You Can Catch Being Cold

As if life isn’t strange enough.  You know how yawns are contagious? Well it turns out that being cold is catchy too. In fact researchers found that just looking at somebody shivering is enough to make you literally feel cold.

It seems to touch something off in the empathy centers of our brain. In a recently published  journal ‘PLOS ONE’, they had 36 people watch videos of actors putting their hands into either obviously warm or cold water while measuring the temperature of the watcher’s hands. Oddly enough their hand temperature dropped when watching the ‘cold’ videos versus no change them watching the ‘warm’ videos.

The conclusion by these scientists at the Brighton and Sussex Medical School was that humans are susceptible to 'temperature contagion'. The lead Neuropsychiatrist Dr Neil Harrison, surmised that such unconscious physiological changes may help us empathize with one another and live in communities.

He added that we are profoundly social creatures and we desire to work well in complex social structures by understanding the feelings of whom ever we are interacting with. Cool…sorry I couldn’t resist.