You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News Read online

  Where it really gets weird …

  The spooky part is the way your brain prevents you from noticing the blackness that occurs several times a second, every time you use your eyes. Estimates vary, but it’s likely that you’re spending around forty minutes a day with your eyes wide open, and totally blind.

  Here’s where saccadic masking and change blindness team up to screw with your mind. A scientist named George McConkie was able to track people’s eye movements down to each individual saccadic movement. This enabled him to introduce changes in words and text without the subject noticing while they were looking directly at it. If a change occurs during that fraction of a second when the brain is dodging calls like the optic nerve was an ex-girlfriend, you won’t notice it. Even when it happens right in front of your damned eyes.

  3. PROPRIOCEPTION

  Proprioception is your brain’s map of your body, and it steers you wrong on a regular basis.

  Um, what?

  Proprioception is your brain’s ability to sense where your limbs are. This is how you can put a sandwich in your mouth while your eyes are focused on the TV: Your brain knows where your hand is in relation to your face.

  If you’ve ever failed a field sobriety test, you know this kind of self-knowledge is fallible. Your proprioception is like your brain’s underwear: pretty much the first thing to disappear when you’re any kind of drunk. Basically, the cops doing the roadside test are trying to see if your brain knows where your fingers are in relation to your nose.

  Even though your brain carries around a detailed awareness of exactly where your body parts are at all times, when that awareness gets drunk enough to start lying to you, you’ll ignore everything you’ve ever known and say, “Oh, well. Guess I’ve been wrong about the length of my nose all these years.”

  Where it really gets weird …

  The best example we’ve found so far is “the Pinocchio illusion.” Scientists have found that they can have the subject touch the tip of their nose with their finger while having their biceps electrically stimulated at the same time. Your brain “feels” your arm muscle extending, but also feels that you’re maintaining contact with the tip of your nose and leaps to the immediate conclusion that your nose has suddenly grown to be about three feet long.

  Incidentally, we know exactly which illusion you’re about to try to induce, figuring all it’ll take is a girl, a dark room, and the right equipment. Don’t do it. It leads to eventual disappointment.

  2. CRYPTOMNESIA

  Sometimes called subconscious plagiarism, it’s what happens when your brain rips off someone else’s ideas and doesn’t tell you.

  Um, what?

  Your brain isn’t great at remembering where your ideas come from. Cryptomnesia happens when you find a really good idea and don’t bother to remember that it’s not yours.

  Although occurrences are pretty rare, there are still some famous cases: Nietzsche accidentally didn’t write quite a bit of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, George Harrison was forced to shell out almost $600,000 for a song he “borrowed,” and an early incident with cryptomnesia permanently ruined the celebrity-author career of Helen Keller, who wrote up a fairy tale that it turned out had been told to her years before—much to her surprise.

  This occurs when your brain retains enough memory to recall an event but not the origin of the event, leading to the convenient and mistaken impression that you’re the originator.

  You may be wondering at this point how we know cryptomnesia exists at all. After all, how do we know those cases of “accidental” plagiarism weren’t all intentional?

  The answer: We don’t. If you haven’t experienced it for yourself, you have no way of knowing whether it’s not just a big fat scam. If you have experienced it, good luck trying to convince that first group.

  Where it really gets weird …

  But there is plenty of evidence that we’re really bad at remembering where our ideas come from. In 2002, the journal Psychological Science published an experiment in which scientists implanted a completely fabricated childhood memory in the minds of subjects. The researchers showed the subjects a doctored photograph that depicted them in the basket of a hot-air balloon. Even though the subjects had never been in a hot-air balloon, many of them constructed detailed memories to match the fake photograph.

  So no matter how confident you are in the originality of an idea, it’s worth Googling around to make sure you didn’t inadvertently steal it. Also, no matter how unlikely it might seem, scientists will take the time to Photoshop you into a hot-air balloon, just to screw with your head.

  1. SUBCONSCIOUS BEHAVIOR, A.K.A. BEST GUESSING

  When you’re running down a flight of stairs at top speed, your brain doesn’t have time to think about each and every step you take. Your feet are on autopilot, reaching out for the next step faster than your conscious mind can tell them what to do. Well, it turns out that your brain is on autopilot more often than you think. Even when you’re making important choices throughout the course of your day, a part of your brain knows what you’re going to do well before it lets your conscious mind in on the decision. The technical term for this: precognition.

  Um, what?

  Your brain is constantly making guesses and predictions about what’s happening or about to happen around you, and once it has a good idea of what it thinks is about to go down, it acts on that prediction before you’ve made a conscious choice to act. In some cases, it will move parts of your body. Other times it will screw with your perception.

  If it didn’t do this, we’d be the clumsiest creatures on the planet. Our brains have to make thousands of snap decisions throughout the day. Imagine if you needed to consciously decide to put one foot in front of the other while flying down those steps. Luckily, there’s a part of your brain that’s constantly making decisions you only find out about after they occur. The creepy part is that you don’t get to decide when it’s time to use autopilot.

  Take the starburst illusion to the right. It takes advantage of the fact that your brain has lots of experience with converging lines. When we “see” the background starburst pattern in real life, we’re generally traveling toward a point of convergence, on a road or down a tunnel for instance. But no matter how much you try to convince your autopilot to shut the hell up, your brain adjusts your perception by enlarging and distorting the center, as though you were moving toward it. That’s why those perfectly vertical lines look like they’re bending outward in the middle.

  Where it really gets weird …

  In 2008, the Wall Street Journal reported on a series of experiments being conducted with brain scanners in Germany, Norway, and the United States. The scientists found that if they hook you up to a scanner and ask you to make a decision, part of your brain lights up to take action up to ten seconds before you consciously make the decision. So when you’re working out in your head whether or not to go to work tomorrow, a part of your brain has already decided to call in sick, several seconds before the voice in your head arrives at that same conclusion.

  Think about what that means for free will, and prepare to have your mind blown (it should hit you in about ten seconds).

  FIVE FIGHT MOVES THAT ONLY WORK IN MOVIES

  MOVIEGOERS understand that most of what they’re seeing in action flicks is bullshit: Buses won’t jump a sixty-yard gap in the highway, a fire hose is not a bungee cord, and Steven Seagal is a bigger threat to a Sizzler buffet than a gang of criminals. Objectively, our brains know that, and yet most real-world bar fights feature at least one guy trying out a move he saw in a martial arts film—and being subsequently shocked to learn he would have been better off casting an ass-kicking spell he’d found in the pages of a Harry Potter novel.

  5. BEER BOTTLE OVER THE HEAD

  For years, a beer bottle shattered over the head has been the visual shorthand for “this person got knocked unconscious.” But when real people really smack a real beer bottle over someone’s head, one of two things happens:
(1) It doesn’t break and they are enraged, or (2) their head gets wet. If you’re lucky, you might open up a cut. If you’re unlucky, it will be on your hand. Otherwise the body attached to the head it broke against can go about the business of kicking your ass while still fully conscious and, if anything, somewhat refreshed.

  You don’t have to take our word for it: Thanks to YouTube and the contents of the beer bottles themselves, there are hundreds of easily accessible failed bottle-over-head experiments. And though each of the amateur scientists involved clearly has a soft skull, they all remain wildly undevastated by their bottle-breaking field work. No one’s saying try this at home, just trust that the millions of years evolution spent building a helmet for your brain trumps an empty Bud Light every time.

  The rest of Road House though? One hundred percent accurate. It’s basically a documentary.

  4. THE TWIST WITH YOUR HANDS/LEGS NECK BREAK

  Even if you do it really hard and your victim is a completely incidental guard outside the enemy’s base, coming up behind someone and cranking their head to the side doesn’t break their neck. You probably suspected this the first time your chiropractor did it to you and you didn’t wake up rolling through heaven in a wheelchair. When the spine is given a choice between simply turning in the same direction as the neck or detaching from the head, it usually picks the first one.

  But what if you leap up, wrap your legs around his head, and kind of twist? Surely something that awesome-looking has to be effective! Well, no. And what’s worse, the mythical leg-scissors neck break actually squanders a golden opportunity to do some real damage. If you find yourself in a position to execute a leg-around-the-head move, modern jujitsu would recommend a tight triangle choke, thus matching the puny muscles of your opponent’s neck against your comparatively immense leg muscles. If you instead take your pointers from Jean-Claude Van Damme movies and just twist your hips awkwardly, you’ll be astonished at how much your opponent doesn’t die. In fact, you’ll be lucky if you manage to give him an Indian burn with your jeans before he takes advantage of the prime penis-biting position you’ve put him in. In short: No one will be dead and you’ll both go home with a lot of explaining to do to your wives.

  3. THE STANDING ARM-BREAK

  If Steven Seagal blocks your punch, there’s a really good chance you’re going to be the bad type of double jointed in the very near future. Whether he’s cracking arms over his shoulder or kicking knees in the wrong direction, all extremities turn to crispy breadsticks under Seagal’s awesome powers. According to martial arts movies, a half pound of pressure shatters a kneecap, while according to real life Hollywood got all its information on bones well before the invention of milk.

  It takes a lot more than yanking on an arm to break it. Two much more likely things happen first: Either the body attached to the arm goes in the direction you pull it, or the shoulder simply dislocates. Trying to snap the bone before one of these things happens is like trying to knock a wall down by jumping into the window.

  There is actual documentation of a forced arm-breaking, but it took more than Steven Seagal gently leaning his considerable bulk against an elbow to make it happen. At UFC 48: Payback, jujitsu expert Frank Mir locked his entire 250-pound body onto Tim Sylvia’s arm and cranked it as hard as he could, while six-foot-eight Sylvia stood up and pulled in the opposite direction. His forearm snapped. To re-create these kinds of conditions outside the ring, you’d need a gallon of moonshine, a tractor, and the world’s dumbest volunteer.

  2. KNOCKING A NOSE INTO A BRAIN

  In 1991’s The Last Boy Scout, Bruce Willis punched a henchman so hard he died. Another henchman exclaimed, “God, he punched his nose through his brains!” From that moment on, filmmakers no longer felt the need to explain why their characters die after getting hit in the nose. In reality, the henchman’s buddy might as well have screamed, “God, Bruce Willis hired elves to eat their way into his skull! They’ve made it into a cookie factory!”

  The human nose does not contain the brain’s off button. It’s made of soft cartilage. In the history of face punching, people have probably died, but it was not from a nose’s soft tissue traveling through skull bone and lobotomizing its owner. That would be like trying to hammer a crayon through a brick wall. If you finally break through, it ain’t gonna be the crayon that does the trick. That’s why you could get punched all day and you’d still have a better chance of dying from a winning lottery ticket falling out of the sky and slicing your wrist open than from a face-to-brain nose missile.

  1. ALMOST ANY KICK YOU’VE EVER SEEN IN A MOVIE

  Attackers are charging at you from both sides! Before you decide to leap into the air and kick them each at the same time, you should know that’s only going to make you go out looking like a cheerleader. A kick’s power is generated by your hips, and your hips can’t generate any power while they’re spreading in midair, thirsting for a man’s touch.

  Most kicks in movies are designed around aesthetics rather than effectiveness. If Jean-Claude Van Damme was trying to break down the front door of your house, he wouldn’t twirl into the air and kick the door. It’s easier and more effective to kick the door in like a regular person, with one foot planted firmly on the ground (also, Van Damme would just come back as Timecop and hand himself the key). The one and only strategic advantage the door has is that it’s connected to something that’s connected to the ground. So are you, until you leap in the air like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and earn every bullet of the Darwinian reckoning about to be visited on you by the drug dealer who just heard you bounce off his front door.

  The same goes for real combat. In Ultimate Fighting, all but two kicks have become extinct: the round kick (what it sounds like) and the front kick (what you should have done to the door a few sentences ago). If you are practicing a kick that involves a word like spinning, crescent, flying, or cartwheel, remember it’ll only be useful in a real fight when you want to fall down extravagantly before getting choked.

  FIVE AWESOME PLACES TO HAVE SEX (AND THE HORRIFIC CONSEQUENCES)

  EVERY month magazines like Cosmo, Playboy, and Boob Fancy write up titillating articles about places you just have to have sex at least once in your life. All of them seem to operate on the principle that having sex while, say, zooming down the Pacific Coast Highway on a motorcycle is well worth the risks involved.

  You should at least know the dangers before you get drunk enough to try five of the most popular.

  5. SEX ON THE BEACH

  Sex on the beach sounds pretty hot. It’s so popular that there’s even a drink named after it. Then again, there’s also a drink named the duck fart. In any event, it’s still a common motif in romantic films and books. What could be more romantic than some briny coitus between two half-naked adults while the waves crash around your suntanned bodies?

  Just about anything, it turns out. As anyone who’s ever had sex on the beach probably already knows, if you’re not extremely careful, you’re going to discover what it feels like to exfoliate areas of your body you can’t see without a mirror. And while places that recommend sex on the beach will point out the sand issue with a little wink and a nudge, they rarely mention one important detail about the sand you’re cramming into your unmentionable areas: It’s often loaded with fecal bacteria.

  Sand acts as a naturally occurring filth filter, so when a beach is closed due to high bacteria levels in the water, the sand is what makes it safe to swim again, collecting big, fatty loads of turd with the ebb and flow of tides. Good news for the surfers, swimmers, and the mayor of Amity Island. It’s even good for the bacteria, which live fuller, more robust lives in the sand than in the ocean. The news is less good for couples grinding sand around one another’s sexual organs like a human pepper mill. Exposure to the bacteria can lead to fun things like typhoid fever, hepatitis A, and dysentery, all terrible diseases even when they’re not focused in your nether regions.

  4. IN A POOL

  Of course you co
uld always dodge nature’s poo filter by having some good clean sex in a far more sanitary (looking) chlorinated swimming pool. What could be hotter than dipping your naked hide in clear azure water, while a pool noodle bobs obscenely along with your ungainly and hard-to-maintain humping?

  It turns out pool sex has the unwholesome side effect of teaching you just how poorly water works as a lubricant while forcing chemically treated liquids deep into easily infected regions. According to research by the University of California, Santa Barbara, if turkey basted into the wrong places, even chlorinated pool water contains enough bacteria to lead to yeast and urinary tract infections.

  The aforementioned issue with lubrication leads to something science types call microtears but that you’re going to be more likely to call “tiny, painful rips in my junk.” That’s why having sex in a pool greatly increases the risk of STDs and, more disastrously, pruny zombie wang.

  If you’re looking to avoid chlorine with some manner of ocean scuba sex, dive researcher David F. Colvard, MD, would like you to know that having sex underwater can lead to your losing track of important things like buoyancy. You could end up floating to the surface too quickly, giving yourself an embolism. Now, we’re not underwater sex doctors, like Dr. Colvard back there, but an embolism is probably a total willy wilter.

  3. IN A CAR

  The idea of getting nasty in a car, or road head, as Mom used to call it, is a staple of the not-so-exotic fantasy life of many people. Back in the 1950s, everyone was taking their girl up to make-out point to pump her full of babies on luxurious leather upholstery. As time went on, people apparently decided parked-car sex simply didn’t endanger enough lives and moved on to having sex while driving. Hey, who doesn’t like a little eroticism to break up the monotony of steering a fast-moving chunk of metal and flammable liquids?