Can people really die of fright? - podcast episode cover

Can people really die of fright?

Feb 24, 200918 min
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Episode description

Can a human being be scared to the point of sudden death? Listen in as Chuck and Josh explore the physiological possibilities behind dying of fright in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.

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Transcript

Speaker 1

Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you should know from House Stuff Works dot com? Boom, Hello, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. That's Chuck. We're all together now, yeah, the stuff you should know nation as one together. But this is special time. It is I like it, Chuck. Um. Have you ever been scared, like really truly like about to lose your life? Scared? No, thankfully, but you know

who has multiple occasions. Our producer Jerry has uh been scared to the point like she was an elevator once that started to fall. I think you should create you should describe that a little for a little better. This is the in Atlanta that is an outdoor elevator made of glass. You see everything and what your five hundred seven hundred stories up? So yeah and go ahead, chucked well and the elevator was dropping and it caught, so

she thought she's gonna die. Then she's been held up at gunpoint, which was scared her to death, and she was in a storm in a boat one time where she feared for her life. So Jerry and she has to deal with us every week. So but at least she's been to the Bahamas before, assuming she made it, so I haven't. But Jerry is. She teeters on the edge of death constantly. So you know, I can tell

you that, Um. While Jerry was she's cool as a cucumber, by the way, to to everybody who who hasn't met her, UM, but I can tell you she was still there were some things going on with her physiologically, whether she liked it or not. Right specifically, she was under the iron fist of one of our favorite things in human physiology, fight or flight. It's our favorite thing. Chuck, give a brief overview of fight or flight. I know we've talked

about before, but sometimes we have latecomers. You know. Well, it's you know, it's a physical reaction. Your body goes through your adrenaline surges. Uh, people's dilate breathing fast. That was a high coup. That was a high coup right there. Holy cow, you're good. Adrenaline, like I said, pumping through your veins and all of a sudden, it's literally a physical chemical reaction in your body. What happens, though, is

the threat leaves and things calm down. UM. Usually ideally, well, what one of the one of the ways that all these reactions start happening is through adrenaline. It acts on things like your myo cardial tissue, your heart tissue, uh and basically says, work faster, work harder. It makes your veins constrict to maximize blood flow. Um and and basically adrenaline is flowing throughout your body and it's just got you really jacked up, really keyed up. So are either

gonna run or fight? Right? As you said, the thing is is there is a conception, um among most lay people that you could conceivably, if this happened to you, uh, in a sudden enough fashion, you could conceivably be scared to right, scared to death, not scared half to death. And as just as a sidebart, let me say that makes no sense whatsoever. Scared half to death. And I researched to find the background on that and I couldn't find any. But you can't be half dead. Clearly, it's

you're alive or you're dead. You're dedicated to your craft and apparently see everything in black and white, So kudos to you. Yeah. So okay, Well, basically what we're what we're talking about is called sudden death. Can you be scared to death? Right? Um? Sudden death is basically, uh, it doesn't necessarily have to have to do with just fear only it could be panic or um actually relief

to you. Could you can conceivably experience such a sense of relief that you're you could have organ failure usually sudden death. What the the the definition of it is where basically somebody who is otherwise healthy just drops dead. Most of the time it has to do with heart cardiac arrest or or um some sort of infarction, right um. And this is not supposed to happen. Is the weird thing? I mean, well to you or I it makes sense, you know, like you get scared to die? Um. Medical

science doesn't generally take too much for granted. It likes to say, well, yeah, okay, this, this is related to this, but what are the points in between? Right? And there's actually an emerging field. It's called neuro cardiology. Have you heard about this? There is a guy and his name is doctor Martin Samuel's and he is often called the death doctor. And he is this leading proponent of neuro cardiology,

is kind of the father of it. And uh, from what I gather he doesn't do too much research because the problem is this is a this could very easily become an unethical field. Yeah, it's kind of hard to perform a study and say, all right, we're gonna scare you really badly and if you're still alive afterward, we're going to make some notes on that, and if not, then thank you for your time, and here's you. And even more to Dr Samuel's credit, he refuses to um

test on animals for ethical reasons. So basically he's just having to collect anecdotal evidence. Whenever he can get his hand on a heart um from somebody who's experienced sudden death, he likes to do that, I'm quite sure. And one of the things that he's found, and this is actually a well known um uh symptom of stress uh, and that is um contraction bands along the heart UM. They

look like little red stripes. And basically what it is the adrenaline is come in in such a concentrated form or in such an amount because of this huge fear response or whatever UM that it's just destroyed cells. It's just blown them out, and so you've got lesions formed along your heart tissue, not good to have and actually, um unsurprisingly UH, this has shown up in cocaine users as well. UM, so you can have you can can you can create contraction bands along your heart from drug

abuse or from being scared. The thing is, it's like when you come out of it, you're you're not like, oh my heart hurts. You know that you can't tell. And apparently if this happens enough, over time, the heart becomes weak and stops functioning properly. Interesting. It is interesting stuff, and there's actually um there again we should say, uh. Neuro cardiology is something of an emerging field. UM, so they're still trying to get as much proof as they can.

I found another unrelated study that found that UM, the prevalence of contraction bands in UM accident victims, the the the degree and the severity of contraction bands actually uh increases the longer time. The longer the time between the accident and between death goes by. So your heart's just pumping and your adrenaline is flowing. But then you die. So if you just die immediately, you don't your your your body doesn't have time to release that it tryingly

create contractions. So there's a clear link. But queen adrenaline and contraction bands. And we do know that something like fear can release adrenaline, right, yeah, uh you know, like you were saying earlier with this doctor, it's you can't ethically perform a test like this, but what you can do is you can look at statistics and things like that over time. And a couple of people have done this.

The one, the one I like to call it the Baskerville Effect from the famous Hound of Baskerville's Sir author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was a physician himself. What a mouthful, uh he was. And in the Hound of Baskerville's one of the main characters has a heart attack because they were scared by a ghostly dog that haunted the area. So I've always I've read that many many years ago. I've always been ghostly dog. It's not that scary ghost person. Scary Yeah dog, scary ghost dog, not scary.

So uh. One the one I liked was China and China and Japan. Actually the number four is supposed to be unlucky. Yeah, we've talked about that before. We have, indeed in our Terrible Terrible Friend of podcast. You're being harsh, um and apparently in in China and Japan the number four is unlucky because its pronunciation is similar to the

word for death, first of all. And so what they did was they studied uh some data over the course pretty expansive data, yeah, twenty five years, and they looked at the death certificates of about two hundred thousand Chinese and Japanese people over that period. And then they had a control group of forty seven million, uh, white folks like you and I. And what they found was the mortality was indeed higher for the fourth of the month

compared to the white control group in China and Japan. Yeah, people with chronic heart disease UM they saw a increase in deaths on the fourth of any given month UM and for people who were in the hospital with with heart problems, there was a forty seven percent increase compared to UM any the white control control group is interesting.

So you you obviously, as we covered in that Terrible Friday the thirteenth podcast, um we we we said that you know, there's not a lot to it, but that doesn't mean there's no fear associated with it, right, right, So it's entirely possible that you know, these people are are already suffering from heart problems. But you know, the fourth of the month rolls around there a little more

jacked up the calendar. You know, they're there, yeah, there, there's They're just a little more vulnerable than other days of the month. So it would be kind of um self initiated and Chuck, I know you're hot and heavy for another study about sudden death, aren't you. Yeah, there's a good one. Um. Remember the earthquake in north Ridge and in southern California. Yeah, how could I forget six point seven on the Richter scale? Was it? I didn't

even know that? Good for you? On a normal day in l A, there's about five sudden deaths, which we talked about, Um, when the north Ridge earthquake hit, there were twenty four sudden deaths that day, big spike almost five times. And a few of these they linked to physical exertions, you can throw those out, But most of these were actually attributed to the you know, tremendous fright caused by the earthquake. And the average agent was a

little bit high, sixty eight years old. But only of these people had any kind of heart disease previously in the past so there was genuine sudden death, even though they were a little bit on the old side. So that's, you know, again pretty clear link, right. But of course correlation is not causation, and so neurocrdiologists like Dr Martin are gonna keep looking into it. Um. And actually one other thing, all of this is based on something called

voodoo death. Have you heard about that? I have Walter Cannon. Yeah, in nineteen forty two, he he wrote a paper, um, and basically he said that there was a lot more prevalence of sudden death in places where voodoo was practiced. And he went on to postulate that this was because people believed in voodoo and and and um, that kind of mysticism so much that when they were led to believe that they had just been hexed or should be

dead under voodoo practices, um, they actually did die. Um. In some cases they died because they wouldn't drink food or water because they thought it was poisoned by so they died of that. But some of them also died of sudden death as well. And that's actually the basis of all of this. The Hound of the Basker bill is sure, but really as far as medical science goes um. It was Cannon who first really started looking at sudden death, and it continues today, and it still will continue because

we like to know why we die. We can try to stop it. And Canon was a Harvard physiologist, so he's he wasn't some fly by night crap, but no, he was definitely one worth listening. There was another thing I wanted to talk about have you here, which is, uh, have you ever heard of someone supposedly their hair turning white overnight because of fear? Sure I have of that. Not quite true. That's a bit of an urban myth from what I could tell the just just send it

to his chick. We we both did some research here, and uh, apparently fear and stress and that kind of emotion can cause your hair to turn white. But there's no way it could happen overnight. It would cause a change of metabolic function. I think, um, that that could turn your hair a different color or make it lose its color. Right, yeah, okay, but there is a way it can turn gray, um, seemingly overnight, but it's not from from fear. What that's called is diffuse alopecia areata.

It's like selective hair loss. Right. Yeah, basically that's a sudden hair loss um, which can happen overnight. But um, the biochemistry of alopecia isn't that well understood. So if you have a mix of dark and gray hair or white hair, the uncolored hair is less likely to fall out. So theoretically you could wake up with a lot less hair and the only hair that sticks around is white. So it's a bad morning, yeah, but it's that's not

quite this same thing as being scared scared white? Right. Also, even if if it could change your hair color, which were not entirely certain it could, it would only do it from the scalp down. Everything that is out of your head, like your fingernails, your well, not fingernails. If you have fingernails growing out of your head, you have much bigger problems in your hair being white. But um, anything that's coming off of your body, fingernails, um, your

hair that those are dead cells. It's dead. So there's no change that could could take place aside from maybe a flow be going over them. Right, what do you mean scalp down? Now, the scalp towards your skull, under the skin subdermal head of a cat. Uh, So this entire podcast is based on one of my favorite articles on the site right now. It's called can You Really

Scare Someone to Death? It was written by our esteem colleague Molly Edmonds, who not only has uh this article to be proud of, she and another colleague of ours who we love very much, Kristen Can, just launched their own podcasts. They called stuff Mom Never Told You. You can find that on iTunes, alongside ours and a bunch of other how Stuff Works podcasts um at our homepage.

On iTunes, you can just type in how stuff works is one word in the iTunes search bar room, and you can also type all sorts of cool things into the search bar at how stuff works dot com, including can you really scare someone? In debt? But now Josh, it's still not over there? Or goodness in the form of you people aren't going anywhere. It's listener mail, times mail, so listener mail. I've got quite a few today. These are things that we've titled stuff we should Know, not

necessarily corrections, although some are. We did the podcasts on Commas, which got a lot of good response from Yeah, we were kind of worried about that. If I remember correctly, yeah, we didn't want to treat it lightly. And we actually had people who had family members and commas and they thought we'd were respecting, which went a really long way too.

That was huge actually. But in that podcast we mentioned the film Diving Bell and Butterfly, and I had seen the movie and I said something about, um, the main character was was able to uh. I think I said he used Yeah, that he used a computer and looked at the keys of the computer to write his memoir. Not true at all. What he what he did was he blinked the letters to someone who who transcribed this book for him and it was a really basically the main part of the film. And I can't explain why

I didn't remember that so for a while. So we need to thank Kendra Wallpi of Philadelphia and Tita of Montreal, Canada. I especially would like to thank whoever sent the computer device in quotes, which apparently we called it and then sent us the Wikipedia link um, which you know right, great, Thank you, And Jesse Aiden of Vienna, Austria sent that in So another quickie hypo allergenic cats, Josh, you've goofed up and said that created a new species. Not true.

Not true is not a new species. It was a new breed. And we got quite a few people, Philip Fast, Scott Ruddick, Matt we Abou of Boston, j Scott Brunig who is from Princeton University, Jamie vander Ratt of Saskatchewan, Canada, and actually put this in the form of a hiku, which is ain't speciation because they can interbreed. Still, I learned a lot beautiful uh and I'm sorry a quick when just came in before we recorded Keyshore the Lowdika. Two more quickies, I'm sorry one more quickly. Yeast is

a fungus from our Moonshine podcast. I think you said something about this plan and all of our biology friends said, no, it's a fungus, and West Sivak, Brian Ray, Sam S and John Salter told us all that it was, in fact the fungus fantas amungus. Thank you all of you. Um, well, we'll try to, you know, not screw up quite as much. But if not, what would you have to write to us about? So keep them coming right, Yes, keep us diligent and uh, if you want to learn a little

more about Friday right. Other superstitions Urban Legends. You got a great article on that, right, There's a lot more on the Friday thirteenth article there, Yes, yeah, there is. Um. You just go on to our handy search bar start randomly typing letters, or you could make a more specific search and type in Friday thirteenth or urban legends, something like that, and you can do that at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com brought

to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray. It's ready, are you

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