Hook Suspension and the Complexity of Pain

I had an ingrown toenail. Okay, this is years and years ago, and I tried to address it myself with some sort of which I do not advise anyone to do, with some sort of bathroom surgery and imagining you with like a bowie knife in the bathroom, basically like tweezers and whatnot. And I should not have been doing this, but there was a moment there where I almost blacked out. Oh wow, And you know, this is just a tonnail.

But I guess everything is just so um you know tight in their yeah, the the nerve endings at all, but that that stands out as a moment of rather intense pain. But it was just such a fleeting moment too. There was no it was immediately back out of it. It's like, you know, flying and then dipping down into a canyon and then saying, oh, that's a little bit

too much and then coming back out. See the fact that it's your toneail is interesting to me because today's topic is connected to something I think about a lot when I watched action movies, which is like, inevitably somebody's getting tortured, and in the back of my head, I'm kind of like, how would I do in these scenarios? And I think I could probably deal with a fingernail

getting ripped out, But I don't know. When you say that, it makes me think like they're so tied in to your nervous system that that's just something I don't have any qualification of understanding for. You know, well, it's those all pains we can certainly understand a little a little better. You know, when we're watching a movie, if we have a character that gets their arm blown off, most of us have no frame of reference for that sort of thing.

But if the character breaks a finger, or their fingernail rips, or there's a there's a moment in raising Arizona where it is a fight between John Goodman's character Nicholas Cage's character and one goes to do a double axe handle on the other and they scraped their knuckles across the ceiling of the the popcorn ceiling of the trailer, and like, that's a moment where we can feel it because yeah, because we can relate, we can maybe have not helped

that exact sensation, but we we have a better idea of what that consists. Off. Yeah, I'm like you in that I am lucky knock on wood that I have not had any you know, I've never broken any bones to my knowledge. I've had major surgery once and I was pretty well under with anesthetic. But the worst I can think of, like when when somebody first asks me this, I always think of um sometimes. So I have two different types of contact solution. One is just like your

daily cleaning solution is one. One is the overnight storage and it's got some kind of acidic thing in it that you're not supposed to put directly in your eye, and I maybe once a year make the mistake of accidentally putting it in my eye and it burns so bad, it really hurts but every time I do it, I start thinking like God, this is this is super painful, but it starts leaning into a point of not pleasure, but just sort of meditative transcendence of like everything just

evens out and the pain is still there, but I but I'm just kind of it's flatline isn't the right word, but you know what I mean, Like it's just everything else, all other senses sort of level out all of a sudden and there's no longer like any kind of overstimulation and it's just the pain. And there's something kind of nice about that. Well, this reminds me a lot of doing yoga and what I sometimes think about like young

really and literally fit people who are doing yoga. I kind of want to say, look, if you if you don't have injuries, if you don't have soreness, then you can't get how much can you possibly be getting out of this? Because for me, like sometimes it's working with a part of your body that's sore where you get into these um these sensations that are difficult to categorize.

Like a few years back, I had to some risk injury minor risk injury, but it made it difficult to put a lot of direct pressure down, but there were some poses where I'm like where I'm bending my risk in the other way and putting like subtle pressure there, and the resulting sensation was it was difficult to categorize because it certainly it wasn't really pleasurable, but it wasn't

pain either. It was it was a very soothing, you know, sense of relief that I felt, and I and it and it was in somewhere in that gray area betwixt the I knew this woman once who was she was in my yoga class, but she was also some day I knew outside of yoga who was nine months pregnant, and she was like really good at yoga, and she got into scorpion pose like a week before she gave birth to her daughter, and I was just like a completely stunned, like like not only like what must that

feel like, because you know, you're you're carrying this extra weight, it's a completely different body dimension, but also just like the discipline that she must have in her yoga practice to be able to pull that off. Oh man, Yeah, scorpion is a tough one. Super I can't do scorpion, And yeah, I've never been par oh and by the way, I don't mightn't mean to imply that young fit people can't get something out of yoga. Everybody can get something

out of yoga. But I'm just saying if you have if you have an injury or a soreness, depending on the degree of the injury, UH, yoga can open up sort of new pathwayte of understanding what do Yeah, well, here's a if you're young and fit and you're not getting anything out of yoga, maybe you should consider body suspension. Y Yeah, move on up to the next level. That's

what our topic is today. This is why we're talking about pain and pleasure at the top is that we've actually had I think multiple listeners right into us because we've just sort of brought it up casually in the past, the idea of body suspension, and we've had people send us photos and write to us about their experiences with it, and we decided, you know what, let's take a deep look at like how this works. There's there is a

lot of science behind it, a lot of math. Yeah, there's certainly physics and UH and in medicine that are involved in approaching it. And then in terms of understanding what's happening with pain and interpreting the sensations that are going on. There's of course a lot of research into

just the human experience totally. Yeah. Now, a number of you may remember from our Listener mail episode we heard from a listener by the name of Ainsley and she wrote in and she shared her own experience with the with hook suspension, and she says, quote, I fell in love. I was allowed to feel and bleed and openly respect the process of each It was a whole new world

for me. Suspension became my life. And when I read those words, it made me think back to a book that I read a while back titled The Body and Pain by E. Laine Scary, and it's a This is a one of these deep, deep considerations of the idea of pain, not only in terms of just physical experience, but what it means philosophically and politically socially. Um. It is a it is a deep read, but but one of the things that she talks about in it, so

I pret pretty much. Her main statement in the book is that an individual's physical pain has no voice, but when it finds a voice, it begins to tell a story, a story of of of the vast distances between your experience of pain and my own. Uh. She even describes this distance as being interstellar, like, that's the that's the space between my understanding of pain and another person's experience

of pain. This is a really good example of how lonely humanity can be in a way, and that like there's no way for us to possibly understand what another person's level of pain is. Yeah, the either the limits or at least the challenges of of human empathy, right. Uh. And then on top of that, we have the complications that are inherent in that distance, our an ability to to understand each other's pains, and in the very nature of human creation. So she ties all of that up.

And of course authors and artists often cite pain is a necessary part of creation, some more than others. But you know, it makes it makes you think, you know, if we're if we're pretty much okay with that idea that that that out of pain, out of personal suffering, we can create these these great things. And how how weird is it really for someone to engage in some careful manipulation of pain sensation. Yeah, I've I've got to say, like this is something like I'm constantly coming to terms

within the real life. Is that like things that I think of as being like not normal but not being abnormal, like body suspension. I'm constantly surprised when other people around me are like, whoa, that's so weird, or what is wrong with you? Or that kind of thing. Not that I've done body suspension, and I'm not particularly into body modification in any way, but I understand it, like I I can identify with what people seem to be getting

out of this experience. It's I think, in a similar way, I'm glad you brought up yoga, like it's similar to what I've gotten out of yoga before. But it's also like, um, you and I have talked about sensory deprivation tanks on the show before. I can imagine that they're similar experiences. It's just that the pain part isn't there. Yeah, and and it's certainly not for everyone, to say the least, there's very much in an outsider enterprise. But but of

course here's the thing. It's it's still something that emerges from the human experience and merges in and at least a few different human cultures. So it's worth exploring. Like we can't just it's it's easy to look at it, and especially if you look at say a media representation of it, be it you know, dateline denied or whatever,

or or the cell. The cell is the go to I mean the minute, Uh, anybody brings this up, I always think of Vincent din Afrio in The Cell. And it's really, especially after doing the research, I think it's like a kind of horrible negative depiction of this process. And probably I would imagine people in this suspension community

probably don't feel great about how they're portrayed in that movie. Yeah, because he's a he's a serial killer character in it, and he's you know, he's using it to sort of hurt himself while hurting others, and he only does it to himself by himself. Yeah, Whereas in as we're going to discuss, actual hook suspensions tend to be more of a like a seemingly communal experience where they're the people

facilitating the suspension and those observing it. And you see that not only in sort of the the modern primitive industrial uh you know, subculture of hook suspension, but even some of the traditional users of hook suspension that will discuss as well from from Native American and uh In Indian traditions. Yeah. Absolutely, I mean this goes back a

long ways, like five thousand years. But still it's difficult for I think most people to get past the idea that this is somebody that is intentionally suffering, intentionally doing harm to their body and it and we just we we tend to just say, oh well then just must be a complete whackadoodle and you just put up this wall. I'm not getting like, I'm just like walls up, shields up. I'm not going to attempt to interact with that or

empathize with that in any other form. Well, you know, like I guess because of like the people that I've spent time with that things like other body modification practices like tattooing, piercing, even scarification or or gauging like seem like totally normal things that like people in my everyday life have gone through. So it's like, what is the line that is drawn where you go like, well, tattooing is totally normal and that's okay, but putting hooks through

yourself and suspending is not. You know, I don't know, like I see that there's different levels again, like there's variations and pain thresholds too. But like, I get it. You know, I'm not in any rush to go hook myself up and do it. Um. But I but I feel like I understand. Why don't we actually give the audience like a very basic definition of what we mean when we say body suspension. So this is a form of body modification that involves hanging the human body by

hooks that are attached to ropes. So I think a lot of us have various ideas of what it means that we're going to go through it into deeper detail. Um. The other form of body modification that I that I am unfamiliar with that we've talked about here at How Stuff Works before. I don't think we've done a show on it is subdermal implantation. Uh. And that's something I'm also really interested in. We have a pretty good article

with some excellent infographics on subdermal implantation on the site. Yeah, I may have done something. I think I've touched on it a little bit on the blogs before. Some forms of subdermal implants um, notably I think the bagel head things, which ultimately was not a very big thing at all. Right, Yeah, what if it's sailing and the forehead and then sort of make an intention that was kind of like a bagel, but it was this was hard. It was hardly a trend.

But it's kind of an interesting study in what happens when a few people do something that is kind of weird or rather weird, and then it gets blown out of proportion by the media. Right, It's not like the

people who give themselves like horns. Yeah, but it's also worth noting again that you know, what's normal within one community is not normal in another, and even major supporters of suspension, such as suspension artist Alan Faulkner, he points out, quote, hanging from hooks is hardly seen as a normal activity.

That's from an artical eroded safe piercing dot org. So you know, it's it's like any like really niche thing one maybe into you know, you admit that it's not the mainstream thing, and you really you don't want it to be the mainstream thing. I haven't seen anybody that engages in in hook suspension that's saying, hey, we really need to get this everybody. You know, we shouldn't be doing this in public schools. Yeah, nobody's making that argument. Everyone is seems to be rather cool with the fact

that this is a very specialist interest. But at one time, for some cultures, it was I don't know, I don't want to say normal, but it was a part of their ritualistic behavior. So let's take a look at the history of it for a minute. And we're going to start in North America. Actually, uh, I don't think we have records of how far back this practice goes in North America. But this is the O keepaw hooks suspension ceremony, right, and it's it's a much larger ceremony than just the

hook suspension. Yeah. And and before we get into that, I do want to also point out that pain, of course, is a very normal, everyday aspect of human lives. And so you see uh, rituals of pain and just about every culture, and then that includes Christian culture, Islamic culture, Hindu culture, pretty much anywhere you go, there's gonna be some sort of right of passage, some sort of of of self inflicting um ritual that pops up as at some point or another. Yeah, maybe we should do an

episode on self flagellation at something. Yeah, that's it's a fascinating topic onto itself. But here in in North America, Yeah, we had the the Okipa hook suspension ceremony, and this was practiced by the North what's now North Dakotan uh Mandan tribe. So it was a ride of passage and the ceremony saw hook suspended warriors twist and swing until the inner ed a transcendent state. And for you, film

buffs out there. Uh. The nineteen seventy film starring Richard Harris, A man called Horse, depicted the right in a rather memorable scene. I remember seeing the scene, or at least a trailer for it on like KBS or something back in the day, and it really confused me. I had no idea what was going on. I thought, Oh, they're torturing that guy. That's horrible what they're doing to him. But I had no idea. I've never seen this movie,

but I am picturing older Richard Harris. I'm picturing like Dumbledore Richard Harris instead of you know, I imagine in the seventies he was probably what like a man in his forties or something like that. He was I'm not sure what his age was, but he was definitely like leathery but still handsome Richard Harris. Yeah, well, this particular ceremony, as I said, it's a four day ceremony, and suspension

is just one part of it. They also have a long vigil, there's dancing, and then trials of endurance, of which the suspension is part of it. So what they would do is they suspend young warriors from the roof of the tribe's lodge by ropes that were attached to skewers in their chest, back or shoulders. And sometimes they would add weights as well that were attached to their legs to increase the pain. Now here's the thing in this culture, if you cried out in pain, you were

considered cowardly. So the ceremony itself didn't end until they were lowered, and then they had their left pinky finger removed with a hatchet, and then there was a run around the village with the skewers and weights all still in place. Uh. This was first documented by white men in eighteen thirty five by a guy named George Catlin, and he was a painter apparently, I think he was just like visiting this community. He witnessed it and then

brought it back. The last ceremony of this nature. Well, the public I think that took place was in eighteen eighty nine. And and in public again is as an or at least semi public. Is the is an important thing to drive home because again these are communal experiences. Right, It's not just somebody hanging alone in a tent. Uh. They're being suspended as part of this right. And as we'll find out later, the modern suspension practice has its

roots in the Okipa ceremony. Now, if we travel all the way around the world, we get to Hinduism and at least two additional suspension rights. Uh, probably more, I think, as we'll discussed. But just to drive the nail into a couple of them. Here, there's no Yeah, there's a there's Shahrak Puja. This is a Hindu folk festival in southern Bangladesh. And here the faithful believe that the festival will satisfy Lord Shiva and generate prosperity through the elimination

of the previous year's sorrows and sufferings. You know. So there's a catharsis here. So sometimes a human Shahrak as they're called, takes part in the festivities, tied with a hook on his back and then moved around a bar with a long rope. And then we have Sri Lanka's vel Hinduism festival named for the divine javelin val of the war god Morrigan, also known as uh Kardi Kaya, and this entails public suspension as well as with so

many religious rites of pain, including those in Christianity and flatullation, etcetera. Uh, these traditions seem rooted in religious penance and the expression of devotion. Yeah. So, as I said earlier, this practice has been going on for five thousand years. So if you look at body suspension today and you go oh weird, you know, you think about the larger human experience. This has been going on for a long time, large far

longer than many of us can imagine. Back to UH, there's also the Hindu festival of Tai Posam that still happens in Southeast Asia. And one of our listeners actually wrote into us about this a year and a half ago, maybe for a Listener Male episode. We talked about it and he sent us pictures of it. Um he was living. I think he was an expatriate in Singapore, as many of our listeners know. I went to high school in Singapore, and UH was totally unaware of this ceremony, so when

he sent us the pictures, it was really interesting. And UH, one of our colleagues, Ramsey and coincidentally went to the same high school in Singapore, and I was talking to him about this, and he went several times with his family to the Tai Pusan festival, so he was able to tell me a little bit more about this. I guess the basic idea here is similar to some of

the ones that you just mentioned. Uh. It's a practice called vel cavati where worshippers undergo what's sort of referred to as a debt bondage to Murragon, that same war god and val is the again the divine javelin that's used as a weapon against against the against evil. Yeah, so these skewers are representative of the spear or javelin that Povarty gave Murragon to kill the demon Sura pad

Um Uh. And so what happens is actually during this festival, the worshippers are sometimes suspended in the air with the levels of pains correlating to their actual devotion, you know, Um, and it's not My understanding is it's not like what we think of his body suspension and that it's vertical. I think they're that. I think from the pictures we were shown, starts off on the ground and they're lifted up by people horizontal to them. Yeah, I believe that

sounds right. Yeah, those of you out there who have maybe partaken in this and seen it, let us know in looking at any of these religious or semi religious modes of of hook suspension. It's it. It reminds me again of Scary's writings which she talks about pain becoming a sort of proof, an argument that the quote act of wounding is explicitly presented as a sign the human body is in each the site for the analogical verification

of the existence and authority of God. And of course, a modern suspension is often a secular affair, rooted in traditions of personal exploration and performance art. But you still see some aspects of this, this idea that that the pain is there as a as a proof of something. You know, why don't we take a quick break and when we get back, we're going to get into the

modern suspension practices and how it's done. Thank, okay, we're back, So One of the big sources that we use for this episode was a fantastic article written for The Atlantic called the Therapeutic Experience of being Suspended by your Skin. And this is by a guy named Wyatt Marshall. Yeah, this is a great article. Will include a link to it on the landing page for this episode. It's stuff

to blow your mind dot com. Um. He goes through a lot of what we're gonna be talking about here, and he points out that the modern suspension movement traces back to the nineteen sixties when a man by the name of Fakir Mussafar who's born Roland Loomis, reintroduced and adapted various forms of suspension and coined the term modern primitives, and in his wake suspension enthusis is such as Mussafar, protege Alan Faulkner, who already quoted, and performance artist Steelark,

who've talked about on the show before. They've continued and others have continued to advance the culture and the public understanding of this these of these sort of rights. Yeah, so this isn't necessarily religious today, but people do see it as a spiritual experience or as a way to test themselves. Now. Fakir Mussafar was born on an Indian reservation in South Dakota, and then he developed forms of modern suspension based on kapa. He performed one of these

in nineteen sixty three. So so for instance, you know, we read earlier that the last time this was was performed was in the like late nineteenth century. I don't think he did the full four day ceremony. I think he just died the suspension part and he saw it as being about self expression or spiritual exploration. And you know, as you mentioned that, Alan Faulkner goes on and sort of brings it out to the world at law Arge.

So Faulkner actually I read up on him. He's a laser technician from Dallas, uh and he has a tattoo removal shop. And so he met Musa far when he dropped out of school and moved to California and he tried to do his first suspension with a fishing line and it ripped. So I think, like you know, they eventually take on the practices the knowledge of the Ukapa ceremony, which involves math and physics in one way or another, figuring out you know what weight will bear on a

particular pulley or rope things like that. Yeah, and then of course you have where to connect them on the body. How you're their additional concerns to come into into play as well. Yeah, I mean, if this isn't obvious, I think we should put a disclaimer out there, like, don't just go do this to yourself, Like you want to sit down with experts for a lot of reasons that we'll talk about, but you don't want to just put fishing line in your skin and hang yourself up from something. Uh.

I'm also a little confused about Musafar's origins story. I could not, for the life of me, find more about him. It sounds like he was not Native American, but he was born on this reservation and learned about the practice and then appropriated it. So I'm kind of curious how these local tribes feel about modern body suspension culture. Yeah. Yeah, I'd love to hear more about that. He of course, is it's still alive as of this recording. Yeah, And

there's all kinds of people that do suspension too. That's another thing I think we should put out there to sort of dispel the idea that this is just like circus performers or something right like lawyers, wrestlers, doctors, acrobats and even politicians have done this. Now, I mentioned Steve Lark already, the Australian performance artists, and he's usualized suspension at several different points and and continues to do so in his exploration of sort of the trans humanist body

and the ide of our body beyond our body via technology. Uh. And some pret actitioners also take hook suspension in a more industrial or even erotic direction. And I think all this is quite understandable as well. After all, pain and pleasure are more closely linked than we typically realize in modern hook suspension, you know, to think industrially, it's a union not of human and God, but of human and

medical slash industrial paraphernalia. Yeah, and all of this is connected to previous episodes that Robert and I have done about cyborgism, and we did an episode about body modification engineering as well, and steel Ark came up in there.

I actually read an article for this episode that was all about steel Arcs just sort of general project, and showed that he really uses the suspension thing as a way to highlight his other experiments like for instance, when he put the ear on his armed ear, like the suspension was a way to get people to like sit and look at that ear for a long period of time rather than just like you know, sit around and

do a photo shoot or something like that. And of course he's done some other interesting perform and start bits with like a mechanical arms, mechanical and want to say, spider legs, uh, fascinating body of work. So there are different types of suspension positions too. That's one thing you should know if you're if you're thinking about this or you're interested in it. Hooks when they're inserted into the upper back, this is known as suicide suspension because it

looks like you you've hanged yourself. There's also a pose called the Superman suspension, which is what it sounds like. It it looks like you're hanging in the air as if you're flying Superman style. Um. Now, Dallas, Texas has an annual body suspension convention called Suscon that was founded in two thousand and one, and this is because Alan Faulkner is from Dallas. There's apparently also one that's in Oslo.

I was also running across pictures from one in Medadine, Columbia. Okay, okay, uh And now Faulkner himself, and as we'll get into when we're sort of going through this, describes even a small suspension practice requires a crew of like two to six people. So en don't buy the whole, you know, if you've seen the cell, don't buy that like one person. I guess they could, but that's not usually how this is done. Like there, in fact, like doing it with a community of people seems to be part of the

transcended experience. Yeah, I mean, in a sense, it has to be witnessed to take place. So let's get into the safety a little bit. Is it safe? Now? Now I realize safe and safety? And it might seem weird to talk about this in light of putting hooks in your back and hanging from from the ceiling. Uh. And you know we're talking about something that's intrinsically endorphin releasing.

But safety is a prime concern for modern enthusiasts. After all, It's it's one thing to to pierce the skin and hanging from specially prepared to hooks quite another to suffer tearing or a fall. Yeah. So the basic idea here at least as it was portrayed by one of the I guess experts in this in that Atlantic article was that there's two aspects for planning. There's there's medical aspect

and there's a rigging aspect. Now, the medical aspect has to do with the insertion of the hooks, cleaning them, the blood that comes out, cleaning up that blood, and then of course maintaining the skin. Rigging, Uh, they use methods that are borrowed from construction, rock climbing and stage rigs. For example, you need to know what a ceiling is made of before you rig something up, and what's above that ceiling because you need to know how much stress

is already being placed upon that single fracture point. And also to easily hoist a human body, you have to make use of the mechanical advantage that you get through pulley systems. Right. So there's a certain amount of engineering that's required here. Uh. And like we said earlier, math and physics. Although the guy in that Atlantic article was like, yeah, I basically do all the math in my head. That

scared me a little. Now in that article by Whyatt Marshall, Uh, he talks to a pair of physicians, and they testify to an important basic fact of human anatomy here, and one that I think comes up when when any of us look at hook suspension, especially in light of say the hell Raiser movies, where the Silent Hill movies, uh, you know, both of which I can think of moments where an individual skin skin is cleanly ripped off and like the blinking of an eye, and in a reality

outside of the Hell Raiser in Silent Hill universe is, unless they're shared universe, maybe they are some Hollywood executive just heard that it is like running to the bank. Well, in reality, our hides are incredibly durable. Uh. If skin tearing begins to occur, it's a gradual process and quote almost never the sort of dramatic freefall that someone watching a suspension for the first time might imagine. So it's infection,

not accidental flaying that poses the greatest health risk. And that's where the importance of sterilized hooks, needles, and gods comes into play. And of course, to your point on rigging though, that, if course, is another huge area of concern and and and generally so much care is put into that that it's not going to be an issue.

But obviously if you're thirty ft fifty feet off of the ground, off of a concrete floor, the potential for injury there is great if care it's not taken in the rigging which you did read about an example of that. But for the most part, people don't just rip and free fall in these things. Uh. It may look like it's about to rip, but like Robert said, skin is pretty strong. Think of leather, you know, and and all the products that we use leather in and the amount

of tension that it can sustain. So there's an aspect of physics to where you place the hooks and how big the actual hooks are to this whole practice, as much as there is with rigging. Now tearing is actually more likely on your knees and on your chest, but usually there's more than enough time to begin lowering a person if tearing starts to happen, like the crew of people will start seeing it before it just rips, and they will say, hey, you know, it looks like you're

starting to rip a little bit here. Do you want me to lower you or do you want to keep going? Uh. Now falls are usually do actually to improper insertion of hooks. And any high degree of motion that happens when you're up there. So it's not necessarily about the skin as much as it is about again the science the physics of where things are placed and how you're moving. Many of the people who offer this service to they seem to be trained in medical emergencies and first aid care.

A lot of the people that were interviewed for that Atlantic piece where like nurses or paramedics. Uh, and they will consult your doctor if you have a medical condition that you're concerned about before doing this. Like Robert said, infection is a huge risk as well, but also nerve and tendon damage tend to be things that can happen if you have improper hook placement. So again, hook placement is huge on this. It's not like you just take

a hook and just put it anywhere you please, you know. Yeah. I also read that while scarring, you know, inevitable is going to occur to some um some level, it's not quite as bad as one might expect expect, you know, but yeah, they were talking about um one of the guys had a tattoo and there was like a little bit of white flesh where where he had been scarred. From doing it previously, But the writer said I wouldn't have noticed otherwise if he hadn't pointed it out to me.

There's also something and I could not find a lot more about this, called suspension shock syndrome. And this apparently happens if you hang vertically for too long. So I guess that's if you're in the suicide suspension pose. Um, there's there's something related to that that I guess put your body into shock. Okay, like blood flow? I think probably. Yeah. Now there's a there's another article out there. There's pretty good two Guardian article titled body suspension Why would anyone

hang from hooks for fun? Uh? The article is better than the headline on that one, but it provides an even handed discussion of the health issues involved in health concerns and in the article Emergency Medical Technicians, Scott Dubor points out that hook suspension is not something that you have a lot of medical journal articles about, you know, it hasn't received that much serious attention in these circles. Uh So, so we don't have like perfect data on

on how to handle all of this. But he says that again, experienced practitioners taken individual's health history, you know, very seriously when considering a suspension event, I can see why it's not right, Like, especially in the world of publisher perish, if you're sending out articles to peer reviewed journals,

they might frown at something that's about body suspension. On the other hand, this seems like it has really big potential for just the broader human knowledge about like what our bodies can take and what they can't, and just general like physics of lifting things. Plus I totally read that journal article. If we had been able to access something like this for this episode, I would have been thrilled.

So if anybody out there is researching the physics or the the health issues related to hook suspension, let us know. We'd love to take a peek of that research. Alright. So that leaves us with the next and final question, what does an individual feel in a hook suspension? What's going on with pain and pleasure? Yeah, I'm so back to our previous examples, which many listeners are probably going,

you guys don't know pain. Pain. You don't know the meaning of the word, you know, like uh, me putting the wrong sailine in my eye and Robert taking out an and grown tonail is probably nothing compared to this, right, But at the same time, there's a purpose to this that in you know, involves sort of again transcending becoming something else. All Right, we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back, we will jump right into

this area. All right, we're back, you know. I I what you just said prior to our break made me think of hell Razor again because you kind of did a pinhead voice there that was my not not a very good piure, But it does remind me that in the especially in the first hell Raiser movie and definitely in Clive Barker's original The hell Bound Heart, it's less about pain and more that these uh, the Centobytes are are you know since uh Cincinnats, I guess, and they

have been just exploring the limits of human sensation in ways that go beyond pleasure or pain. And I always found that that the better read it becomes more about pain and just sort of torturous demons as monsters that are one. But early on it's like, like the the Centobytes, you can't really say they're evil because they're not. It's not like they want to hurt somebody. It's just that they're understanding of mortal sensation is so far beyond anything

that a human could could understand. This is a brief aside, but I think a lot of people forget that about the original Hell Raiser, that Pinhead and the Centobytes aren't really like the villains per se, and that they're the villain is like it was his name, Uncle Frank, the guy who who's like skinless and growing up in the attic.

Like you know that that's a movie that actually has some really interesting themes because of Barker, uh, specifically about pain, pleasure and just like the human experience, which I think is what makes it such a classic. Yeah. I mean, the cinembytes are essentially just a very inhuman bureaucratic organization. It gets wound up in a in a in a family dispute. Yeah, it gets bad when they start like

putting CD players inside their faces and stuff like that. Yeah, But by the third Hell Raiser it's gone an entirely different direction. All right. But but back to the real world of hook suspension. So it is h it is again a consensual exercise. If we haven't been clear on that, Let me just drive at home no matter what you saw in the cell. Uh, it's, it's it's It's definitely a choice that one makes, and it's far from an impulsive activity. So matters of health and physics are carefully calculate,

calculated for the purely physical aspects of the event. But then on top of that, the participant is gonna be weighing in on the inner complexities of the experience. So anticipation priming, uh, it all accentuates the already complex interplay of nerve response in psychology, It's like anything, you're building

up your anticipation for it. You have certain expectations that are going to be met or aren't going to be met, and also expectations and understandings of what's going to take place that they're going to color your experience and then how you reflect on that experience. Yeah, and you can see how that played into ceremonial practices, right. There was

build up before the ceremony. There's the act of it itself, there's the communal aspect, and then there's sort of like the calm down of your you're lowered in your you're still around your community, right, like you're around like a supportive group of people. Um, and then the actual like hanging part, the feeling of shock that's involved in that. We got all kinds of chemicals involved there, right, there's endorphins, serotonin, etcetera. And those are obviously producing a sort of high like

we talked about. But again, I think the key to this seems to be about being part of a group. I don't know. I'd love to hear from people out there who have different experiences, but it seems to me like, I guess you could just like rig yourself up in

a closet or something like that. Have to be a big closet, but uh, and you would get something out of it, but I don't think it would be the same as what you're getting when you're like you're working together with people, they're thinking about your well being and it's it's all about you sort of clearing your mind. Yeah, And on the communal aspect here, it's also to keep in mind that this applies to not only the individual that's suspended, but those who are facilitating it in those

who are observing it. This ties in with a Neil Durkheim's collective effervescence theory, and this is the idea that a communal ritual generates a kind of shared electricity. Uh. It makes me think of like, I mean, this is why I like going to yoga class more than I like doing yoga home. I do yoga at home, and I it feels good and I'm able to kind of like work the kinks out. But when I go to class,

it's a communal thing. I'm out, I'm in public. I'm not a particularly like social person to begin with, so this is a good experience to get me out and like engaging with other people. I went to a really crowded yoga class at a local um Asheram recently and uh, and at first I was like, oh, I'm I got a way over my head and this way too crowded. I'm just packed in like sardines with everyone. But then it was a a good yoga class, and then be there was something about being there was so many people

that we it was a very communal experience. I felt like I was in that movie Society where I'll just kind of like moving together. Yeah, I've had that to My local UM studio does classes on holidays like on Thanksgiving and New Year's Day, and there jam packed when they do them on those holidays. So you're like, I think you've you've got enough room for maybe like forty or fifty people in this room, and you're just literally need a knee, like you know, full on doing like

some pretty difficult poses. Although there's not a lot of inversions in a class like right. And of course this kind of scenario applies to any kind of communal, secular, or religious event that's taken place in a certain amount

of ritual to it. But as part of the human experience just in general, you know, I mean, like I would imagine that, like there is the same sort of just general good feeling that comes out of going to church on Sunday morning that you and I get out of going to a yoga class or somebody else gets out of body suspension. Yeah, and but you have this added level of physical exertion that is involved here. And and this can actually play into one's connection to a group.

Having having completed a suspension, one may feel more connected with the group for having experienced a painful ride of passage. This is a process that was actually explored in in a nineteen nine United States Army psychology study, not really suspension, but just as far as pain and how it a relates to your experience as being part of a group.

Psychologist Elliott Aronsen of Stanford and Judson Mills. They used electric shocks and found that individuals who received severe electric shocks before entering a group value their membership more than those who received mild shocks. It's almost kind of a hazing scenario. But this is another like part of like it reminds me of like the classic Milgram study too. It's like that period of time what Milgram was earlier than I believe, but you know that idea that like

you could get away was something then, you know. All right, So let's come back to just pain itself for a little bit. I know that we've talked about the communal aspects here obviously, as as we've discussed. Pain itself is kind of hard to tag down, you know. Um, it's a it's a very distressing feeling that involves regions of the brain that are also associated associated with the enjoyment of food, drugs, and sex. So you have some shared pathways there for sure. And uh, and then what else

is going on? Well, let's look at a few a few tidbits here. So a two thousand six University of Michigan study revealed that the brain's dopamine system is highly active while someone experiences pain, and that this response varies between individuals in a way that relates directly to how the pain makes them feel. And when spiritual or secular ritual is involved, the ritual in and of itself can arouse the participant and trigger hormones that stimulate the reward

systems of the brain. And this, according to anthropologists Dmitries Zagalates, can cause sensations such as pain or fear to transform into pleasurable experiences through a dopamine spike uh so, an increase in the New York peptides that we call endorphins. Uh This binds to the brains opiate receptors, producing the same soothing euphoria that is felt to a certain extent by marathon runners during a runner's high. So this is

base sickly the same thing. Well, I'm I'm really generalizing here, but the same effect that we get when we take various kinds of drugs, whether they're legal or illegal. Right Like, they're influencing the amount of certain chemicals and proteins in our system that makes us feel a certain way. There's something about this. That seems better to me than just like popping a pill in that like, again, you're engaging in the human activity of community. Yeah, well, and I

definitely agree that. One of the things to keep in mind here is that someone who's engaging in hook suspension does not have an alien biology or an alien psychology. It's like they have the same their their body and their experience is the same mix of chemicals, that the same biomachinery. They're just interacting with it in a way

that you were not. But they're not producing feelings that are necessarily like like that different than something you've experienced, right, Yeah, which, god man, the more we talk about this, the more the cel but comes ridiculous. I mean that movie was silly already, but like when you think about it, that like the premise where it's like, oh, somebody who's into this body suspension practice, of course they would be a serial killer, you know, like it's just it's poor writing, Hollywood.

Come on, now, remember we talked about priming earlier. What's going on in your mind is you're preparing to to go into this what people were telling you, what you're expecting. Well, many descriptions of first time hook suspensions. They speak to this anticipation of extreme sensation, and according to a two thousand thirteen study from the University of Oslo, pain that hits less severely than expected may give us a rush of release or even something like pleasure on top of

the endorphins. You know, what this made me think of is just and I think almost everybody can identify with this, going to the doctor and getting a shot or getting your blood drawn. Like for me, like I go and I just go, okay, Like I anticipate that the pain is going to come. I prepare my mind for it. The needle is inserted, my blood is being drawn, and uh, you know, after like two or three seconds, I'm don't don't feel it anymore other than the blood draining out

of my body. You know. Uh. That's I think, like a relatable thing that most people can think of, similar to body suspension, just on a like micro level. Indeed. Yeah, and you know, on top of that too, we we talked about transcendence and sort of altered states with individuals that are undergoing a hook suspension, and there's a there's an interesting study that lines up with that as well.

A two thousand fourteen study from Northern Illinois University, and they linked various like B D S, M, S and M type activities to altered states of mind in keeping

with those achieved through yoga or meditation. So basically what happened here was the researchers administered to cognitive test to S and M participants following a A A switching scene, and based on the findings, they suspect that pain altered blood flow in the brain, particularly to the dorso lateral prefrontal cortex, which plays into our ability to distinguish self from other. Yeah, so this is where you get into things that are like a little bit more dangerous like cutting. Yeah.

But but also it's where we can easily see some of the science behind the idea that someone could suspend from hooks totally have have this physical pain experience and lose some sense of themselves, to have this this experience of of lifting, of flying above their worries and concerns and their anxieties and their baggage and and finding this

place of release. And in fact, I found a quote from Alan Faulkner, who's talked about here, and he said, quote, if life had a dial to adjust the volume, suspension has a way of accessing this invisible knob and turning it down again, like totally in line with my experience of both yoga and uh uh, sensory deprivation takes like it's just it takes for for me, like I I have a a particularly sensitive of nervous system, right, Like I take in a lot of sensory information, I think

more than most people. But again it's hard to tell when I do yoga or when I'm laying in the float tank or whatever. Again, that's a perfect metaphor just turning the volume down just it calms everything down. It's nice. Yeah, So that's yeah, that's basically what's happen going on with hook suspension here. So obviously we again we're not saying go try this. We are not. We're certainly saying not trying to tell you to go try it yourself on

your own. But hopefully what we've done here is we've been able to take something that is that is often seen is just this outsider weirdo thing and putting it framing it in a way that lines up with with with more relatable modes of human experience. Yeah, so I would love to hear from you the audience, if you have experienced with this. Obviously we've heard from a couple of you already, but uh, please tell us what we got right and maybe what we got wrong about this.

Also let us know about your own experience it is with it, or maybe you've witnessed one of these ceremonies that we talked about. Uh, it's It's a fascinating line of inquiry and I'm curious to see where it goes next, especially like we were mentioning, if academics actually get involved and start doing research studies on it. Indeed, and you know, I think get involved in ways that are not just simply becoming cinabytes that we had it was it Dr Kleinard.

I believe in the second movie he's the oh yeah, yeah, British doctor who ends up getting turned into this crazy cinebyte with a big worm attached to This is true. Yeah, I thought for a minute you're going to reference the monster science episode that you did on centobytes. Oh yes, yes, we did do one on sinovites. It actually touches on some of the some of the pain related details that that we covered here. So this is a link to that.

This is a good segue to our website stuff to Blow your Mind dot com, where all of our videos are at, along with all of our podcasts. So if you've never seen Monster Science before you want to see this particular one, you're in for a treat. Go look at it on stuff to Blow your Mind and dot com. There's also a blog post galore. In fact, Robert just posted a pretty lengthy I wouldn't even call it a blog post. You did a full on article about this topic on our site. Uh. We've also got links up

to our social media accounts Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, and Instagram. Yeah, and I think there's a YouTube button on there too, because we're doing this Facebook series these days called Trailer Talk, where we we we spin off from these podcast episodes we look at some movie trailers talk about sometimes be a lot of times it's be movies or other horror sci fi genre films and how they tie into the

topics of the week. And I'm not sure there's I think there's a strong chance we'll have something tied in with these episodes. We'll see how it comes together. I think so a lot of movie just came up in this episode. So yeah, I mean so I would expect this let's see if this episode publishes the week after recording it, then a couple of days later. They're usually on Fridays when we do these Facebook lives, and they then are both on our Facebook page for watching and

on YouTube. Yeah, you can find archives on YouTube for sure. And if you want to get in touch with us the old fashioned way, we'll just send us an email at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is that how stuff works dot com