Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stop to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamp and I'm Julie Douglas. And
Speaker 1: in our last episode that we recorded, we talked about
Speaker 1: watch stoppers, this idea that some people can magically stop
Speaker 1: watches just by wearing them, that they can walk under
Speaker 1: a street lamp and they'll set it off with their
Speaker 1: electromagnetic field. Well, in this episode, we're exploring a similar misnomer,
Speaker 1: this idea that some unique individuals are natural lightning rods.
Speaker 1: Although I'm going to guess there are probably less people
Speaker 1: who think they are human lightning rods than watch stoppers. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because it's one of those things like strike me once
Speaker 1: with lightning, shame on you strike me seven times. Well,
Speaker 1: maybe maybe there's something weird going on with me. It's true,
Speaker 1: and we'll get into that. There's a idea that you
Speaker 1: know that has been kicked around, like could it be genetic?
Speaker 1: Could could lightning strikes be attracted a certain people. I'm
Speaker 1: guessing you guys know the answer to that, But we'll
Speaker 1: discuss it in a bit more. Um, But let's talk
Speaker 1: about the anatomy of a bolt of lightning because this
Speaker 1: is really, in and of itself a very cool thing. Yes,
Speaker 1: lightning is very cool. Has anyone who's ever seen it
Speaker 1: can can certainly test ouh and uh and I would
Speaker 1: also want to call back to our episode from Stuff
Speaker 1: to blow your kid's mind when we talked about lightning.
Speaker 1: But essentially, you have this, uh, this generated electrical charge
Speaker 1: and it needs to get to the earth. It does,
Speaker 1: and think think about what's going on weatherwise. You have
Speaker 1: down drafts and up drafts and they're all colliding and
Speaker 1: uh dogs everything. Now you're just putting yoga in it. Uh.
Speaker 1: They're colliding with unstable air and these particles collide and
Speaker 1: you know it might be particles of ice or rain,
Speaker 1: and they cause electrical charges to separate. So if you're
Speaker 1: thinking about this in terms of the cloud, um, if
Speaker 1: you've got the cloud in mind, think about this positive
Speaker 1: charges shooting high and then the negative charges hanging low
Speaker 1: within the cloud, and then the electrical imbalance kind of
Speaker 1: hangs in the air and intensiflies within the cloud and
Speaker 1: then between the cloud and the ground. So most of
Speaker 1: the lightning that you see is cloud. The clouds just
Speaker 1: kind of playing with each other. But then sometimes it
Speaker 1: makes that jump to the ground again because this is
Speaker 1: this this upper portion of the storm cloud being that
Speaker 1: this is positive in the lower portion is negative. Now,
Speaker 1: the exact mechanics of this are are sort of poorly understood.
Speaker 1: That we do know that much, and we know that
Speaker 1: um as that charge increases, the field becomes more and
Speaker 1: more intense, so intense. This is really interesting that the
Speaker 1: electrons at the Earth's surface are repelled deeper into the
Speaker 1: Earth by the strong negative charge at the lower portion
Speaker 1: of the cloud. So that's when you get to this
Speaker 1: cloud to ground lightning because you've got the repletion of
Speaker 1: electrons causing their surface to acquire a strong positive charge.
Speaker 1: This is quite a dance going on here in the atmosphere, uh.
Speaker 1: And this is when you see the cloud to the
Speaker 1: ground electricity happen in that strong electrical charge really serving
Speaker 1: as a conductive path and serving and then in the
Speaker 1: air serving as an insulator. Right now, when when lightning
Speaker 1: is traveling to the Earth, it's it's it tends to
Speaker 1: be very sensible about things. It tends to be very economic,
Speaker 1: and we can see that reflected in our basic understanding
Speaker 1: of what not to do during a lightning storm. Like,
Speaker 1: what do they tell you not to do? Don't stand
Speaker 1: under a tall tree why because the tall tree is
Speaker 1: more likely to be hit by lightning. Don't play golf
Speaker 1: during a lightning storm. In other words, don't stand up
Speaker 1: in a in a in a wide open area while
Speaker 1: raising a piece of metal over your head because you're
Speaker 1: susceptible to lightning strike. Right. Why because this flash of
Speaker 1: light it heats the air around it to nearly fifty
Speaker 1: thousand degrees fahrenheit about twenty almost twenty eight thousand degrees celsius,
Speaker 1: and that is hotter than surface of the sun, and
Speaker 1: the scorching heat really forces the air to expand in
Speaker 1: an explosion of thunder. That is why you don't want
Speaker 1: to wave around a golf club. So yeah, as you
Speaker 1: said that, as a charge near the ground, something like
Speaker 1: a tall tree will send positive charges surging up it.
Speaker 1: And that's why it connects so well with something really
Speaker 1: tall like a tree or house, a telephone poll and
Speaker 1: then of course people, right, this is where it all
Speaker 1: comes down to. You frequently struck by lightning, but with
Speaker 1: with humans, Yes, humans do get struck by lightning, and
Speaker 1: in many cases, uh, there's not a lot of opportunity
Speaker 1: to test the theory that this individual is more susceptible
Speaker 1: to lightning, because one good boat can and will kill
Speaker 1: you in many cases. Yeah, although a lot of people
Speaker 1: do survive it, but one one will do its um.
Speaker 1: In case you're wondering what's going on in the United States,
Speaker 1: in terms of statistics, lightning researchers estimate that twenty two
Speaker 1: million lightning flashes strike the ground each year, and of
Speaker 1: course the majority of that is in Florida, which is
Speaker 1: at Central Florida has been called a lightning alley and
Speaker 1: they have on average twelve flashes of lightning pursh square
Speaker 1: kilometer the year. This is a lot. And so why
Speaker 1: is the most common month to get struck between the
Speaker 1: hours of noon to six pm? So what's going on here?
Speaker 1: Is Florida just cursed by God? Well that's one interpretation. No, Now,
Speaker 1: it's all about weather, right, They have tons of it,
Speaker 1: and they have tons of moisture and warmth and there
Speaker 1: you know, we've got the ocean there and lo and
Speaker 1: behold you have sort of the perfect storm, as you
Speaker 1: would say, and you have a lot of people out golfing, voting, etcetera.
Speaker 1: So you have a lot of lightning, a lot of
Speaker 1: people putting themselves in a position to be hit high lightning.
Speaker 1: Put those two together, it's natural what's going to occur.
Speaker 1: And now, so obviously we've talked about the tall objects.
Speaker 1: We've talked about power lines, reckon. We haven't talked about
Speaker 1: power lines, but power lines metal, All of these things
Speaker 1: you would want to stay away from. Um, most people
Speaker 1: think that includes cars, but that is in fact the opposite.
Speaker 1: A car can actually protect you. And I wanted to
Speaker 1: mention this just because we're kind of going through and
Speaker 1: debunking a couple of things. Um, Yes, cars metal, but
Speaker 1: what it does is it acts as a sort of
Speaker 1: Faraday cage for you. And when I talked about a
Speaker 1: fair Day cage, I'm talking about something that is conducting
Speaker 1: the electrons over the surface but keeping the inside neutral.
Speaker 1: So that's what a car is basically doing. It has
Speaker 1: nothing to do with rubber tires or you wearing rubber soles. Um.
Speaker 1: It's just basically crux. Yes, it's just basically that you
Speaker 1: are protected because of these electrons moving along the surface
Speaker 1: of the car and not on you. And it's also
Speaker 1: worth pointing out when we talk about human lightning rods.
Speaker 1: Of course, the lightning rod in essence is a is
Speaker 1: a rod that is erected on, say a building, with
Speaker 1: the understanding that, hey, we have a tall building in
Speaker 1: the middle of nowhere, lightning is going to strike it.
Speaker 1: So I'm going to have this, uh, this rod here
Speaker 1: in place so that the lightning will strike this rod,
Speaker 1: and that's grounded in such a way that it doesn't
Speaker 1: impact the rest of the building. Right, And that's really
Speaker 1: important when I when I talk about Faraday or um,
Speaker 1: the Faraday cage or the car, you're talking about the
Speaker 1: path of it going into the ground and away from it.
Speaker 1: So the car, obviously the path of lightning electricity is
Speaker 1: running along the wall, water or down the tires and
Speaker 1: into the ground. Yeah, bolt of lightning sensible, dude. It
Speaker 1: wants to get where it's going if you if you
Speaker 1: offer an alternate route that's a little more sensible, it
Speaker 1: will take that instead. So what have we learn so
Speaker 1: far right here in terms of being at the wrong
Speaker 1: place at the wrong time, trying not to visit Florida
Speaker 1: in the month of July and then decide to picnic
Speaker 1: on a golf course under a cypress tree while entertaining
Speaker 1: your picnic guests by twirling a baton. Let's say, no
Speaker 1: golfing on a boat in there in the middle of
Speaker 1: a storm either, that's always a no note. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: and try to stay away from a phone booth too,
Speaker 1: because we're talking about lightning hitting the ground and traveling
Speaker 1: you that telephone booth and up the wires, and if
Speaker 1: you're happy to be in there holding the telephone, that
Speaker 1: is not a good situation. Yeah, definitely worth thinking about.
Speaker 1: The more and more that we end up of burying
Speaker 1: our power lines and whatnot. It's easy to maybe see
Speaker 1: that booth and think, oh, well that's a place of safety,
Speaker 1: but not so another thing for for mighty Thor's sake,
Speaker 1: try not to be of the male persuasion. Yeah, now
Speaker 1: this is uh, this is pretty interesting as well, and
Speaker 1: I believe it's making the rounds very recently. Uh. The
Speaker 1: idea here is that of individuals hit by lightning our ment.
Speaker 1: So then that's a pretty high percentage when you know,
Speaker 1: essentially we're talking I mean, we're talking about half of
Speaker 1: the the species. If we were all getting hit equally,
Speaker 1: to be about fifty, but I don't know, it's eighty.
Speaker 1: So what are we to make of that the lightning
Speaker 1: hates men? Lightning hates men? Well, yeah, so you could say,
Speaker 1: all right, well this is the act of of of
Speaker 1: wrathful God and knows that that the men are worse
Speaker 1: and therefore are deserving of more lightning. Uh. There are
Speaker 1: some other crazier theories. The one you ran across was
Speaker 1: a head to do with the proteins. Uh, no, minerals
Speaker 1: something I did not go into much iron too much,
Speaker 1: but it was something like the accumulation of minerals would
Speaker 1: make men more conductive. I abandoned this article, by the way,
Speaker 1: But yeah, there are a lot of different ideas. You know.
Speaker 1: Some people will say, oh, we'll men tend to be taller,
Speaker 1: so maybe they're more likely to be hit by lightning.
Speaker 1: But well, actually there's some information out there that says
Speaker 1: try to make yourself as small as possible if you
Speaker 1: are out in a thunderstorm and you are the tallest
Speaker 1: thing out there. I thought that was more like you
Speaker 1: want to be submissive to an angry guy, so you
Speaker 1: just sort of a little bit because if you're proud
Speaker 1: and like you know, you're doing like chest out, you're
Speaker 1: just asking for the word is going to take you on.
Speaker 1: But no, I mean if you have an umbrella above
Speaker 1: your head, which is an entirely different can of worms
Speaker 1: there with an umbrella, but really anything that makes yourself taller.
Speaker 1: There's this idea to you that men participate more in
Speaker 1: outdoor sports like fishing and golfing, and therefore there increasing
Speaker 1: their exposure times to storms. And then there's an idea
Speaker 1: that men are taking more risks in these sorts of situations.
Speaker 1: They're out there hunting down the food while the woman
Speaker 1: is back cooking it in the kitchen. Well maybe if
Speaker 1: you're in the mafia. Yeah, no, I don't know what
Speaker 1: I mean. I see that. I see that there's a
Speaker 1: logic here that you know, men are going to get
Speaker 1: struck more than women because you know, let's say that
Speaker 1: you work on power lines. Um, you know, most likely
Speaker 1: with the data we have available, you're probably a man. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And then also you get into the I two that
Speaker 1: you know, again the men are more more of a
Speaker 1: risk taker but also a little stupider, and that they
Speaker 1: don't want to be seen as a whim. So it's like, well,
Speaker 1: I guess it's there's a lightning storm moving in. Maybe
Speaker 1: we should go home. And stop playing golf. Do you
Speaker 1: want to be that guy? You want to be the
Speaker 1: guy who says, ah, well heck with that, that's not
Speaker 1: God's not going to stop this golf game, and then
Speaker 1: you keep going. So the idea too, is that men
Speaker 1: are more likely to be that fool hardy regarding their
Speaker 1: their risk of likning strike. Well. I think a good
Speaker 1: example of work related injuries and just a good example
Speaker 1: of someone being struck repeatedly and actually thinking that thor
Speaker 1: might be after him is a guy by the name
Speaker 1: of Roy Cleveland Sullivan, and I think we've actually mentioned
Speaker 1: him before. He was a force ranger at the Shenandoah
Speaker 1: National Park in Virginia, and he was struck seven times,
Speaker 1: once while in the lookout tower, in once while driving
Speaker 1: while walking across his front yard. This was in nineteen seventy.
Speaker 1: Like that one was just you know, it's different if
Speaker 1: you're the top of the tower, but dude was just
Speaker 1: like getting his mail or something exactly, standing in a
Speaker 1: ranger station on patrol in the park, check at camp ground,
Speaker 1: and then fishing. So after the fourth one, he has
Speaker 1: to have said that to have gotten very paranoid and
Speaker 1: begin to think that some force was after him, and
Speaker 1: I cannot blame him. Yeah, because again, we tend to see, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, we tend to apply meaning to patterns, and
Speaker 1: the crazier the pattern than well, the crazier at the meaning,
Speaker 1: we end up coming up with Ford. And you know,
Speaker 1: once you're own lightning hit five or six, I can
Speaker 1: certainly understand it. Also, there's a there's a biological toll
Speaker 1: to be taken here, So I mean it can. Lightning
Speaker 1: strikes can cause a host of of physical ailments, and
Speaker 1: some of them are neurological in nature. Yeah. Actually, let's
Speaker 1: take a quick break and when we get back, we're
Speaker 1: gonna talk a little bit more about that. All right,
Speaker 1: we're back, and we're gonna talk about a little something
Speaker 1: cooled coronopathy. And this is a pathology of lightning, and
Speaker 1: a handful of specialists actually study the effects of lightning
Speaker 1: on living things. Again, there's probably not a lot of
Speaker 1: subjects that these specialists can look at, because thankfully, lightning
Speaker 1: strikes are fairly rare. Yeah, like, I don't I don't
Speaker 1: know that we have a there's a coronapathy clinic in
Speaker 1: my neighborhood. No, no, no, Well, you know, if you
Speaker 1: live in a super fancy neighborhood. Maybe that's when you
Speaker 1: get your own or right, maybe in Florida it's more
Speaker 1: more likely. But you know, I was looking at the
Speaker 1: map of showing where lightning strikes are are likely to occur,
Speaker 1: and George's actually it was in the black on the
Speaker 1: on the map. Blogger and science journalist Kyle Hill says
Speaker 1: that people being bags of electrolytes, are better transmitters of
Speaker 1: electrical current than most ground is, and many are injured
Speaker 1: by ground current. Each year's lightning surges up one leg
Speaker 1: that is closer to the strike, and then down the
Speaker 1: one that's further away. Yeah, and that's just something to
Speaker 1: keep in mind because again we're talking about lightning striking
Speaker 1: people and the reason it does what it does, and
Speaker 1: the sort of effects that we have afterward. Dr Elizabeth
Speaker 1: Glurbier of the Electricity de France, so please don't write
Speaker 1: in I know it's an awful pronunciation in France, says
Speaker 1: that lightning survivors experience residual effects, most commonly affecting the
Speaker 1: brain and the neuropsychiatric, vision and hearing sections, and that
Speaker 1: these effects can actually develop slowly and become apparent only
Speaker 1: much later. Yeah, and plus you're throwing and stuff like
Speaker 1: just you know, post traumatic stress syndrome as well. I mean,
Speaker 1: just the the the experience of being struck by lightning
Speaker 1: is is pretty intense. Well, it is forever changing, and
Speaker 1: it's not something that we think about all the time
Speaker 1: because again it's rare. But you tend to think of
Speaker 1: people being struck by lightning and having these incredible abilities afterward,
Speaker 1: because we have a couple examples of this. Oh, yes,
Speaker 1: we've we've talked about before. The individual who's suddenly had
Speaker 1: a profound interest in piano music, right and and and
Speaker 1: someone who had never played the piano before became a
Speaker 1: composer and actually a wonderful pianist. M He was actually
Speaker 1: in a phone booth when he was struck by lightning,
Speaker 1: by the way, But really the most common symptoms that
Speaker 1: happen physically, you will suffer some burns, but not a
Speaker 1: lot um. You can get burned through the sweat that's
Speaker 1: vaporized by the lightning um. Mentally, the person may suffer
Speaker 1: from short term memory loss, have difficult difficulty mentally storing
Speaker 1: new information and accessing old information, get tired very easily
Speaker 1: because their mental processes are being taxed. Um, they're not
Speaker 1: really used to sort of running at the same speed
Speaker 1: that they were before. The personality can change, become very irritable,
Speaker 1: and they often suffer irreparable nerve damage. Um. And this
Speaker 1: is something that again it's not we don't think of
Speaker 1: with lightning strikes, but this is stuff that will affect
Speaker 1: them in various ways depending on how they were struck,
Speaker 1: and they often have chronic headaches, some of which are
Speaker 1: really debilitating and SUPERINTENSEE. We're looking at some photos of
Speaker 1: what we call Lichtenberg figures, and you see these, uh
Speaker 1: you see these on for instance, cattle sometimes that have
Speaker 1: been struck by lightning into in this one particular instance,
Speaker 1: on a human being who had been struck, and it's
Speaker 1: this crazy kind of like tree like pattern, like if
Speaker 1: you didn't know any better, you'd look at it and
Speaker 1: I think it was some sort of a body art
Speaker 1: like like, yeah, I was gonna say it looks tribal
Speaker 1: kind of a thing, yeah, because that's sort of like
Speaker 1: a tree branching out and there is a beauty to it.
Speaker 1: But I think that one of the things that the
Speaker 1: lictomrid figures, as it shows you it is evidence of
Speaker 1: how life altering being struck by lightning would be, or
Speaker 1: having that sort of current run through your body. That's
Speaker 1: the sort of imprint that it can make. Sometimes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like you are you are marked by it, very
Speaker 1: deep and profound sense. And of course you have individuals
Speaker 1: who claim, and this is even less likely, but you
Speaker 1: have individuals who claim that they have a genetic susceptibility
Speaker 1: to lightning strikes, that it runs in the family. For
Speaker 1: there was recently um an episode of on Being an
Speaker 1: interview with the author Kevin Kling, and uh Kling argued
Speaker 1: that or not they didn't really seriously argue, but he
Speaker 1: he claimed that there that lightning strikes run in his family. Again,
Speaker 1: all the factors that go into it. We you can
Speaker 1: ask questions like, well, does your family tend to live
Speaker 1: in Florida? Does your family tend to climb things a lot?
Speaker 1: Are you a very outdoorsy family? Are you fisherman? You know,
Speaker 1: there are all these other factors that go into it.
Speaker 1: That really has nothing to do with a cursed family
Speaker 1: lineage or something in your genes that makes you especially
Speaker 1: susceptible to a lightning strike. But you know, always thinking
Speaker 1: about the ancestral Memories episode. Then we talked about sometimes
Speaker 1: that you take on your family's history and you repeat it,
Speaker 1: and if this becomes part of your family's mythology, then
Speaker 1: you begin to especially if if you have an uncle
Speaker 1: or and or someone in the family that is marked
Speaker 1: like this, with this Lichtenburg figure, you can easily see
Speaker 1: how someone might begin to think this is, you know,
Speaker 1: something that is a curse on their family and not
Speaker 1: necessarily looking at it like, well, you know, we we
Speaker 1: work out in the outdoors quite a bit, and we
Speaker 1: live in Florida, or you know, various other factors that
Speaker 1: would make the likelihood even greater for this family to
Speaker 1: be struck. Yeah, there's a great character in Corte McCarthy's
Speaker 1: All the Pretty Horses, a character in Blevins, and I
Speaker 1: think this is reflected in the film version as well.
Speaker 1: But um he he claims to have this history of
Speaker 1: lightning strikes, and there's this this great bit where he's
Speaker 1: explaining it. He says, it runs in my family. My
Speaker 1: granddaddy was killed in a mind bucket in West Virginia.
Speaker 1: It run down in the whole hundred and eighty feet
Speaker 1: to get him. Couldn't even wait for him to get
Speaker 1: up to the top. They had to wet down the
Speaker 1: bucket to cool it for they could get him out
Speaker 1: of it. Him and two other men. It fried him
Speaker 1: like bacon. My daddy's older brother was blowed out of
Speaker 1: a derek in the Baston field in the year nineteen
Speaker 1: and four, cable rig with a wood derek. But the
Speaker 1: lightning got him anyways, and him not nineteen years old.
Speaker 1: Great uncle on my mother's side, mother's side, I said,
Speaker 1: got killed on a horse and it never singed a
Speaker 1: hair on that horse, and it killed him graveyard dead.
Speaker 1: They had to cut cut his belt off of him
Speaker 1: where it welded the buckle shut. And I got a
Speaker 1: cousin ain't but four years older than me, and was
Speaker 1: struck down in his own yard coming from the barn,
Speaker 1: and it paralyzed him all down one side and melted
Speaker 1: the fillings in his teeth and soldered his jaws shut.
Speaker 1: So as persuasive persuasive? Um, alright, so you think that's persuasive,
Speaker 1: But then all you have to do, as we ever
Speaker 1: have to do when we try to get outside of ourselves,
Speaker 1: is to look to space, of course, because there's something
Speaker 1: about space and lightning going on that explored to look
Speaker 1: like weak sauce. Okay, scientists have actually observed lightning on
Speaker 1: Mars and Saturn before. Right, we know this, um, But
Speaker 1: what is nuts is that it can occur in the
Speaker 1: middle of space and it has done so to a
Speaker 1: force equaling a trillion lightning bolts. Okay, we're talking about
Speaker 1: electrical surge, trillion lightning bolts. This current was discovered near
Speaker 1: Galaxy three C three zero three, and it's thought to
Speaker 1: be the byproduct of a nearby massive black hole that
Speaker 1: is emitting huge amounts of magnetic energy. Two. It's the
Speaker 1: biggest burst of electric current ever detected in the universe.
Speaker 1: That is just crazy because you have not only do
Speaker 1: you have a black hole in this scenario, you have
Speaker 1: the most enormous lightning bolt ever imagined occurring as well.
Speaker 1: I mean just amazing. Like, I mean, what can you
Speaker 1: even say about that? That's drama. Yeah, that is that
Speaker 1: is some drama. All right, Well there you go. All right, well, um,
Speaker 1: what's called the about over and do some quick listener mail?
Speaker 1: All right, this is this one comes from a slightly
Speaker 1: older episode, but listener of Brenton Wrightson and says, get
Speaker 1: a Robert and Julie. Perhaps that means this is an
Speaker 1: Australian listener. We shall find out. I love your podcast
Speaker 1: I'm slowly working my way through them, and to have
Speaker 1: just listened to the Firewalking podcast you Your mentioned of
Speaker 1: your sister putting your tongue on the car cigarette ladder
Speaker 1: made me smile, as did a similar thing when I
Speaker 1: was a kid. Just use my finger and