Welcome to brain stuff from how stuff works. Hey, they're brain stuff. It's Christian Seger. If you're a person who has a nose and eyeballs, you've probably noticed that when you sneeze, your eyelids naturally snap shut. It's the reason that sneezing while driving is a terrifying roulette game of death.
But I've got a question for you. When you were a kid, did you hear the story that if you managed to resist this reflex and hold your eyes open during a sneeze, that they would pop out of your head? I did. In fact, my ninth grade science teacher, Mrs Abraham told me this is it true? Though? Well short answer, almost definitely not. But unfortunately we can't be as perfectly certain as we would all like to be about this particular topic. So here are the facts. Fact one, your
eyes can pop out of their sockets. It's not very common, but it can happen. Doctors call anterior bulging of the eye beyond its normal orbit a case of exophthalamus. If the eyeball gets dislocated from its socket enough that its equator is literally outside your retracted eyelids, this is known as globe luxation. Fact number two. If you want to sleep soundly tonight and really every other night for the rest of your life, you should not search the web
for images of globe luxation. Fact number three. Globe luxation is rare, but it can be caused by a number of conditions. Of course, gouging at an eyeball with a finger or another instrument that will do it. Some various types of traumatic head injury can cause the eyeballs to
pop out of their sockets. Many cases of spontaneous globe luxation in the medical literature have happened while the eye was being messed with in some ways, such as during the application of a contact lens or eye drops, or when a doctor was manipulating the eyelids during an exam. Violent vomiting has also been cited as a cause of eyeball dislocation. And I might add that whoever this refers to has my sympathies, because that sounds like the worst
day ever. Now, if we are to believe our historical sources, there may have been a few cases where a sneeze knocked somebody's eyeball out. For example, in April of eighteen eighty two, a US newspaper reported that a woman on a street car in Indianapolis burst one of her eyeballs
in the middle of a sneezing fit. Whether this means she suffered globe luxation, or that her eyeball just up and exploded, or that journalists in the eighteen eighties sometimes reported rather dubious stories, look, it's hard to say, but if we look at the more recent sources. A two thousand two ophthalmology study reviewed the twenty six cases of
spontaneous globe luxation then known to the medical world. While most of the cases they found were triggered by manipulation of the eyelids, the authors did also claim that a small number were odd on by other triggers, including things like crying, coughing, nose blowing, bending over, and yes, sneezing. So sneezing might have caused the dislocation of the eyeball in a very very small number of known cases. But does keeping your eyes open during the sneeze have anything
to do with it? As I said before, almost definitely not. And it's certainly true that eyeball dislocation doesn't happen every time you sneeze with your eyes open, because you can go to YouTube right now and look up videos of people sneezing with their eyes open. It's not easy, but some people can do it and their eyeballs are They're fine, and they seem to enjoy showing off this disgusting trick.
But the complete lack of correlation between open eyes and eyeball poppage is a combination of the fact that sneezing almost never, if ever, causes the eyes to pop out, and the fact that your eyelids don't really do any of the work of keeping your eyeballs in their sockets to begin with. Instead, your eyeballs are primarily held in place by a combination of six muscles known as the extra ocular muscles. They control the movements of the eyes
and are much stronger than the eyelids. So whether or not you can manage to keep your eyes open during a sneeze probably has little to no effect on the chances that your eyes will pop out, and those chances are very very slim in the first place, though possibly not zero. Take that, Mrs Abraham check out the brainstuff channel on YouTube, and for more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.