruscans in Italy started to create large stone and clay statues as well as painted pottery that they also created.
(Art History Facts)
Body hair:
Fine hair on the body and thick hair on the genitals is the opposite of what occurs in primates, our close animal relatives. Suggested reasons for pubic hair include a role in radiating scent, providing warmth or even protecting from chafing.
It’s controversial as to whether your hair *actually* continues to grow after you die.
“Some people will say yes, it does continue to grow. Not like an inch or anything, but a little bit,” says Green. “Others will say that it’s because the body’s dehydrated, which gives the appearance of growth.”
There is an unidentified disease that causes fingernails to grow out of hair follicles instead of hair.
It’s extremely rare, but for Shanya Isom it’s a reality. After taking steroids for a terrible asthma attack, her doctors found that her hair follicles began producing nails instead of hair.
Hypertrichosis is the name for extremely excessive hair growth on any part of the body.
(14 Oddly Bizarre Facts You Never Knew About Body Hair)
“Our theory right now is that other powerful men in the country attacked the castle and set fire to the gates,” Ulriksen was quoted as saying.
Science Mysteries 