Can People Really Get Hysterical Strength?

During times of emergency, people have been known to preform feats of great strength. Learn more about going from the dull stare of the dairy cow to the eye of the tiger in seconds flat.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know
from how stuff works dot Com? Hi, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, a staff writer here how
stuff works dot Com with me today is fellow staff
writer an extraordinary guy, Charles Bryant. How are you, Chuck.

(00:21):
I'm great, I'm extraordinary. Thanks for having me, Chuck. I
am so jazz. I've got like all this adrenaline pumping
through right now. I feel like I lived a car.
I could throw this table across the room and you
might Yeah, have you heard of these stories about people
like picking cars up of all other people? Yeah? I have.
It's you know, you might think it's an urban legend.
You know, you hear these stories about people just chunking
a buick off of their son when they're trapped underneath it.

(00:44):
But it's actually true. There's plenty of documented cases. Uh.
When you were researching this, you found a bunch of
good ones. My favorite was the Granny and Texas. This
is my favorite to actually. Yeah. Murray Peyton, who her
nickname is Boots. We call her Bootsy around the office,
right and I think everyone calls her boot lovingly. Yeah,
we love Bootsy. So Bootsy was cutting her grass in
Texas one day on a riding more. Um, I don't

(01:07):
know if she fell off or what, but somehow the
Lawmar got away from her and it kind of kept
on going, and her little granddaughter, Evie, thought it might
be a good idea to stop the riding more with
I guess superpower. She jumped in front of it, all
a super girl. It was the impression I have, and um,
I imagined. Poor Evie suffered quite a start when she
found that her superpowers had failed her and she was

(01:28):
suddenly pinned beneath a running rider motor right. She suffered
more than that, Josh. She lost four of her little
toes as a result, and she probably would have lost
a lot more if it hadn't have been for super
Granny coming in there. Yeah, yeah, Marie. Yeah, So Bootsy
flies in there, well not literally, but she she runs
in there and she picks up this Lawmar and throws

(01:49):
it off of her granddaughter, you know, saving her life.
Threw it off of her like it was a piece
of cardboard, like a piece of cardboard or maybe something
even lighter. And actually after the I imagine after the
tremblings have decided and eve these injuries have been attended to. Uh,
Marie went back over kind of curious and tried to
pick up the lawnmoard again, couldn't budget. She couldn't even
pined over. No, I'm sure. And what what we're talking

(02:11):
about here and what boots he experienced is something called
hysterical strength, and it's not actually recognized by the medical community.
Did you know that? Yeah? I did, because you know,
there's no way you can really follow up and do
a study on something like this, right, and and and
for something to be experimented on, it has to be
you know, it has to be able to be replicated.
And you you can't just throw a kid beneath the
car in a lab and see what the parents do.

(02:33):
You could? You could, It's unethical and you'd lose your
funding very quickly. Yeah, but so you know, medical science
hasn't taken many steps to explain it. But these cases
are widely documented. There's lots of witnesses that kind of thing,
and it seems to be an extension of the fight
or flight response. You know much about this? Yeah? I do? Okay, Well,
I'll tell everybody else. Then you just sit there quietly.

(02:54):
So basically, let's say you're walking down the street and
you're eating a hot dog and you come upon a
lion and he is loose and he's hungry. That happens
all the time, all right, Well, that this hot dog
is being digested until your fight or flight response kicks in,
which is from the sympathetic system. Uh, it takes over
all of a sudden, adrenalinees released. That hot dog is
no longer being digested. Instead, all the energy on stuff

(03:17):
that's that's peripheral, all of a sudden to this danger
is transferred over to things like increasing your heart rate,
your respiration, your pupils dilate so you can take in
more visual information, that kind of thing. And basically you
go from the dull stare of the dairy cow to
the eye of the tiger, and seconds flat, you're ready
to go. The way this connects to hysterical strength, you know,
like lifting a car is in this fight or flight response,

(03:41):
your muscles contract, They shorten and tighten um so that
you can run faster, throw a harder punch, you know
that kind of thing. Um and your skeletal muscles actually
contract by receiving electrical impulses from your brain. Yeah, exactly.
They you know, have you ever been electrocuted twice? Well,
if you if you get a sudden surge of electricity,

(04:02):
a lot of times you'll be shot across the room
or across the street or you know, who knows where
you could land. Uh. And a lot of people think
this is probably just like a blast from the electrical box,
but that's not the case. It's actually your own muscles
doing all the work. You just get such a surge
of electrical impulse that you tap into this energy and
and your muscles you didn't know you had. Yeah, you're
you're actually throwing yourself, which which illustrates this kind of

(04:26):
untapped reserve of of muscular strength. Well yeah, and it
makes you kind of wonder why, you know, you don't
walk around like that all the time and just be
you know, a race of you know, superheroes, right or
people ready to beat up a line at any given moment.
Right right, Well, I'll tell you why, Chuck. The short
answer is that it would kill us, uh in fairly
short order. The whole goal to our body is homeostasis,

(04:47):
which is like this balance between you know the eye
of the tiger and the dulstair of the dairy cow.
That kind of thing. Um and uh. If we don't
achieve homeostasis, if we're in the state of hyper arousal,
we get worn down, our hearts, wear down, more susceptible
the illness. That kind of thing. Well, and you can
feel that, you can and you can see it actually too.
You and I both know from being overworked you you

(05:09):
get worn down and you'll eventually die because you're in
a state of stress well exactly, Josh, Like you know,
like a stress induced or a work related heart attack exactly.
And you can avoid a stress related heart attack or
work related heart attack by taking some time out of
your day and reading how can adrenaline help you lift
a thirty pound car? On how stuff works dot com

(05:30):
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