Вскоре после Второй мировой войны Уинстон Черчилль стал странным опытом. Приняв долгую ванну со скотчем и сигарой, он, как сообщается, вошел в соседнюю спальню - ndash; Авраам Линкольн. Добрый вечер, господин президент. Вы найдете меня в невыгодном положении. ” Дух улыбнулся и исчез .

Его контакт с предполагаемым сверхъестественным Черчилль ставит в прославленной компании. Артур Конан Дойл говорил с призраками через медиумов, в то время как Алан Тьюринг верил в телепатию . Трое мужчин, которые были известны своим проницательным мышлением, но не могли удержаться от веры в невозможное. Вы можете хорошо присоединиться к ним. три четверти американцев верят в паранормальные явления , в какой-то форме, а призрак / \ "> почти каждый пятый . суеверия и фольклор. Их результаты могут свидетельствовать о том, что вы попадаете в паранормальные явления. На самом конце света. Сообщения о полтергейстах, незаметно движущихся впереди страницы правого полушария, которые отвечают за визуальное обработка; Между тем, определенные формы эпилепсии могут вызывать жуткое чувство преследует вас рядом & ndash; ; теневые люди ” скрывается в окрестностях.

{\ "image \": {\ "pid \": \ "p029q354 \"}}

сейчас принято неврологические явления, в то время как некоторые визуальные иллюзии могли бы посрамить здоровый мозг и создать мифические существа. Например, один молодой итальянский психолог смотрит в зеркало. the-mind.html # .VFElDhD2fWY Его более поздние эксперименты подтвердили, что иллюзия была на удивление популярной, возможно, из-за половины времени. Даже если вы ищете старого, приколы или отвратительных животных. Черчилль. Конан Дойл, кому, похоже, нравилось другое повседневное занятие?

Защитный щит <<< Психолог. Идея заключается в том, что, когда происходит что-то неожиданное, - смерть, стихийное бедствие или потеря работы & ndash; мозг «Это настолько неприятное состояние, что, если оно не получит объективного контроля, мы сможем обойти его, даже если их не будет», - сказал он. говорит Дженнифер Уитсон в Техасском университете. заставляет людей видеть иллюзорными Сил на работе она нашла. Но это не может быть первый раз, когда вы находитесь на фондовом рынке.

Антропоморфизм Это хороший способ получить его в Северо-Западном университете в Иллинойсе. Поэтому мы можем думать, что дух - это проблема. а не признание того, что мы не имеем никакого контроля над этим вопросом; и если вы хотите быть призраком, вы можете отправить сообщение. Мы создаем веру в призраков, потому что нам не нравится, что вселенная случайна, ” говорит Вайц. <<< P> Учитывая эти странные повороты прошлого, они более суеверны, чем другие? Речь идет о том, что Тапани Риекки из Университета Хельсинки в Финляндии. Он говорит, что верующие часто не понимают, почему они не разделяют их мировоззрение. r Они говорят, что я не понимаю, почему другие люди не чувствуют то, что я чувствую, или не верю в то, во что я верю, & ” Он сказал.

Скрытые лица

Риекки недавно спросил скептиков и верующих. Он нашел паранормальных верующих. как если бы фигуры были в игре с тегом ” скажем & ndash; и это было отражено в большей активности мозга в регионах, обычно связанных с & ldquo теория разума ” и понимание других ’ мотивы. Риекки также нашел людей, которые верят в сверхъестественное. находка, подтвержденная другой командой в университете Амстердама, которая показала, что такое параноики.

{\ "image \": {\ "pid \": \ "p029q38b \"}}. к этому Риекки нашла & ldquo; ингибирование ” , по сравнению со скептиками. Это такие нежелательные мысли, так что, возможно, мы будем задушены странными совпадениями. Риекки приводит пример того, кто хочет знать, что делать. ; есть и из, и, и, и, и, и, и, и, и и, и и, и, и, и, и, и, и, и, и он задается вопросом. Примечательно, что другая газета сообщила, чтоПаранормальные верующие также уверены в своих решениях. Так что, как только они привязались к вере, вам, возможно, придется подумать об этом, большинство исследователей согласны с тем, что скептики не должны слишком критиковать людей, которые питают эти убеждения. В конце концов, одно исследование показало, что различные суеверия могут повысить производительность в диапазоне навыков. В одном испытании привносит удачу в тест памяти значительно улучшенные предметы вспомнить , В другом эксперименте испытуемые испытуемые ’ гольф положить способности. Говоря им, счастливчики были мяч означал, что они были более склонны забивать, чем просто используя любой старый мед. Даже перелом ноги ” Я сохраню свои пальцы для вас & quot; Я оставлю свои пальцы для вас ” улучшил участников ’ двигательная ловкость и их способность решать анаграммы.

Майкл Нис в колледже Лафайет в Пенсильвании. Тонко заправка волонтеров. несмотря на то, что они в основном скептики сообщается. Оживление разума.

{\ "image \": {\ "pid \": \ "p029q3bp \"}}

Исследование Уитсона, между тем, оно обнаруживается. Каждый последний обычно считается положительной эмоцией & ndash; все еще может повысить веру людей в сверхъестественное. Причина, по ее словам, полна неопределенности; Вы не можете увидеть себя в будущем. другие убеждения, которые столь же причудливы, говорит она. Это может быть полномасштабная теория заговора. пятна ” Призрачные модели в эпидемии Эболы Таких как появление народных средств. /2014/08/26/upshot/fighting-ebola-and-the-conspiracy-theories.html? _R = 0 \ "target = \" _ blank \ ">

Легко думать о себе как о рациональных картах, но это стоит отметить. , ” говорит Уитсон. Мы будем более чем уверены & & ldquo; Как показали Черчилль, Тьюринг и Конан Дойл, даже самые проницательные умы. на будущее, отправляйтесь в наш Facebook or Google+ page, or message us on Twitter.

\"We create beliefs because we don’t like believing that the universe is random\"

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Я буду через час, раз в секунду, восемь минут. Я пытаюсь получить беспокойство. Я чувствую себя слегка нелепо, надевая облегающую куртку сверху & ldquo; Все, что нужно для отдыха, ” говорит Майк Эстерман, исследователь собирается убить меня. Ему легко сказать & ndash; Он держит магнит.

Я пришел к Бостонская лаборатория внимания и обучения. Джо, я впервые в мире работаю над проектом. С помощью армии США вы сможете узнать, как бороться с этими проблемами. Но что я хочу знать? И если так, могут ли они сделать это со мной? Пожалуйста?

{\ "image \": {\ "pid \": \ "p028qs6n \"}}

ДеГутис, чтобы спросить это Вопрос, он не был уверен, что они могут помочь. ; предложить обучение и и & и ассортимент и и и и и и и и и и и и и и и и и и и и и и и и и и и и и он сказал. ; Если вам не хватает, вы сможете работать со мной результаты

тест, и он передумал. Я набрал 53 - более 20 баллов И вряд ли ударил мой почтовый ящик. R & и в и и и и и и и и и и и и и и и и и и в в в Его не привлекут, но он говорит, что есть место для улучшения ” <<< p> Я не должен был удивляться. Среди людей, которые меня хорошо знают Мой брат придумал моего лучшего друга. & Ldquo; О, ” он д. & Это похоже на 'работу Кэролайн' Старый друг был поэтической версией, называя меня «мозгом бабочки» и «из-за пути». Надежда на изменения

К счастью для меня & ndash; Facebook Facebook logo Оставить меня в системе Facebook Войти через Facebook это Примерно десятилетие неврологии Схемы, которые мы используем чаще всего, становятся бесполезными, а схемы, которые мы не используем, сжимаются и исчезают. Но & ndash; и это большое но & ndash; изменить Так в чем твоя проблема? Как ты долго концентрируешься?

Психологи и неврологи очень заинтересованы. По оценкам, 80% студентов и 25% взрослых будут болеть за счет возможности делать что-то хуже.

\ "image \": {\ "pid \": \ "p028qrkn \"}}

приводит к стрессу, болезни и отношения проблем. И это не заставляет вас чувствовать себя лучше в любом случае. В исследовании 2010 года психологи из Мэтью Киллингсворта и Дэниел Гилберт из Гарвардского университета перебивали людей в течение дня. Они были так счастливы. Фактически, в остальное время блуждание ума фактически делало их менее счастливыми.

Как мы можем взять под контроль семью? Вступая на первое место. По словам психолога Университета Карлтона Университета Карлтона. психологический У нас комплекс выбран немедленная награда. Я бы предпочел чувствовать себя хорошо сейчас. Даже если мы собираемся укусить нас за задницу. он говорит.

Хорошая новость в том, < Сила воли похожа на мускул со временем вы можете укрепить свои ресурсы внимания. Я верю в это, & rdquo;

Мозговая цель

Их учебная программа нацелена на «сеть дорсального внимания», которая является областью префронтальной коры головного мозга. бит мозг над глазами, которые помогают нам принимать решение & Ndash; и теменная кора - «распределительный щит»; для наших чувств Сеть дорсального внимания является частью сети. ответственность за скитание ума, творчество и мышление.

спинного внимания мозга. люди, которые не хотят быть плохим человеком на всевозможных тестах. Я ищу что-то вроде этого .. фокусировщик и выше среднего странник. Я не мог думать об этом, как я бы рухнул. Я ищу место для сна в больничной палате с рентгеновским снимком на стене. ба. В первый день стимуляции нет, просто пару часов. В мерах как Facebook или уведомление по электронной почте & ndash; У меня все хорошо. Я не беспокоюсь за ваше вождение, & rdquo; Дегутис говорит, тестирует Фокус, фокус

Фокус, фокус

; насколько хорошо я могу оставаться начеку во время скучной и монотонной задачи. Первый тест - это то, что Эстерман ласково назвал «Не трогай Бетти». Звучит просто: серия мужских лиц. Но когда появляется единственное женское лицо (Бетти), ты не нажимаешь. Для меня это не так сложно, как физически невозможно. Даже когда я замечаю Бетти. Бетти бормотает. Я провожу целых 12 минут, ругая себя как насмешку Бетти.

}

Я узнаю. Моя ошибка составляет 51%, 20% у здоровых добровольцев. Худшая оценка составила 40%. У меня есть глаз на моей руке, ПТСР или повреждение удара. ; Это мера того, являетесь ли вы тот человек, который бродит вокруг в изумлении много. Неудивительно, что ДеГутис и Эстерман выглядят обеспокоенными. У них есть всего четыре дня, чтобы улучшить свое внимание, прежде чем я летаю домой в Великобританию и рассказать миру об этом. Мозг не похож на магнитно-резонансную томографию, так что Эстерман может точно определить область мозга, которую он хочет стимулировать. , Он работал в области лобного глаза (FEF). Идея в том, что я смогу использовать источник питания в компьютерной среде. вроде как изменения обвязки вниз хорошую руку, чтобы заставить кого-то, чтобы усилить плохой.

{\ "образ \" {\ "PID \" \ "p028qs57 \"}}

Когда я иду на стимуляцию на следующий день, это не так плохо, как я боялся. По крайней мере, сначала. Впервые я буду немного похож на суку. Впрочем, через пять минут, и это серьезно раздражает. <<< p> <<< p> У меня два восьмиминутных сеанса магнитной стимуляции. обучение. Я хотел бы использовать 12-минутные блоки обучения в Интернете. Целевое изображение & ndash; Скажи белую чашку на коричневом столе - ndash; который мигает на экране и теперь каждый раз. Вам не нужно нажимать пробел для этого. Это как чит. Сначала это так же разочаровывает, как Бетти & ndash; Я знаю, что должен. Мозг Ааааа!

Я немного взволнован. Я говорю о том, что говорю. Я делаю что-то вроде этого. Я чувствую себя так глупо - У меня нет проблем с поиском цели сразу. Это просто пистолет для моей головы, который не мог остановиться.

{\ "image \": {\ "pid \": \ "p028qsl1 \"}} / p>

Но тогда, из синих, то между утренней и вечерней тренировкой на три дня, что-то щелкает. Мой & не трогай; rdquo; оценка скачка между 11 и 30%, правильная - между 50 и 70%. Я на самом деле начинаю получать от этого удовольствие - ndash; и начали оказывать странное и внезапное осознание того, что & Rsquo; творится в моей голове, когда я случайно нажать на цель. Например, я пропустил вступление к этой части. И еще, потому что мне было интересно, что мой последний был до дома. И я должен выиграть после тренировки, или пива <р> описан в: Дегутис, кажется, думает, что это развитие Важного. Это очень далеко, если вы пытаетесь остановить это, и это очень далеко. «Все немного мета-осведомлены», - сказал он. он говорит. & ldquo; Они выполняют задачу и видят себя. {\ "image \": {\ "pid \": \ "p021xf3f \"}} Сара Лазар, невролог Гарвардской медицинской школы На этой странице вы можете найти информацию о долгосрочных медитаторах. Результатом этого, говорит Лазарь, является хороший друг ПК. r Когда ваш внутренний голос звучит как «о, я» и у вас есть крайний срок ». Вы можете сказать: «Хорошо, тихо, я пытаюсь сосредоточиться», & rdquo; она говорит. Но это должно быть много. Из-за моих навыков неопознанного мы не узнаем, действительно ли я улучшилась до пятницы, когда я снова сдам тест Бетти. До тех пор они раздают. У меня нет СДВГ. что-то все три из нас было интересно, так как мой первый тест онлайн. {\ "image \": {\ "pid \": \ "p028qsj8 \"}}

Через пару дней это Это первый эксперимент. День повторных испытаний и результаты. Я знаю, как я знаю об этом и об этом - ndash; и это проблема. и в любом случае, они, как правило, бьют по моему мозгу. Они не смогут ничего сделать.

На этот раз не трогай Бетти & rdquo; задание Я прошел задание на 51% перед тренировкой & ndash; хуже худшего здорового человека они записаны в их исследовании, так и в области ПТСР больных и Ndash; до 9,6%, что является лучшим результатом в том же исследовании. Более того, судя по предыдущим исследованиям Просто артефакт & Betty & rdquo; задание на повторное тестирование. r Это замечательно, & rdquo; говорит ДеГутис. Мы были как, «Что?

Запускали ли вы ту же версию теста? На самом деле, я задал им тот же вопрос сразу после повторного тестирования. Рэйчел сказала, что не лицо Бетти. Я улыбался в задней части бара. И это было невероятно, даже при том, что я чувствовал себя среди ночи. 815 миллисекунд до тренировки и 816 продолжений.

В принципе, как скоро мозг может переориентировать после отвлечения & Ndash; Я показываю похожие улучшения, забиваю. Это огромное улучшение & rdquo; говорит де Гутис, и тест моргания внимания не показывает большую часть знакомства. Солнечный Бостон, вдали от стрессов нормальной жизни. Не структурно, & rdquo; Не структурно & rdquo; Они говорят в унисон. Но функционально, как вы задействуете мозг? что-то другое, & rdquo; добавляет Эстерман

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Тест в стиле Бетти - это тест в стиле Бетти, который , Они выяснили, что активность в сети была высокой - предлагая странствующий ум - ndash; ошибка была более вероятно, в то время как больше активности в сети внимания дорсальной коррелирует с успехом. Таким образом, мы можем просто посмотреть, если вы можете. - говорит Эстерман.

Поскольку я не проводил тесты в сканере, мне некуда идти. быть признаком нахождения в зоне. И я усовершенствовал эту меру после моей недели обучения и NBSP. У тебя бывают моменты, когда ты в постели. говорит Эстерман Смысл ума

И вот почему это показалось легче & ndash; потому как ни странно это звучит, когда дело доходит до внимания, меньше больше. Staying on task isn’t about pouring all your energy into the job – it’s about allowing the brain to wander occasionally and gently nudging it back on course. And stressing out about getting distracted only releases a flood of hormones into the brain, and they don’t help in the slightest.

“When you’re not too anxious and you’re not too engaged and you’re kind of in this sweet spot, norepinephrine [a hormone responsible for vigilant concentration] receptors in the prefrontal cortex called the alpha 2-A receptors are on. If you get too stressed they shut off,” says DeGutis.

So ironically, it seems that what is behind my wandering mind is trying too hard to focus, which backfires, making me less able to concentrate. It’s a vicious circle. Now, though after only a week’s training, it feels like I’ve cracked it.

Then DeGutis gives me the bad news. My new-found calm almost certainly won’t last. “The dose you got will probably fade away in a week or two,” he says. It’s the downside of adult brain training, apparently. Just like physical exercise, you have to keep at it or you’ll end up as flabby as before.

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So now what? DeGutis promises to send me more training when I get home, which is great, but I can’t expect him to do that forever, and I can’t keep crossing the Atlantic for a top-up of brain stimulation. At some point I will be on my own, left with a brain and personality that is primed to procrastinate. Making their system work for people long-term is a problem that is very much in the front of their minds too.

How about an app, I suggest? But they’re in no hurry to go down that route. “We consider it a research project so we’re not running to commercialise it because we want to learn about it first,” says DeGutis. And, they point out, the basic problem is that the training sort of needs to be boring to do the job. “It’s boring but it’s good for you – how do you market that?”

In the meantime they suggest maybe finding a mindfulness meditation class, and doing yoga more regularly than my usual once a week. They also tell me that there is evidence that time in nature helps with focus, so getting in the zone may be as simple as taking the dog for a tear around the woods whenever my mind refuses to behave.

Less is not more

Since coming home I have come across some other suggestions. Attention researcher Nilli Lavie of University College London has found that making a task more visually demanding – by adding more colours or shapes to the page, or increasing the number of sounds your brain has to process – takes up more processing power, and leaves the brain nothing left to process distractions. So, counter-intuitive as it sounds, making things busier might make it harder for my mind to wander – it just won’t have the energy.

There is also a new app, called Focus@will, which claims to use the power of music to increase focus by 400%, by calming the part of the brain that releases norepinephrine. As far as I can tell it hasn’t been tested in peer-reviewed studies, and its results are based on very slight changes in brainwaves, so I’m taking it with a huge a pinch of salt. At this stage, though, three weeks post-training and with my focus sliding back to normal, I’m willing to try anything to bring back that focused feeling.

In the end, though, the most important thing for me was that I went to Boston to ask the question: can my butterfly brain be trained? And came back with an emphatic: yes. Now I have two more questions: how can I keep it going? And which brain wrinkle should I iron out next?

Find out your ‘continuous concentration’ score at www.testmybrain.org. I got 53, which is below average. How well do you focus?

Caroline Williams will be speaking about her brain training experience at TEDx Edinburgh Napier University in Scotland on 18 October. She filed this story more or less on time.

If you would like to comment on this, or anything else you have seen on Future, head over to our  Facebook or Google+ page, or message us on Twitter.

\"Willpower is like a muscle. I'm a big believer in that.\"

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We've all been told that men think about you-know-what far too often – every seven seconds, by some accounts. Most of us have entertained this idea for long enough to be sceptical. However, rather than merely wonder about whether this is true, stop for a moment to consider how you could – or could not – prove it.

If we believe the stats, thinking about sex every seven seconds adds up to 514 times an hour. Or approximately 7,200 times during each waking day. Is that a lot? It sounds like a big number to me, I’d imagine it’s bigger than the number of thoughts I have about anything in a day. So, here’s an interesting question: how is it possible to count the number of mine, or anyone else’s thoughts (sexual or otherwise) over the course of a day?

The scientific attempt to measure thoughts is known to psychologists as \"experience sampling\". It involves interrupting people as they go about their daily lives and asking them to record the thoughts they are having right at that moment, in that place.

Terri Fisher and her research team at Ohio State University did this using 'clickers'. They gave these to 283 college students, divided into three groups, and asked them to press and record each time they thought about sex, or food, or sleep.

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Using this method they found that the average man in their study had 19 thoughts about sex a day. This was more than the women in their study – who had about 10 thoughts a day. However, the men also had more thoughts about food and sleep, suggesting perhaps that men are more prone to indulgent impulses in general. Or they are more likely to decide to count any vague feeling as a thought. Or some combination of both.

The interesting thing about the study was the large variation in number of thoughts. Some people said they thought about sex only once per day, whereas the top respondent recorded 388 clicks, which is a sexual thought about every two minutes.

However, the big confounding factor with this study is \"ironic processes\", more commonly known as the \"white bear problem\". If you want to have cruel fun with a child tell them to put their hand in their air and only put it down when they've stopped thinking about a white bear. Once you start thinking about something, trying to forget it just brings it back to mind.

This is exactly the circumstances the participants in Fisher's study found themselves in. They were given a clicker by the researchers and asked to record when they thought about sex (or food or sleep). Imagine them walking away from the psychology department, holding the clicker in their hand, trying hard not to think about sex all the time, yet also trying hard to remember to press the clicker every time they did think about it. My bet is that the poor man who clicked 388 times was as much a victim of the experimental design as he was of his impulses.

Always on my mind

Another approach, used by Wilhelm Hoffman and colleagues, involved issuing German adult volunteers with smartphones, which were set to notify them seven times a day at random intervals for a week. They were asked to record what featured in their most recent thoughts when they received the random alert, the idea being that putting the responsibility for remembering onto a device left participants' minds more free to wander.

The results aren't directly comparable to the Fisher study, as the most anyone could record thinking about sex was seven times a day. But what is clear is that people thought about it far less often than the seven-second myth suggests. They recorded a sexual thought in the last half hour on approximately 4% of occasions, which works out as about once per day, compared with 19 reported in the Fisher study.

The real shock from Hoffman's study is the relative unimportance of sex in the participants' thoughts. People said they thought more about food, sleep, personal hygiene, social contact, time off, and (until about 5pm) coffee. Watching TV, checking email and other forms of media use also won out over sex for the entire day. In fact, sex only became a predominant thought towards the end of the day (around midnight), and even then it was firmly in second place, behind sleep.

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Hoffman's method is also contaminated by a white bear effect, though, because participants knew at some point during the day they'd be asked to record what they had been thinking about. This could lead to overestimating some thoughts. Alternately, people may have felt embarrassed about admitting to having sexual thoughts throughout the day, and therefore underreported it.

So, although we can confidently dismiss the story that the average male thinks about sex every seven seconds, we can't know with much certainty what the true frequency actually is. Probably it varies wildly between people, and within the same person depending on their circumstances, and this is further confounded by the fact that any efforts to measure the number of someone's thoughts risks changing those thoughts.

There’s also the tricky issue that thoughts have no natural unit of measurement. Thoughts aren't like distances we can measure in centimetres, metres and kilometres. So what constitutes a thought, anyway? How big does it need to be to count? Have you had none, one or many while reading this? Plenty of things to think about!

If you have an everyday psychological phenomenon you'd like to see written about in this column please get in touch @tomstafford or ideas@idiolect.org.uk.

If you would like to comment on this, or anything else you have seen on Future, head over to our Facebook or Google+ page, or message us on Twitter.

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When he was asked, as a joke, to explain how the mind works in five words, cognitive scientist Steven Pinker didn't hesitate. \"Brain cells fire in patterns\", he replied. It's a good effort, but all it really does is replace one enigma with another mystery.

It’s long been known that brain cells communicate by firing electrical signals to each other, and we now have myriad technologies for recording their patterns of activity – from electrodes in the brain or on the scalp, to functional magnetic resonance scanners that can detect changes in blood oxygenation. But, having gathered these data, the meaning of these patterns is still an enduring mystery. They seem to dance to a tune we can't hear, led by rules we don't know.

Neuroscientists speak of the neural code, and have made some progress in cracking that code. They are figuring out some basic rules, such as when cells in specific parts of the brain are likely to light up depending on the task at hand. Progress has been slow, but in the last decade various research teams around the world have been pursuing a far more ambitious project. We may never be able to see the complete code book, they realised, but by trying to write our own entries, we can begin to pick apart the ways that different patterns correspond to different actions.

Albert Lee and Matthew Wilson, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) first helped to set out the principles in 2002. It progresses like this. First, we record from the brain of a rat – one of our closer relatives, in the grand tree of life – as it runs a maze. Studying the whole brain would be too ambitious, so we can focus our recording on an area known as the hippocampus, known to be important for navigation and memory. If you've heard of this area before it is probably because of a famous result which showed that London taxi drivers developed larger hippocampi the longer they had spent navigating the streets of England's sprawling capital.

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While the rat runs the maze we record where it is, and simultaneously how the cells in the hippocampus are firing. The cell firing patterns are thrown into a mathematical algorithm which finds the pattern that best matches each bit of the maze. The language of the cells is no less complex, but now we have a Rosetta Stone against which we can decode it. We then test the algorithm by feeding it freshly recorded patterns, to see if it correctly predicts where the rat was at the point that pattern was recorded.

It doesn’t allow us to completely crack the code, because we still don't know all the rules, and it can’t help us read the patterns which aren't from this bit of the brain or which aren't about maze running, but it is still a powerful tool.  For instance, using this technique, the team was able to show that the specific sequence of cell firing repeated in the brain of the rat when it slept after running the maze (and, as a crucial comparison, not in the sleep it had enjoyed before it had run the maze).

Fascinatingly, the sequence repeated faster during sleep – around 20 times faster. This meant that the rat could run the maze in their sleeping minds in a fraction of the time it took them in real life. This could be related to the mnemonic function of sleep; by replaying the memory, it might have helped the rat to consolidate its learning. And the fact that the replay was accelerated might give us a glimpse of the activity that lies behind sudden insights, or experiences where our life “flashes before our eyes”; when not restrained, our thoughts really can retrace familiar paths in “fast forward”. Subsequent work has shown that these maze patterns can run backwards as well as forwards  - suggesting that the rats can imagine a goal, like the end of the maze, and work their way back from that to the point where they are.

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One application of techniques like these, which are equal parts highly specialised measurement systems and fiercely complicated algorithms, has been to decode the brain activity in patients who are locked in or in a vegetative state. These patients can’t move any of their muscles, and yet they may still be mentally aware and able to hear people talking to them in the same room. First, the doctors ask the patients to imagine activities which are known to active specific brain regions – such as the hippocampus. The data is then decoded so that you know which brain activity corresponds to certain ideas. During future brain scans, the patients can then re-imagine the same activities to answer basic questions. For instance, they might be told to imagine playing tennis to answer yes and walking around their house to answer no – the first form of communication since their injury.

There are other applications, both theoretical science, to probe the inner workings of our minds, and practical domains such as brain-computer interfaces. If, in the future, a paraplegic wants to control a robot arm, or even another person, via a brain interface, then it will rely on the same techniques to decode information and translate it into action. Now the principles have been shown to work, the potential is staggering.

If you have an everyday psychological phenomenon you'd like to see written about in these columns please get in touch @tomstafford or ideas@idiolect.org.uk

If you would like to comment on this, or anything else you have seen on Future, head over to our Facebook or Google+ page, or message us on Twitter.

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None of us likes being scammed, and David Modic is no different. But it’s not the fact that scammers try to trick us into handing over our money that bothers him – it’s the way they can rob people of something far more important: their hope.

Take the abuse of dating websites. “People go on dating sites in the hope of fulfilment, and they sometimes get scammed,” says Modic, who researches the psychology of internet fraud at the University of Cambridge. “And that makes me angry.”

It’s this personal passion that’s convinced Modic to study the psychology of scamming. He’s not alone: the field is thriving, and the information that researchers are uncovering is valuable to us all – from vulnerable singletons in search of love to the technology wizards in charge of the world’s online security.

Modic is particularly interested in what makes people vulnerable to scams. It’s tempting to imagine that only the foolish or poorly educated might fall victim – but even anecdotal evidence suggests this is not the case. Take Paul Frampton, an Oxbridge educated academic who was, until earlier this year, a professor of physics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 2012 Frampton was given almost 5 years in prison for drug smuggling in Argentina, after falling victim to an online dating scam. And then there’s John Worley. As a psychotherapist, Worley arguably knows more than most of us about controlling life’s trajectory. But in 2005 he was put on trial for bank fraud and money laundering after becoming a victim of the notorious Nigerian email scam. This scam sees people contacted by someone claiming to be a Nigerian government official appealing for help moving large sums of money out of the country – who just requires a little money upfront to release the fortune. Worley was found guilty and sentenced to two years in prison.

Intelligence and experience offers no protection against scammers, says Modic. “If it did, then better educated people and older people would be less likely to fall for scams. And that is not supported by my research.”

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So what does make someone vulnerable? To look for answers to that question, Modic and his colleagues have quizzed thousands of people, asking them first whether they think various scams are plausible – and whether they have fallen victim to them – before asking them to perform a personality test. The research has identified a number of characteristics that people who are victims of scams seem to share in common. Some of these traits – like a lack of self-control – we would probably recognise as dangerous. But others – a trust in authority, a desire to act in the same way as our friends, or a tendency to act in a consistent way – we might think of as good characteristics. 

These may be new findings to psychologists, but they are not new to scammers. Modic points out, for instance, that some scammers gain a victim’s trust by pretending to share a mutual friend. In other situations the scammer might contact the victim under the guise of a figure of authority – a doctor or a lawyer - to appear more persuasive. There are also scams that initially involve no loss of money and which are designed to encourage a victim to behave in a certain way, so that later they are more likely to behave in the same way when their money is at stake. Some card game swindles use this strategy.

\"I am surprised at the ingenuity of scammers who, perhaps subconsciously, have discovered such principles themselves without scientific studies,\" says Frank Stajano, a security and privacy researcher at the University of Cambridge. \"I can't imagine individual scammers working it all out by themselves, so I wonder what kind of word-of-mouth network they use to learn the tricks of their trade?\"

Hidden knowledge

The very fact that scammers clearly are aware of our psychological vulnerabilities – no matter how they gained that knowledge – suggests they can potentially teach us as much as their victims about confidence tricks. This is something Stajano has taken to heart in his research. He has worked with Paul Wilson, a close-up magician and security consultant to casinos, to explore exactly how scammers persuade their victims to hand over their personal belongings. Wilson is one of the writers and stars of BBC television show The Real Hustle, in which he and his team “scam” members of the public by recreating notorious confidence tricks (any money or valuables are later returned).

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Wilson’s team has recreated hundreds of scams for the cameras, but Stajano – who quickly became a fan of the show – realised that the scammers repeatedly used one or more of the same seven persuasion principles. Three of these principles are similar to those Modic identified by talking to potential or actual scam victims. Scammers use the “time principle” to persuade us we need to act quickly before we can think rationally and exercise self-control. They also make use of the “deference to authority principle” and the “herd principle” – our tendency to act like our friends or those around us – to convince people that the scam is legitimate.

But scammers have at least four other tricks up their sleeves, says Stajano. They might distract us so we don’t recognise a scam – making use of physically attractive accomplices, for instance. They can use our deepest desires to blind our reasoning – which is why online dating scams are so common. They can hook some victims by manipulating our innate dishonesty and making us act criminally ourselves – knowingly attempting to launder money as part of the Nigerian email scam, for instance. Finally, they can use the kindness of some well-meaning victims against them – scam emails begging for help and money are often sent out in the wake of a natural disaster.

Old tricks

What’s really fascinating, says Stajano, is that scammers have used these principles for centuries. For instance, the Nigerian email scam might seem the product of the digital age, but a version of it existed in 16th Century Europe.

There’s a good reason for that, he says: many of the vulnerabilities that scammers exploit are actually human strengths rather than weaknesses. He points to the work of psychologist Robert Cialdini at Arizona State University, who is famous for his work on the psychology of persuasion. “He’s explained that the authority principle, for example, is actually very helpful for surviving peacefully in human society,” says Stajano. “We shouldn’t see scam victims as stupid – they’re acting in a way that’s beneficial for our survival most of the time.”

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The seven persuasion principles might be as old as the hills, but Stajano says they are often ignored by security experts, who are as likely to blame security breaches on the people using their systems as they are to blame the scammers. “Too many security professionals think: users are such a pain – my system would be super-secure if only users behaved in the proper way,” he says. He is trying to persuade experts that they need to make security systems that work in harmony with – not despite - the way we behave.

Making those new systems won’t be easy, and Stajano believes the only solution is to encourage people to empathetically understand and anticipate human behaviour.

As an example of the problems security experts face, imagine you’re about to win an online auction for a mobile phone. You might reasonably expect to trust the seller, whose profile is brimming with positive feedback from other users. But Stajano points out that your trust in this case is really based on the herd principle: you can’t be sure that the seller is not in fact a scammer who has built up a positive reputation by trading with a handful of accomplices. Any of us might fall victim to this scam. In fact, even Modic has been tricked. “I bought a mobile phone from China that was not as it appeared online,” he says.

We may never be truly immune to confidence tricks. But perhaps ordinary users and system designers alike can protect ourselves to some degree by learning to think like a scammer.

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Could you be more vulnerable to scams than you think? Would you like to help ongoing research about conmen and their victims? Modic and colleagues are studying what makes people fall for scams, and they’d like your help. Complete a short survey about yourself hosted by the University of Cambridge.

If you would like to comment on this, or anything else you have seen on Future, head over to our Facebook or Google+ page, or message us on Twitter.

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It started as a headache, but soon became much stranger. Simon Baker entered the bathroom to see if a warm shower could ease his pain. “I looked up at the shower head, and it was as if the water droplets had stopped in mid-air”, he says. “They came into hard focus rapidly, over the course of a few seconds”. Where you’d normally perceive the streams as more of a blur of movement, he could see each one hanging in front of him, distorted by the pressure of the air rushing past. The effect, he recalls, was very similar to the way the bullets travelled in the Matrix movies. “It was like a high-speed film, slowed down.”

• See readers' stories of how they experienced time standing still

The next day, Baker went to hospital, where doctors found that he had suffered an aneurysm. The experience was soon overshadowed by the more immediate threat to his health, but in a follow-up appointment, he happened to mention what happened to his neurologist, Fred Ovsiew at Northwestern University in Chicago, who was struck by the vivid descriptions. “He was a very bright guy, and very eloquent” says Ovsiew, who recently wrote about Baker in the journal NeuroCase. (Baker’s identity was anonymised, which is typical for such studies, so this is not his real name).

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It’s easy to assume that time flows at the same rate for everybody, but experiences like Baker’s show that our continuous stream of consciousness is a fragile illusion, stitched together by the brain’s clever editing. By studying what happens during such extreme events, researchers are revealing how and why the brain plays these temporal tricks – and in some circumstances, they suggest, all of us can experience time warping.

Although Baker is perhaps the most dramatic case, a smattering of strikingly similar accounts can be found, intermittently, in medical literature. There are reports of time speeding up – so called “zeitraffer” phenomenon – and also more fragmentary experiences called “akinetopsia”, in which motion momentarily stops. For instance, travelling home one day, one 61-year-old woman reported that the movement of the closing train doors, and fellow passengers, was in slow motion and “broken up”, as if in “freeze frames”. A 58-year-old Japanese man, meanwhile, seemed to be experiencing life like a badly dubbed movie; in conversation, he found that although others’ voices sounded normal, they were out of sync with their faces. There may be many more unreported cases, says Ovsiew. “Since it’s a transient phenomenon, it could often be overlooked.”

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Such experiences almost always accompany problems like epilepsy or stroke. Baker was only 39 at the time of his experience, which seems to have been caused by a weakened blood vessel that began bleeding while he was carrying some heavy boxes. The result was a relatively large patch of neural damage in the right hemisphere. “In the scans, it looks like there’s a cigar in my head,” he jokes today.

Yet why did this affect Baker’s time perception? Some clues could come from studies that have attempted to pinpoint the regions responsible for our perception of time. Of particular interest is an area of the visual cortex, called V5. This region, which lies towards the back of the skull, has long been known to detect the motion of objects, but perhaps it has a more general role in measuring the passing of time. When Domenica Bueti and colleagues at the University Hospital of Lausanne, Switzerland zapped the area with a magnetic field to knock out its activity, her subjects found it tricky to do two things: they struggled to track the motion of dots on a screen, as would be expected,  but also found it hard to estimate how long some blue dots appeared too.

One explanation for this double-failure is that our motion perception system has its own stopwatch, recording how fast things are moving across our vision – and when this is disrupted by brain injury, the world stands still. For Baker, stepping into the shower might have exacerbated the problem, since the warm water would have drawn the blood away from the brain to the extremities of the body, further disturbing the brain’s processing.

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It is just one possibility; not all patients with time warping experiences have damage to V5, so other cogs in the brain’s time-keeping apparatus may also play a role.

Another explanation comes from the discovery that our brain records its perceptions in discrete “snapshots”, like the frames of a film reel. “The healthy brain reconstructs the experience and glues together the different frames,” says Rufin VanRullen at the French Centre for Brain and Cognition Research in Toulouse, “but if brain damage destroys the glue, you might only see the snapshots.”

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We may all experience the normal smooth picture breaking down occasionally. For starters, if you’ve ever looked at overtaking cars on the motorway, their wheels can seem to stand still. This happens because the brain’s intermittent snapshots fail to capture the wheel’s motion fully. If, for example, it has made a full rotation between each “frame”, it will seem to be in exactly the same position each snapshot, giving the illusion that it is stationary.

And users of LSD often report “visual trails” following moving objects, a bit like the trails of bullets in The Matrix movie. VanRullen suspects this might arise because the brain somehow overlaps those sensory snapshots, rather than refreshing its picture anew.

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Reports of time standing still are also common during a life-threatening accident; in one survey of people who had skirted close to death, more than 70% reported the feeling that the event occurred in slow motion. Some researchers claim that they are simply an artefact of memory, since the intense emotions lead us to lay down more details, so that we believe that the event lasted for longer only in hindsight. But the descriptions certainly sound close to those reported by the neurological patients, suggesting there may be some overlap.

For example, one person told researchers in the 1970s how they vividly remembered seeing the face of a train’s engineer during a near fatal collision: “It was like a movie run slowly so the frames progress with a jerky motion – that was how I saw the face”.

What’s more, Valtteri Arstila at University of Turku, Finland, points out that many of these subjects also report abnormally quick thinking. As one pilot, who’d faced a plane crash in the Vietnam War, put it: “when the nose-wheel strut collapsed I vividly recalled, in a matter of about three seconds, over a dozen actions necessary to successful recovery of flight attitude”. Reviewing the case studies and available scientific research on the matter, Arstila concludes that an automatic mechanism, triggered by stress hormones, might speed up the brain’s internal processing to help it handle the life or death situation. “Our thoughts and initiation of movements become faster – but because we are working faster, the external world appears to slow down,” he says. It is even possible that some athletes have deliberately trained themselves to create a time warp on demand: surfers, for instance, can often adjust their angle in the split second it takes to launch off steep waves, as the water rises overhead.

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For Baker, the experience was a one-off, and after surgery to remove the damaged blood vessels, he has now made a full recovery. He remains remarkably upbeat about his condition, pointing out that in some ways it has actually been of benefit. Beforehand, he had been somewhat taciturn, particularly around strangers – a tendency that had even been labelled a disability by his school. But today, his shyness has gone – a fact that is clearly evident as he chats happily during our telephone conversation. “It was more than just feeling a little more forthcoming – I suddenly felt compelled to talk,” he says. Ovsiew has verified the report with Baker’s wife. “She confirmed that he was calmer, more talkative, and more friendly in social situations,” says Ovsiew.

The experience of time freezing around him, meanwhile, has given him new wonder at the fragility of our conscious experiences. “It was a really concrete example of how something very localised in brain can change your whole perception of the world,” he says. “One minute I was fine, the next minute I was in an altered reality.”

Have you ever experienced time slowing down or speeding up? Let us know on our Facebook or Google+ page, or message us on Twitter.

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David Robson is BBC Future's feature writer. Follow him on Twitter: @d_a_robson

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You may have already met Slender Man – the preternaturally tall, spectral being wearing a black suit and tie, with a white and featureless face. He is often seen in the shadows of photos, stalking small children, and some say that he can drive you insane with terror. One of his first sightings came at an asylum; after a bloody rampage in the hospital, a photo emerged of his ghostly but silent presence hiding in the stair well while the chaos erupted around him.

Rising from humble internet forums, this modern urban legend has now inspired a slew of fan fiction, best-selling computer games and a series of short movies. But the tale has also taken a darker turn as the line between myth and reality became blurred: some are convinced that they have spotted Slender Man lurking behind trees and scaling the sides of buildings; and in January there were more claimed sightings in the UK reported by the British tabloids.

“I find it fascinating, because it really shows how folklore is always adapting to new technologies and media, rather than being some kind of relic of the past,” says anthropologist Jamie Tehrani at the University of Durham.

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The question is, why did this particular story infect people’s minds in a profound way? Assuming such widely-shared tales are not actually true, what makes them endure? During the last decade psychologists have started to sift out some of the features that make certain stories contagious, potentially explaining the appeal of everything from urban legends to Little Red Riding Hood.

To understand the appeal of tales like Slender Man, it makes sense to begin with his first outing. Starting on the Something Awful forum in 2006, a user, “Victor Surge”, posted two photos, doctored with the ghostly figure in the background. Beneath, he wrote some short, enigmatic captions, implicating the shadowy figure in the mysterious abduction of 14 children.

One of two recovered photographs from the Stirling City Library blaze. Notable for being taken the day which 14 children vanished and for what is referred to as “The Slender Man”. Deformities cited as film defects by officials. Fire at library occurred one week later. Actual photograph confiscated as evidence. — 1986, photographer: Mary Thomas, missing since June 13th, 1986.

And:

We didn't want to go, we didn't want to kill them, but its persistent silence and outstretched arms horrified and comforted us at the same time… — 1983, photographer unknown, presumed dead

His descriptions are chilling, for sure – but perhaps part of the appeal lay in the gaps of Surge's story, which leave space for us to project our own imagination. “Victor Surge’s original post provides tantalising hints of a larger narrative involving a terrifying creature,” notes semiotician Jeffrey Tolbert. “It suggests the being’s unique power to induce violence, and indicates that the photographers responsible for the images are missing or dead – and thus sets the stage for the processes that would lead to the communal construction of an entire narrative tradition.” Just take a look at the following video to see the lengths that some would go to in order to build that mythology:

Contains elements of horror; content may disturb some viewers

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It’s probably no coincidence that, within that skeletal framework, Slender Man also evokes some familiar fairy tale elements; psychologists are finding that there is good reason that those stories often follow certain set formulae.

Firstly, tales of the supernatural may be especially appealing since they are “minimally counter-intuitive”, combining both the familiar and the bizarre. “They depart from what's expected and as a result push us to process the information more deeply,” says Ara Norenzayan at the University of British Columbia, “so we remember more and are more likely to retell them.” Counter-intuitive elements could include a talking animal, or a pumpkin that turns into a chariot – but it’s not so much the nature, as the number of these narrative devices that seems to be crucial. Norenzayan’s analysis of Grimm’s fairy tales found that the most popular stories – as measured by the number of times they have been cited online – only have two or three supernatural surprises. Our brains, it seems, have only so much room for the bizarre before it becomes too confusing to be enjoyable.

Consider Little Red Riding Hood. “There are only a couple of things that don’t make sense – such as the talking wolf and her and the grandmother being rescued from the stomach,” says Tehrani. “But the idea of a girl visiting her grandmother – that makes perfect sense.” Yet the lesser-known tales such as The Donkey Lettuce flout those constraints. “Honestly, if you wanted me to summarise it, I couldn’t – there’s just so much weird stuff going on.” The same goes for contemporary urban legends. Tehrani recently examined the evolution of the Bloody Mary myth – that if you chant an incantation into the mirror, a mutilated face will appear before you. There are many different variants involving different characters and events, but, as with Grimm’s tales, the most popular almost always contained just two or three unsettling events.

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Crucially, Slender Man seems to titillate the brain’s sense of surprise in exactly the same way. “Slender Man is minimally counter-intuitive because, on the one hand, we can attribute psychological motivations to him just as we would any other person,” says Tehrani. “But on the other, he appears to be able to violate the laws of physics, by appearing out of thin air, and the laws of biology – he can stretch and shrink his body and grow tentacles.” In other words, the tale offers just enough hints of the eerie to pique our curiosity, without leaving us feeling too alienated.

Delighting in disgust

In terms of their wider themes, psychologists have found that, perhaps unsurprisingly, the most popular tales also tend to evoke strong emotions – and the feeling of disgust seems to make a story particularly potent. Julie Coultas at the University of Sussex recently asked subjects to read and share different versions of common urban legends, some more disgusting than others. One, in particular, seemed to stay in her students’ mind, about a woman who takes her poodle to Vietnam. As the woman fumbles with her order for a delicious steak, the dog trots into the kitchen. It is only when the bill comes, minus the cost of the meat, that she realises she has eaten her beloved pet. Even a year later, the students were still struck by the tale, she says. “It was amazing to see the difference in recall between the high and low disgust content stories,” says Coultas. Perhaps that can explain why urban legends are so often in very bad taste.

We are also drawn to themes of survival – which is why many stories deal with life and death. That makes sense, given our evolution – stories would have been an important way of transmitting valuable information that could save our skin at a later point.

But the most memorable tales, according to Tehrani’s recent lab experiments, involve some kind of social connection; we just can’t forget a piece of lurid gossip. His participants were given a choice of tales and asked to choose one to read, remember and pass on to another person. Each tale reflected the above biases in a different way, and it seemed to have a big effect on their popularity. One told the story of a woman who died after a poisonous spider made a nest in her unwashed beehive haircut. Dealing with death, it was a classic survival tale – but although it piqued people’s interest, it proved to be less easily remembered than some of the others. In contrast, a more memorable story concerned a woman who had cybersex with an unknown man, only to find out months later that it was her father. It’s hardly Jane Austen, but the story requires you to consider others’ motives and decisions, tapping into our social bias. (Others, along a similar vein, might include the story of the inadvertent biscuit thief that ends in excruciating embarrassment.)

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Appealing to both the social and survival biases, the story of a serial killer who lures women to their death, with the sounds of a baby crying proved to be most popular of all. Tehrani thinks this too can be explained by considering human prehistory; as we lived in bigger societies, our survival depended less on environmental dangers and more on other people, so we are primed to take notice of quirks in other people’s behaviour, as much as more immediate dangers.

Surprisingly, Slender Man only partially confirms these findings. “There are elements of these memes that exploit our survival bias, such as the fact he targets vulnerable children in a typical woodland setting, and our emotion bias – fear and disgust,” Tehrani says. Yet the story is almost completely lacking in social information. Even something as simple Little Red Riding Hood, he says, asks us to exercise our ability to understand that the wolf is lying as he builds up the girl’s trust. “Slender Man,” in comparison, “simply entices his victims using some kind of paranormal power”; there is no social conundrum for us to crack.

One possibility is that Slender Man is just a fluke – the exception that proved the rule. More intriguing, however, is the idea that it instead reflects a deeper change in the way that we craft folk tales thanks to the internet. Tehrani points out, for instance, that social stories may be more memorable but they weren’t necessarily more enjoyable, according to his participants. Memorability would have been crucial when stories were passed mouth to ear, but with the cut and paste buttons on our desktop, it perhaps plays less of a role. “We may find social content easier to remember, but actually, we are just as likely to want to hear about stories relevant to survival and to pass them on – so the advantage of social information over other biases disappears,” Tehrani says.

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In other words, as more stories are shared on the internet, our stories may lose some of their social nuances, and become even more ghoulish. “It is certainly feasible that story-telling in the digital age may evolve in a very different way from the fairy tales of the past, which were shaped by the cognitive constraints of oral transmission,” says Tehrani.

These are just musings, of course; Tehrani has yet to study the appeal of Slender Man formally, though he plans to look into the stories on creepypasta.com – a website that allows users to share and contribute many of these modern urban myths. “It’s very much on our to-do list.”

Story-telling is, after all, a craft like any other, evolving with tools and technology. Our entertainment has already seen monumental changes in literature and cinema. But perhaps those transformations are trickling down to the myths and legends we tell each other too – the humble stories that form a substantial, though neglected, contribution to our culture. It is an intriguing thought that the elements forged by storytellers from across the millennia are now being cast into a very different folk tale – the beginning of a tradition that our descendants may be reading and sharing on their tablets in centuries to come.

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Soon after World War II, Winston Churchill was visiting the White House when he is said to have had an uncanny experience. Having had a long bath with a Scotch and cigar, he reportedly walked into the adjoining bedroom – only to be met by the ghost of Abraham Lincoln. Unflappable, even while completely naked, Churchill apparently announced: “Good evening, Mr President. You seem to have me at a disadvantage.” The spirit smiled and vanished.

His supposed contact with the supernatural puts Churchill in illustrious company. Arthur Conan Doyle spoke to ghosts through mediums, while Alan Turing believed in telepathy. Three men who were all known for their razor-sharp thinking, yet couldn’t stop themselves from believing in the impossible. You may well join them. According to recent surveys, as many as three quarters of Americans believe in the paranormal, in some form, while nearly one in five claim to have actually seen a ghost.

Intrigued by these persistent beliefs, psychologists have started to look at why some of us can’t shake off old superstitions and folk-lore. Their findings may suggest some hidden virtues to believing in the paranormal. At the very least, it should cause you to question whether you hold more insidious beliefs about the world.

Some paranormal experiences are easily explainable, based on faulty activity in the brain. Reports of poltergeists invisibly moving objects seem to be consistent with damage to certain regions of the right hemisphere that are responsible for visual processing; certain forms of epilepsy, meanwhile, can cause the spooky feeling that a presence is stalking you close by – perhaps underlying accounts of faceless “shadow people” lurking in the surroundings.

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Out-of-body experiences, meanwhile, are now accepted neurological phenomena, while certain visual illusions could confound the healthy brain and create mythical beings. For example, one young Italian psychologist looked in the mirror one morning to find a grizzled old man staring back at him. His later experiments confirmed that the illusion is surprisingly common when you look at your reflection in the half light, perhaps because the brain struggles to construct the contours of your face, so it begins to try to fill in the missing information – even if that leads to the appearance of skulls, old hags or hideous animals.

So any combination of exhaustion, drugs, alcohol, and tricks of the light could contribute to single, isolated sightings, like that reported by Churchill. But what about the experiences of people like Conan Doyle, who seemed to see other-worldly actions on a day-to-day basis?

Protective shield

Psychologists studying religion have long suspected that a belief in the paranormal can be a kind of shield from the even harsher truths of the world. The idea is that when something unexpected happens – a death, natural disaster, or job loss – the brain scrambles around for answers, looking for meaning in the chaos. “It’s such an aversive state that if it can’t gain control objectively, we will get it by perceiving more structures around us, even if they don’t exist,” says Jennifer Whitson at the University of Texas, who studies pattern perception, and judgment and decision making. Even simply asking people to remember a time when they felt out of control, can make people see illusory forces at work, she has found. That included seeing patterns in the random movements of the stock market, for example, but it could also manifest itself by linking two unconnected events, such as the belief that “knocking on wood” for good luck would improve your chances in a job interview.

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Anthropomorphism is another common way that we try to understand events, says Adam Waytz at Northwestern University in Illinois. So we might think that a spirit lies behind a storm or that a demon is causing us to get ill – rather than acknowledging that we have no control over the matter; and if a branch is tapping on your window, you might be more inclined to imagine that it is a ghost sending you a message. “We create beliefs in ghosts, because we don’t like believing that the universe is random,” says Waytz. Again, this seems to be more common when we feel less control over our lives.

Given these strange turns of the mind, might some people be naturally inclined to see hidden patterns and motives, and could this explain why they are more superstitious than others? It is a question that Tapani Riekki at the University of Helsinki in Finland has tried to answer for the last few years. He says that believers often welcome his research, since they genuinely can’t understand why others don’t share their worldview. “They say that ’I don’t see why other people don’t feel what I feel, or believe what I believe’,” he says.

Hidden faces

Riekki recently asked sceptics and believers to view simple animations of moving shapes, while lying in a brain scanner. He found paranormal believers were more likely to see some kind of intention behind the movements – as if the shapes were playing a game of “tag”, say – and this was reflected in greater brain activity in the regions normally associated with “theory of mind” and understanding others’ motives. Riekki has also found that people who believe in the supernatural are more likely to see hidden faces in everyday photos – a finding confirmed by another team at the University of Amsterdam, who showed that paranormal believers are more likely to imagine that they had seen a walking figure in random light displays.

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Added to this, Riekki has found that believers may have weaker cognitive “inhibition”, compared to sceptics. That’s the skill that allows you to quash unwanted thoughts, so perhaps we are all spooked by strange coincidences and patterns from time to time, but sceptics are better at pushing them aside. Riekki gives the example of someone who is thinking about their mother, only for her to call two minutes later. “Is it just that sceptics can laugh and say it is just coincidence, and then think of something else?” he wonders. Significantly, another paper reported that paranormal believers also tend to have greater confidence in their decisions, even when they are based on ambiguous information. So once they have latched onto the belief, you might be less likely to let it go. 

Even so, most researchers agree that sceptics shouldn’t be too critical of people who harbour these beliefs. After all, one study has found that various superstitions can boost your performance in a range of skills. In one trial, bringing their favourite lucky charm into a memory test significantly improved subjects’ recall, since it seemed to increase their confidence in their own abilities. Another experiment tested the subjects’ golf putting ability. Telling them that they were using a “lucky” ball meant they were more likely to score than those simply using any old ball. Even something as simple as saying “break a leg” or “I’ll keep my fingers for you” improved the participants’ motor dexterity and their ability to solve anagrams.

And even if you think you are immune, you shouldn’t underestimate the power of suggestion. Michael Nees at the Lafayette College in Pennsylvania recently asked a group of students to listen to sound recordings from US ghost-hunting shows. Subtly priming the volunteers with the thought that they were involved in a paranormal study increased the number of voices they reported hearing in the fuzzy recordings – despite the fact that they mostly reported being sceptics. It seems that the merest expectation of hearing something spooky can set your mind whirring.

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Whitson’s research, meanwhile, shows how easy it is for us all to imagine strange happenings when we feel unsettled. Her latest experiment found that even priming someone with a feeling of hope – normally considered a positive emotion – can still increase people’s belief in the supernatural, or conspiracy theories. The reason, she says, is that hope is still full of uncertainty; it makes you question the future, compared to a feeling like anger where you might be surer of your righteousness.

And if you tell yourself that you have reasoned yourself out of superstitions and ghost stories, you might still harbour other beliefs that are equally fanciful, she says. It could be a full blown conspiracy theory about the government, or just suspicions that your colleagues are ganging up on you, based on a few spurious comments.

We can perhaps see the brain’s ability to “spot” illusory patterns in the response to the Ebola epidemic – such as the emergence of folk remedies (including the belief that drinking salt water is a cure), fears in the West that it will spread through air travel, and theories that it was created by industrialised governments.

“It’s easy to think of yourself as the one holding the rational cards, but it’s wiser to understand that every one of us are going to be prone to those mistakes when we feel like we are lacking control,” says Whitson. “We should all be ready to evaluate our assumptions more thoughtfully.” As Churchill, Turing and Conan Doyle showed us, even the most astute minds can be given to fancy from time to time.

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\"We create beliefs because we don’t like believing that the universe is random\"

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In A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge blamed cheese for causing his ghostly night-time encounters.  He only ate “a crumb”, and the story may have had a happy ending, but the idea that cheese gives you nightmares still persists. Is there any truth to this?

A few years ago there were reports that different types of British cheese gave people different kinds of good and bad dreams, though none of the study volunteers reported having nightmares as such. Stilton-eaters had bizarre dreams, fans of Red Leicester dreamt about the past, and those who ate Lancashire before bed dreamt about the future. If you want to dream about celebrities, apparently you should make Cheddar your bedtime snack.

But bear in mind that this was a survey conducted by the body that promotes cheese in the UK, one that goes by the wonderful name of The British Cheese Board. There is no doubt that it was a clever piece of marketing, but as a scientific study it had fundamental flaws. There was no control group, so we do not know, for instance, whether people who did not eat cheese in the evenings had more or fewer bad dreams.

Perchance to dream

For argument’s sake, though, let’s explore whether there is anything in cheese that could promote bad dreams. Eating heavy meals with a high fat content late at night can give you indigestion, which in turn disturbs your sleep. Disturbed sleep often involves more nightmares, or at least the memory of more nightmares, because you wake more often and remember them.

In some countries the last course eaten in a big meal is cheese, which might suggest that cheese leads to nightmares, but it could of course be the quantity of food, rather than cheese in particular which led to indigestion. It is worth noting that as well as blaming the crumb of cheese for his apparitions, Scrooge also blames “an undigested bit of beef, “a blot of mustard”, or possibly “a fragment of an underdone potato”.

But there is another substance contained in cheese which might be pertinent here – tryptophan. It is an amino acid found in various foods, including milk, chicken, turkey and peanuts. The body uses it to produce serotonin, a chemical messenger associated with stable mood and sound sleep.  Sometimes it has been suggested that this is why people who celebrate Christmas or Thanksgiving with roast turkey often feel sleepy after lunch – that and the alcohol, of course. Studies on tryptophan as a sleeping pill have shown mixed results, but for some people it is effective.

Extreme response

The idea that cheese has strange effects on the mind could come from a very real, but rare phenomenon known as the “cheese reaction”. There is a class of older antidepressants called monoamine oxidase B inhibitors, which reduce the breakdown of chemicals such as serotonin. These drugs can be effective in treating depression, but they have an unusual and very serious side effect. They prevent the breakdown of the substance tyramine, which occurs naturally in cheese. If tyramine builds up it can cause blood pressure to rise to levels high enough to increase the risk of heart problems or stroke.

The cheese reaction can prove fatal, so although this antidepressant is used less commonly now, people taking it are given strict warnings to avoid cheese and other foods, including cured or pickled products.  The problem is that the amount of tyramine contained in foods is highly variable; when patients experiment they might find they are fine on one occasion, but have a serious reaction the next.

So, incomplete as the evidence is, there is no solid proof that eating cheese at night causes nightmares. What we can say with more certainty is that if you eat immediately before going to bed, or have over-eaten, then indigestion might give you a restless night. But it could be the case that a little cheese might even help you sleep more soundly.

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Disclaimer
All content within this column is provided for general information only, and should not be treated as a substitute for the medical advice of your own doctor or any other health care professional. The BBC is not responsible or liable for any diagnosis made by a user based on the content of this site. The BBC is not liable for the contents of any external internet sites listed, nor does it endorse any commercial product or service mentioned or advised on any of the sites. Always consult your own GP if you're in any way concerned about your health.

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Down in the underground, things are evolving.   Not just evolving, going Wilde. It was good old Oscar who in 1889 came up with the much borrowed and adapted line “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life”. If you want an example of such mimicry, look no further than Mimic.   

Remember Mimic, the late 90s Guillermo Del Toro film in which strange giant insectoids begin appearing in the Manhattan subway system? It turns out that it’s all the result of scientists’ misguided attempts at eradicating nasty disease-carrying cockroaches by genetically engineering a mutant bug to wipe them out.    The designer creature does the job, but then continues to evolve into something far more alarming. Which is what generally happens in movies anytime genes get tampered with.

In Del Toro’s hands Mimic is a preposterously entertaining thrill-ride with plentiful clever touches. The funny thing, though, is that a real-life version of the same story has been playing out in the same locations. Something which seems to have evolved in underground railway tunnels and that feeds on humans has managed to work its way up through Manhattan basements and air vents and out to the inhabitants of the Upper West Side. A lot of people have been attacked.    

Plot twist

When the invasion began in late summer 2010, it was soon clear than they were being caused by huge numbers of what CBS described as “extra blood thirsty” mosquitoes, but the real surprise was the finding that they were a type previously almost unknown in Manhattan. Culex pipiens molestus (the molestus bit being that they molest us more than ordinary mozzies) is more commonly known as the London Underground mosquito, a distinct species that was first identified in the city’s tube tunnels but which has now been found in many other subway systems across the world.    

The same creature diverging over time to develop an above ground form and a more dangerous close relative which ekes out its existence in tunnels below the surface has definite shades of the Eloi and Morlocks from HG Wells’ The Time Machine. Quite when and where this happened with the mosquito and its subterranean cousin isn’t clear. There is ample evidence of Londoners sheltering in underground stations during the blitz having been repeatedly bitten, but it wasn’t until around a decade ago that PhD student Katherine Byrne took the trouble to go down in the tube station at midnight and look for the insects once the trains had stopped running. 

She found plenty of pools of scummy water containing larvae, and by comparing them with mosquito larvae from up top was able – with her University of London supervisor Richard Nicholas – to establish that although outwardly similar, there were clear genetic and behavioural differences between the two varieties. For starters while the ones above ground hibernate in winter and usually only bite birds, the more troglodytic mosquitoes breed all year round in the warm tunnels and seem to have a particular appetite for human blood.  

There’s lots more to C. Molestus including the question of how they have spread from subway to Metro to Tube across the world.   But in the last few days there’s been a twist to the story that Guillermo Del Toro himself would have been proud of.  It seems the mosquitoes aren’t the only unexpected development shared between different underground rapid transit systems. The systems themselves are evolving, and evolving to become ever more alike.

A paper in the latest issue of the Royal Society journal Interface details how researchers at France’s National Centre for Scientific Research have carried out a mathematical analysis of 14 of the world’s largest subway systems. They discovered that despite differences of geography and economics and scale and a lack of co-ordinated central planning, they all appear to be converging on the same overall network structure. Some similarities are only to be expected – a core with lines branching off it may be obvious as well as functional, and later transport engineers are likely to have been influenced by the work of earlier ones – but there are others which are harder to explain.   Such as all the different subways where the distance from the city centre to its furthest station was twice the diameter of the system’s core. Or the total number of stations again and again being proportional to the square of the number of lines.

There are suggestions that at the very least this is evidence of urban evolution and self-organisation, and that it could even help us to build cities which have the capacity for self-improvement. Perhaps.  In the shorter term the idea of an ever-evolving network of tunnels sounds like a scary subterranean variant on the changing corridors and stairs of Hogwarts or the hotel in recent Dr Who episode The God Complex.   So is that art mimicking life or something deeper?

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What’s your earliest memory? For me, the answer is not pleasant.

I’m about four years old, and I’m sitting in the green-carpeted hallway of our family’s first home in Biloxi, Mississippi. The bathroom door stands open in front of me, and my mother is emerging from the shower. As she pulls a towel from the rack, I notice a dark stain marring that clean, fluffy pink material. It’s a cockroach. I see it before she does. As she wraps the towel around her body, however, it quickly makes itself known. She shrieks, flailing and stomping, suddenly naked and vulnerable and afraid. I begin to cry.

I recently asked my mother about this event, and she had no idea what I was talking about. Perhaps I dreamed it, or my early memory is flawed. Or perhaps it was just business-as-usual in our Southern US home, where – no matter what chemical barriers were erected – cockroaches inevitably found their way inside.

Real or imaginary, this incident triggered an intense dislike of cockroaches that would only intensify as years passed and encounters with those creatures multiplied. For me, a roach is not just an insect. It is a psychological gateway into a lengthy laundry list of traumatic experiences: digging through a box of supplies in my outdoor playhouse when a roach zips out and scuttles up my leg, its spiky appendages pricking at my skin. Watching my first cat, Salty, as he traps a roach, dismembers it with his claws and mouth, and then eats the succulent, writhing remains. Finding a small dead cockroach tangled in my wet hair after a trip to the beach, and thereafter suffering recurring nightmares of picking roaches out of my hair.

Roaches invade our homes and make those intimate spaces their own. As physical embodiments of filth and germs, they show that for all of our fortifications against dirt and disease, those efforts are ultimately futile. “They’ve really figured out how to exploit the opportunities we create, and in doing so, developed behaviours and life histories that prevent us from controlling them,” says Jeff Lockwood, a professor of natural sciences and humanities at the University of Wyoming. “In a sense, we loathe that which we foster.” Our very existence enables them to thrive.

The true nature of that relationship – and the irrational fear it so often inspires – was something I was compelled to learn more about for very personal reasons. That mission would require me to dig out the cockroach exoskeletons in my closet, explore intriguing new techniques to help us conquer insect fear, and ultimately confront the terror head-on, by journeying into the heart of six-legged darkness, at one of the premier cockroach labs in the world. Along the way, however, I would uncover an unsettling truth about the future of our relationship with roaches, and it would transform the way I see these life-long foes.

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Delving into cockroach lore, I quickly learned that our distaste for them goes way back. The ancient Egyptians fashioned spells imploring the ram-headed god Khnum to banish cockroaches; in ancient Rome, Pliny the Elder wrote of the “disgusting” nature of those pests; and John Smith of Jamestown complained of the “ill-scented dung” of the “cacarooch”, which quickly took up residence throughout the New World. By the 19th Century, the handful of cockroach species that carved out a niche for themselves as pests had more or less achieved global domination.

Yet given what we know today, logically it does not make sense to fear cockroaches. Unlike mosquitoes, ticks or fleas, roaches aren’t disease vectors, and they do not feed directly on our blood, skin or fluids. We don’t go screaming when we see a mosquito, even though they are the world’s deadliest animal. Yes, cockroaches wallow in filth, but a case of food poisoning is probably about as bad as it gets if one of those pests skitters across your slice of pizza – a stroll through the park compared to malaria, yellow fever or dengue fever.

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Still, anecdotally, many people suffer from katsaridaphobia, or cockroach phobia. Lockwood guesses that the number reaches well into the tens of millions, and Richard Kaae, an entomologist at California State University, thinks that cockroaches are the number one insects feared by humans. Quantifying the impacts of katsaridaphobia is difficult, however. The vast majority of people incapacitated by roaches never seek help, primarily because they want to do everything possible to avoid even speaking of those creatures. I was one of them – until I decided to do something about it.

They creep up on you
I had been busy all afternoon in my New Orleans kitchen, preparing dinner for a guy I liked. After the meal, we headed outside to enjoy the magnolia-perfumed breeze drifting off the Mississippi. As I coyly sipped my wine – SMACK! – a flying cockroach touched down straight on my cheek. Releasing a staccato scream, I spasmodically jerked my arms upward and sent a waterfall of red wine down my date’s face and white shirt. He stood there, stunned. That roach ruined my date. 

In the worst cases, roaches actively impact the victim’s life. Psychologists report patients too terrified to get out of bed at night or to go to the kitchen for fear of encountering a cockroach. Emily Driscoll, a documentary producer in New York City, once became trapped in a hotel room in India because a roach was sitting on the door handle. “I couldn’t move, I was paralysed,” she says. “I needed to keep in it my sight.”

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Andrew Stein, a computer programmer who grew up in New Orleans but now lives in New York, also recalls once being trapped by a roach. One night in his newly renovated Brooklyn apartment, he heard a familiar scratch-scratch-scratch coming from the bathroom. “This was not a place I was expecting to see a bunch of insects,” he says. “But I thought, ‘That sounds like it could be a cockroach.’”

Investigating, he found a large American cockroach clinging to his bath towel. He spent the next two hours camped out in the hallway, trying to work up the courage to go back inside and kill the roach. When his roommate came home at around 2am, however, Stein saw a better way out: he paid his roommate $10 to dispose of the roach rather than face it himself. “That’s probably the most emasculating thing I’ve ever told anyone,” he says. 

It’s hard to pinpoint what exactly it is about cockroaches that bothers people so much, simply because there are so many answers. “They’re erratic; it’s like they’re doing eight things at once; they look dirty; they move really fast; they seem to have no fear of people,” Stein rattles off. “The first thing I think about when I see one is that that thing could jump across the room and touch me if it wanted to – and there’s nothing I could do about it.”

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As Lockwood explains, the things we find so repulsive about roaches are all a matter of those creatures’ biology. “Cockroaches tap into this sort of evolutionary aversion we have to greasy, smelly, slimy things,” he says. Their unpredictable movements and phenomenal speed – relative to their size, they’re one of the fastest terrestrial animals on Earth – evolved as escape mechanisms for evading predators. Their stench, too, is indicative of an underlying purpose. The reason why smashed cockroaches smell like a clogged truck stop toilet that’s been fermenting in 90-degree heat is because they store nitrogenous waste – uric acid, specifically – in their fat for recycling. Finally, their sickly slick feel derives from a lipid-based wax that their cuticle secretes to prevent water loss. None of these traits bode well for the human observer.

“Plus,” Lockwood adds, “they’re defiant little bastards.”

Roaches are incredibly prolific, and hard to get rid of. If you start out with one pair of German cockroaches and allow them to reproduce in peace and with bountiful food available, then “within a couple years you could have two to three million”, Kaae says. They’ll also eat just about anything, from cork to paper to grass. In the heaviest of infestations – on Navy submarines and in children’s bedrooms alike – they will gnaw off their sleeping victims’ eyelashes. 

But those physical and behavioural traits do not explain why roaches are so frequently the subjects of phobias. As it turns out, the root of that fear often traces back to some traumatic experience in life, such as witnessing your mother scream at the sight of a roach. Often, that fear forms early, around the age of four or five. “Evolutionarily, we’re highly attuned to picking up on cultural clues from parents and society as to how we ought to respond to insects,” Lockwood says. “Today, most of that feedback is negative so we wind up raising anxious children.”

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Some do manage to evade that fear, however. Philip Koehler, a veteran entomologist with a mischievous twinkle in his eye, probably spends more time (voluntarily) with cockroaches than almost anyone else in the world. At his lab at the University of Florida, he keeps around a million of those insects. Although intimately familiar with the roach antics that bother so many people, he’s nonplussed. “I didn’t overcome any fear because I never had any fear,” he says, chuckling. “I was probably a twisted individual right from start.”

His fascination with those creatures does have its limits, however. “Personally, I don’t find them to be attractive,” he admits.

On a warm spring morning I dropped by Koehler’s office with a two-fold mission: glean all I can about his pesky research subjects and, more importantly, confront them one-on-one.

The clutter of Koehler’s office reflects a nearly 40-year career; the walls and shelves are crowded with gag gifts and posters professing his comical hatred, not of roaches, but of cats; faded, poster-sized prints of the horrendous cockroach infestations of the 80s; and a wall full of awards. Outside, a disturbingly realistic 6-foot tall metal cockroach sculpture, lovingly crafted by one of his former students, guards his door. Earlier, one of Koehler’s students warned me that “Dr Koehler loves to make people feel strange”, and I half expect some sort of trickery – a roach in my coffee, an insect tossed my way, but luckily we start slow. The trust is not broken. He’s here to help.  

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Koehler is no psychologist, but he’s familiar with treatments for cockroach phobias. Several years ago, a woman in her 50s approached him. She said her life was completely disrupted by cockroaches; everywhere she went, she couldn’t function because she was always on the lookout for a cockroach. Was there anything he could do to help? He invited her to the lab for an informal session of exposure therapy, starting small by simply talking about roaches, then progressing to photos, pinned roaches and eventually the real deal. After several visits, her hyperventilating stopped and she was even able to hold a hissing cockroach. I’ve travelled to Gainesville to see if the same treatment could work for me.

He begins by weeding out my issue with roaches. “What is it you don’t like about them?” he asks, peering inquisitively from behind wire-framed glasses. “The colour, the movement, maybe the feel of their legs?”

I relay a few of my stories, trying to make him understand, and he listens patiently until I finish. “So the roaches never really hurt you?” he asks, leaning forward over the desk. He’s challenging the logic of my fear – a tried and true tactic when it comes to treating irrational phobias.

“Well, no, I guess not,” I admit. “It’s just they were there… They were in my space…”

“They just startled you,” he suggests.

“Yeah, I guess it must be something about the surprise…”

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He’s technically right, but I don’t feel fully satisfied with the conclusion we’ve reached. “Startled” doesn’t begin to articulate what roaches manage to do to me. Later, I realise how I should have conveyed the problem. When a roach slinks into my bedroom at night or flies into my face, I am forced to acknowledge that all is not under my control. Just as a leering cat-caller or subway groper might not inflict physical harm on his victims, that undesirable interaction can still inspire intense distress. Unprovoked danger – whether actual or perceived – can appear without warning. It can slink out of a dark alleyway or from beneath a closet door at any moment.

To their victims, cockroaches commit a personal violation. In the words of George A. Romero, they creep up on you. And there’s nothing you can do to stop them.

Yet could there be a way to conquer that aversion?

Exposure therapy
“Hey, Roach!” a third-grade classmate jeered at me one day. Cleverly, he had replaced my nickname, “Rach”, with that of my nemesis. But rather than being offended, I fully embraced the new moniker, drawing cartoon roaches on folded notes passed under desks to friends, encouraging the nickname’s use. Roaches are cute, I told myself, even lovable. There’s nothing to be afraid of. But when a living roach would appear in the school bathroom or gym, these soothing thoughts were revealed for what they really were: lies told to comfort a scared little girl.

Over the years, I noticed my phobia intensifying. Viewing this as a weakness, I tried in my own ways to self medicate. In high school, I stayed up late playing “Bad Mojo,” a computer game about a criminal entomologist who is transformed into a cockroach, and encouraged slumber party karaoke of “Joe’s Apartment” cockroach song renditions. But digitised, anthropomorphised roaches on a two-dimensional screen and real-life roaches are not at all the same beast.

A bit older and living in New Orleans, I volunteered to work at the Audubon Zoo’s hands-on Discovery Walk, and requested to work with the Madagascar hissing cockroaches and giant Brazilian cockroaches. Perhaps if I demonstrated roaches’ harmlessness to children, I thought, I could somehow undo my own distaste for them. But even though I regularly handled those exotic species, I still performed a sort of panicked Riverdance each time one of their urban cousins crossed my path in the infested Crescent City.

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I find it hard to believe that anything could ever change my feelings and reaction towards roaches. But not everyone agrees with this hopeless prognosis.

Defeating phobias, therapists insist, just requires becoming habituated to the cause of that fear, whether it’s cockroaches, heights or being in crowds. Expose someone to the same thing over and over again and it will eventually become boring and commonplace. Untold numbers of phobics go untreated, however, simply because few possess the unique mix of desperation and bravery needed to willingly sign up for the chance to interact with a cockroach. “The idea of touching a roach is pretty much the worst thing I can think of,” Stein says.

Some therapists are designing workarounds for skittish patients. A team of researchers at the James I University in Spain thinks that augmented reality could be a solution for treating cockroach phobia. Augmented reality projects computerised images into the real world, allowing a more convincing encounter. To apply this for cockroach phobia treatments, a headset combined with a six degrees of freedom tracking system creates a vision of cockroaches running over the wearer’s actual hand.

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To test the system, the Spanish researchers recruited six participants, all of who suffered from debilitating, clinically verified cockroach phobias. One participant wanted to sell her apartment after spotting a roach, while another refused to visit her grandmother for fear of seeing a cockroach. Still others reported “complete loss of control” when seeing a cockroach.

Before undergoing augmented reality therapy, none of the women would agree to enter a room that contained a live cockroach in a plastic container. After putting on the augmented reality headset and watching fantasy roaches crawl all over their hands for one to three hours, however, the women’s anxiety levels slowly began to decline. When the treatment session concluded, they were able to approach the live cockroach and even stick a finger into its container for a few seconds. Twelve months after the original treatment, the participants maintained those improvements.

“A phobic brain has stored bad information about cockroaches: it thinks cockroaches are very, very dangerous,” says Cristina Botella, a professor of clinical psychology and leader of the study. The augmented reality system, however, changes that fear structure by demonstrating cockroaches’ harmlessness. “The brain is able to store new information that is not compatible with the old,” she says.  

Unfortunately, augmented reality is not yet available in a clinical setting. Until further research can be completed and the treatment gains approval for use in therapy, phobics wishing to rid themselves of their fear must go about it in the old fashioned way: through cognitive behaviour therapy paired with exposure therapy.

For those who can garner the courage to try it, their efforts are often rewarded in as few as one to three sessions. “These therapies provide a way to live with those creatures rather than spend a life trying to avoid them,” Lockwood says.  

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Back in Gainesville, I’m hoping this kind of therapy might work for me. We leave Koehler’s office, heading to a closed door just down the hall. “And here we have our cockroach room!” he proclaims, swinging open the portal to my personal hell. I want to wait a moment to gather my resolve, but he shoos me in. Suddenly, I am surrounded by at least a million roaches of 14 different species. They are on display no more than four feet in front of me, in dozens of glass jars fitted with deceptively festive orange and blue lids. Each contains a teeming mass of insects, from bitty babies smaller than my pinky nail to giant Brazilian cockroaches larger than a mouse. My gaze, however, immediately seeks out and settles on that most reviled species of all: the American cockroach.

There they sit, about a dozen of them: bloated, shining, and the colour of slick sewage, the glass of their enclosure stained with faeces and regurgitate. Their antennae waggle as they slowly mull about the confines of their glass enclosure. I can hear them; the gentle scratch, scratch, scratch of their spiny feet. As Koehler and Liz Pereira, the lab’s official “roach rearer,” parade various specimens before me – the comical Madagascar hissing roaches, pullers of toy tractors; the Suriname cockroach, which burrows into its substrate like an earthworm; a colony of German cockroaches named after the Chinese restaurant they were collected from; the Cuban cockroach, a striking chartreuse creature with delicate wings, the only lovable one of the bunch, but sadly discovered to have died sometime over the past day – my peripheral vision never leaves those American cockroaches. I can feel it in the hairs on my arms, in the racy beat of my heart and slight shortness of breath.

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Finally, the moment to confront those monsters has arrived. Pereira pulls the American cockroaches off their place on the shelf and gently deposits them on the counter before me. I take an instinctive step back, putting Koehler’s body between the roaches and myself, subconsciously seeking out a protective parental presence as that timeless fear resurfaces. Pereira, meanwhile, is all giggles. “On my first day here I reacted like you,” she says, grinning. Then, she moves to remove the lid.

“Wait! Won’t they fly out?” I protest – but it’s already done.

The reek of their existence fills the small room, and I crinkle my nose while craning my neck toward the jar. Nestled within protective folds of cardboard, several large roaches wave back to me with their antennae.

I swallow, and then ask, “Is it possible to touch one?” Koehler grins. “Of course it is!”

In one swift motion, Pereira snatches the cardboard shelter from the jar, seamlessly transferring it to another empty container and banging it against the walls. The roaches tumble forth from their hideout, scattering around the glass enclosure in startled confusion. She uses carbon dioxide to sedate them (I’m curious but not crazy). Eventually, they all grow still.

Pereira reaches in and scoops one up. “Want to hold it?” she asks.

I extend a trembling hand, and she drops a fat specimen it into my open palm. My brain struggles to register this conflicting information – I am holding a cockroach, and it’s fine – and I laugh nervously, slightly hysterically even, as Koehler snaps a few photos. And then it’s over. Pereira gently takes the roach and returns it to its slumbering friends.

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Later, I send a photo of myself holding the roach to my boyfriend. “It doesn’t count if you’re wearing a glove!” he texts back. He clearly doesn’t understand, I think, shaking my head. Only a fellow phobic would understand. Glove or no glove, I held a cockroach, and I survived.

Plus, what we’ve discovered about roaches recently suggests that, if we value our health, it’s wise to avoid physical contact.

Cause for alarm
One early morning during my teenage years, I groggily got out of bed and reached for a box of cookie leftovers on my bedroom floor. I took a big bite, and – while chewing – casually noticed a large chunk of chocolate icing was still in the box. Except it wasn’t icing. It was a tremendous American cockroach. A roach that had, for all I know, dredged itself in raw sewage and rotting meat, not to mention toting along its own natural garden of microbial terror. I spewed out my mouthful, splattering my white and pink flower-patterned wallpaper with dark streaks of chocolate-infused spittle. Those stains never did come out.

There was a reason I wore that glove in Koehler’s roach room. People have long suspected that cockroaches are mechanical transmitters of disease – they walk through rot and faeces and filth and then deposit those germs onto other surfaces. But it’s hard to prove that a cockroach is to blame for a case of food poisoning when it could be a chef’s dirty hands or any number of other factors that introduced the contamination. Several years ago, however, Koehler and one of his students helped prove that cockroaches could at least plausibly transmit harmful bacteria. Bacteria such as salmonella and E. coli O157:H7 – the deadly kind – can actually swim through the cockroaches’ waxy outer layers and survive there for at least two months, all the while posing a risk for being transferred to food. Bacteria can also survive a trip through a cockroach gut, so faeces scattered throughout a kitchen or home are like little land mines of potential disease. 

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Spreading disease, however, likely is not their biggest impact on our health. Proteins found in cockroach faeces, regurgitates, skin and body parts are potent allergens for many people, as proven when entomologists often become acutely allergic to their research subjects. One famous cockroach expert, William Bell, grew so allergic to the arthropods’ cuticles that he could no longer eat lobster by the end of his career. Likewise, some people who seem to be allergic to coffee or chocolate are actually just aversely reacting to ground up cockroach parts sprinkled into those products.

But the worst problems with cockroach allergies occur in urban centres, where there’s often no escaping them. People breathe in whiffs of cockroaches on the subway and in restaurants, on the bus and in the street. For many, especially those who live in large apartment buildings with inadequate pest control, their homes are also perfumed with these invisible allergens. If a neighbour isn’t taking care of his cockroach problem, then it’s almost guaranteed that those allergens will find their way into adjacent apartments, through air vents, shared hallways and pioneering insects travelling through communal walls and plumbing.

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Children are the most impacted victims of cockroach allergies, which have also been associated with asthma attacks. The distribution of asthma is not at all even across New York. In some neighbourhoods, rates soar to 20%.

In Manhattan’s far north, on 168th street, Matt Perzanowski studies these allergens at his lab at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. He and his colleagues travel to homes across the city and vacuum up dust samples in kitchens and beds. In his white, sterile lab, he analyses the contents of those vials for cockroach parts. From looking, you’d never guess that the bodies and refuse of six-legged invaders taint those harmless-looking bits of fuzz and dust. “Cockroaches haven’t changed,” he says. “The critical thing that’s changed in terms of exposure is that kids just spent a lot more time inside now, which means they’re around cockroaches more.”

There are surely other factors, but Perzanowski has found that kids who live in neighbourhoods with higher rates of asthma are about twice as likely to be allergic to roaches.

Roaches, in other words, are more than just a source of irrational fear. They may be making us unwell. The question is, what can we do about it?

The coming war
I douse the roach in a stream of Raid, taking perverse pleasure in its dance of death. Try as it might, the roach can no longer get a grip on the plaster wall. It topples backward, antennae flailing, wings unfolding, running in frenzied figure-of-eights as if searching for a way out. But it will find no respite from the neurotoxin. Minutes later, it has bucked itself onto its back, its abdomen curled into itself, the closest a roach could come to a foetal position. Life occasionally reasserts itself with a deceptive spasm of the legs, but I know this roach is toast.

Naively, we thought we could stop them. Back in the 1990s, we assumed the war was won when bait traps hit the market. After decades of inefficient home treatments, we had finally developed a method that seemed to completely devastate the enemy. For roaches, baits were “like crack-cocaine, the roaches loved them so much”, says Jack Brans, owners of Brans Pest Control in Harahan, Louisiana. The hoards were pushed back, the cockroach problem all but eliminated. We humans became complacent. Assuming the problem had been taken care of, fewer entomologists dedicated their studies to roaches, and funding for roach-related research and poisons shifted to other pests, like bedbugs.

But that success will likely be short-lived. In the early 2000s, a darkness began to re-emerge in kitchens and bathrooms across the country. Whispers of a growing enemy proliferated at entomological conferences across the country. The roaches, experts realised, had begun to fight back. Baits were no longer as effective as they once were.

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Last year, researchers discovered at least one of the problems: cockroaches have evolved a glucose aversion. The sweetener that roaches originally found irresistible now registers as bitter. With a dearth of researchers available to battle those insects and plenty of regulatory hurdles in the way of developing speedy alternatives, some believe that we’re poised on the edge of a coming invasion. “Right now, the German cockroach is making this huge comeback,” Koehler says. “A pest control operator called me just today and said that roaches are running all over the place, that they haven’t found anything that will kill them.”

Koehler believes that we will never defeat the roaches. As he points out, those insects were already doing well for themselves for hundreds of millions of years before we showed up. We just gave them the extra boost they needed for global domination. “They’ve been able to come up with solutions for almost everything that’s been thrown at them for more than 300 million years,” he says, a hint of awe in his voice. “There’s no way that humans could survive the changes that cockroaches have endured.”

Most likely, they will outlast us, too. When our species finally bites the dust, cockroaches will be there to feast on the rotting remains.

As I’ve come to realise, we need to master our phobias. If not, Koehler warns, “we’re going to be living in a roach-filled, skittish society”.

As for me, I don’t plan on nurturing roach colonies in my apartment anytime soon, and I’ll continue to keep a can of Raid under my sink. But when the summer approaches and the roaches creep out of their hiding places, I’ve resolved to try to do what many other New Yorkers do: just ignore them. Otherwise, I’d be setting myself up for a very distressing future indeed. It’s time to get over my fear, and learn to live with our conquerors.

Do you have a cockroach experience you’d like to share? Let us know on our Facebook or Google+ page, or message us on Twitter.

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The documentary Dinosaur 13 may be the most accurate film about dinosaurs ever made. It’s also among the most moving, telling how fossil hunters in South Dakota unearthed the largest and most complete T-rex skeleton ever found. Instead of it becoming the centrepiece of their nearby museum – as they planned – what followed was a bitter custody battle over the fossil, an FBI raid, a trial and a long prison term for one of the palaeontologists.

The remains were sold off at auction for close to $8m, none of which went to the discoverers, and now reside in a private museum in Chicago almost a thousand miles away.

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The power of the documentary comes from the story itself and the way we come to know and care about most of the key individuals involved – including the T-rex. Just as important is what’s not there. It has none of the visuals that have become so familiar from movies and TV shows about dinosaurs: no computer generated tyrannosaurs, no animatronics, not even any stop-motion creatures or men in monster suits stomping about on screen.

Lumbering reality?

As well as going back to the dawn of time, dinosaurs go back almost to the dawn of cinema itself. For a century, film and television-makers have been using every bit of evolving technology at their disposal to raise the dead and make dinosaurs walk the Earth again. They’ve turned these extinct prehistoric beasts into living icons of contemporary culture and shaped our thinking about every aspect of their appearance and behaviour.

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The problem is, much of what they’ve taught us is wrong.

From Gertie, a perpetually peckish Brontosaurus (a name now formally phased out in favour of Apatosaurus) which starred in a series of black and white silent cartoons in the 1910s right through to today’s overwhelming 3D surround-sound CGI creations, audiences assume that what’s lumbering in front of them is what dinosaurs were really like.

Sometimes they assume even more. In 1922, while on a lecture of America, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was invited by his friend Harry Houdini to a meeting of his fellow illusionists. He decided to play a trick of his own, presenting a short film without comment. The front page of the New York Times on 3 June relates how Doyle “Mystifies World-Famed Magicians with Pictures of Prehistoric Beasts”.  Many of them apparently thought the moving images they had been shown were of genuine living dinosaurs that had somehow escaped extinction. The truth, only revealed the next day, was this was footage created by Willis O’Brien – later of King Kong fame – for a forthcoming film adaptation of Conan Doyle’s novel The Lost World.

Colour conundrum

By today’s standards the stop-motion animation looks clunky and jerky and obviously fake, but seeing is believing. Back then when no-one had witnessed anything like it, the illusionists – despite their expertise – struggled not to believe what they saw.

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Little has changed since Conan Doyle hoodwinked Houdini and company. Today’s special effects are vastly more sophisticated, but they still have the same goal of fooling us into accepting what we are seeing is real. We think we know what dinosaurs looked and sounded and moved like simply because we’ve watched countless hours of them galumphing around in films and documentaries. But although animatronics and CGI advances have made them much more compelling and convincing, what we see on screen remains at least as much the product of fantasy as reality.

For all the huge strides made by palaeontology and the use of new imaging techniques to get pigment and tissue details from fossils, we still have only the haziest idea what colour most dinosaurs were. Maybe they had polka dots or were purple like Barney. Many more than we used to believe now appear to have been feathery not leathery, including Jurassic Park’s velociraptors (which were also much smaller than in the movies, about the size of a large chicken) and quite possibly T-rex itself. And bar a couple of exceptions, we are still largely clueless as to what noises they would have made. Work on a well-preserved Parasaurolophus skull indicated it may have made sounds akin to low notes from a trombone. As to how they moved, what and how they ate and many other key details, it’s fair to say our ideas are still in flux.

Documentary dilemmas

In the end, fiction is fiction, so it’s arguable that it doesn’t matter that much if Jurassic Park and its ilk stomp on a few facts in the cause of creating drama. All monster movies take liberties: the latest incarnation of Godzilla, for instance, is far too big to be plausibly supported by his own legs. Where this blurring of what-we-know and what-we-conjecture is more significant is in programmes that could be mistaken for reality

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The archetype is Walking with Dinosaurs, often cited as the most successful television documentary series of all time. Technically dazzling and entertaining as the programmes undoubtedly are, can they truly be classified as documentaries? With a format familiar to viewers from nature programmes, scores of scientists credited as consultants, and (in the UK version) Kenneth Branagh’s compellingly matter-of-fact narration, it often feels like everything you are being shown and told is established beyond doubt. It hasn’t. These are creatures, environments, situations and behaviours from tens or even hundreds of millions of years ago.

Shows of this kind are of necessity simulations fuelled by speculation: some elements are based on what most palaeontologists are very confident about from the fossil record, some are what their current best hunch is, and some are possible but far from probable scenarios weaved in to make it more gripping television. New finds and new theories mean our thinking is continuing to develop, so that various details depicted in Walking With Dinosaurs – right up to how some of the biggest dinosaurs would have walked – are now thought to be wrong.

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Это хорошая идея, чтобы помнить о себе. работа ведения заметок умозаключений. Они будут хорошо это скрывать, но все они в мире. Этот б-фильм с участием классических динозавров и ранних людей & ndash; даже если два не пришел в течение 60 миллионов лет друг от друга и Ndash; Вот так это было уда и похвасталось смелым слоганом. Пока у нас много сегодняшних динозавров & ldquo; документальные фильмы ” также изображать внимание, так оно и было это, в лучшем случае, путь It Might Возможно, был, они могут обладать как гибридом науки факта и изобретательской научной фантастикой, что они & hellip; их нет.

Динозавра 13 там нет US and UK.

Если вы ищете будущее, зайдите на наш Facebook or Google+ page, or message us on Twitter.

","BusinessUnit":"worldwide","CalloutBody":"","CalloutPosition":"","CalloutSubtitle":"","CalloutTitle":"","Campaign":null,"Collection":[],"DisableAdverts":false,"DisplayDate":"2014-08-20T00:00:00Z","Geolocation":null,"HeadlineLong":"Why movie dinosaurs are nothing like the real thing","HeadlineShort":"How movie dinosaurs lied to us","HideRelated":false,"Horizontal":null,"HyperHorizontal":null,"Intro":"Movie dinosaurs are almost as old as cinema itself. But our big screen version of these prehistoric beasts may be very wide of the mark, argues Quentin. Это была также, которая вызвала горькие религиозные споры и могла заставить вас сходить с ума.