Tylenol Fights Headaches…and Existential Angst?
Smithsonian Magazine:
Everyone knows you can pop a Tylenol to ease a headache or reduce a fever. But that’s not all. A new study suggests that you can also take Tylenol to ease the psychological angst of watching weird, twisted David Lynch films, or to generally ward off existential dread of death and nothingness.
In what is perhaps one of the oddest studies in recent memory, researchers in the psychology department at the University of British Columbia hypothesized that overwhelming feelings of pointlessness and physical pain may be located in the same part of the brain, LiveScience explains. So they decided to test the effects of acetaminophen, Tylenol’s main ingredient, on easing the anxiety brought on by pondering the meaning of life.
First, the researchers enrolled 120 students to take either 1,000 mg of Tylenol or a placebo.
Read the whole story: Smithsonian Magazine
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