Stuff You Should Know - Can people really die of fright?

Episode Date: February 24, 2009

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. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid work. Be sure to listen to the War on Drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? Hello, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. That's Chuck. We're all together now. Yeah, the Stuff You Should Know Nation has won together. This is a special time. It is. I like it. Chuck, have you ever been scared, like really, truly like about to lose your life, scared?

No, thankfully. But you know who has? On multiple occasions, our producer, Jerry, has been scared to the point like she was an elevator once that started to fall. No, no, no. I think you should describe that a little further, a little better. This is the in Atlanta. That is an outdoor elevator made of glass. You see everything and what your 500, 700 stories up. So yeah, and go ahead, Chuck. Well, and the elevator was dropping and it caught. So she thought she's going to 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 has had a rough life and she has to deal with us

every week. So. But at least she's been to the Bahamas before. Yeah, true. Assuming she made it. So I haven't. But Jerry is, she teeters on the edge of death constantly. Yeah. So, you know, I can tell you that while Jerry was, she's cool as a cucumber, by the way, to everybody who hasn't met her. Right. But I can tell you, she was still, there were some things going on with her physiologically, whether she liked it or not, right? 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 late comers, you know.

Well, it's, you know, it's a physical reaction. Your body goes through your adrenaline surges, pupils dilate, breathing fast. That was a haiku. That was a haiku 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 usually, ideally. Well, one of the ways that all these reactions start happening is through adrenaline. It acts on things like your myocardial tissue, your heart tissue, and basically says, work faster, work harder, and makes your veins constrict to maximize blood flow. And basically, adrenaline is flowing throughout your body and it's just got you really jacked up,

really keyed up. So you're either going to run or fight, right? Well, as you said, the thing is, is there is a conception among most lay people that you could conceivably, if this happened to you in a sudden enough fashion, you could conceivably be scared to death. Right. Scared to death, not scared half to death. And just as a sidebar, 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 talking about is called sudden death. Right. Can you be scared to death?

Right. Sudden death is basically, it doesn't necessarily have to have to do with just fear only. It could be panic or 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 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 some sort of infarction, right? Right. And this is not supposed to happen is the weird thing. I mean, while to you or I, it makes sense, you know, like you get scared to die. Right. 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?

Right. And there's actually an emerging field. It's called neuro cardiology. Have you heard about this? I have not. There is a guy and his name is Dr. Martin Samuels. Yes. And he is often called the death doctor. Yeah. And he is this leading proponent of neuro cardiology. He's kind of the father of it. And 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 going to scare you really badly. Yeah. And if you're still alive afterward, we're going to make some notes on that. Right. And if not, then thank you for your time. And here's your $25. And even more to Dr. Samuels credit, he refuses to 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 from somebody who's experienced sudden death, he likes to do that. I'm quite sure who doesn't. And one of the things that he's found, and this is actually a well-known symptom of stress, and that is contraction bands along the heart. It's cool. They look like little red stripes. Okay. And basically what it is is the adrenaline has come in in such a concentrated form or in such an amount because of this huge fear response or whatever, that it's just destroyed cells. It's just blown them out. Wow. And so you've got lesions formed along your heart tissue, not good to have. No. And actually, unsurprisingly, this has shown up in cocaine users as well.

Right. So you can create contraction bands along your heart from drug abuse or from being scared. Right. The thing is, it's like when you come out of it, you're not like, oh, my heart hurts. Right. You can't tell. And apparently, if this happens enough over time, the heart becomes weak and stops functioning properly. Interesting. It is interesting, isn't it? And there's actually, again, we should say, neurocardiology is something of an emerging field. Right. So they're still trying to get as much proof as they can. Right. I found another unrelated study that found that the prevalence of contraction bands in accident victims, the degree in the severity of contraction bands actually increases the longer the time between the accident and

between death goes by. Okay. So your heart's just pumping. Right. Right. And your adrenaline's flowing, but then you die. Sure. So if you just die immediately, your body doesn't have time to release that adrenaline, create contraction. So there's a clear link between adrenaline and contraction bands. And we do know that something like fear can release adrenaline. Right. Yeah. You know, like you were saying earlier with this doctor, it's you can't ethically perform a test like this. No. 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 Baskervilles, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Yes.

Wow. Who was a physician himself? What a mouthful. He was and then Hound of Baskervilles, 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. Agreed. So the one I liked was 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 Friday the 13th podcast. You're being harsh. And apparently in China and Japan, the number four is unlucky because its pronunciation is similar to the word for death, first of all. Right. And so what they did

was they studied some data over the course of pretty expansive data. Yeah, 25 years. And they looked at the death certificates of about 200,000 Chinese and Japanese people over that period. And then they had a control group of 47 million white folks. Yeah. Like you and I. Sure. 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, they saw a 13% increase in deaths on the fourth of any given month. And for people who were in the hospital with heart problems, there was a 47% increase compared to the white control group on the fourth of the month. You can't dismiss that. It is interesting. So you obviously, as we covered in that terrible

Friday, the 13th podcast, we said that 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 these people are already suffering from heart problems. Right. But the fourth of the month rolls around. They're a little more jacked up. They're looking at that calendar. Yeah. They're just a little more vulnerable than other days of the month. So it would be kind of 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. Remember the earthquake in 1994 in Northridge and Southern California? Oh yeah. How could I forget? 6.7 on the Richter scale. Was it? Yeah. I didn't even know that. Good for you. In 1968, five black girls

dressed in oversized military fatigues were picked up by the police in Montgomery, Alabama. I was tired and just didn't want to take it anymore. The girls had run away from a reform school called the Alabama Industrial School for Negro children. And they were determined to tell someone about the abuse they'd suffered there. Picture the worst environment for children that you possibly can. I believe Mount Megs was patterned after slavery. I didn't understand why I had to go through what I was going through and for what. I'm writer and reporter Josie Duffy Rice. And in a new podcast, I investigate how this reform school went from being a safe haven for black kids to a nightmare. And how those five black girls changed everything. All that on unreformed.

Listen to unreformed on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 1980, cocaine was captivating and corrupting Miami. Miami had become the murder capital of the United States. They were making millions of dollars. I would categorize it as the Wild Wild West. Unleashing a wave of violence. My God took a walk into the devil's stand. The car fells. They just killed everybody that was home. They start pulling out pictures of Clay Williams body taken out in the Everglades. A world orbiting around a mysterious man with a controversial claim. This drug pilot by the name of Lamora Chester. He never ran anything but grass until I turned over that load of coke to him on the island. Chester would claim he did

it all for this CIA. Pulling many into a sprawling federal investigation. So Clay wasn't the only person who was murdered. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco. Join me for murder in Miami. Listen to murder in Miami on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On a normal day in LA, there's about five sudden deaths, which we talked about. When the Northridge earthquake hit, there were 24 sudden deaths that day. Big spike. That is a huge spike. Almost five times. And a few of these, they linked to physical exertion, so you can throw those out. But most of these were actually attributed to the tremendous fright caused by the earthquake. And the average age was a little bit high, 68 years old,

but only 42% 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. Right. Yeah. So that's, you know, again, a pretty clear link, right? But of course, correlation is not causation. And so neurocardiologists like Dr. Martin are going to keep looking into it. 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 1942, he wrote a paper. And basically he said that there was a lot more prevalence of sudden death in places where voodoo was practiced. Right. And he went on to postulate that this was because people believed in voodoo

and 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, they actually did die. Right. In some cases, they died because they wouldn't drink food or water because they thought it was poisoned by voodoo. Right. 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 Baskervilles, sure. But really, as far as medical science goes, 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 so we can try to stop it. And Cannon was a Harvard physiologist. So he wasn't some fly-by-night crackpot. No.

No. And he was definitely one worth listening to. There was another thing I wanted to talk about, too, while I have you here. Yes, sure. Which is, have you ever heard of someone supposedly their hair turning white overnight because of fear? Sure, I have heard that. Not quite true. No. That's a bit of an urban myth from what I could tell. Just send it to us, Chuck. We both did some research here. And 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 in metabolic function, I think, that could turn your hair a different color. True. Or make it lose its color, right? Yeah. Okay. But there is a way it can turn gray,

seemingly overnight. But it's not from fear. What that's called is diffuse alopecia areata. It's like selective hair loss, right? Yeah, basically. That's sudden hair loss, which can happen overnight. But 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 the same thing as being scared, scared white. Right. Also, even if it could change your hair color, which we're 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 than your hair being white. But anything that's coming off of your body, fingernails, your hair, that those are dead cells, right? It's dead. So there's no change that could could take place aside from maybe a flow bee going over them. Right. What do you mean scalp down now? The scalp toward your skull. Okay. Under the skin, subdermal. Gotcha. Yeah. Yeah. Head of a cat. 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 esteemed colleague Molly Edmonds, Miles, who not only has this article to be proud of, she and another

colleague of ours who we love very much, Kristen Conger, just launched their own podcast. They called Stuff Mom Never Told You. You can find that on iTunes alongside ours and a bunch of other How Stuff Works podcasts at our homepage on iTunes. You can just type in How Stuff Works is one word in the iTunes search bar. And you can also type all sorts of cool things into the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com, including Can You Really Scare Someone to Death? But now, Josh, it's still not over. There's more goodness in the form of... People aren't going anywhere. It's listener mail time. Listener 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 podcast on comas, which we 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 in comas, and they thought we were respectful to them. 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 the main character was able to... I think I said he used... Show me several B. Yeah, that he used a computer and looked at the keys of the computer to write his memoir. Not true at all. What he did was he blinked the letters to someone 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. It's okay, brain freeze. You've been eating ice cream for a while. So we need to thank Kendra Walpe 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, which, you know... Right. Great, thank you. And Jesse Aiden of Vienna, Austria sent that in. Sweet. So another quickie, hypoallergenic cats. Josh, you goofed up and said that you created a new species. Not true. Not true. It's not a new species. It was a new breed. And we got quite a few people. Philip Fass, Scott Rudick, Matt Weaboo of Boston, J. Scott Brunig, who is from Princeton University, Jamie Vanderrott of Saskatchewan,

Canada, and actually put this in the form of a haiku, which is, ain't speciation because they can interbreed. Still, I learned a lot. Beautiful. And we love our haikus. Nice. And I'm sorry, a quick one just came in before you recorded. Kishore Velody. Okay. Thanks to all of you. Two more quickies. Oh, yeah? I'm sorry. One more quickie. Okay. Yeast is a fungus from our Moonshine podcast. I think you said something about that. It's a plant. And all of our biology friends said, no, it's a fungus. And Westsevac, Brian Ray, Sam S., and John Souter told us all that it was in fact a fungus. Fantastic. A fungus. Thank you to all of you. 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 if you want to learn a little more about Friday the 13th, right? Other superstitions, urban legends, you've got a great article on that. Right. There's a lot more in the Friday the 13th article though. Yes. Yeah, there is. 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 the 13th or urban legend, something like that. And you can do that at howstuffworks.com. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have

way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Attention, bachelor nation. He's back. The host of some of America's most dramatic TV moments returns with the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison. During two decades in reality TV, Chris saw it all and now he's telling all. It's going to be difficult at times. It'll be funny. We'll push the envelope. We have a lot to talk about. Listen to the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.