August 6, 2013 • 38 mins
What's the real science behind beds of nails, sword swallowing and headless women? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Julie strip away the carnie veneer and get right to the facts.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to go your mind.
My name is Robert Lamb, and welcome to the sadness
that is the circus side show. Sadness looking with a
lot of sadness, and yeah, it's general sadness to the circus,
(00:26):
to the circus side show, I mean just to the
straight up circus, the main attraction, as opposed to what
exists in its shadows, the circus itself. You have, like,
we have a lot of of animals that have been
taken from their natural habitat and forced to perform inside
of a dark tint for for locals so they can
cheer and throw a popcorn at them. You have clowns
(00:47):
prancing around, uh and engaging in various antics, um, some
of which may be arguably perverse. You have you have singing,
you have dancing, you have music, and then you walk
outside and in the shadow of the tent there you
have the side show. And that's where we encounter a
number of things that are either um, outright disturbing or
(01:10):
more subtly disturbing. Well, see that's the adult perspective. If
you'll come with me to my eight year old self.
Then you will be delighted and amazed by all of this,
this rich symbolism present not just at the circus, but
in the Carnie side show, right, because here the mysteries
are revealed in front of your very eyes and the
(01:33):
oddities of life, and you begin to question what is reality? Yes, yeah, definitely,
I mean there's a lot of it it's about there's
a lot of magic and law involved, a lot of illusion,
and then a lot of outright examples of nature gune
a little strange, and then that forces you to to a question, well,
what is normal? What is what is what is wrong
with me? Personally? Because I'm paying to see this, All
(01:56):
of these factors come into play, and we are going
to start out while we look at the secrets of
the side shows more in uh in history here, because really,
if you look at a current side show today, it's
nothing like it was in the past. As you say,
it was very dark terrain here, very dark psychological stuff
that people were taking their families to. Yeah, and you know,
(02:19):
there's still still a lot of love for it, a
lot of nostalgia for it. And you can you can,
certainly you can go to Coney Island and enjoy some
of that there and then at various other points across
the United States. But this was a time, you know,
ni nineteen forties, nineteen fifties, where people didn't really have
the understanding, um that we do now of the natural
loss of science, let's say, and the fact that there
(02:41):
couldn't maybe be a Fiji mermaid, that skeleton of Fiji
mermaid that proved that mermaids do exist, because sometimes this
was part and parcel. Everybody had the more or less
the basic understanding of the natural world as that the
common YouTube commenter basically perhaps perhaps it's very possible, but
today we are We're definitely going to lift the canvas
(03:02):
tent flap, look inside and see what's going on here.
And to really understand that, you do need to kind
of get into the world of the Carnie and the
side show more specifically in something called ten in one
and this is part of the circus that contained usually
ten different side shows in one tent. Well, I don't
(03:24):
know if it was one price, but I do understand
from what I've read that you had a guide taking
you through the sort of hall of horrors or mysteries.
Um letting you know about all these fantastic things that
exist in the world. Yeah, and then sometimes at the
end there's an extra little bit, sort of a sort
of an under the table bit for for the discerning
(03:45):
gentleman in the audience. You're talking about some sort of
like sexy lady thing. Sometimes it was sexy lady thing,
but sometimes it was simply a stuff that was like
a little grimmer or for instance, it was or sometimes
it was just pickled pugs were of course, you know
various um uh, still births and weird fetuses of animals
that are preserved and and uh, then you got at
(04:06):
sometimes that it would be that, and sometimes that would
factor into an earlier part of the show. Yeah, and
the Fiji Mermaid, which I had mentioned the bones of
this supposed mermaid that existed. Um but yeah, there are
a bunch of different oddities. They had some that were
really kind of cheesy and and not to illusion heavy,
Like there was a woman who's head stuck out of
this board spider web, making it look as though she
(04:30):
was a human spider and it's very obvious that our
head is just sticking through something like it sounds like
they were even doing any makeup on her human head.
It was just straight up. Look it's a spider with
a human head on it. And then there's the sword swallower,
which is a real thing, right, I mean, people are
actually pulling off this trick, and we'll talk more about
that later, but all of this stuff is mixed in
(04:50):
so that you do have some real tricks being pulled off,
some some real like hey, we're pushing the edges of
what's possible with our physiology, along with just pure like bunk.
It reminds me a lot of the Last Unicorn. You've
seen the Last Unicorn, right, perhaps even read it. I've
seen ten minutes. You've seen ten minutes of the Last Unicorn. Well, no,
(05:13):
I tried to show my daughter. She's four years old,
supersensitive to she saw danger of coming and we had
to turn it off. It is it's I mean, it's
really good, but yeah, maybe she's not ready for it
just yet. But there's a scene in it where the
unicorn is taken in by this this evil witch and
she has this side show these various carts with cages
(05:33):
and inside appears to be a different magical creature in
each one, like a mantic core and a dragon etcetera.
But the thing is that most of these cages are
filled with just normal animals that she's cast a spell on,
and the spell makes them seem to be like the
the manticor is not a manticord. It's just a broken
down old lion, but the spell makes it seem like
(05:55):
something amazing and unreal. Uh. One of the animals actually
is a dangerous, um crazy magical creature, the harpy. And
then the unicorn. Uh. The horn is invisible to everyone else,
so she still has even though the unicorn is real,
she has to cast a spell on it to make
it seem amazing to the individuals that are attending her
(06:15):
little freak show. And you see varying degrees of that
with with with some of these sides show acts that
we're looking at, where you'll have things that there's really
no trick to it at all. There's nothing amazing going on,
it's just the illusion. Then you have a plenty of
examples to where there is something really amazing, really dangerous
going on, but you need to heighten the drama of
it in order to sell it to the audience. And
one of the best examples of this that you stumbled
(06:38):
upon is the Headless Lady. The Headless Lady, Yes, this
one uh um I may have encountered in passing before,
but I really had not looked long and hard at
it until just yesterday. Um. The Headless Lady act generally
consists of the phone. Uh, they'll be, they'll they'll be
a woman on the stage, so it's seeded up on
a pedestal of some kind. But here's the the gimmick.
(07:00):
She appears to have no head. Uh. There's just a
stump where where at the neck where the head should be.
And out of that stump there's like a tree emerging
like a like a metal pipe with other tubes coming
out of it, and the tubes are hooked up to
um what what What's supposed to be a bunch of
medical equipment but in reality maybe like a carburetor and
an old octat tank. And who knows what I mean.
(07:21):
I look at a number of pictures and it ranges
from I could I could buy that as being some
you know, typical mad science mumbo jumbo too that is
totally like a carburetor or something. Um. So there'll be
a doctor or scientist attending her, because you know, when
you when you create the kind of scientific breakthrough that
can keep a body alive without a head and make
(07:42):
it do your your bidding. You want to showcase that
at the at the local county fair or freak ship.
And the doctor has to travel with this one ting
to ensure that she continues to live. Yeah, so the
cell on this is the miracles of modern science. Look
what we can do now. And so the the ideas
that this woman lost her head and the body's kept
alive through this amazing mechanical of feet. And then the
(08:05):
doctor will even go so far as to h to
command the body to do certain things to do, like
small tasks with its hands and uh. And then there
may even be some sort of vaudevillian uh shenanigans going
on in there as well, some you know, slapstick or
what have you. Um, someone tickling her foot and so
you see the legs moving, yeah, and the whole Yeah,
the whole time you're seeing her at least twitch and move,
(08:26):
and you're seeing her performed task. And they do the
trick by having a real human woman set up there
with a kind of tiara of mirrors that reflects the sides,
the dark sides of the booth that she's in and
makes it look like her head is gone and all
you see is this tree of tubes that seem to
be emerging from her neck. So everyone you know attends
it and they're like, oh, this amazing. And at first
(08:49):
I was thinking this is a cool thing to cover
because it's kind of mad science e and it's kind
of weird, and and it's generally the kind of thing
I go for. But the closer I looked at it,
the more disturbing it really was, right because here, in
its essence, is the objectification of a woman, right. I mean,
it doesn't matter that she has a head, right, there's
her body, we see her in pieces. Yeah, and this
falls in line with a lot of advertising stuff I
(09:11):
was looking at yesterday to where one author was making
the point that anytime you see like a commercial advertisement, etcetera, uh,
look to see if the woman's head is partially or
completely cut off. Look to see if her feet or
partially or or completely cut off. They were arguing that
removing the head, rember, removing the feet, that's complete objectification.
(09:32):
In that case, you're like, look at this woman, but
don't worry, she has no brain. She can't look at
you or speak to you or hear you. And also
she can't run away, so we can just it's just
all they are for you. Yeah, every little troop about
women is contained in this one sideshow act. And what's
interesting about the sideshow act is that this is the
age of the artificial lung, artificial heart, and so, you know,
(09:57):
no doubt there there weren't a lot of people who
were taken by this. I'm sure most people went through
it and knew that there was some sort of trick
at play. And yet it arrests that the imagination because
you know, there's just a period where it must have
felt like cutting edge science was going on. Maybe just
maybe someone could lose their head in an accident and
a German doctor could somehow PLoP all of these hoses
(10:20):
into her neck stump and make her live. Yeah, it
seemed possible, and a little illusion makes it seem completely real.
But but yeah, just so disturbing, especially when you look
at some of these photos. There was one photo that
we're looking at yesterday was actually apparently by your Dora Wealthy,
and this one that showed it was like really creepy
because the woman, the headless woman's not up on her
(10:42):
pedestal in a booth. The drawing shows her standing with
an arm around one gentleman, shaking the hand of another gentleman,
and in the text promises you a thousand dollars if
she is not alive. And that's just it was just
so grim and gross, and just like the implied molestation
of a headless woman was just really really weird. It's
(11:04):
pretty creepy. And I have to say that you know,
that's not such a crazy bet. She's clearly alive. They're
not gonna lose money, Yeah, you don't. You don't offer
that unless you can falter but it. But it also
falls right in line with a two thousand twelve study
that that you you also sent me, and this is
published in the European Journal of Social Psychology titled seeing
Women as Objects the sexual body part recognition Bias, And
(11:27):
simply put, the study found that men and women tend
to see women is an assembolage of various parts rather
than a complete whole. That's right. They had them look
at a several different pictures and try to figure out
if the body part was belonged to this specific person
and so on and so forth, and they called it
was it global and local cognitive processing, and so it
didn't matter if you were a male or a female.
(11:50):
Overwhelmingly people would look at the photos of women in
a global perspective, meaning that they there's a lot of
space between how they saw her, and they saw her
more in pieces as opposed to the pictures of the men,
which they saw more as a whole. So what that
is pointing to is again this idea that um, it's
(12:10):
sort of written into the code of of society that
you look at women piece meal. Yeah, um, and that
you can't help to cut them up at least in
your psyche. Oh God, that's awful. It is awful, And
that one of the the awful things about this is
I wanted to use that Aurora a wealthy uh photo
in a blog post yesterday. It wasn't available. So I
(12:31):
did a like a Getty Images and a Corbus Images
search for headless woman and it was really horrifying. Not
that I was saying like a bunch of like decapitation photos,
because the decapitation like art that which intended to be
uh depictions of the biblical Judith, which was actually rather
encouraging in light of the other results which were all
just a bunch of fashion e artsy shots of women, um,
(12:53):
you know, with their head cut off in the photo
I cut off via the photography, and it was just
a really, a really dark afternoon. I'm glad you brought
that up, because anytime I've done searches in in various
stock photo systems and it could be like, you know,
maybe my search keywords are like mouse baby, eventually a
(13:13):
naked female torso is going to show up in that
batch for some reason or another. Yeah, well, and you
can turn off the nudity results on some of those
search engines. But but then again, if you turn that off,
you're still going to get a buch of ridiculous images.
So my view is, well, they might as well be
naked if I'm gonna have to put up with a
bunch of stupidity in these results. On a side note,
(13:34):
have you ever seen the collection of stock photos of
women eating salad? Very funny, It's like women laughing and
smiling while eating stuck and picture in my mind for sure,
because I know I've seen that a million times and
advertising Yeah, you know exactly what I'm talking about. So, yeah,
it's interesting to go into those vaults of of pictures
(13:57):
of humans and see all these tropes played out. Um,
but we're gonna we're gonna get to some some other
good circus side show stuff here. Yeah, step with, step
with with more science behind it than the fox science
of the Headless Woman. Should we take a quick break
before we go into swords swallowing? Yes, indeed, we'll be
right back. All right, we're back, and we're talking a
(14:27):
little bit now about sword swallowing, another another staple of
the of the side show world and a real thing. Right.
This is not an illusion. This is something that someone
is doing methodically and obviously they have practiced so many times,
have gotten to know their digestive system really well before
attempting this in front of an audience. Yeah, there's some
(14:48):
myths out there about it, um, and some of these
are you know, you'll find I think some of them
even have been repeated in major Encyclopedia's Harry Hudeny even
reported that sword swallowers would actually a swallow low a
metal sheath first before inserting the sword, which for starters,
does not sound like it would make it any easier.
It's it's like, oh, don't worry, they're not They're not
(15:11):
really swallowing a sharp sword. They've secretly inserted a really
long sword sheath into their into their down their throat,
and into their stomach. And that's how they're getting away
with this. Yeah, it just seems like it would complicate things. Yeah,
and and as certainly as we explain how it's actually done,
you'll see that that's good. That's completely silly, Yeah, because
I mean, honestly, it's just I wouldn't say it's easy,
(15:33):
but it's something that you can control and with practice
you can do. Um. If you want to see or
if you want to read more about this, check out
our sword swallowing article by tricy View Wilson of history stuff.
It's really great. But let's look at the g I
tracked before we delve into the actual blade into the
digestive system. Yeah. Now we've covered some of this before
(15:56):
because we did that that epic journey through the digestive system,
and we're just talking about the initial jaunt here. You
remember from that episode that we chew up our food,
we form this bolus, and the bolus travels down the
throat and into the stomach, and that's you know, the
territory we're dealing with here the upper g I track
because of course a series of connected living organs. It
includes the throat, uh, the esophagus, and the stomach. And
(16:19):
it's relatively soft, has several pronounced curves and uh that's
in a relaxed state. Um. And it's on the surface
of things, not a perfect sheath in which to insert
a blade of any kind. No, because it's a regular
shaped right, and so there are some things that you
have to do to manipulate it down your throat. But
I wanted to point out that skeletal muscle is presence
(16:41):
in the upper g I as well as smooth muscle.
Skeletal muscle is under voluntary control, so you can just say, hey,
that's I don't need to contract this right now. I
need to contract my throat or my mouth. But your
smooth muscle is involuntary. And this is what is involved
in paristalsis, and this is that movement of that bullus
down into the stomach. So what we're talking about here
(17:04):
is really trying to control those gag reflexes and that
smooth muscle movement when you're performing this trick. Because there
are a couple of different things that happen when you're
inserting the blade. So imagine you have this this sword
about fifteen inches long, anywhere from fifteen inches to two
(17:24):
inches by the way, and there's an actual like limit
that is set forth by the Sword Swallowing Association. Yeah,
like they they're generally cool with you not having it
enter the stomach, but it's okay if it does a
little bit. However, you don't want to use a sword
so long that it like winds up in your boot
because then then you're doing it wrong. There's gonna be
some puncturing going on with that. So yeah, there's actually
(17:47):
a Sword Swallowers International Association that that sort of police
is this, if you will, And what happens if you
have that blade what stays twenty inches long? It passes
by the teeth and then the eases into the up
esophageal sphincter scrapes over the teeth even I think that
makes it even grizzly or so yeah, yeah, okay, now
I'm like having some physiological responses here to that. Um So,
(18:09):
then it's coated and saliva at this point, and that
helps to lubricate it, and it goes deeper into the esophagus. Now,
the blade as it is traveling down into the esophagus
is sort of straightening it out this long tube and
occasionally is actually nudging organs out of the way as
it passes by, because there's a lot of stuff that
(18:29):
could potentially get pierced if you do it wrong. We're
talking about the trachy of the heart, the order, the vannakava,
the diaphragm, and you can get it all on one
big shish kebab. It's true you could. And here's the
thing you need to know your digestive system. You need
to know whether or not the lower esophagus curves as
it meets the stomach or if it's just a straight shoot,
(18:52):
because if it curves, then you're not going to be
able to insert or plunge that sword as deeply as
you could if it was just a straight shoot. As
you mentioned already, one of the big things you want
to be able to do is suppress the gag reflects
because we're we're naturally inclined not to let swords climb
down our throats. Uh. It gets into our regular bodi's
defenses against choking, et cetera. And uh, and so all
(19:15):
you have to do now, you know, as you're listening
to this podcast, is if you hang out and I
got hope that you'll start to gag a little bit, unless,
of course, you suppress it. Now, suppressing the gag reflex
is something that doesn't really it's not going on off switch.
You can't just you know, go into his end like
state and be like, I got it. It comes from
(19:35):
a lot of gagging yourself and possibly vomiting as you
do it. And and then you need not use a
sword to do it to to actually prepare yourself. Uh,
And generally they're using like something you're like a chopstick
or something, or just good old fingers or your toothbrush, right,
or your toothbrush. Yeah, I mean this is something you'd
have to do over and over and over again until
your mind could get comfortable with this feeling and you
(19:57):
could kind of say, I need you to suppress this
because what's happening here. You've got receptors or nerve endings
that are coming into contact with that blade, and then
the nerves or the neurons carry the receptors information to
your central nervous system, and then the integration center says, hey,
there's there's something going on here, maybe we need to
have a response. And then right back the motor neuron
(20:18):
carries the integrating center's instructions to that part of your
body to say, hey, you need to do something about this,
and then something called the effect or makes a necessary
change to what's going on your body, namely this gag reflex.
So it's a it's a bit of a process, yeah,
because eventually you kind of have to break down the
brain and convince it no, it's totally cool that a
(20:40):
saber is going down my throat and like this is
something that is in place for your survival, right, So
you have to convince your brain like, look, there really
is no threat here, even though it's hard wired to say, really,
that's a that's a blade coming after us. So, as
an audience member watching somebody swallow a sword, well, a
(21:00):
few of the different aspects that really make it a
memorable show is, first of all, you're not is counting
on the the audience not having a really thorough understanding
of the digestive tract and how it's working. Because again,
as where we point out here, it's totally possible to
get that more or less straight line, get it lined up.
It's it's totally possible to suppress the gag reflect over time.
(21:21):
So we're they're doing something that isn't completely crazy from
a physiological standpoint, but then still is risky. Certainly. It's
it's it's very easy to injure yourself, if not severely,
then you know, certainly you can. You can have mild
internal bleeding, you can have you can you can aggravate
um any number of tissues on the way down. So it's, uh,
(21:44):
it's at once not that big of a deal and
still completely nuts exactly, Yeah, because the person the audience
cannot imagine pulling this feed off for him or herself.
And when you think about swallowing a sword, you immediately
think of just sticking it straight to your mouth, right,
And you don't even realize that the performer is hyper
flexing his or her neck in order to get that
(22:07):
straight shoot down, So you're not thinking about the mechanics
of like, okay, now, they're just creating a very straight
tube to insert this into. Yeah, And it's really if
you don't know how it works, it is easier to
imagine the ways you could fake it rather than to
imagine the ways you could actually do it. Now, my
mind wouldn't instantly go to like fake, I mean to
(22:29):
metal sheets inserted in the throat, because that seems like
you're doing that would be doing the same trick twice
you get out of doing it once or something, you know.
But I always kind of imagine, well, they must have
some sort of a sword that collapses so that there
may be not sticking it all the way down, like
maybe just you know, it's like one of those toy
um you know, plastic swords that pops out, except it's
made out of metal. But but no, it's the it's
(22:50):
an actual sword going down your actual throat, maybe even
a little bit into your actual stomach. But that's not
required according to the source Wallers Association International. But I
don't know, maybe it helps you never know, I mean,
you might want to push your boundaries a bit if
you're the performer. Yeah, see how good you can get
and how dangerous it could be, right, because I imagine
that if you're doing this over and over and over again,
(23:13):
it becomes pretty normal. Uh in quotation marks, I suppose, well,
and then some of these uh these profetic because the
thing is, as we've outlined it, it's a. It's a
totally learnable thing. You can you can train yourself and
train your body to do it, and then you're an
accomplished sword swallower. And then you're you're having to compete
with other sword swallows. So what do you have to do?
You have to swallow more swords. So you see acts
(23:34):
where an individual will will have like seven swords uh
down their throat at a given moment, and so just
ups the annie until somebody winds up a shisha and
then you know, then everybody just goes home. Yeah, and
there's still some sort of awful delight from that. Yeah,
let's just admit it. Yeah, because it's yeah, there's the
shadow side of this whole thing, as you had said
(23:55):
at the top. All right, so we are patting down
the hall of wonder here and what do we come
upon next? Oh? The bed of nails. Yes, now, this
one is this one has always been a favorite of
mine because it's on the surface of things. It's it's
clearly a torture instrument. It's it's nefarious. You've taken something
completely comfortable and mundane and wonderful. The bed the place
(24:19):
where where where where people find their rest, where they
find their enjoyment where they may read a book. It's
a it's supposed to be a safe place. And what
have you done. You've turned it into an instrument of torment.
You've replaced that comfy mattress with with hundreds of razor
sharp nails and they're just poking up. And so clearly
if one were to lay on this, it would just
be just unequal torment. And you know, if you you
(24:42):
color it up a bit in your presentation and you
you describe how this, uh, the the origin of the
u the bed of nails like dates back to some
you know, twisted civilization, or it's it's an import from
some strange country on the other side of the world.
Then all the better. It's exotic, it's got aggon. It
looks like a medieval torture device. Yes, but if you
(25:03):
put mind over matter or somehow use a little magical
who do in there there's a way to lay upon
the bed of nails and suffer no injury, miraculously. But
all of this actually has a lot to do with
it seems odd, but say stilettos and an elephant's foot, okay,
Because this is this idea that a bed of nails
(25:23):
is providing surface area, and your body is the force
or the weight that is going to lay upon this
area or ly upon this area. So if you okay,
so let me just go back to this, the stiletto
and this elephant. If you are to be stepped on
by an elephant, you would actually find out that it
(25:43):
is much less painful than the stiletto. And the reason
is because all of that padding, that surface area of
that that elephant's foot is actually helping to distribute the weight,
whereas that that stiletto has just that little bit of
surface are and there's a ton of pressure coming down.
In fact, a person in high heels is going to
(26:05):
exert fifteen times more pressure than that elephant's foot because
all of it is is completely isolated into that one
little tip, all the weight and that one little tip,
whereas in the elephant foot it's spread out, it's distributed. Yeah,
So imagine if there was a piece of plywood, you know,
the size of a bed, and it had only one
nail in it, much like that stiletto, and you threw
(26:26):
your body on top of that, You're gonna puncture yourself, yes,
But if you have six hundred nails that are spread
across it, low and behold. It's going to support your
weight and you're going to come out of that experience
completely unscathed. But the audience is going to think, what
sort of superpowers do you have? Yeah, because it's first
(26:46):
of all, again it's the presentation of the thing. And
then most people do not have, or at least did
not have access to a bed of nails to try
this out for themselves. They had no real frame of
reference other than one nail is bad, so clearly hundreds
of nails would be even work. But you have given
the choice between laying on a bed of nails and
laying on a bed of nail, always go with the nails,
(27:07):
That's right, go with the plural and um. What I
love about this is that this sideshow act has actually
been taken into schools by the University of Virginia and
their fun uh fun science section I believe, excuse me,
their division of science. It's I can't remember the name
of it it, like fun fun physics, excuse me, and it's
p h U N fun. But they go into elementary
(27:29):
and high school students with this bed of nails and
then they have the teacher lie on top of it,
and they teach children this whole idea about force and pressure.
And um, what they had said actually in some of
their materials that they have online, that is that an
average human of a hundred fifty pounds, when they're spread
out over the six hundred nails, they'll feel only point
(27:50):
to five pounds of force per nail. So if you
have this bed of nails, um, they're not getting or
I should say, they're not going to get that experience
of pain because they would have to experience something like
two pounds of pressure per nail. But if only your
teacher could fire breathe. Ah, yes, fire breathing is another
(28:12):
another great carnival act, and of course this one is
often generally flavored up with lots of lots of information
about how it's like a you know, far Eastern art
that is being brought to you and uh, and certainly
it's an old practice. An individual will sometimes drink something
or sometimes they'll sort of do that a little surreptitiously.
You'll have an open flame and you'll just and you'll
(28:33):
breathe out this, uh, this fiery goodness. Let's write a
fun mist will cover this flame source and then yeah,
you'll get that huge plume of flame. And it is
pretty simple, I mean in in theory, right, you just
switch something around in your mouth and fuel source and
then you spew it out. Look, what could possibly go wrong? Yeah? Right,
that's that's so straightforward. What Why isn't everyone a fire
(28:56):
breather worst worst case? Why not worse? But if things
go wrong, you can always join the freak show. Right?
Oh yeah, that's true. Yeah. Well, I was reading some
examples of one quote unquote freak in in particular, who's
in a gasoline accident and burned up lower portion of
his face and he had a prosthetic that he could
wear that looked fine and you know, in the right lighting.
(29:17):
And then so he began a career as a side
show freak, as like a two faced van where you
would see him with the prosthetic and then without. Okay, again,
it's sad, it's dark, but I know it is. It's
can clouds the fire breathing. Now, all right, so let
me let's talk about how it could go awry here.
You've got to have direction and consistency. So what fibruy
(29:37):
theres usually do is they practice pretty extensively with water
first to make sure that they can get that mist
going in the right direction um and that they can
get it traveling for the distance that they needed too,
so it doesn't basically like fall The fuel doesn't fall
back on them right, never do it into the wind exactly.
And they have to have a specific angle that they're
(30:00):
shooting for about between sixty and eighty degrees. This angle,
if it's lower, it can make that flame come up
on a body part, and higher can cause that fuel
to fall back onto the face. And the choice of
fuel is really important because you have a flash point
and this is the point at which the fuel like
nites you cannicknite at a higher or a low temperature,
(30:21):
You have toxicity, You have the taste in the smell,
you have the color and the visibility of the flame,
which is for the audience, right, you want to be
huge and big, and then you have the amount of
um and the thickness of smoke. So kerosene is most
often used, but I will tell you that gasoline in
methyl ethyl alcohol, they those are things that are avoided
(30:41):
like the plague because first first of all, they really
really uh flammable, highly flammable instead of hard to control,
but they're also really toxic and with methyl ethel you
could actually become drunk off of the fumes. Yeah, and
there's two things you don't want to mix there for sure.
So fire breathing not something you just want to pick
up on a whim and think, all right, it's simple.
(31:02):
I just need fuel in my mouth and then an
open flame and then I just do it and then
people will cheer me and I get paid. Not so fast,
you're saying, yeah, and this is not easy money, folks. Yeah,
the stakes are pretty high. In fact, I have seen
recommendations where if people are curious about this, they should
start with corn storch instead of an actual fuel in
(31:22):
their mouth. Well, you know, just spitting a fine miss
can be plenty of enjoyment. Of course, as everyone knows,
I'm I'm a fan of the pro wrestling, and there's
a long tradition of of some wrestlers using a green
miss or sometimes a red mist as an I legal
move and it's generally uh. It has kind of a
side show mentality to it as well, because it's a
it's something mysterious, generally from from the East, and it
(31:46):
will often be used by a historically used a lot
by by Japanese wrestlers uh or wrestlers claiming to be
Japanese performing the United States. Uh. And so you would
have like a die in the mouth and then you
spit this mist in someone's face and they're blinded. You know.
I was thinking a lot about wrestling in our Capabe
episode that we did about the shadow self, yeah, and
(32:08):
about all of all of what it takes to create
this illusion. It's not just the mechanics of it. They're
sci fi films, yeah, not just in in spirit, but
I mean also historically, I mean they're both carnival businesses,
and there's still a lot of Carney uh to wrestling,
and just as there's of course a lot of Carney
to actually being a Carney. So it's true. Yeah, all right.
(32:32):
Up next another favorite of mine, the human blockhead. Now,
this act is generally pretty uh, pretty simple on the
on the surface of things. And you'll just you'll have
a geek cool come forth and they will take a
nail and they'll angle it into their nostrils. Generally, they'll
they'll sort of their nose will sort of go up
like a pig snows that as they get in a position,
(32:54):
and then they'll tap on it with a hammer and
uh and just so these this nice pink, pink pink
noises that the nail thinks a little deeper into the
into the into the face, into the head of the individual,
and uh. And then they'll turn the hammer around, use
the client to pull it out, and and everyone will
go nuts. Sometimes they'll up the annie though you maybe
they use a screw driver, or they'll use even a
(33:16):
power drill in more recent years, and it's just grizzly
to look at, uh and and then and they're generally
approaching them with a certain amount of humor that makes
it all the more entertaining. Now it's a lot like
swords wallowing, actually, so sports sorting sorts wallowing, as we discussed,
is basically taking advantage of an existing orifice, that is
(33:37):
and and putting a rigid object into that non rigid orifice, okay,
and also overcoming your gag instinct uh and involutary reflex
in order to pull it off. And we see much
the same thing with the human blockhead act. And a
lot of it comes down to the shape of the
nasal cavity. If you look at a cross section of
(33:57):
the human heads. You realize or you at least reminded
of the fact that your your mouth nasal cavity, it
takes up a lot of real estate in the head.
So behind your nose there's actually a lot of room
for a long nail or screwdriver, what have you to
go in You've just got too again, You've got to
you sort of angle the nose up and get it
sort of lined upright, and then add a little theatrics
(34:18):
about you know, so that you're having hammered in and
creating the illusion that this that this nail is being
driven into solid mass or even brain. Yeah, it's true
because if you look at the nose, you assume that
the nasal passage is sort of a perpendicular structure, but
it's not. It's at a horizontal That nasal cavity is
actually connecting the nose in the throat and it goes
(34:40):
almost straight back. So that's why when the performer is
inserting the nail, they kind of lift up the nostril
a bit like you said, like sort of the pick
nose in order to get the angle too straight shoot
back into that hole in their skull. Yeah, because think
of the skull. Think of there's a straight up picture
of the skull and the vertical slit that you would
(35:01):
see where the nose would be. I mean, there you go,
there's the nose hole right there, and it's uh and
you could totally drive nails into that all day. Now.
The other thing about the reflex you're having to overcome
in this particular situation, it's the urge to sneeze one
has to deal with because what happens when you start
sticking stuff around in your nose, you're going to trigger
that sneeze reflex. Sneeze reflex, of course, is about ridding
(35:24):
the nasal cavity of potentially harmful material by ejecting it
in a brilliant spray, not unlike the spray of a
of a of a fire breather. It's true. So it's
that reflex arc that you have to suppress, much like
with the sword with the gag reflex, because you know,
in this case you have that the nerves that are
sending the signal to the brain, and then your eyes
(35:45):
start to water and your nasal passages start to secrete fluid,
and your diaphragm moves abruptly and is causing you to
take a deep breath and get ready to eject that
foreign object or that irritant from your nose. So you
don't want to just be blasting nails of the audience,
I mean not most that's your deal. And if you do,
or if that is your deal, you want to at
(36:06):
least have control of when it happens. That would be
a very interesting sort of like low tech pneumatic nail gun. Well,
that would be actually a very interesting side show on it. Son,
I wonder if anyone's done that. Imagine like a superhero
who is the human blockhead and then he's struck by
lightning during an act and it gives him the power
to blast nails out of his nose. That would be
(36:27):
kind of neat wow to summon like a supercharged reaction. Yeah,
I like it now. Of course, you might also want
to avoid looking at the lights while doing this particular
act because you want to avoid photo sneeze reflex, which
of course is we've all had that thing where it's like,
if you feel like you're about to sneeze and you
want to get it over with, they say, stare at
the sun. Well, don't stare at the sun. But but
(36:47):
let's sort of look in the direction of a bright
light and and it will cause the sneeze to happen.
You know, that's really interesting. The researchers aren't exactly sure
why it happens, but something like of the population when
they go out into this from their house or some
other dark area, um, maybe it's a sneeze, And thought
that the sensors in our the light sensors in our
(37:09):
optic nerves are so close to the sensors for our
nose that it's a little bit of a misfire of
the brain which is detecting that that the nose um
sensors are basically detecting that light and interpreting it as
an irritant. It's one of those things that I didn't
really know about until not too long ago, when I
don't think maybe it was my wife that pointed out
(37:30):
that if you're about to sneeze and you just want
to go and get it over with, you know, look
to a bright light and that'll do it without My
daughter does it every single time she leaves the house
son sneezing. Yeah. Interesting, Well, you know, maybe we have
some swords swallowers out there in the audience. That can
hope we do. Yeah, they can let us know fire breathers,
fire breathing human blockheads or even just you know, carnival
(37:54):
sideshow officionados. We'd love to hear, crom Um. You can
certainly find us in any of the normal means. You
can check out our main website, stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com. You can go to find us on
social media or on Twitter blow the Mind as the
handle there. You can find us on Facebook and tumbler
at stuff to Blow your Mind, and you can also
reach us by sending us an email at below of
(38:14):
the mind at discovery dot com for more on this
and thousands of other topics, because it how stuff works
dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to go your mind.
My name is Robert Lamb, and welcome to the sadness
that is the circus side show. Sadness looking with a
lot of sadness, and yeah, it's general sadness to the circus,
(00:26):
to the circus side show, I mean just to the
straight up circus, the main attraction, as opposed to what
exists in its shadows, the circus itself. You have, like,
we have a lot of of animals that have been
taken from their natural habitat and forced to perform inside
of a dark tint for for locals so they can
cheer and throw a popcorn at them. You have clowns
(00:47):
prancing around, uh and engaging in various antics, um, some
of which may be arguably perverse. You have you have singing,
you have dancing, you have music, and then you walk
outside and in the shadow of the tent there you
have the side show. And that's where we encounter a
number of things that are either um, outright disturbing or
(01:10):
more subtly disturbing. Well, see that's the adult perspective. If
you'll come with me to my eight year old self.
Then you will be delighted and amazed by all of this,
this rich symbolism present not just at the circus, but
in the Carnie side show, right, because here the mysteries
are revealed in front of your very eyes and the
(01:33):
oddities of life, and you begin to question what is reality? Yes, yeah, definitely,
I mean there's a lot of it it's about there's
a lot of magic and law involved, a lot of illusion,
and then a lot of outright examples of nature gune
a little strange, and then that forces you to to a question, well,
what is normal? What is what is what is wrong
with me? Personally? Because I'm paying to see this, All
(01:56):
of these factors come into play, and we are going
to start out while we look at the secrets of
the side shows more in uh in history here, because really,
if you look at a current side show today, it's
nothing like it was in the past. As you say,
it was very dark terrain here, very dark psychological stuff
that people were taking their families to. Yeah, and you know,
(02:19):
there's still still a lot of love for it, a
lot of nostalgia for it. And you can you can,
certainly you can go to Coney Island and enjoy some
of that there and then at various other points across
the United States. But this was a time, you know,
ni nineteen forties, nineteen fifties, where people didn't really have
the understanding, um that we do now of the natural
loss of science, let's say, and the fact that there
(02:41):
couldn't maybe be a Fiji mermaid, that skeleton of Fiji
mermaid that proved that mermaids do exist, because sometimes this
was part and parcel. Everybody had the more or less
the basic understanding of the natural world as that the
common YouTube commenter basically perhaps perhaps it's very possible, but
today we are We're definitely going to lift the canvas
(03:02):
tent flap, look inside and see what's going on here.
And to really understand that, you do need to kind
of get into the world of the Carnie and the
side show more specifically in something called ten in one
and this is part of the circus that contained usually
ten different side shows in one tent. Well, I don't
(03:24):
know if it was one price, but I do understand
from what I've read that you had a guide taking
you through the sort of hall of horrors or mysteries.
Um letting you know about all these fantastic things that
exist in the world. Yeah, and then sometimes at the
end there's an extra little bit, sort of a sort
of an under the table bit for for the discerning
(03:45):
gentleman in the audience. You're talking about some sort of
like sexy lady thing. Sometimes it was sexy lady thing,
but sometimes it was simply a stuff that was like
a little grimmer or for instance, it was or sometimes
it was just pickled pugs were of course, you know
various um uh, still births and weird fetuses of animals
that are preserved and and uh, then you got at
(04:06):
sometimes that it would be that, and sometimes that would
factor into an earlier part of the show. Yeah, and
the Fiji Mermaid, which I had mentioned the bones of
this supposed mermaid that existed. Um but yeah, there are
a bunch of different oddities. They had some that were
really kind of cheesy and and not to illusion heavy,
Like there was a woman who's head stuck out of
this board spider web, making it look as though she
(04:30):
was a human spider and it's very obvious that our
head is just sticking through something like it sounds like
they were even doing any makeup on her human head.
It was just straight up. Look it's a spider with
a human head on it. And then there's the sword swallower,
which is a real thing, right, I mean, people are
actually pulling off this trick, and we'll talk more about
that later, but all of this stuff is mixed in
(04:50):
so that you do have some real tricks being pulled off,
some some real like hey, we're pushing the edges of
what's possible with our physiology, along with just pure like bunk.
It reminds me a lot of the Last Unicorn. You've
seen the Last Unicorn, right, perhaps even read it. I've
seen ten minutes. You've seen ten minutes of the Last Unicorn. Well, no,
(05:13):
I tried to show my daughter. She's four years old,
supersensitive to she saw danger of coming and we had
to turn it off. It is it's I mean, it's
really good, but yeah, maybe she's not ready for it
just yet. But there's a scene in it where the
unicorn is taken in by this this evil witch and
she has this side show these various carts with cages
(05:33):
and inside appears to be a different magical creature in
each one, like a mantic core and a dragon etcetera.
But the thing is that most of these cages are
filled with just normal animals that she's cast a spell on,
and the spell makes them seem to be like the
the manticor is not a manticord. It's just a broken
down old lion, but the spell makes it seem like
(05:55):
something amazing and unreal. Uh. One of the animals actually
is a dangerous, um crazy magical creature, the harpy. And
then the unicorn. Uh. The horn is invisible to everyone else,
so she still has even though the unicorn is real,
she has to cast a spell on it to make
it seem amazing to the individuals that are attending her
(06:15):
little freak show. And you see varying degrees of that
with with with some of these sides show acts that
we're looking at, where you'll have things that there's really
no trick to it at all. There's nothing amazing going on,
it's just the illusion. Then you have a plenty of
examples to where there is something really amazing, really dangerous
going on, but you need to heighten the drama of
it in order to sell it to the audience. And
one of the best examples of this that you stumbled
(06:38):
upon is the Headless Lady. The Headless Lady, Yes, this
one uh um I may have encountered in passing before,
but I really had not looked long and hard at
it until just yesterday. Um. The Headless Lady act generally
consists of the phone. Uh, they'll be, they'll they'll be
a woman on the stage, so it's seeded up on
a pedestal of some kind. But here's the the gimmick.
(07:00):
She appears to have no head. Uh. There's just a
stump where where at the neck where the head should be.
And out of that stump there's like a tree emerging
like a like a metal pipe with other tubes coming
out of it, and the tubes are hooked up to
um what what What's supposed to be a bunch of
medical equipment but in reality maybe like a carburetor and
an old octat tank. And who knows what I mean.
(07:21):
I look at a number of pictures and it ranges
from I could I could buy that as being some
you know, typical mad science mumbo jumbo too that is
totally like a carburetor or something. Um. So there'll be
a doctor or scientist attending her, because you know, when
you when you create the kind of scientific breakthrough that
can keep a body alive without a head and make
(07:42):
it do your your bidding. You want to showcase that
at the at the local county fair or freak ship.
And the doctor has to travel with this one ting
to ensure that she continues to live. Yeah, so the
cell on this is the miracles of modern science. Look
what we can do now. And so the the ideas
that this woman lost her head and the body's kept
alive through this amazing mechanical of feet. And then the
(08:05):
doctor will even go so far as to h to
command the body to do certain things to do, like
small tasks with its hands and uh. And then there
may even be some sort of vaudevillian uh shenanigans going
on in there as well, some you know, slapstick or
what have you. Um, someone tickling her foot and so
you see the legs moving, yeah, and the whole Yeah,
the whole time you're seeing her at least twitch and move,
(08:26):
and you're seeing her performed task. And they do the
trick by having a real human woman set up there
with a kind of tiara of mirrors that reflects the sides,
the dark sides of the booth that she's in and
makes it look like her head is gone and all
you see is this tree of tubes that seem to
be emerging from her neck. So everyone you know attends
it and they're like, oh, this amazing. And at first
(08:49):
I was thinking this is a cool thing to cover
because it's kind of mad science e and it's kind
of weird, and and it's generally the kind of thing
I go for. But the closer I looked at it,
the more disturbing it really was, right because here, in
its essence, is the objectification of a woman, right. I mean,
it doesn't matter that she has a head, right, there's
her body, we see her in pieces. Yeah, and this
falls in line with a lot of advertising stuff I
(09:11):
was looking at yesterday to where one author was making
the point that anytime you see like a commercial advertisement, etcetera, uh,
look to see if the woman's head is partially or
completely cut off. Look to see if her feet or
partially or or completely cut off. They were arguing that
removing the head, rember, removing the feet, that's complete objectification.
(09:32):
In that case, you're like, look at this woman, but
don't worry, she has no brain. She can't look at
you or speak to you or hear you. And also
she can't run away, so we can just it's just
all they are for you. Yeah, every little troop about
women is contained in this one sideshow act. And what's
interesting about the sideshow act is that this is the
age of the artificial lung, artificial heart, and so, you know,
(09:57):
no doubt there there weren't a lot of people who
were taken by this. I'm sure most people went through
it and knew that there was some sort of trick
at play. And yet it arrests that the imagination because
you know, there's just a period where it must have
felt like cutting edge science was going on. Maybe just
maybe someone could lose their head in an accident and
a German doctor could somehow PLoP all of these hoses
(10:20):
into her neck stump and make her live. Yeah, it
seemed possible, and a little illusion makes it seem completely real.
But but yeah, just so disturbing, especially when you look
at some of these photos. There was one photo that
we're looking at yesterday was actually apparently by your Dora Wealthy,
and this one that showed it was like really creepy
because the woman, the headless woman's not up on her
(10:42):
pedestal in a booth. The drawing shows her standing with
an arm around one gentleman, shaking the hand of another gentleman,
and in the text promises you a thousand dollars if
she is not alive. And that's just it was just
so grim and gross, and just like the implied molestation
of a headless woman was just really really weird. It's
(11:04):
pretty creepy. And I have to say that you know,
that's not such a crazy bet. She's clearly alive. They're
not gonna lose money, Yeah, you don't. You don't offer
that unless you can falter but it. But it also
falls right in line with a two thousand twelve study
that that you you also sent me, and this is
published in the European Journal of Social Psychology titled seeing
Women as Objects the sexual body part recognition Bias, And
(11:27):
simply put, the study found that men and women tend
to see women is an assembolage of various parts rather
than a complete whole. That's right. They had them look
at a several different pictures and try to figure out
if the body part was belonged to this specific person
and so on and so forth, and they called it
was it global and local cognitive processing, and so it
didn't matter if you were a male or a female.
(11:50):
Overwhelmingly people would look at the photos of women in
a global perspective, meaning that they there's a lot of
space between how they saw her, and they saw her
more in pieces as opposed to the pictures of the men,
which they saw more as a whole. So what that
is pointing to is again this idea that um, it's
(12:10):
sort of written into the code of of society that
you look at women piece meal. Yeah, um, and that
you can't help to cut them up at least in
your psyche. Oh God, that's awful. It is awful, And
that one of the the awful things about this is
I wanted to use that Aurora a wealthy uh photo
in a blog post yesterday. It wasn't available. So I
(12:31):
did a like a Getty Images and a Corbus Images
search for headless woman and it was really horrifying. Not
that I was saying like a bunch of like decapitation photos,
because the decapitation like art that which intended to be
uh depictions of the biblical Judith, which was actually rather
encouraging in light of the other results which were all
just a bunch of fashion e artsy shots of women, um,
(12:53):
you know, with their head cut off in the photo
I cut off via the photography, and it was just
a really, a really dark afternoon. I'm glad you brought
that up, because anytime I've done searches in in various
stock photo systems and it could be like, you know,
maybe my search keywords are like mouse baby, eventually a
(13:13):
naked female torso is going to show up in that
batch for some reason or another. Yeah, well, and you
can turn off the nudity results on some of those
search engines. But but then again, if you turn that off,
you're still going to get a buch of ridiculous images.
So my view is, well, they might as well be
naked if I'm gonna have to put up with a
bunch of stupidity in these results. On a side note,
(13:34):
have you ever seen the collection of stock photos of
women eating salad? Very funny, It's like women laughing and
smiling while eating stuck and picture in my mind for sure,
because I know I've seen that a million times and
advertising Yeah, you know exactly what I'm talking about. So, yeah,
it's interesting to go into those vaults of of pictures
(13:57):
of humans and see all these tropes played out. Um,
but we're gonna we're gonna get to some some other
good circus side show stuff here. Yeah, step with, step
with with more science behind it than the fox science
of the Headless Woman. Should we take a quick break
before we go into swords swallowing? Yes, indeed, we'll be
right back. All right, we're back, and we're talking a
(14:27):
little bit now about sword swallowing, another another staple of
the of the side show world and a real thing. Right.
This is not an illusion. This is something that someone
is doing methodically and obviously they have practiced so many times,
have gotten to know their digestive system really well before
attempting this in front of an audience. Yeah, there's some
(14:48):
myths out there about it, um, and some of these
are you know, you'll find I think some of them
even have been repeated in major Encyclopedia's Harry Hudeny even
reported that sword swallowers would actually a swallow low a
metal sheath first before inserting the sword, which for starters,
does not sound like it would make it any easier.
It's it's like, oh, don't worry, they're not They're not
(15:11):
really swallowing a sharp sword. They've secretly inserted a really
long sword sheath into their into their down their throat,
and into their stomach. And that's how they're getting away
with this. Yeah, it just seems like it would complicate things. Yeah,
and and as certainly as we explain how it's actually done,
you'll see that that's good. That's completely silly, Yeah, because
I mean, honestly, it's just I wouldn't say it's easy,
(15:33):
but it's something that you can control and with practice
you can do. Um. If you want to see or
if you want to read more about this, check out
our sword swallowing article by tricy View Wilson of history stuff.
It's really great. But let's look at the g I
tracked before we delve into the actual blade into the
digestive system. Yeah. Now we've covered some of this before
(15:56):
because we did that that epic journey through the digestive system,
and we're just talking about the initial jaunt here. You
remember from that episode that we chew up our food,
we form this bolus, and the bolus travels down the
throat and into the stomach, and that's you know, the
territory we're dealing with here the upper g I track
because of course a series of connected living organs. It
includes the throat, uh, the esophagus, and the stomach. And
(16:19):
it's relatively soft, has several pronounced curves and uh that's
in a relaxed state. Um. And it's on the surface
of things, not a perfect sheath in which to insert
a blade of any kind. No, because it's a regular
shaped right, and so there are some things that you
have to do to manipulate it down your throat. But
I wanted to point out that skeletal muscle is presence
(16:41):
in the upper g I as well as smooth muscle.
Skeletal muscle is under voluntary control, so you can just say, hey,
that's I don't need to contract this right now. I
need to contract my throat or my mouth. But your
smooth muscle is involuntary. And this is what is involved
in paristalsis, and this is that movement of that bullus
down into the stomach. So what we're talking about here
(17:04):
is really trying to control those gag reflexes and that
smooth muscle movement when you're performing this trick. Because there
are a couple of different things that happen when you're
inserting the blade. So imagine you have this this sword
about fifteen inches long, anywhere from fifteen inches to two
(17:24):
inches by the way, and there's an actual like limit
that is set forth by the Sword Swallowing Association. Yeah,
like they they're generally cool with you not having it
enter the stomach, but it's okay if it does a
little bit. However, you don't want to use a sword
so long that it like winds up in your boot
because then then you're doing it wrong. There's gonna be
some puncturing going on with that. So yeah, there's actually
(17:47):
a Sword Swallowers International Association that that sort of police
is this, if you will, And what happens if you
have that blade what stays twenty inches long? It passes
by the teeth and then the eases into the up
esophageal sphincter scrapes over the teeth even I think that
makes it even grizzly or so yeah, yeah, okay, now
I'm like having some physiological responses here to that. Um So,
(18:09):
then it's coated and saliva at this point, and that
helps to lubricate it, and it goes deeper into the esophagus. Now,
the blade as it is traveling down into the esophagus
is sort of straightening it out this long tube and
occasionally is actually nudging organs out of the way as
it passes by, because there's a lot of stuff that
(18:29):
could potentially get pierced if you do it wrong. We're
talking about the trachy of the heart, the order, the vannakava,
the diaphragm, and you can get it all on one
big shish kebab. It's true you could. And here's the
thing you need to know your digestive system. You need
to know whether or not the lower esophagus curves as
it meets the stomach or if it's just a straight shoot,
(18:52):
because if it curves, then you're not going to be
able to insert or plunge that sword as deeply as
you could if it was just a straight shoot. As
you mentioned already, one of the big things you want
to be able to do is suppress the gag reflects
because we're we're naturally inclined not to let swords climb
down our throats. Uh. It gets into our regular bodi's
defenses against choking, et cetera. And uh, and so all
(19:15):
you have to do now, you know, as you're listening
to this podcast, is if you hang out and I
got hope that you'll start to gag a little bit, unless,
of course, you suppress it. Now, suppressing the gag reflex
is something that doesn't really it's not going on off switch.
You can't just you know, go into his end like
state and be like, I got it. It comes from
(19:35):
a lot of gagging yourself and possibly vomiting as you
do it. And and then you need not use a
sword to do it to to actually prepare yourself. Uh,
And generally they're using like something you're like a chopstick
or something, or just good old fingers or your toothbrush, right,
or your toothbrush. Yeah, I mean this is something you'd
have to do over and over and over again until
your mind could get comfortable with this feeling and you
(19:57):
could kind of say, I need you to suppress this
because what's happening here. You've got receptors or nerve endings
that are coming into contact with that blade, and then
the nerves or the neurons carry the receptors information to
your central nervous system, and then the integration center says, hey,
there's there's something going on here, maybe we need to
have a response. And then right back the motor neuron
(20:18):
carries the integrating center's instructions to that part of your
body to say, hey, you need to do something about this,
and then something called the effect or makes a necessary
change to what's going on your body, namely this gag reflex.
So it's a it's a bit of a process, yeah,
because eventually you kind of have to break down the
brain and convince it no, it's totally cool that a
(20:40):
saber is going down my throat and like this is
something that is in place for your survival, right, So
you have to convince your brain like, look, there really
is no threat here, even though it's hard wired to say, really,
that's a that's a blade coming after us. So, as
an audience member watching somebody swallow a sword, well, a
(21:00):
few of the different aspects that really make it a
memorable show is, first of all, you're not is counting
on the the audience not having a really thorough understanding
of the digestive tract and how it's working. Because again,
as where we point out here, it's totally possible to
get that more or less straight line, get it lined up.
It's it's totally possible to suppress the gag reflect over time.
(21:21):
So we're they're doing something that isn't completely crazy from
a physiological standpoint, but then still is risky. Certainly. It's
it's it's very easy to injure yourself, if not severely,
then you know, certainly you can. You can have mild
internal bleeding, you can have you can you can aggravate
um any number of tissues on the way down. So it's, uh,
(21:44):
it's at once not that big of a deal and
still completely nuts exactly, Yeah, because the person the audience
cannot imagine pulling this feed off for him or herself.
And when you think about swallowing a sword, you immediately
think of just sticking it straight to your mouth, right,
And you don't even realize that the performer is hyper
flexing his or her neck in order to get that
(22:07):
straight shoot down, So you're not thinking about the mechanics
of like, okay, now, they're just creating a very straight
tube to insert this into. Yeah, And it's really if
you don't know how it works, it is easier to
imagine the ways you could fake it rather than to
imagine the ways you could actually do it. Now, my
mind wouldn't instantly go to like fake, I mean to
(22:29):
metal sheets inserted in the throat, because that seems like
you're doing that would be doing the same trick twice
you get out of doing it once or something, you know.
But I always kind of imagine, well, they must have
some sort of a sword that collapses so that there
may be not sticking it all the way down, like
maybe just you know, it's like one of those toy
um you know, plastic swords that pops out, except it's
made out of metal. But but no, it's the it's
(22:50):
an actual sword going down your actual throat, maybe even
a little bit into your actual stomach. But that's not
required according to the source Wallers Association International. But I
don't know, maybe it helps you never know, I mean,
you might want to push your boundaries a bit if
you're the performer. Yeah, see how good you can get
and how dangerous it could be, right, because I imagine
that if you're doing this over and over and over again,
(23:13):
it becomes pretty normal. Uh in quotation marks, I suppose, well,
and then some of these uh these profetic because the
thing is, as we've outlined it, it's a. It's a
totally learnable thing. You can you can train yourself and
train your body to do it, and then you're an
accomplished sword swallower. And then you're you're having to compete
with other sword swallows. So what do you have to do?
You have to swallow more swords. So you see acts
(23:34):
where an individual will will have like seven swords uh
down their throat at a given moment, and so just
ups the annie until somebody winds up a shisha and
then you know, then everybody just goes home. Yeah, and
there's still some sort of awful delight from that. Yeah,
let's just admit it. Yeah, because it's yeah, there's the
shadow side of this whole thing, as you had said
(23:55):
at the top. All right, so we are patting down
the hall of wonder here and what do we come
upon next? Oh? The bed of nails. Yes, now, this
one is this one has always been a favorite of
mine because it's on the surface of things. It's it's
clearly a torture instrument. It's it's nefarious. You've taken something
completely comfortable and mundane and wonderful. The bed the place
(24:19):
where where where where people find their rest, where they
find their enjoyment where they may read a book. It's
a it's supposed to be a safe place. And what
have you done. You've turned it into an instrument of torment.
You've replaced that comfy mattress with with hundreds of razor
sharp nails and they're just poking up. And so clearly
if one were to lay on this, it would just
be just unequal torment. And you know, if you you
(24:42):
color it up a bit in your presentation and you
you describe how this, uh, the the origin of the
u the bed of nails like dates back to some
you know, twisted civilization, or it's it's an import from
some strange country on the other side of the world.
Then all the better. It's exotic, it's got aggon. It
looks like a medieval torture device. Yes, but if you
(25:03):
put mind over matter or somehow use a little magical
who do in there there's a way to lay upon
the bed of nails and suffer no injury, miraculously. But
all of this actually has a lot to do with
it seems odd, but say stilettos and an elephant's foot, okay,
Because this is this idea that a bed of nails
(25:23):
is providing surface area, and your body is the force
or the weight that is going to lay upon this
area or ly upon this area. So if you okay,
so let me just go back to this, the stiletto
and this elephant. If you are to be stepped on
by an elephant, you would actually find out that it
(25:43):
is much less painful than the stiletto. And the reason
is because all of that padding, that surface area of
that that elephant's foot is actually helping to distribute the weight,
whereas that that stiletto has just that little bit of
surface are and there's a ton of pressure coming down.
In fact, a person in high heels is going to
(26:05):
exert fifteen times more pressure than that elephant's foot because
all of it is is completely isolated into that one
little tip, all the weight and that one little tip,
whereas in the elephant foot it's spread out, it's distributed. Yeah,
So imagine if there was a piece of plywood, you know,
the size of a bed, and it had only one
nail in it, much like that stiletto, and you threw
(26:26):
your body on top of that, You're gonna puncture yourself, yes,
But if you have six hundred nails that are spread
across it, low and behold. It's going to support your
weight and you're going to come out of that experience
completely unscathed. But the audience is going to think, what
sort of superpowers do you have? Yeah, because it's first
(26:46):
of all, again it's the presentation of the thing. And
then most people do not have, or at least did
not have access to a bed of nails to try
this out for themselves. They had no real frame of
reference other than one nail is bad, so clearly hundreds
of nails would be even work. But you have given
the choice between laying on a bed of nails and
laying on a bed of nail, always go with the nails,
(27:07):
That's right, go with the plural and um. What I
love about this is that this sideshow act has actually
been taken into schools by the University of Virginia and
their fun uh fun science section I believe, excuse me,
their division of science. It's I can't remember the name
of it it, like fun fun physics, excuse me, and it's
p h U N fun. But they go into elementary
(27:29):
and high school students with this bed of nails and
then they have the teacher lie on top of it,
and they teach children this whole idea about force and pressure.
And um, what they had said actually in some of
their materials that they have online, that is that an
average human of a hundred fifty pounds, when they're spread
out over the six hundred nails, they'll feel only point
(27:50):
to five pounds of force per nail. So if you
have this bed of nails, um, they're not getting or
I should say, they're not going to get that experience
of pain because they would have to experience something like
two pounds of pressure per nail. But if only your
teacher could fire breathe. Ah, yes, fire breathing is another
(28:12):
another great carnival act, and of course this one is
often generally flavored up with lots of lots of information
about how it's like a you know, far Eastern art
that is being brought to you and uh, and certainly
it's an old practice. An individual will sometimes drink something
or sometimes they'll sort of do that a little surreptitiously.
You'll have an open flame and you'll just and you'll
(28:33):
breathe out this, uh, this fiery goodness. Let's write a
fun mist will cover this flame source and then yeah,
you'll get that huge plume of flame. And it is
pretty simple, I mean in in theory, right, you just
switch something around in your mouth and fuel source and
then you spew it out. Look, what could possibly go wrong? Yeah? Right,
that's that's so straightforward. What Why isn't everyone a fire
(28:56):
breather worst worst case? Why not worse? But if things
go wrong, you can always join the freak show. Right?
Oh yeah, that's true. Yeah. Well, I was reading some
examples of one quote unquote freak in in particular, who's
in a gasoline accident and burned up lower portion of
his face and he had a prosthetic that he could
wear that looked fine and you know, in the right lighting.
(29:17):
And then so he began a career as a side
show freak, as like a two faced van where you
would see him with the prosthetic and then without. Okay, again,
it's sad, it's dark, but I know it is. It's
can clouds the fire breathing. Now, all right, so let
me let's talk about how it could go awry here.
You've got to have direction and consistency. So what fibruy
(29:37):
theres usually do is they practice pretty extensively with water
first to make sure that they can get that mist
going in the right direction um and that they can
get it traveling for the distance that they needed too,
so it doesn't basically like fall The fuel doesn't fall
back on them right, never do it into the wind exactly.
And they have to have a specific angle that they're
(30:00):
shooting for about between sixty and eighty degrees. This angle,
if it's lower, it can make that flame come up
on a body part, and higher can cause that fuel
to fall back onto the face. And the choice of
fuel is really important because you have a flash point
and this is the point at which the fuel like
nites you cannicknite at a higher or a low temperature,
(30:21):
You have toxicity, You have the taste in the smell,
you have the color and the visibility of the flame,
which is for the audience, right, you want to be
huge and big, and then you have the amount of
um and the thickness of smoke. So kerosene is most
often used, but I will tell you that gasoline in
methyl ethyl alcohol, they those are things that are avoided
(30:41):
like the plague because first first of all, they really
really uh flammable, highly flammable instead of hard to control,
but they're also really toxic and with methyl ethel you
could actually become drunk off of the fumes. Yeah, and
there's two things you don't want to mix there for sure.
So fire breathing not something you just want to pick
up on a whim and think, all right, it's simple.
(31:02):
I just need fuel in my mouth and then an
open flame and then I just do it and then
people will cheer me and I get paid. Not so fast,
you're saying, yeah, and this is not easy money, folks. Yeah,
the stakes are pretty high. In fact, I have seen
recommendations where if people are curious about this, they should
start with corn storch instead of an actual fuel in
(31:22):
their mouth. Well, you know, just spitting a fine miss
can be plenty of enjoyment. Of course, as everyone knows,
I'm I'm a fan of the pro wrestling, and there's
a long tradition of of some wrestlers using a green
miss or sometimes a red mist as an I legal
move and it's generally uh. It has kind of a
side show mentality to it as well, because it's a
it's something mysterious, generally from from the East, and it
(31:46):
will often be used by a historically used a lot
by by Japanese wrestlers uh or wrestlers claiming to be
Japanese performing the United States. Uh. And so you would
have like a die in the mouth and then you
spit this mist in someone's face and they're blinded. You know.
I was thinking a lot about wrestling in our Capabe
episode that we did about the shadow self, yeah, and
(32:08):
about all of all of what it takes to create
this illusion. It's not just the mechanics of it. They're
sci fi films, yeah, not just in in spirit, but
I mean also historically, I mean they're both carnival businesses,
and there's still a lot of Carney uh to wrestling,
and just as there's of course a lot of Carney
to actually being a Carney. So it's true. Yeah, all right.
(32:32):
Up next another favorite of mine, the human blockhead. Now,
this act is generally pretty uh, pretty simple on the
on the surface of things. And you'll just you'll have
a geek cool come forth and they will take a
nail and they'll angle it into their nostrils. Generally, they'll
they'll sort of their nose will sort of go up
like a pig snows that as they get in a position,
(32:54):
and then they'll tap on it with a hammer and
uh and just so these this nice pink, pink pink
noises that the nail thinks a little deeper into the
into the into the face, into the head of the individual,
and uh. And then they'll turn the hammer around, use
the client to pull it out, and and everyone will
go nuts. Sometimes they'll up the annie though you maybe
they use a screw driver, or they'll use even a
(33:16):
power drill in more recent years, and it's just grizzly
to look at, uh and and then and they're generally
approaching them with a certain amount of humor that makes
it all the more entertaining. Now it's a lot like
swords wallowing, actually, so sports sorting sorts wallowing, as we discussed,
is basically taking advantage of an existing orifice, that is
(33:37):
and and putting a rigid object into that non rigid orifice, okay,
and also overcoming your gag instinct uh and involutary reflex
in order to pull it off. And we see much
the same thing with the human blockhead act. And a
lot of it comes down to the shape of the
nasal cavity. If you look at a cross section of
(33:57):
the human heads. You realize or you at least reminded
of the fact that your your mouth nasal cavity, it
takes up a lot of real estate in the head.
So behind your nose there's actually a lot of room
for a long nail or screwdriver, what have you to
go in You've just got too again, You've got to
you sort of angle the nose up and get it
sort of lined upright, and then add a little theatrics
(34:18):
about you know, so that you're having hammered in and
creating the illusion that this that this nail is being
driven into solid mass or even brain. Yeah, it's true
because if you look at the nose, you assume that
the nasal passage is sort of a perpendicular structure, but
it's not. It's at a horizontal That nasal cavity is
actually connecting the nose in the throat and it goes
(34:40):
almost straight back. So that's why when the performer is
inserting the nail, they kind of lift up the nostril
a bit like you said, like sort of the pick
nose in order to get the angle too straight shoot
back into that hole in their skull. Yeah, because think
of the skull. Think of there's a straight up picture
of the skull and the vertical slit that you would
(35:01):
see where the nose would be. I mean, there you go,
there's the nose hole right there, and it's uh and
you could totally drive nails into that all day. Now.
The other thing about the reflex you're having to overcome
in this particular situation, it's the urge to sneeze one
has to deal with because what happens when you start
sticking stuff around in your nose, you're going to trigger
that sneeze reflex. Sneeze reflex, of course, is about ridding
(35:24):
the nasal cavity of potentially harmful material by ejecting it
in a brilliant spray, not unlike the spray of a
of a of a fire breather. It's true. So it's
that reflex arc that you have to suppress, much like
with the sword with the gag reflex, because you know,
in this case you have that the nerves that are
sending the signal to the brain, and then your eyes
(35:45):
start to water and your nasal passages start to secrete fluid,
and your diaphragm moves abruptly and is causing you to
take a deep breath and get ready to eject that
foreign object or that irritant from your nose. So you
don't want to just be blasting nails of the audience,
I mean not most that's your deal. And if you do,
or if that is your deal, you want to at
(36:06):
least have control of when it happens. That would be
a very interesting sort of like low tech pneumatic nail gun. Well,
that would be actually a very interesting side show on it. Son,
I wonder if anyone's done that. Imagine like a superhero
who is the human blockhead and then he's struck by
lightning during an act and it gives him the power
to blast nails out of his nose. That would be
(36:27):
kind of neat wow to summon like a supercharged reaction. Yeah,
I like it now. Of course, you might also want
to avoid looking at the lights while doing this particular
act because you want to avoid photo sneeze reflex, which
of course is we've all had that thing where it's like,
if you feel like you're about to sneeze and you
want to get it over with, they say, stare at
the sun. Well, don't stare at the sun. But but
(36:47):
let's sort of look in the direction of a bright
light and and it will cause the sneeze to happen.
You know, that's really interesting. The researchers aren't exactly sure
why it happens, but something like of the population when
they go out into this from their house or some
other dark area, um, maybe it's a sneeze, And thought
that the sensors in our the light sensors in our
(37:09):
optic nerves are so close to the sensors for our
nose that it's a little bit of a misfire of
the brain which is detecting that that the nose um
sensors are basically detecting that light and interpreting it as
an irritant. It's one of those things that I didn't
really know about until not too long ago, when I
don't think maybe it was my wife that pointed out
(37:30):
that if you're about to sneeze and you just want
to go and get it over with, you know, look
to a bright light and that'll do it without My
daughter does it every single time she leaves the house
son sneezing. Yeah. Interesting, Well, you know, maybe we have
some swords swallowers out there in the audience. That can
hope we do. Yeah, they can let us know fire breathers,
fire breathing human blockheads or even just you know, carnival
(37:54):
sideshow officionados. We'd love to hear, crom Um. You can
certainly find us in any of the normal means. You
can check out our main website, stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com. You can go to find us on
social media or on Twitter blow the Mind as the
handle there. You can find us on Facebook and tumbler
at stuff to Blow your Mind, and you can also
reach us by sending us an email at below of
(38:14):
the mind at discovery dot com for more on this
and thousands of other topics, because it how stuff works
dot com
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.