Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of I Heart Radio, Hey brain Stuff, lorn Boga bam here. Have you ever heard that we humans swallow an average of eight spiders each year while we sleep, or that the average person swallows fifty two spiders over the course of a lifetime. These so called facts are so widespread that it may be hard to believe that they're completely inaccurate. The fact is, the odds of swallowing even a single spider over your
entire lifetime are so low that their virtually zero. It's extremely unlikely that a spider would even approach a sleeping human, much less crawl into their open mouth and wait to die. While just one in four people admit to a fear of spiders and insects, spiders are generally much more afraid of you than you are of them. Think about it.
The spider uses vibrations to sense danger, as sleep in human is nothing but noise and vibration, from your breath and heartbeat to tossing and turning, to snores, snorts, and other sounds. Everything about a human even at rest, signals for spiders to steer clear, giving them no incentive to creep into your bed during the night. They prefer to hang out in quiet, unoccupied parts of the home and spend their time attending to their webs. Um But what if you happen to come into contact with a spider
whose ability to sense vibrations is off. Sure, it's possible that a spider that was going against every natural instinct could find its way into your mouth, but it's still extremely unlikely. At First, you'd have to have your mouth open while you snooze, which is far from a universal trait. Next, you'd have to find a way to sleep through the sensation of a spider crawling its way across your face and into your mouth. Finally, you'd have to actually swallow
while sleeping, which is not automatically going to happen. Hopefully, the spider would change its mind or get bored and crawl back out of your mouth before the stars got align enough for all of these events to occur. There is not a single reliable report anywhere in the scientific or medical literature to prove that anyone has ever swallowed a spider while sleeping, much less eight per year. That
being said, you absolutely can eat spiders. Your body will digest it just like any other food that you eat. Cambodian cuisine includes a dish of fried tarantula that's said to taste a bit like fried prawns. Today's episode is based on the article do we really Swallow Spiders in our sleep? On how stuffworks dot Com? Written by Bambi Turner. Brain Stuff is productive by Heart Radio in partnership with how stuff works dot Com and is produced by Tyler
glen Or. More podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite chos