Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of I Heart Radio, Hey
Speaker 1: brain Stuff, lorn Boga bam here. Have you ever heard
Speaker 1: that we humans swallow an average of eight spiders each
Speaker 1: year while we sleep, or that the average person swallows
Speaker 1: fifty two spiders over the course of a lifetime. These
Speaker 1: so called facts are so widespread that it may be
Speaker 1: hard to believe that they're completely inaccurate. The fact is,
Speaker 1: the odds of swallowing even a single spider over your
Speaker 1: entire lifetime are so low that their virtually zero. It's
Speaker 1: extremely unlikely that a spider would even approach a sleeping human,
Speaker 1: much less crawl into their open mouth and wait to die.
Speaker 1: While just one in four people admit to a fear
Speaker 1: of spiders and insects, spiders are generally much more afraid
Speaker 1: of you than you are of them. Think about it.
Speaker 1: The spider uses vibrations to sense danger, as sleep in
Speaker 1: human is nothing but noise and vibration, from your breath
Speaker 1: and heartbeat to tossing and turning, to snores, snorts, and
Speaker 1: other sounds. Everything about a human even at rest, signals
Speaker 1: for spiders to steer clear, giving them no incentive to
Speaker 1: creep into your bed during the night. They prefer to
Speaker 1: hang out in quiet, unoccupied parts of the home and
Speaker 1: spend their time attending to their webs. Um But what
Speaker 1: if you happen to come into contact with a spider
Speaker 1: whose ability to sense vibrations is off. Sure, it's possible
Speaker 1: that a spider that was going against every natural instinct
Speaker 1: could find its way into your mouth, but it's still
Speaker 1: extremely unlikely. At First, you'd have to have your mouth
Speaker 1: open while you snooze, which is far from a universal trait. Next,
Speaker 1: you'd have to find a way to sleep through the
Speaker 1: sensation of a spider crawling its way across your face
Speaker 1: and into your mouth. Finally, you'd have to actually swallow
Speaker 1: while sleeping, which is not automatically going to happen. Hopefully,
Speaker 1: the spider would change its mind or get bored and
Speaker 1: crawl back out of your mouth before the stars got
Speaker 1: align enough for all of these events to occur. There
Speaker 1: is not a single reliable report anywhere in the scientific
Speaker 1: or medical literature to prove that anyone has ever swallowed
Speaker 1: a spider while sleeping, much less eight per year. That
Speaker 1: being said, you absolutely can eat spiders. Your body will
Speaker 1: digest it just like any other food that you eat.
Speaker 1: Cambodian cuisine includes a dish of fried tarantula that's said
Speaker 1: to taste a bit like fried prawns. Today's episode is
Speaker 1: based on the article do we really Swallow Spiders in
Speaker 1: our sleep? On how stuffworks dot Com? Written by Bambi Turner.
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Speaker 1: how stuff works dot Com and is produced by Tyler
Speaker 1: glen Or. More podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart
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