Wonderword
One five-letter word a day, each one a little piece of the weird science we cover. Six guesses, green-amber-grey, then meet the phenomenon behind it.
Guess the five-letter word.
Our sources
// every fact this game reveals was checked before it went up
≈ Most dreams are forgotten within minutes of waking: the noradrenaline that helps lay down long-term memories is at its lowest during REM sleep, so dreams are poorly encoded.
, Sleep-and-memory research; e.g. reviews of REM neurochemistry and dream recall
✓ Goosebumps are piloerection, tiny arrector pili muscles pull body hairs upright, a vestigial reflex that would fluff up fur for warmth or to look bigger in an ancestor with more of it.
, Standard physiology of piloerection; Darwin, 'The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,' 1872
✓ Yawning is contagious: seeing, hearing or reading about a yawn can trigger one, and susceptibility is higher toward people you are socially closer to.
, Provine, contagious-yawning research; Norscia & Palagi, PLoS ONE, 2011 (social bias)
✓ Face pareidolia, seeing faces in sockets, clouds and toast, is driven by a face-detection system biased toward false positives; the brain's face-specific N170 signal fires at ~165 ms even for face-like objects.
, Hadjikhani et al., 'Early (N170) activation of face-specific cortex by face-like objects,' NeuroReport, 2009
✓ A chill or shiver from music ('frisson', sometimes called a skin orgasm) is linked to dopamine release around peak emotional moments in the music.
, Salimpoor et al., 'Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music,' Nature Neuroscience, 2011
✓ Each eye has a blind spot where the optic nerve leaves the retina and there are no photoreceptors; you never notice it because the brain fills in the missing region from its surroundings.
, Standard visual neuroscience; Ramachandran, 'Blind spots,' Scientific American, 1992
✓ Most of what we call 'taste' is actually smell (retronasal olfaction): blocking the nose sharply reduces the perceived flavour of food.
, Flavour-perception research; Rozin, 'Taste-smell confusions,' Perception & Psychophysics, 1982
≈ Feelings of dread in supposedly 'haunted' places have been linked to infrasound (very low-frequency sound below conscious hearing), though the strongest 'ghost' effects are contested.
, Tandy & Lawrence, JSPR, 1998; French et al., 'The Haunt project,' Cortex, 2009