What happens when your brain decides that your body is dead?
What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’d have an even weirder answer if you’d listened to
PopSci’s
newest podcast.
The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week
hits iTunes, Soundcloud, Stitcher, and PocketCasts every Wednesday, and it’s your new favorite source for the weirdest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of
Popular Science
can muster.
Check out our second episode below, and keep scrolling for more info about the facts contained therein.
Fact: Sometimes your brain just tells you that you’re dead
By Eleanor Cummins
Most people make it through the day without questioning whether or not they’re...
alive
. And if they did pose the question, they’d find a million comforting answers waiting for them, from the physical (do you move? metabolize? grow?) to the philosophical (“I think, therefore I am”). But all of this goes out the window, it seems, for people with Cotard’s delusion.
Every few years
doctors report an encounter with a patient convinced they are dead
. First defined by the
French neurologist Jules Cotard in 1882
, people suffering from the delusion become convinced that they are skin and bones and perhaps actively putrefying. They report the desire to be among other dead people. They lose their appetites—corpses, after all, don’t need to eat.
To this day, no one is certain what causes the delusion. Some propose an organic issue in the brain, which is likely the case with Capgras delusion, where people believe their loved ones have been replaced with look-alikes. Scientists believe a disruption between facial recognition skills and emotions causes this condition. But some experts think Cotard’s delusion is purely psychological. Regardless of its origins, the case studies of Cotard’s delusion—from
Mademoiselle X
in the 1880s onward—were certainly the weirdest thing I learned this
week
month.
Fact: The first celebrity diet was basically salt and vinegar chips
By Claire Maldarelli
The Internet is full of dietary advice. Want to lose 10 pounds in 10 days? Quit carbs altogether? Avoid added sugar like the plague?
Each nutritional plan is backed up by websites promising scientific evidence
(though there usually isn’t any). And almost every diet has at least one celebrity endorsing the trend and claiming it changed their life.
Last week, I was researching healthy diets for
this story
on lifestyle factors that lead to a longer life. I quickly went down a rabbit hole of the history of diets, and it made me wonder: Who actually was the first celebrity dieter?
While it’s impossible to know for sure, my research led me to Lord Byron, an English poet who lived from 1788 to 1824. The writer attended Cambridge University, and during his time at school,
historians claim
that Byron was
extremely
vain. With a crushing fear of becoming overweight, Byron subsited on a combination of soda water and biscuits. For a little variety, he’d occasionally eat potatoes covered in vinegar.
Byron was likely thinking only of himself, but it turns out he had a profound effect on the other young poets of his day—many of them turned to the same diet or variations thereof, like eating vinegar and rice. They all sought that same pale and thin look that Byron wore with such pride.
But, reality check: Carbs drenched in vinegar do not a nutritious diet make. As we’ve
previously reported
, vinegar has few, if any, health benefits. And while potatoes
are a healthier food
than low-carb trends might have you believe,
you’d have to eat
a lot
of them to get all the vitamins and nutrients you need to stay well
. As cool as celebrities are, they are probably not the best people to take dieting advice from.
