When we are confused, we tend to do things that involve our head. Touching our forehead, holding our temples with our hands, rubbing our hands on the temples…
Why we have so much physical interaction with our head when confronting mentally difficult issues? The cartoonish monkyish scratch over the top of our heads - what is that for? Does messaging our temples have some physical effect on the blood vessles or parts of our brain?
Interestingly enough, it looks like Scientology has a procedure that specifically involves touching someone. The procedure is called a “touch assist”. I wonder if it’s related somehow.
Funny, I was just thinking about this a couple of hours ago. Basic biology is about to give me a stroke, and there’s a test next Wednesday. I get the bit about one molecule of glucose yielding 36 molecules of ATP. It’s just everything that happens in between that is on the verge of driving me to smoke rock cocaine. Anyway, I’ve realized for years that every time I’m having trouble concentrating, I wrap my hand around my forehead and squeeze/massage both of my temples, and this seems to bring things back into focus. Yet for the life of me I can’t think of any rational reason why this might occur.
BTW, anybody know of a good, FREE video that illustrates glycolosis?
I remember reading many years ago, most likely in the Time-Life book The Primates, that gorillas “scratch their heads” when puzzled, so this behavior must have its origin well before the beginnings of humanity.
Not quite the same thing, but why do we look up when thinking hard - trying to remember something, for instance?
That’s another good question. I just did that a few minutes ago. Almost invariably when I do this, I am also voicelessly mouthing the concepts that I am trying to consolidate to memory, as if I’m trying to explain to myself the thing that I am trying to learn.
Newborns put their hands to their faces to console themselves. Perhaps the hands-to-temples movement is a similar vestige of curling up in the womb.
It is unlikely that there is any direct effect on the brain. The blood supply to the brain does not run through the top part of the head, and the skull is pretty solid and hard, so rubbing or scratching outside it is not going to directly affect the brain within.
I think we are probably massaging tension that has developed in the muscles of the scalp. Certainly headaches are caused by muscular tension in the outer parts of the head, and have nothing much to do with the brain at all.
As for hard thinking, recent research suggests that unconscious eye movements may play a much larger role in thought processes than is commonly realized (much more of the brain than one might think is involved in controlling them). Thinking, we are coming to realize, is not something that happens entirely within the brain, it involves the peripheral nervous system and the muscles too, especially (though not only) the muscles responsible for eye movements. (The eyes are almost constantly in motion, to the extent that it has been plausibly claimed that “The vast majority of behavioral acts [in humans] are saccadic jumps of the eye.”* A good proportion of these saccadic jumps probably subserve thinking and imagining more than they do actual seeing - although they play a very large and crucial role in seeing too.)
It seems possible that massaging of the scalp muscles might be relieving some of the tensions that have built up from intense bouts of eye movement, or from repetitive eye movements as we perseverate over some aspect of a problem (i.e., get fixated and stuck on one particular idea). The massaging also might help to break up such patterns of perseveration by interfering with and breaking up repetitive eye movement patterns.
*Bridgeman, B. (1992). Conscious vs Unconscious Processes: The Case of Vision.
Theory and Psychology (2) 73-88.
Try the Khan Academy videos on YouTube. I’m on my phone otherwise I would link directly.