[maskedinvader]

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.

[weare138]

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]

> 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.

[pineaux]

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.

[ffhhttt]

I’m sorry, what’s not true?

6% ABV was enough to kill germs prior to their discovery but then suddenly it became 60% in the 1800s? Interesting..

People were boiling “dirty” water to make it drinkable since at least Ancient Egypt. There is plenty of evidence they did that during the middle ages. Obviously people preferred clean water and it generally was obtainable most of the time in most inhabited places:

> Do remember that untill Pasteur proved the Germ theory in the mid 19th centurys.

Ok I will. I’m not sure how is this relevant though. I mean if I understand you correctly you’re arguing that people didn’t understood that boiling water killed bacteria, however they knew that turning it into beer did?

> So no, you are in fact wrong.

About what? Obviously people drank beer and they also drank water, clean water was generally available even if much more difficult to procure than nowadays.

> Also, getting a mug of beer from a vat i

You do know that beer (ale) without hops doesn’t really last that long in room temperature? It can and will go bad in days or weeks. Hops weren’t really used in England for instance until the 1400s..

[bondarchuk]

You do not have to know about germ theory to know that boiling water makes it safer to drink.

(Besides that I won't comment on the "medievals drank beer instead of water" controversy as I always see people on either side talking with equal confidence and plausibility)

[ffhhttt]

> equal plausibility

Not really. It’s a myth created in the early 1900s or maybe a few decades earlier.

[weare138]

Beer isn't boiled or distilled, it's fermented. We quickly pasteurized beer before packaging now but they didn't do that back then.

[ffhhttt]

Is there any way to make beer without having to boil the water at some stage? How do you think beer is made?

[AbrahamParangi]

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".

[dragonwriter]

> In 1978, 918 people committed suicide at Jonestown

Almost certainly not; somewhat more than that died related to the cult on the day in question, but many of them, including at the compound, were murdered either outright (as occurred in the mass killing/assassination used deliberately by Jones to justify the call to suicide as the only option for his followers, painting a picture that they would otherwise be killed for their association with the act, an idea that had been carefully prepped by extensive prior indoctrination into the idea that they were targeted), or coerced into taking the poison.

But closed coercive authoritarian cults are a separate phenomenon than any that would explain the “dancing plague”.

[lostlogin]

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-...

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.

[zzzeek]

that is a totally different kind of event, it was not a spontaneous event among people who a day earlier didn't know each other and without any apparent cause. The Jonestown massacre was an intentional, orchestrated event among leaders of a cult and its victims were people who had gone through a substantial cult mind control process for months or years beforehand. There were also people who were murdered in connection with the same event including a US congressman.

in short, the Jonestown massacre was an organized mass murder that had nothing to do with mass psychogenic illness, as the mechanisms of cult mind control have been studied and documented for decades and are well understood.

[jncfhnb]

fwiw These people were drugged up and surrounded by armed guards threatening to kill them.

[AbrahamParangi]

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]

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

[treprinum]

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]

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]

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.

[emmelaich]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

> 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]

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]

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.

[maxbond]

I dunno about teachers, but I definitely remember being a kid and adults having explosive reactions to my saying, "I don't know why."

I think, at least here in the States, we've improved our cultural understanding of how to appropriately talk to/discipline children since then, however.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

I read alot. I probably see 5-10 new "theories" on how to raise children per year, and have for the past few decades.

I've never seen anything even resembling a "don't punish kids if they say they don't know why they misbehaved". I do remember being chastised for it when I was a child myself. And in the last 3 or 4 years, I've seen hints of a few psychological studies that have posited that people often don't know why they do things, but make up reasonings for their behavior after the fact.

But never has anyone put two and two together that I am aware of.

I could write books on the evidence I have for why we've not "improved our understanding of how to discipline children".

[maxbond]

> I've never seen anything even resembling a "don't punish kids if they say they don't know why they misbehaved".

I don't know very much about parenting strategies (I don't have any children yet so I've never taken the time), but I feel like that's compatible with some things I've heard about responsive parenting. I'm guessing you'd know more though?

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

I wouldn't claim I'm anything other than "well read". Definitely not an expert.

Based on past exchanges, there's a 20% chance of someone linking to something from 10 or 15 years ago titled "Don't punish your kids if they say they don't know why they misbehaved".

If so, I'll be happy to see it. If not, still a decent chance that it's out there, and no one knew it to link to it.

But I'm unwilling to assume it exists merely because I'd like to live in a world where it was true. Someone's going to have to show me.

[AbrahamParangi]

Highschool does typically reward bullshit (especially in the humanities where the bar for "verifiably bullshit" is much higher) over "idk lol"

[dmvdoug]

My response to post-hoc rationalizations is to stare and go, “Mmm hmmm, you have no idea do you?”

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

For the ones you can recognize as post-hoc, sure.

[dmvdoug]

I just assume they all are. Then, when someone gives me an actually thought-out reason for why they did something and it seems plausibly pre-hoc (so to speak), I can be legitimately surprised and delighted. But in all honesty, I’m talking about early-to-mid teenagers, for whom most random outbursts are just that, random. Which is not, as it turns out, that big a deal. Adults get huffy because they take it personally. Dudes and dudettes, they’re teenagers. Chill.

[bigfryo]

Yes, humans are evolved to be very conformist and to act in accordance with the rest of the tribe, even though we are evolved also to see ourselves as independent actors.. sociobiologist E O Wilson said that mankind is the primates species that adopted the social model of the ants bees and termites.. and those insects are of course highly conformist and they imitate each other

[maskedinvader]

Alright fair that as a human myself I wouldn’t know what I’d fall prey to, but until we can see this in modern times with video recordings and learn more about the actual mechanism here , I’d like to continue believe this is BS and probably an urban myth.

[lostlogin]

You assume there isn’t a disease process at play. There could have been, eg Sydenham’s chorea.

[maxbond]

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.

[ekaryotic]

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.

[mvncleaninst]

> 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

There's a bunch of literature about this gondii thing. A lot of it sounds like bait for pop psych articles

[metadaemon]

I don’t think I could resist, I love dancing more than a lot of things.

[maskedinvader]

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.

[marginalia_nu]

Ergot is a hell of a drug....

[ReactiveJelly]

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

[maskedinvader]

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]

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.

[NovaDudely]

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.

[psychoslave]

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.

[sufehmi]

People are more cattle-like than they'd like to believe.

Once I realized this, the world makes more sense.

[phailhaus]

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

[citizenpaul]

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.

[prmph]

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

[PhasmaFelis]

> Especially since nothing similar has ever happened again.

The article says otherwise.