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June 30, 2010

Ah Choo! It’s a Sneeze Fest

I was thinking about sneezing the other day because I scared the dog with a loud sneeze. We’ve all experienced the prickling, tickling sensation that heralds a sneeze. Sometimes they explode out of nowhere at the most inconvient times, such as when you’re driving. I was curious so I googled sneezing…as one does.

A sneeze is your body’s way of expelling an irritant from your nose. It can be dust, pepper, cold air, allergies or viruses that cause the explosion.

When you sneeze you use lots of different muscles — your abdominal muscles, chest muscles, the diaphragm, vocal cords and muscles at the back of your throat. You also use your eyelid muscles since sneezing makes us shut our eyes. Remember that sneeze while you’re driving? Yep, not so good because you automatically close your eyes.

Sometimes we want to sneeze but it doesn’t quite happen. There’s nothing worse! They say one out of three people sneeze when they’re exposed to bright light. I haven’t found that. They also say it’s an inherited trait and runs in families.

Do you sneeze after exposure to a bright light?

Sources:
www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneeze
www.kidshealth.org/kid/talk/qa/sneeze.html

6 Comments

  1. Maria D.

    umh….have never thought about it but in my family there is a long history of allergies so I pretty much attribute sneezing to either something that I might be allergic to (such as dust) or some kind of irritant…sneezing is one of those scary things that we do without thinking that can even be dangerous to our own bodies…

  2. Shelley Munro

    Allergies must be terrible, Maria. Sneezing once is a pain, but often would be awful.

  3. Helen Hardt

    Like Maria, I have allergies. Sneezing is a fact of life for me :)

  4. Shelley Munro

    That’s no good at all. I’m so lucky when it comes to that. My sister has bad allergies, but I have very, very mild ones. I get a runny nose whenever I go outside. Probably more than you needed to know…

  5. Mary

    Right at the beginning of summer I start sneezing because of the Olive Tree Allergies I have.

    When I was a kid…now this is going to sounds funny. Me and my little brother found out that by sticking our noses right up to the screen on our bedroom windows we could make ourselves sneeze. We would do this several times and knew our mom would hear. Then we would play like we felt sick and say we didn’t feel good. She would think we had a cold and we would get to stay home. lol

  6. Shelley Munro

    LOL – Mary, that’s funny! I wish I’d thought of it. :mrgreen: