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Can people really die of fright? · Stuff You Should Know

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  Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
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  Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you should know
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  Speaker 1: from House Stuff Works dot com? Boom, Hello, welcome to
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  Speaker 1: the podcast. I'm Josh. That's Chuck. We're all together now, yeah,
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  Speaker 1: the stuff you should know nation as one together. But
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  Speaker 1: this is special time. It is I like it, Chuck. Um.
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  Speaker 1: Have you ever been scared, like really truly like about
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  Speaker 1: to lose your life? Scared? No, thankfully, but you know
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  Speaker 1: who has multiple occasions. Our producer Jerry has uh been
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  Speaker 1: scared to the point like she was an elevator once
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  Speaker 1: that started to fall. I think you should create you
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  Speaker 1: should describe that a little for a little better. This
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  Speaker 1: is the in Atlanta that is an outdoor elevator made
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  Speaker 1: of glass. You see everything and what your five hundred
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  Speaker 1: seven hundred stories up? So yeah and go ahead, chucked
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  Speaker 1: well and the elevator was dropping and it caught, so
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  Speaker 1: she thought she's gonna die. Then she's been held up
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  Speaker 1: at gunpoint, which was scared her to death, and she
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  Speaker 1: was in a storm in a boat one time where
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  Speaker 1: she feared for her life. So Jerry and she has
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  Speaker 1: to deal with us every week. So but at least
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  Speaker 1: she's been to the Bahamas before, assuming she made it,
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  Speaker 1: so I haven't. But Jerry is. She teeters on the
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  Speaker 1: edge of death constantly. So you know, I can tell
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  Speaker 1: you that, Um. While Jerry was she's cool as a cucumber,
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  Speaker 1: by the way, to to everybody who who hasn't met her, UM,
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  Speaker 1: but I can tell you she was still there were
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  Speaker 1: some things going on with her physiologically, whether she liked
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  Speaker 1: it or not. Right specifically, she was under the iron
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  Speaker 1: fist of one of our favorite things in human physiology,
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  Speaker 1: fight or flight. It's our favorite thing. Chuck, give a
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  Speaker 1: brief overview of fight or flight. I know we've talked
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  Speaker 1: about before, but sometimes we have latecomers. You know. Well,
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  Speaker 1: it's you know, it's a physical reaction. Your body goes
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  Speaker 1: through your adrenaline surges. Uh, people's dilate breathing fast. That
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  Speaker 1: was a high coup. That was a high coup right there.
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  Speaker 1: Holy cow, you're good. Adrenaline, like I said, pumping through
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  Speaker 1: your veins and all of a sudden, it's literally a
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  Speaker 1: physical chemical reaction in your body. What happens, though, is
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  Speaker 1: the threat leaves and things calm down. UM. Usually ideally, well,
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  Speaker 1: what one of the one of the ways that all
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  Speaker 1: these reactions start happening is through adrenaline. It acts on
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  Speaker 1: things like your myo cardial tissue, your heart tissue, uh
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  Speaker 1: and basically says, work faster, work harder. It makes your
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  Speaker 1: veins constrict to maximize blood flow. Um and and basically
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  Speaker 1: adrenaline is flowing throughout your body and it's just got
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  Speaker 1: you really jacked up, really keyed up. So are either
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  Speaker 1: gonna run or fight? Right? As you said, the thing
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  Speaker 1: is is there is a conception, um among most lay
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  Speaker 1: people that you could conceivably, if this happened to you, uh,
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  Speaker 1: in a sudden enough fashion, you could conceivably be scared
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  Speaker 1: to right, scared to death, not scared half to death.
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  Speaker 1: And as just as a sidebart, let me say that
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  Speaker 1: makes no sense whatsoever. Scared half to death. And I
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  Speaker 1: researched to find the background on that and I couldn't
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  Speaker 1: find any. But you can't be half dead. Clearly, it's
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  Speaker 1: you're alive or you're dead. You're dedicated to your craft
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  Speaker 1: and apparently see everything in black and white, So kudos
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  Speaker 1: to you. Yeah. So okay, Well, basically what we're what
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  Speaker 1: we're talking about is called sudden death. Can you be
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  Speaker 1: scared to death? Right? Um? Sudden death is basically, uh,
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  Speaker 1: it doesn't necessarily have to have to do with just
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  Speaker 1: fear only it could be panic or um actually relief
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  Speaker 1: to you. Could you can conceivably experience such a sense
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  Speaker 1: of relief that you're you could have organ failure usually
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  Speaker 1: sudden death. What the the the definition of it is
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  Speaker 1: where basically somebody who is otherwise healthy just drops dead.
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  Speaker 1: Most of the time it has to do with heart
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  Speaker 1: cardiac arrest or or um some sort of infarction, right um.
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  Speaker 1: And this is not supposed to happen. Is the weird thing?
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  Speaker 1: I mean, well to you or I it makes sense,
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  Speaker 1: you know, like you get scared to die? Um. Medical
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  Speaker 1: science doesn't generally take too much for granted. It likes
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  Speaker 1: to say, well, yeah, okay, this, this is related to this,
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  Speaker 1: but what are the points in between? Right? And there's
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  Speaker 1: actually an emerging field. It's called neuro cardiology. Have you
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  Speaker 1: heard about this? There is a guy and his name
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  Speaker 1: is doctor Martin Samuel's and he is often called the
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  Speaker 1: death doctor. And he is this leading proponent of neuro cardiology,
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  Speaker 1: is kind of the father of it. And uh, from
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  Speaker 1: what I gather he doesn't do too much research because
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  Speaker 1: the problem is this is a this could very easily
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  Speaker 1: become an unethical field. Yeah, it's kind of hard to
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  Speaker 1: perform a study and say, all right, we're gonna scare
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  Speaker 1: you really badly and if you're still alive afterward, we're
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  Speaker 1: going to make some notes on that, and if not,
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  Speaker 1: then thank you for your time, and here's you. And
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  Speaker 1: even more to Dr Samuel's credit, he refuses to um
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  Speaker 1: test on animals for ethical reasons. So basically he's just
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  Speaker 1: having to collect anecdotal evidence. Whenever he can get his
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  Speaker 1: hand on a heart um from somebody who's experienced sudden death,
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  Speaker 1: he likes to do that, I'm quite sure. And one
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  Speaker 1: of the things that he's found, and this is actually
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  Speaker 1: a well known um uh symptom of stress uh, and
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  Speaker 1: that is um contraction bands along the heart UM. They
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  Speaker 1: look like little red stripes. And basically what it is
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  Speaker 1: the adrenaline is come in in such a concentrated form
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  Speaker 1: or in such an amount because of this huge fear
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  Speaker 1: response or whatever UM that it's just destroyed cells. It's
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  Speaker 1: just blown them out, and so you've got lesions formed
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  Speaker 1: along your heart tissue, not good to have and actually,
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  Speaker 1: um unsurprisingly UH, this has shown up in cocaine users
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  Speaker 1: as well. UM, so you can have you can can
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  Speaker 1: you can create contraction bands along your heart from drug
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  Speaker 1: abuse or from being scared. The thing is, it's like
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  Speaker 1: when you come out of it, you're you're not like,
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  Speaker 1: oh my heart hurts. You know that you can't tell.
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  Speaker 1: And apparently if this happens enough, over time, the heart
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  Speaker 1: becomes weak and stops functioning properly. Interesting. It is interesting stuff,
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  Speaker 1: and there's actually um there again we should say, uh.
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  Speaker 1: Neuro cardiology is something of an emerging field. UM, so
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  Speaker 1: they're still trying to get as much proof as they can.
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  Speaker 1: I found another unrelated study that found that UM, the
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  Speaker 1: prevalence of contraction bands in UM accident victims, the the
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  Speaker 1: the degree and the severity of contraction bands actually uh
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  Speaker 1: increases the longer time. The longer the time between the
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  Speaker 1: accident and between death goes by. So your heart's just
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  Speaker 1: pumping and your adrenaline is flowing. But then you die.
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  Speaker 1: So if you just die immediately, you don't your your
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  Speaker 1: your body doesn't have time to release that it tryingly
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  Speaker 1: create contractions. So there's a clear link. But queen adrenaline
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  Speaker 1: and contraction bands. And we do know that something like
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  Speaker 1: fear can release adrenaline, right, yeah, uh you know, like
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  Speaker 1: you were saying earlier with this doctor, it's you can't
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  Speaker 1: ethically perform a test like this, but what you can
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  Speaker 1: do is you can look at statistics and things like
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  Speaker 1: that over time. And a couple of people have done this.
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  Speaker 1: The one, the one I like to call it the
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  Speaker 1: Baskerville Effect from the famous Hound of Baskerville's Sir author,
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  Speaker 1: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was a physician himself. What
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  Speaker 1: a mouthful, uh he was. And in the Hound of
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  Speaker 1: Baskerville's one of the main characters has a heart attack
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  Speaker 1: because they were scared by a ghostly dog that haunted
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  Speaker 1: the area. So I've always I've read that many many
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  Speaker 1: years ago. I've always been ghostly dog. It's not that
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  Speaker 1: scary ghost person. Scary Yeah dog, scary ghost dog, not scary.
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  Speaker 1: So uh. One the one I liked was China and
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  Speaker 1: China and Japan. Actually the number four is supposed to
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  Speaker 1: be unlucky. Yeah, we've talked about that before. We have,
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  Speaker 1: indeed in our Terrible Terrible Friend of podcast. You're being harsh,
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  Speaker 1: um and apparently in in China and Japan the number
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  Speaker 1: four is unlucky because its pronunciation is similar to the
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  Speaker 1: word for death, first of all. And so what they
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  Speaker 1: did was they studied uh some data over the course
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  Speaker 1: pretty expansive data, yeah, twenty five years, and they looked
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  Speaker 1: at the death certificates of about two hundred thousand Chinese
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  Speaker 1: and Japanese people over that period. And then they had
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  Speaker 1: a control group of forty seven million, uh, white folks
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  Speaker 1: like you and I. And what they found was the
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  Speaker 1: mortality was indeed higher for the fourth of the month
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  Speaker 1: compared to the white control group in China and Japan. Yeah,
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  Speaker 1: people with chronic heart disease UM they saw a increase
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  Speaker 1: in deaths on the fourth of any given month UM
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  Speaker 1: and for people who were in the hospital with with
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  Speaker 1: heart problems, there was a forty seven percent increase compared
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  Speaker 1: to UM any the white control control group is interesting.
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  Speaker 1: So you you obviously, as we covered in that Terrible
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  Speaker 1: Friday the thirteenth podcast, um we we we said that
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  Speaker 1: you know, there's not a lot to it, but that
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  Speaker 1: doesn't mean there's no fear associated with it, right, right,
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  Speaker 1: So it's entirely possible that you know, these people are
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  Speaker 1: are already suffering from heart problems. But you know, the
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  Speaker 1: fourth of the month rolls around there a little more
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  Speaker 1: jacked up the calendar. You know, they're there, yeah, there,
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  Speaker 1: there's They're just a little more vulnerable than other days
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  Speaker 1: of the month. So it would be kind of um
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  Speaker 1: self initiated and Chuck, I know you're hot and heavy
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  Speaker 1: for another study about sudden death, aren't you. Yeah, there's
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  Speaker 1: a good one. Um. Remember the earthquake in north Ridge
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  Speaker 1: and in southern California. Yeah, how could I forget six
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  Speaker 1: point seven on the Richter scale? Was it? I didn't
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  Speaker 1: even know that? Good for you? On a normal day
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  Speaker 1: in l A, there's about five sudden deaths, which we
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  Speaker 1: talked about, Um, when the north Ridge earthquake hit, there
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  Speaker 1: were twenty four sudden deaths that day, big spike almost
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  Speaker 1: five times. And a few of these they linked to
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  Speaker 1: physical exertions, you can throw those out, But most of
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  Speaker 1: these were actually attributed to the you know, tremendous fright
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  Speaker 1: caused by the earthquake. And the average agent was a
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  Speaker 1: little bit high, sixty eight years old. But only of
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  Speaker 1: these people had any kind of heart disease previously in
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  Speaker 1: the past so there was genuine sudden death, even though
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  Speaker 1: they were a little bit on the old side. So that's,
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  Speaker 1: you know, again pretty clear link, right. But of course
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  Speaker 1: correlation is not causation, and so neurocrdiologists like Dr Martin
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  Speaker 1: are gonna keep looking into it. Um. And actually one
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  Speaker 1: other thing, all of this is based on something called
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  Speaker 1: voodoo death. Have you heard about that? I have Walter Cannon. Yeah,
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  Speaker 1: in nineteen forty two, he he wrote a paper, um,
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  Speaker 1: and basically he said that there was a lot more
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  Speaker 1: prevalence of sudden death in places where voodoo was practiced.
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  Speaker 1: And he went on to postulate that this was because
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  Speaker 1: people believed in voodoo and and and um, that kind
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  Speaker 1: of mysticism so much that when they were led to
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  Speaker 1: believe that they had just been hexed or should be
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  Speaker 1: dead under voodoo practices, um, they actually did die. Um.
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  Speaker 1: In some cases they died because they wouldn't drink food
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  Speaker 1: or water because they thought it was poisoned by so
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  Speaker 1: they died of that. But some of them also died
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  Speaker 1: of sudden death as well. And that's actually the basis
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  Speaker 1: of all of this. The Hound of the Basker bill
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  Speaker 1: is sure, but really as far as medical science goes um.
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  Speaker 1: It was Cannon who first really started looking at sudden death,
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  Speaker 1: and it continues today, and it still will continue because
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  Speaker 1: we like to know why we die. We can try
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  Speaker 1: to stop it. And Canon was a Harvard physiologist, so
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  Speaker 1: he's he wasn't some fly by night crap, but no,
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  Speaker 1: he was definitely one worth listening. There was another thing
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  Speaker 1: I wanted to talk about have you here, which is, uh,
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  Speaker 1: have you ever heard of someone supposedly their hair turning
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  Speaker 1: white overnight because of fear? Sure I have of that.
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  Speaker 1: Not quite true. That's a bit of an urban myth
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  Speaker 1: from what I could tell the just just send it
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  Speaker 1: to his chick. We we both did some research here,
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  Speaker 1: and uh, apparently fear and stress and that kind of
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  Speaker 1: emotion can cause your hair to turn white. But there's
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  Speaker 1: no way it could happen overnight. It would cause a
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  Speaker 1: change of metabolic function. I think, um, that that could
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  Speaker 1: turn your hair a different color or make it lose
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  Speaker 1: its color. Right, yeah, okay, but there is a way
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  Speaker 1: it can turn gray, um, seemingly overnight, but it's not
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  Speaker 1: from from fear. What that's called is diffuse alopecia areata.
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  Speaker 1: It's like selective hair loss. Right. Yeah, basically that's a
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  Speaker 1: sudden hair loss um, which can happen overnight. But um,
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  Speaker 1: the biochemistry of alopecia isn't that well understood. So if
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  Speaker 1: you have a mix of dark and gray hair or
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  Speaker 1: white hair, the uncolored hair is less likely to fall out.
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  Speaker 1: So theoretically you could wake up with a lot less
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  Speaker 1: hair and the only hair that sticks around is white.
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  Speaker 1: So it's a bad morning, yeah, but it's that's not
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  Speaker 1: quite this same thing as being scared scared white? Right. Also,
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  Speaker 1: even if if it could change your hair color, which
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  Speaker 1: were not entirely certain it could, it would only do
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  Speaker 1: it from the scalp down. Everything that is out of
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  Speaker 1: your head, like your fingernails, your well, not fingernails. If
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  Speaker 1: you have fingernails growing out of your head, you have
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  Speaker 1: much bigger problems in your hair being white. But um,
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  Speaker 1: anything that's coming off of your body, fingernails, um, your
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  Speaker 1: hair that those are dead cells. It's dead. So there's
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  Speaker 1: no change that could could take place aside from maybe
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  Speaker 1: a flow be going over them. Right, what do you
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  Speaker 1: mean scalp down? Now, the scalp towards your skull, under
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  Speaker 1: the skin subdermal head of a cat. Uh, So this
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  Speaker 1: entire podcast is based on one of my favorite articles
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  Speaker 1: on the site right now. It's called can You Really
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  Speaker 1: Scare Someone to Death? It was written by our esteem
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  Speaker 1: colleague Molly Edmonds, who not only has uh this article
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  Speaker 1: to be proud of, she and another colleague of ours
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  Speaker 1: who we love very much, Kristen Can, just launched their
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  Speaker 1: own podcasts. They called stuff Mom Never Told You. You
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  Speaker 1: can find that on iTunes, alongside ours and a bunch
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: of other how Stuff Works podcasts um at our homepage.
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  Speaker 1: On iTunes, you can just type in how stuff works
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  Speaker 1: is one word in the iTunes search bar room, and
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  Speaker 1: you can also type all sorts of cool things into
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  Speaker 1: the search bar at how stuff works dot com, including
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  Speaker 1: can you really scare someone? In debt? But now Josh,
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: it's still not over there? Or goodness in the form
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: of you people aren't going anywhere. It's listener mail, times mail,
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: so listener mail. I've got quite a few today. These
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: are things that we've titled stuff we should Know, not
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: necessarily corrections, although some are. We did the podcasts on Commas,
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: which got a lot of good response from Yeah, we
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: were kind of worried about that. If I remember correctly, yeah,
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: we didn't want to treat it lightly. And we actually
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: had people who had family members and commas and they
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: thought we'd were respecting, which went a really long way too.
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: That was huge actually. But in that podcast we mentioned
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: the film Diving Bell and Butterfly, and I had seen
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: the movie and I said something about, um, the main
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: character was was able to uh. I think I said
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: he used Yeah, that he used a computer and looked
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: at the keys of the computer to write his memoir.
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: Not true at all. What he what he did was
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: he blinked the letters to someone who who transcribed this
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: book for him and it was a really basically the
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: main part of the film. And I can't explain why
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: I didn't remember that so for a while. So we
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: need to thank Kendra Wallpi of Philadelphia and Tita of Montreal, Canada.
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: I especially would like to thank whoever sent the computer
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: device in quotes, which apparently we called it and then
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: sent us the Wikipedia link um, which you know right, great,
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: Thank you, And Jesse Aiden of Vienna, Austria sent that
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: in So another quickie hypo allergenic cats, Josh, you've goofed
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: up and said that created a new species. Not true.
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: Not true is not a new species. It was a
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: new breed. And we got quite a few people, Philip Fast,
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: Scott Ruddick, Matt we Abou of Boston, j Scott Brunig
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: who is from Princeton University, Jamie vander Ratt of Saskatchewan, Canada,
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: and actually put this in the form of a hiku,
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: which is ain't speciation because they can interbreed. Still, I
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: learned a lot beautiful uh and I'm sorry a quick
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: when just came in before we recorded Keyshore the Lowdika.
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: Two more quickies, I'm sorry one more quickly. Yeast is
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: a fungus from our Moonshine podcast. I think you said
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: something about this plan and all of our biology friends said, no,
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: it's a fungus, and West Sivak, Brian Ray, Sam S
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: and John Salter told us all that it was, in
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: fact the fungus fantas amungus. Thank you all of you. Um, well,
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: we'll try to, you know, not screw up quite as much.
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: But if not, what would you have to write to
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: us about? So keep them coming right, Yes, keep us
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: diligent and uh, if you want to learn a little
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: more about Friday right. Other superstitions Urban Legends. You got
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: a great article on that, right, There's a lot more
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: on the Friday thirteenth article there, Yes, yeah, there is. Um.
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: You just go on to our handy search bar start
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: randomly typing letters, or you could make a more specific
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  Speaker 1: search and type in Friday thirteenth or urban legends, something
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  Speaker 1: like that, and you can do that at how stuff
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