The Creepypasta Experiments

Surf the Internet long enough and you’ll happen upon creepypasta: little cut-and-paste snippets of horror that blur the lines between reality and the fantastic. These collectively assembled amalgams of pop culture influences take on their own amorphous power -- and more than a few of them seem to involve shadowy science experiments. So in this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Christian explore the real-life science behind a handful of experiments from the world of creepypasta.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Christian Sager. This
week we are rerunning one of our favorite and one
of our audiences most beloved episodes for the Halloween season,

(00:27):
the first of our Creepy Pasta Experiment episodes. Yeah, Creepy
Pasta a little strange nuggets of often unattributed horror fiction
on the Internet. We take them apart, we look at
some science that ties into them, and just discuss what
creepy pasta is in general. Yeah, we'll get into it.
Throughout the episode. We introduce you to what creepy pastas are,

(00:49):
and then we take a couple of them. We look
at the science behind them, a couple of things we
wanted to let you know beforehand. There is actually a
second Creepy Pasta episode if you like this one and
you want to hear more. We have one about Jeff
the Killer, and we are going to be recording a
third one for the October Halloween season sometime in the
next few weeks, so hopefully you will see that from

(01:11):
us soon. Yeah, and the stories we cover in it,
the pastas we cover in it our TBD. So if
there's one that's just really really just grinding away your
mind that you want us to to tease apart, let
us know and maybe we'll cover it. Yeah. Absolutely, I
just read two new ones today and I'm already the
gears are going. I'm already thinking about how we can
take these apart. But please let us know you got

(01:32):
one that you think is perfect for the show. Send
us an email, write us on social media. All right,
without further ado, creepy pasta. Today we're talking about creepy pasta,
which imagined there are three different responses out there. Some
people were probably going to creepy pasta, Love creepy pasta,
other people are going creepypasta, what are you doing covering that?

(01:53):
And other people are just flat up asking what the
hell is creepy creepy pasta? L dente? Yeah, it has
it the texture or that is it posta that shaped
like little ghosts. That's what entered my mind when I
first started hearing about it a few years back. But what,
let's explain what creepy pasta is for everyone who's not familiar, right, Okay,

(02:14):
so I'm only recently familiar with this uh phenomenon, but
apparently around two thousand six h a a sort of
fad I guess meme started up on the Internet called
copy pasta, and I think it originated on four Chan
and then splintered off into several different genres in different areas.

(02:35):
The basic idea, though, is that you're creating uh content
that's like copy and pasted into an email or maybe
on a blog or something like that. Right, It's something
that's like easily accessible and share able. Yeah, and it's
I think the two most ubiquitous examples of this. First
of all, emails from your grandma your uncle, like some

(02:56):
sort of ridiculous story about you know, somebody's putting disease
needles into convenience store machines, you know, or or watch
out for hoodlums throwing eggs at your car, or people
turning their lights on and off. You know. There's always
some sort of like oh it's gang activity or or
some sort of weird horror going on in your daily
life where you could possibly believe it, but if you

(03:18):
actually research it, you'll see, oh, this is just a
the same couple of paragraphs that then copy and pasted
throughout the history of the Internet, and we just keep
following for it again and again. And creepy pasta is
sort of the horror iteration of copy pasta, and that
it pretends to be like an urban legend or like

(03:39):
a pseudo real life event that happened, but it's told
as a horror story. Yeah, and I think some of
the you can definitely see some creepy pasta in the
copy pasta that you you see some of those emails,
you know, where it's ultimately you're talking about some sort
of folkloric modern folkloric horror theme. Um, it's wrapped in

(04:01):
enough reality or pseudo reality that you buy into it. Yeah.
They all sort of play off of these authentic aesthetics
using like they mimic things like documents of real life.
It's almost like the found footage of pros. Like, uh,
there's diary entries, witness statements. Sometimes there's image and video files.
And as we're going to talk about today, many of

(04:22):
them take the shape of scientific reports or like lab analysis.
And so what we thought we would do today is
look at some of the most popular scientific based creepy
pastas and then look at the the the plausibility and
the real life connections of the science that they pose it. Yeah,

(04:45):
and I want to definitely imagine some big quotation marks
around scientifically based there. Yeah. Oh yeah, but as we'll
get into yeah, yeah, I mean there's some there's some
very loose stuff when they just say a stimulating gas
was presented, right, there's no, they don't name the gas,
they don't give any methodology or anything. But some of

(05:05):
them are better than others, and well we'll get into
that as well. It's um one thing to keep in
mind with coffee pasta two and I'm especially creepy pasta.
Are the different ways that you come across it online, Like,
they are definite creepy pasta destinations for people who love
reading it and creating it. And they're just kind of
wikis for this. And we'll have some links to these
stories on the landing page for this episode, stuff about

(05:27):
yournd ut com, so you can explore that on your own.
But you'll also see stuff showing up on social media
or you're doing like we encountered this, but a plenty
of times you're doing some research, you're trying to find
out about certain actual experiments, and then you run across
some creepy posta and for a split second you're like,
what is this experiment they're talking about? Oh, it's creep Yeah,
it is kind of perfect. And especially researching this particular

(05:49):
episode was difficult because when you're trying to research the
actual scientific basis for some of these stories, you end
up finding either fake article or or the actual story
itself popping up in a lot of your searches. I've
also seen like wiki questions and message boards, you see
this kind of stuff popping up there where someone will
have yeah, people have a legitimate question, and somebody will

(06:13):
decide to throw a slip a little pop there there,
you know, Like I've I've seen medical question sites, um,
where someone will be talking. I think I was writing
something that had to do with the about about prostates
prostate exams, and I ran across this message board where
somebody was asking, Hey, what can I expect when I
go in there? And then somebody had this ridiculous story

(06:36):
that they shared, and then another individual point it responded
and said, oh, this is pasta here's an example of
where it was previously uh rolled out. I think that's
where I first discovered the term copy pop. Yeah, I
mean like in today's age of like, uh, what we
are often told in our daily jobs is user generated content, right,

(06:59):
where like the user is commenting or creating something on
their own. This is the perfect kind of thing to
slip in there, right, Like in an Amazon review, you
could drop in some creepy pasta related to whatever item
it is that's a that's on sale, and you give
it a five star review, but let people know that
it was haunted or something when you got in the mail. Yeah,
it's kind of like the creepy mold that grows uh on,

(07:22):
you know, on the structures of the Internet and throughout
the systems of the Internet, and some of it is
just merely mold and sometimes but sometimes it's exquisite and
it's fun to look at and feel. But I think
so um, people who maybe aren't familiar with the creepy
pasta genre, you might actually know. The most famous of

(07:44):
the creepy pasta characters or stories is the slender Man one. Uh.
And I don't know a ton about slender Man other
than what I've read about him outside of the creepy
pastas he appears in, but basically the ideas that he's
kind of like a he's a horror story character, right,
He's just as much as like Jason Vorhees or Freddy Krueger,

(08:05):
but he's kind of like in a elongated, skinny, scary
looking man and like a suit. Yeah, you see. To
like the reason one of the reasons Slenderman is such
a nice example of copy pasta is that he's kind
of collectively assembled. He's an amalgam of pop culture influences
and and ultimately the final forums very amorphous too, because

(08:29):
because a lot of it is about his depictions and
individual pieces of creepy pasta or especially in imagery and
these various photoshop contests that have contributed to to the myth. Right, Yeah,
that's one of the ones where there's a lot of
visual accompaniment, Like a lot of a lot of slender
Man revolves around the pictures that people have created that
are just terrifying. Yeah, and there's no real consensus on

(08:51):
like exactly what the story is, Like nobody said this
is what slender Man is slender Man, and that helps
to make it mysterious and and weird. I mean, that's
one of the reasons that Lovecraft's mythos continues to resonate
is that there's individuals have come along and tried to
create a boiler plate uh uh, you know, mythos for him,

(09:12):
but ultimately his mythos is shrouded in mystery and contradictions. Absolutely,
and so included in that And I'd be remiss if
we'd or we'd be remiss if we didn't include this
is that. You may have also heard in the news
that there was an inspired violent assault by two twelve

(09:32):
year old girls against another twelve year old girl. They
were trying to murder her in inspiration they were inspired
by slender Man. Uh and um, you know. To clarify,
like the owners of Creepy pasta dot com, many of
the people who were involved in this community, they all
you know released a state statements basically saying like they

(09:54):
this was not their intention, They didn't want to be
connected this at all. It was more just kind of
a fun pop culture thing for them to have a
community around. But these girls somehow took it internally and
uh and ended up almost killing their friend. Luckily, she
escaped and was I think she was had like seventeen
or nineteen times or something like that. She was found

(10:14):
by somebody on the Southern Road and was able to
get medical care. Well, I mean it just speaks to
the power of storytelling. This to the power of folklore
and the power of the power of symbols, you know.
I mean, anybody can create a story, and oftentimes the
story is not going to be that good, but you're
playing with powerful elements when you start playing with with
established tropes and it's established symbols, established symbols of fear,

(10:37):
and uh, even you know, a very amateur creator can
end up creating something that strongly resonates. And I mean
that's the beauty of something like Creepy Pasta. It is.
And and I also, like, I think that it would
be really like off the mark to say that, like, oh,
it's because of slender Man that this happened, you know,
I mean clearly like there was something going on with

(10:59):
these girls anyway. Is uh. That's like the argument that
like Ozzy Osbourne influenced teenagers to kill each other in
the eighties or something, you know. Just I don't buy
into it, but I think it's important that we let
the audience know about that. Um, Creepy Pasta really kind
of hit its height in because the New York Times
actually covered it and did an article on it. Um.

(11:21):
But you know, a lot of it resembles what we
we refer to as weird fiction, right, yeah, you still.
I mean it kind of runs the gamut because on
one end of the spectrum you have creepy pasta that
reads like a either either like a Wikipedia article or
pro or a poorly written Wikipedia article, where it's just

(11:42):
very factual, very grounded in this subjective reporting style. And
then on the other hand, stuff that is aspiring more
and more to resemble weird fiction, you know, something with
more of a narrative flow. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, as
a both a fan of horror pros and somebody who
writes or pros, I guess my personal literary criticism here

(12:03):
is just that the best of these always ends up
still reading kind of like a Wikipedia entry, right. So,
there's no there's no craft to the prose necessarily that
you would find in something that's designed for literature. It's
mostly just a summary of the plot. Um. However, it
can be done artfully. Um is so in such a

(12:24):
way to make it seem like it was a real thing. Right. Uh.
If it's done as such, then it can have a
pretty sustaining dread that goes along with it. Um. So
there are some of these that I like better than others, uh,
like any kind of you know, um medium or storytelling.
But uh, I have to say, and I want to

(12:45):
warn our listeners if you if you haven't read any
of these yet, A lot of the grammar and spelling
is just horrible in these, Like they need a proof
reader to just go over reach these. Although I guess
that that could potentially be part of the charm, right,
is that like it's been written by somebody who hasn't
taken the time to proof read and go back and

(13:06):
fix errors, and therefore it seems more authentic. Sometimes when
you've been horrified by your participation in a frightening paranormal experiment,
you know you're less a less attentive to grammar. That's
that's possible for sure. Uh. I do want to say
one more thing. I want to throw a plug out
there for our colleagues. So a lot of people don't
know this, but our how stuff works colleagues, including our

(13:30):
producer Noel who's on the board right now, Lauren Vogelbaum
from Forward Thinking, and Ben Bolan and Matt Frederick from
Stuff they don't want you to know, all got together
and put together what I would call a Creepy pasta
audio play. It's called See You Next Time, and they
did it for the Atlanta Fringe Festival, and it's about

(13:51):
like a thirty minute MP three that you can go
and download from their site. So if you're into that
kind of thing, like if you're like a Welcome to
night Vale kind of person, go download that and check
it out, because it's all how stuff works, characters and personalities.
In fact, Joe and I both make very minor appearances
in the story, just as like kind of extras, but

(14:11):
really well done, and it was like one of my
favorite horror stories from this past year. Cool. Yeah, we'll
include a link to that on landing page for this episode. Um.
In terms of back to the Creepy Pasta though the like,
I find that the ones that are instantly uh grounded
in more of a traditional storytelling, like you know what
the narrator is saying. What I have to relate to

(14:34):
you about this experiment is to bind you instantly know
you're reading the story, but I guess the the and
then to your point, if it reads entirely like a
Wikipedia piece, then it's it runs the risk of just
being completely dry. Um, you can still be engaging. But
I think the probably the sweet spot is if you
can have it start dry and seemingly factual and objective,

(14:57):
and then have it morph into something uh that that
that is more elegantly written, and then maybe steer back
out of it. Yeah it builds. Yeah. Yeah. I think
another thing that that is key with these as well
is the format. So like the mimicking of a of
a particular kind of format, uh to create the authenticity

(15:19):
type thing, like like ones that mimic actual Wikipedia entries
are kind of using that format to their advantage, right,
Whereas like if it's just a chain of prose that
shows up a night email sent to me by my
weird aunt, then I'm less likely to go, oh, this
could potentially be a thing. Yeah uh. And And another

(15:40):
thing too that's probably worth noting is that, like part
of our job for the podcast and other things is
to evaluate sources and evaluate validity of things, and so inherently,
I think for for people like us reading these things
were automatically like wait a minute, I need some more evidence,
I need more information, where the sources cited. One of

(16:00):
the early examples of just just recording folklore that I
think has some potential ties into creepy PASTA is a
book called Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio by Lousy
Z from eighteenth century China. Uh, each of these tales
that that the author relates, they all they all start

(16:22):
the same, and they all kind of end the same.
Where he's saying, I knew this particular individual and and
he works over in this province and works in this office,
and he told me this story about this encounter he had.
And then the encounter might be seeing a strange like
pen dragon, or seeing or encountering a horrifying ghost, or

(16:42):
having some sort of mildly body hilarious encounter. And then
it will end again with him firmly tucking it back
into reality by saying, and this particular acquaintance of mine
he continued to have a great career in this province,
and I still hear from some time to time. Yeah.
The idea I think they're maybe is conscious or not

(17:03):
was sort of taking the oral tradition of folklore and
translating it into pros And yeah, I think you see
that with a lot of early weird fiction as well,
like Arthur Makin you mentioned Lovecraft earlier, Uh, to an
extent like Algernon Blackwood, things like that. Yeah, you have
to sort of you have this nugget of of the
fantastic and you need to tuck it in firmly into

(17:25):
the bed of of our our informational system really, and
in this case it's the the Internet. Yeah. Absolutely, they're
using the medium to its advantage. So okay, so we're
gonna talk about three particular creepy pasta science experiments and
we'll we'll we'll give you the premise, we'll lay it
down for you. It's going to be a very shorthand

(17:47):
version of it, and then you know, if you want
to go read them on the on your own, uh,
and then we will take a look at these science
behind these Yeah. All right, Well, let's kick it off
with probably the more famous of the three, the one,
the one that seems to have to hit up there
at the top of the list on most of these
Grepposta sites, the Russian sleep experiment. Right, So, okay, the

(18:09):
premise of this I'm gonna try to go through this
pretty quickly. Premise of this story is that in the
late nineteen forties, there was a Russian researcher or it
was a research team I believe, who kept five people
awake for fifteen days using what's only referred to as
an experimental gas based stimulants. So we have no idea
whatever this chemical was. The research team kept them in

(18:32):
a sealed environment and monitored their oxygen intake. I don't
know how, It's never explained in the story, but basically
because this gas was potentially I think it was toxic
and high concentrations, as the story goes, uh. Because they
didn't have video equipment at the time, they watched these
uh participants through portholes and they listened listened in with microphones.

(18:56):
But basically the chamber there and was stocked up with
you know, the things that they would need, like books
and cots, running water, a toilet. They had enough dried
food in there for a month. Uh. And they were
all political prisoners that were deemed enemy of the state,
enemies of the state during World War two. But they
were falsely told before they went in, Hey, if you

(19:17):
do this experiment and you can manage to sleep not
sleep for thirty days straight, then we will free you
and we'll forgive your actions. Uh. So the story goes
like this. First five days, these people are fine. After
about day four, though, their conversations start to get a
little dark. They start getting paranoid of one another. By

(19:38):
day nine, one of them starts screaming and running up
and down the length of the chamber, and he screams
so loud that he physically tears the vocal cords his
vocal cords. The others begin to just start whispering into
the microphones, uh, not even acknowledging that the other guy
is screaming. Then a second one starts screaming and running around.

(20:00):
These two take the books that are in the room,
rip their pages out, cover them with their own feces,
and paste them up over the porthole windows. Uh. So
the studio we're in right now actually has a porthole windows.
I was actually just thinking, this is this is like
what happens when you try to record four podcast episodes.
And yeah, absolutely, I begin the screaming and running around. Uh.

(20:21):
Day twelve, all the sounds stop, uh, and the oxygen
consumption rate rises to what is uh, you know, understood
as heavy exercise levels for the five people. On day fourteen,
they use the intercom and they try to you know,
contact them and figure out what's going on inside this room.
They get one response, which is we no longer want

(20:44):
to be freed. On day fifteen, they're finally like, all right,
we're going in there. They open up this chamber and
they send soldiers in. They find that one of the
guys is dead. The rest of them are all crazy.
They've eaten themselves, ripped their own skin off, removed some
of their own organs from their bodies, very like gory
body horror type stuff. Uh. They really wanted to go

(21:07):
to stay in the chamber, like they were addicted to
this gas. One of them the minute they take him
out of the chamber, he bleeds to death immediately, and
they find when they're trying to resuscitate him he's utterly
resistant to morphine. One assaults and kills one of the soldier.
I think there's like another thing about, like another one
like biting a soldier's leg and taking a chunk out

(21:28):
of it and then like some more padding. That's like
all of the soldiers committed suicide within five days or
something like that. Uh, And then this part didn't make
sense to me even in then like narrative of the story.
But they they sowed the skin back onto one of
these victims, Yeah, to try to save him, I guess. Uh.

(21:51):
And they tried it with one of the others, the
other survivors, but they just kept laughing so much during
the surgery process that they couldn't pull it off. So Uh,
it ends up with them being put back in the
chamber because there's some higher up who says, you know,
we gotta figure out what's going on. Say, put these
guys back in the chamber. Uh. They turn up the gas,

(22:11):
their brain waves start fluctuating between normal and then flatlining
as if they're dead. They try putting three of the
researchers in there with him, but one of the researchers
grabs a gun and shoots his commander and then shoots
the captives right before he kills the last captive. The
captive says this, we are you. We are the madness

(22:33):
that lurks within you, all begging to be free at
every moment in your deepest animal mind. We are what
you hide from in your beds every night. We are
what you sedate into silence and paralysis when you go
to the nocturnal haven where we cannot tread. And that's
the end of the creepy pasta all right, Like most
of these experiments, it ends in madness and death and

(22:54):
and some inkling of the world beyond the veil. Right, yeah,
I think you're going to find that, Like there's common
theme of science experiment, people go crazy, kill everybody, and
then say something eerie. Yeah, Like we're saying if you
if you were to find the published, pure reviewed studies
for each of these, you would be able to skip
down to the conclusions and it would say, and everybody

(23:15):
went mad and we had to put down the d
nmate right right, Yeah, what I'd love to see the
i r B for these, the Institutional Review Board like
like looking at this, like, wait, you're gonna do what now? Alright? So,
what's the basically at hard here that we're dealing with
the science of sleep deprivation. There have been a number
of studies that have looked at this. So what happens

(23:37):
when you stay awake for extended periods of time? How
can we make ourselves stay awake for extended periods of
time and and still function properly? Right? So what we
know about sleep deprivation? And I'm sure many of you
out there have experienced some form or another of this. Right,
Like last night I got one hour less than my normal.

(23:57):
However many eight hours a night that I get and
I'm a little uh little LOGI I think is the
term this morning. But the basic breakdown of it goes
like this. We know that we are alertness lowers, right,
we have trouble concentrating. If you even lose ninety minutes
of sleep in one night compared to your average sleep schedule,

(24:20):
you'll be thirty two percent less alert the next day.
So I'm somewhere in that thirty today. Um, forty of
us drivers this is a scary part, scarier I think
than the creepy PASTA. Forty one percent of us drivers
admit to falling asleep behind the wheel because of this
lack of alertness. It also totally screws up our circadian rhythm. Uh,

(24:44):
So our body can't keep the correct time when we
haven't slept the right way. It's as if you're jet lagged,
which makes sense. Uh. And we actually, on our sister show,
brain Stuff, have done both episodes on what happens when
you don't sleep and what happens with jet lag? And
there's some really interesting stuff about jet lag in relation
to uh light entering our eyes and how it interacts

(25:06):
with our brains. So if you want to dive in more,
there's stuff there. But because the circadian rhythm is impaired,
our motor skills are also impaired, and our hormones start
to rise and fall and these just very inappropriate ways.
We also lose memory. That's a common symptom of this.
So what we know is that when we sleep, it

(25:28):
consolidates our memories, basically takes the things that happened to us,
and it organizes it in such a way that helps
our cognitive function. It's kind of like a defragging of
the human absolute and if you're not running your defragment
defragg and if you're not running your defragger appropriately and enough,
then everything gets that that's screwed up up there. Yeah. Um.

(25:49):
In fact, like you start losing recall, you can even
create false memories, and it lowers your just general ability
to process information. Uh. And then this is a quote
directly from our house Stuff Works article on the effects
of sleep deprivation. UH quote. When we learn and store
information and our memory, that information is moved from the hippocampus,

(26:10):
which we know is the memory creating region of our
brain to the prefrontal cortex, specifically the neo cortex region,
which is where we form and store long term memories.
So you can see kind of biologically how this would
start to affect memory. There's also a process going on
where our body's glimphatic system cleans out our nervous system

(26:33):
while we're sleeping. But if you don't sleep, all of
this waste, I guess or trash starts to build up.
And but by trash, what I mean is it's cerebro
spinal fluid that's filled with proteins and toxins. It doesn't
get flushed out of your system, so subsequently you've got
that stuff floating around in there too. All of this
can lead to a speeding up of the progression of

(26:54):
Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Yeah, it's it's important to note here
and distress here that when when when slept, sleep deprivation
is taking place, it's really messing with the chemistry of
the brain, the functioning of the brain, and ultimately our
perceptions of reality, both objective reality and subjective reality, playing

(27:17):
with our memories, our perceptions of the past. Uh hallucinations
are absolutely a symptom. Yeah, so we're we're it's it's
it's ultimately a very Nightmarrick scenario. Not you know, certainly
not out of keeping with the realm of creepy plasta
and horror. Oh yeah, certainly. I mean, I think that's
one of the things that's probably why this particular one

(27:37):
is one of the most popular, is that it's something
at their core. The science ce creepy Pasta's work best
when it's something that almost everyone can identify with. Lack
of sleep is something that I think every person reading
it can kind of imagine. Yeah, sleep is that realm
of mystery, and there there is enough science out there
even if one is not that familiar with it, it's

(27:57):
you can you can certainly at least see it there
on the internet. You know that there than there's been
researching to sleep. You know, there are sleep institutes that
that work with people who have trouble um. One of
the side effects of the sleep deprivation as well as
something that we've covered here on the show before is
sleep paralysis. So I know you've done a video on it,

(28:19):
and was there a previous podcast episode about sleep. It's
come up, it's come up a lot, Like anytime I've
covered something related to supernatural experience, UM, sleep paralysis always
always up there as a possible explanation for encounters with aliens,
encounters with ghosts. Uh and and I'll make sure we
link to some resources in the landing page for this episode.

(28:39):
But you know, essentially, it's a situation where when you
go to sleep, your body is put on lockdown, so
that if you get in a kung fu fight with
a bear in your dream, you won't throw any kung
fu strikes at the person sleeping next to you. But
in sleep paralysis, you wake up with your mind your
eyes open, but your body is still on lockdown and
you're in this this also in this weird phase between

(29:00):
dream and reality where uh, you're highly susceptible to hallucination. Yeah.
And in fact, I haven't seen it yet, but I'm
hoping to watch it this week. Um, have you heard
about The Nightmare? It's this documentary that's all about sleep paralysis.
This is the one from the guys that did the
Room two seven. Yeah, it's the same creative team from
Room two thirty seven. And I've heard that it is horrifying.

(29:21):
It's a documentary this is not a fictional film. But
as we know from you know, researching sleep paralysis in
the past, just the examples of what people think is
happening to them can be utterly terrifying. Yeah, because you're
you often have to your brain is referring back to
pre existing scripts for what you're encountering. You're hearing or
seeing something out of the ordinary, and your brain has

(29:44):
to make sense of it. And so it will turn
to that, uh that episode of the X Files that
you saw, or maybe it will think back to some
creepy pops if he read on the Internet, and use
that to inform what you're experiencing. So, before I go
into more symptoms about I get sleep depth, let's tie
back to that creepypasta story about the Russian sleep experiment. Then, so, yes,

(30:06):
hallucinations are possible. Uh so, I guess you could say
that there's a potential for going crazy or at least
losing the ability to distinguish reality from fantasy. Um, and
then sleep paralysis plays into that as well. Although they
wouldn't be like tearing their own organs out and stuff
like that if they had sleep paralysis. Yeah, I don't

(30:27):
think you'd go full hell right, right. So okay, the
other really big thing that has a multiple effects on
your body when you don't get sleep is that your
genes aren't as efficient at handing out instructions to your body.
So we call this genetic expression, and it causes all
kinds of things. There's weight fluctuations. In fact, there's study

(30:50):
that showed that people who have less than seven to
nine hours a night of sleep are more likely to
be overweight. Uh And and I won't go into all
the numbers here, but basically the idea is like the
less sleep you get, them more likely you are to
be overweight. When you're forced to stay awake, what happens
is your body has trouble processing blood, sugar and lepton,
which is this protein hormone that regulates our appetite and

(31:13):
our metabolism. Uh And this can lead to type two diabetes,
can lead to weight gain, and due to your decreased
ability to process sugar, you're not as easily able to
suppress your food craving. So you know, if you're like me,
you're going to the fridge and having a lot of
ice cream late at night. Uh. It can also lead
to illness. So sleep deprivation diminishes our immune system, which

(31:37):
sometimes leads to serious or chronic illness. Blood pressure becomes
a problem. If you have less than six hours of
sleep at night, it puts you at high risk for
high blood pressure. This starts over taxing your heart. Also,
your brain doesn't have as much time to regulate the
stress hormones that are moving around in there, which also
leads to higher blood pressure. And then finally, death is

(32:01):
a symptom of not sleeping. So and I don't mean
that like if you don't sleep, you'll just drop dead.
In fact, you die at a rate of two times
faster than people who have normal sleeping patterns if you're
sleep deprived. And we can look to certain experiments with
animals and if some animals certainly die without proper sleep,

(32:21):
sleep deprivation and rodents and flies can cause death more
quickly than food deprivation. Uh, specifically, two weeks without sleep
can kill a lap rat. Okay, So, and that's about
as long as the Creepy Pasta experiment went on for
they were in there for about fifteen days before they
started ripping their skin off. And there's all kinds of

(32:42):
super gory stuff in that story. That also inappropriate Amazon purchases.
That was another stuff. Really they had Internet in the
ninety the skin off, they started making inappropriate online purchases
just because they believe altered state they're buying like curtains

(33:03):
made of human skin. Okay. So there's another scientific aspect
to this story as well, right, and that is the
quote experimental gas based stimulant okay, which could I guess
be almost anything. It could be anything, and so it's
a little difficult for us to kind of narrow it
down and say, well, the actual effects would be this,
but I thought it was worth just kind of touching

(33:24):
on what gas does to our bodies. Right. So, any
type of gas, chlorine, sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, nitrogen dioxide, ammonia,
you name it, they're going to irritate your lungs and
some of them dissolve immediately, and uh, you know that's
when you experience the irritation your mouth, nose, and throat.

(33:46):
I mean, like if you think about it, like when
you go to the gas station, you're pumping your gas
and you're inhaling stuff that's kind of a version of this, right, Um,
But the ones that don't easily dissolve, they don't produce
early warning signs, and this can lead to things like
fluid developing your lungs and airway. They can also trigger

(34:07):
allergic responses. These kind of responses can scar your lungs,
maybe leading to chronic bronchitis. If the gas is radioactive,
of course, it can lead to cancer. And if there's
body poisoning, it's gonna poison your body cells, right, So
if it's a poisonous gas, that's going to be lethal
to you as well. Uh, and it'll what will end
up doing is displacing the oxygen that's in your blood,

(34:29):
so you have less oxygen reaching your tissues. Carbon monoxide
itself doesn't appear to have any kind of neurological effects,
but levels below of like if you're exposed to it
can to decrease your mental performance. And one other study
that I found said that mustard gas affects mental health
even for people who have been exposed to it, like

(34:52):
up to twenty five years after their exposure. However, they
usually qualify that as like PTSD because their exposure the
mustard gas was probably in a traumatic situation like war. Um.
So all that is to say is that yes, gas
has physical effects on your body, and there are some

(35:12):
connections to mental problems, I guess, But but not like
within fifteen days you'd go absolutely insane and start ripping
off your skin. Maybe we just haven't found the right
chemical yet. Maybe so we you know, we haven't stumbled
across the right experiment. Declassified experiment from World War two

(35:34):
era Russian history. Now this next bit of creepy pasta,
I found this one a lot of fun. This is
I think I probably like this one the most of
the ones that we looked at here for this episode. Uh.
In short, this one involves a supposed nineteen four British

(35:55):
Secret Intelligence Service experiment aimed at modifying human blood. Here's
a quote. The chemical would modify the blood's chemical properties
and structure so that, if shot or cut, the blood
would have the ability to freeze or solidify to where
the person was shot. This would stop bleeding and can
make a person far stronger than an average human being. Now,

(36:18):
of course, as you as you you know can expect,
the experiment gets all dark and monster as this, turning
the test subjects into gray skin, blood eyed, jelly blooded,
thick skinned cannibals that run them up and as such,
they end up putting them all down, shutting down the experiment,
and deciding not to um alter the blood of British soldiers.

(36:40):
So I think I might have read a different version
than you, because mine ended with them escaping and it
was like, these crazy super soldiers are out there somewhere.
They're homicidal and they could get you. Maybe there are
a couple of versions of it, and that's what the
beauty of creepy pasta that it can change. It's a
morphous it's it's a collective create a scenario. I kept

(37:01):
thinking of them as being basically Wolverine from the X Men,
like like they they all their wounds heal immediately, right,
because the I think one of the things is like
immediately after this test, they like stab him in the
leg and then shoot him in the arm to see
what happens, and like the wounds seal up immediately, right.
But it also makes them kind of feral and crazy

(37:24):
and try to kill everybody. Yeah, I kind of pictured
him looking like creatures from a tool video running them up. Yeah. Yeah. Well.
One of the things I loved about this particular one
is is how much it adhered to the idea of
it being an actual lab report. It said a copy
of this lab report can be found somewhere deep within
the old m I five building in London. I like

(37:44):
that the idea, Like everybody who lives in London knows
about the old m I five building. You can just
pop by and down and check out the file. That's
why they're there. Uh. And they actually name three chemicals
as opposed to the Russian study. They actually name the
chemicals that these guys are exposed to no mo fungan, pepprophora,
midadine in communison. However, in my version it was misspelled

(38:09):
as communism, so it was like they were exposed to
these two chemicals and communism maybe commune isn't wait what
is it? Commune sin? Maybe communistin is uh is a
a drug that causes communism communism inducing you know what?
That would possibly have as much validity as the rest

(38:30):
of this story. I feel like like that was one
of the drugs in RoboCop two or something. Right. Yeah, Well,
the idea that they said here was that those chemicals
modified human blood chemical properties, allowing them to solidify or
freeze when the body is damaged. And they list a
couple of other things that they do to solidify the blood.
So I just want to mention these quickly because this

(38:51):
is kind of their scientific basis for things. Uh. They
increased the blood plasma in the subjects, removed the thromba
sites from their blood, modified the medulla oblongata in their
brains so that it would be familiar with the modified
blood cells. And then they removed forward four to six
percent of their blood volume because I guess the idea

(39:12):
of being that once they've done all this other stuff,
their blood is thicker and subsequently like takes up more
space in their circulatory system. Uh. And they also said
that they weren't allowed to give any food or painkillers
to the subjects for at least twenty four hours, which
I like because that's basically what they do to you
when you like go in for prep surgery anyways. Uh.

(39:34):
And then um, the doctors after the experiment determined that
the pH value of the blood in these guys was
lower than normal. Uh. And they think the chemical caused
aggression by modifying the medulla oblongata. So this is where
I want to start with the science on this one,
because I you know, within five minutes was able to

(39:57):
look up that the medulla oblangada doesn't really have a
whole to do with our emotion and aggression. In fact,
this is the you know, it's commonly known as the
brain stem. It controls our reflexes and autonomic functions, uh,
limb movements, visceral functions. It's basically you know, things like
blood pressure, breathe. There you go, aggression. But so uh yeah,

(40:23):
unless they're like, uh, you know, discovering new things about
that part of the brain that we don't necessarily know.
I don't know that that that would have been the cause.
If I was on the review committee for this academic article,
I would probably point that out now. It's also worth
noting here that this is not to be confused with
the Luftwaffe as freezing experiments hypothermia that took place at

(40:47):
the dock al and Offfitch uh during the Second World War. Uh.
Those were actually dealing with what happens when the bloody
body freezes. This is ultimately about coagulation and healing and
how to how our our bodies heal and what we
can do to speed that process up, especially as far
as internal bleeding goes. And there has been some interesting

(41:10):
research in this area, researchers trying to figure out ways
to to speed up coagulation, speed up healing, and deal
especially with military scenarios where you need to you need
to take care of either a need for blood or
a need for for blood to do its job deep down.
If you follow like science and tech feeds, like like
like we do for work, you end up seeing a

(41:31):
lot of these. I'd say at least once a week
there's some kind of update on uh, either something that's
designed to seal a wound faster or you know, affect
the blood as such. Ye. Yes, I started playing the
latest metal gear thing. Oh yeah, Phantom Pain is that
what it's called? Yeah, where it's like ground zero. I
think it's the one like the free this month, So

(41:53):
I checked it out. And you get wounded to a
certain amount and you like spray your wound with a
little area. Yeah. But um. The first to discuss here
about blood science and kind of cool blood science is
there's a Cleveland, Ohio biotech firm called Arterial Site and
they made headlines in two thousand ten with the development
of an artificial, genetically engineered blood for use on the battlefield.

(42:17):
So we're talking typo negative. Of course, here universal blood donor.
Because you're gonna make artificial blood, everybody should be able
to use it. Yeah, and this would allow for mobile
blood banks and war zones. You wouldn't have to worry
about shortages back home and then the lengthy shipments that
decrease the shelf life for the blood samples you need.
You need blood on the on the field, say an Afghanistan,

(42:41):
then you have a machine that will help create it
right now, presumably. Yeah, that's my question I guess, is that, like,
are they creating this on site in the in a
battlefield scenario, or is it like they created in America
and then they shipped just all of this genetically engineered
blood to wherever the war zone is. I think the
latter is probably the more immediate goal. But my understanding

(43:03):
based on the reading, is that ultimately that's where they
want to get. It's to where you can have at
least a local blood hub, you know, whereas if it's
it's like a three D printer of blood. Yeah, like
at the very least you're like shiving it in from
the closest military base that's opposed to all the way
around the world. Um, they received one million dollars stuff
for the project front through DARPA. And last that it

(43:26):
was really reported on UH they had shipped off samples
to DARPA. And we're hoping to up production to bring
costs down from five thousand dollars per unit of blood
to around one thousand per unit. And just to give
everyone a reminder, one unit equals about a pint in.
The average human contains eight to ten points. So in
order to make enough for humans, it's like, at their

(43:50):
low end, going to be eight to ten thousand dollars
worth of blood. Yeah, and the average soldier needs six
units during trauma treatment, you know, because you're talking about
situations with a lot of blood is lost. I wonder
how that compares to just the leg good old you
know Red Cross, you know, going and giving your blood
volunteer type thing. Well, I mean, of course, then again
you're dealing with all different blood types, and and then

(44:13):
and then a rigorous screening process to figure out which
samples are appliable and shipping, yeah, and shipping, which again
hurts the shelf life. So the process here is pretty interesting.
Scientists harvest HEMEO to pedic cells from the umbilical cords
and via a process called farming that's p H A
R M I N g uh, they turn one umbilical

(44:34):
cord into twenty units of of package blood. This takes
place of the course of three days according to initial
reports through Wired magazine, where they getting all the umbilical
cords from babies. Man, if you can if baby, if
you find babies where the parents are not going to
you know, dry it and bet it or feed it themselves, Uh,

(44:57):
then yeah, the umbilical cord is as has a lot
of valuable material in it. So this is a thing
that as a someone who doesn't have kids that I'm
woefully unaware of. That's like when you go in and
have the procedure and everything for giving birth, they're just
like a you know, in the paperwork, it's a box
that you check. That's something like, I want the umbilical cord.

(45:17):
I assume. I mean, we did not go through that
process with my son, so I'm not I'm not exactly
sure how it rolls out in real time, but I'm
guessing there's a box that you in a panic to
you know, pre birth days, you check or you don't.
Otherwise there's just like a bio hazard bag filled with
umbilical cords that they then ship off to do so.

(45:39):
Ultimately that we're talking about the rapid expansion of umbilical
cord blood sped up even more through the use of
what's called nanex technology. This is a nano fiber based
structure that mimics bone marrow and bone marrows where blood
cells generally multiply and at a greater rate. So yeah,
that's pretty impressive. Yeah, I think so. I mean, it's

(46:01):
it's crazy science fiction ey and and I think would
lend itself well to a little tweaking. I mean, you're
talking about, ultimately the discarded pieces of a baby that
are used to create blood for soldiers in the field
and potentially vampires, right right, Yeah, I mean, well that's
where this would naturally ahead as a Daybreakers situation. You
make these soldiers, they become vampires, and then they vampirize

(46:24):
the rest of the population, So it's a planet of vampires.
I wonder if vampires prefer OH negative as a universal
donor or does that mean it's just probably too common? Right,
It's like the Coca Cola of blood, all right, So
that's artificial blood. But then there's the use of healing
factor nanoparticles in the blood all right, So this is
straight up wolverine healing factor is right out of the

(46:48):
X men exactly. This is where we're getting into, at
least the near future version of that UM. So there
are different substances that can be used as a coagulant
to help with excessive bleeding. Of course, the bad way
to deal with excessive bleeding on the surfaces to apply
pressure when it's a wound that can be treated in
that manner to die or a wound um But a

(47:09):
two thousand nine study published in the journal Science Translational
Medicine introduced the use of injectable synthetic nanoparticles or nano
platelets that curb bleeding. So normally blood platelets at a
wound site buying together in order to plug that wound. Right,
These these nano platelets, what they do is they mimic
platelet structure, so they augment the process bonding with natural

(47:33):
blood platelets and acting as a nanostructure. So it's like
throwing in a bunch of a bunch of extras. To say,
you're to television taping and the crowds looking kind of thin,
get some extras in there make it look nice and
thick for the cameras. So yeah, that's what I'm kind
of thinking that it's like a thickening process, like almost
like a blood plasma kind And what's more, though, this

(47:57):
the best part about this is again not the use
of this at at the skin level, but the ability
to to get down and stop deep and internal bleeding
more easily. Again, you can't just apply pressure if you're
dealing with bleeding inside the body. Yeah, there's got to
be so many potential hazards with this though, too. I

(48:18):
would imagine given the like I mean, like our blood
is like it's got that Goldilocks factor to it, right,
it has to be like just right. It can't be
too thick and it can't be too thin otherwise there's
all there's a whole host of problems I'll get into
later that you know can affect your body. Oh yeah,
like I'm instantly thinking too back to last season of

(48:38):
The Nick. Oh I've only seen a couple episodes. Yeah,
there's some pretty horrific It's like, you know, turn of
the century hospital, brilliant surgeon, and at one point he
gets obsessed with blood transfusion and trying to figure out,
like what's the key, right, it's really rough stuff. But
but in this case with these particularly a particular nano
platelets that they found that the stuff has had bleeding

(49:01):
time and wounded rats. And just a couple of years later,
in two thousand and eleven, the Massachusetts General Hospital Center
for Engineering and Medicine developed a way to deliver nano
spheres containing keratinosite growth factor or KGF, suspended in a
fibrin gel. Uh So, again, the advantage here would be
to deal with the targeted treatment of deep wounds as

(49:25):
opposed to trying to treat the whole body and just
get at it um. So this is right. So the
difference between this and Wolverine is that, like, you don't
just heal immediately from any wound. You have a wound
and then they apply these nanospheres to you. And the
thing with the nanopolatelist, it wouldn't be a matter of
as we see in the creepy post. It wouldn't be

(49:47):
like we've changed the blood of the soldiers, you know.
It's this is a way to treat the blood of
a soldier at a wound site and try to speed
up the healing. Well, Okay, So you may recall that
at the top of when we were talking about this
experiment that I mentioned, they had three particular chemicals that
they mentioned. I assumed these were fictional, but I decided

(50:08):
to look them up. No mo funcan peppro formiddine, and
commune sin turns out, at least as far as I
can tell, that they are real things. However, there were
a few links that definitely looked like they were fake
that we're potential. Uh, I'm gonna guess like fake sources

(50:30):
to back up the creepy pasta story. But then there
were a lot of legitimate academic chemistry articles about these
that were behind firewalls I couldn't access. But I did
get access to one that was called Synthetic Studies towards
Commune Sin's and it was published in the Israel Israel
Journal of Chemistry. In and this I could barely understand

(50:53):
it because it was written in such deep chemistry language. However,
this is what I got out of it. Uh, these
are basically the same chemicals. They're like synthesized chemicals that
are isolated from a marine fungal strain of a Penicilla
penicillum species. And that there's a possible use for these

(51:17):
as an insecticide. They're also cytotoxic against certain tumor cells.
So I think that they're being investigated for those possible applications. Uh.
And then they were first isolated in so yeah, they
really exist. It sounds like it doesn't sound like their
usage though, is to you know, plug up blood or

(51:39):
make blood freeze or anything like that. But I mean,
I guess we're looking at the standard trick here, right.
You you draw a little science terminology out, you throw
it in there in a way where you're not too specific,
and it's harder for the the average reader to look
at it and call bs uh, And so it gives
it that science vibe and let me to invest a
little more creepy bust. They did a great job. Whoever

(52:02):
wrote this did a great job with the that application
of of these chemicals, because not only were they like
difficult to find information on, but also they're so relatively
new in the in in the research it's being done
on them, that there isn't a whole lot out there.
I guess it could be plausible that, you know, somebody
comes up with his magical synthetic chemical that can freeze

(52:23):
your blood. UM. And real quick, let's just talk about
what happens when your blood is thickened or frozen in
certain situations. First of all, it's very rare that you
could freeze human beings blood while it was still inside
their body. The hypothalamust constantly tries to keep the core

(52:44):
of our bodies warm, so it constricts our blood supprise
supply to the core of our bodies, essentially removing it
from the extremities if necessary. So that's why you get
those instances of like frostbite where people's fingers or toes
fall off and stuff like that. Um. But even in
cryonics when they're going to freeze somebody's body, your blood

(53:06):
isn't frozen from what I understand reading about it. Your
body is usually injected with something called heperin, which is
an anticoagulant, and the reason why is to prevent blood
clotting while you're under I don't know what's the proper
term under freeze freezer. Um. And then lastly, there is

(53:29):
a there there are a couple different UH diseases that
lead to blood thickening. One in particular is called Hughes syndrome.
And that's an abnormal immune system response that causes your
blood to thicken. Basically, the idea here is it sounds
similar to the nanotech we were talking about earlier. It
causes your blood platelets to clump together. But this can

(53:50):
be very dangerous, like I was saying earlier, because it
can lead to thrombosis, which can subsequently lead to something
like a heart attack or a stroke or I suppose
even an annual him But no cannibalism, Nope, they don't
have that yet. Alright, alright, well, now we're gonna turn
to the third section here and and this one we're
really drawing on two different, uh creepy pastas, which will

(54:13):
we'll refer to here in short. One is the Harbinger
experiment and the other one is Gateway of the Mind,
and they both resolve and they both revolve around the
same thing. Really, so the Harbinger Experiment, this creepy pasta
is this is a bit long, and it it kind
of reads like, you know, average weird fiction story. Really,
the basics here is it's some inner prolonged isolation experiment

(54:37):
with an occult twist, some entity that's summoned into the
bodies of the patients by this mysterious doctor Zimmerman. Zimmerman
wants to prove the existence of the spirit realm by
trapping a spirit in a human body, a human body
that he's injected with a compound that somehow prevents the
spirit from leaving again while the host is still alive.

(54:57):
Right right, And yeah, if I remember this one, correct, Like,
Zimmerman is like fantastically rich and like does all of
this at like an off site, hidden bunker underground where
he's like hired his own private army and team of researchers. Right,
so you canna imagine how it ends up, right, right,
And it's just like, yeah, and now the the other

(55:20):
one is Gateway of the Mind and do you want
to roll the Yeah, this one is an interesting one.
So the idea with this is that there's this team
of scientists. The story refers to them as deeply pious scientists, uh,
and that the idea is that they want to prove
the existence of God. So their theory is that without

(55:41):
sensory input, that human beings would be able to perceive
the presence of God. So and that they interfere with
some kind of holy signal. Right, So what they do
is they take this elderly volunteer and they surgically cut
out nerves so he can't see here, taste, smell, or
feel uh, and he can he he can't communicate, but

(56:01):
he can, like you can clearly talk. He's sort of
like yells, Yeah, I don't think he knows what's going
on around him, but he like yells out things about
what he's experiencing. But he's basically alone with his thoughts,
and Yeah, what happens is he goes totally crazy. He
says that he's talking to ghosts. He's able to like
use information from the ghosts to like prove that there's

(56:23):
something supernatural going on to the researchers, right bat like
revealing secrets about them that nobody else would know. And
then at the very end, he tells them that he's
a he's had a conversation with God and and God
has abandoned us. Okay, well, I feel like it kind
of loses a little steam there at the end, with
like like maybe maybe the message that he revealed shouldn't

(56:44):
be so explicit, but I'm I'm I'm not picking him. Yeah,
they sort of like this the author or authors of
this creepy pasta. It seems like God is sort of
kg about getting in touch with this guy who doesn't
have his five senses. Like the ghosts show up pretty quickly,
but God like waits until like the absolute last minute,
and all he does just say like, hey, I've abandoned

(57:08):
you guys. I'm on vacation for the week. So both
of these, on one level, they deal with this idea
of like, let's scientifically prove the afterlife and and there
have been a number of experiments and sort of studio
experiments that have gone into that. We have a whole
episode of stuff to blow your mind to deals with
soul weighing experiments that tried to show that the soul
has weight, and therefore there is a soul, there is

(57:30):
some part of us that's immortal and to death. Um,
there there's real science behind that too. Isn't there like
a particular like I remember like that there's like a
very specific weight that they said that oh yeah, there's
that disappears when you die or something like that. Right, yeah,
I think twenty one Graham was the number of those
as we discussed in that episode, which I'll link to

(57:51):
on the landing page for this episode. Uh, you know,
there's some science applied. It's very rough and even though
a lot of problems, there are some more recent theories
that are in arresting. But both of these experiments ultimately
deal with isolation. Right, what happens when someone is isolated
from from sensory input particularly Uh in the case of

(58:12):
the experience we're gonna discuss here, you put them in
a room, you put them in solitary confined. Yeah, what
happens when you deprive us of our environment that we've
evolved to thrive within. What happens to the mind? Yeah,
And so I think it's worth mentioning here before we
get into the science of it, of what happens when
you're deprived of your senses and for that matter of

(58:32):
social interaction. That both Robert and I have gone into
sensory deprivation tanks before, so we have personal experience with this. Uh.
In my case, I didn't hallucinate, which seems to be
a common symptom that people have. But it was enjoyable.
It was peaceful. You basically lay inside a big tank

(58:54):
that's dark, laying on top of salt water. Uh. For
in my case, it was about an hour long. Yeah. Uh,
and um, you know because of the water, your ears
are plugged out. Oh no, you I wore ear plugs.
But there the water also keeps you from really being
able to hear anything. Uh. You can't see anything, you
don't really feel anything other than the water. Uh and

(59:17):
the taste of salty air. Yeah. When I went into it,
I wasn't really thinking about how salty it was gonna be,
and how that there's a good point, a good portion
of the float experience that has spent reacting to the
feel of the salt water, the smell of the salt water,
and and just sort of getting past that. Yeah, I
guess I should clarify that there's so much salt water

(59:38):
that you float to the top like you're not just
laying in it. Yeah, like you instantly are acquainted with
any random nicks or scratches or which is on your
body because now they have tons of salt pressing up
against them. So we've had a number of of studies
that have looked at at what happens when you put
somebody in solitary confinement, when you isolate someone from stemming. Lie. Uh.

(01:00:00):
There's a two thousand thirteen pieces on from Wire Magazine
by Brandon Kime, titled The Horrible Psychology of Solitary Confinement,
and it takes a nice look at horrifying topic, pointing
out the solitary confinement has been shown to make prisoners
extremely anxious, to make them angry, make them hallucinate, experienced
mood swings and flatness, the loss of impulse control, and

(01:00:24):
this is all on top of aggravating any pre existing
mental illnesses. Um. So they We've looked at solitary confinement
many times from a scientific standpoint in the past, and
it generally comes in ways responding to trends and concerns
related to modern incarcin incarceration, So the mid eighteen hundreds
or concern and interest in this. In the nineteen fifties,

(01:00:46):
it popped up again due in part of his reaction
to the Korean War um prisoners of war and how
they were allegedly treated, and then it rose up again
in the nineteen eighties with you know, some research spread
out in between, but those are sort of the big periods.
So I have to say, like every time, like I
read a fictional account or watch a TV show er

(01:01:07):
movie where it's a prison setting and somebody does something
wrong and get sent to solitary. My first thought is
always like that sounds great, Yeah, like, oh yeah, you
get to be away from all the craziness. And do
you sit all by yourself in a room and hang
out and sleep and you're alone with your thoughts. However,
I don't think it's as peaceful as I'm imagining it
to be based on these experiments, right, and and also

(01:01:30):
on other things we know, and it's based on accounts
where people just talk about it is just this brutalization
of the mind. Essentially, in absence of stimuli, we focus
on what little stimuli there is. Our brains are made
for a world of you know, fixed and moving objects,
of varied environmental actions going on, not a limited cell.

(01:01:51):
So you get in there, your brain is up chewing
on itself. Uh. May, maybe it's some detail in the cell.
Maybe it's um, it's something in your memory. Your brain
finds something to focus on and sort of recreate the
world you've been robbed off out of its limited pieces.
And this is the Hannibal Elector style, like like forming
what does he call it his memory palace? Yeah? I

(01:02:12):
think he doesn't. He paint the walls with to resemble
Florence or something. It depends on the iteration of Hannibal.
But yeah, in the TV show which just ended, I believe,
once they actually incarceraate him, like he just constructs it
all inside it like he can, like because he's such
a crazed genius, he can like go inside his memory

(01:02:34):
palace and it's like he's in a church in Florence
or something like that. Yeah. So, like basically that's what
your brain wants to do, but oftentimes you don't have
and you don't have that rich tapestry to to to
draw on. What you have are maybe some traumatic memories
from your incarceration. Maybe it's you know, some weird markings
on the wall or something that's troubling you in the

(01:02:54):
back of your mind, and that's what gets flowed up.
That's what is blown out to your new virtual world. Yeah.
Well so I O I and actually has a really
nice summary piece, less about um the isolation part, but
more about the sensory deprivation and guess who came up
at the beginning of their article. It was the good

(01:03:15):
old John C. Lily Uh character that often seems to
come up on stuff to blow your mind. In fact,
we've talked recently about maybe doing an episode just about
him and you. You were the one who told me
I think that. Uh. He was the inspiration for Altered States, right,
which is kind of my go to, UM pop culture
movie reference for sensory deprivation tanks. He claimed that when

(01:03:39):
he was in a sensory deprivation tank, it allowed him
to make contact with creatures from another dimension. Uh, and
they're from a civilization that was far more advanced than
our own. Uh. So that is, I guess kind of
close to the Harbinger story. Although I don't know necessarily
that John C. Lily is a reliable source. Um he is.

(01:04:02):
He's a kind of a problematic source, but a fascinating one.
But hallucinations are absolutely real, um people. We definitely know
people have hallucinations when they're deprived of their senses. Renowned
physicist Richard Feynman has described having them when he was
in a sensory deprivation chamber. We have lots of examples

(01:04:22):
of studies that have been done. Uh. Both meditation and
senor sensory deprivation are linked to decreased alpha waves and
increased theta waves within our brains. These are the same
things that we we find when we're in a sleeping state,
and in fact, we're going to find as we kind
of go through this sensory deprivation stuff that there's a
lot of connections to what we were talking about earlier

(01:04:44):
with the Russian sleep experiment story of sleep. So there's
a connection between the isolation and the sleep stuff, at
least in how our brains work. Uh. There's an investigation,
uh in two thousand nine that showed that some people
within fifth teen minutes of sensory deprivation will have hallucinations triggered. Uh.

(01:05:06):
And however, I will qualify it by saying that this
particular study, they the people that they got for this
study purposely were scored low on what is called they
revised hallucination scale. I'd love to know that test, how
they how they how they determine that basically what this
man was like these people, I think we're in like
the lower twenty percentile of people who are are likely

(01:05:29):
to have hallucinations. Now, it's also worth noting that that
this kind of isolation warps our perception of time, and
you know, part of that you get into the whole
just a relative nature of time. Right. An hour spent
in a boring waiting room is far different than an
hour spent at the carnival. Right. So, sociologist and caving

(01:05:50):
enthusiast Maresio Mantobini spent three hundred and sixty six days
in an Italian cave to replicate a long solitary space flight.
You know, what would be the experience of staying in
a little tube on your way to march right. Uh.
When he emerged, he was convinced only two d and
nineteen days had passed, uh, instead of three hundred and

(01:06:12):
sixty six, So his sleep wave cycles had nearly doubled
in this in this scenario. So there's another connection. Your
senses are inherently connected, I guess to your circadian rhythm.
That gets back to what I was talking about earlier
with light and jet lag. Uh. There's another crazy story
that we have an instance of this in nineteen sixty one.

(01:06:33):
It's a French geologist named Michel Sifra who studied an
underground glacier beneath the French Alps, and he ended up
staying for two months instead of his anticipated two weeks.
And what happened was he basically decided to stop doing
his study and live like an animal. That's quote, I
think that's his quote, live like an animal. Uh. And

(01:06:56):
when he was tested back on the surface, when his
team and they got him out, they found that it
took him five minutes to count to one twenty seconds.
So it definitely interferes with our perceptions of time. Yeah,
and therefore also ends up warping our sleep and in
the the way that plays into how we use our time.
For reasons that we're still not sure about it. It Uh,

(01:07:19):
it really blows out your sleep cycle. So most underground
dwellers shift to a forty eight hour cycle, thirty six
hours of activity followed by twelve hours of sleep. I
don't know if well, I suppose if I was in
the right environment, I would shift over to that, but
I don't know that I could be awake for thirty
six hours straight. Um. One of the key series of

(01:07:41):
experiments here and again I mentioned the you know, the
different boom periods for for isolation experimentation. Uh. This was
McGill University Medical Center in Montreal, where psychologist Donald Hebb
led several key isolation experiments in the late fifties. Again,
this is after the Korean Wars find to somew treatment. Uh,

(01:08:01):
volunteer students were put in soundproof cubicles. They even gave
them trans hallucin visors, cotton gloves, cardboard cuffs to you know,
keep them from feeling the way that doesn't involve slicing nerves.
We gave them U shaped pillows turn on some white noise,
and they found that the test stuff just became restless
and mirror hours and in some cases became anxious and emotional.

(01:08:23):
U their abilities in arithmetic and word association test quickly
took a dive. And then uh, the hallucinations points of
light lines or shapes eventually bizarre seeing such ads and
these are at actual scenes. Hallucinations are crazy? Is there
like the kind of urban legend hallucinations you hear, like, well,

(01:08:43):
such and such kid took LSD and then he saw
this for the rest of his life or whatever, right,
like these are nuts? Yeah? And speaking of nuts, yeah,
the first squirrels marching with sacks over their shoulders. Another one,
processions of eyeglasses filing down a street. One one person
only saw dogs, another one only saw babies. Um, and
they had no control over the visuals. They're just rolling

(01:09:05):
them out. So this this reminds me of two things.
I mean, first of all, what we said earlier about
the brain focusing on a one little thing, It just
it has to fill up your world, and it ends
up filling your world up with a babby. Just yeah,
and I don't I think it was like lots of babies.
It wasn't just like a baby or two. It was like,
I think this person was just hallucinating hordes of babies,

(01:09:28):
which sounds like the scariest horror movie never made. And again,
it's like they had no control over. So this is
the kind of perhaps some people who engage in meditation
or yoga can relate to this. But when I am
finishing yoga, sometimes, when I'm in shivasana, I get to
experience some level of hallucination that I don't have control over.

(01:09:48):
It's often just lights and stuff, you know, but you're
just sort of watching it transpire. You're not directly influencing
what you're seeing. Yeah, absolutely, I've I've had similar situations before,
although nothing doble, which is apparently what happened in this
McGill's study. Right, Yeah, there were some audible hallucinations. They're
hearing music, they're hearing sounds, tactile hallucinations where they touched

(01:10:09):
the door knob and I think they feel a shock
or another person said that they felt pellets hitting their skin. Yeah.
So basically the gist of this is that they weren't
even able to finish this study. They wanted it to
be several weeks long, but everyone became so distressed and
had so much trouble that they just ended the study. Uh,
they only lasted a few days in isolation, none of

(01:10:31):
them lasted more than a week, and they reported, you know,
they were unable to think clearly the whole time. They
were actually more susceptible to suggestion after they got out. So,
for instance, one of the things that they did was
suggest to them, uh, while they were sorry, while they
their their senses were deprived, they suggested to them that

(01:10:52):
ghosts were real. And then when they got out of
the situation, they asked them questions about the paranormal and
these people were now more likely to think that ghosts
were real, which lent credence to this idea that, you know,
there was this paranoid idea that the Soviets were using
sensory deprivation in some kind of way to brainwash people, right,

(01:11:12):
like a Manchurian candidate kind of situation, And so that
subsequently led to even more research in this area, also
done at at McGill. This guy d Ewen Cameron. He
was the head of McGill's psychiatry department in the fifties
and he was inspired by Heav's work, so he began
employing sensory deprivation as part of a technique called psychic driving.

(01:11:35):
This is something we should probably do an episode on
UH and his unsuccessful attempt to reprogram the minds of
mentally ill patients. So basically he justified this saying, you
know this, this was something that was sort of necessary
so that we could better understand the mind and lieu
of the Soviet brainwash characters. UM. Ultimately, the patients, some

(01:11:58):
of them ended up suing him afterwards, and UH. In
nineteen fifties six he wrote in the American Journal of
Psychiatry that he would hypnotize schizophrenic patients under the stimulant
drugs and after prolonged psychological isolation. So, like we were
saying earlier, like let's say you're a prisoner and you're

(01:12:19):
putting solitary confinement and you're already mentally ill. Like, that's
not going to help the situation. This guy was like
doing that to people on purpose and then throwing drugs
into the mix. Uh, and then finally, uh, you know,
ultimately like this is a real ethics violation. I think
this is one of those things that probably led to
the strict adherence to institutional review boards that we have nowadays.

(01:12:43):
In most studies, these people were sick, they had mental illness,
and they wanted to get help, but instead they were
just subjected to this kind of brutal research that seemed
to be largely stimulated by the Cold War. Just have
one more study on all this. In two thousand and eight,
psycholog just Ian Robbins created recreated HEAVS experiments and in

(01:13:04):
collaboration with the BBC, and in this they isolated six
volunteers for forty eight hours and soundproof rooms, all this
taking place in a former UM nuclear bunker. This sounds
fairly close to the Harbinger. It does, and they've had
similar results that anxiety, extreme emotions, paranoia, significant deterioration in

(01:13:24):
their mental functioning, and of course crazy hallucinations. Yeah, so
that I wanted to list these hallucinations because they're just
as bonkers, isn't the first batch one person hallucinated a
heap of five thousand empty oyster shells, And then there
are other things like a snake zebras, tiny cars, the
room taking off I think, like flying a bunch of mosquitoes,

(01:13:45):
and then this one that there are fighter planes flying
and buzzing around within the room. So yeah, so the
deprivation can definitely uh twist your mind. Yeah, you remove
human from its natural sleep side. So you remove a
human from its natural environment and you change the expression
of the mind, you change our experience of reality. And

(01:14:09):
that is ultimately a very terrifying concept to wrap our
hands around and lends itself so well to uh to
too horror. Yeah, absolutely, yeah, Yeah. I guess like ultimately
what I come back to the Harbinger and the Gateway
of the mind is the idea of being able to
just sever our connections to our senses from our consciousness.

(01:14:31):
That is very scary. Um yeah, to the point that
I don't know that I can imagine it. Yeah, I mean,
it significantly changes what it is to be human, and
that's you know, ultimately, stories like this, that's what it's
about it's about exploring the human condition, uh, though taking
a more frightening approach to that exploration. All right, today

(01:15:04):
you have it one of everybody's favorite episodes from last
Halloween season, and again look for a new creepy postit
episode as well some new Halloween content to come out
in the week's add This is really big time of
the year for us. We always get real excited. It's
our favorite time of the year. In fact, I'm going
to take this opportunity to plug our new season of
Monster Science, produced by Robert and our producer Tyler in House.

(01:15:28):
Some really good stuff coming out of that. You'll find
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(01:15:50):
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(01:16:18):
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