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. Hey.
Today we are going to be talking about some more
October Halloween related stuff. But before we get into it,

(00:24):
I want to remind you that at the end of
the month, we are going to be using periscope to
respond to our listener mail. So Joe, Robert and I
will be together in front of I'm assuming an iPhone
or something at broadcasting live reading your listener mail. So
if you want to participate in that or you just

(00:45):
want to watch it, and I believe you can interact
with us in real time on there, uh, follow us
on Twitter and then also you know, keep an eye
out on our other social media channels for announcements about
this upcoming periscope thing, and also check us out. Last
two weeks of October, we're gonna have Monster Science back up,
so that's gonna be some VHS late in daytime horror

(01:08):
themed explorations of the real science behind some notable film monsters.
So be sure to check check in on that. You
can find what links for that All over Stuff to
Blow your Mind dot com, as well as our Facebook
page and how stuff Works and Twitter and tumbler as well,
all of those social media channels where blow the mind.

(01:28):
And if you want to get in on the listener
mail action, remember that you can always email us that
blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com. But
today we're talking about creepy pasta, which I imagined there
are three different responses out there. Some people were probably
going to creepypasta, I love creepy pasta. Other people are
going creepypasta, what are you doing covering that? And other
people are just flat up asking what that is? Creepy

(01:50):
creepy pasta? Dente? Yeah? Is it? Is it the texture
or the is it posta that shaped like little ghosts?
That's what in 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,
so I'm only recently familiar with this, uh phenomenon. But

(02:11):
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.
The basic idea, though, is that you're creating uh content

(02:33):
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 or your uncle chain
like some sort of ridiculous story about you know, somebody's
putting disease needles into convenience store machines, you know, or

(02:57):
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 actually research it, you'll see, oh, this is
just a The same couple of paragraphs have been copy
and pasted throughout the history of the Internet, and we

(03:20):
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 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

(03:42):
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, uh that's
wrapped in enough reality or pseudo reality that you buy
into it. Yeah. They all sort of play off of
these author ic aesthetics using like they mimic things like

(04:03):
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 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

(04:24):
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, and I
want to definitely imagine some big quotation marks around scientifically
based there. Oh yeah, oh yeah, but as we'll get

(04:45):
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 them are better
than others. And well we'll get into that as well.
It's um one thing to keep in mind with copy
Pasta two and I'm especially creepy Pasta are the different

(05:07):
ways that you come across it online, Like, there 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 to blow your mind
out 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 plenty of times,

(05:28):
you're doing some research, you're trying to find out about
certain actual experiments, and then you run across some creepyposta
and for a split second, you're like, what is this
experiment they're talking about? Oh, it's creepy pasta. Yeah, it
is kind of perfect. And especially researching this particular episode
was difficult because when you're trying to research the actual
scientific basis for some of these stories, you end up

(05:50):
finding either fake articles or or the actual story itself
popping up in a lot of your searches. I've also
seen like wiki questions and message boards, so you can
see this kind of stuff popping up there where someone
will have yeah, people have a legitimate question, and somebody
will decide to throw a slip a little pop down there,
you know, Like I've seen medical question sites, um, where

(06:14):
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 shared, and then another
individual point it responded said, oh, this is pasta here's
an example of where it was previously uh rolled out.

(06:38):
I think that's where I first discovered the term copy puff. 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, 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 an Amazon review,

(07:01):
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 it
in the mail. Yeah, it's kind of like the creepy
mold that grows uh on, 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

(07:23):
that 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 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

(07:46):
about him outside of the creepypastas he appears in. But
basically the idea is that he's kind of like a
he's on a horror story character, right, He's just as
much as like Jason Vorhees or Freddy Krueger, but he's
kind of like in a elongated, skinny, scary looking man
and like a suit. Yeah, you see to like, the

(08:08):
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 because a lot
of it is about his depictions and individual pieces of
creepy pasta or especially in imagery and these various photoshop

(08:29):
contests that have contributed to to the myth though, right, Yeah,
that's one of the ones where there's a lot of
visual accompaniment. Yea, 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 like exactly what the story is. Like nobody said
this is what slender Man is slender many and that

(08:50):
helps to make it mysterious and and and weird. I mean,
that's one of the reasons that the Lovecraft's myth those
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, But ultimately his mythos is shrouded in
mystery and contradictions absolutely and so included in that and

(09:13):
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 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,

(09:37):
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 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

(10:00):
their friend. Luckily she escaped and was I think she
was had like seventeen or nineteen times or something like that.
She was found by somebody on the Southern Road and
was able to get medical care. Well, I mean, it
just speaks to the power of storytelling us through 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,

(10:22):
but you're playing with powerful elements when you start playing
with with established tropes and established symbols, established symbols of fear,
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

(10:43):
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
these girls anyways. Uh, that's like the argument that like
Ozzy Osbourne influenced teenagers to kill each other in the
eighties or something. You just I don't buy into it,
but I think it's important that we let the audience

(11:03):
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. But you know,
a lot of it resembles what we we refer to
as weird fiction, right, yeah, you see, I mean it
kind of runs the gain because on one end of

(11:25):
the spectrum. You have creepy papsa that reads like a
either either like a Wikipedia article or p or a
poorly written Wikipedia article, where it's just 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

(11:46):
narrative flow. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, as a both a
fan of horror pros and somebody who writes horror pros,
I guess my personal literary criticism here 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

(12:06):
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 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

(12:28):
are some of these that I like better than others, uh,
like any kind of you know, uh medium or storytelling.
But I have to say, and I want to 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

(12:50):
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 fixed 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

(13:12):
possible for sure. 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 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

(13:32):
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 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, uh,

(13:53):
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 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

(14:13):
of back to the Creepy pasta though the like, I
find that the ones that are instantly grounded in more
of a traditional storytelling, like you know where the narrator
is saying what I have to relate to you about
this experiments to buying. You instantly know you're reading the story,
but I guess the the and then to your point,

(14:34):
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, and then have it
morph into something uh that that that is more elegantly written,

(14:57):
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 is the format. So like the mimicking
of a of a particular kind of format, uh to
create the authenticity type thing, like like ones that mimic
actual Wikipedia entries are kind of using that format to

(15:20):
their advantage, right, Whereas like if it's just a chain
of prose that shows up an email sent to me
by my weird aunt, then I'm less likely to go, oh,
this could potentially be a thing. Yeah. And another 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,

(15:44):
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. Yeah. One
of the early examples of just just recording folklore that
I think has some some potential ties into creepy pasta
is a book called The Strange Stories from a Chinese
Studio by lousy Z from eighteenth century China Uh, each

(16:11):
of these tales that that the author relates, they all
they all start 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 pin dragon, or seeing or

(16:34):
encountering a horrifying ghost, or 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

(16:55):
maybe is conscious or not, was sort of taking the
oral tradition of folklore and trans aiding 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

(17:16):
to to tuck it in firmly into the bed of
of our our informational system, really, and in this case
it's 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

(17:37):
you the premise, we'll lay it down for you. It's
going to be a very shorthand 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

(17:57):
on most of these creepy pasta sites, the Russians EAP experiment. Right,
So okay, the 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

(18:20):
have no idea whatever this chemical was. The research team
kept them in 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

(18:43):
watched these uh participants through portholes and they listened listened
in with microphones. But basically the chamber there in 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.

(19:07):
But they were falsely told before they went in, Hey,
if you do this experiment and you can manage to
sleep not sleep for thirty days straight, then we will
free you and will 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

(19:27):
a little dark. They start getting paranoid of one another.
By 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

(19:49):
guy is screaming. Then a second one starts screaming and
running around. These two take the books that are in
the room, rip their pages out, cover them with their
own fee sas, and paste them up or the porthole windows.
Uh so the studio we're in right now actually has
a porthole windows. Yeah. We're actually just thinking this is
this is like what happens when you try to record
four podcast episodes in Yeah. Absolutely, I begin the screaming

(20:12):
and running around. Uh. 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

(20:33):
on inside this room. They get one response, which is
we no longer want to be freed. On day fifteen,
they're finding 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

(20:54):
their bodies, very like gory body horror type stuff. They
really wanted to go 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

(21:15):
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 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

(21:35):
the skin back onto one of these victims, yeah, to
try to save him, I guess, uh. 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

(21:57):
there's some higher up who says, you know, we gotta
fig gure out what's going on. So they put these
guys back in the chamber. Uh, they turn up the gas.
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

(22:18):
the captives right before he kills the last captive. The
captive says this, we are you. We are the madness
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

(22:42):
the end of the creepy pasta, all right. Like most
of these experiments, it ends in madness and death and
and some inkling of the world beyond the veil. R. Yeah,
I think you're gonna find that. Like, there's a common
theme of science experiment, people go crazy, kill everybody, and
then say something eerie, Like we're saying if you if
you were to find the published, pure viewed studies for

(23:03):
each of these, you would be able to skip down
to the conclusions and it would say, and everybody went
mad and we had to put down the inmates, 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

(23:24):
sweep deprivation? There have been a number of studies that
have looked at this. So what happens 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

(23:44):
some form or another of this, right, Like last night
I got one hour less than my normal. However many
eight hours a night that I get and I'm a
little uh, LOGI I think is the term this morning.
But the base sick breakdown of it goes like this.
We know that we are alertness lowers, right, we have

(24:06):
trouble concentrating. If you even lose ninety minutes of sleep
in one night compared to your average sleep schedule, you'll
be thirty two percent less alert the next day. So
I'm somewhere in that 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

(24:29):
falling asleep behind the wheel because of this lack of alertness,
it also totally screws up our circadian rhythm. UH 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, and we actually on our sister show,
Brain Stuff, have done both episodes on what happens when

(24:49):
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
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

(25:10):
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
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 cuter. And if you're not running your

(25:32):
defragment defragg and if you're not running your defragger appropriately
and enough, then everything gets a bit screwed up up there. Yeah. Um.
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

(25:52):
directly from our house Stuff Works article on the effects
of sleep deprivation. Uh. Quote. When we learn and store
information in our memory, that information is moved from the hippocampus,
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

(26:14):
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 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

(26:37):
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 Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Yeah,
it's it's important to note here and distress here that
when when, when sleep deprivation is taking place, it's really

(26:59):
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 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 nightmarck scenario,

(27:21):
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 is one of the most popular, is
that it's something at their core. The science c Creepypasta's
work best when it's something that almost everyone can identify with.
So lack of sleep is something that I think every

(27:41):
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 you can you can certainly at least see it
there on the internet. You know that there have been
there's been research into sleep. You know, they are sleep
institutes that that work with people who have trouble. UM.
One of the side effects of the sleep deprivation, as

(28:05):
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, 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 paralys
is always always up there as a possible explanation for

(28:26):
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. 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

(28:47):
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 dream and reality where you're highly
susceptible to hallucination. Yeah, and in fact, I haven't seen it,
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

(29:07):
that did the Room two thirty seven. Yeah, it's the
same creative team from Room two thirty seven. And I've
heard that it is horrifying. 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

(29:29):
back to pre existing scripts for what you're encountering. You're
hearing or seeing something out of the ordinary, and your
brain has 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 you read on the internet,
and use that to inform what you're experiencing. So before

(29:51):
I go into more symptoms about I guess sleep depth,
let's tie back to that creepypasta story about the Russian
sleep experiment, and so, yes, hallucis nations 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

(30:14):
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 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

(30:35):
this genetic expression, and it causes all kinds of things.
There's weight fluctuations. In fact, there's study 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,
the more likely you are to be overweight. When you're

(30:58):
forced to stay awake, what happens is your body has
trouble processing blood sugar and leptin, which is this protein
hormone that regulates our appetite and 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.

(31:19):
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 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.

(31:41):
This starts over at 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 a symptom
of not sleeping. So and I don't mean that like
if you don't sleep, you'll just dropped dead. In fact,

(32:02):
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, sleep deprivation
and rodents and flies can cause death more quickly than
food deprivation. Uh, specifically, two weeks without sleep can kill

(32:23):
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 was all kinds of super
gory stuff in that story that also inappropriate Amazon purchases.
That was another really experience they had Internet in thee

(32:46):
with the skin off, they started making inappropriate online purchases
just because they believe an altered state they're buying like
curtains 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

(33:08):
guess the 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
on what gas does to our bodies. Right, So, any
type of gas, chlorine, sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, nitrogen dioxide, ammonia,

(33:29):
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.
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

(33:52):
early warning signs, and this can lead to things like
fluid developing your lungs and airway. They can also tree
your 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

(34:14):
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,
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

(34:34):
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
up to twenty five years after their exposure. However, they
usually qualify that as like PTSD because their exposure to
the mustard gas was probably in a traumatic situation like war. Um.

(34:58):
So all that is to say is that yes, gas
has physical effects on your body, and there are some
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

(35:20):
across the right experiment. Declassified experiment from World War two
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 in this episode. Uh.
In short, this one involves a supposed nineteen four British

(35:43):
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 they've shot or cut, the blood
would have the ability to freeze or solidify to where
the person would This would stop bleeding and can make
a person far stronger than an average human being. Now,

(36:07):
of course, as you as you you can expect, the
experiment gets all dark and monstrous, 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. So

(36:28):
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 and they're
homicidal and they could get you. Maybe there are a
couple of versions of it. That's the beauty of Creepypostat that. Yeah,
it can change. It's a morphous it's it's a collective,
creative scenario. I kept thinking of them as being basically

(36:51):
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 and try to kill everybody. Yeah.

(37:13):
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 that the idea, like,
everybody who lives in London knows about the old m

(37:35):
I five building and you can just pop by and
let's go down and check out the file. Yeah, 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,
peppro for a, midadine, and communison. However, in my version

(37:56):
it was misspelled as communism, so it was like they
were exposed of these two chemicals and communism Commune isn't
wait what is it? Commune sin? Maybe commune saint is
uh is a a drug that causes communism communism inducing
you know what? That would possibly have as much validity

(38:18):
as the rest of this story. Yeah, 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 is kind of their scientific

(38:40):
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 foward four to six percent of their blood volume
because I us the idea of being that once they've

(39:01):
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. And then um, the doctors after

(39:26):
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 oblong gata.
So this is where I want to start with the
science on this one, because I, you know, within five
minutes was able to look up that the medulla oblongata

(39:46):
doesn't really have a whole lot 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 of this role functions.
It's basically you know, things like blood pressure, breathe there
you gossures the aggression. But so uh yeah, unless they're like, uh,

(40:13):
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 doc al

(40:36):
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, right and healing and what
how 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 research

(40:59):
in this area of researchers trying to figure out ways
to to speed up coagulation, speed up healing and 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

(41:19):
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. Yeah, always showing up in our video. 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 free

(41:40):
this month, So I checked it out. And you get
wounded to a certain amount and you like spray your
wound with a little area. Yeah. But the first bit
to discuss here about blood science and kind of cool
blood science is there's a Cleveland, Ohio biotech firm called
Arterial Side, and they made headlines in two thousand ten
with the development of an artificial, genetically engineered blood for

(42:04):
use on the battlefield. 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
length the shipments that decrease the shelf life for the
blood samples you need. You need blood on the on

(42:27):
the field, say in Afghanistan, 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

(42:47):
the more immediate goal. But my understanding 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 like a three D printer
of blood. Yeah, like at the very least you're like
shivving it in from the closest military base as opposed
to all the way around the world. Um. They received
one million dollars stuff for the project through DARPA and

(43:13):
lasted that it was really reported on. 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 yourvone a reminder, one unit equals about a
point in the average human contains eight to ten points.
So in order to make enough for humanits, it's like,

(43:38):
at their 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 to let 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. Yeah,

(44:00):
that's true. And and then 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.

(44:21):
They turn one umbilical 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 get it

(44:43):
or eat it themselves, Uh, then yeah. The umbilical cord
is a 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 willfully unaware of. That's like
when you go in and have the procedure and everything
for giving birth is they're just like a you know,
in the paperwork, there's a box that you check that's
something like I want the umbilical cord, I assume. I mean,

(45:07):
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 birthdays,
you check or you don't. Otherwise there's just like a
biohazard bag filled with umbilical cords that they then ship
off to this, so ultimately that we're talking about the

(45:28):
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.

(45:49):
I mean, it's it's crazy science fiction e 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 the eight 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,

(46:12):
and then they vampiize the rest of the population. So
as a planet of vampires, I wonder vampires prefer oh
negative as a universal donor or does that mean it's
probably too common? Right, It's like the Coca cola blood alright,
So that's artificial blood. But then there's the use of
healing factor nanoparticles in the blood. All right, So this

(46:32):
is straight up wolverine healing factor is right out of
the 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 best
way to deal with excessive bleeding on the surfaces to
apply pressure when it's a wound that can be treated

(46:54):
in that manager to die or a wound UM. But
a two thousand nine study publish 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,

(47:14):
these these nano platelets, what they do is they mimic
platelet structure, so they augment the process bonding with natural
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

(47:36):
of thinking that it's like a thickening process, like almost
like a blood plasma and just kind of And what's more, though,
this 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

(47:57):
you're dealing with bleeding inside the body. Yeah, there's got
to be so many potential hazards with this though, too.
I 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

(48:18):
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 back to last season of 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 transfus and trying to figure out like what's the

(48:38):
key and right, it's really rough stuff. But but in
this case with these particularly particular nano platelets, they found
that the stuff has had bleeding time and wounded rats.
And just a couple of years later, in two thousand
and eleven, the massachuse A General Hospital Center for Engineering
and Medicine developed a way to deliver nano spheres containing

(49:01):
keratinisite 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 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

(49:22):
immediately from any wound. You have a wound and then
they apply these nano spheres to you, and the same
with the nanoplateist to right, It wouldn't be a matter
of as we see in the creepy pasta. It wouldn't
be 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

(49:43):
up the healing. Well, okay, so you may recall that
at the top of when we were talking about this experiment,
I mentioned they had three particular chemicals that they mentioned.
I assumed these were fictional, but I decided to look
them up. No more funking pepper, formidadine, and commune Sin.

(50:04):
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 to back
up the creepy pasta story. But then there were a
lot of legitimate academic chemistry articles about these that were

(50:26):
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 this I could barely understand it because it was
written in such deep chemistry language. However, this is what

(50:46):
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 uh Penicillum species,
and that there's a possible use for these as an insecticide.
They're also cytotoxic against certain tumor cells. So I think

(51:11):
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 make blood
freeze or anything like that. But I mean, I guess
we're looking at the standard trick here, right. You you

(51:33):
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 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
of the creepy bust. They did a great job. Whoever
wrote this did a great job with the that application

(51:54):
of these chemicals, because not only were they like difficult
to find information on, but also they're so relatively new
in in in the research that'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 your blood
um and real quick let's just talk about what happens

(52:16):
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 hypothalamus constantly tries to keep the core of our
body is warm, so it constricts our blood supprise supply

(52:37):
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 isn't
frozen from what I understand reading about it. Your body

(52:58):
is usually injected with something called hepperin, 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 the freezer. Um. And then lastly, there is a
there there are a couple of different diseases that lead

(53:21):
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
be very dangerous, like I was saying earlier, because it

(53:41):
can lead to thrombosis, which can subsequently lead to something
like a heart attack or a stroke or I suppose
even an aneurysm. 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 cre bepastas, which will will

(54:02):
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, yeah,
so the Harbinger Experiment, this creepy pasta is this was
a bit long, and it it kind of reads like,
you know, average weird fiction story. Really, the basics here

(54:22):
is it's some manner prolonged isolation experiment 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

(54:43):
while the host is still alive, right, right, And yeah,
if I remember this one correctly, 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 can imagine how it ends up, right, right, And

(55:04):
it's just like, yeah, and now the the other one
is Gateway of the Mind. Do you want to roll
the Yeah, this one is an interesting one. So the
idea with this is that in ninety three there's this
team of scientists. The story refers to them as deeply
pious scientists, uh, and that the idea is that they

(55:24):
want to prove the existence of God. So their theory
is that without 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,

(55:45):
or feel. Uh, and he can he can't communicate, but
he can, like you're 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

(56:07):
use information from the ghosts to like prove that there's
something supernatural going on to the researchers right by 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 God has
abandoned us. Okay, well, I feel like it kind of
loses a little steam there at the end, with like

(56:29):
like maybe maybe the message that he revealed shouldn't 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,

(56:52):
and all he does is to say, like, hey, I've
abandoned you guys. I'm on vacation out of 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

(57:15):
the soul has weight and therefore there is a soul,
there is 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
disappears when you die or something like that. Right, Yeah,
I think twenty one Grahams is the number of those

(57:36):
as we discussed in that episode, which I'll link to
on the landing page of this episode. Uh, you know,
there's some science applied. It's very rough and even there
are a lot of problems. There's some more recent theories
that are interesting. But both of these experiments ultimately deal
with isolation. Right, what happens when someone is isolated from

(57:56):
from sensory input. Particularly in the case of 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

(58:17):
of your senses and for that matters 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.

(58:38):
You basically lay inside a big tank that's dark, laying
on top of salt water. Uh. For in my case,
it was about an hour long. 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. You

(58:59):
can't see anything, you don't really feel anything other than
the water. Uh, and 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,

(59:20):
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 that you float to
the top like you're not just laying in it, Like
you instantly are acquainted with any random nix or scratches
or itches 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

(59:43):
happens when you put somebody in solitary confinement, when you
isolate someone from stimuli. Uh. There's a two on from
Wire magazine by Brandon Kime titled The Horrible Psychology of
solitary confinement, and it takes a nice look at horror
fine topic pointing out the solitary confinement has been shown
to make prisoners extremely anxious, to make them angry, make

(01:00:06):
them hallucinate, experienced mood swings and flatness, the loss of
impulse control, and 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 waves responding to
trends and concerns related to modern and carson incarceration. So

(01:00:30):
the mid eighteen hundreds or concern and interest in this.
In the nineteen fifties, it popped up again due in
part as a 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

(01:00:50):
every time, like I read a fictional account or watch
a TV shower movie where it's a prison setting and
somebody does something wrong and get sent to solitary arry,
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

(01:01:11):
your thoughts. However, I don't think it's as peaceful as
I'm imagining it to be based on these experiments, right,
and also on other things we know, and it's based
on accounts for people to 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

(01:01:33):
moving objects of varied environmental actions going on, not a
limited cell. So you get in there, your brain end
up chewing on itself. Uh. May maybe it's some detail
in the cell. Maybe it's um, it's something in your
memory that 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 Lecter style,

(01:01:56):
like like forming what does he call it his memory palace? Yeah?
I 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 incarceerate him, like he just constructs
it all inside it like he can, like because he's

(01:02:19):
such a crazed genius, he can like go inside his
memory 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

(01:02:40):
markings on the wall or something that's troubling you in
the back of your mind, and that's what gets fixed up.
That's what he is, blown out into your new virtual world. Yeah, well,
so I own 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

(01:03:01):
the beginning of their article. It was the good 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, uh pop culture

(01:03:21):
movie reference for sensory deprivation tanks. He claimed that when
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

(01:03:45):
that John C. Lily is a reliable source. Um. He is.
He's a kind of a problematic source, but a fascinating one. Um.
But hallucinations are absolutely real, um people. We definitely know
people have hallucine nations when they're deprived of their senses.
Renowned physicist Richard Feynman has described having them when he

(01:04:06):
was in a sensory deprivation chamber. We have lots of
examples 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

(01:04:27):
we kind of go through the sensory deprivation stuff that
there's a lot of connections to what we were talking
about earlier 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

(01:04:47):
within fifteen minutes of sensory deprivation will have hallucinations triggered. Uh.
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 a
revised hallucination scale. I'd love to know that test, how they,

(01:05:09):
how they how they determined 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 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
of relative nature of time. Right. An hour spent in

(01:05:30):
a boring waiting room is is far different than an
hour spent at the carnival. Right. Sociologist and caving 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

(01:05:51):
a little tube on your way to Mars. Right Um.
When he emerged, he was convinced only two hundred and
nineteen days had passed uh instead of three hundred and
sixty six, So sweep 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

(01:06:13):
light and jet lag. Uh. There's another crazy story that
we have that's an instance of this. In nineteen sixty one,
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.

(01:06:35):
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. And when
he was tested back on the surface, when his team
finally 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

(01:06:58):
also ends up 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, 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

(01:07:18):
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 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

(01:07:42):
several key isolation experiments in the late fifties. Again, this
is after the Korean Wars. Find to to some po
dew treatment. UH. Volunteer students were put in soundproof cubicles.
They even gave them translucent advisors, cotton gloves, cardboard cuffs
to you know, keep them from feeling way that doesn't
involve slicing nerves. They have hm U shaped pillows turn

(01:08:04):
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. Their abilities in arithmetic and
word association tests quickly took a dive. And then uh,
the hallucinations points of light lines or shapes eventually bizarre
seen such ads and these are at actual scenes. Hallucinations

(01:08:26):
are crazy? Is there like the kind of urban legend
hallucinations you hear? Like, well, 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, they have the first squirrels marching
with sacks over their shoulders. Another one processions of eyeglasses
filing down a street. One one person only saw dogs,

(01:08:48):
another one only saw babies. Um, and they had no
control over the visuals are just rolled them out. So
this this reminds me of two things. I mean First
of all, what we said earlier about the brain focusing
on one little thing, it just it has to fill
up your world, and it ends up filling your world
up with a baby baby. Just yeah, And I know,
I think it was like lots of babies. It wasn't

(01:09:10):
just like a baby or two. It was like, I
think this person was just hallucinating hordes of babies, 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 shovasana, I get to

(01:09:32):
experience some level of hallucination that I don't have control over.
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 audible, which is apparently what happened in this
McGill's study. Right, Yeah, there were some audible hallucinations or

(01:09:53):
hearing music, they're hearing sounds, tactile hallucinations where they touched
the door knob and they think they feel a shock.
Another person said that they felt Palett's 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,

(01:10:16):
they only lasted a few days in isolation. None of
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

(01:10:40):
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 brainway people

(01:11:00):
write like a man Churian 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

(01:11:22):
psychic driving. 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 brainwashed characters. UM. Ultimately the patients

(01:11:46):
some 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

(01:12:07):
you're 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.

(01:12:31):
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,
psychologist Ian Robbins created recreated HEBBS experiments and in collaboration

(01:12:52):
with the BBC, and in this they isolated six volunteers
for forty eight hours and sound proof 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 the anxiety, extreme emotions, paranoia, significant deterioration in
their mental functioning, and of course crazy hallucinations. Yeah, so

(01:13:16):
that I wanted to list these hallucinations because they're just
as bonkers. Isn't a perspetch 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,
and then this one that there are fighter planes flying

(01:13:37):
and buzzing around within the room. So yeah, so the
deprivation can definitely uh twist your mind. Yeah, you remove
human from its natural sweep cycles, You remove a human
from its natural environment, and you change the expression of
the mind, You change our experience of reality, and that
is ultimately a very terrifying concept to wrap our heads

(01:14:00):
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. That is very scary. Um yeah,

(01:14:24):
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. In a lot of ways, it's connected to
the episodes that we did on feral children and their

(01:14:45):
social isolation and sort of what resulted from that. Yeah, exactly,
all right, So there you have it, creepy pasta apasta experiment.
So that's just three of these creepy pasta stories. I mean,
my impression is that there are thousands of youngs out there,
and and even just within the like sort of sub
genre of science e creepy pastas, there's probably hundreds, right. Yeah,

(01:15:08):
if everyone liked this particular episode and you want more,
we could probably do another couple of creepy pasta episodes
to illuminate the science behind the scares. Yeah. In fact,
so if there is a creepy pasta story out there
that you think is particularly good for us to cover,
we'd like to hear about it. Let us know over
our social media channels. Again, we're on Facebook, Twitter, and

(01:15:30):
tumbler uh, and we're Blow the Mind on all of
those channels. And then of course you can always write
and let us know about your creepy pastas or potential
science that's connected to creepy pastas that you've read at
Blow the mind at how stuff works dot com for

(01:15:51):
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