Latest / The Last Observer: Science and Beyond / The Dancing Plague of 1518: Why Did Hundreds Dance Until They Collapsed?

Transcript

The Dancing Plague of 1518: Why Did Hundreds Dance Until They Collapsed? · The Last Observer: Science and Beyond

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Imagine for a second that it's July in the year
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: fifteen eighteen, right, a very hot summer exactly. You are
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: in the city of Strasbourg, which you know at the
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: time is this bustling, densely packed hub in the Holy
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: Roman Empire. So you're walking down this narrow, dusty cobblestone street,
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: just going about your daily business, dodging carts and crowds,
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: and suddenly you see a woman step outside her front door.
• 0:25
  Speaker 2: And we know her historically as.
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: Frautra fe right, fraud tra fayo. She steps out into
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: this punishing summer heat, and she simply, well, she just
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: begins to dance. Yeah, there's no music playing, there's no
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: festival going on, and like, if you look at her face,
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: there is absolutely no joy. She's just twirling and swaying
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: and leaping, entirely in silence.
• 0:44
  Speaker 2: And it is so crucial to understand right from the
• 0:47
  Speaker 2: outset that this was not some spontaneous, lighthearted moment of expression.
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: No, not at all.
• 0:52
  Speaker 2: This was a nightmare. I mean she danced like that
• 0:54
  Speaker 2: continuously for six straight days.
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: Six days. I just I cannot even fathom the color
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: burn of that, let alone the sheer physical pain just
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: non stop exertion.
• 1:04
  Speaker 2: The physical toll is almost unimaginable. And the thing is,
• 1:07
  Speaker 2: within a week, several dozen people had joined her right
• 1:11
  Speaker 2: there in the streets. It just spread like wildfire. By August,
• 1:16
  Speaker 2: this completely inexplicable hysteria had swept through the whole city,
• 1:20
  Speaker 2: ensnaring and estimated four hundred people. Wow, you had men, women, children,
• 1:26
  Speaker 2: all just dancing through the intense heat. It was frankly
• 1:30
  Speaker 2: horrific to witness. They were bleeding from raw swollen feet,
• 1:34
  Speaker 2: their shoes had completely worn through. They were screaming in agony,
• 1:38
  Speaker 2: literally begging for mercy from anyone passing by. But they
• 1:41
  Speaker 2: were entirely unable to stop their own limbs from moving.
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: That is just a terrifying image, being an absolute prisoner
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: inside your own moving body.
• 1:48
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they danced until they physically broke. Many of them
• 1:51
  Speaker 2: collapsed from sheer dehydration or you know rhabdomialysis.
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: Which is when your muscles break in exactly.
• 1:56
  Speaker 2: Your overwork muscles literally begin to break down. Yeah, and
• 2:00
  Speaker 2: and poison your kidneys. We are talking about people suffering
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: massive heart attacks or dying of strokes right there on
• 2:05
  Speaker 2: the cobblestones.
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this because the core mission we are
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: tackling today is figuring out how a solitary, bizarre performance
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: by one woman escalates into one of the most horrifying
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: and inexplicable medical emergencies in European history.
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: It's staggering.
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: We are talking about an entire city completely gripped by
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: a dancing plague.
• 2:27
  Speaker 2: Right, and it's a question that has haunted historians and
• 2:30
  Speaker 2: medical professionals for centuries now. Iwbut because understanding this event
• 2:36
  Speaker 2: it's about much more than just looking backward at some
• 2:38
  Speaker 2: medieval anomaly. It is an investigation into what actually happens
• 2:42
  Speaker 2: to your own mind and your own body when you
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: are pushed to the absolute breaking point of stress and belief.
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: So let's look at the immediate aftermath. How does a
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: city government even begin to respond when its citizens are
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: literally dancing themselves to death in the town square.
• 2:56
  Speaker 2: It's total chaos, right, you have.
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: An exploding body count, overflowing streets, complete civic panic.
• 3:01
  Speaker 2: Well, you have to view their response through the lens
• 3:04
  Speaker 2: of sixteenth century medical logic. Right in fifteen eighteen, society is,
• 3:08
  Speaker 2: you know, centuries away from modern medicine or germ theory
• 3:11
  Speaker 2: or neurology, Oh absolutely, So the civic and religious authorities
• 3:15
  Speaker 2: rushed to contain the crisis, and they bring in the
• 3:18
  Speaker 2: most prominent physicians of the time to consult. They observed
• 3:21
  Speaker 2: these victims and officially concluded that the affliction was a
• 3:24
  Speaker 2: physical illness caused by hot blood.
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: Wait, hot blood, like they literally thought her blood was
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: boiling inside.
• 3:31
  Speaker 2: Her veins in a sense. Yeah, The prevailing medical philosophy
• 3:34
  Speaker 2: of the era was humoral theory. Doctors believed the human
• 3:38
  Speaker 2: body was essentially a vessel governed by four distinct fluids
• 3:42
  Speaker 2: or humors. So you had blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and
• 3:46
  Speaker 2: black bile.
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: And health was just about balancing them.
• 3:49
  Speaker 2: Precisely. Health was simply keeping those four fluids in perfect balance.
• 3:53
  Speaker 2: So they theorized that Frautrofhea and the hundreds of others
• 3:57
  Speaker 2: had developed an over abundance of blood which had physically overheated.
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: So it's literally too hot, right.
• 4:02
  Speaker 2: Think of a pot of water placed on a stove.
• 4:05
  Speaker 2: As it boils, the water agitates and bubbles over. They
• 4:09
  Speaker 2: believed this overheated blood was rushing to the victim's brains,
• 4:12
  Speaker 2: causing this frantic, uncontrollable physical agitation.
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: So, okay, if you are a sixteenth century doctor and
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: your official diagnosis is a brain boiling with hot blood,
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: what on earth is the prescription?
• 4:27
  Speaker 2: Well, their official literal prescription was that the victims needed
• 4:30
  Speaker 2: to dance it out.
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: Dance it out.
• 4:32
  Speaker 2: Yes, The medical consensus was that if they could just
• 4:35
  Speaker 2: keep these afflicted people moving at a rapid pace, they
• 4:37
  Speaker 2: would eventually sweat out the morbid humors, vent the excess heat,
• 4:41
  Speaker 2: and purge the illness from their systems.
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: I have to pause here because that logic is just
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: its astounding. To cure people who are literally dropping dead
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: in the streets from sheer cardiovascular exhaustion, the official medical
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: advice was to prescribe even more aerobic activity.
• 4:57
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that was the plan.
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: That is like trying to put out a roaring house
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: fire by throwing a massive bucket of gasoline on it.
• 5:03
  Speaker 2: It sounds completely absurd to our modern years, I know,
• 5:05
  Speaker 2: but they follow this humoro logic to its absolute extreme.
• 5:09
  Speaker 2: The city council actually took radical, highly expensive civic action
• 5:13
  Speaker 2: to facilitate this cure.
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: What do they do?
• 5:15
  Speaker 2: They ordered the public squares to be cleared of their
• 5:18
  Speaker 2: open air markets, and they brought in guilds of carpenters
• 5:21
  Speaker 2: to construct dedicated, heavy wooden dance stages right in the
• 5:25
  Speaker 2: center of the city.
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: You are kidding. They actively built infrastructure for the victims.
• 5:30
  Speaker 2: They absolutely did. They essentially turned the town square into
• 5:33
  Speaker 2: a massive, designated quarantine zone for dancing. And it gets
• 5:38
  Speaker 2: even more surreal. Also, the city council used public funds
• 5:42
  Speaker 2: to hire professional musicians. Way yes, they brought in dozens
• 5:46
  Speaker 2: of pipers and drummers, paying them to play continuously day
• 5:50
  Speaker 2: and night in shifts to keep the rhythm going so
• 5:52
  Speaker 2: the afflicted would not stop moving.
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: That is insane.
• 5:56
  Speaker 2: And when victims began to collapse from exhaustion before they
• 5:59
  Speaker 2: had quote unquote quoe sweated out the poison, the city
• 6:02
  Speaker 2: hired strong, healthy, professional dancers to get up on those
• 6:06
  Speaker 2: wooden stages and physically hold the dying victims upright, dragging
• 6:10
  Speaker 2: them through the motions.
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: That is just a staggering visual. You have hundreds of
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: people screaming and paying their feet, leaving buddy footprints on
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: the wood and the government's response is to hire a
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: live band and build them a dance floor.
• 6:22
  Speaker 2: What's fascinating here is the tragic irony of that official response.
• 6:26
  Speaker 2: It really cannot be overstated. Right, The authorities were desperately
• 6:29
  Speaker 2: trying to cure a mania, but in the process they
• 6:32
  Speaker 2: accidentally engineered a massive chaotic festival atmosphere.
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: Because now there is constant thumping music and a giant
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: public spectacle drawing everyone out of their homes.
• 6:43
  Speaker 2: Everyone is coming to watch, exactly, and in doing so,
• 6:46
  Speaker 2: they inadvertently turbocharged the phenomenon. The very infrastructure designed to
• 6:51
  Speaker 2: cure the plague acted as a massive catalyst.
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: It drew more people in.
• 6:56
  Speaker 2: Right. The constant drumming created this mesmerizing sensor overload. The
• 7:01
  Speaker 2: crowds gathered to watch, which pulled more and more vulnerable,
• 7:04
  Speaker 2: exhausted people into the hysteria. The infection rageous skyrocketed once
• 7:09
  Speaker 2: the stages.
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: Were built, so the gasoline definitely spreads the fire, Oh absolutely.
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: The body count is rising rapidly. The stages are literally
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: turning into slaughter houses of exhausted bodies, and the authorities
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: finally have to realize that their brilliant medical cure is
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: actually a death sentence.
• 7:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it takes a few grueling weeks, but as the
• 7:26
  Speaker 2: death toll mounts, the city council completely reverses course.
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: They realize it's failing right.
• 7:32
  Speaker 2: The hot blood theory is deemed a disastrous failure. So
• 7:35
  Speaker 2: when sixteenth century science fails to stop the dying, the
• 7:39
  Speaker 2: authorities pivot completely to divine intervention. They institute an incredibly
• 7:45
  Speaker 2: strict crackdown.
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: A complete one hundred and eighty degree turn from the
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: festival atmosphere.
• 7:50
  Speaker 2: A total sweeping ban. The council outlawed all music, all dancing,
• 7:55
  Speaker 2: and all public gatherings throughout the entire territory of Strasbourg.
• 8:00
  Speaker 2: The wooden stages were immediately torn down. The pipers and
• 8:03
  Speaker 2: drummers were dismissed and silenced, which.
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: I mean that must have resulted in an incredibly eerie,
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: unsettling silence over the city after weeks of constant drumming
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: and screaming.
• 8:13
  Speaker 2: I can only imagine.
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: But what do they do with the people who were
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: still physically trapped in this compulsion, you know, the ones
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: who couldn't stop moving even without the music.
• 8:20
  Speaker 2: Well, the city resorted to desperate religious measures. The most
• 8:23
  Speaker 2: severely affected victims, the ones who were still thrashing and
• 8:27
  Speaker 2: suffering on the ground, were bundled into wagons.
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: Where do they take them?
• 8:30
  Speaker 2: They were transported out of the city up into the
• 8:33
  Speaker 2: nearby Voja's mountains to an isolated shrine dedicated specifically to
• 8:38
  Speaker 2: Saint Vitas.
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: Saint Vitus, and the ritual they were forced to undergo
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: there is fascinating in its bizarre magical specificity. I mean,
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: they didn't just have a priest prey over them.
• 8:49
  Speaker 2: No, it was a highly structured, almost the astrical, religious ritual.
• 8:52
  Speaker 2: Right at the mountain shrine, the victims were taken off
• 8:55
  Speaker 2: the wagons and their ruined feet were placed in bright
• 8:58
  Speaker 2: red shoes.
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 8:59
  Speaker 2: Yeah. They were led to the altar, sprinkled with holy
• 9:02
  Speaker 2: water and physically forced to kneel. They were made to
• 9:05
  Speaker 2: pray to Saint Fetus, begging for divine intervention to lift
• 9:09
  Speaker 2: the affliction.
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: Putting agonizingly swollen, bleeding feet into specific red shoes really
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: highlights how deeply ingrained the superstition was. It's that mindset
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: you have to follow an exact and magical recipe to
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: break a curse.
• 9:23
  Speaker 2: Strangely enough, the intervention worked. Yeah. Whether it was the
• 9:27
  Speaker 2: sudden change of environment or the physical exhaustion finally overriding
• 9:32
  Speaker 2: the neurological compulsion, or maybe just the sheer psychological power
• 9:36
  Speaker 2: of the ritual itself, breaking the trans it marked the
• 9:39
  Speaker 2: beginning of the end that is wild. By early September,
• 9:42
  Speaker 2: the epidemic finally began to wane. The dancing stopped, but.
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: The event leaves behind a completely traumatized city. You have
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: hundreds of dead victims, devastated families, and a terrifying mystery
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: that modern researchers has spent decades trying to solve. Definitely,
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: because we still have to answer the fundamental core question
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: of this entire phenomenon, what actually triggers an entire population
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: to dance to death?
• 10:05
  Speaker 2: And science naturally demands a concrete answer for an event
• 10:09
  Speaker 2: of this magnitude.
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: Of course, this.
• 10:10
  Speaker 2: Wasn't a fairytale or a myth. It was a heavily
• 10:13
  Speaker 2: documented civic crisis, recorded in tax documents, medical journals, and
• 10:17
  Speaker 2: city council minutes.
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: We know what happened.
• 10:19
  Speaker 2: Right Over the centuries, historians, toxicologists, and sociologists have debated
• 10:24
  Speaker 2: the root cause fiercely. Two primary theories have emerged from
• 10:28
  Speaker 2: all that investigation to explain the impossible.
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: So let's start with the first one because it sounds
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: like a plot line straight out of a toxicology textbook.
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: The idea that this was a massive accidental poisoning. Yes.
• 10:39
  Speaker 2: The first major theory points to a biological toxicological cause
• 10:43
  Speaker 2: known as ergotism. The culprit behind this theory is a
• 10:47
  Speaker 2: fungus called Claviceps purpyria. It is a specific type of
• 10:51
  Speaker 2: mold that grows on damp rye grain, particularly when a
• 10:55
  Speaker 2: region experiences unusually wet and freezing agricultural seasons.
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: And rye would have been the absolute staple grain for
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: the bread that the peasant class was eating every single
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: day in sixteenth century Strasburg.
• 11:07
  Speaker 2: It was the foundation of their entire diet. The peasants
• 11:11
  Speaker 2: would harvest the damp rye, mill it into flour, and
• 11:13
  Speaker 2: bake it into bread, completely unaware that the mold had
• 11:16
  Speaker 2: infected the kernels.
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: Right they couldn't see it, and.
• 11:18
  Speaker 2: This mold contains highly active alkaloids. Specifically, it produces an
• 11:23
  Speaker 2: alkaloid called ergotamine. From a chemical perspective, ergotamine is a
• 11:28
  Speaker 2: direct precursor to lysergic acid diphylamide yes LSD. The toxicological
• 11:34
  Speaker 2: theory proposes that the entire peasant population of Strasburg was
• 11:38
  Speaker 2: accidentally consuming mass quantities of a hallucinogenic neurotoxin with their
• 11:43
  Speaker 2: daily meals. Wow, and ergot poisoning is terrifying. It aggressively
• 11:48
  Speaker 2: targets the central nervous system. It can cause incredibly vivid,
• 11:52
  Speaker 2: terrifying hallucinations, violent muscle spasms, and severe, uncontrollable convulsions.
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: Here's where it gets really interesting, though. There is a
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: massive glaring biological flaw in this theory when you really
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: look at how ergotism affects the human body. Because ergotism
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: doesn't just cause hallucinations and spasms, It causes severe vasoconstriction.
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: It aggressively restricts the blood flow to your extremities, and
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: when blood stops flowing to your fingers and toes, it
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: leads directly to gangreen Your tissue literally begins to die
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: and rot while you were still alive.
• 12:26
  Speaker 2: It's horrific.
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: It's an incredibly painful, debilitating condition. So if these victims
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: were suffering from a severe enough case of ergot poisoning
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: to cause city wide hallucinations, they would also have gangrenous limbs. Exactly,
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: it would be physically biologically impossible for them to perform strenuous, athletic,
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: coordinated dancing for days or weeks on end. You cannot
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: leap and twirl on a wooden stage. If your feet
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: are rotting off, they would have died from the gang
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: green or the cardiovascular stress. Far quicker.
• 12:55
  Speaker 2: You have zeroed in on the exact counter argument that
• 12:59
  Speaker 2: modern medical historians used to dismiss the ergot theory.
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: It just doesn't fit the physical timeline.
• 13:04
  Speaker 2: Right, the physical endurance required to dance for a week
• 13:06
  Speaker 2: street It completely contradicts the physical degradation caused by ergotism.
• 13:11
  Speaker 2: Violent spasms and uncoordinated convulsions are very different from the sustained, rhythmic,
• 13:16
  Speaker 2: albeit frantic dancing explicitly described in the civic records. Yeah,
• 13:20
  Speaker 2: ergotism makes you bed ridden, it doesn't make you a
• 13:22
  Speaker 2: marathon dancer, which brings us to the second and frankly,
• 13:26
  Speaker 2: much more widely accepted theory today.
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: The psychological explanation.
• 13:29
  Speaker 2: Yes, prominent historical scholars, most notably John Waller, have argued
• 13:33
  Speaker 2: extensively that this outbreak was a classic, albeit extreme case
• 13:38
  Speaker 2: of mass psychogenic illness. Okay, what is more commonly referred
• 13:41
  Speaker 2: to in the public sphere as stress induced mass hysteria.
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: But to trigger a mass hysteria of this sheer magnitude
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: the baseline level of stress in the population has to
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: be astronomical. People don't just snap and dance themselves to
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: death because they had a rough week at work.
• 13:57
  Speaker 2: No, absolutely not. And if we connect than this to
• 14:00
  Speaker 2: the bigger picture, the context of Strasbourg in fifteen eighteen
• 14:03
  Speaker 2: is absolutely vital to understanding how this happened.
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: What were conditions like?
• 14:08
  Speaker 2: The living conditions were basically apocalyptic. The city was reeling
• 14:12
  Speaker 2: from a string of consecutive failed harvests. There was severe,
• 14:16
  Speaker 2: widespread famine. People were forging for roots. They were literally
• 14:20
  Speaker 2: starting in the streets.
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: So their physical bodies were already depleted, malnourished, and basically
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: functioning on fumes exactly.
• 14:27
  Speaker 2: And to make matters worse, on top of the starvation,
• 14:30
  Speaker 2: you have devastating outbreaks of infectious diseases sweeping through the
• 14:34
  Speaker 2: overcrowded population. The sweating sickness was killing people in hours.
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: Oh wow.
• 14:39
  Speaker 2: Syphilis, which at the time was a terrifying new disease
• 14:42
  Speaker 2: known as the Great Pox, was rampant and completely untreatable.
• 14:45
  Speaker 2: Leprosy and smallpox were constantly lingering.
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: So the visible, terrifying realities of agonizing death were everywhere
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: you looked. You just couldn't escape it.
• 14:54
  Speaker 2: It was a landscape of inescapable socioeconomic despair. But interwoven
• 14:59
  Speaker 2: with all that physical suffering was a profound, suffocating religious terror.
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: Because of how they viewed disease back.
• 15:05
  Speaker 2: Then, Right in the medieval mindset, this kind of relentless,
• 15:09
  Speaker 2: compounding suffering wasn't just bad luck or bad weather. It
• 15:12
  Speaker 2: was a direct sign of divine punishment. The population firmly
• 15:17
  Speaker 2: believed that God was actively angry with them.
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: Which perfectly sets the stage for the folklore of Saint Vitas.
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: The culture already had a built in narrative for this
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: exact type of punishment.
• 15:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah, in medieval European folklore, there was a deeply rooted,
• 15:30
  Speaker 2: widely feared cultural belief that Saint Vitas possessed the power
• 15:35
  Speaker 2: to curse sinners with an uncontrollable dancing mania. Wow, it
• 15:39
  Speaker 2: was a specific, known curse in the public consciousness. People
• 15:42
  Speaker 2: whispered about it, they genuinely feared it.
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: So you have this perfect tragic storm of vulnerability. You
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: have a population whose bodies are starving and riddled with disease,
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: their minds are utterly broken by relentless trauma and the
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: pervasive fear of hell fire, and they all share this absolute,
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: terrified belief in a saint who can force you to
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: dance against your will.
• 16:05
  Speaker 2: This environment fundamentally changes how the human brain functions.
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: Really yeah.
• 16:10
  Speaker 2: Waller explains that this combination of extreme physical exhaustion, psychological trauma,
• 16:15
  Speaker 2: and specific cultural fear created what psychologists call a highly
• 16:19
  Speaker 2: suggestible state in vulnerable individuals. The sheer volume of stress
• 16:24
  Speaker 2: just overloads the brain.
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: How does that actually work mechanically? Though? Like how does
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: stress make your legs move?
• 16:30
  Speaker 2: It is a phenomenon known as a conversion disorder.
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 16:32
  Speaker 2: When the brain experiences a level of emotional or psychological
• 16:36
  Speaker 2: trauma that it simply cannot process consciously, the amygdala, the
• 16:40
  Speaker 2: fear center of the brain, basically short circuits.
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: It just breaks.
• 16:43
  Speaker 2: It bypasses the prefrontal cortex, which handles logic and reasoning,
• 16:47
  Speaker 2: and directly channels that overwhelming emotional distress into the motor cortex.
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: Oh I see, the psychological trauma is literally converted into
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: a physical somatic symptom. Think about how extremingsie might make
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: your hand shake involuntarily, or how mortal terror might freeze
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: your vocal cords. This is that exact same neurological mechanism,
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: but scaled up to a massive systemic short circuit. The
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: brain forces the body to act out the distress.
• 17:16
  Speaker 2: So when Frau Trefee steps out onto the cobblestones and
• 17:19
  Speaker 2: her mind finally breaks under the crushing weight of the
• 17:22
  Speaker 2: famine and the fear, her brain acts out the exact curse.
• 17:25
  Speaker 2: She has been terrified of her entire life exactly.
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: It's an involuntary trance like state. She isn't faking it.
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: Her brain has literally lost control of her body.
• 17:34
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: And because the rest of the population is trapped in
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: that exact same environment of trauma and shared belief, witnessing
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: her erratic behavior acts as a spark in a powder keg.
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: It triggers a psychological contagion.
• 17:46
  Speaker 2: Contagion is the perfect word for it. It functions just
• 17:49
  Speaker 2: like a virus.
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: Think about the mechanics of yawning. When one person yawns
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: in a quiet room, it almost instantly triggers a neurological
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: mirror response, and everyone else begins to yawn involunte terily.
• 18:00
  Speaker 2: Now replace the mild sensation of fatigue with the absolute,
• 18:05
  Speaker 2: mortal terror of divine punishment.
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: That is terrifying.
• 18:09
  Speaker 2: The hysteria sweeps through the city, jumping from one highly
• 18:12
  Speaker 2: suggestible traumatized mind to the next. The collective belief in
• 18:16
  Speaker 2: the curse literally manifests the physical reality of the curse
• 18:19
  Speaker 2: across hundreds of people.
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: So what does this all mean? We're talking about a bizarre,
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: tragic event from over five hundred years ago. Why should
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: you listening to this today care about a medieval dancing plague?
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: Why does this historical footnote actually matter?
• 18:35
  Speaker 2: Well? While isolated dancing manias happened elsewhere in Europe during
• 18:38
  Speaker 2: the Middle Ages, the Strasbourg event of fifteen eighteen remains
• 18:41
  Speaker 2: the most thoroughly and meticulously documented on the record. Yes,
• 18:45
  Speaker 2: it serves as a cold hard historical fact, and it
• 18:48
  Speaker 2: stands as a stark, terrifying reminder of the incredible influence
• 18:52
  Speaker 2: that acute trauma, mass panic, and shared belief systems can
• 18:56
  Speaker 2: exert over the human mind and body.
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: It proves that the barrier between I mean, psychological stress
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: and physical reality is incredibly porous. They aren't separate systems,
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: they are entirely linked.
• 19:06
  Speaker 2: It demonstrates that when the human mind is pushed past
• 19:09
  Speaker 2: its breaking point by collective environmental despair, the physical body
• 19:14
  Speaker 2: will follow suit in unimaginable ways. The trauma was so
• 19:18
  Speaker 2: heavy that the mind broke and the body surrendered to
• 19:21
  Speaker 2: the nightmare.
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: It forces you to look at our modern world a
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: little differently, doesn't it. We love to think that we
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: are vastly superior, highly advanced, and completely rational. Oh absolutely,
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: we feel protected by our smartphones, our technology, and our
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: modern medicine. But our neurology, the fundamental wiring of our
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: brains is exactly the same today as it was for
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: those peasants in fifteen eighteen. We have the exact same hardware.
• 19:46
  Speaker 2: We really do. We are just tes susceptible to collective anxieties,
• 19:50
  Speaker 2: madjustable states, and psychological contagion as they.
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: Were, which leaves you with a rather unsettling question to
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: mull over long after this discussion ends. If the extreme
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: share anxieties of a sixteenth century city, like the famine,
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: the disease, the religious terror could literally manifest as a horrifying,
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: uncontrollable dancing plague in the public square, what strange, invisible,
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: stress induced behaviors might be spreading contigiously through our own
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: highly anxious, hyperconnected modern society right now?
• 20:19
  Speaker 2: It's a scary thought, What.
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: Are the subtle psychological compulsions we're catching from each other
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: every single day without even realizing it. The next time
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: you find yourself doom scrolling for hours, unable to look
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: away from the screen, or caught up in a wave
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: of collective modern panic, just remember Frau Trofea stepping out
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: onto that narrow cobblestone street, entirely unable to stop moving.