Hook Suspension and the Complexity of Pain

Hook suspension challenges our perceptions of pain. We see practitioners, pierced through the flesh with hooks, suspended by chains and yet smiling as if lost to a state of bliss. What are they feeling? Where does this practice come from and how does it fit into the larger human experience? Join Robert and Christian as they explore this most-outsider form of masochistic performance art.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Christian Sager. Robert,
what is the worst pain you have ever felt? Oh,

(00:23):
this is a good question. Um, well, this is a
tough one, you know, because I'm pretty lucky in that
I haven't had any major injuries thus far, any major,
major lye painful life experiences. Um. I guess the the
one moment that comes to mind the most just when
I had an ingrown toenail. Okay, this is years and

(00:44):
years ago, and I tried to address it myself with
some sort of which I do not advise anyone to do,
with some sort of bathroom surgery and imagining you with
like a bowie knife in the bathroom, basically like tweezers
and whatnot. And I should not have been doing this,
but there was a moment there where I almost blacked out.

(01:06):
Oh wow, And you know, this is just a tonnail.
But I guess everything is just so um you know
tight in their yeah, the the nerve endings at all,
but that that stands out as a moment of rather
intense pain. But it was just such a fleeting moment too.
There was no it was immediately back out of it.
It's like, you know, flying and then dipping down into
a canyon and then saying, oh, that's a little bit

(01:27):
too much and then coming back out. See the fact
that it's your toneail is interesting to me because today's
topic is connected to something I think about a lot
when I watched action movies, which is like, inevitably somebody's
getting tortured, and in the back of my head, I'm
kind of like, how would I do in these scenarios?
And I think I could probably deal with a fingernail
getting ripped out, But I don't know. When you say that,

(01:50):
it makes me think like they're so tied in to
your nervous system that that's just something I don't have
any qualification of understanding for. You know, well, it's those
all pains we can certainly understand a little a little better.
You know, when we're watching a movie, if we have
a character that gets their arm blown off, most of
us have no frame of reference for that sort of thing.

(02:12):
But if the character breaks a finger, or their fingernail rips,
or there's a there's a moment in raising Arizona where
it is a fight between John Goodman's character Nicholas Cage's
character and one goes to do a double axe handle
on the other and they scraped their knuckles across the
ceiling of the the popcorn ceiling of the trailer, and like,

(02:32):
that's a moment where we can feel it because yeah,
because we can relate, we can maybe have not helped
that exact sensation, but we we have a better idea
of what that consists. Off. Yeah, I'm like you in
that I am lucky knock on wood that I have
not had any you know, I've never broken any bones
to my knowledge. I've had major surgery once and I

(02:55):
was pretty well under with anesthetic. But the worst I
can think of, like when when somebody first asks me this,
I always think of um sometimes. So I have two
different types of contact solution. One is just like your
daily cleaning solution is one. One is the overnight storage
and it's got some kind of acidic thing in it

(03:16):
that you're not supposed to put directly in your eye,
and I maybe once a year make the mistake of
accidentally putting it in my eye and it burns so bad,
it really hurts but every time I do it, I
start thinking like God, this is this is super painful,
but it starts leaning into a point of not pleasure,

(03:38):
but just sort of meditative transcendence of like everything just
evens out and the pain is still there, but I
but I'm just kind of it's flatline isn't the right word,
but you know what I mean, Like it's just everything else,
all other senses sort of level out all of a
sudden and there's no longer like any kind of overstimulation

(04:00):
and it's just the pain. And there's something kind of
nice about that. Well, this reminds me a lot of
doing yoga and what I sometimes think about like young
really and literally fit people who are doing yoga. I
kind of want to say, look, if you if you
don't have injuries, if you don't have soreness, then you
can't get how much can you possibly be getting out
of this? Because for me, like sometimes it's working with

(04:23):
a part of your body that's sore where you get
into these um these sensations that are difficult to categorize.
Like a few years back, I had to some risk
injury minor risk injury, but it made it difficult to
put a lot of direct pressure down, but there were
some poses where I'm like where I'm bending my risk
in the other way and putting like subtle pressure there,
and the resulting sensation was it was difficult to categorize

(04:47):
because it certainly it wasn't really pleasurable, but it wasn't
pain either. It was it was a very soothing, you know,
sense of relief that I felt, and I and it
and it was in somewhere in that gray area betwixt
the I knew this woman once who was she was
in my yoga class, but she was also some day
I knew outside of yoga who was nine months pregnant,

(05:08):
and she was like really good at yoga, and she
got into scorpion pose like a week before she gave
birth to her daughter, and I was just like a
completely stunned, like like not only like what must that
feel like, because you know, you're you're carrying this extra weight,
it's a completely different body dimension, but also just like

(05:29):
the discipline that she must have in her yoga practice
to be able to pull that off. Oh man, Yeah,
scorpion is a tough one. Super I can't do scorpion,
And yeah, I've never been par oh and by the way,
I don't mightn't mean to imply that young fit people
can't get something out of yoga. Everybody can get something
out of yoga. But I'm just saying if you have
if you have an injury or a soreness, depending on

(05:51):
the degree of the injury, UH, yoga can open up
sort of new pathwayte of understanding what do Yeah, well,
here's a if you're young and fit and you're not
getting anything out of yoga, maybe you should consider body suspension.
Y Yeah, move on up to the next level. That's
what our topic is today. This is why we're talking

(06:12):
about pain and pleasure at the top is that we've
actually had I think multiple listeners right into us because
we've just sort of brought it up casually in the past,
the idea of body suspension, and we've had people send
us photos and write to us about their experiences with it,
and we decided, you know what, let's take a deep
look at like how this works. There's there is a

(06:34):
lot of science behind it, a lot of math. Yeah,
there's certainly physics and UH and in medicine that are
involved in approaching it. And then in terms of understanding
what's happening with pain and interpreting the sensations that are
going on. There's of course a lot of research into
just the human experience totally. Yeah. Now, a number of
you may remember from our Listener mail episode we heard

(06:54):
from a listener by the name of Ainsley and she
wrote in and she shared her own experience with the
with hook suspension, and she says, quote, I fell in love.
I was allowed to feel and bleed and openly respect
the process of each It was a whole new world
for me. Suspension became my life. And when I read
those words, it made me think back to a book
that I read a while back titled The Body and

(07:16):
Pain by E. Laine Scary, and it's a This is
a one of these deep, deep considerations of the idea
of pain, not only in terms of just physical experience,
but what it means philosophically and politically socially. Um. It
is a it is a deep read, but but one

(07:36):
of the things that she talks about in it, so
I pret pretty much. Her main statement in the book
is that an individual's physical pain has no voice, but
when it finds a voice, it begins to tell a story,
a story of of of the vast distances between your
experience of pain and my own. Uh. She even describes
this distance as being interstellar, like, that's the that's the

(07:58):
space between my understanding of pain and another person's experience
of pain. This is a really good example of how
lonely humanity can be in a way, and that like
there's no way for us to possibly understand what another
person's level of pain is. Yeah, the either the limits
or at least the challenges of of human empathy, right. Uh.

(08:22):
And then on top of that, we have the complications
that are inherent in that distance, our an ability to
to understand each other's pains, and in the very nature
of human creation. So she ties all of that up.
And of course authors and artists often cite pain is
a necessary part of creation, some more than others. But
you know, it makes it makes you think, you know,
if we're if we're pretty much okay with that idea

(08:44):
that that that out of pain, out of personal suffering,
we can create these these great things. And how how
weird is it really for someone to engage in some
careful manipulation of pain sensation. Yeah, I've I've got to say,
like this is something like I'm constantly coming to terms
within the real life. Is that like things that I

(09:06):
think of as being like not normal but not being abnormal,
like body suspension. I'm constantly surprised when other people around
me are like, whoa, that's so weird, or what is
wrong with you? Or that kind of thing. Not that
I've done body suspension, and I'm not particularly into body
modification in any way, but I understand it, like I
I can identify with what people seem to be getting

(09:30):
out of this experience. It's I think, in a similar way,
I'm glad you brought up yoga, like it's similar to
what I've gotten out of yoga before. But it's also like, um,
you and I have talked about sensory deprivation tanks on
the show before. I can imagine that they're similar experiences.
It's just that the pain part isn't there. Yeah, and
and it's certainly not for everyone, to say the least,

(09:51):
there's very much in an outsider enterprise. But but of
course here's the thing. It's it's still something that emerges
from the human experience and merges in and at least
a few different human cultures. So it's worth exploring. Like
we can't just it's it's easy to look at it,
and especially if you look at say a media representation
of it, be it you know, dateline denied or whatever,

(10:14):
or or the cell. The cell is the go to
I mean the minute, Uh, anybody brings this up, I
always think of Vincent din Afrio in The Cell. And
it's really, especially after doing the research, I think it's
like a kind of horrible negative depiction of this process.
And probably I would imagine people in this suspension community
probably don't feel great about how they're portrayed in that movie. Yeah,

(10:37):
because he's a he's a serial killer character in it,
and he's you know, he's using it to sort of
hurt himself while hurting others, and he only does it
to himself by himself. Yeah, Whereas in as we're going
to discuss, actual hook suspensions tend to be more of
a like a seemingly communal experience where they're the people
facilitating the suspension and those observing it. And you see

(10:58):
that not only in sort of the the modern primitive
industrial uh you know, subculture of hook suspension, but even
some of the traditional users of hook suspension that will
discuss as well from from Native American and uh In
Indian traditions. Yeah. Absolutely, I mean this goes back a
long ways, like five thousand years. But still it's difficult

(11:20):
for I think most people to get past the idea
that this is somebody that is intentionally suffering, intentionally doing
harm to their body and it and we just we
we tend to just say, oh well then just must
be a complete whackadoodle and you just put up this wall.
I'm not getting like, I'm just like walls up, shields up.
I'm not going to attempt to interact with that or

(11:41):
empathize with that in any other form. Well, you know,
like I guess because of like the people that I've
spent time with that things like other body modification practices
like tattooing, piercing, even scarification or or gauging like seem
like totally normal things that like people in my everyday

(12:01):
life have gone through. So it's like, what is the
line that is drawn where you go like, well, tattooing
is totally normal and that's okay, but putting hooks through
yourself and suspending is not. You know, I don't know,
like I see that there's different levels again, like there's
variations and pain thresholds too. But like, I get it.

(12:24):
You know, I'm not in any rush to go hook
myself up and do it. Um. But I but I
feel like I understand. Why don't we actually give the
audience like a very basic definition of what we mean
when we say body suspension. So this is a form
of body modification that involves hanging the human body by
hooks that are attached to ropes. So I think a

(12:46):
lot of us have various ideas of what it means
that we're going to go through it into deeper detail. Um.
The other form of body modification that I that I
am unfamiliar with that we've talked about here at How
Stuff Works before. I don't think we've done a show
on it is subdermal implantation. Uh. And that's something I'm
also really interested in. We have a pretty good article

(13:06):
with some excellent infographics on subdermal implantation on the site. Yeah,
I may have done something. I think I've touched on
it a little bit on the blogs before. Some forms
of subdermal implants um, notably I think the bagel head things,
which ultimately was not a very big thing at all. Right, Yeah,
what if it's sailing and the forehead and then sort

(13:26):
of make an intention that was kind of like a bagel,
but it was this was hard. It was hardly a trend.
But it's kind of an interesting study in what happens
when a few people do something that is kind of
weird or rather weird, and then it gets blown out
of proportion by the media. Right, It's not like the
people who give themselves like horns. Yeah, but it's also

(13:46):
worth noting again that you know, what's normal within one
community is not normal in another, and even major supporters
of suspension, such as suspension artist Alan Faulkner, he points out, quote,
hanging from hooks is hardly seen as a normal activity.
That's from an artical eroded safe piercing dot org. So

(14:08):
you know, it's it's like any like really niche thing
one maybe into you know, you admit that it's not
the mainstream thing, and you really you don't want it
to be the mainstream thing. I haven't seen anybody that
engages in in hook suspension that's saying, hey, we really
need to get this everybody. You know, we shouldn't be
doing this in public schools. Yeah, nobody's making that argument.

(14:28):
Everyone is seems to be rather cool with the fact
that this is a very specialist interest. But at one time,
for some cultures, it was I don't know, I don't
want to say normal, but it was a part of
their ritualistic behavior. So let's take a look at the
history of it for a minute. And we're going to
start in North America. Actually, uh, I don't think we

(14:49):
have records of how far back this practice goes in
North America. But this is the O keepaw hooks suspension ceremony, right,
and it's it's a much larger ceremony than just the
hook suspension. Yeah. And and before we get into that,
I do want to also point out that pain, of course,
is a very normal, everyday aspect of human lives. And

(15:10):
so you see uh, rituals of pain and just about
every culture, and then that includes Christian culture, Islamic culture,
Hindu culture, pretty much anywhere you go, there's gonna be
some sort of right of passage, some sort of of
of self inflicting um ritual that pops up as at

(15:31):
some point or another. Yeah, maybe we should do an
episode on self flagellation at something. Yeah, that's it's a
fascinating topic onto itself. But here in in North America, Yeah,
we had the the Okipa hook suspension ceremony, and this
was practiced by the North what's now North Dakotan uh
Mandan tribe. So it was a ride of passage and
the ceremony saw hook suspended warriors twist and swing until

(15:55):
the inner ed a transcendent state. And for you, film
buffs out there. Uh. The nineteen seventy film starring Richard Harris,
A man called Horse, depicted the right in a rather
memorable scene. I remember seeing the scene, or at least
a trailer for it on like KBS or something back
in the day, and it really confused me. I had

(16:15):
no idea what was going on. I thought, Oh, they're
torturing that guy. That's horrible what they're doing to him.
But I had no idea. I've never seen this movie,
but I am picturing older Richard Harris. I'm picturing like
Dumbledore Richard Harris instead of you know, I imagine in
the seventies he was probably what like a man in
his forties or something like that. He was I'm not
sure what his age was, but he was definitely like

(16:35):
leathery but still handsome Richard Harris. Yeah, well, this particular ceremony,
as I said, it's a four day ceremony, and suspension
is just one part of it. They also have a
long vigil, there's dancing, and then trials of endurance, of
which the suspension is part of it. So what they
would do is they suspend young warriors from the roof

(16:56):
of the tribe's lodge by ropes that were attached to
skewers in their chest, back or shoulders. And sometimes they
would add weights as well that were attached to their
legs to increase the pain. Now here's the thing in
this culture, if you cried out in pain, you were
considered cowardly. So the ceremony itself didn't end until they
were lowered, and then they had their left pinky finger

(17:18):
removed with a hatchet, and then there was a run
around the village with the skewers and weights all still
in place. Uh. This was first documented by white men
in eighteen thirty five by a guy named George Catlin,
and he was a painter apparently, I think he was
just like visiting this community. He witnessed it and then
brought it back. The last ceremony of this nature. Well,

(17:41):
the public I think that took place was in eighteen
eighty nine. And and in public again is as an
or at least semi public. Is the is an important
thing to drive home because again these are communal experiences. Right,
It's not just somebody hanging alone in a tent. Uh.
They're being suspended as part of this right. And as
we'll find out later, the modern suspension practice has its

(18:02):
roots in the Okipa ceremony. Now, if we travel all
the way around the world, we get to Hinduism and
at least two additional suspension rights. Uh, probably more, I think,
as we'll discussed. But just to drive the nail into
a couple of them. Here, there's no Yeah, there's a
there's Shahrak Puja. This is a Hindu folk festival in

(18:25):
southern Bangladesh. And here the faithful believe that the festival
will satisfy Lord Shiva and generate prosperity through the elimination
of the previous year's sorrows and sufferings. You know. So
there's a catharsis here. So sometimes a human Shahrak as
they're called, takes part in the festivities, tied with a
hook on his back and then moved around a bar

(18:45):
with a long rope. And then we have Sri Lanka's
vel Hinduism festival named for the divine javelin val of
the war god Morrigan, also known as uh Kardi Kaya,
and this entails public suspension as well as with so
many religious rites of pain, including those in Christianity and flatullation, etcetera. Uh,

(19:08):
these traditions seem rooted in religious penance and the expression
of devotion. Yeah. So, as I said earlier, this practice
has been going on for five thousand years. So if
you look at body suspension today and you go oh weird,
you know, you think about the larger human experience. This
has been going on for a long time, large far
longer than many of us can imagine. Back to UH,

(19:29):
there's also the Hindu festival of Tai Posam that still
happens in Southeast Asia. And one of our listeners actually
wrote into us about this a year and a half ago,
maybe for a Listener Male episode. We talked about it
and he sent us pictures of it. Um he was living.
I think he was an expatriate in Singapore, as many
of our listeners know. I went to high school in Singapore,

(19:51):
and UH was totally unaware of this ceremony, so when
he sent us the pictures, it was really interesting. And UH,
one of our colleagues, Ramsey and coincidentally went to the
same high school in Singapore, and I was talking to
him about this, and he went several times with his
family to the Tai Pusan festival, so he was able
to tell me a little bit more about this. I

(20:12):
guess the basic idea here is similar to some of
the ones that you just mentioned. Uh. It's a practice
called vel cavati where worshippers undergo what's sort of referred
to as a debt bondage to Murragon, that same war
god and val is the again the divine javelin that's
used as a weapon against against the against evil. Yeah,

(20:32):
so these skewers are representative of the spear or javelin
that Povarty gave Murragon to kill the demon Sura pad
Um Uh. And so what happens is actually during this festival,
the worshippers are sometimes suspended in the air with the
levels of pains correlating to their actual devotion, you know, Um,

(20:53):
and it's not My understanding is it's not like what
we think of his body suspension and that it's vertical.
I think they're that. I think from the pictures we
were shown, starts off on the ground and they're lifted
up by people horizontal to them. Yeah, I believe that
sounds right. Yeah, those of you out there who have
maybe partaken in this and seen it, let us know

(21:13):
in looking at any of these religious or semi religious
modes of of hook suspension. It's it. It reminds me
again of Scary's writings which she talks about pain becoming
a sort of proof, an argument that the quote act
of wounding is explicitly presented as a sign the human
body is in each the site for the analogical verification

(21:37):
of the existence and authority of God. And of course,
a modern suspension is often a secular affair, rooted in
traditions of personal exploration and performance art. But you still
see some aspects of this, this idea that that the
pain is there as a as a proof of something.
You know, why don't we take a quick break and

(21:57):
when we get back, we're going to get into the
modern suspension practices and how it's done. Thank, okay, we're back,
So One of the big sources that we use for

(22:19):
this episode was a fantastic article written for The Atlantic
called the Therapeutic Experience of being Suspended by your Skin.
And this is by a guy named Wyatt Marshall. Yeah,
this is a great article. Will include a link to
it on the landing page for this episode. It's stuff
to blow your mind dot com. Um. He goes through
a lot of what we're gonna be talking about here,
and he points out that the modern suspension movement traces

(22:42):
back to the nineteen sixties when a man by the
name of Fakir Mussafar who's born Roland Loomis, reintroduced and
adapted various forms of suspension and coined the term modern primitives,
and in his wake suspension enthusis is such as Mussafar,
protege Alan Faulkner, who already quoted, and performance artist Steelark,

(23:06):
who've talked about on the show before. They've continued and
others have continued to advance the culture and the public
understanding of this these of these sort of rights. Yeah,
so this isn't necessarily religious today, but people do see
it as a spiritual experience or as a way to
test themselves. Now. Fakir Mussafar was born on an Indian

(23:27):
reservation in South Dakota, and then he developed forms of
modern suspension based on kapa. He performed one of these
in nineteen sixty three. So so for instance, you know,
we read earlier that the last time this was was
performed was in the like late nineteenth century. I don't
think he did the full four day ceremony. I think

(23:48):
he just died the suspension part and he saw it
as being about self expression or spiritual exploration. And you know,
as you mentioned that, Alan Faulkner goes on and sort
of brings it out to the world at law Arge.
So Faulkner actually I read up on him. He's a
laser technician from Dallas, uh and he has a tattoo

(24:08):
removal shop. And so he met Musa far when he
dropped out of school and moved to California and he
tried to do his first suspension with a fishing line
and it ripped. So I think, like you know, they
eventually take on the practices the knowledge of the Ukapa ceremony,
which involves math and physics in one way or another,
figuring out you know what weight will bear on a

(24:32):
particular pulley or rope things like that. Yeah, and then
of course you have where to connect them on the body.
How you're their additional concerns to come into into play
as well. Yeah, I mean, if this isn't obvious, I
think we should put a disclaimer out there, like, don't
just go do this to yourself, Like you want to
sit down with experts for a lot of reasons that
we'll talk about, but you don't want to just put

(24:52):
fishing line in your skin and hang yourself up from something. Uh.
I'm also a little confused about Musafar's origins story. I
could not, for the life of me, find more about him.
It sounds like he was not Native American, but he
was born on this reservation and learned about the practice
and then appropriated it. So I'm kind of curious how
these local tribes feel about modern body suspension culture. Yeah. Yeah,

(25:19):
I'd love to hear more about that. He of course,
is it's still alive as of this recording. Yeah, And
there's all kinds of people that do suspension too. That's
another thing I think we should put out there to
sort of dispel the idea that this is just like
circus performers or something right like lawyers, wrestlers, doctors, acrobats
and even politicians have done this. Now, I mentioned Steve

(25:41):
Lark already, the Australian performance artists, and he's usualized suspension
at several different points and and continues to do so
in his exploration of sort of the trans humanist body
and the ide of our body beyond our body via technology. Uh.
And some pret actitioners also take hook suspension in a
more industrial or even erotic direction. And I think all

(26:06):
this is quite understandable as well. After all, pain and
pleasure are more closely linked than we typically realize in
modern hook suspension, you know, to think industrially, it's a
union not of human and God, but of human and
medical slash industrial paraphernalia. Yeah, and all of this is
connected to previous episodes that Robert and I have done
about cyborgism, and we did an episode about body modification

(26:30):
engineering as well, and steel Ark came up in there.
I actually read an article for this episode that was
all about steel Arcs just sort of general project, and
showed that he really uses the suspension thing as a
way to highlight his other experiments like for instance, when
he put the ear on his armed ear, like the
suspension was a way to get people to like sit

(26:51):
and look at that ear for a long period of
time rather than just like you know, sit around and
do a photo shoot or something like that. And of
course he's done some other interesting perform and start bits
with like a mechanical arms, mechanical and want to say,
spider legs, uh, fascinating body of work. So there are
different types of suspension positions too. That's one thing you

(27:13):
should know if you're if you're thinking about this or
you're interested in it. Hooks when they're inserted into the
upper back, this is known as suicide suspension because it
looks like you you've hanged yourself. There's also a pose
called the Superman suspension, which is what it sounds like.
It it looks like you're hanging in the air as
if you're flying Superman style. Um. Now, Dallas, Texas has
an annual body suspension convention called Suscon that was founded

(27:37):
in two thousand and one, and this is because Alan
Faulkner is from Dallas. There's apparently also one that's in Oslo.
I was also running across pictures from one in Medadine, Columbia. Okay, okay,
uh And now Faulkner himself, and as we'll get into
when we're sort of going through this, describes even a
small suspension practice requires a crew of like two to

(27:58):
six people. So en don't buy the whole, you know,
if you've seen the cell, don't buy that like one person.
I guess they could, but that's not usually how this
is done. Like there, in fact, like doing it with
a community of people seems to be part of the
transcended experience. Yeah, I mean, in a sense, it has
to be witnessed to take place. So let's get into

(28:20):
the safety a little bit. Is it safe? Now? Now
I realize safe and safety? And it might seem weird
to talk about this in light of putting hooks in
your back and hanging from from the ceiling. Uh. And
you know we're talking about something that's intrinsically endorphin releasing.
But safety is a prime concern for modern enthusiasts. After all,

(28:42):
It's it's one thing to to pierce the skin and
hanging from specially prepared to hooks quite another to suffer
tearing or a fall. Yeah. So the basic idea here
at least as it was portrayed by one of the
I guess experts in this in that Atlantic article was
that there's two aspects for planning. There's there's medical aspect
and there's a rigging aspect. Now, the medical aspect has

(29:03):
to do with the insertion of the hooks, cleaning them,
the blood that comes out, cleaning up that blood, and
then of course maintaining the skin. Rigging, Uh, they use
methods that are borrowed from construction, rock climbing and stage rigs.
For example, you need to know what a ceiling is
made of before you rig something up, and what's above

(29:24):
that ceiling because you need to know how much stress
is already being placed upon that single fracture point. And
also to easily hoist a human body, you have to
make use of the mechanical advantage that you get through
pulley systems. Right. So there's a certain amount of engineering
that's required here. Uh. And like we said earlier, math
and physics. Although the guy in that Atlantic article was like, yeah,

(29:47):
I basically do all the math in my head. That
scared me a little. Now in that article by Whyatt Marshall, Uh,
he talks to a pair of physicians, and they testify
to an important basic fact of human anatomy here, and
one that I think comes up when when any of
us look at hook suspension, especially in light of say
the hell Raiser movies, where the Silent Hill movies, uh,

(30:11):
you know, both of which I can think of moments
where an individual skin skin is cleanly ripped off and
like the blinking of an eye, and in a reality
outside of the Hell Raiser in Silent Hill universe is,
unless they're shared universe, maybe they are some Hollywood executive
just heard that it is like running to the bank. Well,

(30:33):
in reality, our hides are incredibly durable. Uh. If skin
tearing begins to occur, it's a gradual process and quote
almost never the sort of dramatic freefall that someone watching
a suspension for the first time might imagine. So it's infection,
not accidental flaying that poses the greatest health risk. And

(30:54):
that's where the importance of sterilized hooks, needles, and gods
comes into play. And of course, to your point on
rigging though, that, if course, is another huge area of
concern and and and generally so much care is put
into that that it's not going to be an issue.
But obviously if you're thirty ft fifty feet off of
the ground, off of a concrete floor, the potential for

(31:15):
injury there is great if care it's not taken in
the rigging which you did read about an example of that.
But for the most part, people don't just rip and
free fall in these things. Uh. It may look like
it's about to rip, but like Robert said, skin is
pretty strong. Think of leather, you know, and and all
the products that we use leather in and the amount

(31:36):
of tension that it can sustain. So there's an aspect
of physics to where you place the hooks and how
big the actual hooks are to this whole practice, as
much as there is with rigging. Now tearing is actually
more likely on your knees and on your chest, but
usually there's more than enough time to begin lowering a
person if tearing starts to happen, like the crew of

(31:58):
people will start seeing it before it just rips, and
they will say, hey, you know, it looks like you're
starting to rip a little bit here. Do you want
me to lower you or do you want to keep going? Uh.
Now falls are usually do actually to improper insertion of hooks.
And any high degree of motion that happens when you're
up there. So it's not necessarily about the skin as

(32:21):
much as it is about again the science the physics
of where things are placed and how you're moving. Many
of the people who offer this service to they seem
to be trained in medical emergencies and first aid care.
A lot of the people that were interviewed for that
Atlantic piece where like nurses or paramedics. Uh, and they
will consult your doctor if you have a medical condition

(32:42):
that you're concerned about before doing this. Like Robert said,
infection is a huge risk as well, but also nerve
and tendon damage tend to be things that can happen
if you have improper hook placement. So again, hook placement
is huge on this. It's not like you just take
a hook and just put it anywhere you please, you know. Yeah.
I also read that while scarring, you know, inevitable is

(33:03):
going to occur to some um some level, it's not
quite as bad as one might expect expect, you know,
but yeah, they were talking about um one of the
guys had a tattoo and there was like a little
bit of white flesh where where he had been scarred.
From doing it previously, But the writer said I wouldn't
have noticed otherwise if he hadn't pointed it out to me.
There's also something and I could not find a lot
more about this, called suspension shock syndrome. And this apparently

(33:27):
happens if you hang vertically for too long. So I
guess that's if you're in the suicide suspension pose. Um,
there's there's something related to that that I guess put
your body into shock. Okay, like blood flow? I think probably. Yeah.
Now there's a there's another article out there. There's pretty
good two Guardian article titled body suspension Why would anyone

(33:47):
hang from hooks for fun? Uh? The article is better
than the headline on that one, but it provides an
even handed discussion of the health issues involved in health
concerns and in the article Emergency Medical Technicians, Scott Dubor
points out that hook suspension is not something that you
have a lot of medical journal articles about, you know,

(34:08):
it hasn't received that much serious attention in these circles.
Uh So, so we don't have like perfect data on
on how to handle all of this. But he says
that again, experienced practitioners taken individual's health history, you know,
very seriously when considering a suspension event, I can see
why it's not right, Like, especially in the world of

(34:31):
publisher perish, if you're sending out articles to peer reviewed journals,
they might frown at something that's about body suspension. On
the other hand, this seems like it has really big
potential for just the broader human knowledge about like what
our bodies can take and what they can't, and just
general like physics of lifting things. Plus I totally read

(34:53):
that journal article. If we had been able to access
something like this for this episode, I would have been thrilled.
So if anybody out there is researching the physics or
the the health issues related to hook suspension, let us know.
We'd love to take a peek of that research. Alright.
So that leaves us with the next and final question,
what does an individual feel in a hook suspension? What's

(35:15):
going on with pain and pleasure? Yeah, I'm so back
to our previous examples, which many listeners are probably going,
you guys don't know pain. Pain. You don't know the
meaning of the word, you know, like uh, me putting
the wrong sailine in my eye and Robert taking out
an and grown tonail is probably nothing compared to this, right,
But at the same time, there's a purpose to this

(35:36):
that in you know, involves sort of again transcending becoming
something else. All Right, we're gonna take a quick break
and when we come back, we will jump right into
this area. All right, we're back, you know. I I
what you just said prior to our break made me
think of hell Razor again because you kind of did
a pinhead voice there that was my not not a

(35:58):
very good piure, But it does remind me that in
the especially in the first hell Raiser movie and definitely
in Clive Barker's original The hell Bound Heart, it's less
about pain and more that these uh, the Centobytes are
are you know since uh Cincinnats, I guess, and they
have been just exploring the limits of human sensation in

(36:21):
ways that go beyond pleasure or pain. And I always
found that that the better read it becomes more about
pain and just sort of torturous demons as monsters that
are one. But early on it's like, like the the Centobytes,
you can't really say they're evil because they're not. It's
not like they want to hurt somebody. It's just that
they're understanding of mortal sensation is so far beyond anything

(36:44):
that a human could could understand. This is a brief aside,
but I think a lot of people forget that about
the original Hell Raiser, that Pinhead and the Centobytes aren't
really like the villains per se, and that they're the
villain is like it was his name, Uncle Frank, the
guy who who's like skinless and growing up in the attic.
Like you know that that's a movie that actually has

(37:06):
some really interesting themes because of Barker, uh, specifically about pain,
pleasure and just like the human experience, which I think
is what makes it such a classic. Yeah. I mean,
the cinembytes are essentially just a very inhuman bureaucratic organization.
It gets wound up in a in a in a
family dispute. Yeah, it gets bad when they start like

(37:26):
putting CD players inside their faces and stuff like that. Yeah,
But by the third Hell Raiser it's gone an entirely
different direction. All right. But but back to the real
world of hook suspension. So it is h it is
again a consensual exercise. If we haven't been clear on that,
Let me just drive at home no matter what you
saw in the cell. Uh, it's, it's it's It's definitely

(37:48):
a choice that one makes, and it's far from an
impulsive activity. So matters of health and physics are carefully calculate,
calculated for the purely physical aspects of the event. But
then on top of that, the participant is gonna be
weighing in on the inner complexities of the experience. So
anticipation priming, uh, it all accentuates the already complex interplay

(38:09):
of nerve response in psychology, It's like anything, you're building
up your anticipation for it. You have certain expectations that
are going to be met or aren't going to be met,
and also expectations and understandings of what's going to take
place that they're going to color your experience and then
how you reflect on that experience. Yeah, and you can
see how that played into ceremonial practices, right. There was

(38:31):
build up before the ceremony. There's the act of it itself,
there's the communal aspect, and then there's sort of like
the calm down of your you're lowered in your you're
still around your community, right, like you're around like a
supportive group of people. Um, and then the actual like
hanging part, the feeling of shock that's involved in that.

(38:51):
We got all kinds of chemicals involved there, right, there's endorphins, serotonin, etcetera.
And those are obviously producing a sort of high like
we talked about. But again, I think the key to
this seems to be about being part of a group.
I don't know. I'd love to hear from people out
there who have different experiences, but it seems to me like,

(39:11):
I guess you could just like rig yourself up in
a closet or something like that. Have to be a
big closet, but uh, and you would get something out
of it, but I don't think it would be the
same as what you're getting when you're like you're working
together with people, they're thinking about your well being and
it's it's all about you sort of clearing your mind. Yeah,
And on the communal aspect here, it's also to keep

(39:34):
in mind that this applies to not only the individual
that's suspended, but those who are facilitating it in those
who are observing it. This ties in with a Neil
Durkheim's collective effervescence theory, and this is the idea that
a communal ritual generates a kind of shared electricity. Uh.

(39:55):
It makes me think of like, I mean, this is
why I like going to yoga class more than I
like doing yoga home. I do yoga at home, and
I it feels good and I'm able to kind of
like work the kinks out. But when I go to class,
it's a communal thing. I'm out, I'm in public. I'm
not a particularly like social person to begin with, so
this is a good experience to get me out and
like engaging with other people. I went to a really

(40:17):
crowded yoga class at a local um Asheram recently and uh,
and at first I was like, oh, I'm I got
a way over my head and this way too crowded.
I'm just packed in like sardines with everyone. But then
it was a a good yoga class, and then be
there was something about being there was so many people
that we it was a very communal experience. I felt

(40:39):
like I was in that movie Society where I'll just
kind of like moving together. Yeah, I've had that to
My local UM studio does classes on holidays like on
Thanksgiving and New Year's Day, and there jam packed when
they do them on those holidays. So you're like, I
think you've you've got enough room for maybe like forty
or fifty people in this room, and you're just literally

(41:00):
need a knee, like you know, full on doing like
some pretty difficult poses. Although there's not a lot of
inversions in a class like right. And of course this
kind of scenario applies to any kind of communal, secular,
or religious event that's taken place in a certain amount
of ritual to it. But as part of the human
experience just in general, you know, I mean, like I

(41:20):
would imagine that, like there is the same sort of
just general good feeling that comes out of going to
church on Sunday morning that you and I get out
of going to a yoga class or somebody else gets
out of body suspension. Yeah, and but you have this
added level of physical exertion that is involved here. And
and this can actually play into one's connection to a group.

(41:41):
Having having completed a suspension, one may feel more connected
with the group for having experienced a painful ride of passage.
This is a process that was actually explored in in
a nineteen nine United States Army psychology study, not really suspension,
but just as far as pain and how it a
relates to your experience as being part of a group.

(42:03):
Psychologist Elliott Aronsen of Stanford and Judson Mills. They used
electric shocks and found that individuals who received severe electric
shocks before entering a group value their membership more than
those who received mild shocks. It's almost kind of a
hazing scenario. But this is another like part of like

(42:25):
it reminds me of like the classic Milgram study too.
It's like that period of time what Milgram was earlier
than I believe, but you know that idea that like
you could get away was something then, you know. All right,
So let's come back to just pain itself for a
little bit. I know that we've talked about the communal
aspects here obviously, as as we've discussed. Pain itself is

(42:47):
kind of hard to tag down, you know. Um, it's
a it's a very distressing feeling that involves regions of
the brain that are also associated associated with the enjoyment
of food, drugs, and sex. So you have some shared
pathways there for sure. And uh, and then what else
is going on? Well, let's look at a few a
few tidbits here. So a two thousand six University of

(43:09):
Michigan study revealed that the brain's dopamine system is highly
active while someone experiences pain, and that this response varies
between individuals in a way that relates directly to how
the pain makes them feel. And when spiritual or secular
ritual is involved, the ritual in and of itself can
arouse the participant and trigger hormones that stimulate the reward

(43:30):
systems of the brain. And this, according to anthropologists Dmitries Zagalates,
can cause sensations such as pain or fear to transform
into pleasurable experiences through a dopamine spike uh so, an
increase in the New York peptides that we call endorphins.
Uh This binds to the brains opiate receptors, producing the

(43:52):
same soothing euphoria that is felt to a certain extent
by marathon runners during a runner's high. So this is
base sickly the same thing. Well, I'm I'm really generalizing here,
but the same effect that we get when we take
various kinds of drugs, whether they're legal or illegal. Right Like,
they're influencing the amount of certain chemicals and proteins in

(44:15):
our system that makes us feel a certain way. There's
something about this. That seems better to me than just
like popping a pill in that like, again, you're engaging
in the human activity of community. Yeah, well, and I
definitely agree that. One of the things to keep in
mind here is that someone who's engaging in hook suspension
does not have an alien biology or an alien psychology.

(44:39):
It's like they have the same their their body and
their experience is the same mix of chemicals, that the
same biomachinery. They're just interacting with it in a way
that you were not. But they're not producing feelings that
are necessarily like like that different than something you've experienced, right, Yeah, which,
god man, the more we talk about this, the more

(44:59):
the cel but comes ridiculous. I mean that movie was
silly already, but like when you think about it, that
like the premise where it's like, oh, somebody who's into
this body suspension practice, of course they would be a
serial killer, you know, like it's just it's poor writing, Hollywood.
Come on, now, remember we talked about priming earlier. What's
going on in your mind is you're preparing to to

(45:20):
go into this what people were telling you, what you're expecting. Well,
many descriptions of first time hook suspensions. They speak to
this anticipation of extreme sensation, and according to a two
thousand thirteen study from the University of Oslo, pain that
hits less severely than expected may give us a rush
of release or even something like pleasure on top of

(45:41):
the endorphins. You know, what this made me think of
is just and I think almost everybody can identify with this,
going to the doctor and getting a shot or getting
your blood drawn. Like for me, like I go and
I just go, okay, Like I anticipate that the pain
is going to come. I prepare my mind for it.
The needle is inserted, my blood is being drawn, and uh,

(46:02):
you know, after like two or three seconds, I'm don't
don't feel it anymore other than the blood draining out
of my body. You know. Uh. That's I think, like
a relatable thing that most people can think of, similar
to body suspension, just on a like micro level. Indeed. Yeah,
and you know, on top of that too, we we

(46:23):
talked about transcendence and sort of altered states with individuals
that are undergoing a hook suspension, and there's a there's
an interesting study that lines up with that as well.
A two thousand fourteen study from Northern Illinois University, and
they linked various like B D S, M, S and
M type activities to altered states of mind in keeping

(46:45):
with those achieved through yoga or meditation. So basically what
happened here was the researchers administered to cognitive test to
S and M participants following a A A switching scene,
and based on the findings, they suspect that pain altered
blood flow in the brain, particularly to the dorso lateral
prefrontal cortex, which plays into our ability to distinguish self

(47:06):
from other. Yeah, so this is where you get into
things that are like a little bit more dangerous like cutting. Yeah.
But but also it's where we can easily see some
of the science behind the idea that someone could suspend
from hooks totally have have this physical pain experience and
lose some sense of themselves, to have this this experience
of of lifting, of flying above their worries and concerns

(47:29):
and their anxieties and their baggage and and finding this
place of release. And in fact, I found a quote
from Alan Faulkner, who's talked about here, and he said, quote,
if life had a dial to adjust the volume, suspension
has a way of accessing this invisible knob and turning
it down again, like totally in line with my experience

(47:49):
of both yoga and uh uh, sensory deprivation takes like
it's just it takes for for me, like I I
have a a particularly sensitive of nervous system, right, Like
I take in a lot of sensory information, I think
more than most people. But again it's hard to tell
when I do yoga or when I'm laying in the

(48:09):
float tank or whatever. Again, that's a perfect metaphor just
turning the volume down just it calms everything down. It's nice. Yeah,
So that's yeah, that's basically what's happen going on with
hook suspension here. So obviously we again we're not saying
go try this. We are not. We're certainly saying not
trying to tell you to go try it yourself on

(48:31):
your own. But hopefully what we've done here is we've
been able to take something that is that is often
seen is just this outsider weirdo thing and putting it
framing it in a way that lines up with with
with more relatable modes of human experience. Yeah, so I
would love to hear from you the audience, if you
have experienced with this. Obviously we've heard from a couple

(48:52):
of you already, but uh, please tell us what we
got right and maybe what we got wrong about this.
Also let us know about your own experience it is
with it, or maybe you've witnessed one of these ceremonies
that we talked about. Uh, it's It's a fascinating line
of inquiry and I'm curious to see where it goes next,
especially like we were mentioning, if academics actually get involved

(49:13):
and start doing research studies on it. Indeed, and you know,
I think get involved in ways that are not just
simply becoming cinabytes that we had it was it Dr Kleinard.
I believe in the second movie he's the oh yeah, yeah,
British doctor who ends up getting turned into this crazy
cinebyte with a big worm attached to This is true. Yeah,
I thought for a minute you're going to reference the

(49:34):
monster science episode that you did on centobytes. Oh yes, yes,
we did do one on sinovites. It actually touches on
some of the some of the pain related details that
that we covered here. So this is a link to that.
This is a good segue to our website stuff to
Blow your Mind dot com, where all of our videos
are at, along with all of our podcasts. So if
you've never seen Monster Science before you want to see

(49:56):
this particular one, you're in for a treat. Go look
at it on stuff to Blow your Mind and dot com.
There's also a blog post galore. In fact, Robert just
posted a pretty lengthy I wouldn't even call it a
blog post. You did a full on article about this
topic on our site. Uh. We've also got links up
to our social media accounts Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, and Instagram. Yeah,

(50:16):
and I think there's a YouTube button on there too,
because we're doing this Facebook series these days called Trailer Talk,
where we we we spin off from these podcast episodes
we look at some movie trailers talk about sometimes be
a lot of times it's be movies or other horror
sci fi genre films and how they tie into the
topics of the week. And I'm not sure there's I

(50:37):
think there's a strong chance we'll have something tied in
with these episodes. We'll see how it comes together. I
think so a lot of movie just came up in
this episode. So yeah, I mean so I would expect
this let's see if this episode publishes the week after
recording it, then a couple of days later. They're usually
on Fridays when we do these Facebook lives, and they
then are both on our Facebook page for watching and

(50:58):
on YouTube. Yeah, you can find archives on YouTube for sure.
And if you want to get in touch with us
the old fashioned way, we'll just send us an email
at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com

(51:19):
for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is
that how stuff works dot com