5 ms·

I’ve read about these in the past as well and I honestly find it very hard to believe this story as described. Perhaps my own bias for never being inclined to d

I’ve read about these in the past as well and I honestly find it very hard to believe this story as described. Perhaps my own bias for never being inclined to dance is contributing to the skepticism. Surely there would be people like me who could resist the dancing plague.

ekaryotic 3y ago
A healthy person could surely resist, but consider something like toxoplasmosis gondii that is known to modify mouse behaviour to make them more likely to be eaten by cats. couldn't it be possible that the malnourished would be susceptible to rhythmic manipulation.
- metadaemon 3y ago
  I don’t think I could resist, I love dancing more than a lot of things.
  - maskedinvader 3y ago
    Sure, but I’d imagine if you’re healthy and strong minded, you’d stop when you’re tired or hungry or something. I guess I’ll be more convinced if someone figures out the mechanism of action at play here the explains this dancing plague.
- mvncleaninst 3y ago
  > Looking at humans, studies using the Cattell's 16 Personality Factor questionnaire found that infected men scored lower on Factor G (superego strength/rule consciousness) and higher on Factor L (vigilance) while the opposite pattern was observed for infected women.[99] Such men were more likely to disregard rules and were more expedient, suspicious, and jealous. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasma_gondii https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasma_gondii There's a bunch of literature about this gondii thing. A lot of it sounds like bait for pop psych articles
marginalia_nu 3y ago
Ergot is a hell of a drug....
citizenpaul 3y ago
I find high skepticism as well. When things too farfetched to be real like this happen I have to assume human intervention was involved. Perhaps some lord thought it amusing to pay people to dance and not tell anyone. Perhaps a competing king wanted to make these areas look bad or cause a panic. Especially since nothing similar has ever happened again.
- PhasmaFelis 3y ago
  > Especially since nothing similar has ever happened again. The article says otherwise.
- prmph 3y ago
  Your comment makes no sense. Applying a bit critical thinking, the following are evident: 1. No one could be paid to dance until their own death, and 2. Mass dancing hysteria has happened several times over the ages. Just Google it. And there have been other types of mass psychosis as well, some even in the last century. Heck, Havana Syndrome from a few years ago [1] may be a case of it. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havana_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havana_syndrome
phailhaus 3y ago
I don't think anybody said that it had a 100% "infection rate".
weare138 3y ago
I think there's another class of psychoactive compounds in common use in medieval Europe at the time that could explain the dancing plague. Anticholinergic tropanes such as atropine, hyoscyamine and especially scopolamine. These are the psychoactive compounds found in plants like henbane, mandrake, angel's trumpets, jimsonweed (datura) and nightshade (belladonna). These plants were commonly used as adulterants in beer and beer was commonly drunk instead of water because the alcohol sterilized it. In low to moderate doses they act as a deliriant which is why they were commonly added to low-quality beer but at high doses things get really weird. Some of the bizarre effects of these compounds is it causes people to be easily influenced and causes vivid hyper-realistic hallucinations akin to a psychotic break. Also it's incredibly long lasting especially scopolamine. Effects from scopolamine overdoses have been reported to last for up to 48 hours or more. In fact scopolamine was a compound the CIA experimented with as a 'truth serum' back in the day.
- ffhhttt 3y ago
  > drunk instead of water because the alcohol sterilized it. No it didn’t. Just think about it, beer is what? 4-10% ABV? That’s not even remotely enough to sterilize anything. Boiling which is part of the beer making process obviously helped and beer could be stored for longer than some other beverages but people obviously drank water and understood that boiling it made it safer to drink.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - pineaux 3y ago
    No, this is definitely not true. A lot of water in the middle ages was exceedingly bad quality. Especially in cities. People also have to remember that there was no running water. So people had to collect water. Because there were no sewage systems, the ground water was dangerous to drink. Although cooking water will kill the pathogens, it does not destroy all the poissons. Also they had the miasma theory of disease, so although many old books spoke of the benefits of cooking water, it was not, in fact, known that tiny things in the water were to be killed to make it safe for consumption. Add to that that fuel in cities was expensive and needed to be transported from afar. Also, getting a mug of beer from a vat is a lot less tedious than fetching water, making a fire and cooking it. So no, you are in fact wrong. Especially for city life, but also for around that. Do remember that untill Pasteur proved the Germ theory in the mid 19th centurys. Many doctors never washed their hands before a surgery. Many, many women died unnecessarily during child birth because doctors helped with labor and did research on corpses on the same day.
treprinum 3y ago
People in the past were underfed with all kinds of nutritional deficiencies. We can even today observe what a lack of some vitamins does to people in poor countries, e.g. schizophrenia from the lack of B3 or beri-beri from the lack of B1, scurvy from the lack of C etc. It's quite possible there was some sort of deficiency leading to neural damage manifesting itself as "dancing".
- User23 3y ago
  Also there’s the ever popular ergot/mushroom conjectures for such phenomena. I think it’s a bit overused but probably partly true part of the time.
- ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
  If it was a nutritional deficiency, then surely the symptoms would appear in different people at different times, but this event appears to be synchronised. To me that sounds more like some kind of neurotoxin that they were exposed to.
ReactiveJelly 3y ago
Maybe you and I are immune because the plague reduced the number of people who enjoy dancing in the gene pool?
- maskedinvader 3y ago
  Ah survivor ship bias I think it’s called, that’s one explanation, but how does the original gene mutation work ? How did it survive for apparently so many generations ? Seems to be the kind of mutation that would have not survived if it literally caused you to dance till you die.
  - carlmr 3y ago
    The question is rather if there's sufficient evolutionary pressure to rule this out. It led to a handful of people dancing till they die, ok, but maybe only in a dense urban setting which wasn't an issue before. Maybe that gene conferred other benefits, like more stamina. Maybe it's like a lot of disease which don't seem to have benefits but still affect a much larger part of the population.
NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
> Surely there would be people like me who could resist the dancing plague. Intelligent humans are in some ways the dumbest humans. You assume that your consciousness/will is the only "code" executing inside your skull. It isn't. You're just unaware of the rest. What is it doing, and how much influence or control does it have on your overt behavior? Well, wouldn't you like to know. The biggest part of the illusion that "you" are in control, is your capacity to re-interpret your behaviors after the fact. Someone asks you, "hey, why'd you A?" and your brain panics at the idea of blurting out "I honestly don't know". There has to be an answer. You're not exactly lying when you come up with that answer, it's more like your best guess. I think in some ways, all those teachers and other authority figures that punished you extra if you said "I dunno" when they asked why'd you break the rules have something to do with this too. Finally, if you could be the one person immune to so-called dancing plagues... would you really want to be the inhuman freak who didn't?
- jazzyjackson 3y ago
  Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders What the part that isn't thinkin', isn't thinkin' of Should you worry when the skullhead is in front of you Or is it worse because it's always waiting Where your eyes don't go Where your eyes don't go a part of you is hovering It's a nightmare that you'll never be discoverin' You're free to come and go, or talk like Kurtis Blow But there's a pair of eyes, in back of your head Where your eyes don't go a filthy scarecrow waves its broomstick arms When you turn around to look it's gone behind you On its face it's wearin' your confused expression Where your eyes don't go
- dmvdoug 3y ago
  I don’t know of any teachers, who punish teenagers extra when they say they don’t know why they did something. Honestly, they’re just being honest. They really don’t know why they do impulsive things.
  - AbrahamParangi 3y ago
    Highschool does typically reward bullshit (especially in the humanities where the bar for "verifiably bullshit" is much higher) over "idk lol"
maxbond 3y ago
There have been similar modern phenomena, like the "dancing" cats of Minamata, a town exposed to organic mercury. It seems plausible to me that a bunch of people were exposed to a neurotoxin and that they moved around in a sort of dance.
AbrahamParangi 3y ago
In 1978, 918 people committed suicide at Jonestown. I think we should all understand that an average human being surrounded by people acting insane will act insane themselves. Some won't, some have contrary convictions or just don't like to go with the flow, but this isn't typical. Better to understand that this is innate human nature and guard against it than to just say "couldn't be me".
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  fwiw These people were drugged up and surrounded by armed guards threatening to kill them.
  - AbrahamParangi 3y ago
    It's uncertain that these people were in-fact drugged up and the guards themselves killed themselves as well. Moreover, it doesn't really excuse the point. It was insane. Insane for the people to be there. Insane for the guards to keep them there. Insane for their leaders to tell them to die.
    - jncfhnb 3y ago
      Sure there were some crazies. But it wasn’t 900 people thinking suicide was a great idea. They were held at gunpoint, probably drugged, and being told that they were going to face a fate worse than death if they didn’t kill then selves. The vast majority of these people were almost certainly not happy with the setting, to say the least
- lostlogin 3y ago
  It doesn’t have to be hysteria or mass psychosis or whatever Jonestown was. There are disease processes which cause some pretty distinctive movements, and this was pointed out last time this topic came up here. The leg movements in the below case report are dance-like and it’s epilepsy. https://bmcneurol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12883-017-0797-2 https://bmcneurol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12883-... In the first link Dang has posted (early 2023) user c3534l started a thread that is interesting. St. Vitis' Dance and Sydenham’s chorea are discussed and it’s an interesting and convincing read.
emmelaich 3y ago
For contemporary examples, find a video of a evangelistic / revivalist meeting.(0) People will dance, jog, shriek 'spontaneously'. Some of it would be acted but there's strong social pressure to join. The booming sounds and bright lights contribute. (0) or better, don't unless you use an incognito window lest you get recommendations for more.
- hattmall 3y ago
  That's a really good point I once accidentally wandered into something like this because I saw hordes of kids my age going into a convention center so I slipped in. It was absolutely insane and there were 1000s of teenagers, all speaking in tongues and falling on the floor rolling around. People walked around splashing water and a "the preacher" was in the boom of like a power company truck and he was flying over the crowd while the truck drove around and people threw money at it. There were several cars with hydraulics bouncing in the crowd as well. It was completely nuts, then later I talked to some of the kids that were there and they said that it was their first time speaking in tongues and they didn't really remember everything that was going on.
  - bigfryo 3y ago
    You should read the book called the corruption of reality by Schumacher.. the idea there is that human beings are evolved to enter a altered state of consciousness during ceremonies and rituals combined with action and music, usually drums.. that's why you hear reports of primitive tribes in the past entering a trance State and writhing on the floor.. Professor Schumacher theorized that humans are evolved to enter such a trance state in order to regularly suppress their fear of death..
    - hattmall 3y ago
      Damn, that also resonates with me because I can feel that with raves and house music. Perhaps it's not that different than the church people if that's what they have been attuned to. I seem to recall "Deep House Cures Depression" being a theme on some promotions. Maybe they were on to something.
NovaDudely 3y ago
It is hard to tell, as someone else said Jones town is a good example of insane ideas taking hold of a group. Historical accuracy is difficult even on short time scales. Penn and Tell on their show BS used the "official" recipe of Elvis Presely Banana Bacon Sandwich as an example of how even in living memory two people in a position of authority on these things could have two very different recipes. To be a little more high brow, Pliny the Elder was the one that wrote of Emperor Nero playing the harp as watching Rome burn. He wrote this 150 years (?) after the fact and was very skeptical of this claim as it had been passed along verbally and manipulated heavily along the way. Could be similar here.
sufehmi 3y ago
People are more cattle-like than they'd like to believe. Once I realized this, the world makes more sense.
psychoslave 3y ago
At large scale, it’s unlikely any random virus/bacteria won’t hit some healthy carrier. Except if the whole infected population counts only clones, of course.

ekaryotic 3y ago

A healthy person could surely resist, but consider something like toxoplasmosis gondii that is known to modify mouse behaviour to make them more likely to be eaten by cats. couldn't it be possible that the malnourished would be susceptible to rhythmic manipulation.

metadaemon 3y ago
I don’t think I could resist, I love dancing more than a lot of things.
- maskedinvader 3y ago
  Sure, but I’d imagine if you’re healthy and strong minded, you’d stop when you’re tired or hungry or something. I guess I’ll be more convinced if someone figures out the mechanism of action at play here the explains this dancing plague.
mvncleaninst 3y ago
> Looking at humans, studies using the Cattell's 16 Personality Factor questionnaire found that infected men scored lower on Factor G (superego strength/rule consciousness) and higher on Factor L (vigilance) while the opposite pattern was observed for infected women.[99] Such men were more likely to disregard rules and were more expedient, suspicious, and jealous. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasma_gondii https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasma_gondii There's a bunch of literature about this gondii thing. A lot of it sounds like bait for pop psych articles

marginalia_nu 3y ago

Ergot is a hell of a drug....

citizenpaul 3y ago

I find high skepticism as well. When things too farfetched to be real like this happen I have to assume human intervention was involved. Perhaps some lord thought it amusing to pay people to dance and not tell anyone. Perhaps a competing king wanted to make these areas look bad or cause a panic. Especially since nothing similar has ever happened again.

PhasmaFelis 3y ago
> Especially since nothing similar has ever happened again. The article says otherwise.
prmph 3y ago
Your comment makes no sense. Applying a bit critical thinking, the following are evident: 1. No one could be paid to dance until their own death, and 2. Mass dancing hysteria has happened several times over the ages. Just Google it. And there have been other types of mass psychosis as well, some even in the last century. Heck, Havana Syndrome from a few years ago [1] may be a case of it. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havana_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havana_syndrome

phailhaus 3y ago

I don't think anybody said that it had a 100% "infection rate".

weare138 3y ago

I think there's another class of psychoactive compounds in common use in medieval Europe at the time that could explain the dancing plague. Anticholinergic tropanes such as atropine, hyoscyamine and especially scopolamine. These are the psychoactive compounds found in plants like henbane, mandrake, angel's trumpets, jimsonweed (datura) and nightshade (belladonna). These plants were commonly used as adulterants in beer and beer was commonly drunk instead of water because the alcohol sterilized it. In low to moderate doses they act as a deliriant which is why they were commonly added to low-quality beer but at high doses things get really weird. Some of the bizarre effects of these compounds is it causes people to be easily influenced and causes vivid hyper-realistic hallucinations akin to a psychotic break. Also it's incredibly long lasting especially scopolamine. Effects from scopolamine overdoses have been reported to last for up to 48 hours or more. In fact scopolamine was a compound the CIA experimented with as a 'truth serum' back in the day.

ffhhttt 3y ago
> drunk instead of water because the alcohol sterilized it. No it didn’t. Just think about it, beer is what? 4-10% ABV? That’s not even remotely enough to sterilize anything. Boiling which is part of the beer making process obviously helped and beer could be stored for longer than some other beverages but people obviously drank water and understood that boiling it made it safer to drink.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- pineaux 3y ago
  No, this is definitely not true. A lot of water in the middle ages was exceedingly bad quality. Especially in cities. People also have to remember that there was no running water. So people had to collect water. Because there were no sewage systems, the ground water was dangerous to drink. Although cooking water will kill the pathogens, it does not destroy all the poissons. Also they had the miasma theory of disease, so although many old books spoke of the benefits of cooking water, it was not, in fact, known that tiny things in the water were to be killed to make it safe for consumption. Add to that that fuel in cities was expensive and needed to be transported from afar. Also, getting a mug of beer from a vat is a lot less tedious than fetching water, making a fire and cooking it. So no, you are in fact wrong. Especially for city life, but also for around that. Do remember that untill Pasteur proved the Germ theory in the mid 19th centurys. Many doctors never washed their hands before a surgery. Many, many women died unnecessarily during child birth because doctors helped with labor and did research on corpses on the same day.

treprinum 3y ago

People in the past were underfed with all kinds of nutritional deficiencies. We can even today observe what a lack of some vitamins does to people in poor countries, e.g. schizophrenia from the lack of B3 or beri-beri from the lack of B1, scurvy from the lack of C etc. It's quite possible there was some sort of deficiency leading to neural damage manifesting itself as "dancing".

User23 3y ago
Also there’s the ever popular ergot/mushroom conjectures for such phenomena. I think it’s a bit overused but probably partly true part of the time.
ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
If it was a nutritional deficiency, then surely the symptoms would appear in different people at different times, but this event appears to be synchronised. To me that sounds more like some kind of neurotoxin that they were exposed to.

ReactiveJelly 3y ago

Maybe you and I are immune because the plague reduced the number of people who enjoy dancing in the gene pool?

maskedinvader 3y ago
Ah survivor ship bias I think it’s called, that’s one explanation, but how does the original gene mutation work ? How did it survive for apparently so many generations ? Seems to be the kind of mutation that would have not survived if it literally caused you to dance till you die.
- carlmr 3y ago
  The question is rather if there's sufficient evolutionary pressure to rule this out. It led to a handful of people dancing till they die, ok, but maybe only in a dense urban setting which wasn't an issue before. Maybe that gene conferred other benefits, like more stamina. Maybe it's like a lot of disease which don't seem to have benefits but still affect a much larger part of the population.

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago

> Surely there would be people like me who could resist the dancing plague. Intelligent humans are in some ways the dumbest humans. You assume that your consciousness/will is the only "code" executing inside your skull. It isn't. You're just unaware of the rest. What is it doing, and how much influence or control does it have on your overt behavior? Well, wouldn't you like to know. The biggest part of the illusion that "you" are in control, is your capacity to re-interpret your behaviors after the fact. Someone asks you, "hey, why'd you A?" and your brain panics at the idea of blurting out "I honestly don't know". There has to be an answer. You're not exactly lying when you come up with that answer, it's more like your best guess. I think in some ways, all those teachers and other authority figures that punished you extra if you said "I dunno" when they asked why'd you break the rules have something to do with this too. Finally, if you could be the one person immune to so-called dancing plagues... would you really want to be the inhuman freak who didn't?

jazzyjackson 3y ago
Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders What the part that isn't thinkin', isn't thinkin' of Should you worry when the skullhead is in front of you Or is it worse because it's always waiting Where your eyes don't go Where your eyes don't go a part of you is hovering It's a nightmare that you'll never be discoverin' You're free to come and go, or talk like Kurtis Blow But there's a pair of eyes, in back of your head Where your eyes don't go a filthy scarecrow waves its broomstick arms When you turn around to look it's gone behind you On its face it's wearin' your confused expression Where your eyes don't go
dmvdoug 3y ago
I don’t know of any teachers, who punish teenagers extra when they say they don’t know why they did something. Honestly, they’re just being honest. They really don’t know why they do impulsive things.
- AbrahamParangi 3y ago
  Highschool does typically reward bullshit (especially in the humanities where the bar for "verifiably bullshit" is much higher) over "idk lol"

maxbond 3y ago

There have been similar modern phenomena, like the "dancing" cats of Minamata, a town exposed to organic mercury. It seems plausible to me that a bunch of people were exposed to a neurotoxin and that they moved around in a sort of dance.

AbrahamParangi 3y ago

In 1978, 918 people committed suicide at Jonestown. I think we should all understand that an average human being surrounded by people acting insane will act insane themselves. Some won't, some have contrary convictions or just don't like to go with the flow, but this isn't typical. Better to understand that this is innate human nature and guard against it than to just say "couldn't be me".

jncfhnb 3y ago
fwiw These people were drugged up and surrounded by armed guards threatening to kill them.
- AbrahamParangi 3y ago
  It's uncertain that these people were in-fact drugged up and the guards themselves killed themselves as well. Moreover, it doesn't really excuse the point. It was insane. Insane for the people to be there. Insane for the guards to keep them there. Insane for their leaders to tell them to die.
  - jncfhnb 3y ago
    Sure there were some crazies. But it wasn’t 900 people thinking suicide was a great idea. They were held at gunpoint, probably drugged, and being told that they were going to face a fate worse than death if they didn’t kill then selves. The vast majority of these people were almost certainly not happy with the setting, to say the least
lostlogin 3y ago
It doesn’t have to be hysteria or mass psychosis or whatever Jonestown was. There are disease processes which cause some pretty distinctive movements, and this was pointed out last time this topic came up here. The leg movements in the below case report are dance-like and it’s epilepsy. https://bmcneurol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12883-017-0797-2 https://bmcneurol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12883-... In the first link Dang has posted (early 2023) user c3534l started a thread that is interesting. St. Vitis' Dance and Sydenham’s chorea are discussed and it’s an interesting and convincing read.

emmelaich 3y ago

For contemporary examples, find a video of a evangelistic / revivalist meeting.(0) People will dance, jog, shriek 'spontaneously'. Some of it would be acted but there's strong social pressure to join. The booming sounds and bright lights contribute. (0) or better, don't unless you use an incognito window lest you get recommendations for more.

hattmall 3y ago
That's a really good point I once accidentally wandered into something like this because I saw hordes of kids my age going into a convention center so I slipped in. It was absolutely insane and there were 1000s of teenagers, all speaking in tongues and falling on the floor rolling around. People walked around splashing water and a "the preacher" was in the boom of like a power company truck and he was flying over the crowd while the truck drove around and people threw money at it. There were several cars with hydraulics bouncing in the crowd as well. It was completely nuts, then later I talked to some of the kids that were there and they said that it was their first time speaking in tongues and they didn't really remember everything that was going on.
- bigfryo 3y ago
  You should read the book called the corruption of reality by Schumacher.. the idea there is that human beings are evolved to enter a altered state of consciousness during ceremonies and rituals combined with action and music, usually drums.. that's why you hear reports of primitive tribes in the past entering a trance State and writhing on the floor.. Professor Schumacher theorized that humans are evolved to enter such a trance state in order to regularly suppress their fear of death..
  - hattmall 3y ago
    Damn, that also resonates with me because I can feel that with raves and house music. Perhaps it's not that different than the church people if that's what they have been attuned to. I seem to recall "Deep House Cures Depression" being a theme on some promotions. Maybe they were on to something.

NovaDudely 3y ago

It is hard to tell, as someone else said Jones town is a good example of insane ideas taking hold of a group. Historical accuracy is difficult even on short time scales. Penn and Tell on their show BS used the "official" recipe of Elvis Presely Banana Bacon Sandwich as an example of how even in living memory two people in a position of authority on these things could have two very different recipes. To be a little more high brow, Pliny the Elder was the one that wrote of Emperor Nero playing the harp as watching Rome burn. He wrote this 150 years (?) after the fact and was very skeptical of this claim as it had been passed along verbally and manipulated heavily along the way. Could be similar here.

sufehmi 3y ago

People are more cattle-like than they'd like to believe. Once I realized this, the world makes more sense.

psychoslave 3y ago

At large scale, it’s unlikely any random virus/bacteria won’t hit some healthy carrier. Except if the whole infected population counts only clones, of course.