Our brains might prime our immune system merely by seeing someone who looks sick.
A study published July 28 in Nature Neuroscience found that participants who saw sick-looking faces in virtual reality showed changes in brain activity related to personal space monitoring and threat detection. Additionally, the activity of certain immune cells in the blood increased.
The study is “unique in demonstrating that people’s immune system can be primed just by the visual recognition that someone looks sick,” says Michael Irwin, a psychoneuroimmunologist at UCLA who was not involved in the work. “That’s really remarkable.”
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