BRRR! PASS ME MY JUMPER

IF YOU’RE feeling the need to get a jumper right now, you’re experiencing what scientists at the University of Sussex recently named ‘temperature contagion’.

Neuroscientist Dr Neil Harrison found that when people looked at pictures of others holding their hand in ice water, their own body temperature fell slightly. This is possibly ‘because much of human success comes from our ability to work together in complex communities — this would be hard to do it we were not able to rapidly empathise with each other to predict another’s thoughts, feeling and motivations’, he told Good Health.

Exactly how that ends up as a drop in your own body temperature is not clear — ‘but higher brain areas like the cortex can regulate the temperature to some degree and we believe that’s what’s at work here,’ he says.

Warmth doesn’t seem to be as catching, according to Dr Harrison’s research.