Why Does Bright Light Make Me Sneeze?
Achoo! Jason Schneider Perhaps as many as a quarter of us sneeze when we look at a bright light, a condition scientists have been calling “photic sneeze reflex” since 1954. But the condition goes back millennia. Aristotle proposed that the sun’s heat dries nasal fluid, causing the nose to tingle. (The ancient Greeks also suggested sneezing is divine and should occur only during sexual excitement.) Modern science has put forth a few more likely explanations. For starters, the effect has been observed in babies, so it’s probably not a learned response—but it could be genetic. One Swedish study found that in families where one parent had the condition, more than half of the children had it too. A separate research team even found two places in the human genome where the trait might...