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Videos on weird science phenomena12/13/2023 One is that yawning helps to cool the brain by increasing blood flow to the jaws, neck, and sinuses, and then removing heat from this blood when inhaling a big breath. Ideas abound, but none seem to hold up to scientific scrutiny. Thanks, biology-but what purpose does yawning serve? (Did you just yawn?) You can even “catch” yawns from other people, and from other animals like dogs. Reading or thinking about it makes you more likely to yawn. It’s even part of some of the newer psychotherapeutic approaches to psychosis, such as AVATAR therapy.You yawn, I yawn, we all yawn. Thinking about presences, and not just voices, poses a whole new set of challenges for our scientific models of psychosis and how we deliver psychotherapy. If you’ve ever had your own personal space violated, or dreaded to go into certain places because of who might be there, you will know how much the presence of another can affect you, even without a word being uttered. The strangeness of presences makes them all too easy to miss in a time-pressured doctor’s appointment, but for many people, it may be the figure behind voices or visions that matters the most. And grassroots work such as Rethink Psychosis, led by people with experience of psychosis themselves, are calling for more recognition and understanding of the phenomenon through projects like “ Psychosis Outside the Box,” a collection of the more neglected and unusual aspects of psychosis. There’s now evidence that people who hear voices (or have auditory hallucinations) also describe high rates of felt presence-literally voices than can be there without speaking. But the trail ran cold for a number of years-until very recently. Not long after William James was writing, figures like Karl Jaspers were describing examples of presence in some of the first textbooks of psychiatry. Lastly, we’re now beginning to recognize that feelings of presence are a missing piece in the story of psychosis. Lots of people with Parkinson’s have feelings of presence as part of the condition, and this makes them particularly susceptible to the phantom touches of the robot. But when the touches start to then go out of sync-slowing and dragging, not quite hitting where they should-participants suddenly feel like a person, not just a robot, is controlling the touches from behind. In sync, it almost feels like it’s you pressing your own back-you brain takes the cues from your own movements, and the sensations on your back, and comes to the conclusion that the only person in this process is you. With the presence robot, you make random pressing movements into the air in front of you, while the robot presses you in the back at exactly the same time. But if you mess with that, strange things start to happen things don’t feel like “us” and instead start to feel like they belong to someone else. Go to clap your hands, and your brain is ready for a new sight and sound, all at the right time. The robot works to disrupt your sensory expectations: Whenever we make a movement, our brains are thought to make a set of predictions about what will happen to our senses. Since 2014, they have used a robot to induce feelings of presence in healthy individuals and clinical disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease. The next piece of evidence comes from cognitive neuroscience, and a team led by neurologist Olaf Blanke in Geneva.
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