why do some people sneeze when they see sudden light?
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Sneezing in the sudden presence of bright light, especially sunlight, is a phenomenon known as sun sneezing or the photic sneeze reflex. It affects anywhere between 10 to 35 percent of the population, depending on which survey you read. A 1987 study in the Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine, for example, estimated its prevalence at 17 to 35 percent of the population. A 1983 study in Human Heredityfound a 24 percent prevalence among 460 blood donors.
Although most of us aren’t sun sneezers, it’s a common enough curiosity to get lots of people wondering: What’s going on here?
There’s still no hard evidence to fully explain sun sneezing, but scientific and popular attention has largely focused on a particular hypothesis proposed in 1964 by Henry Everett when he was a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University Hospital. According to the hypothesis, the photic sneeze reflex is caused by a confusion of nerve signals in pathways very near one another. Since sneezing is such a sudden and involuntary reflex, the cause is probably located in the nervous system, which is capable of transmitting signals very quickly.
Researchers suspect that two important reflexes may play a key role in sun sneezing. The first is the pupillary light reflex. In this reflex, bright light entering the eyes sends signals along the optic nerve to the brain, which sends signals back to the eyes to constrict the pupils—a means of adjusting to differently lit environments. The second is the sneeze reflex, in which a cranial nerve called the trigeminal nerve detects a tickling in the nose and alerts the brain, which in turn stimulates the chest, nose, mouth and other muscles involved in sneezing.
Although most of us aren’t sun sneezers, it’s a common enough curiosity to get lots of people wondering: What’s going on here?
There’s still no hard evidence to fully explain sun sneezing, but scientific and popular attention has largely focused on a particular hypothesis proposed in 1964 by Henry Everett when he was a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University Hospital. According to the hypothesis, the photic sneeze reflex is caused by a confusion of nerve signals in pathways very near one another. Since sneezing is such a sudden and involuntary reflex, the cause is probably located in the nervous system, which is capable of transmitting signals very quickly.
Researchers suspect that two important reflexes may play a key role in sun sneezing. The first is the pupillary light reflex. In this reflex, bright light entering the eyes sends signals along the optic nerve to the brain, which sends signals back to the eyes to constrict the pupils—a means of adjusting to differently lit environments. The second is the sneeze reflex, in which a cranial nerve called the trigeminal nerve detects a tickling in the nose and alerts the brain, which in turn stimulates the chest, nose, mouth and other muscles involved in sneezing.
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