How may psychology help us combat a heat wave? Why can a video game make me feel fresh? 

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Video games make me feel cool

It’s been scorching everywhere these last several days, in case anyone living in an air-conditioned home hasn’t noticed. Summer fans will be pleased. People throw snowballs at each other in the middle of the street during a cold wave, yet you want to die during a heat wave. 

There are few options for dealing with high heat in the middle of spring, especially if you are short on cash. Lots of water, fresh meals, staying out of the sun during the warmest hours of the day, and keeping a watch on the elderly and children to help them if they show signs of dehydration. 

That, plus, of course, all the lists of the coolest movies, shows, and games that will sprout like mushrooms in the coming days

Here, too, some will collapse sooner rather than later. Beware that we must eat anything, but within that already common form of proposing cold-themed activities when you should be inviting people to chew ice, I couldn’t help but wonder to what degree it was or wasn’t something utterly silly.

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Are you really encouraging me to start playing the console to feel fresh, with your hand on your chest and your voice not shaking? Either the people who make these lists are horrible people, or there is some reality to it. Stranger things have been witnessed, and you know how brains can be utter nonsense at times, so let’s see what science has to say. 

Brain manipulation

Brain manipulation icon

To answer the question, I begin by stating how little I know. The hypothalamus, on the other hand, is the region of our brain that regulates our body temperature. 

The hypothalamus makes us sweat to offer freshness or causes an earthquake in the muscles to generate heat, similar to how the thermostat switches on the air conditioning or heating depending on whether you want to cool or heat the house. 

Not only that, but he’s also in charge of pumping us up with adrenaline in a dangerous circumstance or forcing us to relax in different ways—two situations that an entertainment product, such as a video game, can directly influence. 

I’m also aware of the extent to which you can manipulate your brain’s view of reality—no, I’m not going there. I’m familiar with research that shows how breathing control and meditation can help with cold pain. 

But, in even more surprising instances, a study has found that insulting and cursing can help us survive the cold for longer than saying random words or remaining silent. 

Empathy for heat 

Because studies almost always rely on the cold to avoid the potential damage produced by a burn, the two keys to the inquiry remain. 

Yes, I can trick my brain, but can I do it in order to feel fresh or to resist the heat? And, most importantly, can I obtain it from video game images? Yes, but it depends on the individual as much as the game. 

A study proposed that social esamimeticism could also move to body temperature, based on emotional contagion, a social convergence phenomenon also seen in other animals that explains why you can’t help but smile when someone else does, or yawn when someone else opens their mouth like the lion from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. 

You don’t have to look far to discover examples of this; simply think about the last time you were with family and friends and someone put on a jacket, prompting the others to do the same, despite the fact that they looked to be coping well with the cold up until that point. 

In a more severe situation, Dr. Neil Harrison of the University of Sussex presented the same possibility. He became cold despite the fact that there was no real person in front of him to spread the virus, only a television image. 

The picture of its protagonist racing naked through the Arctic led the neurologist to feel cold while viewing a documentary on the Inuit, Atanarjuat, the legend of the swift man, and he immediately thought about the idea of duplicating and analysing it. 

Manipulate the mind to make it feel new

According to Harrison’s findings, the temperature of the study group’s hands was reduced by between 0.2 and 0.05 degrees when they were exposed to an image of someone putting their hands in icy water for several minutes. a minor temperature difference that did not appear in control movies or footage of hands immersed in hot water. 

Temperature contagion does exist, even at very low levels, but this answer poses another question. What if the image on the other side of the screen isn’t accurate? Is it possible to modify the temperature solely based on the color? Because blue and white connote freshness, while red connotes heat. 

Video game can make feel call

It appears to be the case. A group of Japanese scientists demonstrated that they could manipulate the subject’s perception through a fully visual thermal interaction by using the illusion of the rubber hand, which involves hiding the subject’s real hand and showing a rubber one that is tickled, causing the subject’s sense of sight to believe that the tickles are real. 

Placing ice on the rubber hand made it feel cold, but accomplishing the same thing by directing a laser of various colours at the hand elicited identical emotions. The temperature increased when the laser was red but decreased when the laser was blue. 

The capability of tricking our brain to make our body feel fresher is genuine—albeit slight—but it depends both on the subject and the visual cues it receives. 

Yes, you may feel a little cooler when you watch Nathan Drake crawling through the snow in Uncharted 2 with his teeth browned, but it’s probable that whoever sits on the other side of the sofa will need more than polygons to recreate that same experience.