Ask mr Brain...All will be explained

Does your heart really skip a beat when you sneeze? Your heart does not skip a beat but it may pause for a fraction of a second before resuming its normal rhythm.

The pause probably occurs due to a change of pressure in the chest when you sneeze. That pressure change may stimulate the vagus nerve, which slows the heart rate down for a brief moment. There is no danger in this slight pause.

The reason we say, 'God bless you', when a person sneezes is because people used to believe that they were between Heaven and Hell during that slight pause.

If you were blessed, you would be saved from damnation.

How did turkeys get their name? The bird best known for gracing the dinner table at Christmas, and at Thanksgiving Day in the United States, is actually native to North America, so how did it come to be named after an Asian country? The answer is that when the birds were first taken to England around 1540, they were mistakenly believed to be from Turkey, and named accordingly. In fact, they had come from Spain, where Hernan Cortes had taken them from Mexico during his 1519 expedition. Even when the mistake was discovered, the name stuck.

The English were not the only ones to be geographically confused about the bird's origins. The French thought they were Indian and the Germans, no doubt trying to go one better than their neighbours, said the birds were from the Indian city of Calicut. In Europe the birds were so well established as being from Turkey, that when the Pilgrim Fathers set foot in the US in 1620 they were amazed to find so many of these supposedly Asian birds in their new country.