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