r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Mar 03 '25
Neuroscience Chewing different materials affects the brain and a new study found that chewing on wood (wooden tongue depressors), compared to chewing gum, led to a significant increase in a natural brain antioxidant called glutathione, and better performance on memory tasks.
https://www.psypost.org/chewing-wood-may-boost-memory-and-brain-antioxidants-study-finds/
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u/waitwuh Mar 03 '25
My bet is they just ingested at least one nasty bacteria from the dirt that made them sick. That could cause a fever and/or throwing up as their body tries to clear the infectious agent. A high enough fever and/or severe enough dehydration can cause hallucinations.
Kids are generally more prone to hypnogogic hallucinations. Similar to why kids sleep walk, their brains sometimes get mixed up with the “settings” and activity and stage coordination related to sleep. In a hypnagogic hallucination, it’s happening because part of the brain tries to jump into the REM sleep stage (which is when you dream) too early, before the whole brain is really ready and you’re still partly conscious/awake. It’s sometimes called a “waking dream.” It can happen with or without something else called sleep paralysis, which is when the voluntary muscle control gets turned off before you’re all the way asleep so you feel “stuck.” In sleep walking, by contrast, the brain didn’t cut off the voluntary muscle control to prevent acting out dreams / walking before the REM cycle started. Hypnogogic hallucinations and/or sleep paralysis are probably just as common in kids as sleep walking, it’s just that sleep walking is more obvious to the outsider observers ie. parents so we know and hear about it more. As kids grow older they usually grow out of these experiences because their systems figure things out and settle into more proper patterns.
Probably related to that, kids seem to be more prone to having fever and dehydration related hallucinations. I remember getting bad stomach bugs a few times as a kid, and also fevers with or without those, and having weird dream/hallucinations. I have one especially vivid memory where I was shivering from cold but sweating profusely and I lifted my bed sheets and a bunch of cats ran out from under the covers, one after the other, like a clown car situation. We didn’t even have any cats. My parents had to take me to the hospital a few times for IVs because I would get so sick I couldn’t keep any fluids down. Just fun childhood stuff.