If Thanksgiving weekend is a time for gratitude, let's make the weekend before the holiday a time for whining. Actually, two studies out this week explore the upside of negative thinking. Sometimes, believing that everything's the worst can ultimately be for the best, the research suggests.

Fun fact 1: Complaining can help inspire people to change a bad situation. “In order to actually change the system, you’ve got to know what’s wrong with it,” says India Johnson, a graduate student at Ohio State University who helped lead a study set to appear in the journal Psychological Science.

Study participants read about a student at the Ohio university who wasn't happy with his experience with the school's freshman orientation. Some of the stories detailed the student's successful attempt to improve the orientation process; others read about the student's failure to do so. Then the volunteers were given an external review of the university from the Department of Education -- they could choose between reading a positive or negative report.

Interestingly, the students who'd read about the successful changes made to the freshman orientation were more likely to choose the negative report. Johnson explains, “In order for people to feel like they can actually affect the world and actually do something, they have to view the world as changeable. If you want people to be able to make that leap, you have to first get them to that point. Then they’ll be willing to seek out the negative information." 

Fun fact 2: The best two words to motivate an expert may be, "You stink!" Newbies thrive on positive feedback, but when you're dealing with a pro, it may be best to give it to him straight, according to a new study appearing in the Journal of Consumer Research.

In one study, researchers Stacey Finkelstein and Ayelet Fishbach, both of the University of Chicago, examined reactions of beginning and advanced French students. Those who were just starting the language were more likely to improve if their instructor gave them gentle feedback, but the old-timers thrived on harsh criticism. Like the Ohio State study, the research suggests that negative words can bring about positive change.

What's bugging you today? Get out your complaints in the comments so you'll be ready to give thanks on Thursday.

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Lisa Poole / AP file

Heavy bags are a real downer.

The charity workers staking out your favorite holiday shopping site with collection cups in hand may have chosen the exact right spot to prick your conscience, a new study suggests.  

It’s not that you feel guilty for your purchasing power.  It’s about the weight of your shopping bags.

Researchers found that when we are physically weighed down, with anything from groceries to gifts, our thoughts inescapably turn to serious -- weighty -- subjects.  Apparently, the wiring in our brain sparks directly from physical weight to psychological weight.

When we’re toting a big haul, we're more likely to be suddenly struck by the importance of current events or issues in the world around us, according to the report published in the Journal of Consumer Behavior.

“We found that carrying a heavy load leads consumers to feel an unrelated event as being more important and more stressful,” said the study’s lead author Meng Zhang, an assistant professor in the department of marketing at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

For the new study Zhang ran a series of experiments on more than 100 people to look at the impact of heavy loads on thinking.

In her experiments, Zhang asked a group of volunteers to carry a shopping bag with bottles of water that weighed about 10 pounds. A comparison group carried bags with empty water bottles. The volunteers were told the experiment was to determine how much weight consumers might be willing to carry while shopping.

Survey: Are your kids spoiled by the holidays?

Later, both groups were asked questions, such as how important it is for people to express their opinions in public, how important it was to read nutrition labels, or how important it was that people stay socially connected.

Sure enough, volunteers carrying the heavy bags tended to score higher on their answers to the societal questions. In other words, people carting around heavy bags were more likely to say lots of stuff was really important.

Perhaps even more intriguing was Zhang’s discovery that people could be nudged to think about the importance of weighty societal issues just by asking them to read narratives that included words such as “heavy,” “tons,” and “loaded.”

Is there an antidote to the psychological consequences of carrying a shopping bag loaded down with holiday loot?

Apparently there is.  In another experiment Zhang determined that the psychological impact of a heavy load could be diminished when people thought about lightweight objects, such as balloons and feathers.      

Read more stories from the Vitals blog. It's good for you!

The economy may be killing your sex life   

Empathy may be in your genes -- and on your face

Latte decay: Slow sipping may be rotting your teeth

By Maren Kasselik
Men's Health

Have you ever walked into a room and realized you don’t remember what you’re doing there? Yeah, us too. Well thankfully science finally explains why: It’s the doorway’s fault, a new study finds.

“When you go from room to room, your brain identifies each room as a new event and sets a new memory trace to capture the new event,” says study author Gabriel Radvansky, Ph.D., a psychology professor at the University of Notre Dame.

Like a chapter marker, doorways end old episodes and begin new ones, as far as your brain is concerned. This makes it difficult to retrieve older memories because they’ve already been filed away, Radvansky says.

Radvansky suggests physically carrying a reminder of what your intent is: “For example, if you want to go from the living room to the kitchen to get a snack, you may forget why you went to the kitchen when you get there because this is a new event, and you may have been distracted. But, it would be easier to remember if you walked into the kitchen with something to remind yourself of what you wanted, such as a bowl.”

Don’t keep bowls in the living room? That’s OK. Form your hand into a bowl shape when you walk to the kitchen. If you’re going from room to room to fetch a pair of scissors, hold your index and middle fingers in a scissor shape to help the memory stay intact.

More from Men's Health:

• Stimulate the brain for better recall through yoga
• Red wine improves your memory
• Never go blank again

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• Had a Perry moment? What causes memory loss
• Want to improve your memory? Oh, forget it
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The "five-second rule" goes something like this: Food dropped on the ground is perfectly sanitary and safe to eat -- as long as it's picked back up within five seconds. But is there any truth to the saying? Nadine Wimmer of KSL, the NBC affiliate in Salt Lake City, decided to investigate.

Wimmer took a bunch of pacifiers and graham crackers -- things mothers and their kids drop all the time -- and placed them on the ground in various places -- in a suburban mom's kitchen and driveway, and under the tables and in the walkways of a local diner. She then took the samples to Richards Laboratories in Pleasant Grove, Utah, where the five-second rule was pretty much debunked.

The kitchen was declared least gross of the four floor spaces, as the crackers dropped on on the kitchen floor showed light to moderate amounts of bacteria, and the pacifiers showed light traces of bacteria, along with yeast and mold. The crackers and pacifiers dropped on the pavement picked up bacteria, plus heavy amounts of mold and yeast. As for the stuff dropped at the diner, the tests showed light amounts of bacteria, yeast and mold on those crackers and pacifiers.

None of the tests found any serious stuff, like salmonella or strep, but "even really common bacteria can make you sick if it catches you in the right condition," says Daniel O'Brien of Richards Laboratories. 

"Five seconds, one second -- it's all the same," O'Brien says. "As far as bacteria's concerned, it's all the same."

Hmm. Agree? What's your stance on the five-second rule?

Want more weird health news? Find The Body Odd on Facebook.

The hand you use to write, brush your teeth, and throw a ball may also tip people off to your taste in music, a new study reveals.

An Ohio researcher has found that people with a strong preference for using their right hand for most everything they do, seem to like popular types of music and tend to shy away from less familiar genres, especially bluegrass and reggae.

Strong righties, the study suggests, may be less open to new musical experiences and tend to gravitate toward styles they're more familiar with.

The research also found that people who are mixed-handed, meaning they use their non-dominant hand for at least two activities but it does not mean ambidextrous, reported broader musical interests. They showed greater "open-earedness," or a stronger liking of unpopular musical styles and more willingness to listen to them.

Many factors influence our music preferences, so why would hand choice matter? In part, it's affected by what's happening between the ears -- in the brain.

"Mixed-handers are more 'in touch' with a wide variety of right hemisphere processes," says study author Stephen Christman, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at the University of Toledo in Toledo, Ohio. The right hemisphere of the brain plays a key role in updating thoughts and beliefs and in allowing us to see things in new ways, he explains, while the left hemisphere tends to stick with the tried and true.

Christman notes that about 80 percent of left-handers are mixed-handers while about 60 percent of righties are strong-handed.

The study, published in the journal Psychology of Music, looked at 92 college students who completed a hand preference survey. Forty-nine students were strong right-handers and 43 were mixed-handed.

Four participants were strongly left-handed, too small a group for statistical analysis. But  other studies have found that the taste preferences of strong left-handers tend to resemble strong right-handers more than mixed-handers.

Students were asked to rate how often they listened to 21 different musical genres and their enjoyment of them. Nine were considered "popular" based on recording industry sales figures and the rest were "unpopular." Popular categories included classic rock, heavy metal, country and rap/hip-hop. Unpopular genres ranged from jazz and world to folk and reggae.

The top three musical choices of strong right-handers were R&B, modern pop and alternative rock; mixed-handers favored R&B followed by alternative rock and modern rock.

Although this study looked at college students, Christman suspects his findings would still apply to middle-age and older adults. He says "many of our enduring musical preferences are formed during our high school and college years, and they persist into adulthood."

Still, those interests can expand. Christman advises strong-handed people to keep exposing yourself to new forms of music and listening to unfamiliar genres. "Give the music a little time, and you may find yourself developing a liking for it and rewarded by broader musical horizons."

That's what happened to him. Christman's musical tastes have long favored acoustic/folk-based genres. But when his daughter started bringing home CDs by Eminem and Ludacris, the mixed-hander quickly developed an intense liking for rap and hip-hop.

What's been your experience? Are you right-handed, left-handed, mixed-handed? What kind of music is your favorite?

Want more weird health news? Find The Body Odd on Facebook.

Frazer Harrison / Getty Images

The thought of a new "Twilight" movie does this to some people. Others -- not so much.

When the new "Twilight" film opens, fans will be lining up hours before to make sure they get in. Others will be steering clear.

And that won’t have anything to do with movie reviews or the comments of friends. Some folks just aren’t wired to enjoy flights of fantasy, a new study suggests.

It’s all got to do with how we experience fantasy, said study co-author Russell Webster, a doctoral student in social psychology at Kansas State University. Webster’s study was published in the journal Imagination, Cognition and Personality.  

Webster had noticed that while some friends loved to read fantasy novels others just hated them -- and he wondered why. One possibility was that people who hated fantasy just didn’t have good imaginations. Another was that people couldn’t accept the rules of an imaginary world and immerse themselves in it.

So Webster designed some experiments to look at how people experienced fantasy, which he defined as a type of narrative -- such as a book, film, piece of art -- that included supernatural, unreal or impossible aspects. He distinguished fantasy from science fiction because, he says, science fiction tends to come with a logical explanation for the worlds it creates.  

Webster and his co-author gathered up a group of volunteers and asked them to fill out questionnaires designed to ferret out those who had a tendency to fantasize and daydream.

Then the researchers ran two similar experiments.

In the first, volunteers were given one of two narratives to read and think about: one a fantasy, the other realistic. In the fantasy, the writer has acquired the ability to fly and the narrative describes the feeling of soaring over mountains and then coming down and landing on beautiful field of green grass. The realistic narrative describes a sunrise and includes passages that detail the appearance of the sky with colors bursting out from the sun.

In a second experiment, volunteers were shown and asked to dwell upon one of two paintings: a man sitting in a thatched hut or a man meditating while floating in the air above some mountains.

After each experiment, the volunteers were asked to describe the images that the narratives sparked. The researchers were surprised to discover that the intensity and vividness of the images had nothing to do with a person’s proneness to flights of fantasy.

But, there was a clear difference between people who were prone to fantasizing and daydreaming and those who were not. People who were comfortable with fantasy tended to be more absorbed by what they read and saw. They also tended to have an emotional reaction. Many said they felt good after reading the narratives or looking at the paintings.

Another interesting feature of the fantasy prone people was that even when they were confronted with a realistic narrative or painting, they inserted fantastical elements when they mulled things over. “On their own they began to picture themselves flying while watching the sun rise,” Webster said.

Webster isn’t sure why it is that some people aren’t comfortable with suspending the rules of reality so they can lose themselves in a fantasy story. That’s a subject for future research he says.

Do you love the fantasy genre, or hate it? If you love it -- what's your fave?

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Lewis Jacobs / Lewis Jacobs/NBC

We'll miss you most of all, Abed.

If you, like "Community's" Abed, sometimes have a hard time differentiating between TV and real life, we have some sad news for you. 

NBC just announced its midseason lineup -- a schedule that does not include the low-rated but much-loved "Community." (Aaand here's where we must say: Msnbc.com is a joint venture between NBC and Microsoft.)

Fans on Twitter are already freaking out, even though the show is not being cancelled, and will just be shelved briefly, according to The New York Times. But as we reported back in May, recent research suggests that if you're already mourning the loss of your favorite characters, you're likely not the only one. When a favorite TV show goes off the air, even temporarily, its absence has a real psychological impact on its most fanatical viewers. 

"We develop these relationships with certain characters," lead study author Emily Moyer-Guse, who's also an assistant professor of communications at Ohio State University, told me back in May. "We develop them over time -- it's actually part of the normal way we watch and enjoy TV," said Moyer-Guse. "We watch these shows, and we start to think of them like a friend.

"It’s kind of the same things that drive real relationships with people," she explained. Moyer Guse did her study during the TV writers' strike of 2007 and 2008, when so many shows were briefly off the air. These fans knew their shows were coming back, but they were still sad about even briefly losing them. More from our earlier post:

(Study participants) were also asked why they watched TV -- for companionship? To relax? To escape? Finally, the students were asked what they did with their newfound free time, now that their shows were off the air.

People who said they had deeper "friendships" with their favorite TV characters also said they felt lonelier in the characters' absence. And the students who said they watched TV for companionship reported the most distress related to their shows' temporary absences. And, no, people didn't use this break in the TV season to do crazy things like exercise, garden or read -- most said they just watched reruns, or surfed the Internet.

Are you already sad about "Community's" hiatus? 

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Adam Taylor / ABC

On this season of "Dancing with the Stars," fashion expert and "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" star Carson Kressley was certainly one of the nicest male contestants -- unfortunately, that didn't stop him from being eliminated!

By Stephanie Pappas
LiveScience

Men who hit the dance floor may be revealing more than their ability to cut a rug, according to a new study that finds women judge men with conscientious and agreeable personalities as better dancers.

The study builds on previous research that found women judge the dance movements of stronger men as more attractive and more assertive, and that risk-taking men also get pegged as better dancers. The new research suggests that the information conveyed by dance is even broader, according to study researcher Bernhard Fink, of the University of Göttingen, in Germany.

"We argue that personality is — to some extent — signaled via body movement (dance in particular, as it is the most complex body movement)," Fink wrote in an email to LiveScience. "If that were true, it would explain why dance is such a prominent topic in almost all human societies."

Fink and his colleagues of Northumbria University in the U.K. had previously found thatladies love certain dudely dance moves, particularly a variation of movements in the neck and the torso. Their studies use motion-capture technology much like that used in computer-animated movies to record men's dance moves and transfer them onto featureless avatars. That technique ensures that the women watching the dance moves won't be distracted by the guys' attractiveness or other features.

The findings that women seem able to pick up on factors like strength and risk-taking  from watching just a few seconds of dance moves prompted the researchers to look at otherpersonality traits. They focused on the "Big Five" traits, five basic attributes that describe the spectrum of human personality.

Those traits are openness (a willingness to explore new things), conscientiousness (a tendency toward self-discipline), extroversion (social exuberance), agreeableness (compassion and care for others) and neuroticism (a tendency to experience negative emotions).

The researchers asked 48 men between the ages of 18 and 42 to fill out personality questionnaires that would show where they fell on the spectrum of each trait. Then the men danced to the drumbeat of Robbie Williams' 1997 song "Let Me Entertain You." The music and lyrics were cut out, to prevent the men's love or hatred of the song from influencing their enthusiasm to dance. 

"Dancing in front of cameras is not easy for many people, and some 'support' from a drumbeat usually helps them in the laboratory setting," Fink said.

Next, 53 women between the ages of 17 and 57 watched 15-second clips of the men's dance moves transposed onto a computer-generated avatar. Each woman judged each man's dancing ability on a scale of 1 to 7.

The results revealed that the more conscientious and socially agreeable a man's personality, the more likely women were to view him as a good dancer.

The researchers also found patterns suggesting that extroverts might be better dancers, while people who scored high in neuroticism or openness were seen as worse on the dance floor. But those patterns were not statistically significant, meaning they could have been the result of chance.

Fink says he believes a larger study sample would provide the statistical oomph needed to prove that those nonsignificant traits are linked to a guy's ability to break it down. But put together with old findings, he said, the new study suggests that women are sensitive to discerning personality traits that would be important for both short-term and long-term relationships.

"The significant correlations of conscientiousness and social agreeableness suggest that dance movements signal particularly aspects of 'long-term' partner qualities," Fink said.

Likewise, he said, the earlier study on risk-taking suggests that women are impressed by the dancing of men who are bold sensation-seekers — maybe not the guy you can trust to stick around and help you raise a baby, but one who would likely contribute a healthy set of genes to his offspring.

Of course, the research hasn't yet established how, if at all, women use judgments of dance quality to decide whether to pursue a potential mate. Future studies will need to ask women to watch men's dance moves and then decide whether the guy would make a good long- or short-term partner, Fink said. He and his colleagues are also interested in turning the tables to find out what sort of information female dance moves might communicate.

As for whether you can tune your dance moves to look more consciousness and agreeable, it turns out that Shakira was right: Hips don't lie.

"If one would like to 'fake' a certain (positive) personality in order to attract women, this is probably doomed to fail," Fink said. "An individual's body movement pattern is characteristic and any attempt to fake it would result in less positive judgments of that person."

The research is set to appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Personality and Individual Differences.

More from LiveScience:

• Busted! 6 Gender Myths in the Bedroom & Beyond
• 10 Things Every Woman Should Know About a Man's Brain
• Top 10 Things that Make Humans Special

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• Dance party craze presses 'mute' on speakers
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Dave Hogan / MTV via Getty Images

Redfoo of LMFAO knows exactly what it takes to get a song permanently stuck in your head. Now, researchers are getting a clue, too.

When I take my early morning spinning classes, my weary brain is in a vulnerable state. Maybe that's one reason why the chorus of a particular tune, like LMFAO's "Party Rock Anthem" or Katy Perry's "Firework," played during the workout gets trapped inside my head for the rest of the day -- and night -- and the next day. 

Known as earworms, these random snippets of songs or melodies pop into our minds repeating themselves again and again like a broken record. For me, another one was that silly jingle from the McDonald's filet-of-fish commercial, which undoubtedly would delight advertisers but I found both amusing and mildly annoying.

So it helps to know that earworms are an incredibly common experience: Studies suggest that 90 percent of people get them at least once a week. Over the last decade, researchers have spent time collecting data to learn who gets earworms, how often they occur, how long they last and which songs won't budge from our brains.

Now, a new British study in the journal Psychology of Music has tried to understand their origins. They looked at how earworms, which psychologists call involuntary musical imagery, get started in the first place.

Researchers collected data from 604 people who completed an online survey. After analyzing the responses, they identified four main triggers for earworms. The most common one was music exposure, either recently hearing a tune or repeatedly hearing it. A second reason was memory triggers, meaning that seeing a particular person or word, hearing a specific beat, or being in a certain situation reminds you of a song.

The third reason for earworms your emotional frame of mind, or "affective states."  Feeling stressed, surprised or happy when you hear a song may make it stick in your head. And a fourth cause was "low attention states."  A wandering mind, whether from daydreaming or dreams at night, can set off this involuntary musical imagery. 

"I was initially surprised by the sheer number of idiosyncrasies within the earworm surveys -- the number of different tunes people heard and the number of unique circumstances where earworms popped up," says study author, Victoria Williamson, a music psychologist at Goldsmiths, University of London.

But it makes sense, she says, since "these spontaneous mental tunes appear to be a typical everyday consequence of the way that our brains process music."

And these "sticky songs" can be a tune you hear often or a brand new one. "Earworms are likely to be as individual as we are in both our musical tastes and music listening habits," explains Williamson.

Asked what to do when you get one, Williamson says she'll be trying to find out how people control them in her next research project." But in the meantime, she offers up this advice: "I find that occupying my mind with a task helps -- reading a book, doing a puzzle or talking to a friend."

What about you? Tell us what song has stuck in your head recently and what may have triggered it. 

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Nick Laham / Getty Images file

Feeling relaxed? We thought so.

Exhaust fumes may do more than pollute the air -- in very small amounts, they could be relieving stress in city dwellers.

An Israeli researcher has suggested that breathing in small quantities of carbon monoxide helps relax the frazzled nerves of city folk, making it easier for them to handle the hustle and bustle of urban living.

A study led by Itzhak Schnell, a professor of geography and human environment at Tel Aviv University, found that low levels of the poisonous gas can have a "narcotic effect" on city residents, says a news release. Although breathing in high levels of this colorless and odorless gas has been described as a "silent killer," extremely low levels of it may act as a "silent calmer," the news release claims.

This new study appears in the journal Environmental Monitoring and Assessment.

Schnell and his team tracked 36 young, healthy students who carried micro-sensors as they moved around Tel Aviv, Israel's busiest city. It measured participants' exposure to the typical hassles of city life. Scientists wanted to find out how four environmental stressors -- noise levels, air pollution (carbon monoxide concentrations), crowds and weather (temperature and humidity) -- affected the urbanites aged 20 to 40.

The sensors captured data from participants in indoor and outdoor locations as they walked along busy streets, rode public transportation or shopped. Measurements were taken over a two-day period in all four seasons. Students also completed questionnaires rating their levels of personal discomfort in their surroundings.

Researchers found that urbanite's biggest source of environmental stress was noise pollution from other people, mainly human voices. Participants also reported feeling the most stress in shopping malls, open markets and on main streets, likely because of the hordes of other people in these crowded locations.

According to Schnell, the study's most surprising finding was that participants inhaled much lower levels of carbon monoxide than scientists had predicted. Even though the students took in very low concentrations of the gas, Schnell says it appeared to counteract the stress of the noise and crowds.

The scientists suggest their findings show that for young, healthy people, the daily grind of city life might have fewer negative consequences on health as they had anticipated. Next, they plan to study how these same pressures of urban living affect more high-risk groups, such as babies, older people, and those with medical conditions like asthma.

Perhaps taking several deep breaths of polluted city air several times a day isn't that bad an idea, and may turn out to be a new form of urban Zen.

Want more weird health news? Find The Body Odd on Facebook.

Allergic to cats? Then beware of pigs -- or at least, the meat that comes from these sty-dwelling swine. A small number of people who are sensitive to felines may also get allergic reactions to eating pork.

Dubbed "pork-cat syndrome," this food-induced allergic reaction can occur after consuming pork in people who are also allergic to cats, says Jonathon Posthumus, MD, a fellow in the division of asthma, allergy and immunology at the University of Virginia Health System in Charlottesville.

Although this rare syndrome was first recognized in Europe in the mid-1990s, Posthumus and his colleagues recently described the first six documented cases of it in the U.S. He presented his preliminary findings at the annual meeting of the American College of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology.

According to Posthumus, the true allergen in people with pork-cat syndrome is albumin, a protein that's found in both cat dander and in pork meat. When albumin is consumed in a pork-containing meal it can trigger an allergic reaction in sensitive individuals.

But not all people who are allergic to cat dander are sensitive to cat albumin. So, most cat-allergic individuals would probably not have reactions to pork. 

In this research, five out of six cases of pork-cat syndrome were seen in women, and the average age of those with this rare food sensitivity was 28. Blood tests were positive for cat dander and pork antibodies in all six people.

Following a meal containing pork, one person reported having an itchy mouth, three broke out in hives, and two had anaphylaxis, a severe and sometimes life-threatening allergic reaction. 

People with this syndrome may also develop swelling of the mouth, lips or tongue, and these same areas could become itchy after consuming pork products. Posthumus suspects the reaction may be related to how much pork is on your plate, but he says, there is no way to determine the threshold amount that triggers these symptoms.

Those diagnosed with this unusual food hypersensitivity are advised to steer clear of eating pork, and told what signs to look for and treatments to seek if they accidentally slip-up.

The UVA scientists discovered the country's first reported cases while researching people with meat allergies. Perhaps pork-cat syndrome has been under-recognized in the U.S. because "it can easily be missed if the patient is not properly evaluated and the relationship to cat allergy is not appreciated," Posthumus points out.

Readers, if you've ever experienced these strange sensations after eating pork, we have to hear about it. Leave us a comment telling us your story.

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By Wayne Parry
LiveScience 

The true nature of hypnosis has eluded scientists. It's clear people can be hypnotized, but it's not clear how this happens. New research offers a clue.

By recording the eye movements of a hypnotized woman, and comparing them with those of nonhypnotized people, researchers say they have found evidence that hypnosis involves a special mental state, fundamentally different from normal consciousness.

First some basics: When under hypnosis, a person becomes more capable of hallucinationand susceptible to suggestions, perhaps intended to help him or her stop craving cigarettes, say, or prompt him or her to hear music that isn't actually playing. If no suggestions are given, a hypnotized person will sit still and his or her mind will enter a calm state, like that associated with meditation. After a session ends, the person doesn't remember it, according to study researcher Sakari Kallio, an associate professor at the University of Skövde in Sweden and University of Turku in Finland.  

Some believe these things happen because of a change in brain activity that alters a person's state of consciousness. Another camp believes that under hypnosis, the brain functions just as it would at any other time while awake, and that other, normal processes — like an active imagination — are at work.

Solving this debate by measuring brain activity is dicey, since our brain's electrical activity can vary significantly from moment to moment during its normal state. But the identification of a behavior associated with an altered state of consciousness — something no one could fake — would go a long way to supporting the idea that hypnosis involves a change in consciousness.

And that's exactly what a team of researchers says they have found, by looking at the eye movements of an easily hypnotized Finnish woman.

This woman, identified in the study published in the journal PLoS ONE on Oct. 24 only by her initials TS-H, is 43, an office worker, right-handed, and "as normal as can be," said Kallio, the lead study researcher. TS-H has no history of any neurological or psychiatric illnesses and a normal psychological profile, he and colleagues wrote. [10 Controversial Psychiatric Disorders]

She is, however, also unusually responsive to hypnosis. Kallio said that while TS-H was hypnotized, he could easily induce her to see or hear things that weren't present, and that she forgot the session when the hypnosis ended.

Using three different visual tests, they found that while hypnotized, her pupils became smaller and she blinked more slowly and less frequently — about 10 times less often –- than normally. When moving her gaze to a new point on a screen, her eyes "crept" along, moving in shorter jumps, when normally they would have moved swiftly. And, when watching the middle point of a field of moving bars, her eyes made fewer, smaller, slower movements back and forth.

Because people have little conscious control over these kinds of movements, it is unlikely someone could fake them, according to Kallio.

He and colleagues gave 14 nonhypnotized volunteers the same tasks, and asked the volunteers to perform them naturally, and to try to mimic hypnotized eye movements. While in some instances, such as with blinking, the nonhypnotized volunteers did well, overall, none came close to matching the hypnotized eye movements.

The results don’t come without precedence; a change in the eyes, or a unique sort of stare, has long been associated with hypnosis.

Measurements of electrical activity in TS-H's hypnotized brain taken in separate research also indicate something was going on. In three different experiments, researchers found changes they would not expect in a normal brain, according to Kallio.

In one study, the connections between the frontal area and the rest of the brain diminished dramatically, which typically happens during sleep. Then hypnosis also made her brain's right hemisphere more dominant, although this finding is difficult to interpret, Kallio told LiveScience in an email.

While a bit trickier to interpret, brain measurements further support the idea that something unique happens in TS-H's brain during hypnosis, according to Kallio.

Have you ever been hypnotized? Leave a comment telling us about the experience.

More from LiveScience:

• Top 10 Mysteries of the Mind
• Top 10 Spooky Sleep Disorders
• Eye Tricks: Gallery of Visual Illusions

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• Will your warts away through self-hypnosis

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