109. Two horror movies: one documental, another – Hollywood

A day before my departure in Munich we watched Shyamalans The happening recently released. Personally, I like Shyamalan, especially Six sense and Unbreakable, but this one was a disaster. First of all, the acting – it was just absent. Second, the story – it was not scary at all, instead, it was stupid (SPOILERS below, but you know, there is nothing to spoil actually).

Plants (that is, trees, flowers, etc., you got the idea) conciously entered into interaction with each other and decided to kill all human beings on Earth. In order to do that, they started to emit some kind of neurotoxin into air. Once a human being smells it, she/he first first stops all activities (walking, for example) and than tries to kill herself. Particular ways of suicide demonstrated in the movie included: a) jumping from the roof, b) feeding yourself to a tiger, if you are in a zoo, c) shooting yourself in the head, d) getting in the car and then directing it to a nearest tree at high speed, etc., etc. Oooo, that is where Shyamalan have shown the power of imagination!

It was rather complicated for Shyamalan to show that plants are evil antagonists of ours, so growing danger in the movie was signalised by wind. If a wind blows, then that is it – you are going to breath with neurotoxin and die in 1 to 5 minutes.

Well…

1. In real life, if the wind blows, you should be actually safer, since the concentration of the neurotoxin will drop. Quite the contrary, higher concentration of the neurotoxin will be found in places (of course, with plants emitting it ), where air is static.
2. Plants do want to defend themselves in Nature. Typically, they either produce poison, not neurotoxins, or their smell attracts predators.
3. Neurotoxins do not typically lead to the desire of suicide However, the increase of the latter desire is quite possible if a) you watch crappy movies so often (but I shall not watch them anymore, I swear!) and b) if you happen to get certain parasites actively influencing your nervous system during their life cycle.

And this brings me to the interesting story which I have recently learned from the Neurophilosophy blog (terrific blog by the way, I highly recommend it). It also demonstrates that, as usual, real life is so much more scary than any Hollywood horror movie.

Usually, getting a parasite in your brain is not what one should be afraid of, especially if you follow simple basic rules of personal hygiene: they enter brain through the blood, and hematoencephalic barrier is extremely effective in dealing with such things; say, viruses are much more dangerous in this respect, since they penetrate the HEB much more easily.

But sometimes the bad thing may happen, especially if you eat unwashed food or uncooked pork. Let me pass the microphone to Mo:

Fox 10 News has a rather gruesome story about the removal of a live parasitic worm from a woman’s brain, which is accompanied by a film clip containing footage of the surgical procedure.

As the film explains, the woman, who lives in Arizona, first started to experience flu-like symptoms, followed by numbness in her left arm which grew progressively worse. Neurosurgeon Peter Nakaji operated, expecting to find a tumour in the brainstem, but instead found and removed a tapeworm.

It goes on to say that the woman was infected either by eating uncooked pork or unwashed food contaminated with infected human faeces (making this most probably a pork tapeworm infection); that this was the sixth such case seen by Nakaji in the past few months; and that this is extremely rare but has started to increase recently.

Horrific as this all sounds, the woman in the film was in fact very fortunate, because if it had been the tapeworm larvae, instead of the worm itself, which had entered her brain, the consequences of her infection would have been much more severe.

The moral of the story is simple: wash your hands before the meal!! And, please, cook your meal before eating.