REAL LIFE NEWS: BLUSHING IN THE DARK
by Hazed
Do people blush when they are in the dark? Scientists really didn’t know for sure – until now.
Blushing is considered to be a social reaction intended to convey your embarrassment to others, so the question was, does it happen when we are on our own, or in the dark, where nobody else can see it?
People were at a loss to know how to test this. In the 18th century the German scholar Georg Christoph Lichtenberg put it like this: “The question whether young women blush in the dark is a very difficult one; at least, one that cannot be settled by light.” I don’t suppose it occurred to him to just ask the young women in question... although I guess that wouldn’t yield objective scientific data.
Now technology has come to the rescue, in the form of heat-sensitive cameras, and researchers have discovered that yes, when recounting a story of an embarrassing incident that had happened to her, their test subject did indeed show an increased amount of heat in her face, which indicated the blood rushing to her cheeks.
Mystery solved.
