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The Odd Effects of Being Struck By Lightning
HughPickens.com writes: "Ferris Jabr reports in Outside Magazine that every year, more than 500 Americans are struck by lightning. Roughly 90 percent of them will survive, but those survivors will be instantly, fundamentally altered in ways that still leave scientists scratching their heads. For example, Michael Utley was a successful stockbroker who often went skiing and windsurfing before he was struck by lightning. Today, at 62, he lives on disability insurance. "I don't work. I can't work. My memory's fried, and I don't have energy like I used to. I aged 30 years in a second." Lightning also dramatically altered Utley's personality. "It made me a mean, ornery son of a b****." Utley created a website devoted to educating people about preventing lightning injury and started regularly speaking at schools and doing guest spots on televised weather reports.
Mary Ann Cooper, professor emerita at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is one of the few medical doctors who have attempted to investigate how lightning alters the brain's circuitry. According to Cooper, the evidence suggests lightning injuries are, for the most part, injuries to the brain, the nervous system, and the muscles. Lightning can ravage or kill cells, but it can also leave a trail of much subtler damage and Cooper and other researchers speculate that chronic issues are the result of lightning scrambling each individual survivor's unique internal circuitry (PDF). "Those who attempt to return to work often find they are unable to carry out their former functions and after a few weeks, when coworkers get weary of 'covering' for them, they either are put on disability (if they are lucky) or fired," she writes.
Mary Ann Cooper, professor emerita at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is one of the few medical doctors who have attempted to investigate how lightning alters the brain's circuitry. According to Cooper, the evidence suggests lightning injuries are, for the most part, injuries to the brain, the nervous system, and the muscles. Lightning can ravage or kill cells, but it can also leave a trail of much subtler damage and Cooper and other researchers speculate that chronic issues are the result of lightning scrambling each individual survivor's unique internal circuitry (PDF). "Those who attempt to return to work often find they are unable to carry out their former functions and after a few weeks, when coworkers get weary of 'covering' for them, they either are put on disability (if they are lucky) or fired," she writes.
2. it looked to me as if the frontal lobe of the person in story was affected. Frontal lobe is associated with such changes in personality
Years ago when I was in junior high or early high school, my father was taking my younger brother and I to go shopping. I could hear a thunderstorm outside as we were shopping, but we lived in south Florida, so that was nothing out of the ordinary.
As we were heading out to the car after our shopping was done, something occurred that never happened to me before or since: I heard a crack at the exact same time that I saw a flash of light. I didn't see a source for the flash, just the light, seemingly all around. I had been standing next to my dad, who was holding my brother's hand while we were in the parking lot, but when I turned to see what their reactions were to what I assumed was a REALLY close strike, my dad was on the asphalt on his knees with his hands gripping the top of his head. The umbrella he had been holding had fallen to the ground, my brother and I were getting soaked, and my father wasn't responding to us when we asked him if he was all right.
After about a minute, my father was finally able to respond, and was actually rather embarrassed by the whole thing, since he could see and hear us, but was simply incapable of responding. We didn't know exactly what had happened, since none of us had actually seen the lightning strike, but we knew it had to have hit close, given that none of us had ever heard the crack of the strike happen at the exact same time that we saw the flash of light. My brother mentioned that his heart was racing oddly as well.
When we got home, sure enough, we found a little scorch mark on the top of my father's head that was hot to the touch, and over the course of the next week or so, he discovered that his sense of smell had been damaged, with things smelling differently than they should. It ended up being about a year before he could smell things correctly again. We figure that my brother may have also gotten some of it through him, given that he was holding my dad's hand at the time that it happened.
It was probably a good 5 years before the three of us stopped being skittish when outside in a lightning storm, and even to this day I treat them quite a bit differently than I used to, despite having grown up with them around all the time and generally having practiced good habits around them (even at the time of our strike, there were tall poles and trees (that we weren't under) all around us, so it always seemed odd to me that the strike landed where it did).
I was struck as a kid, probably 11 or so years old, when a thunderstorm rolled in during a little league baseball game. I happened to be opening a car door, so was grounded when I was hit. My forearm turned black and blue, like a massive bruising, but I didn't feel any pain in my arm. I was blinded for a short time, my eyes were not closed when the lighting struck. Outside of a headache from the flash, I had no short or long term damage. Yes, I was extremely lucky to have been mostly grounded.
The Guinness record holder was struck 7 times, and lived to 71. Hard to say if the long term effects led to suicide, but an interview of him I heard long ago seemed to indicate a pretty normal guy.
TFA also indicates that not all incidents lead to permanent damage, physical or psychological. As with most events dealing with electricity, there are a massive number of factors involved making each event unique. For example, when I was in the military I saw two people guy get popped by a 550KW generator. Both guys mishandled the same coupling, both were in Texas and on similar training grounds. The primary different was weather and luck. One guy's clothing caught fire and he suffered only minor burns as they put his clothing out, the other guy died almost instantly. It was winter so rainy and wet when the first guy was popped, making its likely that his wet clothing caused a grounding effect which saved him. The second happened in the summer, extremely dry and hot.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
This was 1991 I belive. I was sitting on this tire swing looking at the thunder storm coming into the valley over the city. Next to me 30 feet infront and 20 to the side was a tennis court all fenced off with a 20 foot fence.
As I was sitting there for a bit watching lightning strikes all of a sudden everything went white for a second and when it dissapeared I heard a huge bang and while looking at the sand below my feet, I saw electricity flying around on the ground. Took me a few secs to get orientged again and all I herd was "Holly Fuck", "Holly fuck" "Did you feel that all over your body" from the two guys that were playing in the tennis court.
Nex thing I know some panic attack hit me and I booted it home about 20 feet away. I started to get a clod sweat and when I felt my heart it must have been going 400 + beats per minute. Then it slowed down rapidly and all I could do is sit on the couch and go WTF?!!!
So for about a few weeks after that everytime there was a thunder strom and the lightning strikes got close to home I always felt wird electric charge aroung me. Well I never stuck around and booted it home the second I got the feeling.
Can't say it changed me but was a weird experience.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Why is this rated to 0? It's a true statement--not something to downmod. Downmoding such a comment, I'm sure, actually bespeaks ignorance or violation of the terms of modding! And while that's not new for /., it's still something to have the actual admins take a look at. It's especially problematic, though, since it's a true statement.
While it is preferable to follow certain rules of grammar for use of Latin phrases, that is within the confines of acceptable English practice. "Profesora" has not, in fact, ever been used--as far as I am aware--in the English language, as an English term. Not, at least, enough to be conventional rather than eccentric. These days, perhaps all the more due to it being Spanish (though being in the Western US where we have a lot of Spanish speakers, perhaps I'm just reinforced given that perception; the east coast, on the other hand, tends not to know jack about Spanish from our POV). I am okay with it to the extent someone would have a Latin or Romance background, but the significations associated with "professor" vs. "profes[s]ora" aren't quite the same, so from that POV I would avoid it myself since it would seem to be a mis-communication, therefore an error.
And "-a" isn't even a solid indication, in English, that a term is actually a feminine for Latin. ("-a" isn't even just feminine in Latin, depending on case!). It *frequently* is in Spanish, but not enough for someone without the prior knowledge. For the last three or so centuries, however, even when Latin was widely taught, been acceptable to mix Latin forms as properly understood or most likely to be, rather than force correctness based on the classical Latin forms (and I have critiques on usage dating back over a 100 years in my personal library), so I don't get the hostility: oversensitivity to "correctness", to me, bespeaks being a poseur--as is often the case in English grammar.
It all seems like the pedantry of correct for case with "I and me" without regard for the actual use-intentions of the personal speaking English, given that the complaints are often applied to usages which antedate the oldest grammars and indicate a different mode of thinking altogether--i.e. evince a feature of English-speakers' mind that doesn't even exist in other classical languages. (Even modern, simplified English, possesses pre-classical features, and actual mixtures of features that span several language families, that ante-date the periods of major influence by Romance and Latin upon the Teutonic, e.g. altering mid-vowels to change tense, not just endings). It's the...gilded age of English armchair philology and grammatical-wishful thinking by the sophomorically over-read and over-credentialed, regarded only for being critics and clever...just not "right."
But in general, critiques of English usage typically proceed out of posing rather than expertise. It's a long-standing tradition in Anglophonic countries, and unfortunate for all the confusion has bred. e.g. I was recently standing in line at a post office and literally stood next to two old women, one who had been warned against the horrific error in saying "dug" rather than "digged", and the other warned contrarily about the error of "digged" over "dug." Both were also pissed I wouldn't take their side...or amused that I could explain the history of that "issue" though a young man, and that the other was so stupid to prefer a "non-word" they had never encountered. I actually found myself in disbelief that either could have suffered such limited exposure.
Intelligent idiots are we. | Evil men do not understand justice.
I heard a news report - might have been BBC - years ago that a study had found that a high correlation between lightning strike victims and the probability of developing Multiple Sclerosis later in life.
The after effects sound like the longer term effects of a stroke. I'd guess that both kill some brain cells (or at least fry some pathways). Most of the time, a well treated stroke victim has subtle changes. It's the 80+ year old victims who already could only just barely dress themselves who have a stroke that end up massicely affected. "aged 30 years in a stroke (of lightning)" when you are already feeling like 120 years old leaves you 150 years old, and that's the traditional drooling incontinent stroke victim. That and the untreated stroke victim - the one where they had the stroke sometime in the night, and didn't get any treatment until noon the next day, so they went 16 hours with an untreated blockage or bleed.
For me, I had a massive stroke at 35. Treated within a couple hours (at the hospital within 15 minutes of the first symptom), and the only effects are the very subtle ones. Nobody guesses that I had a stroke, let alone that was one of the biggest the stroke specialists had ever seen. But I know the difference. It does affect energy levels and patience.
I had a 2-year MRI, and 25%+ of my brain was still "darker" than the rest. At least with a stroke, the MRI will show exactly where the damage is, years later. The lightning would affect random connections spread to where there's no identifiable damage area. We aren't smart enough to be able to see brain damage as minor and random as the effects reported here.
Learn to love Alaska
Professor is an English word, albeit one with a Latin origin, and it has been an English word for about 700 years. Most English words do not get inflected by gender. It must be admitted that many occupation-words that can be used as pronouns are inflected (actor/actress, waiter/waitress, etc.), but professor is not among those words. Professora does not appear in any English dictionary I tried, such as dictionary.reference.com. Professor, emeritus, and emerita all appear in every dictionary I tried.
Furthermore, "Professors Emeriti/ae" is often used as the plural. The 's' plural demonstrates that "professor" is being used in its English-language form.
Surely if a student were to talk about their "professors", you would not lecture them on their ignorant use of plurals. Why, then, do you insist that the professor is "professor emeritus" is actually a different word in a different language and therefore subject to different inflections?
And if that isn't convincing, there's the fact that "Professor Emerita" is an officially-conferred title, and therefore it is correct by definition:
http://www.sfu.ca/policies/gaz... -- an example from Canada
http://www.ucc.ie/en/academics... -- an example from Ireland
http://www.vtnews.vt.edu/artic... -- an example from the United States
What I find particulary fascinating though is the insecurity apparent in perhaps a large number of readers who prefer to defend and repeat a corrupt usage from someone who may not have known better, lest their own competency in English be considered.
The pot calling the kettle black.