February 24, 2009 • 17 mins
Can a human being be scared to the point of sudden death? Listen in as Chuck and Josh explore the physiological possibilities behind dying of fright in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you should know
from House Stuff Works dot com? Boom, Hello, welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh. That's Chuck. We're all together now, yeah,
(00:21):
the stuff you should know nation as one together. But
this is special time. It is I like it, Chuck. Um.
Have you ever been scared, like really truly like about
to lose your life? Scared? No, thankfully, but you know
who has multiple occasions. Our producer Jerry has uh been
(00:42):
scared to the point like she was an elevator once
that started to fall. I think you should create you
should describe that a little for a little better. This
is the in Atlanta that is an outdoor elevator made
of glass. You see everything and what your five hundred
seven hundred stories up? So yeah and go ahead, chucked
well and the elevator was dropping and it caught, so
(01:03):
she thought she's gonna die. Then she's been held up
at gunpoint, which was scared her to death, and she
was in a storm in a boat one time where
she feared for her life. So Jerry and she has
to deal with us every week. So but at least
she's been to the Bahamas before, assuming she made it,
so I haven't. But Jerry is. She teeters on the
(01:23):
edge of death constantly. So you know, I can tell
you that, Um. While Jerry was she's cool as a cucumber,
by the way, to to everybody who who hasn't met her, UM,
but I can tell you she was still there were
some things going on with her physiologically, whether she liked
it or not. Right specifically, she was under the iron
fist of one of our favorite things in human physiology,
(01:48):
fight or flight. It's our favorite thing. Chuck, give a
brief overview of fight or flight. I know we've talked
about before, but sometimes we have latecomers. You know. Well,
it's you know, it's a physical reaction. Your body goes
through your adrenaline surges. Uh, people's dilate breathing fast. That
was a high coup. That was a high coup right there.
Holy cow, you're good. Adrenaline, like I said, pumping through
(02:10):
your veins and all of a sudden, it's literally a
physical chemical reaction in your body. What happens, though, is
the threat leaves and things calm down. UM. Usually ideally, well,
what one of the one of the ways that all
these reactions start happening is through adrenaline. It acts on
things like your myo cardial tissue, your heart tissue, uh
(02:30):
and basically says, work faster, work harder. It makes your
veins constrict to maximize blood flow. Um and and basically
adrenaline is flowing throughout your body and it's just got
you really jacked up, really keyed up. So are either
gonna run or fight? Right? As you said, the thing
is is there is a conception, um among most lay
(02:51):
people that you could conceivably, if this happened to you, uh,
in a sudden enough fashion, you could conceivably be scared
to right, scared to death, not scared half to death.
And as just as a sidebart, let me say that
makes no sense whatsoever. Scared half to death. And I
researched to find the background on that and I couldn't
find any. But you can't be half dead. Clearly, it's
(03:13):
you're alive or you're dead. You're dedicated to your craft
and apparently see everything in black and white, So kudos
to you. Yeah. So okay, Well, basically what we're what
we're talking about is called sudden death. Can you be
scared to death? Right? Um? Sudden death is basically, uh,
it doesn't necessarily have to have to do with just
fear only it could be panic or um actually relief
(03:35):
to you. Could you can conceivably experience such a sense
of relief that you're you could have organ failure usually
sudden death. What the the the definition of it is
where basically somebody who is otherwise healthy just drops dead.
Most of the time it has to do with heart
cardiac arrest or or um some sort of infarction, right um.
(03:56):
And this is not supposed to happen. Is the weird thing?
I mean, well to you or I it makes sense,
you know, like you get scared to die? Um. Medical
science doesn't generally take too much for granted. It likes
to say, well, yeah, okay, this, this is related to this,
but what are the points in between? Right? And there's
(04:16):
actually an emerging field. It's called neuro cardiology. Have you
heard about this? There is a guy and his name
is doctor Martin Samuel's and he is often called the
death doctor. And he is this leading proponent of neuro cardiology,
is kind of the father of it. And uh, from
(04:36):
what I gather he doesn't do too much research because
the problem is this is a this could very easily
become an unethical field. Yeah, it's kind of hard to
perform a study and say, all right, we're gonna scare
you really badly and if you're still alive afterward, we're
going to make some notes on that, and if not,
then thank you for your time, and here's you. And
even more to Dr Samuel's credit, he refuses to um
(05:00):
test on animals for ethical reasons. So basically he's just
having to collect anecdotal evidence. Whenever he can get his
hand on a heart um from somebody who's experienced sudden death,
he likes to do that, I'm quite sure. And one
of the things that he's found, and this is actually
a well known um uh symptom of stress uh, and
(05:22):
that is um contraction bands along the heart UM. They
look like little red stripes. And basically what it is
the adrenaline is come in in such a concentrated form
or in such an amount because of this huge fear
response or whatever UM that it's just destroyed cells. It's
just blown them out, and so you've got lesions formed
(05:45):
along your heart tissue, not good to have and actually,
um unsurprisingly UH, this has shown up in cocaine users
as well. UM, so you can have you can can
you can create contraction bands along your heart from drug
abuse or from being scared. The thing is, it's like
when you come out of it, you're you're not like,
(06:06):
oh my heart hurts. You know that you can't tell.
And apparently if this happens enough, over time, the heart
becomes weak and stops functioning properly. Interesting. It is interesting stuff,
and there's actually um there again we should say, uh.
Neuro cardiology is something of an emerging field. UM, so
they're still trying to get as much proof as they can.
(06:26):
I found another unrelated study that found that UM, the
prevalence of contraction bands in UM accident victims, the the
the degree and the severity of contraction bands actually uh
increases the longer time. The longer the time between the
accident and between death goes by. So your heart's just
(06:49):
pumping and your adrenaline is flowing. But then you die.
So if you just die immediately, you don't your your
your body doesn't have time to release that it tryingly
create contractions. So there's a clear link. But queen adrenaline
and contraction bands. And we do know that something like
fear can release adrenaline, right, yeah, uh you know, like
you were saying earlier with this doctor, it's you can't
(07:09):
ethically perform a test like this, but what you can
do is you can look at statistics and things like
that over time. And a couple of people have done this.
The one, the one I like to call it the
Baskerville Effect from the famous Hound of Baskerville's Sir author,
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was a physician himself. What
a mouthful, uh he was. And in the Hound of
(07:30):
Baskerville's one of the main characters has a heart attack
because they were scared by a ghostly dog that haunted
the area. So I've always I've read that many many
years ago. I've always been ghostly dog. It's not that
scary ghost person. Scary Yeah dog, scary ghost dog, not scary.
So uh. One the one I liked was China and
(07:53):
China and Japan. Actually the number four is supposed to
be unlucky. Yeah, we've talked about that before. We have,
indeed in our Terrible Terrible Friend of podcast. You're being harsh,
um and apparently in in China and Japan the number
four is unlucky because its pronunciation is similar to the
word for death, first of all. And so what they
(08:15):
did was they studied uh some data over the course
pretty expansive data, yeah, twenty five years, and they looked
at the death certificates of about two hundred thousand Chinese
and Japanese people over that period. And then they had
a control group of forty seven million, uh, white folks
like you and I. And what they found was the
(08:35):
mortality was indeed higher for the fourth of the month
compared to the white control group in China and Japan. Yeah,
people with chronic heart disease UM they saw a increase
in deaths on the fourth of any given month UM
and for people who were in the hospital with with
heart problems, there was a forty seven percent increase compared
(08:59):
to UM any the white control control group is interesting.
So you you obviously, as we covered in that Terrible
Friday the thirteenth podcast, um we we we said that
you know, there's not a lot to it, but that
doesn't mean there's no fear associated with it, right, right,
So it's entirely possible that you know, these people are
(09:19):
are already suffering from heart problems. But you know, the
fourth of the month rolls around there a little more
jacked up the calendar. You know, they're there, yeah, there,
there's They're just a little more vulnerable than other days
of the month. So it would be kind of um
self initiated and Chuck, I know you're hot and heavy
for another study about sudden death, aren't you. Yeah, there's
(09:40):
a good one. Um. Remember the earthquake in north Ridge
and in southern California. Yeah, how could I forget six
point seven on the Richter scale? Was it? I didn't
even know that? Good for you? On a normal day
in l A, there's about five sudden deaths, which we
talked about, Um, when the north Ridge earthquake hit, there
were twenty four sudden deaths that day, big spike almost
(10:05):
five times. And a few of these they linked to
physical exertions, you can throw those out, But most of
these were actually attributed to the you know, tremendous fright
caused by the earthquake. And the average agent was a
little bit high, sixty eight years old. But only of
these people had any kind of heart disease previously in
the past so there was genuine sudden death, even though
(10:26):
they were a little bit on the old side. So that's,
you know, again pretty clear link, right. But of course
correlation is not causation, and so neurocrdiologists like Dr Martin
are gonna keep looking into it. Um. And actually one
other thing, all of this is based on something called
voodoo death. Have you heard about that? I have Walter Cannon. Yeah,
(10:47):
in nineteen forty two, he he wrote a paper, um,
and basically he said that there was a lot more
prevalence of sudden death in places where voodoo was practiced.
And he went on to postulate that this was because
people believed in voodoo and and and um, that kind
of mysticism so much that when they were led to
believe that they had just been hexed or should be
(11:10):
dead under voodoo practices, um, they actually did die. Um.
In some cases they died because they wouldn't drink food
or water because they thought it was poisoned by so
they died of that. But some of them also died
of sudden death as well. And that's actually the basis
of all of this. The Hound of the Basker bill
is sure, but really as far as medical science goes um.
(11:33):
It was Cannon who first really started looking at sudden death,
and it continues today, and it still will continue because
we like to know why we die. We can try
to stop it. And Canon was a Harvard physiologist, so
he's he wasn't some fly by night crap, but no,
he was definitely one worth listening. There was another thing
I wanted to talk about have you here, which is, uh,
(11:54):
have you ever heard of someone supposedly their hair turning
white overnight because of fear? Sure I have of that.
Not quite true. That's a bit of an urban myth
from what I could tell the just just send it
to his chick. We we both did some research here,
and uh, apparently fear and stress and that kind of
emotion can cause your hair to turn white. But there's
(12:16):
no way it could happen overnight. It would cause a
change of metabolic function. I think, um, that that could
turn your hair a different color or make it lose
its color. Right, yeah, okay, but there is a way
it can turn gray, um, seemingly overnight, but it's not
from from fear. What that's called is diffuse alopecia areata.
It's like selective hair loss. Right. Yeah, basically that's a
(12:38):
sudden hair loss um, which can happen overnight. But um,
the biochemistry of alopecia isn't that well understood. So if
you have a mix of dark and gray hair or
white hair, the uncolored hair is less likely to fall out.
So theoretically you could wake up with a lot less
hair and the only hair that sticks around is white.
So it's a bad morning, yeah, but it's that's not
(12:59):
quite this same thing as being scared scared white? Right. Also,
even if if it could change your hair color, which
were not entirely certain it could, it would only do
it from the scalp down. Everything that is out of
your head, like your fingernails, your well, not fingernails. If
you have fingernails growing out of your head, you have
much bigger problems in your hair being white. But um,
anything that's coming off of your body, fingernails, um, your
(13:22):
hair that those are dead cells. It's dead. So there's
no change that could could take place aside from maybe
a flow be going over them. Right, what do you
mean scalp down? Now, the scalp towards your skull, under
the skin subdermal head of a cat. Uh, So this
entire podcast is based on one of my favorite articles
(13:45):
on the site right now. It's called can You Really
Scare Someone to Death? It was written by our esteem
colleague Molly Edmonds, who not only has uh this article
to be proud of, she and another colleague of ours
who we love very much, Kristen Can, just launched their
own podcasts. They called stuff Mom Never Told You. You
can find that on iTunes, alongside ours and a bunch
(14:07):
of other how Stuff Works podcasts um at our homepage.
On iTunes, you can just type in how stuff works
is one word in the iTunes search bar room, and
you can also type all sorts of cool things into
the search bar at how stuff works dot com, including
can you really scare someone? In debt? But now Josh,
it's still not over there? Or goodness in the form
(14:27):
of you people aren't going anywhere. It's listener mail, times mail,
so listener mail. I've got quite a few today. These
are things that we've titled stuff we should Know, not
necessarily corrections, although some are. We did the podcasts on Commas,
which got a lot of good response from Yeah, we
were kind of worried about that. If I remember correctly, yeah,
(14:48):
we didn't want to treat it lightly. And we actually
had people who had family members and commas and they
thought we'd were respecting, which went a really long way too.
That was huge actually. But in that podcast we mentioned
the film Diving Bell and Butterfly, and I had seen
the movie and I said something about, um, the main
character was was able to uh. I think I said
he used Yeah, that he used a computer and looked
(15:10):
at the keys of the computer to write his memoir.
Not true at all. What he what he did was
he blinked the letters to someone who who transcribed this
book for him and it was a really basically the
main part of the film. And I can't explain why
I didn't remember that so for a while. So we
need to thank Kendra Wallpi of Philadelphia and Tita of Montreal, Canada.
(15:35):
I especially would like to thank whoever sent the computer
device in quotes, which apparently we called it and then
sent us the Wikipedia link um, which you know right, great,
Thank you, And Jesse Aiden of Vienna, Austria sent that
in So another quickie hypo allergenic cats, Josh, you've goofed
(15:55):
up and said that created a new species. Not true.
Not true is not a new species. It was a
new breed. And we got quite a few people, Philip Fast,
Scott Ruddick, Matt we Abou of Boston, j Scott Brunig
who is from Princeton University, Jamie vander Ratt of Saskatchewan, Canada,
(16:16):
and actually put this in the form of a hiku,
which is ain't speciation because they can interbreed. Still, I
learned a lot beautiful uh and I'm sorry a quick
when just came in before we recorded Keyshore the Lowdika.
Two more quickies, I'm sorry one more quickly. Yeast is
(16:36):
a fungus from our Moonshine podcast. I think you said
something about this plan and all of our biology friends said, no,
it's a fungus, and West Sivak, Brian Ray, Sam S
and John Salter told us all that it was, in
fact the fungus fantas amungus. Thank you all of you. Um, well,
(16:57):
we'll try to, you know, not screw up quite as much.
But if not, what would you have to write to
us about? So keep them coming right, Yes, keep us
diligent and uh, if you want to learn a little
more about Friday right. Other superstitions Urban Legends. You got
a great article on that, right, There's a lot more
on the Friday thirteenth article there, Yes, yeah, there is. Um.
You just go on to our handy search bar start
(17:20):
randomly typing letters, or you could make a more specific
search and type in Friday thirteenth or urban legends, something
like that, and you can do that at how stuff
works dot com for more on this and thousands of
other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com brought
(17:40):
to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray. It's ready,
are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you should know
from House Stuff Works dot com? Boom, Hello, welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh. That's Chuck. We're all together now, yeah,
(00:21):
the stuff you should know nation as one together. But
this is special time. It is I like it, Chuck. Um.
Have you ever been scared, like really truly like about
to lose your life? Scared? No, thankfully, but you know
who has multiple occasions. Our producer Jerry has uh been
(00:42):
scared to the point like she was an elevator once
that started to fall. I think you should create you
should describe that a little for a little better. This
is the in Atlanta that is an outdoor elevator made
of glass. You see everything and what your five hundred
seven hundred stories up? So yeah and go ahead, chucked
well and the elevator was dropping and it caught, so
(01:03):
she thought she's gonna die. Then she's been held up
at gunpoint, which was scared her to death, and she
was in a storm in a boat one time where
she feared for her life. So Jerry and she has
to deal with us every week. So but at least
she's been to the Bahamas before, assuming she made it,
so I haven't. But Jerry is. She teeters on the
(01:23):
edge of death constantly. So you know, I can tell
you that, Um. While Jerry was she's cool as a cucumber,
by the way, to to everybody who who hasn't met her, UM,
but I can tell you she was still there were
some things going on with her physiologically, whether she liked
it or not. Right specifically, she was under the iron
fist of one of our favorite things in human physiology,
(01:48):
fight or flight. It's our favorite thing. Chuck, give a
brief overview of fight or flight. I know we've talked
about before, but sometimes we have latecomers. You know. Well,
it's you know, it's a physical reaction. Your body goes
through your adrenaline surges. Uh, people's dilate breathing fast. That
was a high coup. That was a high coup right there.
Holy cow, you're good. Adrenaline, like I said, pumping through
(02:10):
your veins and all of a sudden, it's literally a
physical chemical reaction in your body. What happens, though, is
the threat leaves and things calm down. UM. Usually ideally, well,
what one of the one of the ways that all
these reactions start happening is through adrenaline. It acts on
things like your myo cardial tissue, your heart tissue, uh
(02:30):
and basically says, work faster, work harder. It makes your
veins constrict to maximize blood flow. Um and and basically
adrenaline is flowing throughout your body and it's just got
you really jacked up, really keyed up. So are either
gonna run or fight? Right? As you said, the thing
is is there is a conception, um among most lay
(02:51):
people that you could conceivably, if this happened to you, uh,
in a sudden enough fashion, you could conceivably be scared
to right, scared to death, not scared half to death.
And as just as a sidebart, let me say that
makes no sense whatsoever. Scared half to death. And I
researched to find the background on that and I couldn't
find any. But you can't be half dead. Clearly, it's
(03:13):
you're alive or you're dead. You're dedicated to your craft
and apparently see everything in black and white, So kudos
to you. Yeah. So okay, Well, basically what we're what
we're talking about is called sudden death. Can you be
scared to death? Right? Um? Sudden death is basically, uh,
it doesn't necessarily have to have to do with just
fear only it could be panic or um actually relief
(03:35):
to you. Could you can conceivably experience such a sense
of relief that you're you could have organ failure usually
sudden death. What the the the definition of it is
where basically somebody who is otherwise healthy just drops dead.
Most of the time it has to do with heart
cardiac arrest or or um some sort of infarction, right um.
(03:56):
And this is not supposed to happen. Is the weird thing?
I mean, well to you or I it makes sense,
you know, like you get scared to die? Um. Medical
science doesn't generally take too much for granted. It likes
to say, well, yeah, okay, this, this is related to this,
but what are the points in between? Right? And there's
(04:16):
actually an emerging field. It's called neuro cardiology. Have you
heard about this? There is a guy and his name
is doctor Martin Samuel's and he is often called the
death doctor. And he is this leading proponent of neuro cardiology,
is kind of the father of it. And uh, from
(04:36):
what I gather he doesn't do too much research because
the problem is this is a this could very easily
become an unethical field. Yeah, it's kind of hard to
perform a study and say, all right, we're gonna scare
you really badly and if you're still alive afterward, we're
going to make some notes on that, and if not,
then thank you for your time, and here's you. And
even more to Dr Samuel's credit, he refuses to um
(05:00):
test on animals for ethical reasons. So basically he's just
having to collect anecdotal evidence. Whenever he can get his
hand on a heart um from somebody who's experienced sudden death,
he likes to do that, I'm quite sure. And one
of the things that he's found, and this is actually
a well known um uh symptom of stress uh, and
(05:22):
that is um contraction bands along the heart UM. They
look like little red stripes. And basically what it is
the adrenaline is come in in such a concentrated form
or in such an amount because of this huge fear
response or whatever UM that it's just destroyed cells. It's
just blown them out, and so you've got lesions formed
(05:45):
along your heart tissue, not good to have and actually,
um unsurprisingly UH, this has shown up in cocaine users
as well. UM, so you can have you can can
you can create contraction bands along your heart from drug
abuse or from being scared. The thing is, it's like
when you come out of it, you're you're not like,
(06:06):
oh my heart hurts. You know that you can't tell.
And apparently if this happens enough, over time, the heart
becomes weak and stops functioning properly. Interesting. It is interesting stuff,
and there's actually um there again we should say, uh.
Neuro cardiology is something of an emerging field. UM, so
they're still trying to get as much proof as they can.
(06:26):
I found another unrelated study that found that UM, the
prevalence of contraction bands in UM accident victims, the the
the degree and the severity of contraction bands actually uh
increases the longer time. The longer the time between the
accident and between death goes by. So your heart's just
(06:49):
pumping and your adrenaline is flowing. But then you die.
So if you just die immediately, you don't your your
your body doesn't have time to release that it tryingly
create contractions. So there's a clear link. But queen adrenaline
and contraction bands. And we do know that something like
fear can release adrenaline, right, yeah, uh you know, like
you were saying earlier with this doctor, it's you can't
(07:09):
ethically perform a test like this, but what you can
do is you can look at statistics and things like
that over time. And a couple of people have done this.
The one, the one I like to call it the
Baskerville Effect from the famous Hound of Baskerville's Sir author,
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was a physician himself. What
a mouthful, uh he was. And in the Hound of
(07:30):
Baskerville's one of the main characters has a heart attack
because they were scared by a ghostly dog that haunted
the area. So I've always I've read that many many
years ago. I've always been ghostly dog. It's not that
scary ghost person. Scary Yeah dog, scary ghost dog, not scary.
So uh. One the one I liked was China and
(07:53):
China and Japan. Actually the number four is supposed to
be unlucky. Yeah, we've talked about that before. We have,
indeed in our Terrible Terrible Friend of podcast. You're being harsh,
um and apparently in in China and Japan the number
four is unlucky because its pronunciation is similar to the
word for death, first of all. And so what they
(08:15):
did was they studied uh some data over the course
pretty expansive data, yeah, twenty five years, and they looked
at the death certificates of about two hundred thousand Chinese
and Japanese people over that period. And then they had
a control group of forty seven million, uh, white folks
like you and I. And what they found was the
(08:35):
mortality was indeed higher for the fourth of the month
compared to the white control group in China and Japan. Yeah,
people with chronic heart disease UM they saw a increase
in deaths on the fourth of any given month UM
and for people who were in the hospital with with
heart problems, there was a forty seven percent increase compared
(08:59):
to UM any the white control control group is interesting.
So you you obviously, as we covered in that Terrible
Friday the thirteenth podcast, um we we we said that
you know, there's not a lot to it, but that
doesn't mean there's no fear associated with it, right, right,
So it's entirely possible that you know, these people are
(09:19):
are already suffering from heart problems. But you know, the
fourth of the month rolls around there a little more
jacked up the calendar. You know, they're there, yeah, there,
there's They're just a little more vulnerable than other days
of the month. So it would be kind of um
self initiated and Chuck, I know you're hot and heavy
for another study about sudden death, aren't you. Yeah, there's
(09:40):
a good one. Um. Remember the earthquake in north Ridge
and in southern California. Yeah, how could I forget six
point seven on the Richter scale? Was it? I didn't
even know that? Good for you? On a normal day
in l A, there's about five sudden deaths, which we
talked about, Um, when the north Ridge earthquake hit, there
were twenty four sudden deaths that day, big spike almost
(10:05):
five times. And a few of these they linked to
physical exertions, you can throw those out, But most of
these were actually attributed to the you know, tremendous fright
caused by the earthquake. And the average agent was a
little bit high, sixty eight years old. But only of
these people had any kind of heart disease previously in
the past so there was genuine sudden death, even though
(10:26):
they were a little bit on the old side. So that's,
you know, again pretty clear link, right. But of course
correlation is not causation, and so neurocrdiologists like Dr Martin
are gonna keep looking into it. Um. And actually one
other thing, all of this is based on something called
voodoo death. Have you heard about that? I have Walter Cannon. Yeah,
(10:47):
in nineteen forty two, he he wrote a paper, um,
and basically he said that there was a lot more
prevalence of sudden death in places where voodoo was practiced.
And he went on to postulate that this was because
people believed in voodoo and and and um, that kind
of mysticism so much that when they were led to
believe that they had just been hexed or should be
(11:10):
dead under voodoo practices, um, they actually did die. Um.
In some cases they died because they wouldn't drink food
or water because they thought it was poisoned by so
they died of that. But some of them also died
of sudden death as well. And that's actually the basis
of all of this. The Hound of the Basker bill
is sure, but really as far as medical science goes um.
(11:33):
It was Cannon who first really started looking at sudden death,
and it continues today, and it still will continue because
we like to know why we die. We can try
to stop it. And Canon was a Harvard physiologist, so
he's he wasn't some fly by night crap, but no,
he was definitely one worth listening. There was another thing
I wanted to talk about have you here, which is, uh,
(11:54):
have you ever heard of someone supposedly their hair turning
white overnight because of fear? Sure I have of that.
Not quite true. That's a bit of an urban myth
from what I could tell the just just send it
to his chick. We we both did some research here,
and uh, apparently fear and stress and that kind of
emotion can cause your hair to turn white. But there's
(12:16):
no way it could happen overnight. It would cause a
change of metabolic function. I think, um, that that could
turn your hair a different color or make it lose
its color. Right, yeah, okay, but there is a way
it can turn gray, um, seemingly overnight, but it's not
from from fear. What that's called is diffuse alopecia areata.
It's like selective hair loss. Right. Yeah, basically that's a
(12:38):
sudden hair loss um, which can happen overnight. But um,
the biochemistry of alopecia isn't that well understood. So if
you have a mix of dark and gray hair or
white hair, the uncolored hair is less likely to fall out.
So theoretically you could wake up with a lot less
hair and the only hair that sticks around is white.
So it's a bad morning, yeah, but it's that's not
(12:59):
quite this same thing as being scared scared white? Right. Also,
even if if it could change your hair color, which
were not entirely certain it could, it would only do
it from the scalp down. Everything that is out of
your head, like your fingernails, your well, not fingernails. If
you have fingernails growing out of your head, you have
much bigger problems in your hair being white. But um,
anything that's coming off of your body, fingernails, um, your
(13:22):
hair that those are dead cells. It's dead. So there's
no change that could could take place aside from maybe
a flow be going over them. Right, what do you
mean scalp down? Now, the scalp towards your skull, under
the skin subdermal head of a cat. Uh, So this
entire podcast is based on one of my favorite articles
(13:45):
on the site right now. It's called can You Really
Scare Someone to Death? It was written by our esteem
colleague Molly Edmonds, who not only has uh this article
to be proud of, she and another colleague of ours
who we love very much, Kristen Can, just launched their
own podcasts. They called stuff Mom Never Told You. You
can find that on iTunes, alongside ours and a bunch
(14:07):
of other how Stuff Works podcasts um at our homepage.
On iTunes, you can just type in how stuff works
is one word in the iTunes search bar room, and
you can also type all sorts of cool things into
the search bar at how stuff works dot com, including
can you really scare someone? In debt? But now Josh,
it's still not over there? Or goodness in the form
(14:27):
of you people aren't going anywhere. It's listener mail, times mail,
so listener mail. I've got quite a few today. These
are things that we've titled stuff we should Know, not
necessarily corrections, although some are. We did the podcasts on Commas,
which got a lot of good response from Yeah, we
were kind of worried about that. If I remember correctly, yeah,
(14:48):
we didn't want to treat it lightly. And we actually
had people who had family members and commas and they
thought we'd were respecting, which went a really long way too.
That was huge actually. But in that podcast we mentioned
the film Diving Bell and Butterfly, and I had seen
the movie and I said something about, um, the main
character was was able to uh. I think I said
he used Yeah, that he used a computer and looked
(15:10):
at the keys of the computer to write his memoir.
Not true at all. What he what he did was
he blinked the letters to someone who who transcribed this
book for him and it was a really basically the
main part of the film. And I can't explain why
I didn't remember that so for a while. So we
need to thank Kendra Wallpi of Philadelphia and Tita of Montreal, Canada.
(15:35):
I especially would like to thank whoever sent the computer
device in quotes, which apparently we called it and then
sent us the Wikipedia link um, which you know right, great,
Thank you, And Jesse Aiden of Vienna, Austria sent that
in So another quickie hypo allergenic cats, Josh, you've goofed
(15:55):
up and said that created a new species. Not true.
Not true is not a new species. It was a
new breed. And we got quite a few people, Philip Fast,
Scott Ruddick, Matt we Abou of Boston, j Scott Brunig
who is from Princeton University, Jamie vander Ratt of Saskatchewan, Canada,
(16:16):
and actually put this in the form of a hiku,
which is ain't speciation because they can interbreed. Still, I
learned a lot beautiful uh and I'm sorry a quick
when just came in before we recorded Keyshore the Lowdika.
Two more quickies, I'm sorry one more quickly. Yeast is
(16:36):
a fungus from our Moonshine podcast. I think you said
something about this plan and all of our biology friends said, no,
it's a fungus, and West Sivak, Brian Ray, Sam S
and John Salter told us all that it was, in
fact the fungus fantas amungus. Thank you all of you. Um, well,
(16:57):
we'll try to, you know, not screw up quite as much.
But if not, what would you have to write to
us about? So keep them coming right, Yes, keep us
diligent and uh, if you want to learn a little
more about Friday right. Other superstitions Urban Legends. You got
a great article on that, right, There's a lot more
on the Friday thirteenth article there, Yes, yeah, there is. Um.
You just go on to our handy search bar start
(17:20):
randomly typing letters, or you could make a more specific
search and type in Friday thirteenth or urban legends, something
like that, and you can do that at how stuff
works dot com for more on this and thousands of
other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com brought
(17:40):
to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray. It's ready,
are you
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