Why do people pick your nose?

Looking sokrovischMnogie of us do it, but few recognized. If we are caught in the act, we feel ashamed. And as a rule, we do condemn the people who do it in public. I'm talking, of course, trying to clear her nose. Is it so bad picking his nose? And as is customary or bad, in fact? And why someone comes to mind to try the taste of the contents of the nose?





The official medical term used to describe the act of picking his nose - "rinotilleksomaniya." The first scientific study of this phenomenon have been taken recently, in 1995, a pair of American scientists, Thompson and Jefferson. They sent questionnaires by mail thousands of adult residents of Dane County, Wisconsin. From 254's 91% of the respondents admitted that they pick your nose, while only 1, 2% could admit that they do so as often as once an hour. This research helped to find out that despite the existence of a cultural taboo on picking your nose, it is quite a common phenomenon.

Habit molodyhPyat years later, doctors Chittaranan Andrade and BS Shriari from the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences in Bangalore (India) decided to study the matter further. They reasoned that many of the habits appear in childhood and are more common among children and adolescents than adults, and it is wise to conduct research rinotilleksomanii among youth. Based on the experience of Wisconsin, where the answer is not all respondents, the researchers conducted a study directly in the classroom, where the probability of getting a higher response.

Overall, Andrade and Shriari collected data from two hundred teenagers. Almost all of them admitted that they pick your nose, on average, four times a day. But that's not all: 7, 6% of students say that picking his nose more than 20 times each day, and about 20% believe that they have "serious problems with rinotilleksomaniey." Most of them stated that picking your nose to get rid of the itch or nose clean, but 24 pupils, and that 12% admitted that they are doing it just because they like it.

And tools were not just your fingers. 13 students said they used tweezers for picking, and 9 students - pencils. And as many as nine students admitted that they eat their mined treasure. Yum yum!

Experiments have shown that no differences in socioeconomic status was not picking your nose - the only thing that unites all.

LitseKovyryanie injury on the nose is not so harmless. In some cases, it can cause serious problems, such as found Andrade and Shriari examined the literature on medicine. In one case, the surgeons were unable to achieve lasting nasal septum closing the wounded, because the patient is constantly picking his nose. In another case, 53-year-old woman is not just drilled a finger nasal septum, and made a hole in the paranasal sinuses.

A case of 29-year-old man suffering from trichotillomania (hair pulling) and rinotilleksomaniii (picking his nose) at the same time. This event was the emergence of the term and rinotilleksomaniya. The man plucked the hair from the nose. When he had gone too far, there was inflammation in the nose. To cure his nose, he began to treat it with a solution of manganese, which led to the appearance of purple spots on the skin. Surprisingly, when because of the spots in the nose hair is no longer visible, he felt much better. Yes, walk down the street with a purple nose was for the poor man rather than a "hairy." However, doctors were able to treat this disorder, was one of the forms of OCD.

Threats to nosaKak usually picking your nose - no pathology (interestingly, biting fingernails and pull hair is considered obsessive-compulsive disorder, but rinotilleksomaniya usually not). But this does not mean that the intensive excavation is completely harmless. In 2006, a group of Dutch scientists found that the constant presence of a finger in the nose can cause the spread of bacteria. Studying volunteers, they found a common part: those who confessed that he could not leave his nose alone, elevated levels of pathogens, such as Staphylococcus aureus.

So why are we still doing this? There is no clear answer, but recently wrote Tom Stafford on a nail-biting, which is possible, the reason is a combination of satisfaction from "harvesting" and the fact that the nose is always within reach - in other words, we pick your nose simply because it can.

Or perhaps picking his nose - a sign of laziness. Since fingers are always on hand if you suddenly "zasverbilo", but not so on the box with paper handkerchiefs.

It's funny to think that scientists are still trying to understand why we do it and what consequences follow from this. In the year 2001 mentioned above, researchers from India, Andrade and Shriari were awarded the Ig Nobel Prize, that "first makes everyone laugh and then think." At the ceremony, Andrade said: "Some people poke their noses into other people's business. My own thing made me turn up their noses in other people's ».

via factroom.ru