The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Halloween Spooktacular 2018 (Season 1 Finale)

Episode Date: October 31, 2018

On the season 1 finale of "The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week," four of our original hosts jump behind the mic to share their spookiest facts, in honor of Halloween. The weirdest things we learned this week range from fetuses that turn to stone to a newt that sticks its ribs through its body to defend itself from predators. Whose story will be voted "The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week"? The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us on social media: www.facebook.com/groups/theweirdestthing www.twitter.com/weirdest_thing #weirdestthingpod Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Claire Maldarelli: www.twitter.com/camaldarelli Eleanor Cummins: www.twitter.com/elliepses Mary Beth Griggs: www.twitter.com/marybethgriggs Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme Music by Billy Cadden: www.twitter.com/billycadden Edited by Jason Lederman: www.twitter.com/Lederman --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the same. Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises, it matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and tech stories every week. And while a lot of the fun facts we stumble across make it into our articles, there are lots of other weird facts that we just keep around the office.

So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week, from the editors of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Feldman. I'm Mary Beth Griggs. I'm Ellen I'm Claire Maldarelli. So a couple of notes. This is a very spooktacular Weirdest Thing Halloween episode, which hopefully you guessed because of how it is Halloween. And also, you know, Weirdest Thing has had,

I believe this will be our 25th episode, which is a lovely round number. We've decided we are going to take a short break. We're going to get prepped for season two of Weirdest Thing. We won't be gone long. We will be back pretty early in the new year, and we're definitely going to have another live show planned for right around that time as well. So keep an eye on the feed. We'll drop a couple of cool bonuses for you as well as announcements about that live show.

And we'll be back with full weirdest thing episode super soon. So on The Weirdest The Guide learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story, something spooky or weird. that we picked up in the course of reporting or editing for popular science, and we decide which one we absolutely have to hear more about first. Then, once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest or spoofiest thing we learned this week actually was. And because this is our super special spooktacular, we have four of the five OG weirdest thing members here today.

Claire, why don't we start with your spooky teas? Okay, great. So I'm just going to quote from a case study. A 74-year-old, stable and sensible woman told me, I was awakened by a sudden bang in the head, as if my head was bursting with a flash of light over both fields of vision. Wow. Whoa. Yep. Rough. Bad night. Death by autopsy. Oh, no. Oh, gosh. I'll just leave that there.

Mary Beth. Okay. I've got a creature that pushes its bones out of its body to punish anything that tries to mess with it. Whoa. Oh, my God. Relatable. I have a story about how babies can turn to stone. Oh.

Yes. I feel like I would start with babies that turn to stone. Yeah. Let's get that one out of the way. All right. I'll take it. A few years ago, a 75-year-old Moroccan woman named Zara Abu Talib, went to the hospital with abdominal pain. And scans revealed this mask that looked really strange to the doctors. So they kept doing more imaging. And eventually, they were like, I think that's a baby in there in that 75-year-old woman's abdomen.

but something's not right. And they realized that it was a baby that had completely calcified. When they eventually did surgery to remove this mass, they realized it was a baby she had conceived 46 years before. Oh, my God. Right. So going back to the 1950s when Zara had been pregnant with her first child, she had a very painful 48-hour labor, no delivery, and doctor said she needed a C-section,

but she recalls that she saw a woman die in childbirth, like in front of her in this very busy hospital, and she was so scared that she decided to run home. She knew that her life was in danger, but she figured she would rather die at home. And she went to her sister's house, who helped her continue to labor. She was in terrible pain for days. but then it stopped and the baby stopped moving. One thing that I had not known before looking into this more, there was actually a local legend where she was from about this phenomenon of sleeping babies,

that a baby could choose to sleep and then reawaken and be born at a later time. Who knows where that came from? But she decided that was what had happened to her. And she thought that the baby would come eventually. and she decided to not worry about it. She ended up adopting three children and tried to forget because as time went on, she, you know, I think started to realize that this baby was not going to wake up. But it wasn't causing her any discomfort.

So she just didn't do anything about it. So she knew it was still in there, like obviously. Yeah, she was still, she felt pregnant still. She could feel where the baby had been. Over time, this eventually started to cause her pain again. and that's when she ended up in the hospital. And so here's what happened. Zara is not alone.

She is in a rarefied group, but she is not alone. I'm never going to want to get pregnant now. This is called a lithopedian or a stone baby. There are only 300 cases in medical history. Wow. And the earliest one was described in the 10th century by the Spanish Muslim physician, Abu al-Kasim. very old historical record, but very rare. Like 300 in a thousand years.

Yeah, exactly. Which sounds like a Game of Thrones prophecy. But like are the real stats here. So here's what had happened with Zara, is that her pregnancy had been ectopic, which is, you know, when the fetus is not in the uterus when it implants. And hers was in the fallopian tube. And what generally happens with ectopic pregnancies that continue to grow is that the Flopian tube bursts. And then usually the fetus dies at some point not long after that. But in very

rare cases, their placenta will attach to an organ in the abdominal cavity. And so they'll continue to have blood flow. They'll continue to grow. Now, in modern days, in very rare cases, these babies can actually survive. Wow. It is extremely dangerous to the mother because that placenta can rupture and cause hemorrhaging at any point. Very dangerous. But somehow, Zara's pregnancy continued to full term so that when she experienced that pain, she was not actually in labor. She would have needed a C-section to deliver the baby. And even then, it would have been a very dangerous delivery. But the pain she felt was probably the baby losing oxygen and dying. But it is really incredible that it had grown

to be a full-term-sized baby. What happens with these stone babies is that when an ectopic pregnancy ends up in the abdominal cavity or or just elsewhere in the body, you know, even if it just stays in the fallopian tube, when it's too large for the body to reabsorb it, sometimes, you know, as the mother's body sees it as a foreign object and sees this dying tissue that could cause infection, the body protects itself by wrapping that dying tissue in a calcareous substance. Wow. And so that builds up over time and mummifies the baby.

So, you know, this may be more common than we know, but it just usually happens with much smaller masses because, you know, most ectopic pregnancies of this nature and much earlier than Zaris did. So, you know, even if something stays in there and calcifies, it's not going to be a mass the size of a newborn baby. baby. There are certainly cases where they've still been found and pulled out when they're much smaller than that, but

you know, this is like a very specific situation where it's too big for reabsorption, small enough or in a strange enough place that it's not like causing immediate death. And it's like actually a really impressive immune response from the

mother's body and seems to work really well. Some last details about Zara. When they removed the fetus, it weighed seven pounds. It was 16 inches long. It had recognizable head, arm fingers. Oh my goodness. And it was like stone. Like when they were trying to extract it, which was a very difficult process because it had really adhered to the abdominal wall. They said it was like their scalples were hitting a rock. Wow. And there was another case in Chile not long ago where a 91-year-old

woman had carried the fetus for over 60 years. So why do they wait so long? Is it just because it's not causing any pain and they're too afraid to... Yeah, I think in a lot of the cases I've read about, if it's not causing pain, and again, most of them are not as large as Zara's was. So it's mostly like a mass that somebody can kind of ignore as something, you know, if they're poor and maybe afraid of surgery, it's easier to just kind of pretend nothing is happening.

There was one historical case I read about where a woman was actually convinced that a baby that she had lost was still inside her and made a doctor promise that he would autopsy her after she died. And he actually died before her, but his son did the autopsy to keep his promise. And they found it. So I think in a lot of cases also, like the women involved no. And it just was not high on anyone else's priority list, I guess, to. Tell me about it. But, yeah, King Frederick, the third of Denmark, owned a Lithopedia. He just had it for fun.

Yeah. He just kept it. Oh, my gosh. That's disgusting. One really interesting thing is that depending on where the stone baby forms, you can actually carry a healthy pregnancy. After that? Yeah.

Wow. It's still in there. Oh, wow. Unfortunately, in some of these cases, it's forming in the uterus or, you know, in the fallopian tumor. tubes and, you know, there's a lot of bad stuff going on and you're not going to be able to have another pregnancy. But there have been some cases where they have been found after women have had other healthy pregnancies because this is just somewhere in their abdomen.

And, you know, the other fallopian tube is still fine. And everything else just carries on as normal. That's incredible. Yeah. Is it more rare now that we have like ultrasounds? Like they do ultrasounds so often now with pregnancies that you would think that you would see a, see it happen? Yeah, that's a really good question. I think there's so little data that it would be impossible to say whether they're becoming less common. But I would think that because we're better able to keep tabs on abdominal ectopic pregnancies, that we would be more likely to, A, either actually save that pregnancy or be, you know, make more immediate interventions to protect the mother's health because they're super dangerous. So in most cases, if your doctor realizes

you have an ectopic pregnancy growing in your abdominal cavity, they will, you know, suggest that you terminate because it is very much threatening to your life. So I think in that way, it may be becoming less common because the circumstances require a lot of, a lot of stuff has to go wrong for a stone baby to happen. And that's my fact. That was super spooky.

I'm crazy. I can't believe the human body is capable of that. Yeah, that is why. And then surviving. for 40 years after that. And also just like no one really caring for like a thousand years or whatever. Definitely a good story.

pregnancy remains ridiculously mysterious. And with that we will take a quick break and then come back. Me, more, I am a robot. Listen to Last Week in Tech. Thanks for that introduction, Robot. I'm Stan Horacek, one of the hosts of Last Week in Tech, a podcast from the popular science editors

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But please do it because he's not joking. All right, and we're back. And Mary Beth, I think you have some exploding bones or something. Yeah, I mean, something similar. Something similar to that. So we've got stone babies. And that seems like a very good Halloween type spooky story. But I want to talk about a monster.

Yes, yes. A monster that can do horrific things to its body and then heal itself as though nothing ever happened. Kind of what pregnancy is like. I mean, true. But this is not pregnancy. This is the Iberian ribbed newt. It lives on the age of it. Liberian Peninsula and Morocco, and it is very cute, and I have a picture that I'm going to show people in the studio.

Aw, and a little chumster. Oh, it's really adorable, actually. Yeah, no, this guy is very cute. It's like a muppet. Yeah, it's a very stocky little salamander with this long tail and these like googly eyes that look really cute and it's adorable. And we will have pictures on popsye.com that you can look at. but beneath that cute little smile and that adorable visage is lurking a survivor

and it is willing to rip its insides out and coat them with poison to punish predators. Wow, same. Yeah, yeah, no, it's great. So from the St. Louis Zoo description, this large stocky salamander lives on the bottom of ponds, lakes, and slow-moving streams. It rarely comes out on land. In fact, if its water dries up, the newt usually tries to bury itself in the mud until rain refills its pond smart yeah isn't that what worms do i think a lot of like creatures that don't like it's a common serpillar just just bury yourself in mud and wait for everything to blow over i find this animal extremely relatable

right yeah yeah no it's it's great and so it's also you know continuing the st louis sue description the newt is a strong swimmer and a greedy predator like that description greedy predator predator. It will consume any moving prey it finds, including aquatic insects and other invertebrates, small fish, and other amphibians. So it'll just eat everything. But when someone tries to eat it, watch out. In 2009, researchers figured out something that had been observed a lot earlier. So in 1879, there was a zoologist, a German zoologist named Franz Laitig, who actually first described this trait. And he noticed that when these salamanders were startled, spikes would suddenly appear out of the sides of its body, just like suddenly show up. And

eventually people figured out that it was this salamander's ribs. that's the most metal thing I've ever heard. Like sticking out from the skin. Yes, through the skin. Like all of a sudden, its ribs would be just sticking out. I was going to say, I was like, if it just has spikes, it's just a porcupine. Right, right. And that would be fine.

But no, these are just its ribs. Wolverine. Yes, yes. No, exactly. It gets better. It gets even closer to that. In 2009, researchers figured out how it does this. so it actually swings its ribs forward

and so they're kind of at an angle to the spine and then they suddenly swing forward by about 50 degrees and so instead of being at this nice little backward angle towards the spine it's suddenly sticking out of the sides and it's with such force that it's actually able to shove the points of the ribs out through the skin which seems terrifying isn't that bad though because it's just like holy

It's inside out. But then don't you, like, destroy all your skin? Right. And see, like, I don't want to... No one wants to do that. Yeah, yeah. And we'll get to that in just a second. But becoming prickly isn't enough for these little guys.

When threatened, they also start secreting all over its body. They start secreting this poisonous, like, slime substance. And it coats their body and their new spines. And it turns them from... a potential tasty treat into a bristly poisonous trick. It's very wicked. And so if someone tries to take a bite of it, it will, instead of getting a nice little bite of newt meat, it will get injected with poison from one of these spines, which I think

is delightful and wonderful. That's a word for it. It's not delightful. It's like homemade pepper spray. Yeah. Don't attack me. Yeah, and these little guys, what's amazing about them is you would think, right, that it does hurt them to, you know, shoot its ribs outside of its body, but it's an amphibian. And so like other amphibians, it has the ability to regenerate.

So that means it's Wolverine. Yes, it is Wolverine. So when the thread has passed, just like Wolverine, it can pull its ribs back in, and the punctures in its side will. heal seemingly without any negative effects from the poison. It's able to, you know, this poison, it tastes really bad for other predators. It can be fatal for other creatures. But for this newt, it can just kind of ignore it and heal up and move on. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. That's crazy. How often does it do this? Because that seems like quite the effort. It does. I don't know, random like leaf blowing by or like attack.

Yeah, I don't think, I think it tends to like wait until it's like really startled. I don't have any firm numbers on it, but it's something that can happen multiple times over the course of its life. And what's kind of incredible is that these newts have actually been included on a bunch of space missions. Most of them, Soviet or Russian, which looked at this particular ability, the ability to regenerate in space. and also whether microgravity changed their reproductive habits, which was pretty interesting. And so it started going into space in 1985 on a biomedical mission, along with two racist macaques and 10 rats aboard a satellite. And actually, I think I have a picture of one of the satellites that they went up in. This was like a replica of one of the early missions, and it basically just looks like a tiny, you know, tin can that

that it managed to go up in. Do you do science have a picture of them with their ribs out? Kind of, yes. So actually, there is this picture that I will link to. It's not that alarming. It's, you know, it is kind of. Eleanor is so skeptical right now. I think I was way more grossed out by the calcified baby.

Stone-ified, whatever. She didn't bring a picture. That is true. That is true. I have actually brought visual aids. And so, yeah, you can see here, it's not that much. It's just kind of like little tiny spines that are sticking out of the side, but it's enough. And if you turn it over, you can kind of see what the ribs are like and how they go from vertical to, yeah.

It's a little bit alarming. But what's interesting about these is, and what was interesting about the space missions was when it went up in space, they found out that its ability to regenerate, it was actually accelerated. And so in microgravity, they actually huge. healed up faster than they did here on Earth, which means that probably newts will take over our space program and therefore the world. It will become part of Newt. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, and see, and that brings us to another interesting point, which is just that people are sequencing the DNA of this newt and other amphibians that are like it in order to study the regenerative properties. We want to know more about how these things can regenerate in the hopes that maybe one day we can figure out how to help humans kind of work towards that gradually. How to make Wolverine. How to make Wolverine.

Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. Okay. Well, I think we are going to take a quick break and contemplate the implications. And then we'll be right back. Hey, pals. Looking for super cool popular science merch, we've got you covered at popsai.threadless.com.

Pick up T-shirts, notebooks, and mugs with iconic, vintage covers and illustrations ripped from the magazine. Plus, check out our podcast store and rep your favorite shows like Last Week in Tech and the weirdest thing I learned this week. That's popsai.threadless.com. P-O-P-S-C-I.thudless.com. And we're back. Eleanor, tell us about death by autopsy.

Yeah, I have a short but spooky tale for you guys. I'm going to take y'all back, as I want to do to the late 1800s, the spookiest time in history. So spooky. Where there's a man named Washington Irving Bishop, better known to the adoring masses, as the mentalist,

which may be familiar to you as a TV show that was nowhere near as cool as this guy's crazy life. So basically he was raised in a very occult-loving family. His mom had the spooky jeans. She was a practicing medium and kind of

taught that to him, and he worked. for other sort of mediums or mentalists. He was like a little bit beyond, you know, your regular magician. He wasn't just doing, you know, parlor tricks. Illusion. Exactly. He was beyond all that. And so he would do these very elaborate body rocking performances

that just got like the people of the late 19th century, like totally turnt. Everyone was so bored. They were so bored. And so this guy, you know, when he came along to perform, and read minds and do all of these crazy things. They were really into it. But he had this medical condition that people call alternately cataleptic fits. That was sort of one word for it.

You might also call it catalepsy. Those were the sort of terms of the time. And so there would just be these moments, sometimes on stage, where he would just become totally unresponsive, not like passed out exactly, but just suddenly, like physically, immobile for no known reason and unresponsive to any stimuli. So, you know, like he might just sort of like fall over, maybe his eyes stay open and then if you shake him, like nothing happens. And then eventually he would kind of come back. And that was like a part of the appeal of his performances,

because it was just like you would never know when this guy would just pass out on stage. But this presented a real problem for him because he had to carry around a little note in his pocket that was like under no circumstances, perform an autopsy on me. I have. and probably not dead. Just give it some time. It's like the first medical alert bracelet. Exactly. Not dead.

No matter what you think. Unfortunately, on the night of May 12, 1889, that a medical alert bracelet, if you will, was not heated. So he went into a cataleptic fit at the Lambs Club in New York, which is on West 36th Street, not far from here. Oh, wow. And so he was performing and he sort of just like becomes unresponsive, but then bounces back, continues his performance.

And that happens again, and this time, no matter what they do, or like how long they wait, he doesn't come back. That was not specified on the medical way. No, he did not give clear instructions for situations like this. Just kidding. Don't autopsy me is a pretty clear instruction. Ever, not once. Yeah, like that's actually like a great, great instruction.

So he didn't wake up, and early the next morning, doctors pronounced him dead. And by the time his, like, wife showed up, he had been autopsied. The autopsy I have to say is just really super weird. Like, I don't think that this is standard procedure. So they cut open his head, removed his brain, and then apparently it was found later sewn into the lining of his abdomen, like parts of his brain. What? So all of us taken together leads his mother, Eleanor Bishop.

Shout out. She decides that her son was murdered and spends, like, the rest of her life just, like, agitating for, I don't know, like the rights of people to not be autops. I'm not sure, but she's like really up in arms about it as a result of his mother's dogged activism on his behalf. He has this really great grave at Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, which I'm, you know, sure we have all been to. And so, you know, you can see it today and it's sort of been washed away with time, but it says the martyr in big all capital letters at the top. A mother's life dedicated and an appeal for justice to all brother Mason's and the generous

public, a synopsis of the butchery of the late Sir Washington Irving Bishop, a most worthy mason of the 32nd degree, the mind reader and philanthropist. This is the book that she wrote calling herself his brokenhearted mother and part of this dramatic text on his gravestone for all eternity. I've known about this story for a long time. I've seen his grave, but I was sort of curious if we understand anything about his condition. This all sounds sort of like too spooky to be real. Today in the international classification for disease 10, which I like to spend a lot of my time in Same. There are, yeah, there are two phenomena that this is related to.

So one is called catatonic schizophrenia. And so this is sort of classifying it as a hallucinatory psychological phenomenon where you just like fall into a stupor and you feel physically constrained for long periods of time. It's kind of dreamlike when you're in it and that it has a lot to do with something, maybe a little bit off with your psychological state or something like organic in the brain going on. It could also be though a dissociative stupor, which is another phenomenon that they definitely think is organic, where something is going on that maybe we haven't really identified, where like stressful events or like intense stimuli can push you into this state. But not a lot of other people have been autopsied in this state as far as I know. That makes him, according to his fans, the only person ever to die by autopsy.

Wow. Saying that's scary. And this is all going on, obviously, of the background. of everyone in America thinking that they're going to be buried alive and, like, putting bells. That was a big concern. Yeah. So I'm sure this story really wigged out a lot of people. Totally.

50 years earlier, Edgar Allan Poe had written a short story about a man with catalepsy who was buried alive. And that just like sort of inflamed all of these tensions. And then that was actually sort of what was going on with Washington Irving Bishop. So stranger than fiction. How long was he out for? It happens during the show late at night and then by the next morning. so we don't really have a lot of information of how much time he elapsed. It definitely seems like it was longer than a lot of his other fits.

Yeah, so I wonder if he really was dead. Yeah, the death report, according to the New York Times, after the second autopsy reveals that his brain has been sewn into his body or whatever. Well, at that point, yeah. He's super dead and they attributed it to the catalepsy. But his mother has always said that it was murder. Yeah. Also, like, why was this brain sewn into his stomach?

I don't know. I really do. I really do not know. there is obviously a lot of like myth making that has happened in the aftermath of this that I think sort of colors the perception we have of it. But the facts of the matter are definitely disturbing on their own. And, you know, if you're a forensic anthropologist or something, like maybe this is a good place to start this very fine Halloween. Ooh, wonderful. I bet you the autopsy person just got super lazy.

And they were like, you've got to put this back in somewhere. They were like, oh, I put it back. It's where I got it from. That's no fair. I'm going to do what I want. All right, we're going to take one more quick break, and then we will be back with our last fact. You love the weirdest thing I learned this week podcast,

and now you can love it as a Facebook group. Share your strangest facts and read all about the offbeat and outlandish findings of other science lovers. We'll also be publishing some of the bonus info and ramblings that didn't make it into the final cut of the podcast. Just search for the weirdest thing on Facebook. Okay, we're back. Claire, tell us about those head explosions. Oh, yes, please. First, I have always been fascinated by this phenomenon of unidentified sounds.

So these are sounds that people hear, but that scientists have no idea where they come from. And some of my faves are, Noah has this whole list online of all these unidentified sounds from the ocean, that they have all these theories of where they came from, but they've heard them on, like, recording. or whatever, but they don't know where the origin is. And then my favorite of all time is this one called the Taos Hum, in which a percentage of residents in the town of Taos, New Mexico, which is a beautiful place, I will say, hear this faint hum just constantly all the time,

but no one can figure out where it came from. And Taos is kind of like a well-to-do community, and so there's been a ton of attention into this, and lots of studies that went into it, and they found just a certain percentage, I think it's like 20% of the residents there hear it, and it drives them bonkers, but no one can understand where it's coming from.

So there's all these camps that say, oh, it's psychological in their heads that the more they think about it, the more they hear it or whatever. And so that just fascinated me, and I've been to Talas, and I was like, I don't hear the hum, but I really want to hear the hum. So for our Halloween episode, I was like, I'm going to go down a Wikipedia spiral of unidentified sounds.

And my favorite of which I came across this condition called Exploding Head Syndrome. There's not that much about it, but I came across this one case study from 1987 that just mentioned 10 people that seemed to have this. And all these physicians were like, we don't really understand what this is, but people are complaining of this experience. explosion in our head, so to speak. At the time, all these newspapers and magazines loved this case study, as we all do. And everyone was so surprised by it. But the biggest surprise came to the scientists who had all these patients call in and say, I've also experienced exploding head syndrome.

And they named all the very, very specific symptoms that these other 10 people had in their previous ones. So they came out with this new case report in 1989. That was 50 people with this exploding head syndrome. And I'll just mention a couple of the quotes from the case studies. So the symptoms are a sense of explosion in the head confined to the hours of sleep, which is harmless but very frightening for the sufferer. And there was a 74-year-old stable and sensible woman who says she was wakened by a sudden bang in the head. as if my head was bursting with a flash of light over both fields of vision,

after which I would be dazed for a split second, and would come round, terrified, my heart thumping. There was no pain, just a frightening sense of explosion. Wow. Just a sense of explosion. I don't like this. This was so much so that the doctors at the time thought that she was at risk for a stroke at any minutes.

I actually had her monitored every couple of months to see if she was. going to have a stroke. And now seven years later, when this case study came out, she's still, she was still perfectly healthy. And so researchers just couldn't figure out where this, what was happening and how common this condition was. And so as I was researching this, I was like, oh my God, I have totally experienced. No way. I really think I have because, yes, I remember once or twice, like falling asleep, it was almost felt like a viability. It was, it was almost felt like a vibration sort of. And then I like woke up from it. And I was like, that was weird.

And then I went back to bed. I don't know. Like this is my anecdotal like hypochondria, Claire. But the symptoms seem to match up with what researchers sort of know about the condition. And it's that as we are, this always happens. So everyone who has reported this has said that it happens as they are falling of sleep. And it sort of wakes them up out of sleep. But because the condition is so benign, no one has had any, like, strokes or any medical ailments afterwards. No one really cares sort of to study this. And so they really don't completely understand what's going on, but they think it's something to do with as we're falling asleep, what happens, like, as our brain is sort of, like,

shutting down or getting into first stage of sleep, essentially. So since that 1989 report came out, even more people have sort of come forth and mentioned their symptoms and things like that. And so doctors think it's actually way more common than we think it is. It's just that because it doesn't cause any pain, most people kind of like me just shrug it off or they just are like, this is not a reason I need to go to the doctor. Like it happened in the middle of night. I must have just been hearing things or whatever. So in 2008, there was a study in Germany that tried to like sort of census. How common is exploding head syndrome?

And they found that it occurs in almost 14% of psychiatric patients surveyed 10% of people with a sleeping disorder. And those two are just because they're seen by doctors a lot, so they're able to study those populations. But then they estimated that about 11% of healthy people who answered questionnaires about exploding head syndrome. seemed to have experienced it at least one time in their lives. I'm surprised. None of you are like, oh, my God, I've definitely experienced that. I definitely have, like, every few months, that sensation of just, like, horrific falling. Oh, yeah, that happens to me all the time.

That's the one that I get really bad. And then I'm just, like, never sleeping again, thanks. Right. When I was a kid, I would have hypnagogic hallucinations, so, like, auditory hallucinations just while you're falling asleep. I think you should reach out to these biases. But I never heard an explosion. What did you hear? The auditory hallucinations I remember were like,

it would sound like there was like an animal screaming outside, but then I would realize that there had not been anything. Stuff like that. Or like thinking, hearing like indistinct loud noises. Nothing I would describe as feeling like there was an explosion in my head. But when you felt the explosion in your head, you said it was like a vibration almost. felt like a vibration, yeah.

Like it was deeper than a sound. Or it just like it was like a shock to the system sort of. Like it shocked me and woke me up. And yeah, that's kind of all I remember. And then I went back to sleep. So it caused no pain. That's why I really think it was. You were just like, chiller about it than these people were like, my head is going to explode.

You were like strange. Good night. Back to bed. But yeah. So they think they have a better understanding now. have, like, it's, they think that it's similar to muscle spasms as we're falling asleep, which, Maribeth, I know you've told me you're like, should I be worried about the fact that, like, yeah.

Very worried. The fact that I suddenly feels like, you know, someone's walking over my grave every once in a while. And, yeah. Or, but it's not as you're falling asleep. So a lot of times, like, people's muscles will, like, spasm as they're falling asleep. Yeah. That is from, there's, like, an area in our brain stems. that sort of regulates all of this stuff.

And it's sort of like an on-off switch as we're falling asleep. And in some people, I guess me, and a lot of other people, it's like kind of disrupted. And so like it can't tell right away that you're falling asleep. And so it switches back on. And so it flashes these like neuron firings. And so that either happens in like a motor neuron so your muscles will spasm or you will hear an explosion in your head. Whoa.

It's amazing. Boom. Okay, so what was the weirdest, spoofiest thing we learned this week? Self-mulified baby. The death by autopsy freak me out. I also love a good Victorian-era spook. I really liked, well, slash, I'm terrified by, actually, the falling asleep in hearing. your head explode or whatever.

And also the coolest one, for sure, was the little Wolverine Newt. Oh, definitely. So I think we all win. Halloween. Happy Halloween. This is our holiday. Yeah. We all won on our holiday.

Amazing. So just a reminder that we are going to be taking a short season break. We will be back early in the new year. And we will be back soon to check in with news about an upcoming live show. So definitely stay subscribed. and keep your eyes on your podcast feed. And we'll still be on social media. You can join our Weirdest Things Facebook group

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