5 Horrific Ways Your Brain Can Turn On You Without Warning
We hate for you to find out this way, but you should know that your brain hates you. Even if you're perfectly healthy and have never had a mental illness or dropped acid, it can mess with you in a terrifying variety of ways.
And some of them are downright diabolical.
#5.
Exploding Head Syndrome
What Is It?
It's a typical night. You've just set aside your glass of scotch and are reclining in bed next to yet another nameless groupie you've just had acrobatic sex with. You click off the lamp and are drifting off to sleep...
And a fucking bomb goes off in your head. There's a horrendous noise, like someone is firing a handgun from somewhere inside your skull and then a flash of light ...
... And suddenly, it's over again. Your heart is pounding. You look around the room blinking, shocked to find that your brains aren't splattered all over the bedroom. Physically, you appear perfectly fine.
Congratulations, you've just experienced a random occurrence of Exploding Head Syndrome and, yes, it's totally a real thing.
Wait, What's Going On?
Well, no one is really sure. Physicians think there's a link to stress or extreme fatigue (surely you've heard the common saying, "Man, I'm so tired, my brain is going to fucking explode!"). They think physically it may also be caused by an inner ear problem, or possibly a form of minor seizure in the temporal lobe. But don't worry, according to Wikipedia, "it is not thought to be dangerous [citation needed]."
The noise itself can be an explosion, or a roar, or waves, or a gunshot, or an electrical zapping. But it will always be loud, like pants-shittingly loud, and it's not a dream. We're just barely exaggerating about the pants-shitting thing, too--the experience is said to be followed by a rush of adrenaline, an elevated heart rate and terror (well duh).
It may only happen once, it may happen several times. EHS is usually random, even happening when a person is fully awake. Whoa, what if it happened right when you were in the middle of defusing a bomb?
Can it Happen to You?
It's rare, and found mostly in those over age 50. It's a little more common in women than men, and seems to come along with pre-existing sleep problems. Otherwise, who knows? It's so rare and so random that they haven't been able to document many cases of it. If you're out there and this is happening to you every night, there's probably someone with a scalpel who would love to take a look under the hood.
#4.
Alice in Wonderland Syndrome
What Is It?
It's the next day. You wake up with a terrible headache. You roll out of bed, stumble into the hall...
...only to find the hallway is about a hundred miles long, the end vanishing into the horizon. What the hell? You look down. Wait a second... the floor is only an inch away from your face. The hallway isn't longer, you're just tiny. Your cat trots by, and you are unsurprised to find it is the size of a woolly mammoth.
A moment later, everything is back to normal. We hope you enjoyed your bout of Alice in Wonderland Syndrome.
Wait, What's Going On?
In this bizarre condition, you don't just see everything as if it's much larger or smaller than it actually is, you completely perceive everything as larger or smaller, including your own damned body.
It's not a hallucination, and your eyes are working just fine. Everything you see and touch is really there. Unfortunately, you just became either Gulliver, or one of the title characters in Honey I Shrunk the Kids, or both at the same time.
Experts think it's due to a malfunction of a part of the brain called the parietal lobe, which is in charge of keeping track of where your body is versus all the stuff in your environment you're trying to avoid running into. When it goes astray, your whole spatial awareness goes berserk. Your front door can appear to be the size of your fist, a cockroach as big as a dog.
Can it Happen to You?
Yep.
AIWS can be triggered by all sorts of things, including psychoactive drugs or the Epstein-Barr Virus (also known as "mono"). But it can happen even without that and, in fact, one of the most common causes is migraines.
The bad news is there's no cure, the good news is it always goes away on its own after a short time. Though those words may not be as comforting coming from a doctor who's towering five-stories above you.
#3.
Phantom Extra Limb Syndrome
What Is It?
You've just sat down to watch the Ace of Cakes marathon. You rest your chin on your hand, thoughtfully. You look down at your other hand and notice you should probably trim your fingernails. You look down at your other hand and notice... that you seem to have three hands.
In fact, the hand that's touching your chin is invisible, even though you can feel and move it. You can now tell your friends you've experienced phantom extra limb syndrome.
Wait, What's Going On?
Meet the sensory homunculus:
That's a model that demonstrates how you would look if you were shaped the way your brain sees you. That is, your brain devotes more power to tracking sensory data from your hands than, say, your ankles. The brain devotes quite a bit of effort to tracking your limbs and the information gained from them. For instance, it knows how close your hands are to the woman's boobies, so that you caress them instead of slapping them, and transmits the touch sensation back to your brain accordingly.
Regular old phantom limb syndrome happens when you lose a limb; the brain sensory cortex doesn't always come to terms with that news very well and goes into a kind of denial. The end result is you feeling sensation, mostly pain, in the missing limb.
But then, in rare cases, you get phantom extra limb syndrome. This happens in people who have not had anything amputated and in those cases the sensory cortex is so messed up it just manufactures an extra limb out of thin air.
Some patients have felt an extra arm or leg branching off from their existing limb, others have felt a third arm growing out of their chest. One patient even claimed he could see a third hand. So you can't underestimate how freaking convincing the sensation is. As far as your body knows, you've got the extra limb. Some patients even accused the hospital of stitching on an extra leg (why? To pad the bill?).
By the way, one woman said she had lost control of her third arm and that it was now trying to strangle her. Holy shit!
Can it Happen to You?
The regular variety of phantom limb syndrome, where you think a limb is still there after amputation, is extremely common in amputees (50 percent to 80 percent). The extra limb variety seems to only occur due to some kind of brain damage, such as in the aftermath of a stroke. So, if you get into a bar brawl and some guy cracks you over the head with a crowbar, make sure the fist you're hitting him with actually exists. Otherwise you'll just look ridiculous.
I used to get Alice in Wonderland Syndrome all the time as a kid, usually when I was sleepy. I used to get a notion that either I was really large, or really small. Then it stopped. I remember being quite disappointed when I realised I hadn't had that feeling in a long while. Years later I read about Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, and realised I'd had it. I seem to remember seeing that it more common in children than adults, and was supposed to be a traumatic experience - I thought it was fun.
ReplyHello! i`m looking for people who suffers form this wierd syndrome or who had this expirience at least once. if it`s you or you know someone who had it, i`d appreciate some help with answering questions about EHS. This is kind of an emergency!! Any information will be helpful!
ReplyI've had the Exploding Head thing a couple of times, not enough to really make me a good test subject for it. But it is very weird, just lying there and then a whooshing sound inside my head and I just open my eyes and look around like wtf.
ReplyOh dear God, it would be annoying to have Gilbert Gotfried yelling out your name over and over.
ReplyDose anyone have any information on what causes sleep paralysis?
ReplyIf you had actually read the article or the first link it mentions, it says why.
Basically your concious mind wakes up before the rest of your body realizes it. That's the kiddie version I was told as a kid.
I used to get REM often up until this past yr. (2011). [Maybe because I often sleep w/my head covered] I have never "seen" anything. Though once I did hear something. It was vague and my mind din't register it enough for me to remember it. It was creepy though. Though usually when I get it, my body feels "heavy" almost. I personally find that forcing my body to try and move is the fastest way to get it to stop. As for the "hearing things just before you fall asleep", I get that also. Though I can tell it's not real because my head always feels very heavy. I'm basically half asleep/dosing in and out. I rarely remember what was said, I don't ever recall it being my name. It's usually happens after I just woke up and am still tired. It's often right before I pass back out.
ReplyI don't take drugs, and I'm not mentally ill, but I was once cycling down the road and very clearly saw a lion in the field next to me. Pretty sure that this couldn't have happened, I stopped and looked back but, of course, there was no lion there.
Replyuntil now, I've never told anyone about that. thanks for confirming my normality, cracked.
from what i know NONE of these has ever happened to me...
Replyconsidering the fact that some of them make that statistically unlikely i can only point to my head and say aspergers syndrome... just an idea i have no idea if thats the truth
#4 happens to me frequently. Either during conversation or when watching TV (and all the time when i had mono) i perceive people's head to grow and shrink. Often i find its correlated to high stress situations which is super helpful... I always thought i had to do with an issue of my eyes focusing and unfocusing...
Replywell... #5 has happened to me a couple times... and I'm a 23 yr old male. Probably has something to do with the couple concussions I've had playing football. Sounded like a gunshot happened inside my head. No lights though, just a loud sound and a weird feeling in the head.
ReplyPretty sure that if the sensory homunculus illustration were 100% accurate it would be 1000% obscene
ReplyThat's why his dick's been pixelated out.
(Not that I looked or anything - I just assumed they'd do that, sort of, erm.....)
I get the sleep paralysis thing, but I'm not stuck in a dream. I just freeze and can't move for like a minute
ReplyI was relieved to see exploding head syndrome is actually a thing because I had it for years. I could be sitting on couch and suddenly it would sound as if a plane was crashing in: I could hear explosions, crumpling metal, and breaking glass all deafeningly loud. For me it was the last manifestation of my mental illness: I initially had a schitzoaffective disorder that caused me to see things that weren't there (or not see things that were there) for a few weeks, then a phase of hearing voices (an angry male and a comforting female) for a couple months. I was a total mess and sought treatment during that time. However, once I ended my treatment I continued to hear explosions 2-4 times a year for a little less than a decade. I had thought they were all part of the same illness, but after reading this I wonder if I was right about that. I'm just glad it all stopped.
ReplyThose experiences have made me very skeptical of any claims regarding ghosts, aliens or anything else paranormal. No matter how good the story is, I just think "at best, that was what you experienced, but it didn't actually happen." That usually offends the teller, who inevitably asks "you think I made it all up?" Then I say something like, "not you, just your brain. Brains are tricky 'cause whether it's lying to you or not, it all feels the same."
I am glad to check the article. I am a professional woman. I am just divorced. I lo ve younger men. I am dat ing a man who is 25 year old. he's caring, kind, has a real job that earns him good money and he is very attractive. I think younger men like cougars because they have no agenda, don't usually want to get married and are usually very independent and don't need a man to take care of them.I meet the younger men on this place COUGARCHATS,C0M.
ReplyWow... first thing I heard about that. You can actually be a PROFESSIONAL woman, you spam-bot?
i have sleep paralysis episodes.
Replyi had some weird ideas about what it was, because a) it's totally real in that moment, + b) i didn't want to ask anyone what was happening, because the only two answers i could see were that i was insane or that aliens or dream gods *were* actually wreaking terrible vengeance on me.
it was a great relief when i found out it was an actual condition.
#1 happened to me once...I was at work, standing out on the loading dock at night, when out of the corner of my eye, I saw a pair of human legs attached to a lower torso just go casually strolling by. Like somebody had chopped a person in half at bellybutton level. I even heard the foosteps it made as it walked. The hallucination lasted about 3 seconds before I turned around and looked, and it was gone.
Reply#5 When I was kid, #4 Once every couple of years and #1 When I'm alone in the dark.
ReplyWhen in the hospital on demerol I once experienced that I could see the room exactly the same whether with my eyes open or closed, the only difference was that with my eyes open my girlfriend was a the end of the bed and closed she was beside me, freaky.
Sleep paralysis is some crazy shit. I've had it happen to me several times, but I never saw anything like what is described in the article. It's just that you feel this insanely malicious presence sitting on top of your chest, and even trying to curl a finger causes intense pain in your chest.
ReplyI get a ton of hallucinations, but the scariest one lives in someone I love:
ReplyWhen I was about 8, I was sleeping once and the dream I was having was normal. I was at school, recess, and talking to my fiend. Then she started chanting, and morphing, and she turned into this thing, it had fur in some spots, scale's in others, and in some it had feathers. I turned and ran and she started chasing me. We ran all the way to my house, and the whole time it was still chanting. I ran upstairs and slammed my bedroom door. I heard it tromping up the stairs. Then I woke up. I was sweating and scared, but glad it was over. Then something started banging on my door. I screamed and my dad ran up stairs. He was turning the knob, I and yelled at him not to, but he did anyway. The thing from my dream followed him in. I was soooooooo scared! But then as I was still screaming, the thing started to turn to fog, and go into my dad's body. He got this look in his eyes, and to this day, when I look at him, he kinda... glares at me, and has the same look in his eyes. I am scared of my own father now. I think that thing possessed him and he will kill me one day.
And I always here my mom calling me. I'll go down stairs, and she'l say (without looking at me) " I didn't call you" because i do it all the time. And sometimes, she'll be right next to me, and i can swear she said my name, but she isn't looking at me, and denies it happening.
My like is so fucked up.
In the case you are telling the truth, your life is indeed fucked up. Talking to your FIEND and whatnot.
And even more so, I'd tell you to go see a psychologist. No, not the "tell me about yourself" kind, but rather if you can a researcher-type. The kind that makes studies. With the knowledge he's supposed to have (and which he'll most likely have), he'll probably find the causes.
Auditory hallucinations - I don't remember if they're discussed in this article - are nothing special but could be symptoms of schizophrenia. That's what schizo. is. You think about something, but hear it in someone else's voice and think that person is talking to you.
A simple test I think for auditory hallucinations is listening to how exactly you're hearing things... obviously behind a door the sound would be muffled.
I'm not a psychology student or any sort of student related to that, but I get most of this from my brother who's in his fifth year of psychology. So honestly don't take it as-is and go see someone specialized. But no psychic. Seriously, don't go see these guys.
Anyway, I also sent you this comment as a PM so that you get the notification. Having it as a comment is only for other people who might have the same troubles.
"...still there after amputation, is extremely common in amputees..."
ReplyYOU DON'T SAY