Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Christian Sager. Hey.
Speaker 1: Today we are going to be talking about some more
Speaker 1: October Halloween related stuff. But before we get into it,
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Speaker 1: this upcoming periscope thing, and also check us out. Last
Speaker 1: two weeks of October, we're gonna have Monster Science back up,
Speaker 1: so that's gonna be some VHS late in daytime horror
Speaker 1: themed explorations of the real science behind some notable film monsters.
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Speaker 1: blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com. But
Speaker 1: today we're talking about creepy pasta, which I imagined there
Speaker 1: are three different responses out there. Some people were probably
Speaker 1: going to creepypasta, I love creepy pasta. Other people are
Speaker 1: going creepypasta, what are you doing covering that? And other
Speaker 1: people are just flat up asking what that is? Creepy
Speaker 1: creepy pasta? Dente? Yeah? Is it? Is it the texture
Speaker 1: or the is it posta that shaped like little ghosts?
Speaker 1: That's what in my mind when I first started hearing
Speaker 1: about it a few years back. But what, let's explain
Speaker 1: what creepy pasta is for everyone who's not familiar. Right, Okay,
Speaker 1: so I'm only recently familiar with this, uh phenomenon. But
Speaker 1: apparently around two thousand six h a a sort of
Speaker 1: fad I guess meme started up on the Internet called
Speaker 1: copy pasta, and I think it originated on four Chan
Speaker 1: and then splintered off into several different genres in different areas.
Speaker 1: The basic idea, though, is that you're creating uh content
Speaker 1: that's like copy and pasted into an email or maybe
Speaker 1: on a blog or something like that. Right, It's something
Speaker 1: that's like easily accessible and share able. Yeah, and it's
Speaker 1: I think the two most ubiquitous examples of this first
Speaker 1: of all, emails from your grandma or your uncle chain
Speaker 1: like some sort of ridiculous story about you know, somebody's
Speaker 1: putting disease needles into convenience store machines, you know, or
Speaker 1: or watch out for hoodlums throwing eggs at your car,
Speaker 1: or people turning their lights on and off. You know,
Speaker 1: there's always some sort of like, oh it's gang activity
Speaker 1: or or some sort of weird horror going on in
Speaker 1: your daily life where you could possibly believe it, but
Speaker 1: if you actually research it, you'll see, oh, this is
Speaker 1: just a The same couple of paragraphs have been copy
Speaker 1: and pasted throughout the history of the Internet, and we
Speaker 1: just keep following for it again and again. And creepy
Speaker 1: pasta is sort of the horror iteration of copy pasta,
Speaker 1: and that it pretends to be like an urban legend
Speaker 1: or like a pseudo real life event that happened, but
Speaker 1: it's told as a horror story. Yeah, and I think
Speaker 1: some of the you can definitely see some creepy pasta
Speaker 1: in the copy pasta that you you see some of
Speaker 1: those emails, you know, where it's ultimately you're talking about
Speaker 1: some sort of folkloric modern folkloric horror theme, uh that's
Speaker 1: wrapped in enough reality or pseudo reality that you buy
Speaker 1: into it. Yeah. They all sort of play off of
Speaker 1: these author ic aesthetics using like they mimic things like
Speaker 1: documents of real life. It's almost like the found footage
Speaker 1: of pros. Like, uh, there's diary entries, witness statements. Sometimes
Speaker 1: there's image and video files. And as we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about today, many of them take the shape of
Speaker 1: scientific reports or like lab analysis. And so what we
Speaker 1: thought we would do today is look at some of
Speaker 1: the most popular scientific based creepy pastas and then look
Speaker 1: at the the the plausibility and the real life connections
Speaker 1: of the science that they pose it. Yeah, and I
Speaker 1: want to definitely imagine some big quotation marks around scientifically
Speaker 1: based there. Oh yeah, oh yeah, but as we'll get
Speaker 1: into yeah, yeah, I mean there's some there's some very
Speaker 1: loose stuff when they just say a stimulating gas was presented, right,
Speaker 1: there's no they don't name the gas, they don't give
Speaker 1: any methodology or anything. But some of them are better
Speaker 1: than others. And well we'll get into that as well.
Speaker 1: It's um one thing to keep in mind with copy
Speaker 1: Pasta two and I'm especially creepy Pasta are the different
Speaker 1: ways that you come across it online, Like, there are
Speaker 1: definite creepy Pasta destinations for people who love reading it
Speaker 1: and creating it, and they're just kind of wikis for this,
Speaker 1: and we'll have some links to these stories on the
Speaker 1: landing page for this episode. Stuff to blow your mind
Speaker 1: out com so you can explore that on your own.
Speaker 1: But you'll also see stuff showing up on social media
Speaker 1: or you're doing, like we encountered this plenty of times,
Speaker 1: you're doing some research, you're trying to find out about
Speaker 1: certain actual experiments, and then you run across some creepyposta
Speaker 1: and for a split second, you're like, what is this
Speaker 1: experiment they're talking about? Oh, it's creepy pasta. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: is kind of perfect. And especially researching this particular episode
Speaker 1: was difficult because when you're trying to research the actual
Speaker 1: scientific basis for some of these stories, you end up
Speaker 1: finding either fake articles or or the actual story itself
Speaker 1: popping up in a lot of your searches. I've also
Speaker 1: seen like wiki questions and message boards, so you can
Speaker 1: see this kind of stuff popping up there where someone
Speaker 1: will have yeah, people have a legitimate question, and somebody
Speaker 1: will decide to throw a slip a little pop down there,
Speaker 1: you know, Like I've seen medical question sites, um, where
Speaker 1: someone will be talking. I think I was writing something
Speaker 1: that had to do with the about about prostates prostate exams,
Speaker 1: and I ran across this message board where somebody was asking, Hey,
Speaker 1: what can I expect when I go in there? And
Speaker 1: then somebody had this ridiculous story shared, and then another
Speaker 1: individual point it responded said, oh, this is pasta here's
Speaker 1: an example of where it was previously uh rolled out.
Speaker 1: I think that's where I first discovered the term copy puff. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean like in today's age of like, uh, what
Speaker 1: we are often told in our daily jobs is user
Speaker 1: generated content, right, where like the user is commenting or
Speaker 1: creating something on their own. This is the perfect kind
Speaker 1: of thing to slip in there, right, like an Amazon review,
Speaker 1: you could drop in some creepy pasta related to whatever
Speaker 1: item it is that's a that's on sale, and you
Speaker 1: give it a five star review, but let people know
Speaker 1: that it was haunted or something when you got it
Speaker 1: in the mail. Yeah, it's kind of like the creepy
Speaker 1: mold that grows uh on, you know, on the structures
Speaker 1: of the Internet and throughout the systems of the Internet,
Speaker 1: and some of it is just merely mold, and sometimes
Speaker 1: that sometimes it's exquisite and it's fun to look at
Speaker 1: and feel, but I think so um, people who maybe
Speaker 1: aren't familiar with the creepy pasta genre, you might actually know.
Speaker 1: The most famous of the creepy pasta characters or stories
Speaker 1: is the slender Man one. Uh And I don't know
Speaker 1: a ton about slender Man other than what I've read
Speaker 1: about him outside of the creepypastas he appears in. But
Speaker 1: basically the idea is that he's kind of like a
Speaker 1: he's on a horror story character, right, He's just as
Speaker 1: much as like Jason Vorhees or Freddy Krueger, but he's
Speaker 1: kind of like in a elongated, skinny, scary looking man
Speaker 1: and like a suit. Yeah, you see to like, the
Speaker 1: reason one of the reasons Slenderman is such a nice
Speaker 1: example of copy pasta is that he's kind of collectively assembled.
Speaker 1: He's an amalgam of pop culture influences and and ultimately
Speaker 1: the final forums very amorphous too, because because a lot
Speaker 1: of it is about his depictions and individual pieces of
Speaker 1: creepy pasta or especially in imagery and these various photoshop
Speaker 1: contests that have contributed to to the myth though, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's one of the ones where there's a lot of
Speaker 1: visual accompaniment. Yea, Like a lot of a lot of
Speaker 1: slender Man revolves around the pictures that people have created
Speaker 1: that are just terrifying. Yeah, and there's no real consensus
Speaker 1: on like exactly what the story is. Like nobody said
Speaker 1: this is what slender Man is slender many and that
Speaker 1: helps to make it mysterious and and and weird. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's one of the reasons that the Lovecraft's myth those
Speaker 1: continues to resonate is that there's individuals have come along
Speaker 1: and tried to create a boiler plate uh uh, you know,
Speaker 1: mythos for him, But ultimately his mythos is shrouded in
Speaker 1: mystery and contradictions absolutely and so included in that and
Speaker 1: I'd be remiss if we'd or we'd be remiss if
Speaker 1: we didn't include this is that you may have also
Speaker 1: heard in the news that there was an inspired violent
Speaker 1: assault by two twelve year old girls against another twelve
Speaker 1: year old girl. They were trying to murder her in
Speaker 1: inspiration they were inspired by slender Man. Uh and um,
Speaker 1: you know. To clarify, like the owners of Creepy pasta
Speaker 1: dot com, many of the people who were involved in
Speaker 1: this community, they all you know, released a state statements
Speaker 1: basically saying like they this was not their intention, They
Speaker 1: didn't want to be connected this at all. It was
Speaker 1: more just kind of a fun pop culture thing for
Speaker 1: them to have a community around. But these girls somehow
Speaker 1: took it internally and uh and ended up almost killing
Speaker 1: their friend. Luckily she escaped and was I think she
Speaker 1: was had like seventeen or nineteen times or something like that.
Speaker 1: She was found by somebody on the Southern Road and
Speaker 1: was able to get medical care. Well, I mean, it
Speaker 1: just speaks to the power of storytelling us through the
Speaker 1: power of folklore and the power of the power of symbols,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean anybody can create a story, and
Speaker 1: oftentimes the story is not going to be that good,
Speaker 1: but you're playing with powerful elements when you start playing
Speaker 1: with with established tropes and established symbols, established symbols of fear,
Speaker 1: and uh, even you know, a very amateur creator can
Speaker 1: end up creating something that strongly resonates. And I mean
Speaker 1: that's the beauty of something like Creepy Pasta. It is.
Speaker 1: And and I also, like, I think that it would
Speaker 1: be really like off the mark to say that, like, oh,
Speaker 1: it's because of slender Man that this happened, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean clearly like there was something going on with
Speaker 1: these girls anyways. Uh, that's like the argument that like
Speaker 1: Ozzy Osbourne influenced teenagers to kill each other in the
Speaker 1: eighties or something. You just I don't buy into it,
Speaker 1: but I think it's important that we let the audience
Speaker 1: know about that. Um. Creepy Pasta really kind of hit
Speaker 1: its height in because the New York Times actually covered
Speaker 1: it and did an article on it. Um. But you know,
Speaker 1: a lot of it resembles what we we refer to
Speaker 1: as weird fiction, right, yeah, you see, I mean it
Speaker 1: kind of runs the gain because on one end of
Speaker 1: the spectrum. You have creepy papsa that reads like a
Speaker 1: either either like a Wikipedia article or p or a
Speaker 1: poorly written Wikipedia article, where it's just very factual, very
Speaker 1: grounded in this subjective reporting style. And then on the
Speaker 1: other hand, stuff that is aspiring more and more to
Speaker 1: resemble weird fiction, you know, something with more of a
Speaker 1: narrative flow. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, as a both a
Speaker 1: fan of horror pros and somebody who writes horror pros,
Speaker 1: I guess my personal literary criticism here is just that
Speaker 1: the best of these always ends up still reading kind
Speaker 1: of like a Wikipedia entry. Right. So there's no there's
Speaker 1: no craft to the prose necessarily that you would find
Speaker 1: in something that's designed for literature. It's mostly just a
Speaker 1: summary of the plot. Um. However, it can be done artfully.
Speaker 1: Um is so in such a way to make it
Speaker 1: seem like it was a real thing. Right. Uh. If
Speaker 1: it's done as such, then it can have a pretty
Speaker 1: sustaining dread that goes along with it. Um. So there
Speaker 1: are some of these that I like better than others, uh,
Speaker 1: like any kind of you know, uh medium or storytelling.
Speaker 1: But I have to say, and I want to warn
Speaker 1: our listeners if you if you haven't read any of
Speaker 1: these yet, A lot of the grammar and spelling is
Speaker 1: just horrible in these, like they need a proof reader
Speaker 1: to just go over reach these. Although I guess that
Speaker 1: that could potentially be part of the charm, right, is
Speaker 1: that like it's been written by somebody who hasn't taken
Speaker 1: the time to proof read and go back and fixed errors,
Speaker 1: and therefore it seems more authentic. Sometimes when you've been
Speaker 1: horrified by your participation in a frightening paranormal experiment, you
Speaker 1: know you're less a less attentive to grammar. That's that's
Speaker 1: possible for sure. I do want to say one more thing.
Speaker 1: I want to throw a plug out there for our colleagues.
Speaker 1: So a lot of people don't know this, but our
Speaker 1: how stuff works. Colleagues, including our producer Noel who's on
Speaker 1: the board right now, Lauren Vogelbaum from Forward Thinking, and
Speaker 1: Ben Bolan and Matt Frederick from Stuff they Don't Want
Speaker 1: You to Know, all got together and put together what
Speaker 1: I would call a creepy pasta audio play. It's called
Speaker 1: See You Next Time, and they did it for the
Speaker 1: Atlanta Fringe Festival, and it's about like a thirty minute
Speaker 1: MP three that you can go and download from their site.
Speaker 1: So if you're into that kind of thing, like if
Speaker 1: you're like a Welcome to night Vale kind of person, uh,
Speaker 1: go download that and check it out, because it's all
Speaker 1: how stuff works, characters and personalities. In fact, Joe and
Speaker 1: I both make very minor appearances in the story, just
Speaker 1: as like kind of extras, but really well done and
Speaker 1: it was like one of my favorite horror stories from
Speaker 1: this past year. Cool. Yeah, we'll include a link to
Speaker 1: that on landing page for this episode. Um. In terms
Speaker 1: of back to the Creepy pasta though the like, I
Speaker 1: find that the ones that are instantly grounded in more
Speaker 1: of a traditional storytelling, like you know where the narrator
Speaker 1: is saying what I have to relate to you about
Speaker 1: this experiments to buying. You instantly know you're reading the story,
Speaker 1: but I guess the the and then to your point,
Speaker 1: if it reads entirely like a Wikipedia piece, then it's
Speaker 1: it runs the risk of just being completely dry. Um,
Speaker 1: you can still be engaging, but I think the probably
Speaker 1: the sweet spot is if you can have it start
Speaker 1: dry and seemingly factual and objective, and then have it
Speaker 1: morph into something uh that that that is more elegantly written,
Speaker 1: and then maybe steer back out of it. Yeah, it builds. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think another thing that that is key with these
Speaker 1: as well is is the format. So like the mimicking
Speaker 1: of a of a particular kind of format, uh to
Speaker 1: create the authenticity type thing, like like ones that mimic
Speaker 1: actual Wikipedia entries are kind of using that format to
Speaker 1: their advantage, right, Whereas like if it's just a chain
Speaker 1: of prose that shows up an email sent to me
Speaker 1: by my weird aunt, then I'm less likely to go, oh,
Speaker 1: this could potentially be a thing. Yeah. And another thing
Speaker 1: too that's probably worth noting is that like part of
Speaker 1: our job for the podcast and other things is to
Speaker 1: evaluate sources and evaluate validity of things, and so inherently,
Speaker 1: I think for for people like us reading these things
Speaker 1: were automatically like wait a minute, I need some more evidence,
Speaker 1: I need more information where the sources cited. Yeah. One
Speaker 1: of the early examples of just just recording folklore that
Speaker 1: I think has some some potential ties into creepy pasta
Speaker 1: is a book called The Strange Stories from a Chinese
Speaker 1: Studio by lousy Z from eighteenth century China Uh, each
Speaker 1: of these tales that that the author relates, they all
Speaker 1: they all start the same, and they all kind of
Speaker 1: end the same. Where he's saying, I knew this particular
Speaker 1: individual and and he works over in this province and
Speaker 1: works in this office, and he told me this story
Speaker 1: about this encounter he had. And then the encounter might
Speaker 1: be seeing a strange like pin dragon, or seeing or
Speaker 1: encountering a horrifying ghost, or having some sort of mildly
Speaker 1: body hilarious encounter. And then it will end again with
Speaker 1: him firmly tucking it back into reality by saying, and
Speaker 1: this particular acquaintance of mine he continued to have a
Speaker 1: great career in this province, and I still hear from
Speaker 1: some time to time. Yeah, the idea I think they're
Speaker 1: maybe is conscious or not, was sort of taking the
Speaker 1: oral tradition of folklore and trans aiding it into pros
Speaker 1: And yeah, I think you see that with a lot
Speaker 1: of early weird fiction as well, like Arthur Makin you
Speaker 1: mentioned Lovecraft earlier, Uh, to an extent, like Algernon Blackwood,
Speaker 1: things like that. Yeah, you have to sort of you
Speaker 1: have this nugget of of the fantastic and you need
Speaker 1: to to tuck it in firmly into the bed of
Speaker 1: of our our informational system, really, and in this case
Speaker 1: it's the Internet. Yeah, absolutely, they're using the medium to
Speaker 1: its advantage. So okay, so we're gonna talk about three
Speaker 1: particular creepy pasta science experiments and we'll we'll we'll give
Speaker 1: you the premise, we'll lay it down for you. It's
Speaker 1: going to be a very shorthand version of it, and
Speaker 1: then you know, if you want to go read them
Speaker 1: on the on your own, uh, and then we will
Speaker 1: take a look at these science behind these Yeah. All right, Well,
Speaker 1: let's kick it off with probably the more famous of
Speaker 1: the three, the one, the one that seems to have
Speaker 1: to hit up there at the top of the list
Speaker 1: on most of these creepy pasta sites, the Russians EAP experiment. Right,
Speaker 1: So okay, the premise of this, I'm gonna try to
Speaker 1: go through this pretty quickly. Premise of this story is
Speaker 1: that in the late nineteen forties, there was a Russian
Speaker 1: researcher or it was a research team I believe, who
Speaker 1: kept five people awake for fifteen days using what's only
Speaker 1: referred to as an experimental gas based stimulants. So we
Speaker 1: have no idea whatever this chemical was. The research team
Speaker 1: kept them in a sealed environment and monitored their oxygen intake.
Speaker 1: I don't know how, it's never explained in the story,
Speaker 1: but basically because this gas was potentially I think it
Speaker 1: was toxic and high concentrations. As the story goes, uh.
Speaker 1: Because they didn't have video equipment at the time, they
Speaker 1: watched these uh participants through portholes and they listened listened
Speaker 1: in with microphones. But basically the chamber there in was
Speaker 1: stocked up with you know, the things that they would need,
Speaker 1: like books and cots, running water, a toilet. They had
Speaker 1: enough dried food in there for a month. Uh. And
Speaker 1: they were all political prisoners that were deemed enemy of
Speaker 1: the state, enemies of the state during World War two.
Speaker 1: But they were falsely told before they went in, Hey,
Speaker 1: if you do this experiment and you can manage to
Speaker 1: sleep not sleep for thirty days straight, then we will
Speaker 1: free you and will forgive your actions. Uh. So the
Speaker 1: story goes like this first five days, these people are fine.
Speaker 1: After about day four, though, their conversations start to get
Speaker 1: a little dark. They start getting paranoid of one another.
Speaker 1: By day nine, one of them starts screaming and running
Speaker 1: up and down the length of the chamber. And he
Speaker 1: screams so loud that he physically tears the vocal cords
Speaker 1: his vocal cords. The others begin to just start whispering
Speaker 1: into the microphones, uh, not even acknowledging that the other
Speaker 1: guy is screaming. Then a second one starts screaming and
Speaker 1: running around. These two take the books that are in
Speaker 1: the room, rip their pages out, cover them with their
Speaker 1: own fee sas, and paste them up or the porthole windows.
Speaker 1: Uh so the studio we're in right now actually has
Speaker 1: a porthole windows. Yeah. We're actually just thinking this is
Speaker 1: this is like what happens when you try to record
Speaker 1: four podcast episodes in Yeah. Absolutely, I begin the screaming
Speaker 1: and running around. Uh. Day twelve, all the sounds stop, uh,
Speaker 1: and the oxygen consumption rate rises to what is uh,
Speaker 1: you know, understood as heavy exercise levels for the five people.
Speaker 1: On day fourteen, they use the intercom and they try
Speaker 1: to you know, contact them and figure out what's going
Speaker 1: on inside this room. They get one response, which is
Speaker 1: we no longer want to be freed. On day fifteen,
Speaker 1: they're finding like, all right, we're going in there. They
Speaker 1: open up this chamber and they send soldiers in. They
Speaker 1: find that one of the guys is dead. The rest
Speaker 1: of them are all crazy. They've eaten themselves, ripped their
Speaker 1: own skin off, removed some of their own organs from
Speaker 1: their bodies, very like gory body horror type stuff. They
Speaker 1: really wanted to go to stay in the chamber, like
Speaker 1: they were addicted to this gas. One of them. The
Speaker 1: minute they take him out of the chamber, he bleeds
Speaker 1: to death immediately, and they find when they're trying to
Speaker 1: resuscitate him he's utterly resistant to morphine. One assaults and
Speaker 1: kills one of the soldier. I think there's like another
Speaker 1: thing about, like another one like biting a soldier's leg
Speaker 1: and taking a chunk out of it and then like
Speaker 1: some more padding. That's like all of the soldiers committed
Speaker 1: suicide within five days or something like that. Uh. And
Speaker 1: then this part didn't make sense to me even in
Speaker 1: then like narrative of the story. But they they sowed
Speaker 1: the skin back onto one of these victims, yeah, to
Speaker 1: try to save him, I guess, uh. And they tried
Speaker 1: it with one of the others, the other survivors, but
Speaker 1: they just kept laughing so much during the surgery process
Speaker 1: that they couldn't pull it off. So uh, it ends
Speaker 1: up with them being put back in the chamber because
Speaker 1: there's some higher up who says, you know, we gotta
Speaker 1: fig gure out what's going on. So they put these
Speaker 1: guys back in the chamber. Uh, they turn up the gas.
Speaker 1: Their brain waves start fluctuating between normal and then flatlining
Speaker 1: as if they're dead. They try putting three of the
Speaker 1: researchers in there with him, but one of the researchers
Speaker 1: grabs a gun and shoots his commander and then shoots
Speaker 1: the captives right before he kills the last captive. The
Speaker 1: captive says this, we are you. We are the madness
Speaker 1: that lurks within you, all begging to be free at
Speaker 1: every moment in your deepest animal mind. We are what
Speaker 1: you hide from in your beds every night. We are
Speaker 1: what you sedate into silence and paralysis when you go
Speaker 1: to the nocturnal haven where we cannot tread. And that's
Speaker 1: the end of the creepy pasta, all right. Like most
Speaker 1: of these experiments, it ends in madness and death and
Speaker 1: and some inkling of the world beyond the veil. R. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think you're gonna find that. Like, there's a common
Speaker 1: theme of science experiment, people go crazy, kill everybody, and
Speaker 1: then say something eerie, Like we're saying if you if
Speaker 1: you were to find the published, pure viewed studies for
Speaker 1: each of these, you would be able to skip down
Speaker 1: to the conclusions and it would say, and everybody went
Speaker 1: mad and we had to put down the inmates, right right? Yeah,
Speaker 1: what I'd love to see the i r B for these,
Speaker 1: the Institutional Review Board like like looking at this, like, wait,
Speaker 1: you're gonna do what now? Alright, So what's the basically
Speaker 1: at hard here that we're dealing with the science of
Speaker 1: sweep deprivation? There have been a number of studies that
Speaker 1: have looked at this. So what happens when you stay
Speaker 1: awake for extended periods of time? How can we make
Speaker 1: ourselves stay awake for extended periods of time and and
Speaker 1: still function properly? Right? So what we know about sleep deprivation?
Speaker 1: And I'm sure many of you out there have experienced
Speaker 1: some form or another of this, right, Like last night
Speaker 1: I got one hour less than my normal. However many
Speaker 1: eight hours a night that I get and I'm a
Speaker 1: little uh, LOGI I think is the term this morning.
Speaker 1: But the base sick breakdown of it goes like this.
Speaker 1: We know that we are alertness lowers, right, we have
Speaker 1: trouble concentrating. If you even lose ninety minutes of sleep
Speaker 1: in one night compared to your average sleep schedule, you'll
Speaker 1: be thirty two percent less alert the next day. So
Speaker 1: I'm somewhere in that today. UM forty of us drivers
Speaker 1: this is a scary part, scarier I think than the
Speaker 1: creepy PASTA. Forty one percent of US drivers admit to
Speaker 1: falling asleep behind the wheel because of this lack of alertness,
Speaker 1: it also totally screws up our circadian rhythm. UH so
Speaker 1: our body can't keep the correct time when we haven't
Speaker 1: slept the right way. It's as if you're jet lagged,
Speaker 1: which makes sense, and we actually on our sister show,
Speaker 1: Brain Stuff, have done both episodes on what happens when
Speaker 1: you don't sleep and what happens with jet lag, and
Speaker 1: there's some really interesting stuff about jet lag in relation
Speaker 1: to uh light entering our eyes and how it interacts
Speaker 1: with our brains. So if you want to dive in more,
Speaker 1: there's stuff there. But because the circadian rhythm is impaired.
Speaker 1: Our motor skills are also impaired, and our hormones start
Speaker 1: to rise and fall and these just very inappropriate ways.
Speaker 1: We also lose memory. That's a common symptom of this.
Speaker 1: So what we know is that when we sleep, it
Speaker 1: consolidates our memories, basically takes the things that happened to us,
Speaker 1: and it organizes it in such a way that helps
Speaker 1: our cognitive function. It's kind of like a defragging of
Speaker 1: the human absolute cuter. And if you're not running your
Speaker 1: defragment defragg and if you're not running your defragger appropriately
Speaker 1: and enough, then everything gets a bit screwed up up there. Yeah. Um.
Speaker 1: In fact, like you start losing recall, you can even
Speaker 1: create false memories, and it lowers your just general ability
Speaker 1: to process information. Uh. And then this is a quote
Speaker 1: directly from our house Stuff Works article on the effects
Speaker 1: of sleep deprivation. Uh. Quote. When we learn and store
Speaker 1: information in our memory, that information is moved from the hippocampus,
Speaker 1: which we know is the memory creating region of our brain,
Speaker 1: to the prefrontal cortex, specifically the neo cortex region, which
Speaker 1: is where we form and store long term memories. So
Speaker 1: you can see kind of biologically how this would start
Speaker 1: to affect memory. There's also a process going on where
Speaker 1: our body's glimphatic system cleans out our nervous system while
Speaker 1: we're sleeping. But if you don't sleep, all of this waste,
Speaker 1: I guess or trash starts to build up. And but
Speaker 1: by trash, what I mean is it's cerebro spinal fluid
Speaker 1: that's filled with proteins and toxins. It doesn't get flushed
Speaker 1: out of your system, so subsequently you've got that stuff
Speaker 1: floating around in there too. All of this can lead
Speaker 1: to a speeding up of the progression of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's important to note here and distress here that
Speaker 1: when when, when sleep deprivation is taking place, it's really
Speaker 1: messing with the chemistry of the brain, the functioning of
Speaker 1: the brain, and ultimately our perceptions of reality, both objective
Speaker 1: reality and subjective reality. Playing with our memories, our perceptions
Speaker 1: of the past. Uh, hallucinations are absolutely a symptom. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so we're we're it's it's it's ultimately a very nightmarck scenario,
Speaker 1: not you know, certainly not out of keeping with the
Speaker 1: realm of creepy plasta and horror. Oh yeah, certainly. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think that's one of the things that's probably why
Speaker 1: this particular one is one of the most popular, is
Speaker 1: that it's something at their core. The science c Creepypasta's
Speaker 1: work best when it's something that almost everyone can identify with.
Speaker 1: So lack of sleep is something that I think every
Speaker 1: person reading it can kind of imagine. Yeah, sleep is
Speaker 1: that realm of mystery, and there there is enough science
Speaker 1: out there even if one is not that familiar with it,
Speaker 1: it's you can you can certainly at least see it
Speaker 1: there on the internet. You know that there have been
Speaker 1: there's been research into sleep. You know, they are sleep
Speaker 1: institutes that that work with people who have trouble. UM.
Speaker 1: One of the side effects of the sleep deprivation, as
Speaker 1: well as something that we've covered here on the show before,
Speaker 1: is sleep paralysis. So I know you've done a video
Speaker 1: on it, and was there a previous podcast episode about sleep.
Speaker 1: It's come up. It's come up a lot, Like anytime
Speaker 1: I've covered something related to supernatural experience. UM, sleep paralys
Speaker 1: is always always up there as a possible explanation for
Speaker 1: encounters with aliens, encounters with ghosts. Uh and and I'll
Speaker 1: make sure we link to some resources in the landing
Speaker 1: page for this episode. But you know, essentially it's a
Speaker 1: situation where when you go to sleep, your body is
Speaker 1: put on lockdown, so that if you get in a
Speaker 1: kung fu fight with a bear in your dream, you
Speaker 1: won't throw any kung fu strikes at the person sleeping
Speaker 1: next to you. But in sleep paralysis, you wake up
Speaker 1: with your mind your eyes open, but your body is
Speaker 1: still on lockdown, and you're in this this also in
Speaker 1: this weird phase between dream and reality where you're highly
Speaker 1: susceptible to hallucination. Yeah, and in fact, I haven't seen it,
Speaker 1: but I'm hoping to watch it this week. Um, have
Speaker 1: you heard about The Nightmare? It's this documentary that's all
Speaker 1: about sleep paralysis. This is the one from the guys
Speaker 1: that did the Room two thirty seven. Yeah, it's the
Speaker 1: same creative team from Room two thirty seven. And I've
Speaker 1: heard that it is horrifying. It's a documentary. This is
Speaker 1: not a fictional film. But as we know from you know,
Speaker 1: researching sleep paralysis in the past, just the examples of
Speaker 1: what people think is happening to them can be utterly terrifying. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because you're you often have to your brain is referring
Speaker 1: back to pre existing scripts for what you're encountering. You're
Speaker 1: hearing or seeing something out of the ordinary, and your
Speaker 1: brain has to make sense of it, and so it
Speaker 1: will turn to that, uh, that episode of the X
Speaker 1: Files that you saw, or maybe it will think back
Speaker 1: to some creepy pops if you read on the internet,
Speaker 1: and use that to inform what you're experiencing. So before
Speaker 1: I go into more symptoms about I guess sleep depth,
Speaker 1: let's tie back to that creepypasta story about the Russian
Speaker 1: sleep experiment, and so, yes, hallucis nations are possible. Uh
Speaker 1: so I guess you could say that there's a potential
Speaker 1: for going crazy or at least losing the ability to
Speaker 1: distinguish reality from fantasy. Um. And then sleep paralysis plays
Speaker 1: into that as well, although they wouldn't be like tearing
Speaker 1: their own organs out and stuff like that if they
Speaker 1: had sleep paralysis. Yeah, I don't think you'd go full
Speaker 1: hell right right? So Okay, the other really big thing
Speaker 1: that has a multiple effects on your body when you
Speaker 1: don't get sleep is that your genes aren't as efficient
Speaker 1: at handing out instructions to your body. So we call
Speaker 1: this genetic expression, and it causes all kinds of things.
Speaker 1: There's weight fluctuations. In fact, there's study that showed that
Speaker 1: people who have less than seven to nine hours a
Speaker 1: night of sleep are more likely to be overweight. Uh
Speaker 1: and and I won't go into all the numbers here,
Speaker 1: but basically the idea is like, the less sleep you get,
Speaker 1: the more likely you are to be overweight. When you're
Speaker 1: forced to stay awake, what happens is your body has
Speaker 1: trouble processing blood sugar and leptin, which is this protein
Speaker 1: hormone that regulates our appetite and our metabolism. Uh and
Speaker 1: this can lead to type two diabetes, can lead to
Speaker 1: weight gain, and due to your decreased ability to process sugar,
Speaker 1: you're not as easily able to suppress your food craving.
Speaker 1: So you know, if you're like me, you're going to
Speaker 1: the fridge and having a lot of ice cream late
Speaker 1: at night. Uh. It can also lead to illness. So
Speaker 1: sleep deprivation diminishes our immune system, which sometimes leads to
Speaker 1: serious or chronic illness. Blood pressure becomes a problem if
Speaker 1: you have less than six hours of sleep at night.
Speaker 1: It puts you at high risk for high blood pressure.
Speaker 1: This starts over at taxing your heart. Also, your brain
Speaker 1: doesn't have as much time to regulate the stress hormones
Speaker 1: that are moving around in there, which also leads to
Speaker 1: higher blood pressure. And then finally, death is a symptom
Speaker 1: of not sleeping. So and I don't mean that like
Speaker 1: if you don't sleep, you'll just dropped dead. In fact,
Speaker 1: you die at a rate of two times faster than
Speaker 1: people who have normal sleeping patterns if you're sleep deprived.
Speaker 1: And we can look to certain experiments with animals and
Speaker 1: if some animals certainly die without proper sleep, sleep deprivation
Speaker 1: and rodents and flies can cause death more quickly than
Speaker 1: food deprivation. Uh, specifically, two weeks without sleep can kill
Speaker 1: a lap rat. Okay, So, and that's about as long
Speaker 1: as the Creepy Pasta experiment went on for. They were
Speaker 1: in there for about fifteen days before they started ripping
Speaker 1: their skin off. And there was all kinds of super
Speaker 1: gory stuff in that story that also inappropriate Amazon purchases.
Speaker 1: That was another really experience they had Internet in thee
Speaker 1: with the skin off, they started making inappropriate online purchases
Speaker 1: just because they believe an altered state they're buying like
Speaker 1: curtains made of human skin. Okay. So there's another scientific
Speaker 1: aspect to this story as well, right, and that is
Speaker 1: the quote experimental gas based stimulant, Okay, which could I
Speaker 1: guess the almost anything. It could be anything, And so
Speaker 1: it's a little difficult for us to kind of narrow
Speaker 1: it down and say, well, the actual effects would be this,
Speaker 1: but I thought it was worth just kind of touching
Speaker 1: on what gas does to our bodies. Right, So, any
Speaker 1: type of gas, chlorine, sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, nitrogen dioxide, ammonia,
Speaker 1: you name it, they're going to irritate your lungs. And
Speaker 1: some of them dissolve immediately, and uh, you know that's
Speaker 1: when you experience the irritation your mouth, nose, and throat.
Speaker 1: I mean, like if you think about it, like when
Speaker 1: you go to the gas station, you're pumping your gas
Speaker 1: and you're inhaling stuff. That's kind of a version of this, right, Um.
Speaker 1: But the ones that don't easily dissolve, they don't produce
Speaker 1: early warning signs, and this can lead to things like
Speaker 1: fluid developing your lungs and airway. They can also tree
Speaker 1: your allergic responses. These kind of responses can scar your lungs,
Speaker 1: maybe leading to chronic bronchitis. If the gas is radioactive,
Speaker 1: of course it can lead to cancer. And if there's
Speaker 1: body poisoning, it's gonna poison your body cells, right, So
Speaker 1: if it's a poisonous gas, that's going to be lethal
Speaker 1: to you as well. Uh, and it'll what will end
Speaker 1: up doing is displacing the oxygen that's in your blood,
Speaker 1: so you have less oxygen reaching your tissues. Carbon monoxide
Speaker 1: itself doesn't appear to have any kind of neurological effects,
Speaker 1: but levels below of like if you're exposed to it
Speaker 1: can to decrease your mental performance. And one other study
Speaker 1: that I found said that mustard gas affects mental health
Speaker 1: even for people who have been exposed to it, like
Speaker 1: up to twenty five years after their exposure. However, they
Speaker 1: usually qualify that as like PTSD because their exposure to
Speaker 1: the mustard gas was probably in a traumatic situation like war. Um.
Speaker 1: So all that is to say is that yes, gas
Speaker 1: has physical effects on your body, and there are some
Speaker 1: connections to mental problems, I guess, but but not like
Speaker 1: within fifteen days you'd go absolutely insane and start ripping
Speaker 1: off your skin. Maybe we just haven't found the right
Speaker 1: chemical yet. Maybe so we you know, we haven't stumbled
Speaker 1: across the right experiment. Declassified experiment from World War two
Speaker 1: era Russian history. Now this next bit of creepy pasta,
Speaker 1: I found this one a lot of fun. This is
Speaker 1: I think I probably like this one the most of
Speaker 1: the ones that we looked at here in this episode. Uh.
Speaker 1: In short, this one involves a supposed nineteen four British
Speaker 1: Secret Intelligence Service experiment aimed at modifying human blood. Here's
Speaker 1: a quote. The chemical would modify the blood's chemical properties
Speaker 1: and structure so that they've shot or cut, the blood
Speaker 1: would have the ability to freeze or solidify to where
Speaker 1: the person would This would stop bleeding and can make
Speaker 1: a person far stronger than an average human being. Now,
Speaker 1: of course, as you as you you can expect, the
Speaker 1: experiment gets all dark and monstrous, turning the test subjects
Speaker 1: into gray skin, blood eyed, jelly blooded, thick skinned cannibals
Speaker 1: that run them up, and as such, they end up
Speaker 1: putting them all down, shutting down the experiment and deciding
Speaker 1: not to um alter the blood of British soldiers. So
Speaker 1: I think I might have read a different version than you,
Speaker 1: because mine ended with them escaping and it was like,
Speaker 1: these crazy super soldiers are out there somewhere and they're
Speaker 1: homicidal and they could get you. Maybe there are a
Speaker 1: couple of versions of it. That's the beauty of Creepypostat that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it can change. It's a morphous it's it's a collective,
Speaker 1: creative scenario. I kept thinking of them as being basically
Speaker 1: Wolverine from the X Men, like like they they all
Speaker 1: their wounds heal immediately, right, because the I think one
Speaker 1: of the things is like immediately after this test, they
Speaker 1: like stab him in the leg and then shoot him
Speaker 1: in the arm to see what happens, and like the
Speaker 1: wounds seal up immediately, right. But it also makes them
Speaker 1: kind of feral and crazy and try to kill everybody. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I kind of pictured him looking like creatures from a
Speaker 1: tool video running them up. Yeah. Yeah. Well. One of
Speaker 1: the things I loved about this particular one is is
Speaker 1: how much it adhered to the idea of it being
Speaker 1: an actual lab report. It said a copy of this
Speaker 1: lab report can be found somewhere deep within the old
Speaker 1: m I five building in London. I like that the idea, like,
Speaker 1: everybody who lives in London knows about the old m
Speaker 1: I five building and you can just pop by and
Speaker 1: let's go down and check out the file. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: why they're there. Uh. And they actually name three chemicals
Speaker 1: as opposed to the Russian study, they actually name the
Speaker 1: chemicals that these guys are exposed to no mo fungan,
Speaker 1: peppro for a, midadine, and communison. However, in my version
Speaker 1: it was misspelled as communism, so it was like they
Speaker 1: were exposed of these two chemicals and communism Commune isn't
Speaker 1: wait what is it? Commune sin? Maybe commune saint is
Speaker 1: uh is a a drug that causes communism communism inducing
Speaker 1: you know what? That would possibly have as much validity
Speaker 1: as the rest of this story. Yeah, I feel like
Speaker 1: like that was one of the drugs in RoboCop two
Speaker 1: or something, right. Yeah, Well, the idea that they said
Speaker 1: here was that those chemicals modified human blood chemical properties,
Speaker 1: allowing them to solidify or freeze when the body is damaged.
Speaker 1: And they list a couple of other things that they
Speaker 1: do to solidify the blood. So I just want to
Speaker 1: mention these quickly because this is kind of their scientific
Speaker 1: basis for things. Uh. They increased the blood plasma in
Speaker 1: the subjects, removed the thromba sites from their blood, modified
Speaker 1: the medulla oblongata in their brains so that it would
Speaker 1: be familiar with the modified blood cells. And then they
Speaker 1: removed foward four to six percent of their blood volume
Speaker 1: because I us the idea of being that once they've
Speaker 1: done all this other stuff, their blood is thicker and
Speaker 1: subsequently like takes up more space in their circulatory system. Uh.
Speaker 1: And they also said that they weren't allowed to give
Speaker 1: any food or painkillers to the subjects for at least
Speaker 1: twenty four hours, which I like because that's basically what
Speaker 1: they do to you when you like go in for
Speaker 1: prep surgery anyways. Uh. And then um, the doctors after
Speaker 1: the experiment determined that the pH value of the blood
Speaker 1: in these guys was lower than normal. Uh. And they
Speaker 1: think the chemical caused aggression by modifying the medulla oblong gata.
Speaker 1: So this is where I want to start with the
Speaker 1: science on this one, because I, you know, within five
Speaker 1: minutes was able to look up that the medulla oblongata
Speaker 1: doesn't really have a whole lot to do with our
Speaker 1: emotion and aggression in fact, this is the you know,
Speaker 1: it's commonly known as the brain stem. It controls our
Speaker 1: reflexes and autonomic functions, uh, limb movements of this role functions.
Speaker 1: It's basically you know, things like blood pressure, breathe there
Speaker 1: you gossures the aggression. But so uh yeah, unless they're like, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, discovering new things about that part of the
Speaker 1: brain that we don't necessarily know. I don't know that
Speaker 1: that that would have been the cause. If I was
Speaker 1: on the review committee for this academic article, I would
Speaker 1: probably point that out now. It's also worth noting here
Speaker 1: that this is not to be confused with the Luftwaffe
Speaker 1: as freezing experiments hypothermia that took place at doc al
Speaker 1: and Offfitch uh during the Second World War. Uh. Those
Speaker 1: were actually dealing with what happens when the bloody body freezes.
Speaker 1: This is ultimately about coagulation, right and healing and what
Speaker 1: how how our our bodies heal and what we can
Speaker 1: do to speed that process up, especially as far as
Speaker 1: internal bleeding goes. And there has been some interesting research
Speaker 1: in this area of researchers trying to figure out ways
Speaker 1: to to speed up coagulation, speed up healing and and deal,
Speaker 1: especially with military scenarios where you need to you need
Speaker 1: to take care of either a need for blood or
Speaker 1: a need for for blood to do its job deep down.
Speaker 1: If you follow like science and tech feeds, like like
Speaker 1: like we do for work, you end up seeing a
Speaker 1: lot of these. I'd say at least once a week
Speaker 1: there's some kind of update on uh, either something that's
Speaker 1: designed to seal a wound faster or you know, affect
Speaker 1: the blood as such. Yeah, always showing up in our video. Yes,
Speaker 1: I started playing the latest metal gear thing. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: Phantom Pain is that what it's called? Yeah, where it's
Speaker 1: like ground zero. I think it's the one like free
Speaker 1: this month, So I checked it out. And you get
Speaker 1: wounded to a certain amount and you like spray your
Speaker 1: wound with a little area. Yeah. But the first bit
Speaker 1: to discuss here about blood science and kind of cool
Speaker 1: blood science is there's a Cleveland, Ohio biotech firm called
Speaker 1: Arterial Side, and they made headlines in two thousand ten
Speaker 1: with the development of an artificial, genetically engineered blood for
Speaker 1: use on the battlefield. So we're talking typo negative of
Speaker 1: course here, universal blood donor because you're gonna make artificial blood.
Speaker 1: Everybody should be able to use it. Yeah, and this
Speaker 1: would allow for mobile blood banks and war zones. You
Speaker 1: wouldn't have to worry about shortages back home and then
Speaker 1: length the shipments that decrease the shelf life for the
Speaker 1: blood samples you need. You need blood on the on
Speaker 1: the field, say in Afghanistan, then you have a machine
Speaker 1: that will help create it right now, presumably. Yeah, That's
Speaker 1: my question I guess, is that, like, are they creating
Speaker 1: this on site in the in a battlefield scenario or
Speaker 1: is it like they created in America and then they
Speaker 1: shipped just all of this genetically engineered blood to wherever
Speaker 1: the war zone is. I think the latter is probably
Speaker 1: the more immediate goal. But my understanding based on the reading,
Speaker 1: is that ultimately that's where they want to get. It's
Speaker 1: to where you can have at least a local blood hub,
Speaker 1: you know, whereas if it's like a three D printer
Speaker 1: of blood. Yeah, like at the very least you're like
Speaker 1: shivving it in from the closest military base as opposed
Speaker 1: to all the way around the world. Um. They received
Speaker 1: one million dollars stuff for the project through DARPA and
Speaker 1: lasted that it was really reported on. They had shipped
Speaker 1: off samples to DARPA, and we're hoping to up production
Speaker 1: to bring costs down from five thousand dollars per unit
Speaker 1: of blood to around one thousand per unit. And just
Speaker 1: to give yourvone a reminder, one unit equals about a
Speaker 1: point in the average human contains eight to ten points.
Speaker 1: So in order to make enough for humanits, it's like,
Speaker 1: at their low end, going to be eight to ten
Speaker 1: thousand dollars worth of blood. Yeah, and the average soldier
Speaker 1: needs six units during trauma treatment, you know, because you're
Speaker 1: talking about situations with a lot of blood is lost.
Speaker 1: I wonder how that compares to just to let good
Speaker 1: old you know, Red Cross, you know, going and giving
Speaker 1: your blood volunteer type thing. Well, I mean, of course,
Speaker 1: then again you're dealing with all different blood types. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's true. And and then and then a rigorous screening
Speaker 1: process to figure out which samples are appliable and shipping, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and shipping, which again hurts the shelf life. So the
Speaker 1: process here is pretty interesting. Scientists harvest hemeo to pedic
Speaker 1: cells from the umbilical cords and via a process called farming,
Speaker 1: that's p h A r M I N g Uh.
Speaker 1: They turn one umbilical cord into twenty units of of
Speaker 1: package blood. This takes place of the course of three days,
Speaker 1: according to initial reports through Wired magazine, where they getting
Speaker 1: all the umbilical cords from babies. Man, if you can
Speaker 1: if baby, if you find babies where the parents are
Speaker 1: not going to you know, dry it and get it
Speaker 1: or eat it themselves, Uh, then yeah. The umbilical cord
Speaker 1: is a has a lot of valuable material in it.
Speaker 1: So this is a thing that as a someone who
Speaker 1: doesn't have kids that I'm willfully unaware of. That's like
Speaker 1: when you go in and have the procedure and everything
Speaker 1: for giving birth is they're just like a you know,
Speaker 1: in the paperwork, there's a box that you check that's
Speaker 1: something like I want the umbilical cord, I assume. I mean,
Speaker 1: we did not go through that process with my son,
Speaker 1: so I'm not I'm not exactly sure how it rolls
Speaker 1: out in real time, but I'm guessing there's a box
Speaker 1: that you in a panic to you know, pre birthdays,
Speaker 1: you check or you don't. Otherwise there's just like a
Speaker 1: biohazard bag filled with umbilical cords that they then ship
Speaker 1: off to this, so ultimately that we're talking about the
Speaker 1: rapid expansion of umbilical cord blood sped up even more
Speaker 1: through the use of what's called nanex technology. This is
Speaker 1: a nano fiber based structure that mimics bone marrow and
Speaker 1: bone marrows where blood cells generally multiply and at a
Speaker 1: greater rate. So yeah, that's pretty impressive. Yeah, I think so.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's it's crazy science fiction e and and
Speaker 1: I think would lend itself well to a little tweaking.
Speaker 1: I mean, you're talking about, ultimately the discarded pieces of
Speaker 1: a baby that are used to the eight blood for
Speaker 1: soldiers in the field and potentially vampires, right right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, well that's where this would naturally ahead as
Speaker 1: a daybreakers situation. You make these soldiers, they become vampires,
Speaker 1: and then they vampiize the rest of the population. So
Speaker 1: as a planet of vampires, I wonder vampires prefer oh
Speaker 1: negative as a universal donor or does that mean it's
Speaker 1: probably too common? Right, It's like the Coca cola blood alright,
Speaker 1: So that's artificial blood. But then there's the use of
Speaker 1: healing factor nanoparticles in the blood. All right, So this
Speaker 1: is straight up wolverine healing factor is right out of
Speaker 1: the X men exactly. This is where we're getting into,
Speaker 1: at least the near future version of that UM. So
Speaker 1: there are different substances that can be used as a
Speaker 1: coagulant to help with excessive bleeding. Of course, the best
Speaker 1: way to deal with excessive bleeding on the surfaces to
Speaker 1: apply pressure when it's a wound that can be treated
Speaker 1: in that manager to die or a wound UM. But
Speaker 1: a two thousand nine study publish in the journal Science
Speaker 1: Translational Medicine introduced the use of injectable synthetic nanoparticles or
Speaker 1: nano platelets that curb bleeding. So normally blood platelets at
Speaker 1: a wound site buying together in order to plug that wound. Right,
Speaker 1: these these nano platelets, what they do is they mimic
Speaker 1: platelet structure, so they augment the process bonding with natural
Speaker 1: blood platelets and acting as a nanostructure. So it's like
Speaker 1: throwing in a bunch of a bunch of extras. To say,
Speaker 1: you're to television taping and the crowds looking kind of thin,
Speaker 1: get some extras in there, make it look nice and
Speaker 1: thick for the cameras. So yeah, that's what I'm kind
Speaker 1: of thinking that it's like a thickening process, like almost
Speaker 1: like a blood plasma and just kind of And what's more, though,
Speaker 1: this the best part about this is again not the
Speaker 1: use of this at at the skin level, but the
Speaker 1: ability to to get down and stop deep and internal
Speaker 1: bleeding more easily. Again, you can't just apply pressure if
Speaker 1: you're dealing with bleeding inside the body. Yeah, there's got
Speaker 1: to be so many potential hazards with this though, too.
Speaker 1: I would imagine given the like I mean, like our
Speaker 1: blood is like it's got that Goldilocks factor to it, right,
Speaker 1: it has to be like just right. It can't be
Speaker 1: too thick and it can't be too thin otherwise there's
Speaker 1: all there's a whole host of problems I'll get into
Speaker 1: later that you know, can affect your body. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: Like I'm instantly thinking back to last season of The Nick.
Speaker 1: Oh I've only seen a couple episodes. Yeah, there's some
Speaker 1: pretty horrific It's like, you know, turn of the century hospital,
Speaker 1: brilliant surgeon and at one point he gets obsessed with
Speaker 1: blood transfus and trying to figure out like what's the
Speaker 1: key and right, it's really rough stuff. But but in
Speaker 1: this case with these particularly particular nano platelets, they found
Speaker 1: that the stuff has had bleeding time and wounded rats.
Speaker 1: And just a couple of years later, in two thousand
Speaker 1: and eleven, the massachuse A General Hospital Center for Engineering
Speaker 1: and Medicine developed a way to deliver nano spheres containing
Speaker 1: keratinisite growth factor or KGF, suspended in a fibrin gel.
Speaker 1: Uh So, again, the advantage here would be to deal
Speaker 1: with the targeted treatment of deep wounds as opposed to
Speaker 1: trying to treat the whole body and just get at
Speaker 1: it um So this is right. So the difference between
Speaker 1: this and Wolverine is that like you don't just heal
Speaker 1: immediately from any wound. You have a wound and then
Speaker 1: they apply these nano spheres to you, and the same
Speaker 1: with the nanoplateist to right, It wouldn't be a matter
Speaker 1: of as we see in the creepy pasta. It wouldn't
Speaker 1: be like we've changed the blood of the soldiers, you know.
Speaker 1: It's this is a way to treat the blood of
Speaker 1: a soldier at a wound site and try to speed
Speaker 1: up the healing. Well, okay, so you may recall that
Speaker 1: at the top of when we were talking about this experiment,
Speaker 1: I mentioned they had three particular chemicals that they mentioned.
Speaker 1: I assumed these were fictional, but I decided to look
Speaker 1: them up. No more funking pepper, formidadine, and commune Sin.
Speaker 1: Turns out, at least as far as I can tell,
Speaker 1: that they are real things. However, there were a few
Speaker 1: links that definitely looked like they were fake. That we're
Speaker 1: potential Uh, I'm gonna guess like fake sources to back
Speaker 1: up the creepy pasta story. But then there were a
Speaker 1: lot of legitimate academic chemistry articles about these that were
Speaker 1: behind firewalls I couldn't access. But I did get access
Speaker 1: to one that was called Synthetic Studies towards Commune Sin's
Speaker 1: and it was published in the Israel Israel Journal of Chemistry.
Speaker 1: In this I could barely understand it because it was
Speaker 1: written in such deep chemistry language. However, this is what
Speaker 1: I got out of it. Uh, these are basically the
Speaker 1: same chemicals. They're like synthesized chemicals that are isolated from
Speaker 1: a marine fungal strain of a penicilla uh Penicillum species,
Speaker 1: and that there's a possible use for these as an insecticide.
Speaker 1: They're also cytotoxic against certain tumor cells. So I think
Speaker 1: that they're being investigated for those possible applications. Uh. And
Speaker 1: then they were first isolated in so yeah, they really exist.
Speaker 1: It sounds like it doesn't sound like their usage though,
Speaker 1: is to you know, plug up blood or make blood
Speaker 1: freeze or anything like that. But I mean, I guess
Speaker 1: we're looking at the standard trick here, right. You you
Speaker 1: draw a little science terminology out, you throw it in
Speaker 1: there in a way where you're not too specific, and
Speaker 1: it's harder for the average reader to look at it
Speaker 1: and call bs uh. And so it gives it that
Speaker 1: science vibe and let me to invest a little more
Speaker 1: of the creepy bust. They did a great job. Whoever
Speaker 1: wrote this did a great job with the that application
Speaker 1: of these chemicals, because not only were they like difficult
Speaker 1: to find information on, but also they're so relatively new
Speaker 1: in in in the research that's being done on them
Speaker 1: that there isn't a whole lot out there. I guess
Speaker 1: it could be plausible that, you know, somebody comes up
Speaker 1: with his magical synthetic chemical that can freeze your blood
Speaker 1: um and real quick let's just talk about what happens
Speaker 1: when your blood is thickened or frozen in certain situations.
Speaker 1: First of all, it's very rare that you could freeze
Speaker 1: human beings blood while it was still inside their body.
Speaker 1: The hypothalamus constantly tries to keep the core of our
Speaker 1: body is warm, so it constricts our blood supprise supply
Speaker 1: to the core of our bodies, essentially removing it from
Speaker 1: the extremities if necessary. So that's why you get those
Speaker 1: instances of like frostbite, where people's fingers or toes fall
Speaker 1: off and stuff like that. Um. But even in cryonics
Speaker 1: when they're going to freeze somebody's body, your blood isn't
Speaker 1: frozen from what I understand reading about it. Your body
Speaker 1: is usually injected with something called hepperin, which is an anticoagulant,
Speaker 1: and the reason why is to prevent blood clotting while
Speaker 1: you're under I don't know what's the proper term under
Speaker 1: freeze the freezer. Um. And then lastly, there is a
Speaker 1: there there are a couple of different diseases that lead
Speaker 1: to blood thickening. One in particular is called Hughes syndrome,
Speaker 1: and that's an abnormal immune system response that causes your
Speaker 1: blood to thicken. Basically. The idea here is it sounds
Speaker 1: similar to the nanotech we were talking about earlier. It
Speaker 1: causes your blood platelets to clump together. But this can
Speaker 1: be very dangerous, like I was saying earlier, because it
Speaker 1: can lead to thrombosis, which can subsequently lead to something
Speaker 1: like a heart attack or a stroke or I suppose
Speaker 1: even an aneurysm. But no cannibalism. Nope, they don't have
Speaker 1: that yet. Alright, alright, well, now we're gonna turn to
Speaker 1: the third section here and and this one we're really
Speaker 1: drawing on two different uh cre bepastas, which will will
Speaker 1: refer to here in short. One is the Harbinger experiment
Speaker 1: and the other one is Gateway of the Mind. And
Speaker 1: they both resolve and they both revolve around the same thing. Really, yeah,
Speaker 1: so the Harbinger Experiment, this creepy pasta is this was
Speaker 1: a bit long, and it it kind of reads like,
Speaker 1: you know, average weird fiction story. Really, the basics here
Speaker 1: is it's some manner prolonged isolation experiment with an occult twist,
Speaker 1: some entity that's summoned into the bodies of the patients
Speaker 1: by this mysterious doctor Zimmerman. Zimmerman wants to prove the
Speaker 1: existence of the spirit realm by trapping a spirit in
Speaker 1: a human body, a human body that he's injected with
Speaker 1: a compound that somehow prevents the spirit from leaving again
Speaker 1: while the host is still alive, right, right, And yeah,
Speaker 1: if I remember this one correctly, like Zimmerman is like
Speaker 1: fantastically rich and like does all of this at like
Speaker 1: an off site, hidden bunker underground where he's like hired
Speaker 1: his own private army and team of researchers. Right, so
Speaker 1: you can imagine how it ends up, right, right, And
Speaker 1: it's just like, yeah, and now the the other one
Speaker 1: is Gateway of the Mind. Do you want to roll
Speaker 1: the Yeah, this one is an interesting one. So the
Speaker 1: idea with this is that in ninety three there's this
Speaker 1: team of scientists. The story refers to them as deeply
Speaker 1: pious scientists, uh, and that the idea is that they
Speaker 1: want to prove the existence of God. So their theory
Speaker 1: is that without sensory input, that human beings would be
Speaker 1: able to perceive the presence of God. So and that
Speaker 1: they interfere with some kind of holy signal. Right, So
Speaker 1: what they do is they take this elderly volunteer, and
Speaker 1: they surgically cut out nerves so he can't see here, taste, smell,
Speaker 1: or feel. Uh, and he can he can't communicate, but
Speaker 1: he can, like you're can clearly talk. He's sort of
Speaker 1: like yells Yeah, I don't think he knows what's going
Speaker 1: on around him, but he like yells out things about
Speaker 1: what he's experiencing. But he's basically alone with his thoughts,
Speaker 1: and Yeah, what happens is he goes totally crazy. He
Speaker 1: says that he's talking to ghosts. He's able to like
Speaker 1: use information from the ghosts to like prove that there's
Speaker 1: something supernatural going on to the researchers right by like
Speaker 1: revealing secrets about them that nobody else would know. And
Speaker 1: then at the very end, he tells them that he's
Speaker 1: a he's had a conversation with God and God has
Speaker 1: abandoned us. Okay, well, I feel like it kind of
Speaker 1: loses a little steam there at the end, with like
Speaker 1: like maybe maybe the message that he revealed shouldn't be
Speaker 1: so explicit, but I'm I'm I'm not picking him. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they sort of like this the author or authors of
Speaker 1: this creepy pasta, it seems like God is sort of
Speaker 1: kg about getting in touch with this guy who doesn't
Speaker 1: have his five senses. Like the ghosts show up pretty quickly,
Speaker 1: but God like waits until like the absolute last minute,
Speaker 1: and all he does is to say, like, hey, I've
Speaker 1: abandoned you guys. I'm on vacation out of the week.
Speaker 1: So both of these, on one level, they deal with
Speaker 1: this idea of like, let's scientifically prove the afterlife, and
Speaker 1: and there have been a number of experiments and sort
Speaker 1: of studio experiments that have gone into that. We have
Speaker 1: a whole episode of stuff to blow your mind to
Speaker 1: deals with soul weighing experiments that tried to show that
Speaker 1: the soul has weight and therefore there is a soul,
Speaker 1: there is some part of us that's immortal and to death. Um,
Speaker 1: there there's real science behind that too, Isn't there like
Speaker 1: a particular like I remember like that there's like a
Speaker 1: very specific weight that they said that oh yeah, there's
Speaker 1: disappears when you die or something like that. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think twenty one Grahams is the number of those
Speaker 1: as we discussed in that episode, which I'll link to
Speaker 1: on the landing page of this episode. Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: there's some science applied. It's very rough and even there
Speaker 1: are a lot of problems. There's some more recent theories
Speaker 1: that are interesting. But both of these experiments ultimately deal
Speaker 1: with isolation. Right, what happens when someone is isolated from
Speaker 1: from sensory input. Particularly in the case of the experience
Speaker 1: we're gonna discuss here, you put them in a room,
Speaker 1: you put them in solitary confined Yeah, what happens when
Speaker 1: you deprive us of our environment that we've evolved to
Speaker 1: thrive within. What happens to the mind? Yeah, And so
Speaker 1: I think it's worth mentioning here before we get into
Speaker 1: the science of it, of what happens when you're deprived
Speaker 1: of your senses and for that matters social interaction. That
Speaker 1: both Robert and I have gone into sensory deprivation tanks before,
Speaker 1: so we have personal experience with this. Uh. In my case,
Speaker 1: I didn't hallucinate, which seems to be a common symptom
Speaker 1: that people have. But it was enjoyable. It was peaceful.
Speaker 1: You basically lay inside a big tank that's dark, laying
Speaker 1: on top of salt water. Uh. For in my case,
Speaker 1: it was about an hour long. UH. And um, you know,
Speaker 1: because of the water. Your ears are plugged out. Oh no,
Speaker 1: you I wore ear plugs. But there the water also
Speaker 1: keeps you from really being able to hear anything. You
Speaker 1: can't see anything, you don't really feel anything other than
Speaker 1: the water. Uh, and the taste of salty air. Yeah.
Speaker 1: When I went into it, I wasn't really thinking about
Speaker 1: how salty it was gonna be, and how that there's
Speaker 1: a good point, a good portion of the float experience
Speaker 1: that has spent reacting to the feel of the salt water,
Speaker 1: the smell of the salt water, and and just sort
Speaker 1: of getting past that. Yeah, I guess I should clarify
Speaker 1: that there's so much salt water that you float to
Speaker 1: the top like you're not just laying in it, Like
Speaker 1: you instantly are acquainted with any random nix or scratches
Speaker 1: or itches on your body because now they have tons
Speaker 1: of salt pressing up against them. So we've had a
Speaker 1: number of of studies that have looked at at what
Speaker 1: happens when you put somebody in solitary confinement, when you
Speaker 1: isolate someone from stimuli. Uh. There's a two on from
Speaker 1: Wire magazine by Brandon Kime titled The Horrible Psychology of
Speaker 1: solitary confinement, and it takes a nice look at horror
Speaker 1: fine topic pointing out the solitary confinement has been shown
Speaker 1: to make prisoners extremely anxious, to make them angry, make
Speaker 1: them hallucinate, experienced mood swings and flatness, the loss of
Speaker 1: impulse control, and this is all on top of aggravating
Speaker 1: any pre existing mental illnesses. Um. So they We've looked
Speaker 1: at solitary confinement many times from a scientific standpoint in
Speaker 1: the past, and it generally comes in waves responding to
Speaker 1: trends and concerns related to modern and carson incarceration. So
Speaker 1: the mid eighteen hundreds or concern and interest in this.
Speaker 1: In the nineteen fifties, it popped up again due in
Speaker 1: part as a reaction to the Korean War um prisoners
Speaker 1: of war and how they were allegedly treated, and then
Speaker 1: it rose up again in the nineteen eighties with you know,
Speaker 1: some research spread out in between, but those are sort
Speaker 1: of the big periods. So I have to say, like
Speaker 1: every time, like I read a fictional account or watch
Speaker 1: a TV shower movie where it's a prison setting and
Speaker 1: somebody does something wrong and get sent to solitary arry,
Speaker 1: my first thought is always like that sounds great. Yeah, like,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, you get to be away from all the
Speaker 1: craziness and do you sit all by yourself in a
Speaker 1: room and hang out and sleep and you're alone with
Speaker 1: your thoughts. However, I don't think it's as peaceful as
Speaker 1: I'm imagining it to be based on these experiments, right,
Speaker 1: and also on other things we know, and it's based
Speaker 1: on accounts for people to talk about. It is just
Speaker 1: this brutalization of the mind. Essentially in absence of stimuli,
Speaker 1: we focus on what little stimuli there is. Our brains
Speaker 1: are made for a world of you know, fixed and
Speaker 1: moving objects of varied environmental actions going on, not a
Speaker 1: limited cell. So you get in there, your brain end
Speaker 1: up chewing on itself. Uh. May maybe it's some detail
Speaker 1: in the cell. Maybe it's um, it's something in your
Speaker 1: memory that your brain finds something to focus on and
Speaker 1: sort of recreate the world you've been robbed off out
Speaker 1: of its limited pieces. And this is the Hannibal Lecter style,
Speaker 1: like like forming what does he call it his memory palace? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I think he doesn't. He paint the walls with to
Speaker 1: resemble Florence or something. It depends on the iteration of Hannibal.
Speaker 1: But yeah, in the TV show which just ended, I
Speaker 1: believe once they actually incarceerate him, like he just constructs
Speaker 1: it all inside it like he can, like because he's
Speaker 1: such a crazed genius, he can like go inside his
Speaker 1: memory palace and it's like he's in a church in
Speaker 1: Florence or something like that. Yeah. So, like basically that's
Speaker 1: what your brain wants to do, but oftentimes you don't
Speaker 1: have and you don't have that rich tapestry to to
Speaker 1: to draw on. What you have are maybe some traumatic
Speaker 1: memories from your incarceration. Maybe it's you know, some weird
Speaker 1: markings on the wall or something that's troubling you in
Speaker 1: the back of your mind, and that's what gets fixed up.
Speaker 1: That's what he is, blown out into your new virtual world. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: so I own I and actually has a really nice
Speaker 1: summary piece less about um, the isolation part, but more
Speaker 1: about the sensory deprivation. And guess who came up at
Speaker 1: the beginning of their article. It was the good old
Speaker 1: John C. Lily Uh character that often seems to come
Speaker 1: up on stuff to blow your mind. In fact, we've
Speaker 1: talked recently about maybe doing an episode just about him.
Speaker 1: And you you were the one who told me. I
Speaker 1: think that. Uh. He was the inspiration for Altered States, right,
Speaker 1: which is kind of my go to, uh pop culture
Speaker 1: movie reference for sensory deprivation tanks. He claimed that when
Speaker 1: he was in a sensory deprivation tank, it allowed him
Speaker 1: to make contact with creatures from another dimension. Uh. And
Speaker 1: they're from a civilization that was far more advanced than
Speaker 1: our own. Uh. So that is, I guess kind of
Speaker 1: close to the Harbinger story. Although I don't know necessarily
Speaker 1: that John C. Lily is a reliable source. Um. He is.
Speaker 1: He's a kind of a problematic source, but a fascinating one. Um.
Speaker 1: But hallucinations are absolutely real, um people. We definitely know
Speaker 1: people have hallucine nations when they're deprived of their senses.
Speaker 1: Renowned physicist Richard Feynman has described having them when he
Speaker 1: was in a sensory deprivation chamber. We have lots of
Speaker 1: examples of studies that have been done. Uh. Both meditation
Speaker 1: and senor sensory deprivation are linked to decreased alpha waves
Speaker 1: and increased theta waves within our brains. These are the
Speaker 1: same things that we we find when we're in a
Speaker 1: sleeping state. And in fact, we're going to find as
Speaker 1: we kind of go through the sensory deprivation stuff that
Speaker 1: there's a lot of connections to what we were talking
Speaker 1: about earlier with the Russian sleep experiment story of sleep.
Speaker 1: So there's a connection between the isolation and the sleep stuff,
Speaker 1: at least in how our brains work. Uh. There's an investigation,
Speaker 1: uh in two thousand nine that showed that some people
Speaker 1: within fifteen minutes of sensory deprivation will have hallucinations triggered. Uh.
Speaker 1: And however, I will qualify it by saying that this
Speaker 1: particular study, they the people that they got for this
Speaker 1: study purposely were scored low on what is called a
Speaker 1: revised hallucination scale. I'd love to know that test, how they,
Speaker 1: how they how they determined that basically what this man
Speaker 1: was like these people, I think we're in like the
Speaker 1: lower twenty percentile of people who are are likely to
Speaker 1: have hallucinations. Now, it's also worth noting that that this
Speaker 1: kind of isolation warps our perception of time, and you know,
Speaker 1: part of that you get into the whole just a
Speaker 1: of relative nature of time. Right. An hour spent in
Speaker 1: a boring waiting room is is far different than an
Speaker 1: hour spent at the carnival. Right. Sociologist and caving enthusiast
Speaker 1: Maresio Mantobini spent three hundred and sixty six days in
Speaker 1: an Italian cave to replicate a long solitary space flight.
Speaker 1: You know, what would be the experience of staying in
Speaker 1: a little tube on your way to Mars. Right Um.
Speaker 1: When he emerged, he was convinced only two hundred and
Speaker 1: nineteen days had passed uh instead of three hundred and
Speaker 1: sixty six, So sweep wave cycles had nearly doubled in
Speaker 1: this in this scenario. So there's another connection. Your senses
Speaker 1: are inherently connected, I guess to your circadian rhythm. That
Speaker 1: gets back to what I was talking about earlier with
Speaker 1: light and jet lag. Uh. There's another crazy story that
Speaker 1: we have that's an instance of this. In nineteen sixty one,
Speaker 1: it's a French geologist named Michel Sifra who studied an
Speaker 1: underground glacier beneath the French Alps, and he ended up
Speaker 1: staying for two months instead of his anticipated two weeks.
Speaker 1: And what happened was he basically decided to stop doing
Speaker 1: his study and live like an animal. That's quote. I
Speaker 1: think that's his quote, live like an animal. And when
Speaker 1: he was tested back on the surface, when his team
Speaker 1: finally got him out, they found that it took him
Speaker 1: five minutes to count to one twenty seconds. So it
Speaker 1: definitely interferes with our perceptions of time. Yeah, and therefore
Speaker 1: also ends up our sleep and in the the way
Speaker 1: that plays into how we use our time for reasons
Speaker 1: that we're still not sure about it. It. Uh, it
Speaker 1: really blows out your sleep cycle. So most underground dwellers
Speaker 1: shift to a forty eight hour cycle, thirty six hours
Speaker 1: of activity followed by twelve hours of sleep. I don't
Speaker 1: know if well, I suppose if I was in the
Speaker 1: right environment, I would shift over to that, but I
Speaker 1: don't know that I could be awake for thirty six
Speaker 1: hours straight. Um. One of the key series of experiments
Speaker 1: here and again I mentioned the you know, the different
Speaker 1: boom periods for for isolation experimentation. UH. This was McGill
Speaker 1: University Medical Center in Montreal, where psychologist Donald Hebb led
Speaker 1: several key isolation experiments in the late fifties. Again, this
Speaker 1: is after the Korean Wars. Find to to some po
Speaker 1: dew treatment. UH. Volunteer students were put in soundproof cubicles.
Speaker 1: They even gave them translucent advisors, cotton gloves, cardboard cuffs
Speaker 1: to you know, keep them from feeling way that doesn't
Speaker 1: involve slicing nerves. They have hm U shaped pillows turn
Speaker 1: on some white noise, and they found that the test
Speaker 1: stuff just became restless and mirror hours and in some
Speaker 1: cases became anxious and emotional. Their abilities in arithmetic and
Speaker 1: word association tests quickly took a dive. And then uh,
Speaker 1: the hallucinations points of light lines or shapes eventually bizarre
Speaker 1: seen such ads and these are at actual scenes. Hallucinations
Speaker 1: are crazy? Is there like the kind of urban legend
Speaker 1: hallucinations you hear? Like, well, such and such kid took
Speaker 1: LSD and then he saw this for the rest of
Speaker 1: his life or whatever, right, like these are nuts? Yeah,
Speaker 1: And speaking of nuts, they have the first squirrels marching
Speaker 1: with sacks over their shoulders. Another one processions of eyeglasses
Speaker 1: filing down a street. One one person only saw dogs,
Speaker 1: another one only saw babies. Um, and they had no
Speaker 1: control over the visuals are just rolled them out. So
Speaker 1: this this reminds me of two things. I mean First
Speaker 1: of all, what we said earlier about the brain focusing
Speaker 1: on one little thing, it just it has to fill
Speaker 1: up your world, and it ends up filling your world
Speaker 1: up with a baby baby. Just yeah, And I know,
Speaker 1: I think it was like lots of babies. It wasn't
Speaker 1: just like a baby or two. It was like, I
Speaker 1: think this person was just hallucinating hordes of babies, which
Speaker 1: sounds like the scariest horror movie never made. And again,
Speaker 1: it's like they had no control over. So this is
Speaker 1: the kind of perhaps some people who engage in meditation
Speaker 1: or yoga can relate to this. But when I am
Speaker 1: finishing yoga, sometimes when I'm in shovasana, I get to
Speaker 1: experience some level of hallucination that I don't have control over.
Speaker 1: It's often just lights and stuff, you know, but you're
Speaker 1: just sort of watching it transpire. You're not directly influencing
Speaker 1: what you're seeing. Yeah, absolutely, I've I've had similar situations before,
Speaker 1: although nothing audible, which is apparently what happened in this
Speaker 1: McGill's study. Right, Yeah, there were some audible hallucinations or
Speaker 1: hearing music, they're hearing sounds, tactile hallucinations where they touched
Speaker 1: the door knob and they think they feel a shock.
Speaker 1: Another person said that they felt Palett's hitting their skin. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So basically the gist of this is that they weren't
Speaker 1: even able to finish this study. They wanted it to
Speaker 1: be several weeks long, but everyone became so distressed and
Speaker 1: had so much trouble that they just ended the study. Uh,
Speaker 1: they only lasted a few days in isolation. None of
Speaker 1: them lasted more than a week, and they reported, you know,
Speaker 1: they were unable to think clearly the whole time. They
Speaker 1: were actually more susceptible to suggestion after they got out. So,
Speaker 1: for instance, one of the things that they did was
Speaker 1: suggest to them, uh, while they were sorry, while they
Speaker 1: their their senses were deprived, they suggested to them that
Speaker 1: ghosts were real. And then when they got out of
Speaker 1: the situation, they asked them questions about the paranormal and
Speaker 1: these people were now more likely to think that ghosts
Speaker 1: were real, which lent credence to this idea that, you know,
Speaker 1: there was this paranoid idea that the Soviets were using
Speaker 1: sensory deprivation in some kind of way to brainway people
Speaker 1: write like a man Churian candidate kind of situation, and
Speaker 1: so that subsequently led to even more research in this area,
Speaker 1: also done at at McGill. This guy d Ewen Cameron.
Speaker 1: He was the head of McGill's psychiatry department in the
Speaker 1: fifties and he was inspired by Heav's work, so he
Speaker 1: began employing sensory deprivation as part of a technique called
Speaker 1: psychic driving. This is something we should probably do an
Speaker 1: episode on UH and his unsuccessful attempt to reprogram the
Speaker 1: minds of mentally ill patients. So basically he justified this saying,
Speaker 1: you know this, this was something that was sort of
Speaker 1: necessary so that we could better understand the mind and
Speaker 1: lieu of the Soviet brainwashed characters. UM. Ultimately the patients
Speaker 1: some of them ended up suing him afterwards, and UH
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifties six he wrote in the American Journal
Speaker 1: of Psychiatry that he would hypnotize schizophrenic patients under the
Speaker 1: stimulant drugs and after prolonged psychological isolation. So, like we
Speaker 1: were saying earlier, like let's say you're a prisoner and
Speaker 1: you're putting solitary confinement and you're already mentally ill, like
Speaker 1: that's not going to help the situation. This guy was
Speaker 1: like doing that to people on purpose and then throwing
Speaker 1: drugs into the mix. Uh, and then finally, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: ultimately like this is a real ethics violation. I think
Speaker 1: this is one of those things that probably led to
Speaker 1: the strict adherence to institutional review boards that we have nowadays.
Speaker 1: In most studies, these people were sick, they had mental illness,
Speaker 1: and they wanted to get help, but instead they were
Speaker 1: just subjected to this kind of brutal research that seemed
Speaker 1: to be largely stimulated by the Cold War. Just have
Speaker 1: one more study on all this. In two thousand and eight,
Speaker 1: psychologist Ian Robbins created recreated HEBBS experiments and in collaboration
Speaker 1: with the BBC, and in this they isolated six volunteers
Speaker 1: for forty eight hours and sound proof rooms, all this
Speaker 1: taking place in a former UM nuclear bunker. This sounds
Speaker 1: fairly close to the Harbinger. It does, and they've had
Speaker 1: similar results the anxiety, extreme emotions, paranoia, significant deterioration in
Speaker 1: their mental functioning, and of course crazy hallucinations. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: that I wanted to list these hallucinations because they're just
Speaker 1: as bonkers. Isn't a perspetch one? Person hallucinated a heap
Speaker 1: of five thousand empty oyster shells, and then there are
Speaker 1: other things like a snake, zebras, tiny cars the room
Speaker 1: taking off I think, like flying a bunch of mosquitoes,
Speaker 1: and then this one that there are fighter planes flying
Speaker 1: and buzzing around within the room. So yeah, so the
Speaker 1: deprivation can definitely uh twist your mind. Yeah, you remove
Speaker 1: human from its natural sweep cycles, You remove a human
Speaker 1: from its natural environment, and you change the expression of
Speaker 1: the mind, You change our experience of reality, and that
Speaker 1: is ultimately a very terrifying concept to wrap our heads
Speaker 1: around and lends itself so well to uh to too horror. Yeah, absolutely, Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess like ultimately, what I come back to the
Speaker 1: Harbinger and the Gateway of the mind is the idea
Speaker 1: of being able to just sever our connections to our
Speaker 1: senses from our consciousness. That is very scary. Um yeah,
Speaker 1: to the point that I don't know that I can
Speaker 1: imagine it. Yeah, I mean, it significantly changes what it
Speaker 1: is to be human. And that's you know, ultimately, stories
Speaker 1: like this, that's what it's about. It's about exploring the
Speaker 1: human condition. Uh, though taking a more frightening approach to
Speaker 1: that exploration. In a lot of ways, it's connected to
Speaker 1: the episodes that we did on feral children and their
Speaker 1: social isolation and sort of what resulted from that. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: all right, So there you have it, creepy pasta apasta experiment.
Speaker 1: So that's just three of these creepy pasta stories. I mean,
Speaker 1: my impression is that there are thousands of youngs out there,
Speaker 1: and and even just within the like sort of sub
Speaker 1: genre of science e creepy pastas, there's probably hundreds, right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if everyone liked this particular episode and you want more,
Speaker 1: we could probably do another couple of creepy pasta episodes
Speaker 1: to illuminate the science behind the scares. Yeah. In fact,
Speaker 1: so if there is a creepy pasta story out there
Speaker 1: that you think is particularly good for us to cover,
Speaker 1: we'd like to hear about it. Let us know over
Speaker 1: our social media channels. Again, we're on Facebook, Twitter, and
Speaker 1: tumbler uh, and we're Blow the Mind on all of
Speaker 1: those channels. And then of course you can always write
Speaker 1: and let us know about your creepy pastas or potential
Speaker 1: science that's connected to creepy pastas that you've read at
Speaker 1: Blow the mind at how stuff works dot com for
Speaker 1: more on this and thousands of other topics, because it
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot Com