The term Kuru comes from the Fore word “to shake”.  Fore is the tribe in Papua New Guinea that sort of, like, invented the disease.  They didn’t so much invent as be the first discovered people to have it – by Australian guys in the fifties.  The cause of the disorder is prions – which are proteins or particles which invade the brain.  Other neurological conditions caused by prions are Creutzgeldt-Jakob Disease, Fatal Familial Insomnia, Gerstmann-Straussler-Scheinker Syndrome, and Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (also known as Mad Cow Disease).

In addition to the random laughing, the other symptoms of Kuru are headaches, joint pains, and trembling.  The way you get it…well.  You have to ingest the prion that causes the disease.  So, the Fore tribe had these funerary practices that included eating the flesh and organs of the dead members of the tribe in order to absorb their life force.  The Fore started this practice in the 19th century, which seems weird.  I mean, why then?  Anywhoo, this eating of the dead introduced these prions into the system of the people who ate the dead people, and then when they died people cleaned up after them and THOSE people got the prions, and so on.

Lucky for the people of Papua New Guinea, some of them developed an immunity to the prion.  Also, people from University College London are working to learn more.

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When we sleep, that sleep undergoes several stages.  You have your NREM sleep, which is divided into stage 1, stage 2, and stage 3 and 4.  Stage 1 is that light sleep, while stage 2 is a consolidated sleep period, stages 3 and 4 are deep sleep stages (known as “slow-wave sleep”), and after these stages we reach REM state.  REM sleep (REM stands for Rapid Eye Movement) is where your eyes move rapidly under your eyelids, your respiration and heart rate can be irregular, and this is when you’re most likely to dream.  Despite the rapid movement of the eyes, the respiration and heart rate irregularities, and the fact that your brain is possibly occupied by a dream, this is supposed to be our most restful stage of sleep, and it accounts for 90-120 minutes of a total night’s sleep.  “Normal” sleepwalking occurs during the REM state, and if you do it you are considered to have a “REM State Sleeping Disorder.”

Sleepwalking can occur outside of the REM state, during stages 3 and 4 of NREM, during that deepest sleep.  Specialists aren’t completely sure what causes the high-voltage delta waves that characterize sleepwalking.  Some think it is a reactionary condition brought on by exhaustion, fever, or something similar.  In some cases it is.  In other cases, somnambulism occurs because of much deeper seated problem.  For instance, many drug users are known to sleepwalk, and people with schizophrenia and anxiety disorders are more likely to be sleepwalkers.  New research shows that sufferers of Tourette Syndrome and frequent migraine headaches are more prone to sleepwalk.

So, what of these people who claim to have had sex, cooked, sent email, and even murdered in their sleep.  This is because, as we mentioned before, REM stage sleepwalking is one thing, but NREM sleepwalking is something else.  During that stage 3 and 4 sleep, the brain is supposed to be, for lack of a better term, quiet.  In a NREM state sleeping disorder, part of the brain wakes up, and causes the person to do all sorts of things.  If that person is predisposed or in the “right” mindframe, they certainly can be capable of murder.

And, given that certain types of insomnia are considered a mental illness, they’ll probably get away with it.

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Norman Bates

Ah, good old Norman.  He was a shy, mild-mannered boy who loved his mother more than anything.  Then his mother found a honey, and Norman decided that wasn’t OK.  He had some sort of psychotic break and killed his mother and her boyfriend, and then he was so overcome with guilt and craziness that his personality cleaved.  One part of Norman was left, but the rest of his widdle brain was overtaken by his dead mother.  Not in a possession kind of way, but more in a split-personality, totally nutso way.

The Diagnosis

Norman Bates suffered from split personality disorder, brought on by his too-close connection to his mother, and then  his guilt involving the brutal murder of said mother.  Who knows?  He might have had a little post-traumatic stress disorder as well.

Freddy Krueger

Freddy Krueger, he who terrorizes dreams, is actually the son of a nun who was shut into an asylum with a bunch of murderers and rapists, and they, ahem, took improper liberties with her, and Freddy was conceived.  So, he was the “bastard son of a hundred maniacs.”  He had an abusive stepfather, was endlessly tormented at school, and had a penchant for killing animals.  A budding psycho, his psychosis took full bloom when he went on a big killing spree, killing his wife and a bunch of kids in the neighborhood.  Later, the parents in the neighborhood burned him up, and his essence gained the ability to enter the dreams of poorly-dressed teenagers and kill them.

The Diagnosis

Well, we can’t really speak for the post-getting-burned-to-a-crisp Freddy, but the live and actively killing in the conscious world Freddy suffered from Psychopathy – a disorder that manifests in amoral conduct while the person seems normal on the outside.  Little Freddy killed the class pet and whipped himself with straps, but outwardly he was normal enough to get married, have a kid, and get a house in the suburbs.  After he died, all the psychosis and murderous rage came out.  Good times.

Michael Myers

If we go by the original film’s story, Michael was a little boy from a totally normal family who murdered his big sister on Halloween night.  He spent the next 15 years in a mental institution, not speaking a word, until he escaped to murder his (unknown to the audience) little sister, who had been adopted by another family.  If we believe Rob Zombie’s remake version of the film, little Mikey’s momma was a stripper, she had a totally skeezy and abusive boyfriend, and his sister was sort of  a skank.  The only person he loved was his little sister.  If that’s the case in the original film, we don’t see any indication of that, seeing he tries his best to kill her and all her friends.  In Zombie’s version, he actually drops the knife in the presence of his baby sister.  Bah.  We trust the original because…

The Diagnosis

Dude is the personification of evil.  Not according to Rob Zombie, but definitely according to John Carpenter, and we trust him more, because he conceived the character to begin with.  I realize there is some faulty logic involved with taking an explanation from a movie that Carpenter himself didn’t bless, but Halloween VI:  The Curse of Michael Myers, tells us that Micheal is a cog in the wheel of a Druid cult.  Apparently he’s the personification of evil, so he has to procreate with his own niece in order to create the perfect child to sacrifice when the constellation of Thorn appears in the sky.  Er.  Whatever.  Dude’s evil.

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1) A Few Here, and a Few More Over…Here

Did you know that excessive plucking of your eyebrows is a form of Trichotillomania? Many people who suffer from this condition state that their condition began with a few simple eyebrow hairs. This spiraled out of control, and soon it led to eyelashes being pulled, head hair removal and pubic hair pulling.

Because tweezing and general hair upkeep is such an ingrained part of our daily lives, many people who experience the warning signs of this condition, don’t realize it until they are hooked. Once the habit forms, it is extremely difficult to break. That’s why it’s so important to stop before it becomes a huge part of your life.

2) Not Just a Phase

Because Trichotillomania tends to start in most people when they are in their adolescence, the symptoms and clear warning signs are often overlooked by the people around them. Children are prone to all sorts of behaviors as they grow up, but that doesn’t mean this condition should be treated as a nail biting phase that will go away.

Like most forms of mental disorder, Trichotillomania gets worse over time, resulting in a prematurely bald child with severe emotional problems. These problems stem from the humiliation of hair loss so young.

3) Controlling Your Impulses

Make no mistake Trichotillomania is an extreme compulsion disorder, peppered with a form of masochism that manifests from the person’s own unnatural behavior. Though people are aware that they have this mental disorder they can’t stop, and it becomes as damaging and dangerous as cutting.

There is little help for these people, as the condition is so rare that it hasn’t been studied as much as other mental disorders. With only 200 000 people in the US affected, they often suffer in silence, or spend years in isolation ashamed of their condition.

4) Escalating Into Trichotillophagia

While Trichotillomania is obsessive hair pulling, Trichotillophagia is obsessive hair eating, which develops from the original condition. A person suffering from this condition may start out with both pulling and eating, though usually the pulling escalates into eating over time.

When people eat their hair compulsively it can cause massive health problems. The most extreme is when a large mass of hair forms in the stomach that clumps and forces weight loss, abdominal pain and eventually – emergency room admission. The clump is known as a trichobezoar and it needs to be removed immediately in open surgery or the patient will eventually die.

5) A Female Problem?

In a recent case study, an overwhelming proportion of Trichotillomania sufferers were found to be female. No one really knows why, but the logical reason would be that girls tend to internalize their feelings more than boys, and are therefore more prone to seeking emotional comfort – no matter how damaging it may be.

6) The Secret Gene

As science advances and more people come forward with this disorder, naturally progress with happen. Recently scientists have discovered a gene that is said to be responsible for Trichotillomania. Like the ‘addiction gene’ this specific mutation can be manipulated – though we are years away from that kind of cure. In the meantime, these scientists are studying people who are affected by the disorder, studying their genes and coming up with biological solutions to the problem.

7) OCD or Not OCD?

There has been much debate over Trichotillomania, and the world wants to know whether it’s a form of OCD or not. Seeing as this is a ‘realities’ article here is the truth about the situation. Trichotillomania is an impulsive disorder. OCD is obsessive compulsive disorder.

What’s the difference? Not much. The two could even be said to be interchangeable. The same supportive treatment applies, as does the general diagnoses. If you’re a hair puller, you have a form of OCD – it’s not OCD, but its close enough.

A Cure For Pullers?

Trichotillomania is pretty rare, but because of the severe effects on the people who do suffer from the condition – there are treatments that you could try. Cognitive behavioral therapy is an option, as it hypnosis and certain types of medication. These medications work best to calm the patient and suppress irrational urges to pull their own hair out. The most successful treatment for this condition is still constant therapy combined with long term medication. Like most mental disorders it will be a long road to recovery.

9) Damaging Effects

Hair pulling and eating will result in noticeable bald spots, receding hairlines and skin problems, if the disorder is acute. This in turn leads to social exclusion – as the person affected becomes more and more ashamed of what they look like. Wigs help, but they don’t disguise the fact that their eyebrows and other body hair is damaged or gone. This extreme isolation, guilt and shame sometimes end in tragedy and suicide.

10) A Life Long Struggle

The harshest reality of all is that people with Trichotillomania rarely recover. Instead they choose to live with the disorder, doing their best to look normal to the outside world when they go out. Until there is a definitive cure, hair pullers will always struggle to stop this damaging habit. All they can do is work towards it, go to therapy and take calming medication for as long as possible.

About Dana Bashor

On her free time Dana Bashor loves to freelance on different topics and provide consumer alerts for sites like planet antares scam alerts.  Catch up with Dana on her blog Dana Bashor blog where you will find whats going on in her life.

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How, oh how, is this possible?  The beams aren’t fake, that’s one thing.  And this guy’s amazing head-butt powers are further examined on the History Channel show.  He breaks a cinderblock by placing the cinderblock on his head and having someone drop a BOWLING BALL on it. He breaks another cinderblock by having someone hit it with a sledgehammer.  Most of these activities would kill someone, or at least seriously scramble their brains, but Gino/John is able to do this with little side effects.  No, it’s not super easy for him, but he can shake it off pretty quickly.

SPOILER ALERT!

So, after doing the tests and things on this guy, the show’s scientists or doctors or whatever discovered that this guy’s skull is, like, 14.5 mm thick.  The average man’s skull is about 6.5 mm thick, which means that Dudester here has a skull that is over twice as thick as an average skull.  How completely cool is that?

Unfortunately for Gino/John, his SKIN isn’t super thick, so when he does things like breaking metal over his head, or hammering a big nail into a board with his forehead, he still gets a little bloody.

But despite his tendency to get all gory, John Ferraro is actually sort of a superhuman.  He has a super thick skull, which makes this self-proclaimed “Head Butt King” exceptional.  Stan Lee named him “The Human Anvil,” and we’re all sort of hoping he gets his own book, right?

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Funny enough, the condition is common in people who have Chimera.   The lines reportedly follow the “migration of embyronic cells” and can also be found in animals.

To reiterate, the disease is invisible, until the sufferer develops a skin condition that causes the patterns to manifest.  Some of the skin conditions that can make the disease manifest are focal dermal hyperplasia, CHILD syndrome, MIDAS syndrome, sebaceous naevus, McCune-Albright syndrome, Lichen striatus, linear morphoea, and a bunch of other skin disorders you may have never heard of.

Blaschko’s Lines are often talked about in relation to mosaicism, which is a condition similar to and related to chimerism.  In mosaicism, the person or animal has two distinct genetic populations of skin cells that live side by side with one another.  Blaschko’s Lines are the Type 1a and 1b forms of cutaneous mosaicism.  Not all sufferers of cutaneous mosaicism  have Blaschko’s Lines, and not all people who have Blaschko’s lines also have cutaneous mosaicism.

The general thought is that all skin has these stripes, but the conditions we talk about above are the ones who bring the stripes to light.

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Manoj was the first Indian to become a WWF fighter, and he’s been willing to pursue the World’s Strongest Man title despite the fact that his country would not support him financially, nor appreciate that kind of effort.  He’s determined to be the best and strongest Manoj he can be.

Unfortunately, the image of ol’ Manoj is pretty small:

Manoj

But I also found some other images of other people doing this mind-boggling trick so I thought I’d share those with you as well.

Meet Georges Christen.  Not only is he from Luxemborg, which I happen to think is awesome, he also has the Guinness World Record for using his amazing lung power to inflate a hot water bottle.  Pretty awesome, huh?

If you want to increase your lung capacity so you can perform amazing hot water bottle feat like these guys, there are techniques you can try.  One is “Pushing Out,” where you bend over and push all the air out of your lungs, and inhale as you stand back up.  Try holding your breath for 20 seconds when you’re standing straight up, and then push all the air out as you bend over from the waist – keep your arms over your head.

You can find more techniques on LiveStrong.com in an article by Harold Sconiers.

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Daniel Browning Smith as "Rubberboy"

How is he able to do that?  How do contortionists make their bodies do that?  Are they double-jointed?  What is “double-jointed,” anyway?  Lucky for you folks, I went ahead and looked all that up for you, along with a few other tidbits to keep you thrilled and entertained.

Huit Huit - named Makaya Dimbelelo - is a contortionist who suffered extreme poverty in Angola and the Congo before making his way to Europe to join the circus. He performed with the 2008 circus Afrika!Afrika!

If you search “double jointed” you’re likely to come up with the term “hypermobility.”  So no, being double-jointed doesn’t mean that you have two joints where you have one joint, making you able to bend the joint either way.  It means that your joints are hypermobile, they are able to stretch much farther and in different directions than normal joints.

What makes a joint hypermobile?  Sometimes the ends of the bones are shaped differently, making them behave in the joint differently.  Other times, there is a collagen or connective tissue issue that allows the bones to move in the joints differently.  Hypermobility might be genetic, as it tends to run in families.  Sometimes the condition is simply a hypermobility of joints with no other health concerns, but other times the condition is a symptom of a larger health condition.  There are a number of diseases that have hypermobility as a symptom, including Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis (strange, huh?) and Down syndrome, among many others.

Even if one of the diseases is absent, people with hypermobility are more susceptible to fibromyalgia and joint pain, as well as chronic fatigue syndrome.  Other people live healthy and happy lives, and go on to use their hypermobility to make a living and to amaze and astonish.

A contestant in 2003's Contortionist Convention

Somebody call the chiropractor!

performers at Cirque de Soleil

Not all contortionists are hypermobile, as the human muscles can be trained to be extremely flexible, but the most flexible contortionists are hypermobile.  They either have a connective tissue issue or interestingly shaped bones.  Some sources separate contortionists into frontbenders or backbenders, noting that most contortionists have greater ease bending one way or the other.

backbender

another backbender

The cool thing about Browning Smith is that he’s a both bender.  He can bend his body every which way and is super flexible in almost every direction.  He’s the most famous contortionist in the world, and a charming co-host on one of the coolest current TV programs.

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This little guy was born January 15, 2007, right before the beginning of The Year of the Pig.  Since he was born in China, and in China the pig is a sign of fertility (sort that one out, why don’t you?) he was considered to be a harbinger of  good things to come.  Since I can’t find any reports on whether he died or not, I imagine he’s been happily living a two-headed life these last almost 4 years.  Unlike this little guy:

Aw!  Double cuteness, right?  Gemini was born in Perth, Australia and only lived about a week before it died peacefully.  We know this because there were a slew of news reports:  “Two Headed Cat Born in Australia” and then “Two Headed Cat Dies.”  No such news on the piggy, so we’re hoping he’s still alive.

What causes something to be born with two heads?  Usually it’s a case of cojoined twins.  Each head has its own brain, and the brains work together to control the limbs and organs.  The survival rate isn’t good.  Humans, actually, have had a surprisingly successful survival rate.  For instance, Abigail and Brittany Hensel have 2 heads, 2 spinal cords, 2 arms, 2 hearts, 2 stomachs, 2 legs, 1 liver, and 3 kidneys.  Their parents looked into getting them separated, but it wasn’t likely that both sisters would survive the operation.  The girls ended up coping and developing just fine – learning to walk, run, ride a bike, and live like normal girls, just ones who share a body.

The girls graduated from high school in 2008 and started college soon after.  Abby and Britty, as they prefer to be called, have completely different taste in clothes, food, and boys.  They get along great (which is a blessing, right?) and expect to live great and full lives.  Which, with their brains and determination, we are sure they will do.

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It’s fun to learn.  There was this guy, Martin Emmerling, who changed his name to Martin Laurello.  That’s not the interesting part.  He changed his name when he moved to the good old US of A in 1921.  He had a special talent in that he could turn his head a full 180 degrees.  What?!?!?  See for yourself:

That’s crazy!  How is that possible?  I can’t tell you for sure because the internet didn’t tell me, but it was likely some genetic predisposition that Laurello cultivated into an “act.”  He started performing in Europe, and then when he moved to the US he toured with Dreamland circus, Barnum & Bailey, and Ripley’s Odditorium.  He had this strange little pamphlet wherein he told people about what he could do.  He said that it took him three years to perfect his “act.”

It is funny that he is encouraging people to try to do what he does.  IF (and it’s a big if) someone was able to accomplish this, without Laurello’s funky spine situation, it would likely kill them, whether they did it before or after breakfast.  But, at least he wasn’t being stingy with the knowledge and stuff.

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