November 4, 2014 • 46 mins
Did a masked madman terrorize a sleepy Illinois town with a paralyzing gas gun? Or did something equally bizarre transpire back in August of 1944? Lend an ear to this bone-chilling episode of Stuff to Blow your Mind and explore the topic of mass hysteria (AKA mass psychogenic disorder), from dancing plagues and witch trials of old to our modern age of bioterrorism.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Flow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey everyone, welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie A. Dougmax.
And in today's episode, first of all, we want to
take you back in nineteen okay, to the sleepy town
(00:26):
of Mattune, Illinois. All right, a prowler is terrorizing the streets.
That's what everybody's talking about, right It's it's on the
lips of victims from thirteen area homes. It's in the newspaper,
and most of the accounts are breaking down like follows.
A man in black is creeping through the night. He's
(00:49):
prying open windows. Perhaps perhaps you're r window right now,
and he's probably open just enough to shove the nozzle
of a gas gun in Okay, then he pulled the
trigger and he pumped your home with some sort of
a noxious paralyzing chemical, a cloud of this stuff that just, uh,
that just makes you sprawl out on the kitchen floor,
(01:10):
and then you can't move. All you can do is
you can you can just listen to the sound of
hopefully the prowler, the mad gasser, running off into the night,
and not say coming and trying to open your door.
And this is the subjective reality of the residence of Mattoon, Illinois.
I like this for several reasons, and one of the
(01:30):
reasons is that it sounds like a potential news item
for the podcast Night Veale. It does sound very night
And I love that there's this idea that there's this
marauding mad gasser. And of course this idea all started
with someone named Alice Kearney who smelled a strange gas
smell and in fact, the whole community was smelling this
(01:53):
weird smell and uh, she soon said that her throat
and lips were burning and she'd and to panic when
her legs became paralyzed. And this story just rippled throughout
the community, made its way to news stories, and that's
when other people began to assume the symptoms for themselves. Yeah.
(02:15):
So suddenly, I mean, in no time at all, you
have thirteen area homes, twenty seven different alleged victims, all
claiming the same story, and the whole time there seems
to be there's no motive that seems to be at play.
These individuals were not uh you know, the homes were
not robbed. They weren't. They weren't in any other way
(02:36):
of you know, violated. Though you could argue that if
someone were to pump a noxious chemical into your house
one that didn't you know that this disables your body,
even temporarily, that that's that's quite a violation. But still
this it didn't seem to make sense. Why would someone
be doing this? What possible reason? And then inevitably the
authorities look into it and nothing turns up, like, there's
(03:00):
like no proof. They they bring in an expert in chemicals,
and none of the none of the symptoms seem to
match up with any potential uh with most potential chemical agents.
It just all kind of falls apart, and then in
no time at all, people kind of forget about it
and they move on with their lives. But there was
this this brief period in which this person, this creature,
(03:24):
this whatever was real, like even if the objective reality
didn't match up, the subjective reality definitely did. And it
turns out to be one of the finer examples that
we have of mass hysteria. And that is not the
only example, especially when it comes to mysterious odors that
people smell in different communities or other examples out there,
(03:44):
But the fact that there was this marauding mad gasser
in this example and that so many people fell ill
makes it a stand out yea. Even though this particular
story isn't one that just gets crazy amounts of attention,
which is one of the reasons I was drawn to
it because I never heard of it before and it's
just so weird and unique. But but individuals have um
(04:05):
investigated it more, and some people will make more of
a uh more of a play for a hoax element,
particularly with the newspapers. Uh. And then some people some
actually make an argument that there may have been like
one mad gassing incident or two or even three that
were legitimate, but in those cases still you would have
something that spiral out of control into mass hysteria. Be
(04:29):
it a hoax that people believed in, which of course
instantly brings to mind, say the orson Wells a war
the world's broadcast right, where we have something that is
a hoax of fiction that people buy into and start
reacting to. Or it's a situation where it happens one
time and then everyone assumes it's happening all the time,
(04:49):
uh and that everyone is in danger and for that
I simply uh invite you to turn on the evening
news and you're gonna dose with that. Yeah. And I
think what's interesting about any sort of potential threat is
that there are two extreme ways in which to assess
a threat, and one is, say, the normalcy bias. And
(05:09):
we've talked about this before. This is the tendency for
some people to say, oh, nothing is a miss, business
as usual. There's not a crazy guy spewing chemicals into
my house through a nozzle, because that just doesn't happen,
or even like that chemical smell nothing, probably from the
banana bread. I'm bacon, right, So that's just kind of
you know, the Ostrich effect, putting your head in the
ground and and not trying to face it. Now, the
(05:32):
polar opposite of that would be this kind of hysteria
in which you overreact and then a panic spreads among people.
And there are countless examples of this, but we thought
we would roll out a couple to try to give
people an idea of how throughout the ages and even
in modern times, there are cultural things at work here.
(05:53):
There's a sort of pattern behind all of this. You
know that the first when you mentioned instantly that brings
to mind emails that you get, generally from a concerned
family member who says, I heard that someone is going
around like the kids are like. The one that I
read most recently was that if you're an egg is
thrown at your windshield, it's because it's a gag and
(06:15):
what they want you to do is turn on your
windshield wipers, which will then me money up your your
windshields even more and then you have to pull over.
That's when the game gets you. So so it's it's
a ridiculous idea and it's totally there's no there's no
truth to it at all. The people buy into it,
and that because they think, well, you know which side
am I going to be on? Am I gonna be
the person that didn't believe that the crazy email from
(06:38):
my uncle? Uh? And and then end up getting attacked
by a gang? Or am I going to believe it
and survive? Right? So right, you can go to to
one of those extremes. You can do that normal cy bias,
you can go to hysteria or hey, you could go
in the middle and really assess the threat as it is.
But um, that being said, there are plenty of instances
in which people have kind of fallen prey to that hysteria. Indeed,
(07:02):
and one of the best is the dancing plague or
dancing epidemic of eighteen, a time in which there was
no CNC music factory, and yet everybody danced. Now it's
no factory to turn it out. But even though there
was no CFC music factory, Uh, they had some other
things going on. They had they had the plague. Yeah, yeah,
they had they had warfare, they had starvation, they had
(07:25):
just every every normal extreme poverty, along with any other
daily anks that we might have in our our modern
age of of comfort. Yeah. And it turns out that
this made just contribute to the right conditions for someone
to try to unload all that stress and have their
own one woman street party. Right they started dancing. Firsts
(07:48):
it's one gal dancing right than somebody else. Then it's
it's two, then it's three, and it just escalates until
it's it's an epidemic. It's mania. People are dancing in
the street eats for seemingly no reason. And uh and
and and we've spent the rest of history trying to
explain why. I mean, there's been various theories that it
(08:09):
was that it was poisoning, that it was some sort
of toxicity or illness, but those don't really really actually
level out all that well. And John Waller, history professor
at Michigan State University UM, he argues that we're really
looking at a great classic case of math hysteria. And
key of all of this is to realize that this
(08:29):
didn't come out of nowhere. It's not. There was a
pre existing script for the dancing um to a large extent,
and that's because the dancing plagues, according to John Waller,
were a calling card of St. Vitus, an early Christian
martyr venerated with dance parties. So the idea is already
in the in the in everyone's heads, and then one
(08:50):
person starts that everyone else follows in with it. So
communities stress community and then an existing script for their behavior. Yeah,
and it was called the dancing Plague of Strasburg because
it kind of was like a plague in the sense
that it began to spread throughout the community, but not
(09:10):
only that people were dancing to their deaths. Now, that
wasn't too hard given the circumstances, because you know, one
person might be riddled with disease, another person was starving
to death, but they were going out dancing. Yeah, well,
that's a heck of a way to go. Why not
you're gonna you're gonna topple over into the gut or anyway,
why not do it after a lengthy about of dancing,
(09:32):
just tork out your existence. Yeah, And of course another
element to this too is the idea that that there
was there was a psychosomatic element here too, write that
that not only was it affecting behavior, but it was
affecting at least your perception of your your body the
way then manifesting in symptoms of the body. And we'll
(09:52):
get into that more as we go forward. Yeah, Now,
fast forward a bit. You've got the Salem which trials,
and you have what is more of a kind of
moral mas hysteria. And we're talking about, of course, the
group of girls who seemed to be exhibiting these demonic signs.
(10:14):
And in some cases, uh, these girls were wrongly convicted
of witchcraft. In other cases, there was a kind of
stress reaction to these moral underpinnings among the girls in
which they were exhibiting tick like behavior. And important here
is to is to again keep in mind stressful situation,
(10:36):
stressful environment and young people and a pre existing script,
because if you've listened to our past episode Hammer of
the Witches, where we went into depth about witchcraft culture
and the paranoia about witchcraft, there was very much there
was a strong script in place for witchcraft and manifestations
(10:58):
of witchcraft within a community, so they could easily draw
on that and everyone I knew what it was supposed
to be. Well, And I was just thinking about the
spiral of silence the last episode that we recorded in
this idea that there is a kind of silence that
settles upon the minority when the majority speaks out very strongly.
In this case, you have the majority those in power
(11:19):
are saying that there is witchcraft in this town. This
is going on, and authority people in the church, yeah,
you know, particularly who are saying that yes, which not
only is witchcraft a threat, but is like the big
threat today, Yeah, among our girls, and we know what's happening.
So in this weird way, it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
I'm sure for some of these girls who say, well,
(11:40):
there they say that the Satan is inhabiting us, and
maybe I'm feeling Satan inhabiting myself right now. And that's
why I'm shuddering or I'm talking in voices or exhibiting
these these really aggressive ticks. All right, fast, fard once more.
The two thousand six, two thousand seven, a mysterious illness
begins to affect girls at a boarding school in Choco, Mexico,
(12:02):
that's near Mexico City. The school, which is run by
Roman Catholic nuns, is one of ten in Asian Latin
America operated by a charity called World Villages for Children
in Asia. The girls, aged twelve and seventeen began to
show strange symptoms that such as difficulty walking, fever, nausea
and UH. After the girl and this was after a
(12:24):
girl's returned from a ten day Christmas break, the ills,
this illness spreads even more so eventually six hundred out
of the thirty d girls at the school showed these symptoms.
And you know, the doctors are looking into it, and
no one can figure out what exactly going on. You know,
you're looking for that underlying illness, that underlying environmental cause
even and nothing is popping up. So after conducting numerous
(12:46):
test uh surveying the facility interviewing folks trying to get
to the heart of it. Doctors decided that it was
it was all a matter of mass psychogenic disorder, which
we also call collective sterea, mass psycho somatic reaction, and
of course mass hysteria. There's not one term that we
(13:06):
end up using because vs M hasn't hasn't ruled on
a a P style doesn't have have one that they like,
so UH for all intens and purposes, mass hysteric. So
going back to the girls at the boarding school, consider
that these kind of symptoms spread and began after they
returned from Christmas break, because this is pretty key because
(13:29):
it turns out that this is a really highly structured environment,
very disciplined from regimented, and the correspondence and interaction with
parents is sparse. Their children see their parents no more
than three times a year, and these kids are returning
from having just spent time with their families, and it
kind of stress settles in again in this highly regiment regimented,
(13:51):
almost you know, foreign environment to them, the opposite of
what you would think of as a family supportive UH structure,
And that explains a lot of the reasons why this
These kids were reacting the way that they were, and
why it kind of spread in that manner um. Now,
I wanted to mention two quick outliers here in the
(14:14):
mass hysteria village. One is Pokemon. A strange and uh
seemingly inexplicable outbreak of bizarre behavior struck Japan in when
thousands of Japanese school children experienced frightening seizures after watching
an episode of Pokemon, and intense flashes of light during
(14:36):
the show triggered relatively harmless and brief seizures, nausea, and headaches.
And when doctors diagnosed some of the children with a
rare pre existing condition called photo sensitive epilepsy, which is
brought on by all this flashing lights, and they figured
out that you know, indeed, there was like, you know,
a couple of kids that were reacting to the show,
(14:57):
but the other kids there reacted, We're just simply exhibiting
signs of mass hysteria because they had heard about the
other kids who were having seizures. So since they were
copying those symptoms, but but in a more meaningful way almost,
I mean, they were kind of they were actually participating
in it. Yeah, And if you think about Pokemon and
(15:20):
it being such a strong cultural signifier, then it kind
of follows that, oh wow, if those kids had such
a reaction to it, maybe I would because it's there's
this is really an important cultural signifier. Well you think
you think back to Beatlemania, right, and you see those
that the footage of the girls just going completely crazy,
like screaming, mad house crazy over the Beatles, you know,
(15:41):
which is it can be difficult to understand, right because
I mean, the things that we love in our lives
we don't go that crazy for, or at least I
don't so. But but if you think of it from
that point of view, that like, like you know, one
one fan starts acting that way, then another and then another,
and then that is the that is the script for
how to react, and you just jump in, you join it.
(16:03):
It's it's parts peer pressure, it's part fitting in with
the crowd, but then it has these psychosomatic aspects as well. Yeah,
apparently the Beatles at some point um at the top
of their popularity, when when you know, girls were swooning
and painting and shouting and screaming. They said that it
became absolutely unbearable to perform because they couldn't even hear
(16:25):
their instruments, so they and what they were saying is
that they had become a cultural phenomenon, but not for
themselves or their artistry. And in fact, their musicianship was
all but you know, swept aside in this sea of
scream So it became about the sea of screams rather
than them. Huh. You know, I also can't help but
think about the faith based healing uh situations and uh
(16:50):
and particularly one. I don't know if I've mentioned this
before in the podcast, but when I was in late
high school early college, went with a friend to check
out a jerk in Huntsville, Alabama, and the they were
doing this thing where people would be healed by the pastor,
but they would they would fall to the ground and
they would laugh hysterically and they would roll around laughing,
(17:12):
and then they would have to bring around blankets to
put over the females because they addresses on and you know,
it's like a modesty blanket while you roll around with
the Holy Spirit rolling through you and making you laugh hysterically.
And uh. You know, I tried to figure out that
that out for a long time. But when you start
looking at it from the guise of mass hysteria. It
makes a lot more sense. Yeah, and it's kind of
(17:33):
speaking in tongues to the same thing is at work.
You're part of this thing, whatever it is you're engaging
in the times, in the ritual. In a ritual, as
we've discussed before, is incredibly powerful. Now, imagine being a
lonely nun in eighteen forty four. You're in a French
uh convent and I don't know, you just feel like,
(17:53):
you know, I like a cat. And all of a
sudden you have your fellow nuns me O I with
you every day at a certain time, for several hours together,
so much so that the neighbors began complaining that this
cavalcade of nuns me owing is driving them insane. And
(18:14):
here you have another lovely little case of mass hysteria,
and you have those cultural underpinnings present. In other words,
you talked about the story before, right. The story here
is that Satan sometimes can take the form of animals,
particularly cat. Right, So maybe Satan entered you and began
(18:37):
meowing like a cat so that you could let others
know that you are now in league with Satan and
you need help, you know, you think Satan would be
more creative when he took over a nunnery. I feel like, yeah,
I feel like the Italian films the nineties, seventies and
eighties really had more imaginative vision of this sort of thing.
But yeah, well, I mean, you know that we're talking
(18:57):
about some very basic folkloreic totems here, like cats, and
I mean we're again stress and anxiety and almost kind
of a release valve. Like you think of it as
the like the crack and that regimented society, and you know,
maybe there's not room for a full blown goat worshiping release,
but there's just enough room for me owing to be
the thing, and then it just catches like well, you know,
(19:19):
in one In some ways, it's probably a lot more
acceptable to be possessed by Satan and start me owing
like a cat rather than just being like this place
is driving me crazy. You're screaming and acting out, yeah,
because then there's something really wrong with you. But if
it's Satan, just kind of like it's like getting your
email account hacked, right, you just have to say, all right, hey, everybody,
(19:40):
if you've got a weird email from me yesterday, just
disregarded I was hacked by Satan. Right, Satan as a
sacrificial goat in the form of a cat. Yes. Um.
If you guys want more like full on none mass
hysteria and other tales, make sure to check out our
sister podcast If Mom never told you They're crazy? No, no,
they're not actually hysterical. They're not, And they are hysterical,
(20:03):
but not in that hysteria way. But their episode is
called the Mysterious Case of Convulsive Cheerleaders and they look
a little bit more into the female Factor. All Right,
we're gonna take a quick break and when we get back,
we're going to talk more about what mass tripogenic filmness is.
(20:29):
All right, we're back. We're talking about mass hysteria. We've
we've run through a number of different encounters from crazy
guys with gas guns to me owing nuns. And you know,
the the amazing thing about the crazy thing about it
is that with all of these cases, on the surface level,
you have two crazy stories to choose from. Is because
(20:51):
on one level, meowing nuns, crazy people with gas guns,
those are crazy ideas and you don't want to live
in a world where they're crazy gas gun wielding maniacs
and me owing nuns possessed by the devil, Like that's
that's a crazy world. But on the other hand, you're
talking about a world in which you can catch this
(21:13):
kind of crazy, where there's the you'll have a situation
where even if the objective reality doesn't match up, the
subjective reality becomes We're possessed by the devil. And people
were buying into this behavior. People are are are feeling
things in their body and experiencing things at least in
their memory and not in the perception of reality, that
are starkly different from what's really going on. So where
(21:38):
it becomes helpful is to really break down mass hysteria
and and this and and sort of take a few
different steps to get there, to realize that this isn't
really a crazy exception to our experience of reality, but
just a step to the left. Yeah, because you make
a good point. You have these extreme examples, but when
you really start to look at mass hysteria, it's a
(21:58):
lot more subtle than you think, and it actually permeates
our culture in less flamboyant ways. Like the best way
to start, really, I think, is to talk about the
psychosomatic aspects here, like the idea that you can just
thinking something, believing something, buying into it with your mind
can have manifestations in your body which can sound a
(22:20):
little hippie dippie perhaps or more magical on the surface
of things, except it's been tested out. And one of
the best examples of this is the cebo effect, but
also the no no cebo effect, which are basically two
different shades of the same thing. Yeah, it's essentially expecting
a certain outcome and that could be a positive outcome
(22:41):
or it could be a negative outcome. And we've seen
this and rafts of studies that have to do usually
with a drug that's being tested out. Right, there's a
laundry list of negative effects that someone might experience. They're
given the sugar pill and lo and behold, they experience
heart palpitations or you know, anxiety depressions, so on and
(23:02):
so forth, because the expectation is there. Yeah, it's the
same mechanism that allows the individual who receives the sugar
pill to feel revitalized and healed. So with both cases,
there is a there's there's a physical manifestation of what's
going on. You know, it's not to the effect where
like a leg is falling off or anything like that.
But but it's the thing that you have hold in
(23:23):
your mind, you're also holding in your body. Yeah, so
it's kind of a short walk from there to say,
being in a community where there is a strange odor
in the air and someone has seems to have fallen
ill because of it, and then assuming those symptoms for
yourself because no cebo effect is essentially at play. Yeah,
(23:45):
I mean, just think about the conversion disorder discus stations
to experience neurological symptoms such as numbness, blindness, paralysis, or
fits without any define herble biological cause. And again tying
in with what we've talked about previously, this often arises
out of stress or inner conflict, with increased susceptibility of
the individual has a history of medical or mental health problems. Okay,
(24:08):
so so we so here we see kind of mass
hysteria patient zero in a sense, you know, you can
look at it that way. Yeah, it's an extreme example
of this right again, though it follows form, and that
form is basically you have that cultural script, you have
that stressor and then you have that expectation of what
(24:29):
you think should happen or might happen, and hey, all
of a sudden, you have a community or a group
of people who are experiencing all these terrible things. Yeah.
And so indeed, we're finally at mass hysteria where people
are actually catching or at least acquiring the symptoms of
another person or of multiple other people. And again, this
(24:51):
is generally taking place in a close knits society under stress,
with some sort of predetermined script, uh that that can
explain what's happening. Yeah, And when we talk about this
kind of contagion, it's worth bringing up that this social
contagion seems to affect seems to affect more females than males,
or at least as reported in that way. So a
(25:12):
lot has been written about this topic. We're not going
to dive into it too deeply because there's a lot
of gender issues to take into a kind of a
lot of historical issues to take into account and and
ultimately it's going to break down community to community community. Yeah.
But I mean, one of things you could say is
that we know culturally that it is, uh, it's far
more accepted for women to express their feelings than men,
(25:35):
So that could be one thing at play. Um, here's
something that's from Ruth Graham, she writes for Slate magazine.
She said symptoms often start with older girls or women
and spread to younger or lower status girls. And she says,
as girlhood guardian Caitlin Flanagan put in New York Times,
it is cheerleaders and not the linebackers who come down
(25:58):
with ticks and stuttering. But as research has shown, is
also the cheerleaders and not the math club girls who
are likely to spread hysteria. What she's getting at is
that all of a sudden, it seems like a sort
of popular girls thing to happen, and it becomes part
of that whole model that we've talked about with teens
in this idea of feeling included and not excluded from
(26:22):
their peers. So you can see how this is working
at that level as we've discussed in the past. Yeah,
it's um. It's vital at that age because you're you've
evolved as an organism to fit in at you know,
with with potentially lethal consequences if you don't. You have
to become a member of a community because you have
this genetic mission you have to carry out, and you
have to carry that out within a community, and that
(26:43):
that's the only way you're gonna survive, and so everything
in your body and your hormones is pushing you towards
that well. And speaking of genetic mission, this ties in
really nicely to the next example of mass hysteria. And
it's a male centric example. And by the way, there
are plenty of just male centric ones in which this.
You know, certain hysterias affected only men, and this one,
(27:06):
this one is called the penis snatching panic. This is
the idea that one's uh penis will be taken away
in the night, or that it will withdraw into the body,
lost to you forever. Yeah. Louisa Lombard, an anthropologist at
the University of California at Berkeley, described visiting a small
town in the Central African Republic where she encountered two
(27:30):
men who claimed that their penises had been stolen. And
it seems that the day before, a traveler visiting the
town had shaken hands with a t vendor who immediately
claimed that he felt a shock and since that his
penis had shrunk, and then he cried out in alarm,
and the crowd gathered, and then the hysteria began to spread,
(27:50):
and other men began to say, my penis shrunk too.
You know, I'm just now remembering from when we did
the episode Hammer of the Witches, when went into the
witch after mania in Europe, Uh, that that there was
a whole chapter devoted to that in the Western tradition
of people uh either afraid or convinced that a witch
(28:10):
may have stolen or otherwise in any way messed with
their penis in the night. Yeah. No, nobody wants their
penis to be messed with, certainly stolen by witches. Yeah. Indeed,
so that's the show that that females do not have
a monopoly on mass hysteria, that that men definitely engage in,
and there are models of it that are male exclusive. Yeah,
(28:32):
and again that's just one example. But a lot of
this has to do with not just how we tell
the stories of our culture and we engage in them,
but also our memories of the events. Yeah. That's especially
key when you're talking about stuff like the mad Gaster,
where so much of it is is, you know, after
the fact, people are being interviewed and saying, what happened,
(28:53):
We'll tell me about it. Tell me the story of
this thing that you said occurred, and and then we're
engaging with our memory, which, as we've discussed before, is
far from a perfect engine. There. In fact, according to
u to Daniel Shackter, author of the Seven Sins of Memory,
How the Mind Forgets and Remembers, there are, as the
title suggests, seven keys ways that we screw up our memories.
(29:16):
That our memories are just flawed either from the get
go or we end up screwing them up when we
recall them. Because if you remember from the metaphor we
always return to, is that a memory is made out
of play, not stone. Every time you get it out
of the drawer to look at it, you're getting your
fingers all over it, and you're changing the form of
it maybe a little, maybe a lot before you put
it back in. I certainly refer back to that episode
(29:39):
more on that. I'll be sure to include a link
to that episode in the landing page at stuff that
Your Mind dot Com for this episode. But just to
run through the seven Sins of Memory real quick. There's um,
there's transience. This is the weakening or loss of memory
over time. That the mad Gaster thing happened last week. Uh,
it's been a week. I don't have his firm memory
of maybe it's been a year, so your your memory
(30:01):
fades over time obviously. Uh. Then there's absent mindedness, and
this is at tension in memory. You know, you're trying
to recall the details of what happened. And if you're
you were legitimately stressed, you were on the floor, uh,
and you didn't feel you could move your legs, maybe
your your memory of the finer details isn't all that great.
There's blocking attempted and this is when you're in attempting
(30:21):
to recall tidbits of memory and uh, and you you
can't recall that face, you can't recall that name. We've
all been there before. There's misattribution. This is where we
recall on authentic memory, but aspects of it are misattributed. Um.
And then there's suggestibility, the power of suggestion. This has
been born out in a number of studies, particularly aimed
(30:42):
at law enforcement. You know, you you suggest that this
individual in the lineup was the perpetrator, and then you can,
you know, you can actually convince the victim that that's
who it was. Bias is a huge effectory Two, you
already have a bias uh in this particular question. That's
going to color the memory. And then finally you have persistence.
(31:02):
This is the failure of the memory system involving unwanted
recall of information that's disturbing. Yeah, And so we bring
this up particularly in the context of something like the
Mad Gasser, in which we have this community that's reacting
to this smell right there on high alert and they
begin to misremember details of what's happening at that time,
(31:25):
but they misremember them in a way that it fits
into bias since adjustability right pre pre existing script, I mean,
that's that's the bias though, right there. Yeah, And we've
talked about this before, but it turns out that the
more freighted with emotion a situation or memory is, the
less reliable your memory is. And we've talked about this
(31:48):
before and the non eleven studies is that, you know,
the more emotionally charged someone is, um, just the the
less they can actually recall those events or details. So
if you think about situations like the Mad Gas or
really any of the other examples, UM, you can see
how people begin to piece things together to fit that narrative.
(32:10):
So the narrative could be informing psycho somatic experiences which
then that's that's heightening the experience and making the memory
more malleable to influence by the re existing script. And
again go back to Placebo Nacebo. You see this at
play and the most I don't know, I guess you
(32:33):
could say, uh wrote ways. And yet here here it
is bearing out this information that it's just the idea
or even the expectation that can really even color or
physical symptoms that we exhibit. This all brings to mind
hallucinations as well, because like the real take home from
looking at at hallucinations is that the the science of hallucinations,
(32:56):
the reality of hallucinations really shows that our perception of
reality itself is a kind of hallucination. So when you
look at the flaws of memory and the and the
and the way the way that the mas hysteria can
take uh can take hold of a community, Uh, it's
less about how crazy these people are, but how inherently
flawed and susceptible to this kind of outbreak. All of
(33:18):
our minds are, all of our communities are, And if
you think about it this way, um, mass hysteria sort
of like the based stock of the mass hysteria soup
is what is the threat level to us. And that's
where we can see sort of the things that are
going on in our modern world coloring our reactions to that.
(33:39):
And I'm talking about specifically bio terrorism. Oh yes, I mean,
I think most of our listeners can probably chime in
on this, because in the wake of nine eleven, there's
there's a lot of this is in the media. Anthrax
was being sent places, or at least in many cases, Uh,
you know, some sort of possible anthrax is being sent
(33:59):
places and we're freaking out. Uh. And at the heart
of it, in the distance, there there was a threat.
You know, there were some there. There, there was a
reality to it, but the echoes from that threat were
what was really affecting everybody, right, It was spreading through
people and creating this sort of math asteria reaction to
it in a way. And more specifically, in December two
(34:20):
thousand and five, there was a mysterious illness marked by headache, fever,
and faintness and numbness in the extremities. And this occurred
in thirteen school children in the shelf Of region of
czech Nia, and a lot of people believe the illness
was caused by a Russian chemical weapons attack. That was
the idea here um, because this is what precipitated this idea,
(34:42):
the rapid spread of similar symptoms throughout the region. Now,
medical efficient officials determined the episode was a case of
psycho somatic contagion here and it was brought on by
the anxiety over Russian military Russian military activities in the area.
So again, here's this, there's a threat level, an implied
(35:05):
threat level. Right, you have an aggressor and then all
of a sudden you have a reaction to this kind
of constant paper tiger, but not paper tiger, I mean,
you know. And this is exhibited in the school children
who probably are the most anxious about it. It is
almost a comparison to be made with phobias here, right,
because with phobias you have a realistic fear that just
(35:26):
gets bigger and bigger until it becomes unreasonable. And with
this you have fear that becomes bigger and bigger to
wear it becomes unreasonable, and then it can become so
unreasonable that it's it's affecting your experience of reality and
experiencing your your bodily experience of reality. Yeah, and I
should mention too that according to the Department of Homeland Security,
there was no evidence of the illnesses were caused by
(35:48):
a chemical weapon or weapons. So truly, in this case,
it was a kind of social contagion. Certainly, right now
as we record this, i Bola is still huge in
the news. Uh, not only in legitimate concerns about of course,
the the plight in Africa, but but also ebola here
(36:08):
on the home front. But while some of it is legitimate,
there's a lot of illegitimate fear out there, there's a
lot of fearmongering in the media and uh, and the
average individual has to figure out where they stand in
all this. So you know which which which radio signal
are they in a tune into. Yeah, there's the catastrophic thinking,
or there's the normal ty bias, or again there's the
(36:30):
middle just logical reaction. But here is a catastrophic thinking. Example.
Right here in Georgia, the state in which we reside,
there was a school who would not allow Rwandan students
to attend simply because their families we're from Rwanda. They
live here, of course, not in Rwanda. And moreover, Rwanda
(36:54):
is something like one two thousand miles removed from any
of the e bowl uh stricken countries in Africa. So
again here's an example of well, these people have relatives
from Africa, and that's yeah, but that's kind of like saying, um,
there's this outbreak in California, and we have some students
(37:17):
in Michigan whose families are from California, and so we're
not going to allow them because that's two that's a
two thousand mile difference there. So we're not gonna allow
these students with, you know, from family from California to attend. Well.
So again it starts as a legitimate concern and then
it blows into unrealistic proportions. Now, one thing that we
(37:38):
saw firsthand is this sort of Internet spread of social
contagion and mass. I don't know if you'd call it
mass hysteria quite man, but I can see the potential
from mass hysteria in it, which I think is where
it gets really interesting. So we did you know that
episode on holes, the fear of holes, phobia, phobia, and
we did a little video to go along with it,
(38:00):
and we did the podcast and I made a photoshop
and image, yes, with the Lotus ce pod on a
woman's back. It was great dastardly great. I've spent way
too much time on it, so I'm glad it worked
for people. Well, I mean, it definitely had a there
was a reaction. People went kind of nuts on our
Facebook feed, and they were a lot of people were
(38:20):
really upset. We had some people who unsubscribed. And again
this the idea behind holes, which was borne out actually
on Facebook accidentally as an experiment for us, was that
it's not a real phobia. It's just that people see
these photos, they see the reaction, and then there's a
kind of you know, social element to it in which
(38:43):
people say, oh, that's terrible, I'm about to throw up. Yeah. Yeah,
people have this visceral reaction made at least one person
commenting on either our share of it or the House
of Works Facebook share of it who said they were
physically anxious over it, like they were having trouble coming
down from a high level of anxiety after seeing the image.
And of course, my whole thing was you know, was
(39:04):
and continues to be. If you listen to our podcast,
we discussed plenty of troubling ideas, plenty of troubling concepts,
and the spread depressing details from history or just from
the human experience that you know, are far worse than uh,
you know, a seed pod photoshopped on to a woman's back.
But but but it's that image that really stirred people up.
(39:26):
I will say though, our video producer Tyler Clang had
said that after hours of editing that footage for holes,
that he became very sensitive to it. And here's a
guy who's really practical skeptical, so you know, but that's
long term exposure, so it's not quite mass hysteria. But
(39:46):
but again you could see where it could reach that point.
You do see this fearful idea taking hold of people
and spreading uh in a kind of meme format. Yeah,
because ultimately we're talking about here is threat a threat level? Yeah?
Okay that as the whole really a threat? No, no, right,
you're not going to fall into it. It's not going
(40:06):
to break out on your skin. And then you look
at something like say nut allergies or even vaccinations, and
you get the same sort of parallels of to what
degree is there actually a threat? Yeah, no, nut allergies
that I do want a preface here and say we're
by no means you know, putting down children with not allergies.
(40:26):
My son goes to a school and there's a kidney's
class that has not allergies. All the snacks you don't
have to be nut free, and that's you know, we
totally understand that not bucking that system at all. No,
because some people can have such severe reactions that it
can actually cause death. And we know this, and this
is why parents have become so I guess, exquisitely attuned
to the threat of nuts in schools and other places. Um,
(40:51):
So we're talking about like instances in which there have been,
say an evacuation of a bus because there was a
peanut on the floor rolling around, or you know, again
nut free schools or served only certain areas where kids
can eat their peanut butter sandwiches and no other kids
can come into contact with them. So you have someone
(41:11):
like Professor Nicholas Cristakis from Harvard Medical School, and he
says that there's no evidence that any of these extreme
restrictions work better than more circumscribed policies, or that they're
worth the money or disruptions that they create. That's what
he says. Yeah. Yeah. He points out that in the
United States alone, a hundred and fifty people die each
year from food allergies, and this is compared to the
(41:32):
fifty who die from bee stings, the hundred who die
from lightning strikes, and of course the forty five thousand
who die in motor vehicle accidents. Uh, and then the
ten thousand who are hospitalized for traumatic brain injury from
playing sports. But he says that these issues don't stir
up such extreme reactions. You know, for the most part,
nobody is saying, let's ban all sports because there are
(41:56):
traumatic brain injuries that occur. They're not saying, don't put
my child in a bus or a car, ever, because
that's super dangerous and they're going to die that way, right.
And Christakis is essentially saying that when it comes to
peanut allergies that there is quote a gross over reaction
to the magnitude of the threat and basically saying that
it's similar to mass psychogenic illness, that this idea of
(42:20):
you know, the threatened people's head has just become outsized. Huh. Yeah.
And he's definitely's definitely analyzing this from you know, almost
an economic standpoint, you know, But but it's it's an
interesting way to look at it. And again, I'm sure
parents with the children with not allergies or individuals either
with that allergies. Um, we'll have a very different take
(42:42):
on this. But indeed, and we are not going to
dip our toes into the anti vax pool, but we
can certainly say again, parallels exists there between. Um, you know,
what is the perceived threat as opposed to the actual threat.
You have a close knit community, that make community, maybe
in person, that community maybe on a message board somewhere,
(43:03):
and everyone's buying into a particular script of what needs
to be done and what the consequences to uh doing
or not doing it are. Yeah, and there's also this
you know, causation correlation thing too, right, So um, for instance,
then checking out right, there is this idea like, okay,
this there have been chemical weapons before, therefore that's probably
what happened here with these children, that's why they fell ill.
(43:25):
And so again, just we're seeing that cultural script, we're
seeing those stressors at play. And I can understand this
because there's probably nothing more stressful, honestly than being responsible
for another person's life, which is essentially what parents have
to do. That's their jobs. So you began to look
at all these different elements in a kid's environment and
(43:48):
trying to figure out, like, how do I keep this
kid alive best? Yeah? Yeah, it's like it's it's super
stressful and if you screwed up, you can go to jail.
You know that's the crazy part. Yeah you can. Yeah,
that's why I tell my son all the time. It's
like I it's like, I'm just trying to to not
have you die on my hands here. That's what That's
what I'm trying to do here at the playground today.
(44:08):
Is you not die? That is daddy's job. Please let
him do it. And I end up talking to myself
in the third person, sound like, how does that go
over with the other parents in the park. Oh, it
depends on the parents. Yeah some of them. Some of
them definitely get it. But they're all talking about themselves
in the third person. Did their toddler anyway? So that's true.
(44:28):
That's true. So there you have it. Mass Hysteria, the
Mad Gather And again I just I love this, this story,
the Mad Gas And I'm so astounded that nobody has
turned this into a horror franchise because it just in
my own mind, I've already like worked out all the
details about how this could this could be the next
big like slasher movie thing was just a few tweets
(44:48):
because the the story as it exists is creepy and weird,
but not necessarily straight up horror movie material. But you
start combining this with some of the a real terrifying,
uh you know, aspects of chemical weapons, and you, I mean,
you've got yourself a pretty scary story. Yeah. I feel
like there's tons of existential anks to plumb in that too. Yeah. Alright, um, guys,
(45:12):
we have other offerings for you, and you can find
these offerings of love at a little place called stuff
to Blow your Mind dot com. That's right. You will
find all the podcast episodes there, episodes we recorded there's
back in you know, primordial days. You will find on
that website stuff that's not on iTunes. Go check it out.
And also, especially with some more recent episodes, you know,
(45:34):
those individual pages are gonna have illustration, they're gonna have
links to related items on the site, external items making
real Apidude include all of that. Plus you'll find our videos,
we find blog posts. Will find pictures of what we
look like, as well as links out to our social
media account and if you guys have some ideas percolating
about mass hysteria, have you ever been involved in an
(45:55):
instance that sounds a lot like what we're describing. Please
do let us know about it, and you can do
so by sending us an email at blow the Mind
at how stuff works dot com for more on this
and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works
dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Flow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey everyone, welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie A. Dougmax.
And in today's episode, first of all, we want to
take you back in nineteen okay, to the sleepy town
(00:26):
of Mattune, Illinois. All right, a prowler is terrorizing the streets.
That's what everybody's talking about, right It's it's on the
lips of victims from thirteen area homes. It's in the newspaper,
and most of the accounts are breaking down like follows.
A man in black is creeping through the night. He's
(00:49):
prying open windows. Perhaps perhaps you're r window right now,
and he's probably open just enough to shove the nozzle
of a gas gun in Okay, then he pulled the
trigger and he pumped your home with some sort of
a noxious paralyzing chemical, a cloud of this stuff that just, uh,
that just makes you sprawl out on the kitchen floor,
(01:10):
and then you can't move. All you can do is
you can you can just listen to the sound of
hopefully the prowler, the mad gasser, running off into the night,
and not say coming and trying to open your door.
And this is the subjective reality of the residence of Mattoon, Illinois.
I like this for several reasons, and one of the
(01:30):
reasons is that it sounds like a potential news item
for the podcast Night Veale. It does sound very night
And I love that there's this idea that there's this
marauding mad gasser. And of course this idea all started
with someone named Alice Kearney who smelled a strange gas
smell and in fact, the whole community was smelling this
(01:53):
weird smell and uh, she soon said that her throat
and lips were burning and she'd and to panic when
her legs became paralyzed. And this story just rippled throughout
the community, made its way to news stories, and that's
when other people began to assume the symptoms for themselves. Yeah.
(02:15):
So suddenly, I mean, in no time at all, you
have thirteen area homes, twenty seven different alleged victims, all
claiming the same story, and the whole time there seems
to be there's no motive that seems to be at play.
These individuals were not uh you know, the homes were
not robbed. They weren't. They weren't in any other way
(02:36):
of you know, violated. Though you could argue that if
someone were to pump a noxious chemical into your house
one that didn't you know that this disables your body,
even temporarily, that that's that's quite a violation. But still
this it didn't seem to make sense. Why would someone
be doing this? What possible reason? And then inevitably the
authorities look into it and nothing turns up, like, there's
(03:00):
like no proof. They they bring in an expert in chemicals,
and none of the none of the symptoms seem to
match up with any potential uh with most potential chemical agents.
It just all kind of falls apart, and then in
no time at all, people kind of forget about it
and they move on with their lives. But there was
this this brief period in which this person, this creature,
(03:24):
this whatever was real, like even if the objective reality
didn't match up, the subjective reality definitely did. And it
turns out to be one of the finer examples that
we have of mass hysteria. And that is not the
only example, especially when it comes to mysterious odors that
people smell in different communities or other examples out there,
(03:44):
But the fact that there was this marauding mad gasser
in this example and that so many people fell ill
makes it a stand out yea. Even though this particular
story isn't one that just gets crazy amounts of attention,
which is one of the reasons I was drawn to
it because I never heard of it before and it's
just so weird and unique. But but individuals have um
(04:05):
investigated it more, and some people will make more of
a uh more of a play for a hoax element,
particularly with the newspapers. Uh. And then some people some
actually make an argument that there may have been like
one mad gassing incident or two or even three that
were legitimate, but in those cases still you would have
something that spiral out of control into mass hysteria. Be
(04:29):
it a hoax that people believed in, which of course
instantly brings to mind, say the orson Wells a war
the world's broadcast right, where we have something that is
a hoax of fiction that people buy into and start
reacting to. Or it's a situation where it happens one
time and then everyone assumes it's happening all the time,
(04:49):
uh and that everyone is in danger and for that
I simply uh invite you to turn on the evening
news and you're gonna dose with that. Yeah. And I
think what's interesting about any sort of potential threat is
that there are two extreme ways in which to assess
a threat, and one is, say, the normalcy bias. And
(05:09):
we've talked about this before. This is the tendency for
some people to say, oh, nothing is a miss, business
as usual. There's not a crazy guy spewing chemicals into
my house through a nozzle, because that just doesn't happen,
or even like that chemical smell nothing, probably from the
banana bread. I'm bacon, right, So that's just kind of
you know, the Ostrich effect, putting your head in the
ground and and not trying to face it. Now, the
(05:32):
polar opposite of that would be this kind of hysteria
in which you overreact and then a panic spreads among people.
And there are countless examples of this, but we thought
we would roll out a couple to try to give
people an idea of how throughout the ages and even
in modern times, there are cultural things at work here.
(05:53):
There's a sort of pattern behind all of this. You
know that the first when you mentioned instantly that brings
to mind emails that you get, generally from a concerned
family member who says, I heard that someone is going
around like the kids are like. The one that I
read most recently was that if you're an egg is
thrown at your windshield, it's because it's a gag and
(06:15):
what they want you to do is turn on your
windshield wipers, which will then me money up your your
windshields even more and then you have to pull over.
That's when the game gets you. So so it's it's
a ridiculous idea and it's totally there's no there's no
truth to it at all. The people buy into it,
and that because they think, well, you know which side
am I going to be on? Am I gonna be
the person that didn't believe that the crazy email from
(06:38):
my uncle? Uh? And and then end up getting attacked
by a gang? Or am I going to believe it
and survive? Right? So right, you can go to to
one of those extremes. You can do that normal cy bias,
you can go to hysteria or hey, you could go
in the middle and really assess the threat as it is.
But um, that being said, there are plenty of instances
in which people have kind of fallen prey to that hysteria. Indeed,
(07:02):
and one of the best is the dancing plague or
dancing epidemic of eighteen, a time in which there was
no CNC music factory, and yet everybody danced. Now it's
no factory to turn it out. But even though there
was no CFC music factory, Uh, they had some other
things going on. They had they had the plague. Yeah, yeah,
they had they had warfare, they had starvation, they had
(07:25):
just every every normal extreme poverty, along with any other
daily anks that we might have in our our modern
age of of comfort. Yeah. And it turns out that
this made just contribute to the right conditions for someone
to try to unload all that stress and have their
own one woman street party. Right they started dancing. Firsts
(07:48):
it's one gal dancing right than somebody else. Then it's
it's two, then it's three, and it just escalates until
it's it's an epidemic. It's mania. People are dancing in
the street eats for seemingly no reason. And uh and
and and we've spent the rest of history trying to
explain why. I mean, there's been various theories that it
(08:09):
was that it was poisoning, that it was some sort
of toxicity or illness, but those don't really really actually
level out all that well. And John Waller, history professor
at Michigan State University UM, he argues that we're really
looking at a great classic case of math hysteria. And
key of all of this is to realize that this
(08:29):
didn't come out of nowhere. It's not. There was a
pre existing script for the dancing um to a large extent,
and that's because the dancing plagues, according to John Waller,
were a calling card of St. Vitus, an early Christian
martyr venerated with dance parties. So the idea is already
in the in the in everyone's heads, and then one
(08:50):
person starts that everyone else follows in with it. So
communities stress community and then an existing script for their behavior. Yeah,
and it was called the dancing Plague of Strasburg because
it kind of was like a plague in the sense
that it began to spread throughout the community, but not
(09:10):
only that people were dancing to their deaths. Now, that
wasn't too hard given the circumstances, because you know, one
person might be riddled with disease, another person was starving
to death, but they were going out dancing. Yeah, well,
that's a heck of a way to go. Why not
you're gonna you're gonna topple over into the gut or anyway,
why not do it after a lengthy about of dancing,
(09:32):
just tork out your existence. Yeah, And of course another
element to this too is the idea that that there
was there was a psychosomatic element here too, write that
that not only was it affecting behavior, but it was
affecting at least your perception of your your body the
way then manifesting in symptoms of the body. And we'll
(09:52):
get into that more as we go forward. Yeah, Now,
fast forward a bit. You've got the Salem which trials,
and you have what is more of a kind of
moral mas hysteria. And we're talking about, of course, the
group of girls who seemed to be exhibiting these demonic signs.
(10:14):
And in some cases, uh, these girls were wrongly convicted
of witchcraft. In other cases, there was a kind of
stress reaction to these moral underpinnings among the girls in
which they were exhibiting tick like behavior. And important here
is to is to again keep in mind stressful situation,
(10:36):
stressful environment and young people and a pre existing script,
because if you've listened to our past episode Hammer of
the Witches, where we went into depth about witchcraft culture
and the paranoia about witchcraft, there was very much there
was a strong script in place for witchcraft and manifestations
(10:58):
of witchcraft within a community, so they could easily draw
on that and everyone I knew what it was supposed
to be. Well, And I was just thinking about the
spiral of silence the last episode that we recorded in
this idea that there is a kind of silence that
settles upon the minority when the majority speaks out very strongly.
In this case, you have the majority those in power
(11:19):
are saying that there is witchcraft in this town. This
is going on, and authority people in the church, yeah,
you know, particularly who are saying that yes, which not
only is witchcraft a threat, but is like the big
threat today, Yeah, among our girls, and we know what's happening.
So in this weird way, it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
I'm sure for some of these girls who say, well,
(11:40):
there they say that the Satan is inhabiting us, and
maybe I'm feeling Satan inhabiting myself right now. And that's
why I'm shuddering or I'm talking in voices or exhibiting
these these really aggressive ticks. All right, fast, fard once more.
The two thousand six, two thousand seven, a mysterious illness
begins to affect girls at a boarding school in Choco, Mexico,
(12:02):
that's near Mexico City. The school, which is run by
Roman Catholic nuns, is one of ten in Asian Latin
America operated by a charity called World Villages for Children
in Asia. The girls, aged twelve and seventeen began to
show strange symptoms that such as difficulty walking, fever, nausea
and UH. After the girl and this was after a
(12:24):
girl's returned from a ten day Christmas break, the ills,
this illness spreads even more so eventually six hundred out
of the thirty d girls at the school showed these symptoms.
And you know, the doctors are looking into it, and
no one can figure out what exactly going on. You know,
you're looking for that underlying illness, that underlying environmental cause
even and nothing is popping up. So after conducting numerous
(12:46):
test uh surveying the facility interviewing folks trying to get
to the heart of it. Doctors decided that it was
it was all a matter of mass psychogenic disorder, which
we also call collective sterea, mass psycho somatic reaction, and
of course mass hysteria. There's not one term that we
(13:06):
end up using because vs M hasn't hasn't ruled on
a a P style doesn't have have one that they like,
so UH for all intens and purposes, mass hysteric. So
going back to the girls at the boarding school, consider
that these kind of symptoms spread and began after they
returned from Christmas break, because this is pretty key because
(13:29):
it turns out that this is a really highly structured environment,
very disciplined from regimented, and the correspondence and interaction with
parents is sparse. Their children see their parents no more
than three times a year, and these kids are returning
from having just spent time with their families, and it
kind of stress settles in again in this highly regiment regimented,
(13:51):
almost you know, foreign environment to them, the opposite of
what you would think of as a family supportive UH structure,
And that explains a lot of the reasons why this
These kids were reacting the way that they were, and
why it kind of spread in that manner um. Now,
I wanted to mention two quick outliers here in the
(14:14):
mass hysteria village. One is Pokemon. A strange and uh
seemingly inexplicable outbreak of bizarre behavior struck Japan in when
thousands of Japanese school children experienced frightening seizures after watching
an episode of Pokemon, and intense flashes of light during
(14:36):
the show triggered relatively harmless and brief seizures, nausea, and headaches.
And when doctors diagnosed some of the children with a
rare pre existing condition called photo sensitive epilepsy, which is
brought on by all this flashing lights, and they figured
out that you know, indeed, there was like, you know,
a couple of kids that were reacting to the show,
(14:57):
but the other kids there reacted, We're just simply exhibiting
signs of mass hysteria because they had heard about the
other kids who were having seizures. So since they were
copying those symptoms, but but in a more meaningful way almost,
I mean, they were kind of they were actually participating
in it. Yeah, And if you think about Pokemon and
(15:20):
it being such a strong cultural signifier, then it kind
of follows that, oh wow, if those kids had such
a reaction to it, maybe I would because it's there's
this is really an important cultural signifier. Well you think
you think back to Beatlemania, right, and you see those
that the footage of the girls just going completely crazy,
like screaming, mad house crazy over the Beatles, you know,
(15:41):
which is it can be difficult to understand, right because
I mean, the things that we love in our lives
we don't go that crazy for, or at least I
don't so. But but if you think of it from
that point of view, that like, like you know, one
one fan starts acting that way, then another and then another,
and then that is the that is the script for
how to react, and you just jump in, you join it.
(16:03):
It's it's parts peer pressure, it's part fitting in with
the crowd, but then it has these psychosomatic aspects as well. Yeah,
apparently the Beatles at some point um at the top
of their popularity, when when you know, girls were swooning
and painting and shouting and screaming. They said that it
became absolutely unbearable to perform because they couldn't even hear
(16:25):
their instruments, so they and what they were saying is
that they had become a cultural phenomenon, but not for
themselves or their artistry. And in fact, their musicianship was
all but you know, swept aside in this sea of
scream So it became about the sea of screams rather
than them. Huh. You know, I also can't help but
think about the faith based healing uh situations and uh
(16:50):
and particularly one. I don't know if I've mentioned this
before in the podcast, but when I was in late
high school early college, went with a friend to check
out a jerk in Huntsville, Alabama, and the they were
doing this thing where people would be healed by the pastor,
but they would they would fall to the ground and
they would laugh hysterically and they would roll around laughing,
(17:12):
and then they would have to bring around blankets to
put over the females because they addresses on and you know,
it's like a modesty blanket while you roll around with
the Holy Spirit rolling through you and making you laugh hysterically.
And uh. You know, I tried to figure out that
that out for a long time. But when you start
looking at it from the guise of mass hysteria. It
makes a lot more sense. Yeah, and it's kind of
(17:33):
speaking in tongues to the same thing is at work.
You're part of this thing, whatever it is you're engaging
in the times, in the ritual. In a ritual, as
we've discussed before, is incredibly powerful. Now, imagine being a
lonely nun in eighteen forty four. You're in a French
uh convent and I don't know, you just feel like,
(17:53):
you know, I like a cat. And all of a
sudden you have your fellow nuns me O I with
you every day at a certain time, for several hours together,
so much so that the neighbors began complaining that this
cavalcade of nuns me owing is driving them insane. And
(18:14):
here you have another lovely little case of mass hysteria,
and you have those cultural underpinnings present. In other words,
you talked about the story before, right. The story here
is that Satan sometimes can take the form of animals,
particularly cat. Right, So maybe Satan entered you and began
(18:37):
meowing like a cat so that you could let others
know that you are now in league with Satan and
you need help, you know, you think Satan would be
more creative when he took over a nunnery. I feel like, yeah,
I feel like the Italian films the nineties, seventies and
eighties really had more imaginative vision of this sort of thing.
But yeah, well, I mean, you know that we're talking
(18:57):
about some very basic folkloreic totems here, like cats, and
I mean we're again stress and anxiety and almost kind
of a release valve. Like you think of it as
the like the crack and that regimented society, and you know,
maybe there's not room for a full blown goat worshiping release,
but there's just enough room for me owing to be
the thing, and then it just catches like well, you know,
(19:19):
in one In some ways, it's probably a lot more
acceptable to be possessed by Satan and start me owing
like a cat rather than just being like this place
is driving me crazy. You're screaming and acting out, yeah,
because then there's something really wrong with you. But if
it's Satan, just kind of like it's like getting your
email account hacked, right, you just have to say, all right, hey, everybody,
(19:40):
if you've got a weird email from me yesterday, just
disregarded I was hacked by Satan. Right, Satan as a
sacrificial goat in the form of a cat. Yes. Um.
If you guys want more like full on none mass
hysteria and other tales, make sure to check out our
sister podcast If Mom never told you They're crazy? No, no,
they're not actually hysterical. They're not, And they are hysterical,
(20:03):
but not in that hysteria way. But their episode is
called the Mysterious Case of Convulsive Cheerleaders and they look
a little bit more into the female Factor. All Right,
we're gonna take a quick break and when we get back,
we're going to talk more about what mass tripogenic filmness is.
(20:29):
All right, we're back. We're talking about mass hysteria. We've
we've run through a number of different encounters from crazy
guys with gas guns to me owing nuns. And you know,
the the amazing thing about the crazy thing about it
is that with all of these cases, on the surface level,
you have two crazy stories to choose from. Is because
(20:51):
on one level, meowing nuns, crazy people with gas guns,
those are crazy ideas and you don't want to live
in a world where they're crazy gas gun wielding maniacs
and me owing nuns possessed by the devil, Like that's
that's a crazy world. But on the other hand, you're
talking about a world in which you can catch this
(21:13):
kind of crazy, where there's the you'll have a situation
where even if the objective reality doesn't match up, the
subjective reality becomes We're possessed by the devil. And people
were buying into this behavior. People are are are feeling
things in their body and experiencing things at least in
their memory and not in the perception of reality, that
are starkly different from what's really going on. So where
(21:38):
it becomes helpful is to really break down mass hysteria
and and this and and sort of take a few
different steps to get there, to realize that this isn't
really a crazy exception to our experience of reality, but
just a step to the left. Yeah, because you make
a good point. You have these extreme examples, but when
you really start to look at mass hysteria, it's a
(21:58):
lot more subtle than you think, and it actually permeates
our culture in less flamboyant ways. Like the best way
to start, really, I think, is to talk about the
psychosomatic aspects here, like the idea that you can just
thinking something, believing something, buying into it with your mind
can have manifestations in your body which can sound a
(22:20):
little hippie dippie perhaps or more magical on the surface
of things, except it's been tested out. And one of
the best examples of this is the cebo effect, but
also the no no cebo effect, which are basically two
different shades of the same thing. Yeah, it's essentially expecting
a certain outcome and that could be a positive outcome
(22:41):
or it could be a negative outcome. And we've seen
this and rafts of studies that have to do usually
with a drug that's being tested out. Right, there's a
laundry list of negative effects that someone might experience. They're
given the sugar pill and lo and behold, they experience
heart palpitations or you know, anxiety depressions, so on and
(23:02):
so forth, because the expectation is there. Yeah, it's the
same mechanism that allows the individual who receives the sugar
pill to feel revitalized and healed. So with both cases,
there is a there's there's a physical manifestation of what's
going on. You know, it's not to the effect where
like a leg is falling off or anything like that.
But but it's the thing that you have hold in
(23:23):
your mind, you're also holding in your body. Yeah, so
it's kind of a short walk from there to say,
being in a community where there is a strange odor
in the air and someone has seems to have fallen
ill because of it, and then assuming those symptoms for
yourself because no cebo effect is essentially at play. Yeah,
(23:45):
I mean, just think about the conversion disorder discus stations
to experience neurological symptoms such as numbness, blindness, paralysis, or
fits without any define herble biological cause. And again tying
in with what we've talked about previously, this often arises
out of stress or inner conflict, with increased susceptibility of
the individual has a history of medical or mental health problems. Okay,
(24:08):
so so we so here we see kind of mass
hysteria patient zero in a sense, you know, you can
look at it that way. Yeah, it's an extreme example
of this right again, though it follows form, and that
form is basically you have that cultural script, you have
that stressor and then you have that expectation of what
(24:29):
you think should happen or might happen, and hey, all
of a sudden, you have a community or a group
of people who are experiencing all these terrible things. Yeah.
And so indeed, we're finally at mass hysteria where people
are actually catching or at least acquiring the symptoms of
another person or of multiple other people. And again, this
(24:51):
is generally taking place in a close knits society under stress,
with some sort of predetermined script, uh that that can
explain what's happening. Yeah, And when we talk about this
kind of contagion, it's worth bringing up that this social
contagion seems to affect seems to affect more females than males,
or at least as reported in that way. So a
(25:12):
lot has been written about this topic. We're not going
to dive into it too deeply because there's a lot
of gender issues to take into a kind of a
lot of historical issues to take into account and and
ultimately it's going to break down community to community community. Yeah.
But I mean, one of things you could say is
that we know culturally that it is, uh, it's far
more accepted for women to express their feelings than men,
(25:35):
So that could be one thing at play. Um, here's
something that's from Ruth Graham, she writes for Slate magazine.
She said symptoms often start with older girls or women
and spread to younger or lower status girls. And she says,
as girlhood guardian Caitlin Flanagan put in New York Times,
it is cheerleaders and not the linebackers who come down
(25:58):
with ticks and stuttering. But as research has shown, is
also the cheerleaders and not the math club girls who
are likely to spread hysteria. What she's getting at is
that all of a sudden, it seems like a sort
of popular girls thing to happen, and it becomes part
of that whole model that we've talked about with teens
in this idea of feeling included and not excluded from
(26:22):
their peers. So you can see how this is working
at that level as we've discussed in the past. Yeah,
it's um. It's vital at that age because you're you've
evolved as an organism to fit in at you know,
with with potentially lethal consequences if you don't. You have
to become a member of a community because you have
this genetic mission you have to carry out, and you
have to carry that out within a community, and that
(26:43):
that's the only way you're gonna survive, and so everything
in your body and your hormones is pushing you towards
that well. And speaking of genetic mission, this ties in
really nicely to the next example of mass hysteria. And
it's a male centric example. And by the way, there
are plenty of just male centric ones in which this.
You know, certain hysterias affected only men, and this one,
(27:06):
this one is called the penis snatching panic. This is
the idea that one's uh penis will be taken away
in the night, or that it will withdraw into the body,
lost to you forever. Yeah. Louisa Lombard, an anthropologist at
the University of California at Berkeley, described visiting a small
town in the Central African Republic where she encountered two
(27:30):
men who claimed that their penises had been stolen. And
it seems that the day before, a traveler visiting the
town had shaken hands with a t vendor who immediately
claimed that he felt a shock and since that his
penis had shrunk, and then he cried out in alarm,
and the crowd gathered, and then the hysteria began to spread,
(27:50):
and other men began to say, my penis shrunk too.
You know, I'm just now remembering from when we did
the episode Hammer of the Witches, when went into the
witch after mania in Europe, Uh, that that there was
a whole chapter devoted to that in the Western tradition
of people uh either afraid or convinced that a witch
(28:10):
may have stolen or otherwise in any way messed with
their penis in the night. Yeah. No, nobody wants their
penis to be messed with, certainly stolen by witches. Yeah. Indeed,
so that's the show that that females do not have
a monopoly on mass hysteria, that that men definitely engage in,
and there are models of it that are male exclusive. Yeah,
(28:32):
and again that's just one example. But a lot of
this has to do with not just how we tell
the stories of our culture and we engage in them,
but also our memories of the events. Yeah. That's especially
key when you're talking about stuff like the mad Gaster,
where so much of it is is, you know, after
the fact, people are being interviewed and saying, what happened,
(28:53):
We'll tell me about it. Tell me the story of
this thing that you said occurred, and and then we're
engaging with our memory, which, as we've discussed before, is
far from a perfect engine. There. In fact, according to
u to Daniel Shackter, author of the Seven Sins of Memory,
How the Mind Forgets and Remembers, there are, as the
title suggests, seven keys ways that we screw up our memories.
(29:16):
That our memories are just flawed either from the get
go or we end up screwing them up when we
recall them. Because if you remember from the metaphor we
always return to, is that a memory is made out
of play, not stone. Every time you get it out
of the drawer to look at it, you're getting your
fingers all over it, and you're changing the form of
it maybe a little, maybe a lot before you put
it back in. I certainly refer back to that episode
(29:39):
more on that. I'll be sure to include a link
to that episode in the landing page at stuff that
Your Mind dot Com for this episode. But just to
run through the seven Sins of Memory real quick. There's um,
there's transience. This is the weakening or loss of memory
over time. That the mad Gaster thing happened last week. Uh,
it's been a week. I don't have his firm memory
of maybe it's been a year, so your your memory
(30:01):
fades over time obviously. Uh. Then there's absent mindedness, and
this is at tension in memory. You know, you're trying
to recall the details of what happened. And if you're
you were legitimately stressed, you were on the floor, uh,
and you didn't feel you could move your legs, maybe
your your memory of the finer details isn't all that great.
There's blocking attempted and this is when you're in attempting
(30:21):
to recall tidbits of memory and uh, and you you
can't recall that face, you can't recall that name. We've
all been there before. There's misattribution. This is where we
recall on authentic memory, but aspects of it are misattributed. Um.
And then there's suggestibility, the power of suggestion. This has
been born out in a number of studies, particularly aimed
(30:42):
at law enforcement. You know, you you suggest that this
individual in the lineup was the perpetrator, and then you can,
you know, you can actually convince the victim that that's
who it was. Bias is a huge effectory Two, you
already have a bias uh in this particular question. That's
going to color the memory. And then finally you have persistence.
(31:02):
This is the failure of the memory system involving unwanted
recall of information that's disturbing. Yeah, And so we bring
this up particularly in the context of something like the
Mad Gasser, in which we have this community that's reacting
to this smell right there on high alert and they
begin to misremember details of what's happening at that time,
(31:25):
but they misremember them in a way that it fits
into bias since adjustability right pre pre existing script, I mean,
that's that's the bias though, right there. Yeah, And we've
talked about this before, but it turns out that the
more freighted with emotion a situation or memory is, the
less reliable your memory is. And we've talked about this
(31:48):
before and the non eleven studies is that, you know,
the more emotionally charged someone is, um, just the the
less they can actually recall those events or details. So
if you think about situations like the Mad Gas or
really any of the other examples, UM, you can see
how people begin to piece things together to fit that narrative.
(32:10):
So the narrative could be informing psycho somatic experiences which
then that's that's heightening the experience and making the memory
more malleable to influence by the re existing script. And
again go back to Placebo Nacebo. You see this at
play and the most I don't know, I guess you
(32:33):
could say, uh wrote ways. And yet here here it
is bearing out this information that it's just the idea
or even the expectation that can really even color or
physical symptoms that we exhibit. This all brings to mind
hallucinations as well, because like the real take home from
looking at at hallucinations is that the the science of hallucinations,
(32:56):
the reality of hallucinations really shows that our perception of
reality itself is a kind of hallucination. So when you
look at the flaws of memory and the and the
and the way the way that the mas hysteria can
take uh can take hold of a community, Uh, it's
less about how crazy these people are, but how inherently
flawed and susceptible to this kind of outbreak. All of
(33:18):
our minds are, all of our communities are, And if
you think about it this way, um, mass hysteria sort
of like the based stock of the mass hysteria soup
is what is the threat level to us. And that's
where we can see sort of the things that are
going on in our modern world coloring our reactions to that.
(33:39):
And I'm talking about specifically bio terrorism. Oh yes, I mean,
I think most of our listeners can probably chime in
on this, because in the wake of nine eleven, there's
there's a lot of this is in the media. Anthrax
was being sent places, or at least in many cases, Uh,
you know, some sort of possible anthrax is being sent
(33:59):
places and we're freaking out. Uh. And at the heart
of it, in the distance, there there was a threat.
You know, there were some there. There, there was a
reality to it, but the echoes from that threat were
what was really affecting everybody, right, It was spreading through
people and creating this sort of math asteria reaction to
it in a way. And more specifically, in December two
(34:20):
thousand and five, there was a mysterious illness marked by headache, fever,
and faintness and numbness in the extremities. And this occurred
in thirteen school children in the shelf Of region of
czech Nia, and a lot of people believe the illness
was caused by a Russian chemical weapons attack. That was
the idea here um, because this is what precipitated this idea,
(34:42):
the rapid spread of similar symptoms throughout the region. Now,
medical efficient officials determined the episode was a case of
psycho somatic contagion here and it was brought on by
the anxiety over Russian military Russian military activities in the area.
So again, here's this, there's a threat level, an implied
(35:05):
threat level. Right, you have an aggressor and then all
of a sudden you have a reaction to this kind
of constant paper tiger, but not paper tiger, I mean,
you know. And this is exhibited in the school children
who probably are the most anxious about it. It is
almost a comparison to be made with phobias here, right,
because with phobias you have a realistic fear that just
(35:26):
gets bigger and bigger until it becomes unreasonable. And with
this you have fear that becomes bigger and bigger to
wear it becomes unreasonable, and then it can become so
unreasonable that it's it's affecting your experience of reality and
experiencing your your bodily experience of reality. Yeah, and I
should mention too that according to the Department of Homeland Security,
there was no evidence of the illnesses were caused by
(35:48):
a chemical weapon or weapons. So truly, in this case,
it was a kind of social contagion. Certainly, right now
as we record this, i Bola is still huge in
the news. Uh, not only in legitimate concerns about of course,
the the plight in Africa, but but also ebola here
(36:08):
on the home front. But while some of it is legitimate,
there's a lot of illegitimate fear out there, there's a
lot of fearmongering in the media and uh, and the
average individual has to figure out where they stand in
all this. So you know which which which radio signal
are they in a tune into. Yeah, there's the catastrophic thinking,
or there's the normal ty bias, or again there's the
(36:30):
middle just logical reaction. But here is a catastrophic thinking. Example.
Right here in Georgia, the state in which we reside,
there was a school who would not allow Rwandan students
to attend simply because their families we're from Rwanda. They
live here, of course, not in Rwanda. And moreover, Rwanda
(36:54):
is something like one two thousand miles removed from any
of the e bowl uh stricken countries in Africa. So
again here's an example of well, these people have relatives
from Africa, and that's yeah, but that's kind of like saying, um,
there's this outbreak in California, and we have some students
(37:17):
in Michigan whose families are from California, and so we're
not going to allow them because that's two that's a
two thousand mile difference there. So we're not gonna allow
these students with, you know, from family from California to attend. Well.
So again it starts as a legitimate concern and then
it blows into unrealistic proportions. Now, one thing that we
(37:38):
saw firsthand is this sort of Internet spread of social
contagion and mass. I don't know if you'd call it
mass hysteria quite man, but I can see the potential
from mass hysteria in it, which I think is where
it gets really interesting. So we did you know that
episode on holes, the fear of holes, phobia, phobia, and
we did a little video to go along with it,
(38:00):
and we did the podcast and I made a photoshop
and image, yes, with the Lotus ce pod on a
woman's back. It was great dastardly great. I've spent way
too much time on it, so I'm glad it worked
for people. Well, I mean, it definitely had a there
was a reaction. People went kind of nuts on our
Facebook feed, and they were a lot of people were
(38:20):
really upset. We had some people who unsubscribed. And again
this the idea behind holes, which was borne out actually
on Facebook accidentally as an experiment for us, was that
it's not a real phobia. It's just that people see
these photos, they see the reaction, and then there's a
kind of you know, social element to it in which
(38:43):
people say, oh, that's terrible, I'm about to throw up. Yeah. Yeah,
people have this visceral reaction made at least one person
commenting on either our share of it or the House
of Works Facebook share of it who said they were
physically anxious over it, like they were having trouble coming
down from a high level of anxiety after seeing the image.
And of course, my whole thing was you know, was
(39:04):
and continues to be. If you listen to our podcast,
we discussed plenty of troubling ideas, plenty of troubling concepts,
and the spread depressing details from history or just from
the human experience that you know, are far worse than uh,
you know, a seed pod photoshopped on to a woman's back.
But but but it's that image that really stirred people up.
(39:26):
I will say though, our video producer Tyler Clang had
said that after hours of editing that footage for holes,
that he became very sensitive to it. And here's a
guy who's really practical skeptical, so you know, but that's
long term exposure, so it's not quite mass hysteria. But
(39:46):
but again you could see where it could reach that point.
You do see this fearful idea taking hold of people
and spreading uh in a kind of meme format. Yeah,
because ultimately we're talking about here is threat a threat level? Yeah?
Okay that as the whole really a threat? No, no, right,
you're not going to fall into it. It's not going
(40:06):
to break out on your skin. And then you look
at something like say nut allergies or even vaccinations, and
you get the same sort of parallels of to what
degree is there actually a threat? Yeah, no, nut allergies
that I do want a preface here and say we're
by no means you know, putting down children with not allergies.
(40:26):
My son goes to a school and there's a kidney's
class that has not allergies. All the snacks you don't
have to be nut free, and that's you know, we
totally understand that not bucking that system at all. No,
because some people can have such severe reactions that it
can actually cause death. And we know this, and this
is why parents have become so I guess, exquisitely attuned
to the threat of nuts in schools and other places. Um,
(40:51):
So we're talking about like instances in which there have been,
say an evacuation of a bus because there was a
peanut on the floor rolling around, or you know, again
nut free schools or served only certain areas where kids
can eat their peanut butter sandwiches and no other kids
can come into contact with them. So you have someone
(41:11):
like Professor Nicholas Cristakis from Harvard Medical School, and he
says that there's no evidence that any of these extreme
restrictions work better than more circumscribed policies, or that they're
worth the money or disruptions that they create. That's what
he says. Yeah. Yeah. He points out that in the
United States alone, a hundred and fifty people die each
year from food allergies, and this is compared to the
(41:32):
fifty who die from bee stings, the hundred who die
from lightning strikes, and of course the forty five thousand
who die in motor vehicle accidents. Uh, and then the
ten thousand who are hospitalized for traumatic brain injury from
playing sports. But he says that these issues don't stir
up such extreme reactions. You know, for the most part,
nobody is saying, let's ban all sports because there are
(41:56):
traumatic brain injuries that occur. They're not saying, don't put
my child in a bus or a car, ever, because
that's super dangerous and they're going to die that way, right.
And Christakis is essentially saying that when it comes to
peanut allergies that there is quote a gross over reaction
to the magnitude of the threat and basically saying that
it's similar to mass psychogenic illness, that this idea of
(42:20):
you know, the threatened people's head has just become outsized. Huh. Yeah.
And he's definitely's definitely analyzing this from you know, almost
an economic standpoint, you know, But but it's it's an
interesting way to look at it. And again, I'm sure
parents with the children with not allergies or individuals either
with that allergies. Um, we'll have a very different take
(42:42):
on this. But indeed, and we are not going to
dip our toes into the anti vax pool, but we
can certainly say again, parallels exists there between. Um, you know,
what is the perceived threat as opposed to the actual threat.
You have a close knit community, that make community, maybe
in person, that community maybe on a message board somewhere,
(43:03):
and everyone's buying into a particular script of what needs
to be done and what the consequences to uh doing
or not doing it are. Yeah, and there's also this
you know, causation correlation thing too, right, So um, for instance,
then checking out right, there is this idea like, okay,
this there have been chemical weapons before, therefore that's probably
what happened here with these children, that's why they fell ill.
(43:25):
And so again, just we're seeing that cultural script, we're
seeing those stressors at play. And I can understand this
because there's probably nothing more stressful, honestly than being responsible
for another person's life, which is essentially what parents have
to do. That's their jobs. So you began to look
at all these different elements in a kid's environment and
(43:48):
trying to figure out, like, how do I keep this
kid alive best? Yeah? Yeah, it's like it's it's super
stressful and if you screwed up, you can go to jail.
You know that's the crazy part. Yeah you can. Yeah,
that's why I tell my son all the time. It's
like I it's like, I'm just trying to to not
have you die on my hands here. That's what That's
what I'm trying to do here at the playground today.
(44:08):
Is you not die? That is daddy's job. Please let
him do it. And I end up talking to myself
in the third person, sound like, how does that go
over with the other parents in the park. Oh, it
depends on the parents. Yeah some of them. Some of
them definitely get it. But they're all talking about themselves
in the third person. Did their toddler anyway? So that's true.
(44:28):
That's true. So there you have it. Mass Hysteria, the
Mad Gather And again I just I love this, this story,
the Mad Gas And I'm so astounded that nobody has
turned this into a horror franchise because it just in
my own mind, I've already like worked out all the
details about how this could this could be the next
big like slasher movie thing was just a few tweets
(44:48):
because the the story as it exists is creepy and weird,
but not necessarily straight up horror movie material. But you
start combining this with some of the a real terrifying,
uh you know, aspects of chemical weapons, and you, I mean,
you've got yourself a pretty scary story. Yeah. I feel
like there's tons of existential anks to plumb in that too. Yeah. Alright, um, guys,
(45:12):
we have other offerings for you, and you can find
these offerings of love at a little place called stuff
to Blow your Mind dot com. That's right. You will
find all the podcast episodes there, episodes we recorded there's
back in you know, primordial days. You will find on
that website stuff that's not on iTunes. Go check it out.
And also, especially with some more recent episodes, you know,
(45:34):
those individual pages are gonna have illustration, they're gonna have
links to related items on the site, external items making
real Apidude include all of that. Plus you'll find our videos,
we find blog posts. Will find pictures of what we
look like, as well as links out to our social
media account and if you guys have some ideas percolating
about mass hysteria, have you ever been involved in an
(45:55):
instance that sounds a lot like what we're describing. Please
do let us know about it, and you can do
so by sending us an email at blow the Mind
at how stuff works dot com for more on this
and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works
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