Achoo! Just a Sneeze, Maybe Not
When you hear someone sneeze you will often also quickly afterwards hear someone else say ‘bless you’. They are responding to the sound of the sneeze with the normal traditional response, but what if it is not just a normal sneeze?
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That traditional response comes from a religious belief that when people sneeze it is the body’s way of eliminating evil spirits from within us and the term ‘bless you’ is a request to the Almighty.
But there are many reasons why a person might sneeze; maybe there is too much pepper in the air when they are eating some food or they have just looked into the sunlight too long or they have a slight cold.
All of these things are sometimes the cause for people to suddenly just sneeze and although for many people they don’t understand necessarily why they have sneezed they think it is quite normal.
A sneeze seems to often occur spontaneously without any warning and the person makes the sound ‘achoo’ involuntary and at the same time will try to raise their hand to cover their nose.
Just as the sound ‘achoo’ is involuntary in a sneeze, so is the apparent sudden movement upward of the hand towards their nose. But both the sound and hand action are connected under their brains control.
Inside a person’s nose is a fine set of membrane fibrous hairs which will stop many of life’s impurities from entering our bodies via the nose. The fine set of membrane fibrous hairs are also sensitive in detecting slight changes in the substances that they come into contact with.
Whenever there is a substance that is detected that might be sensed as presenting a danger to our being, a signal is sent to the brain to start the process of elimination.
This process is the sudden spontaneous intake of air through the mouth and then the rapid expelling of air out the nose, which causes the sound of ‘achoo’ to be heard.
The upward hand movement towards the nose is to capture whatever it was that has entered into the nose and this is also a fundamental part of the process that the brain is performing.
In this way the brain has instructed many muscles to function in order to protect the body from any harmful entities that would enter into it. Some of which could well cause immeasurable disruption to the normal bodily functions that are necessary for survival.
Maybe it is not the evil spirits that have tried to enter through the nose, which so many ancient religions have come to believe is the cause for us to sneeze, but our brains survival mechanism still treats the harmful entities as if they were evil to our bodies.
Achoo! just a sneeze, maybe not if the purpose of the sneeze is a way for us to be able to survive.
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