My sister always does it and I’m confused.
In: Biology
You say that your sister scrarching her head confuses you. You mean, her action make you scratch your head.
Jokes apart, here is my own speculation.
Head is a weighty organ. And it rests atop a softer and nimble neck. This is a problem for the muscles of neck (This problem becomes more evident when people get into accidents leading to whiplash injuries and some times even severing the spinal column due to the heavy head being wretched away from the torso).
Carrying all that weight in odd angles (which we hold our heads while attending to our daily lives) makes the neck muscles get tired. So, when we are tired and/or when we don’t require to hold our head up high, we tend to prep it against our hands. We rest our chin or jaw on to our hands to relax the muscles in the head-neck area.
When we are thinking something deeply, we wish to relax these muscles so all the attentional resources may be diverted to the thinking process (we close our eyes for the same reason when thinking hard). So we plop our chin onto the net of our fingers (and strike the classic pose of someone paying rapt attention). Since some repeated back and forth rocking action helps with the thinking process (that’s why people shake legs, play aimlessly with their hair or draw meaningless rounds, also called doodling), we end up stroking our chin with our fingers (since they are already in contact). This appears to a spectator as stroking or scratching an itch in the chin.
The reason why we may be stroking our head is, as someone rightly pointed out, because not only does repeated action calms us (that’s wht fidget spinners have a huge market), but also because massaging the head relaxes us.
It’s a subconscious stress relief mechanism. Scratching the head is a way of touching the part of the body under stress at that point.
Doing absent minded things can help you focus better.
It’s like when basketball players stick their tongues out when doing free throws.
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