I Smell Your Fear

The most primitive of our senses is olfactory–the sense of smell. It is also the most emotionally powerful. Once we have smelled something it is filed in our brains forever, and if we ever encounter the odor again, it is almost instantly recalled. Often with memories of that first encounter. A certain food, perfume, chemical, you name it, can pull us back in time more deeply than can any sight or sound.

 

 

But can you smell another’s emotion? Can you detect fear, or anger, or disgust with your nose? Animals can. If one dog or gazelle or wildebeest in a group senses fear, the other members of the group immediately sense the same danger. Herd mentality. Some of this might be transmitted through body language or certain movements, even facial expressions, but pheromones released by the concerned group member play a big role. So why shouldn’t we humans have the same ability?

Apparently, we do.

If the results of a recent study done by Gün Semin and colleagues from Utrecht University and published in Psychological Science can be believed, humans possess the ability to communicate emotions through chemical signals. This is an interesting study that used sweat to analyze these chemical transmitters.

 

Cheetos: A Cop’s Best Friend?

You have to admit, Cheetos are simply the best junk food ever invented. Hands down, no contest. I don’t mean those fake puffy ones. The crunchy ones. Real Cheetos.

 

19 year old Austin Westfall Presler might beg to differ.

It seems Austin pilfered beer, cigarettes, energy drinks, and Cheetos from the Cassatt Country Store in Cassatt, SC. But he screwed the pooch when he broke open the Cheetos bag and left a trail right to his front door. Police followed the bright orange tid bits to Presler’s home and found the stolen items inside.

A waste of good Cheetos but at least the crime was solved.

Chalk one up for Chester.

 

 

Drug Smuggling Gets Creative

Criminals are for the most part not all that bright but sometimes their creativity is amazing. Drug traffickers notoriously go to great lengths to slip their product past inspectors and detection devices at airports and border crossings. Last year I posted about diamond and drug smugglers swallowing their booty in an often misguided attempt to avoid detection. Condoms filled with cocaine are one trick that can result in death if one of the condoms breaks.

 

X-ray of swallowed cocaine-filled balloons

 

Now two other clever methods have popped up:

A Panamanian woman was recently arrested in Barcelona, Spain as she attempted to smuggle 3 pounds of cocaine secreted inside her breast implants. I wonder if she got the idea from watching re-runs of NIP/TUCK, where this was one of the story lines in the quirky series.

 

Breast Implants

 

The other is a very unique pneumatic-powered canon that fires barrels packed with marijuana over the border near Yuma, AZ. It didn’t work, at least this time, but you have to give them an A for creativity.

 

Barrels of marijuana scattered like unexploded mortar shells

 

Sleeping Beauty Syndrome: Ever Feel Like You Could Sleep Forever?

Ever feel as if you could lie down, fall asleep, and not get up for days? Maybe after a bad week or some very stressful event? Or maybe work, or writing, has interfered with sleep for a few weeks and it all catches up?

We’ve all experienced that feeling.

So did Sleeping Beauty.

 

But what if you fell asleep for many weeks, or months? You could suffer from “Sleeping Beauty Syndrome.” Also known as Kleine-Levin Syndrome, this odd neurological condition typically occurs in teenagers, particularly males. It often follows some infectious process such as the flu. The sufferer might sleep 20 or more hours a day and only awaken to eat or visit the bathroom. But even in the “more awake” periods, he or she seems “out of it” and highly irritable.

Examples are the situations with Nicole Delien, Stacey Comerford, and Louisa Ball.

 

Be Careful What You Eat

People eat some fairly odd things. There’s even a medical term for some of these foreign-substance ingestions: Pica. Some people eat their own hair (hair pica) and rarely this leads to hair ball formation–just like your cat. People eat coins, starch, paint flecks, and even dirt. In the South there is a long tradition of chalk pica and clay pica (the eating of the red clay dirt that is so common in that region). The belief, passed down generation to generation, is that the red clay offers minerals that the body needs. It doesn’t. In truth, the clay can bind iron and remove it from the body and lead to iron deficiency anemia.

 

 

In two odd cases the ingestion of foreign substances has lead to serious health consequences and even death.

Apparently a new fad is to drink cocktails that contain Liquid Nitrogen (N). Sounds delicious I know but the problem is that Liquid N hovers between -196 degrees F. (its boiling point–the temp at which it converts to its gaseous form) and -346 degrees F. (its freezing point–the temp at which it becomes solid). This can literally freeze the stomach and lead to tissue death.

This is what happened to Gaby Scanlon. She ingested the drink as part of her 18th birthday celebration at a local bar only to end up in the hospital with her stomach surgically removed after it perforated. Not the best of birthdays, I imagine, and definitely not what she expected. Her story should be a cautionary tale for others.

Then there is 32-year-old Edward Archbold. He entered a “roach and worm” eating contest run by a local pet store. The grand prize? A python. Afterwards he became ill (you think?), vomited, and died.

It is unclear what exactly killed him. Was it a toxin in the roaches and worms? Was it a rip or rupture of the esophagus from his vomiting? Tearing of the esophagus with vomiting is called Mallory-Weiss Syndrome while esophageal rupture in this circumstance is termed Boerhaave’s Syndrome. Hopefully the medical examiner’s determination will sort this out.

 

I Hear You . . . But You Sound Funny

Most hallucinogenics cause visual distortions and altered perceptions. Remember Lucy’s kaleidoscopic eyes? Users often misinterpret what they see (marmalade skies) or see things that aren’t really there (pink elephants). DiPT (Diisopropyltryptamine), while it can also cause visual and perceptual problems, primarily causes auditory distortion. For you guitar players out there, it can sound like a flanger or phase shifter. A wobbling or swirling of the sound.

One form of this drug, 5-Methoxy-diisopropyltryptamine, is sold on the streets as “Foxy” or “Foxy Methoxy.” In addition to auditory distortions, it can also cause euphoria, hypersexuality, emotional lability, hyperactivity, anxiety, and even out-of-body experiences.

Sounds like a Van Halen or ZZ Top concert to me.

 

I know all you creators of fictional villains out there are constantly looking for ways your bad guys can cause harm and aggravation to other characters. Employing this drug in your story could produce some interesting scenes.

 

Sasquatch Lives!! Maybe

Sasquatch has been a Pacific Northwest mythical creature for many decades. Sitings and even videos have routinely been knocked down and proven to be hoaxes. Not so fast. Now, anthropologist Jeff Meldrum has analyzed some new tracks and has found evidence that they might indeed be real.

 

His evidence?

The toes, as revealed by analysis of the tracks, seem to grip rocks, curl to grab the soil on inclines, and at times splay out presumably for better balance. Things a rubber or plastic fake foot couldn’t easily do. But more importantly, many of the tracks revealed friction ridge patterns. This is important since only primates have such ridges.

 

Another interesting finding was that there appeared to be scars from old injuries on the soles of the feet. When such injuries heal, the dermal ridges tend to curl inward as part of the healing process. Such healing was found here. Something that would be very difficult to fake.

So does this mean that Sasquatch lives? Maybe, maybe not. Hopefully there is more to come.

 

Vampires Walk Among Us

No really they do.  Well, I only know of one but I’m sure there are others.

It seems that Josephine Smith believes she is a vampire, which lead her to attack Mr. Milton Ellis. Apparently seeing him as a food item, she jumped her meal in front of a vacant Hooters in St. Petersburg, Florida. Had Hooters been open for business she might have opted for the hot wings but since it was closed she went after Mr. Ellis. What’s a hungry vampire to do? She bit his face and arms, apparently ripping away chunks of flesh in the process. And of course shouting, “I’m a vampire, I am going to eat you.”

 

The punchline? Josephine told the police that she had been studying “dental assisting” in Pensacola where she lives. Yet another reason to avoid dentists.

 

Maybe she’d been watching too much of Charlaine Harris’ True Blood. I never miss an episode but I’ve somehow resisted the urge to bite people. Too bad Josephine didn’t resist that urge. I think I can safely say that she’s no Sookie Stackhouse.

You just can’t make this stuff up.

 

The Man Who Swallowed the Diamond

So you’re sitting in an airport lounge waiting for your plane, having a drink and biding your time. Then you notice your purse is missing. Fortunately security tracks the creep down and recovers the purse. Money? Check. Cell phone? Check. $16,000 diamond pendant? No check. A search of the guy doesn’t turn it up. Where could it be?

 

Enter old Dr. Wilhelm Konrad Roentgens invention. You know, the x-ray that he invented almost by accident on a cold November evening in 1895. The thief was subjected to an x-ray examination and “Surprise, surprise, Sargent Carter” there it was.

 

The ovoid shadows in the above x-ray are the drug-filled balloons.

 

But diamond thieves aren’t the only ones that swallow stolen items and contraband. Drug traffickers do, too. Not something I would recommend. The mules will take heroin or cocaine, compact it in small balloons or condoms, and swallow a bunch of them, thinking they can sneak across the border and then later collect their booty from their booty. Doesn’t always work out that way. Stomach acids and digestive enzymes simply won’t cooperate. Let one of those little time-bomb balloons leak and you have a dead trafficker on your hands.

 

This was removed from one mule.

 

Near Death Experiences: A View of the Other Side or a Neuropsychiatric Event?

You’ve heard the stories countless times. Someone has a brush with death but survives and later reports some very odd happenings. A bright light that pulls them forward, or pushes them away. A floating sensation where they hover near the ceiling and look down on their own rescue or surgical procedure. They might report seeing images from their past or people they’ve known who have passed on, beckoning them to join them in heaven.

Is this what is happening? Are these events a glimpse at what lies beyond the curtain that separates life and death? Or is there a physiological explanation for these phenomena?

In an excellent article that appeared in a recent issue of New Scientist, this phenomenon was discussed by neurologist Dr. Kevin Nelson. He points out that we basically have three states of consciousness: Awake, Non-REM Sleep, and REM Sleep. He emphasizes that these three stages are not distinctly separate but rather overlap one another. And it is in these gaps that near-death experiences live.

Such experiences are most often reported by those who suffer cardiac arrest. A cardiac arrest occurs when the heart ceases to function, either because its electrical activity has stopped or it has become extremely chaotic usually in deadly rapid rhythms that we call ventricular tachycardia and ventricular fibrillation. In either case, the heart is no longer and effective pump and blood circulation ceases. The brain requires a constant supply of oxygen and nutrients. If this is interrupted it begins to malfunction and if severely interrupted, as with a stoppage of the heart, brain death begins almost immediately.

 

So how does this relate to a near-death experience?

One of the areas of the brain that will begin to malfunction early are the eyes and the visual cortex near the back of the brain. As vision begins to fail it does so in an out to in manner. That is, from the periphery to the center. This results in a tunneling of the vision so that it appears as though you’re looking down a gun barrel or a hallway or perhaps a pathway to heaven. What is left of the vision is typically a vague light that is enhanced by all the adrenaline running around in the brain as it fights to survive. This might make the light appear much brighter and this will enhance the victim’s tunnel-like vision and create the bright-light image.

Other areas of the brain are concerned with body position and location in space and when these malfunction the perception of where you are can be altered. This leads to a feeling of floating and in some people their brain constructs the image of their surroundings as if they were looking down on everything, including themselves. Interestingly, PCP (phencyclidine or Angel Dust) can cause a similar reaction, as part of a Depersonalization Syndrome.

This level of consciousness is similar to what psychiatrists and neurologists have called Lucid Dreams. These are dreams that occur in that zone between wakefulness and sleep. They are often extremely real and when someone awakens from them they’re not sure if the events really happened or not. The brain is capable of constructing all types of images and scenarios. Some of these may indeed be the faces and forms of past love ones and when coupled with a loss of spatial orientation and tunnel vision, it can look as though they are ghostly apparitions from heaven.

Near-death experiences are not common but they are often dramatic. In my nearly 40 years of practicing cardiology I have seen this phenomenon many times.