Voodoo Death And The Question Of Whether Belief Can Kill You

Sometime in the late 1930s, a man in rural Alabama met another man in a cemetery at night. The second man waved a bottle in his face, told him he had been hexed, and told him there was nothing left to do but go home and wait. He went home. He stopped eating. Weeks later he was near death in a hospital bed with a chart that said nothing was wrong with him. What his physician did next involved a syringe, an elaborate lie, and a lizard.This episode is about the question underneath that story, which turns out to be harder than it looks. Can a person be told they are going to die and then die of it? The evidence says yes, sometimes, under conditions that have almost nothing to do with magic. In 1942 a Harvard physiologist named Walter Cannon gave the phenomenon its name and its physiology, and he also filed it under the exotic, describing it as foreign to the experience of civilized people. That framing turns out to be the most interesting mistake in the whole literature, because the mechanism never stayed where he put it. It changed clothes.I walk through what the nocebo effect actually is and why two labs working independently just traced it to a specific circuit in the brains of mice, which matters more than it sounds like it should. I get into John Leach's clinical description of psychogenic death, the five-stage collapse that prisoners of war called give-up-itis, including the detail about the last cigarette that I have not been able to shake. I revisit the night hag, because a number I gave you back in 2023 has since been settled by a hundred and sixty-seven thousand people. And I close with a patient in Nashville in 1973 who received a death sentence from someone in a white coat, kept it, and died on schedule of a tumor two centimeters across.The question was never whether curses are real. The question is what a mind does with a prediction it accepts and cannot act against.Companion essay drops Thursday on Substack, where paid subscribers also get every episode ad-free. https://substack.com/@psychstrangepodBook picks for this one are on The Strange Shelf. https://www.amazon.com/shop/influencer-b7bd654b/list/1OX5UZT4WR668?ref_=hype_hm_sf_eUntil next time, stay curious and stay strange. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.