Speaker 1: Welcome to brain stuff from how stuff works. Hey, they're
Speaker 1: brain stuff. It's Christian Seger. If you're a person who
Speaker 1: has a nose and eyeballs, you've probably noticed that when
Speaker 1: you sneeze, your eyelids naturally snap shut. It's the reason
Speaker 1: that sneezing while driving is a terrifying roulette game of death.
Speaker 1: But I've got a question for you. When you were
Speaker 1: a kid, did you hear the story that if you
Speaker 1: managed to resist this reflex and hold your eyes open
Speaker 1: during a sneeze, that they would pop out of your head?
Speaker 1: I did. In fact, my ninth grade science teacher, Mrs
Speaker 1: Abraham told me this is it true? Though? Well short answer,
Speaker 1: almost definitely not. But unfortunately we can't be as perfectly
Speaker 1: certain as we would all like to be about this
Speaker 1: particular topic. So here are the facts. Fact one, your
Speaker 1: eyes can pop out of their sockets. It's not very common,
Speaker 1: but it can happen. Doctors call anterior bulging of the
Speaker 1: eye beyond its normal orbit a case of exophthalamus. If
Speaker 1: the eyeball gets dislocated from its socket enough that its
Speaker 1: equator is literally outside your retracted eyelids, this is known
Speaker 1: as globe luxation. Fact number two. If you want to
Speaker 1: sleep soundly tonight and really every other night for the
Speaker 1: rest of your life, you should not search the web
Speaker 1: for images of globe luxation. Fact number three. Globe luxation
Speaker 1: is rare, but it can be caused by a number
Speaker 1: of conditions. Of course, gouging at an eyeball with a
Speaker 1: finger or another instrument that will do it. Some various
Speaker 1: types of traumatic head injury can cause the eyeballs to
Speaker 1: pop out of their sockets. Many cases of spontaneous globe
Speaker 1: luxation in the medical literature have happened while the eye
Speaker 1: was being messed with in some ways, such as during
Speaker 1: the application of a contact lens or eye drops, or
Speaker 1: when a doctor was manipulating the eyelids during an exam.
Speaker 1: Violent vomiting has also been cited as a cause of
Speaker 1: eyeball dislocation. And I might add that whoever this refers
Speaker 1: to has my sympathies, because that sounds like the worst
Speaker 1: day ever. Now, if we are to believe our historical sources,
Speaker 1: there may have been a few cases where a sneeze
Speaker 1: knocked somebody's eyeball out. For example, in April of eighteen
Speaker 1: eighty two, a US newspaper reported that a woman on
Speaker 1: a street car in Indianapolis burst one of her eyeballs
Speaker 1: in the middle of a sneezing fit. Whether this means
Speaker 1: she suffered globe luxation, or that her eyeball just up
Speaker 1: and exploded, or that journalists in the eighteen eighties sometimes
Speaker 1: reported rather dubious stories, look, it's hard to say, but
Speaker 1: if we look at the more recent sources. A two
Speaker 1: thousand two ophthalmology study reviewed the twenty six cases of
Speaker 1: spontaneous globe luxation then known to the medical world. While
Speaker 1: most of the cases they found were triggered by manipulation
Speaker 1: of the eyelids, the authors did also claim that a
Speaker 1: small number were odd on by other triggers, including things
Speaker 1: like crying, coughing, nose blowing, bending over, and yes, sneezing.
Speaker 1: So sneezing might have caused the dislocation of the eyeball
Speaker 1: in a very very small number of known cases. But
Speaker 1: does keeping your eyes open during the sneeze have anything
Speaker 1: to do with it? As I said before, almost definitely not.
Speaker 1: And it's certainly true that eyeball dislocation doesn't happen every
Speaker 1: time you sneeze with your eyes open, because you can
Speaker 1: go to YouTube right now and look up videos of
Speaker 1: people sneezing with their eyes open. It's not easy, but
Speaker 1: some people can do it and their eyeballs are They're fine,
Speaker 1: and they seem to enjoy showing off this disgusting trick.
Speaker 1: But the complete lack of correlation between open eyes and
Speaker 1: eyeball poppage is a combination of the fact that sneezing
Speaker 1: almost never, if ever, causes the eyes to pop out,
Speaker 1: and the fact that your eyelids don't really do any
Speaker 1: of the work of keeping your eyeballs in their sockets
Speaker 1: to begin with. Instead, your eyeballs are primarily held in
Speaker 1: place by a combination of six muscles known as the
Speaker 1: extra ocular muscles. They control the movements of the eyes
Speaker 1: and are much stronger than the eyelids. So whether or
Speaker 1: not you can manage to keep your eyes open during
Speaker 1: a sneeze probably has little to no effect on the
Speaker 1: chances that your eyes will pop out, and those chances
Speaker 1: are very very slim in the first place, though possibly
Speaker 1: not zero. Take that, Mrs Abraham check out the brainstuff
Speaker 1: channel on YouTube, and for more on this and thousands
Speaker 1: of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.