Do you need your personal space?

• April 20, 2024

Surely it has happened to you, you are talking to a person who just presented you and is interesting, clean, polite, but has something curious ... you get very close when he speaks to you. And you do not know exactly why, but you feel in an uncomfortable situation.

You feel the need to step back, but when you do, he gives it to you! And you start looking for different ways that you can not get as close as putting one foot forward and doing your body backwards or looking for another person to join the conversation.
 

It is not paranoia nor are you having moments of severe antisociality, the discomfort you feel is physical, and is caused by a region of your brain in the temporal lobe that, thanks to evolution, prevents you from feeling comfortable being too close to a stranger who could hurt you.

Why it happens? Scientists have studied a 42-year-old woman who suffered damage to this region of the brain because of a genetic disease. In a study published by Nature Neuroscience the doctors undertook the task of investigating what happens when the human being feels in an uncomfortable situation for biological reasons.
 

The woman underwent tests in which she had to indicate the position in which she felt uncomfortable when someone approached her. The distance that this woman preferred to talk to people turned out to be 34 centimeters, while people who do not suffer from their condition prefer at least 64 centimeters away.

To test the theory, the researchers placed eight healthy subjects on an MRI to see what happened to their brain when they were told that someone was very close to them. Although the subjects could not see the person who supposedly was so close, the area of ​​the brain that regulates this emotion of discomfort showed activity.
 

This means that humans are made to repel the contact of other people, unless we feel that there are possibilities of having sex. Magazine Time He speculated about this. It is possible that the same brain region interferes with the way we "link" with strangers.

The same area of ​​the brain shows activity when we feel sexually aroused and is more recurrent in men than in women. That's why the boys can get so close to the women in the bars, an action that many times we find unpleasant.

The study is inconclusive because there is only one person with whom to perform the experiments, but it could mean an advance in the studies of autism.
 

Does it bother you that people invade your personal space?
 

Video Medicine: Back Off! What Personal Space Is All About (April 2024).