Ep 93 Lightning & Other Stories: Power Hour (and a Half)

The company present say the flash was very great, and the crack as loud as a pistol, Yet my senses being instantly gone, I neither saw the one, nor heard the other, nor did I feel the stroke on my hand, though afterward I found that it raised a round swelling where the fire entered as big as half a pistol bullet, by which you may judge the quickness of the electrical fire, which by this instance seems to be greater than the sound, light,

or animal sensation. What I can remember of the matter is that I was about to try whether the bottles were fully charged by the strength and length of the stream issuing to my hand, as I commonly used to do, and which I might safely enough had done if I

had not held the chain in the other hand. I then felt what I know not how to describe, a universal blow through my whole body, from my head to my foot, which seemed within as well as without, after which the first thing I took notice of was a violent, quick shaking of my body, which gradually my sense as gradually returned, And I then thought the bottles must be discharged, but could not conceive how till at last I perceived the chain in my hand and recollected what I had

been about to do. That part of my hand and fingers which held the chain was left white, as though the blood had been driven out, and remained so eight to ten minutes after, feeling like dead flesh, and I had a numbness in my arms and the back of my neck, which continued till the next morning, but wore off. Nothing remains now of this shock but a soreness in my breastbone, which feels as if I had been bruised.

I did not fall, but suppose I should have been knocked down if I had received the stroke in my head. The whole was over in less than a minute.

So a lot of people have asked us how we find our first hand accounts, and it's a mix of things, really, but one of the ways is that listeners will often reach out to us and be like, oh, if you're recovering this in the future, I am willing to share my story, etc. And so if you have a first hand account that you might like to share on the podcast or want to at least learn more about it, the best way to get in touch is either through the contact us form on our website or by emailing

us at this podcast will Kill You at gmail dot com. Yea, and I want to just take this opportunity to say a big thank you to everyone who has ever reached out to us over the years with their experiences, and also for everyone who has ever shared their first hand account. Yeah, okay, should we take a quick break and then get into it.

are temperature differences between air mass. So what happens is like the warm air down close to the Earth moves up. Since warm air rises, it condenses to form clouds. The

water droplets freeze to become like ice crystals. Or whatever, and they're continually being pushed around by all of the air movement, and all of this movement between the ice crystals creates this friction that causes electrons and protons to be transferred between these water molecules, and they're continually moving around in this giant storm, right and the storm is

moving along the ground. And so what happens is these ions, the positive and negative ions, redistribute into these layers, and generally the positive ones hang out on the top of the cloud. The negative ions accumulate at the bottom, and the earth, which usually is kind of negatively charged compared to the atmosphere, now has this positive charge because of how strong the negative charge at the bottom of.

upward towards this cloud to close this gap. And when it just gets to be too much, when the potential difference between the charges at the top of this cloud and the bottom of this cloud and the earth get to be just too strong, boom, lightning strike and then thunder, which is a really important part of lightning because it shows you The power of what's happening thunder is the shock waves from this explosive expansion of air that becomes superheated and ionized by this massive.

ways i'll talk about. So the next way is you can have a contact injury, and that happens if you are touched an object that's part of the path of that current. Like let's say you're touching a fawcet in your house and your house pipes get hit by lightning, and then it goes through that faucet and into you or you're touching a tree at the moment that that

tree gets hit, that's a contact and tree. Then there's something that I think is so fascinating that's called a side flash or a splash, and that's when the lightning hits that's somewhere nearby to you and then jumps it crosses an air gap and then jumps to you as a nearby person. So you're just like splashed with some of the force of the lightning as it makes its way towards the ground.

Those are the main types. There's also and I think this is just oh my goodness, there has been reports of something that's called an upward streamer. So you know how I said that all those positive charges are running along the ground and up to try and get to the cloud as that energy from the cloud is coming down.

So there has been reports of people being struck from the energy just from those upward streamers of energy, even without them making contact with the actual lightning strike, which is like what.

current to flow. They talk about the amperage, which is like the volume of electrons that are flowing. It's a measure of the rate of flow. And then they talk about the resistance, which is an intrinsic property of an object, and different body tissues have different resistances. It's like the ease or the difficulty with which the electric current can actually travel. And then they talk about the pathway that the current takes, which I kind of talked with lightning.

The different ways that you can come into contact. And if you're thinking of household electronics, you can grab it with your hand by accident. Little kids might put electric cords in their mouth, right, So that will determine literally like where in your body is this current going to flow? And then the duration of contact. Now, when it comes to lightning, the voltage and the amperage that we're talking about unbelievably high, like ten or more million volts and forty or more thousand amps.

of contact is instantaneous. It's fractions of milliseconds, whereas, especially if you come into contact with a household electric source or something that's like putting out alternating current, your body reacts to that alternating current by having repetitive contractions, so it can you to actually grab and continue to hold on to that source, prolonging the duration of contact and

therefore prolonging the damage. But this is the literal opposite, because it's such an instantaneous thing that it actually causes an effect that I still don't fully understand.

energy gets transferred into thermal energy. That results in a lot of burning superficial as well as deep burns as it penetrates through our tissues or burns through the can or whatever with lightning. The amount of current and the rate at which it travels is so massive that that can gets filled up instantaneously and the rest of that

current flows out and over the can. It spills all around it, rather than staying contained within and causing damage that is flash over, and so as it flows over it can cause other damage that like normal electricity wouldn't cause because it's flowing out over your body rather than through.

So you have a lot more typical burns, you have a lot more visual and physical damage that we're able to see, and these type of injuries that your brain probably associates with electricity.

with lightning strikes is damage to our heart. Our heart has its own little electrical system, so especially if current of any type, not just lightning, is passing vertically through our bodies, it has a pretty good chance of passing over our heart, which sits kind of right in the center, and that current can then disrupt our heart's internal electric

system and lead to arrhythmias. It can lead to acistily essentially stopping the heart entirely, or it can lead to what's called ventricular fibrillation, which is when the bottom of your heart, the part that's supposed to pump the blood out of your heart to the rest of your body, stops contracting and really instead goes like and fibrillates. Not a good Sorry, you can't see my hands, but.

then you have death because of that. And one thing that's really interesting about lightning strikes specifically is that it's actually far more likely to have successful resuscitation in the case of a cardiopulmonary arrest from lightning than from a lot of other reasons for cardiac arrest. And there's a

lot of different hypotheses as to like why. Part of it might be that because it happens, so I just keep saying this like it feels repetitive, but it is so instantaneous, this complete stop, that there's a thought that maybe you have more time before the tissue damage starts to occur, right whereas with a heart attack or something that blockage starts to cause cell damage over a period

of seconds or minutes, so you've already lost time. But many times people who are struck by lightning are otherwise young and quite healthy, so it might just be that

they have more reserves, so to speak. We don't really know, but it's really interesting because it changes the paradox of for example, in an emergency situation who should be the first person that you like go to to try and save, and likeag is like opposite exactly with lightning, it's the person who looks dead that's the person you go to first, because their heart probably stopped, they might have stopped breathing, but you'll probably get them back, Whereas if someone is breathing,

is moaning, is making any kind of movement or noise, they're going to be okay, most likely in the immediate emergent period. But so that's kind of the most extreme thing that happens. But lightning can also cause a lot of skin damage. It can cause linear burns from water on the skin being vaporized. It can cause these fascinating feathery snowflake lightning strike patterns that actually aren't burns at all, and we don't even really understand what causes them, but

they tend to disappear in a matter of hours. It can cause these small round burns that can be deep, but they're really small in diameter or in area. So in general, the skin and burn injuries that we see from lightning tend to be much less severe, first of all, than you would expect from such a huge amount of electricity. But also less severe than what we see from a lot of other electric sources. Lightning, though, can cause a lot more trauma damage than some other electric sources, except

for perhaps high tension wires. But because of the shock wave that's generated by lightning, that shock wave itself can actually cause barrow trauma, which can cause injury to our internal organs. It can cause a concussion, it can rupture the ear drums, that is, it's terrifying. It's also thought that during flash over the current can actually re enter our body through our eyes and our nose, which can

then cause ocular damage like cataracts. And then of course you can have trauma from falls, from being blasted away, or from shrapnel from a tree, etc. So there's a lot of different ways that lightning can harm you. Yeah, of course there's the neurologic damage, and the neurologic effects can also be pretty wide ranging. They can be transient where they go away really quickly, and it's actually pretty common to have something called karunoparalysis, which is pretty specific

to lightning strikes. It's a total paralysis, especially of the lower extremities, but it's transient and it goes away within a matter of hours. Not fully understood, lightning strikes can cause a lot of autonomic instability, which means like your autonomic nervous system is the part of your body that controls all of our involuntary actions, your heart rate, your temperature,

control your blood vessel, your digestion. Right, so this can manifest as temperature instability, as a fast heart rate for seemingly no reason, as blood pressure problems. But again, these

type of findings tend to improve reallygelatively quickly. There can also be immediate effects from a lightning strike neurologically that don't recover as quickly, that are more prolonged, and that can happen either from direct damage from electric current or from things like a schemic injury from like a hemorrhage or a stroke. If you have damage to blood vessels, et cetera, gotcha. And then there are a lot of delayed onset of symptoms that can be anything from movement

disorders like if there's motor neuron damage. But then of course there are neurocognitive and neuropsychiatric findings that in many cases can be profound and can be completely life changing, and we do not understand the mechanism or the extent.

and they're not They're not true. They're obviously not true. Yeah, but I think also what's glossed over is that, yes, you can survive lightning, but it can be hugely disruptive for the rest of your life or at least for like way longer afterwards. I didn't know that.

assnxiety or hypervigilance. It can result in a lot of memory deficits, especially in working memory, or difficulty with word finding or auditory memory. There's been studies that have shown that it can affect your processing speed. Post traumatic stress disorder happens in about thirty percent of people after a

lightning injury. It's so wide ranging, and I think what's so important about this type of neuropsychiatric findings is the downstream effect that these can have on somebody's life, because they not only can affect the way that somebody interacts with the world, but they then can go on to affect a person's relationships, marriages, friendships, things that make a person who they are, which is terrifying.

history of electricity and tell you about them. Okay, so it's not going to be as deep of a dive as I normally do on like a topic, but I think it's going to be a fun or at least interesting time, and I think that you'll end up with a lot of trivia about electricity.

explain how in the heck radiation worked. And since doctor Jorgenson does such an amazing job of explaining these super complicated topics in a way that I feel like I can actually understand, I wanted to have him on again to explain how precisely electricity works. So tune in next week for the bonus episode where I get to ask him a bunch of questions about how electricity works and why it's so important in understanding biology. Yeah, okay, but are you ready to hear my little vignettes?

lightning is a sign of the gods being angry. And there's also representations of lightning in art and etchings going back thousands and thousands of years. And the fascination that people had with lightning and the power, like the mystical power they ascribed to it, It's completely understandable, right, I mean, it's still fascinating and terrifying. But I'm not here to talk about lightning in mythology, even though I would love

to do that. But what I really want to talk about is when people realized what lightning was and how they gained that understanding. Electricity itself has long, long been recognized by people, and not necessarily in the context of lightning. Like people didn't look at lightning and immediately go, that's electricity.

The word electrical comes from the Latin word electricus, meaning amber like, which refers to the fact that amber, when rubbed with a piece of wool, gets statically charged, and so you get little shocks of static electricity, which is actually the way you can tell whether it's real amber or not. But people saw this characteristic of amber, and it was believed to have mystical or healing properties for that reason, For this like electrical reason, there are amber

pendants dating back to twelve thousand BCE, for instance. And over time, people began observing static electricity in other materials and began to characterize as much as they could about how this electricity worked and how these materials behaved under certain circumstances. And this process of observation and recording and reporting and so on it allowed people to harness the power of electricity, at least to a certain degree, a small degree, pretty small for centuries, and I'm glossing over

a lot here. The only way that people could intentionally produce static electricity is by rubbing materials together petting your cat really hard, just kidding, like rubbing amber with wool, But doing that manually meant that the amount that you could generate was pretty limited. So people began inventing tools to help, such as hand crank tools that rotated an object against a piece of silk, a static electricity machine, and ways to temporarily store that static electricity.

that it did actually happen. So if this story has been like misrepresented over time and it's not really quite truthful, why do we all still know about it?

so Ben wanted to find out. Ben were on first name basis, of course we are. So he devised an experiment that fortunately went through several revisions because the first versions were like incredibly dangerous, even more so than the final one ended up being. And they involved like a person standing on top of a wooden platform holding a metal rod in the middle of the storm and stuff like that not good ideas, and so Ben made some

adjustments to this experiment to make it safer. So he decided that all he needed was a kite that had like a metal rod attached a key, a device called a lighten jar, which is essentially used to store static electricity. Apparently it's like a modern day capacitor. I don't know how that works, so I'm just going to say it's a jar that's used to store static electricity. Okay, yep.

the kite up into the skies. The metal rod attached to the kite picked up some of the ambient electricity from the storm, not lightning itself, because he probably would have died if he'd been struck by lightning or at least been severely injured, and that electricity traveled down the wet twine string into the key that was tied to the twine and Ben was like, is this key charged? Is this key of electricity? And he felt a little

spark and so he was like perfect. So he was able to collect some of the storm's electricity and store it in that lighten jar.

and it made him like quite the celebrity. And even though he didn't discover electricity in this kite situation, his experiment did teach us several things. The first is that it showed that lightning is indeed electrical, right. The phenomenon that you had when you rubbed amber was the same, but on a much much larger scale that you saw

in nature when there was a thunderstorm. Another is that it hinted at the enormous electrical power in storms and how we could possibly someday either harness it or that we could maybe generate great amounts of electricity ourselves. And the last big thing that I'll mention is that this experiment kind of immediately showed that lightning rods like the rod attached to the kite, could be used to protect structures, which is an idea that Ben Franklin and others had

been working on for a few years. I think that many of us, or at least I'll speak for myself, I definitely take it for granted that when I am inside my home, I am protected from lightning, Oh my gosh, yes, or like in a public building.

like literally like bullet points. Here. In twenty sixteen, three hundred and twenty three reindeer in Norway were killed like all at the same time while huddling together during a storm. What uh huh. The longest lasting recorded lightning strike was seventeen point one seconds in a storm over Uruguay and

northern Argentina in June of twenty twenty. Oh No, and apparently the longest single flash was four hundred and seventy seven point two miles or seven hundred and sixty eight kilometers, just like across parts of the southern US in April twenty twenty.

most impactful advancements in the history of electricity. Okay, So, animal electricity was this idea put forth in the seventeen hundreds and championed heavily in the late seventeen hundreds by an Italian researcher named Luigi Galvani. Okay. And it was the idea that all animals created and stored electricity in their bodies, particularly in their brains, and that this animal electricity was responsible for movement.

And so he was like, no, if you can generate satic electricity and store that in a lighten jar, there's no way that that could be the same thing that is in animals.

is the application of external electricity causing the movement. And the two went back and forth in their feud until Volta decided that he needed to settle the matter once and for all. So he was he was always experimenting with things, and he had noticed that when he placed coins made of different metals on his tongue and like, yeah, put them down, he felt a bit of a tingle, kind of like an electric shock. And the strength and the strength of that tingle depended on which types of

metals the coins were made of. Okay, And so he wanted to understand what was going on Like that seemed to him like electricity, But how could he use that? And so he went to the literature and he came across the description of an animal that gave him a little spark of inspiration.

like put the torpedo fish on the person. One of the ailments that they were used for is hemorrhoids second owl. I know, like terrible. But the nature of this shock that they delivered was debated. Was it electricity? There was no visible spark, so was it actually just the sting or was it something totally different. In the seventeen seventies, so a couple of decades before the debate between Galvani

and Volta kind of came to a head. An English scientist named Henry Cavendish showed that the torpedo fish produced electricity, But still there was this question of like, well, what kind of electricity is it? Is this the same kind that we could artificially produce, or is it this animal electricity? And so when Volta came across descriptions of this fish and particularly their electric organs, these columns of jelly filled disks, he thought, I wonder if these work in the same

way that my metal coins on my tongue do. Like just a couple of coins stacked together give me a light tingle. But if I increase the number of coins that touch like the way these columns of disk in the electric fish are arranged, would the amount of electricity also increase and lead to a larger shock. Huh? So he tried it out. He stacked disks of copper and zinc and other metals along with cloth dipped in either dilute acidic solution or salt water, until he had this

big pile of disks. He attached wires to each end, and then he tested it on his tongue. Again that idea, and sure enough a stronger tingle. But not only was it a greater shock, he was also surprised to find out that it was continuous electricity was flowing out of his pile like water. Hence why we call things like electrical current or the flow of electricity was like liquid. People thought it was liquid in nature. It wasn't this

one and done shock. And that is how inspired by the torpedo fish, in seventeen ninety nine, Volta created the first true battery battery. How cool is that?

a long way from Ben Franklin and his kite. Several cities had street lights powered by electricity, and while we were still several decades away from being able to easily bring power into people's homes, electricity was in the process of becoming a more widely accessible, everyday practical tool, rather than something that was used in just magic shows or

tinkered with only in scientific labs. But many people who were living in these cities that were lit by electrical lamps, they were still like pretty wary of this power, especially as newspapers reported on an increase see number of accidental deaths from electricity. One of these deaths would inspire the

invention of one of the US's most gruesome devices. On August seventh, eighteen eighty one, in Buffalo, New York, a man named George Lemuel Smith had had a bit too much to drink, and he stumbled into a power plant, reportedly seeking the thrill of an electrical tingle. What, yeah, he I don't know, Well, he got his tingle and a lot lot more. His death by electrocution was presented by a coroner to an audience of medical professionals in Buffalo, and in that audience was a dentist by the name

of Alfred P. Southwick. You know, people find inspiration in all kinds of ways, Like maybe an idea comes to you when you're in a shower, or when you're reading a book, or when you're on a long walk, or maybe it comes to you in the form of an autopsy report of an electrocuted man. As Southwick listened to this case, an idea began to form. What if we could harness this power and put it to good use, which in his eyes, was to kill people who had

been sentenced to death. I Ah, Southwick teamed up with a physician and the head of the Buffalo ASPCA to test out this new method of execution on the stray animals of Buffalo. I knew it just gets worse. Oh dear, he always does, it always does. I'm not even gonna like venture a guess or say anything about whether Southwick was a sociopath or something like that, but it does seem that his intentions were like, maybe not good, but

at least not evil. Because at the time Capital punishment was done prime merely through hanging, which is not always reliable and was associated with a lot of pain and injury and just bad, like just gruesome. Yeah, And so there was a series of botched hangings that had led to quite a bit of pushback against both hanging as well as capital punishment in general. And so Southwick viewed death by electrocution as a much more humane option. It

seemed quick and painless, and with practice, more reliable. So he took the calculations that he had gathered from his animal experiments, scaled them up for humans, and designed a delivery method a chair not unlike a dental chair, and that is how the electric chair was born. So he brought this design to New York politicians and lobbied them

to replace hanging with his electric chair. The governor at the time was like, huh, you know what, you might be onto something here, So he put together a commission to investigate the electric chair alongside the other common methods and not so common methods of execution that were used, which by the end of their investigations totaled thirty four

different methods. WHOA, yeah, I know, it's disturbing. A number some of these methods were tossed out pretty quickly, but others proved to be stiff competition, like decapitation via kellotine keuillotine. But the commission concluded that electrocution was the winner. They still had concerns, but it seemed like the best choice. What also helped make this be number one choice was that the electric chair got a vote of confidence from

one very prominent figure in electricity, Thomas Edison. You know, Aarin, I would love to spend so much time talking about the electricity wars between Edison and Nikola Tesla and Westinghouse, but I just I can't. If there was ever an episode for it to happen, it would be this one, but I decided against it.

so he launched essentially a smear campaign against it. One strategy of this campaign was to get the alternating current powered electric chair approved for executions, because if AC was used to kill people, would you really want it in

your homes. So, with Edison's backing and just a few pesky details to be worked out, like the amount of charge and how long and blah blah blah, the Commission recommended the electric chair as a primary form of execution, and on August sixth, eighteen ninety nine, years minus one day after the death of George Smith that kicked off this whole situation, the first execution via electric chair on

a person was carried out. A man named William Kembler had been convicted of murdering his girlfriend, Tillie Ziegler with a hatchet in front of like enough witnesses to easily put him away, and he had been sentenced to death. His electrocution did not go well. I think the eyewitness account says it best, Oh dear, and if you would rather not he a pretty gruesome description of an electric chair execution, I would suggest skipping ahead about a minute

and a half to two minutes, okay quote. The scene of Kemmler's execution was too horrible to picture. Men accustomed to every form of suffering grew faint as the awful

spectacle was unfolded before their eyes. Those who stood in the sight were filled with awe as they saw the effects of this most potent of fluids, electricity which is only partially understood by those who have studied it most faithfully, as it slowly, too slowly, disintegrated the fiber and tissues of the body through which it passed, the heaving of the chest, which it had been promised would be stilled in an instant of peace as soon as the circuit

was completed. The foaming of the mouth, the bloody sweat, the writhing of shoulders, and all other signs of life. Horrible as these all were, they were made infinitely more horrible by the premature removal of the electrodes and the subsequent replacing of them for not seconds, but minutes, until the room was filled with the odor of burning flesh, and strong men fainted and fell like logs upon the floor.

execution in the US and basically nowhere else. And in the US, states appointed electrocutioners who were generally people whose skills lay not in human physiology and how our bodies worked, but in electricity. One of these, Robert g. Elliot, was the state executioner for New York and ended up executing three hundred and eighty seven people during his lengthy career.

At the end of his life, he wrote an autobiography reflecting on his whole life and career and experiences, and I wanted to mention it because I think his takeaway is super interesting. He believed at the end of all of this that the death penalty should be abolished. And it's not that he felt morally responsible for these deaths or worried about the people that he had executed having suffered. He thought that it was a painless process and he was like, I'm just doing my job. But he felt

that capital punishment in general wasn't any use. It wasn't a deterrent to crime, and it was really more society taking its revenge. There was no good outcome of this. He felt that witnessing an execution should be a civic duty like jury service for all citizens, and felt that if that were to happen, if there had to be like, oh, this is the committee that's going to watch this execution, that he was like, the death penalty, it would be gone very quickly.

or in like pop culture. There are famous electric chairs like Gruesome, Gurdy, Old Smoky, Old Sparky, and it's been featured in countless songs shout Out to Ride the Lightning by Metallica, which I was I was about to say, forced to listen to for the first time the other day, and also it's featured in books and movies and shows like Off the top of my head, I can think

of several the Green Mile right. Starting in the late nineteen seventies, the electric chair began to be phased out as lethal injection took over in states where the death penalty still exists. But this gruesome chapter in electricity history is not quite over, because the electric chair is still an option in some US states, and some states allow people to choose their method of execution, which is yeah, So maybe how about we stop here in electric chair

and we move on to a slightly lighter bit of history. Okay, Okay, So I wanted to end the history section on a bit of a happier note by talking about how electricity has been used not to kill people, but rather to try to help them. Okay, I'm going to just do a very very quick tour through this history and hope that one day I get to do a deeper dive

on something like electroconvulsive therapy, for instance. Okay, so I already mentioned how both amber and electric fish were used thousands of years ago to try to treat or cure people. But the age of electro therapy really began when the study of electricity kicked off in the seventeen hundreds. People may not have understood exactly how electricity worked. Turns out they still don't, I guess, but they still tried to use it to treat basically any condition they could think of.

Throughout the eighteen hundreds and into the early nineteen hundreds, electrotherapy became incredibly popular, and physicians who practice electrotherapy actually called themselves electricians. Huh yeah, And it was an incredibly lucrative field to be in. And apparently I learned that many of the early advances in electricity technology were driven by physicians wanting to have better control over the electrical charge that they applied to their patients.

the early twentieth century, which was the Pulvermacher belt. You could get it by mail order only, of course. So picture if you will, a normal belt strap, somehow batteries to it, and then put that around your waist directly on your bare skin. Okay, So it was supposed to release like a steady electrical current. They gave off a

nice little tangle where the belt rested. At first, the belt was widely marketed to everyone, but then the focus narrated a bit with the release of the Pulvermacher pouch, which you would attach to the front of the belt and rest your genital inside. It was just like I think you have to see, like the drawing of this belt.

It kills me. It's so funny. So it was advertised as improving sexual vitality, and it was an absolute best seller, like so much so that you know those clickbait headlines that are like, doctors hate this one trick that is essentially the pulvermacher. But they wanted it to be banned. They were like, we need patients to come in to see us, and they're just sitting at home with these

belts on. Also, maybe they wanted it to be banned because it didn't work to do anything really, And that's when people were generally realizing about electrotherapy, especially as things like germ theory revealed the underlying pathologies of various diseases which didn't necessarily have any overt link to electric Whereas in the eighteen hundreds, electrotherapy was considered essentially a cure all, by the early decades of the nineteen hundreds, it had

fallen out of favor more or less and was kind of seen as a specialist treatment, but it didn't go away entirely. In the nineteen twenties and the nineteen thirties, there was a lot of research looking into a possible relationship between epilepsy and schizophrenia, and several physicians mistakenly believed that they represented opposite ends of a disease spectrum, and the implication of that was that if you induced seizures

in someone with schizophrenia, you could treat the disease. And that is how electroconvulsive therapy first began to be used for schizophrenia, and it seemed at least somewhat effective, but the how and the why was not and I think

is still not fully known. And despite the bad popular reputation it has mostly owing to issues with informed consent and negative media portrayals, which I would love to talk more about in like a bigger episode, it's still used today to treat many different disorders in addition to schizophrenia, one of the most common being certain kinds of depression, and it's like successfully used and it seems like we've come a long way from the nineteen twenties and the

nineteen thirties in the way that we treat people with this, and so I think that ECT is kind of this example that we have where like something that started out a long time ago, electrotherapy in general, as snake oil or mostly placebo effect has now evolved so much over time that it is used very effectively in many different

types of conditions. Right, you have ect used to treat types of depression, vagus nerve stimulation to treat some epilepsy, deep brain stimulation to treat Parkinson's disease, and there are many, many more examples. And even if we still have more to understand about how electricity works, it's amazing to me to think of how much it has taught us about ourselves with like different nerves and different muscles, or maybe in the future, what lightning strikes can teach us about

brain functionality. Yeah, so speaking of lightning strikes, Arin, what's happening with electrical shocks and lightning strikes and whatever else today?

times as many injuries as there are deaths. So for estimates of twenty four thousand fatalities, that's over two hundred and forty thousand injuries globally.

Even in the US, our lightning data, from what I read, and I think that this is still true, it's mostly gathered by like Noah, and so it's not gathered in specific by any kind of medical establishment, and so we still don't even have good numbers for the US, and the same is true in most, if not all, other countries.

from lightning strikes. So, for example, in the US, older papers that I read estimated like one hundred fatalities a year. Even older ones said it used to be as high as four hundred a year. More recent numbers.

percent in lightning with climate change. And from what I can gather, there's definitely like a strong theoretical possibility that warmer global temperatures, especially in the tropics, can result in greater lightning frequency because of those.

Lightning is a major cause of forest fires, and so even if the actual amount of lightning might decrease or not change, if the dry season is longer, then that could actually contribute to an increasing risk associated with.

a very impactful episode. I felt that not only talked about like someone's experience, but also a little bit more about like science and stuff like that too.

those papers on the kind of climate change projections. We'll post the sources for this episode and all of our episodes on our website, this podcast will kill You dot com.