Whether it’s a technical issue or an overbooked plane, a lot of factors can get between you and a stress-free flight. Air travel is especially unpredictable during snowstorm season, with up to tens of thousands of flights getting canceled in the U.S. each winter. If you find yourself the victim of a cancellation, there are a few important tips to remember to make sure you receive the maximum amount of compensation.

As Business Insider recently shared, the most important step to take after your flight gets canceled is to contact the airline directly. No matter which company you’re dealing with, you should be guaranteed two contractual rights in the event of a cancellation: The airline must either find you a seat on their next available flight to your destination or refund the remaining value of your ticket. Airlines sometimes provide extra assistance in addition to these basic rights, so make sure to ask about what you’re owed. The reason for the cancellation also makes a difference—for example, airlines are usually more accommodating when the fault lies with them rather than outside forces like the weather.

After speaking with your airline, check to see if your credit card offers special protection in such scenarios. Chase Sapphire, Chase’s United Airlines Explorer card, and some Citibank American Airlines Advantage cards include built-in emergency funds to use on a hotel if an airline leaves you stranded. Cardholders are usually given between $300 and $500 to spend.

Travelers flying to or from Europe may be able to receive more money than their canceled flights were worth. According to the EU’s air passenger rights policy, customers dealt canceled flights traveling within the EU, from EU-based airports, or on EU-based airlines are eligible to receive €600 (about $666) in compensation plus the cost of meals and lodging. The provision may not apply to shorter flights or trips canceled “due to extraordinary conditions.”

If keeping tabs on your passenger rights seems like a lot to juggle, there are websites that can help you. Refund.me and Airhelp.com are two resources that will fill out your paperwork for you and retrieve the maximum amount of whatever you’re owed (keep in mind these sites do claim part of the money they get back, sometimes as much as 25 percent).

A smart way to avoid all this hassle is to book through an airline that’s less likely to cancel your flight in the first place. According to Travel + Leisure, ExpressJet, Delta’s Comair, and AmericanEagle are the worst offenders in this department.

[h/t Business Insider]

For a very long time, extraversion (also spelled “extroversion”) was considered the healthy default. It was considered perverse or pathological to avoid crowds or to crave time alone. Fortunately, introversion is far more accepted these days. People self-identify as introverts in their online dating profiles. You can buy “Go Away, I’m Introverting” T-shirts and coffee mugs.

You might be an introvert. You might be an extravert. But it’s more likely you’re an ambivert: that is, somewhere in between.

That’s because extraversion is not an all-or-nothing identity; it’s a spectrum. Psychologists count extraversion—that is, the quality of finding energy and gratification outside of oneself—among the “Big Five” dimensions of personality (along with conscientiousness, agreeableness, openness to new experience, and neuroticism). Each of us is extraverted to some degree, just as we’re conscientious or neurotic. That degree could be zero (although it probably isn’t). Very few people are 100 percent anything.

Personality psychologist Robert McCrae spent his career examining and testing the Big Five model. In a 1992 study [PDF], McCrae and his collaborator found that many people (around 38 percent) fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum for all five traits, including extraversion.

Adam Grant is a management expert at the Wharton School of Business. In 2013 he conducted a study on 340 call center employees. Since these are people who talk on the phone for a living, you might assume that the majority of them would be extraverts. But two-thirds said they were neither extraverted nor introverted—rather, somewhere in-between. And, more surprising still, these ambiverts outperformed extraverts on their sales calls.

Why? Grant theorized that it’s because phone calls are about more than talking. Sales reps also have to listen. Ambiverts are naturally comfortable doing both, he wrote, which means that they’re “likely to express sufficient assertiveness and enthusiasm to persuade and close a sale, but are more inclined to listen to customers’ interests and less vulnerable to appearing too excited or overconfident.”

Many people who self-identify as introverts or extraverts do so after taking a personality test called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). Despite its lack of scientific support, the MBTI has become immensely popular, in part because every test result is flattering. It’s a little like a horoscope: We can find ourselves in our readings, but there’s no science to back it up. The MBTI also perpetuates the myth of the all-or-nothing identity, labeling each test-taker as either an introvert or an extravert.

Look, we’re not going to tell you that you can’t be one extreme or the other. But the human experience is rich and complex. Isn’t it better to be flexible?

Have you got a Big Question you’d like us to answer? If so, let us know by emailing us at bigquestions@mentalfloss.com.

by Katie Oliver

Beliefs about the way visual perception works have undergone some fairly radical changes throughout history. In ancient Greece, for example, it was thought that beams of light emanate from our eyes and illuminate the objects we look at. This “emission theory” [“a href=”https://web.archive.org/web/20111008073354/http://conference.nie.edu.sg/…” target=”_blank”>PDF] of vision was endorsed by most of the great thinkers of the age including Plato, Euclid, and Ptolemy. It gained so much credence that it dominated Western thought for the next thousand years. Of course, now we know better. (Or at least some of us do: There’s evidence that a worryingly large proportion of American college students think we do actually shoot beams of light from our eyes, possibly as a side effect of reading too many Superman comics.)

The model of vision as we now know it first appeared in the 16th century, when Felix Platter proposed that the eye functions as an optic and the retina as a receptor. Light from an external source enters through the cornea and is refracted by the lens, forming an image on the retina—the light-sensitive membrane located in the back of the eye. The retina detects photons of light and responds by firing neural impulses along the optic nerve to the brain.

There’s an unlikely sounding quirk to this set-up, which is that mechanically speaking, our eyes see everything upside down. That’s because the process of refraction through a convex lens causes the image to be flipped, so when the image hits your retina, it’s completely inverted. Réné Descartes proved this in the 17th century by setting a screen in place of the retina in a bull’s excised eyeball. The image that appeared on the screen was a smaller, inverted copy of the scene in front of the bull’s eye.

So why doesn’t the world look upside down to us? The answer lies in the power of the brain to adapt the sensory information it receives and make it fit with what it already knows. Essentially, your brain takes the raw, inverted data and turns it into a coherent, right-side-up image. If you’re in any doubt as to the truth of this, try gently pressing the bottom right side of your eyeball through your bottom eyelid—you should see a black spot appear at the top left side of your vision, proving the image has been flipped.

In the 1890s, psychologist George Stratton carried out a series of experiments [PDF] to test the mind’s ability to normalize sensory data. In one experiment he wore a set of reversing glasses that flipped his vision upside down for eight days. For the first four days of the experiment, his vision remained inverted, but by day five, it had spontaneously turned right side up, as his perception had adapted to the new information.

That’s not the only clever trick your brain has up its sleeve. The image that hits each of your retinas is a flat, 2D projection. Your brain has to overlay these two images to form one seamless 3D image in your mind—giving you depth perception that’s accurate enough to catch a ball, shoot baskets, or hit a distant target.

Your brain is also tasked with filling in the blanks where visual data is missing. The optic disc, or blind spot, is an area on the retina where the blood vessels and optic nerve are attached, so it has no visual receptor cells. But unless you use tricks to locate this blank hole in your vision, you’d never even notice it was there, simply because your brain is so good at joining the dots.

Another example is color perception; most of the 6 to 7 million cone photoreceptor cells in the eye that detect color are crowded within the fovea centralis at the center of the retina. At the periphery of your vision, you pretty much only see in black and white. Yet we perceive a continuous, full-color image from edge to edge because the brain is able to extrapolate from the information it already has.

This power of the mind to piece together incomplete data using assumptions based on previous experience has been labeled “unconscious inference” by scientists. As it draws on our past experiences, it’s not a skill we are born with; we have to learn it. It’s believed that for the first few days of life babies see the world upside down, as their brains just haven’t learned to flip the raw visual data yet. So don’t be alarmed if a newborn looks confused when you smile—they’re probably just trying to work out which way up your head is.

Thanks to the Norman Conquest and the vogue for all things continental during the Renaissance and beyond, anything from a quarter to a third of all the words in the English language are said to be able to trace their immediate origins back to French. That said, the majority of French words in English have been present in the language for so long now that they scarcely register as French words today, like question (13th century), continue (14th century), and pedigree (originally another word for a genealogical diagram, 15th century). Other French loanwords—surveillance, legionnaire, reconnoiter, etiquette, and accompany, to name a few—are more obvious, but even these are now so naturalized that their French pronunciations have long since disappeared.

And then there are those words that have found their way into English dictionaries, but remain quintessentially French—and there’s a lot more to this last group than just pâtés, crèmes brûlées and coups d’état. Add some je ne sais quoi to your vocabulary with these little-known French loanwords.

1. À CONTRE-COEUR

First used in English around the turn of the 19th century, to do something à contre-coeur is to do it reluctantly, or against your will or better judgment; it literally means “against your heart.”

2. APERÇU

A form of the French word apercevoir, “to perceive,” an aperçu is a telling insight or a quick, revealing glimpse of something.

3. ARRIÈRE-PENSÉE

Literally a “back-thought,” arrière-pensée is another word for what we might otherwise call an ulterior motive.

4. ARRIVISTE

Arriviste has been used in English since the early 1900s. It essentially means “arrival” or “arriver,” but is typically used specifically in the sense of someone intent on making a name for themselves, or else a brash, conspicuous newcomer yet to fit into their new surroundings.

5. ATTENTISME

Derived from a French word meaning “wait” or “expectation,” attentisme is another word for patience or perseverance, or else what we’d more likely refer to as “the waiting game.”

6. BADINEUR

English speakers have been using the French loanword badinage to refer to witty, playful banter since the mid-1600s. Much less well known is the word for someone who indulges in precisely that: namely, a badineur.

7. BIENSÉANCE

Bienséance is an old word for decorum, propriety, or social decency, first borrowed into English in the 17th century. At its root, bienséance derives from an old French verb, seoir, meaning “to be suitable for” or “to be appropriately situated”—which is also the origin of séance, which literally means “a sitting.”

8. BOUFFAGE

A bouffage is a satisfying meal or feast. According to the bilingual Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (1611), it means “any meat that (eaten greedily) fills the mouth and makes the cheeks to swell.”

9. CROQUIS

Derived from a French verb meaning “to sketch,” a croquis (pronounced “cro-kee”) is a quick drawing or rough draft of something to be improved on later.

10. DÉBOUCHÉ

The French verb déboucher means “to clear” or “unblock,” or by extension, “to uncork a bottle.” Derived from that, the English verb debouch means “to move from an enclosed space to an open one,” and in that sense has been used typically in reference to military maneuvers since the early 1800s. The derivative noun débouché can ultimately be used to refer to any opening, outlet, or exit where debouching can take place—or, figuratively, a gap in the market for selling a new product.

11. ÉMEUTE

Derived from a verb meaning “to agitate” or “to move,” in French an émeute is a riot, or more broadly, chaos or disruption. It has been used in English to refer to a social uprising or disturbance since the late 1700s.

12. FAROUCHE

The adjective farouche comes to us from a French word with a similar meaning, which itself probably derives from a Latin word meaning “living outside.” Because of the timid behavior of wild animals, however, in English farouche tends to be used to mean “shy” or “socially reserved,” and by extension, “sullen” or “ill-humored.”

13. FROIDEUR

Froideur is the French word for coldness, but in English is used more figuratively to refer to a “cooling” or “chilling” of a relationship—and in particular a business or diplomatic one.

14. GOBEMOUCHE

A gobemouche is an especially credulous person. It literally means “fly-swallower.”

15. JUSQU’AUBOUTISME

Jusqu’au bout essentially means “to the limit” or “to the very end” in French. Derived from that, the term jusqu’auboutisme emerged in France during the First World War to refer to a policy of absolute unwavering perseverance—that is, of continuing to fight until the bitter end or when a full and lasting conclusion to the conflict could finally be reached. The term first appeared in English in that context in a newspaper report in 1917, but its meaning has steadily broadened and weakened since then: nowadays, feel free to use jusqu’auboutisme to refer to any dogged determination to see something through to its final conclusion.

16. MACÉDOINE

For some reason, in 18th century French the word macédoine—which literally means “Macedonia” or “Macedonian”—came to refer to a medley of chopped fruit, and ultimately a random assortment or mixture of unrelated things; it was in this latter sense that the word was first borrowed into English in the early 19th century and has remained in albeit infrequent use ever since. One theory claims that this word alludes to the supposed melting pot of peoples and cultures that were all once united under Alexander the Great’s Macedonian Empire—but in truth, no one is entirely sure where this term comes from.

17. NOCEUR

Derived from an old French verb meaning “to celebrate” or “to marry,” a noceur is a party-animal, or someone who habitually stays up late and into the early hours.

18. ORAGE

Orage (which is pronounced more like collage or mirage than forage or porridge) is a French word for a storm or tempest. It has been used in that literal sense in English since the late 15th century, but nowadays tends only to be used more figuratively to refer to any wild or tempestuous situation.

19. PLAISANTEUR

A derivative of a French verb meaning “to jest” or “quip,” a plaisanteur is a witty talker or storyteller.

20. PORTE-BONHEUR

Bonheur is the French word for luck or good fortune, while the prefix porte– (derived from the verb porter, meaning “to carry”) is used to form words implying some sense of holding or bearing something. Put together, that makes a porte-bonheur a good luck charm, or else an amulet or talisman carried to protect against misfortune. Likewise …

21. PORTE-MONNAIE

… a porte-monnaie is a purse or wallet.

22. POURBOIRE

Money—and in particular a tip or gratuity—intended only to spend on drink is a pourboire.

23. POURPARLER

Derived from an Old French verb meaning “to speak for” or “to speak on behalf of,” the word pourparler was borrowed into English from French in the early 1700s to refer to a casual discussion that takes place before a more formal meeting or negotiation. In modern French the plural, pourparlers, is equivalent to what English speakers would call “talks.”

24. PUDEUR

Borrowed into English in the late 19th century, pudeur is bashfulness or reticence, or else a feeling of shame or embarrassment.

25. RASTAQUOUÈRE

A rastaquouère (pronounced “rasta-kwair”) is an overbearing or ostentatious outsider, and in particular one that is viewed with suspicion or curiosity by the locals, or else who tries to ingratiate themselves into the local area. The term dates back to mid 19th century France, where it originally referred to members of a wave of nouveau riche Mediterranean and South American traders and businessmen who arrived in Paris in the mid-1800s, but failed to fit in with the city’s stuffy upper classes. At the word’s root is an insult for a contemptible person in South American Spanish, rastracuero, which in turn combines the Spanish words for “drag” or “dragged,” and “leather” or “animal hide.”

26. RÉCHAUFFÉ

First used in English in the 15th century and seemingly independently borrowed again in the 1700s, réchauffé literally means “reheated,” and in a literal sense is used to describe a premade reheated meal, or else a dish made from leftovers. In both English and French, however, réchauffé can also be used figuratively to describe rehashed, unoriginal, derivative literature or ideas.

27. RETARDATAIRE

Derived from a French word for someone who is late in arriving or paying a bill, as a noun retardataire means “a person whose work or interests appear old fashioned, stuck in the past, or stubbornly resistant to modern change,” but more specifically the word is often used to refer to a contemporary artist who produces work in an old-fashioned or earlier genre or style. As an adjective, it can be used to describe anything or anyone out of touch or behind the times.

28. SIMPLISTE

Borrowed into English in the early 1900s, a simpliste is someone who holds a naively over-simplified or blinkered view of something.

29. SOIGNÉ

The French verb soigner, meaning “to care” is the source of the adjective soigné (“swan-yay”), which has been used to describe anything or anyone meticulously well-presented or well-groomed, or showing extreme attention to detail, ever since it was borrowed into English in the early 1800s.

30. SOUFFRE-DOULEUR

Souffre-douleur literally means “suffer-sorrow,” and has been used in English since the mid 19th century to refer to someone who is obliged to listen to or share in another person’s troubles or problems. Rather than just refer to friends or companions sharing one another’s misfortunes, however, in particular souffre-douleur refers to anyone whose lowly position or employment involves them having to put up with listening to their superiors’ personal problems.

In the 20th century and beyond, several research programs explored the ability of apes to communicate with human sign language, including primate celebrities such as Washoe the chimpanzee, Nim Chimpsky, and Koko the gorilla. Charles Darwin himself wondered if human language might have evolved from the musical cries of our ape-like ancestors, asking in one of his Notebooks: “Did our language commence with singing … do monkeys howl in harmony?”

But before Washoe, Nim, and Koko—and even before Darwin—the famed British explorer, ethnographer, and writer Sir Richard Francis Burton made an eccentric attempt to bridge the communications gap by starting a residential school for monkeys and trying to learn the language of their calls and cries.

Burton owed the success of many of his explorations to an extraordinary ability to learn foreign languages. During a life of military adventure and travel in the far reaches of the British Empire, he is said to have learned to speak more than 20 languages with fluency, including Turkish, Persian, Hindustani, Gujarati, Punjabi, and Pashtu. He famously staked his life on his Arabic in 1853, when he entered the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina (then forbidden to Europeans) in disguise as a pilgrim on the hajj.

In the 1840s, Burton was a junior officer in the army of the British East India Company, stationed in the province of Sindh, now in Pakistan. According to his wife, Isabel (née Arundell), who published a version of his journals after his death in 1890, Burton was drawn to the chatter of the wild monkeys in the streets of the city and decided to try and learn what they were saying.

In The Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton [PDF], Isabel described how Burton moved into a house with a troop of monkeys and set about trying to learn their language. “He at one time got rather tired of the daily Mess, and living with men, and he thought he should like to learn the manners, customs, and habits of monkeys,” she wrote, “so he collected forty monkeys, of all kinds of ages, races, species, and he lived with them.” His goal, Isabel wrote, was “ascertaining and studying the language of monkeys, so that he used regularly to talk to them, and pronounce their sounds afterwards, till he and the monkeys at last got quite to understand each other.”

Burton also issued the monkeys with honorary titles and monkey-sized costumes that he thought suited their characters: “He had his doctor, his chaplain, his secretary, his aide-de-camp, his agent, and one tiny one, a very pretty, small, silky-looking monkey, he used to call his wife, and put pearls in her ears,” Isabel explained.

The dinner table provided opportunities for teaching etiquette: Burton presided over the meals, all served by Burton’s servants. “They all sat down on chairs at meals, and the servants waited on them, and each had its bowl and plate, with the food and drinks proper for them,” Isabel wrote. “He sat at the head of the table, and the pretty little monkey sat by him in a high baby’s chair … he had a little whip on the table, with which he used to keep them in order when they had bad manners, which did sometimes occur, as they frequently used to get jealous of the little monkey, and try to claw her.”

Burton repeated the monkeys’ sounds over and over until he believed he understood some of them. According to Isabel, Burton learned to identify up to 60 monkey “words,” which he recorded in a “monkey vocabulary.” But around 1845, he moved on from Sindh and his monkey school, on his way to what became more famous adventures: visiting the forbidden city of Harar in what is now Ethiopia; getting speared through the cheek by Somali warriors (surviving with the scars to prove it); and seeking the source of the Nile in East Africa. Although Burton had hoped to one day return to his animal language research, his journals of his time in Sindh and his monkey vocabulary were destroyed in 1861 after a fire at a London warehouse where his belongings were being stored. Sadly, many of the details of his experiments have been lost to history.

Burton’s experiments seemed fairly bizarre to his contemporaries, but they might seem less so today. More than 150 years after his efforts, scientists look to our primate relatives for clues to the origin of human language. One recent study found that macaque monkeys have all the physical organs necessary to produce human-like speech; what they lack is our brainpower. “If they had the brain, they could produce intelligible speech,” Princeton neuroscientist Asif A. Ghazanfar told The New York Times. No doubt Sir Richard Francis Burton would have been among the first to try and write it down.

Sand artist @sudarsansand sets Guinness record with world’s tallest sand castle https://t.co/0hq0M1KtYt pic.twitter.com/paU4fzP3pg

— Times of India (@timesofindia) February 10, 2017

Sudarsan Pattnaik puts all other beach architects to shame. The Indian sand artist just broke the record for the world’s tallest sand castle, The Times of India reports.

Pattnaik isn’t new to the sand castle game—he’s a professional who runs his own school dedicated to sand art. He recruited 30 students from his Sudarsan Sand Art Institute to assist on the four-day construction project that broke the record. The intricate castle stands more than 48 feet and 8 inches tall, and is inscribed with the words “World Peace.” The castle will be on display for two days.

Guinness World Records officials were on hand to confirm his win. The previous record-holding sand sculpture was 45 feet 10 inches, built in 2015 in Miami by the Sand Sculpture Company and Turkish Airlines. It took 19 people and two weeks to complete that structure, making the speed with which Pattnaik built his castle even more impressive.

[h/t The Times of India]

Banner image courtesy of iStock.

During his mission aboard the International Space Station in 2015, Danish astronaut Andreas Mogensen captured a dramatic weather phenomenon that’s rarely seen from Earth. As Mashable reports, his footage below is the clearest look we have at “blue jet” lightning.

Blue jets form when lightning bolts spring from the tops of thunderclouds, shooting 25 to 30 miles up. Even from a vantage point in the Earth’s orbit, the flashes can be difficult to document. Mogensen recorded this video using highly sensitive camera equipment aboard the ISS.

During the 160 seconds of footage taken above the Bay of Bengal, 245 blue flashes of electricity were captured. The film provides an unprecedented look at a weather phenomenon meteorologists still know little about. The European Space Agency (ESA) is now planning to mount a camera outside their Columbus laboratory aboard the ISS that will monitor thunderstorms around the clock. In addition to giving us more data about blue jets, future footage could provide valuable information about other types of upper-atmospheric lightning like red sprites, pixies, and elves.

[h/t Mashable]

Kids and adults alike are drawn to coloring books for the fun, creative outlet they provide. Although adult coloring books are currently a trendy, bestselling genre, coloring books have a vibrant history—they’ve been around since the 1880s! So grab your colored pencils (or crayons, if they’re more your style) and check out these 10 facts about coloring books.

1. THE MODERN COLORING BOOK IS THANKS TO A FAMOUS CHILDREN’S ILLUSTRATOR.

The coloring book has a surprisingly long history. Laura E. Wasowicz, Curator of Children’s Literature at the American Antiquarian Society, told mental_floss that “the earliest coloring books in our collection were produced in Germany and published in Philadelphia by John Weik & Co.” around 1858. But the real ancestor of the modern coloring book is generally agreed to be British illustrator Kate Greenaway. Born in 1846, Greenaway became internationally recognized as a children’s book illustrator (and is now memorialized with the Kate Greenaway Medal for “distinguished illustration in a book for children”).

Sometime in the late 1870s, she teamed up with publisher Cassell Petter & Galpin for The ‘Little Folks’ Painting Book, a reference to a children’s magazine that Cassell Petter & Galpin published. In some cross-promotion, any child who sent in their colored books to a competition the Little Folks magazine was holding could win money and medals, and the books themselves would go to the Children’s Hospitals to “[provide] for the amusement of little ones during their weary hours in the hospital.” Several more of these books were published over the following years, some with similar contests.

So why were these books so influential? Thank lax copyright laws. As Wasowicz has explained before, American publisher the McLoughlin Brothers took Greenaway’s illustrations and published them in books for the American audience, almost certainly without her permission. These were the books that became massive hits and helped create a new genre. And later this year the Antiquarian Society will be hosting an exhibition on the McLoughlins’ dominance of late 19th-century picture books—thanks in part to copying British works.

2. EARLY COLORING BOOKS WERE MEANT TO EDUCATE CHILDREN.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, reform movements in children’s education helped to shift popular attitudes about the role of education in achieving social progress. Coloring books became an interactive tool that parents gave to their kids to educate and entertain them, in hopes of giving them an advantage in life. During this time, the cost of books (and paper) also decreased, which made coloring books accessible to more children and families than ever before. Some companies that sold consumer goods, such as shoes and paint, even gave free, promotional coloring books to parents with every purchase.

3. THE FIRST ADULT COLORING BOOK MOCKED CORPORATE CULTURE.

Published in 1961 by three advertising executives, The Executive Coloring Book was the first coloring book aimed at adults. Featuring drawings and captions depicting a businessman getting ready for work (“This is me. I am an executive. Executives are important. They go to important offices and do important things. Color my underwear important.”), the book satirizes and mocks the monotony, conformity, and austerity inherent in corporate workplaces. For example, the book comments on the corporate dress code—like the proliferation of gray suits—as well as the pills that some employees took to combat the depression and ennui of early ’60s workplaces. (The original book is getting a full reprint in March 2017, in case you or someone you know is suffering from cubicle syndrome.)

4. THE 1960s SAW A PROLIFERATION OF ADULT COLORING BOOKS.

After The Executive Coloring Book’s publication, adult coloring books became trendy. Many of these books satirized societal expectations, political extremism, social movements, the Soviet Union, communism, President John F. Kennedy, and mental illness. Rather than actually color in the drawings in these books, most adults reportedly bought and read the books for a laugh. By the early 1970s, the trend of subversive, satirical coloring books for adults was over.

5. BARBRA STREISAND CAPITALIZED ON THEIR POPULARITY.

“For those who fancy coloring books…” In 1962 and 1963, singer Barbra Streisand released two versions of a song called “My Coloring Book.” Capitalizing on the contemporaneous popularity of adult coloring books, Streisand sang about a breakup through the lens of a coloring book. “Crayons ready? … Begin to color me / These are the eyes that watched him as he walked away / Color them gray / This is the heart that thought he would always be true / Color it blue.” Though Streisand sang the song on the late-night circuit, the song never charted, but it was later covered by Aretha Franklin, Dusty Springfield, and Kristin Chenoweth.

6. THEY HAVE A LONG HISTORY OF PROMOTING POLITICAL VIEWS.

The ’60s wasn’t the only time period that cartoonists used adult coloring books to lampoon political figures and promote counterculture or fringe views. More recently, creators of coloring books have used the books to comment on events and figures in contemporary politics. You can find coloring books about the death of Osama bin Laden and the Tea Party (complete with drawings of Sarah Palin and text about the evils of political correctness), as well as coloring books devoted to former President Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and President Donald Trump.

7. RESEARCHERS CLAIM THE BOOKS CAN LOWER STRESS AND ANXIETY.

According to researchers and art therapists, adults who color in coloring books may experience a variety of therapeutic benefits. A 2005 study (and a 2012 replication study) concluded that people who colored in mandalas—complex geometric figures frequently seen in Hinduism and Buddhism—experienced lower levels of anxiety than people who simply colored on a blank piece of paper. By focusing on different shapes and patterns in a structured way, people who color can shut off negative thoughts, becoming calmer. The study concluded that like meditation, the act of coloring patterns can let the brain rest, decrease anxiety, and encourage mindfulness.

8. DIGITAL COLORING BOOKS ARE A THING.

If you assumed that all coloring books are tangible items, think again. Plenty of websites offer digital coloring books, allowing users to choose an image, pick a stylus tool, and decide how to color it. But digital coloring books can be more high tech than a glorified Microsoft Paint program. Disney offers Disney Color and Play, an augmented reality coloring book app that lets you use your smartphone or tablet to transform 2D images of Disney characters into a colorful, digital 3D experience.

9. TODAY, YOU CAN FIND JUST ABOUT ANY TYPE OF COLORING BOOK…

Whether you have a hankering to color in drawings based on pop culture, politics, literature, or sports, there’s probably a coloring book for you. Pop culture-themed options include everything from Star Wars and Harry Potter to Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad. And if you want a more involved coloring experience, interactive coloring books let you write your own story, solve puzzles, or scan pages that you’ve colored and animate them online.

10. …AND YOU CAN EVEN CREATE ONE USING YOUR OWN PHOTOS.

The only thing better than taking a selfie is coloring in your selfie! Thanks to Color Me Book, you can order personalized coloring books that feature your own photos. After you upload your images, a team of designers hand-trace them and turn them into pages of a customized coloring book—one that’s perfect for those impossible-to-shop-for family members.