deepstash
Beta
Deepstash brings you key ideas from the most inspiring articles like this one:
Read more efficiently
Save what inspires you
Remember anything
2
Key Ideas
Save all ideas
Contagious yawning
Whenever someone yawns near you, you may find it near impossible not to yawn.
New studies found the reason we battle to stop a yawn appears to reside in the brain area that's responsible for motor function. The urge to yawn when you see someone else doing it is known as echophenomenon - the automatic imitation of another person. Other types of echophenomena include echolalia - imitation of words, and echopraxia - imitations of actions.
77 SAVES
546 READS
Yawning and brain activity
The urge to yawn increases when you try to stop yourself from doing so.
The tendency to yawn in return is linked to brain activity levels in a person's motor cortex. The more activity in the area, the more likely the person would be to yawn.
57 SAVES
451 READS
SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
My Red Is Your Blue
About 1 per cent of American men suffer from red-green colour blindness.
Recent experiments challenge the accepted notion that all of us have the same default perception o...
The Calculations Of Light
- The colour-sensitive receptors that humans have, called melanopsin, measure the amount of blue or yellow light in the atmosphere and likewise regulate our circadian rhythm.
- Human beings have Cone Cells, which are of three types, Red, Blue, and Green, and have evolved much later than the receptors in the brain.
Colour Is A Private Sensation
- Research proves that the universal emotional responses that we have when we see a colour tend to be the same, even if the actual colour is different, as our conscious perception of those colours varies.
- The day-night cycle of living things is impacted by the ambient light, where the morning yellow light awakens us or makes us feel happy, and the dominance of blue light at night makes us feel sleepy.
The history of refrigeration
Refrigeration is the action of creating cooling conditions by removing heat. It is used for preserving food by slowing bacteria growth.
- Around 1000BC, the Chinese u...
Evaporative cooling
- 1720s. Scottish doctor William Cullen saw that evaporation had a cooling effect.
- 1748. Cullen demonstrated his ideas by evaporating ethyl ether in a vacuum.
- 1805. Oliver Evans designed a refrigeration machine that used vapor instead of liquid.
- 1820. English scientist Micahel Faraday used liquefied ammonia for cooling.
- 1835. Jacob Perkins, who worked with Evans, patented a vapor-compression cycle using liquid ammonia.
- 1842. John Gorrie, an American doctor, built a machine similar to Evans's design to artificially create ice and cool down patients with yellow fever.
- New and improved refrigeration ideas continued to be developed, including Albert Einstein's idea of an environmentally friendly refrigerator with no moving parts that did not rely on electricity.
- By 1920, refrigerators were considered essential in American homes.
How refrigerators work
Refrigerators today work by evaporating liquids.
The liquids are pushed through the refrigerator through tubes and begin to vaporize. As the liquids evaporate, they carry heat away with them as the gases travel to a coil outside the refrigerator. Here the heat is released. The gases return to a compressor, where they become liquid again, restarting the cycle.
Misophonia
Misophonia is characterized by strong negative emotions such as anger and anxiety in response to everyday sounds other people make. These sounds include humming, chewing, t...
Misophonia and brain particularities
Scientists do not fully understand misophonia but suspect it's caused by the way some people's brains process particular sounds and react to them.
Some studies found that the brains of people with misophonia showed hyperactivation of the salience network, a group of brain areas that direct our attention to important things in our surroundings. Trigger sounds send the salience network into an overdrive. Researchers found these brain areas are structurally more robust in people with misophonia.
Calming a misophonic brain
There's a lot of similarity between people who experience misophonia, but also a lot of diversity.
Therapists use a variety of techniques that is often based on the symptoms. Those who experience fear and anxiety may respond to exposure-based treatments. Those who experience anger can learn to manage their distress through distraction or relaxation techniques.