If you've ever felt an urge to scratch after witnessing someone else relieve their own itch, you're certainly not alone. Itching can be contagious and the phenomenon is so common it doesn't just affect humans. Now researchers may understand why.
If you've ever felt an urge to scratch after witnessing someone else relieve their own itch, you're certainly not alone. Itching can be contagious and the phenomenon is so common it doesn't just affect humans. Now researchers may understand why.professor of anesthesiology, psychiatry, and developmental biology at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, researchers discovered a specific gene, the, in the spinal cord and a corresponding neuropeptide, GRP .
The researchers then decided to take this one step further by manipulating the amount of GRP in the hypothalamus."When we deleted the GRP in the SCN, the mice stopped imitating the scratch," Chen says."When we injected more GRP into the SCN, the mice started scratching like crazy.", Chen and his team suspect contagious itching may have just as much to do with our eyeballs as our skin and spinal cord.
There's more : After the mice watched a video of another mouse scratching for half an hour, the researchers measured the mice's stress hormone levels, finding a significant increase. This suggested that exposure to impulsive, contagious scratching behavior may have caused heightened anxiety in the mice.
As a result, Chen believes it's fair to infer that contagious behavior, including yawning and emotional contagion, is merely an expression of a fundamental survival mechanism that has evolved over time."The human being is just an imitation machine. It's often very difficult for people to act independently or as a minority because you would be working against evolution," says Chen.
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