Lightness, Heaviness and Gravity

Lightness, heaviness and gravity

As easy to move as a feather: perception of lightness as ease to move.

When perception by touch is couched in terms of movement, perception of heaviness can be understood as perception of difficulty to move. This experiment further investigated this proposal as well as the corollary proposal that perception of lightness may be understood as perception of ease to move. Blindfolded participants wielded weighted objects and rated how heavy or light each object felt a...

The Legend of Carbon Dioxide Heaviness

The false legend of carbon dioxide traps resulting from the weight of carbon dioxide gas is disproved. In spite of water-vapor lightness in comparison with air, no water-vapor trap exists on cave ceilings. In fact, underground atmospheres with specific compositions are not related to gravity, but to the absence of any air movement around the gas sources. The process of double diffusion of oxyge...

A Heavy Heart: The Association between Weight and Emotional Words

People often express emotion in language using weight (e.g., a heavy heart, light-hearted, light humor, or heavy-handed), but the question remains whether these expressions of emotion are rooted in the body. Six experiments used a priming paradigm to explore the metaphoric relation between weight perception and emotional words. Experiments 1 and 2 investigated the influence of weight perception...

Ayurveda of To-Day

One should never sleep during day-time after eating. Such sleep excites phlegm and bile and brings on such diseases as jaundice, painful headaches, languor and unsteadiness, as also heaviness of the limbs, loss of lightness of the body, loss of appetite, dropsical swellings, hiccough, inflammation of the Schneiderian membrane, loss of memory and intelligence, hemicrania, urticaria evanida, erup...