Why do some people sneeze when they look at the sun?
The Short Answer
Between 18 and 35 percent of humans will sneeze when exposed to bright light. This is a heritable genetic trait that serves no known purpose, confers no known advantage, and has no known explanation. Scientists have named it ACHOO syndrome - Autosomal Dominant Compelling Helio-Ophthalmic Outburst. They named it this on purpose. They knew exactly what they were doing.
Biological Insight
Here is what we know about photic sneeze reflex: it's genetic, it's dominant (so if one parent has it, you probably do too), it affects somewhere between a fifth and a third of the human population, and it has been documented since at least Aristotle, who wondered about it in Book II of his Problems. That was 2,400 years ago. We have made no progress since. The mechanism appears to involve some crossed wiring between the optic nerve and the trigeminal nerve, which controls facial sensations including the sneeze reflex. Bright light stimulates one, and somehow the other gets the message. This is, to use the technical term, a bug. It is not a feature. It provides no survival advantage. It may, in fact, be mildly dangerous - fighter pilots with the reflex are advised not to look toward the sun during combat maneuvers, which seems like advice that shouldn't need stating but apparently does. And yet the trait persists in roughly a quarter of humanity, passed down through countless generations, conferring nothing except the occasional inconvenience of sneezing while leaving a building. Scientists named it ACHOO syndrome because when you discover something that makes no sense, has no purpose, and cannot be explained, you might as well have fun with the acronym. There's a lesson here for organizations, though it's not the one you'd expect. Sometimes things exist not because they're adaptive, not because they're vestigial, not because they ever made sense, but because they simply aren't costly enough to remove. They persist through sheer irrelevance. The question for your organization isn't just 'what's broken?' or 'what's outdated?' It's also: what's just... there? What exists not because it helps, not because it hurts, but because no one has ever cared enough to question it?
Key Questions to Ask Yourself
- What exists in your organization simply because it was never costly enough to remove?
- What processes persist through sheer irrelevance rather than usefulness?
- Are you distinguishing between 'actively harmful' and 'inexplicably still here'?
- What would you name if you got to make up the acronym?
Common Mistakes
- Assuming everything that persists must be adaptive
- Only questioning things that are obviously broken
- Ignoring the accumulation of harmless-but-pointless processes
- Underestimating how long purposeless things can persist (2,400 years and counting)