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http://64.74.118.102/2010/01/29225601/Nosepicking-is-disgusting-bu.html People have died from nose-digging. “Man dies from picking his nose,” said a 2008 headline in the UK’s Daily Telegraph, about a man who died from the resulting nosebleed. Nose-picking is as old as the Pharaohs. King Tutankhamun had a personal nose-picker, in life and afterlife. Nose-digging, like masturbation, peaks during adolescence. Chittaranjan Andrade and B.S. Srihari of the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (Nimhans) in Bangalore won the 2001 Ig Nobel prize for “their probing medical discovery that nose-picking is a common activity among adolescents”, which they published in The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. Dr Andrade, a mountaineer who has scaled six Himalayan peaks, states in the paper that “almost the entire sample” of 200 adolescent males admitted to nose-picking with a “median frequency” ranging from four times a day to 20 times a day. Here lies the answer to the harassed parental question: “Arjun (or equivalent), just what do you do in your room all day?” There are two types of nose-digging: controlled and uncontrolled. Controlled is when you do it with the intent to clean, in the privacy of your bathroom. Uncontrolled nose-picking happens anywhere, but staring at a PC seems to engender it. For some reason, picking your nose seems to promote thoughts or perhaps it is the opposite: You pick when you are preoccupied. What to do with the booger is an issue that people solve differently. Some flick it away, other stick it under a colleague’s desk. The mucophagics, of course, eat it.
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