Science: Double Sneezers

Dr. Milton Hyland Erickson, director of psychiatric research at Eloise Hospital in Michigan, observed a young woman who, when she sneezed, nearly always sneezed twice in rapid succession. After one sneeze she waited for the second and if it did not come felt “a distressing sense of incompleteness.” Checking the sneeze behavior of the woman’s mother, he ran into another double-sneeze pattern. When a granddaughter was born, Dr. Erickson kept careful record of her sneezing, found three generations of double sneezers. In his report in the current Journal of Genetic Psychology, he concluded: “Variations in the [sneeze] pattern may be inherited.”