Can Your Eyes Pop Out Of Your Head When You Sneeze?

You’ve heard that if you can keep your eyes open during a sneeze, you’ll be rewarded with the sensation of both eyeballs popping out of their sockets. Is that true?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain stuff from how stuff works. Hey, they're
brain stuff. It's Christian Seger. If you're a person who
has a nose and eyeballs, you've probably noticed that when
you sneeze, your eyelids naturally snap shut. It's the reason
that sneezing while driving is a terrifying roulette game of death.
But I've got a question for you. When you were

(00:23):
a kid, did you hear the story that if you
managed to resist this reflex and hold your eyes open
during a sneeze, that they would pop out of your head?
I did. In fact, my ninth grade science teacher, Mrs
Abraham told me this is it true? Though? Well short answer,
almost definitely not. But unfortunately we can't be as perfectly

(00:44):
certain as we would all like to be about this
particular topic. So here are the facts. Fact one, your
eyes can pop out of their sockets. It's not very common,
but it can happen. Doctors call anterior bulging of the
eye beyond its normal orbit a case of exophthalamus. If
the eyeball gets dislocated from its socket enough that its

(01:06):
equator is literally outside your retracted eyelids, this is known
as globe luxation. Fact number two. If you want to
sleep soundly tonight and really every other night for the
rest of your life, you should not search the web
for images of globe luxation. Fact number three. Globe luxation

(01:26):
is rare, but it can be caused by a number
of conditions. Of course, gouging at an eyeball with a
finger or another instrument that will do it. Some various
types of traumatic head injury can cause the eyeballs to
pop out of their sockets. Many cases of spontaneous globe
luxation in the medical literature have happened while the eye

(01:48):
was being messed with in some ways, such as during
the application of a contact lens or eye drops, or
when a doctor was manipulating the eyelids during an exam.
Violent vomiting has also been cited as a cause of
eyeball dislocation. And I might add that whoever this refers
to has my sympathies, because that sounds like the worst
day ever. Now, if we are to believe our historical sources,

(02:11):
there may have been a few cases where a sneeze
knocked somebody's eyeball out. For example, in April of eighteen
eighty two, a US newspaper reported that a woman on
a street car in Indianapolis burst one of her eyeballs
in the middle of a sneezing fit. Whether this means
she suffered globe luxation, or that her eyeball just up

(02:32):
and exploded, or that journalists in the eighteen eighties sometimes
reported rather dubious stories, look, it's hard to say, but
if we look at the more recent sources. A two
thousand two ophthalmology study reviewed the twenty six cases of
spontaneous globe luxation then known to the medical world. While
most of the cases they found were triggered by manipulation

(02:54):
of the eyelids, the authors did also claim that a
small number were odd on by other triggers, including things
like crying, coughing, nose blowing, bending over, and yes, sneezing.
So sneezing might have caused the dislocation of the eyeball
in a very very small number of known cases. But

(03:16):
does keeping your eyes open during the sneeze have anything
to do with it? As I said before, almost definitely not.
And it's certainly true that eyeball dislocation doesn't happen every
time you sneeze with your eyes open, because you can
go to YouTube right now and look up videos of
people sneezing with their eyes open. It's not easy, but
some people can do it and their eyeballs are They're fine,

(03:37):
and they seem to enjoy showing off this disgusting trick.
But the complete lack of correlation between open eyes and
eyeball poppage is a combination of the fact that sneezing
almost never, if ever, causes the eyes to pop out,
and the fact that your eyelids don't really do any
of the work of keeping your eyeballs in their sockets

(03:58):
to begin with. Instead, your eyeballs are primarily held in
place by a combination of six muscles known as the
extra ocular muscles. They control the movements of the eyes
and are much stronger than the eyelids. So whether or
not you can manage to keep your eyes open during
a sneeze probably has little to no effect on the

(04:19):
chances that your eyes will pop out, and those chances
are very very slim in the first place, though possibly
not zero. Take that, Mrs Abraham check out the brainstuff
channel on YouTube, and for more on this and thousands

(04:40):
of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.