It’s late evening, and as you are strolling
leisurely on your way home,
you come across a crying man sitting on the
side of the street.
Being the
sensitive and responsible gentleperson you
are, you can’t just pass the
poor man by.
The stranger looks up, you try to meet his
gaze...but there
isn’t one… he simply doesn’t have eyes!
Under his eyelids you can see
only see a black void... and a thin stream
of tears sliding down his
cheeks...
Are you dreaming?
Is this a nightmare?
How realistic is this
situation?
And can a person really cry without eyes?
But before we unveil this horrifying secret,
let’s look at why our eyeballs
become wet in the first place when we experience
different things like joy
and sadness.
According to one hypothesis, at a time before
we even
became homo sapiens, liquid coming from one’s
eyes reduced one’s
ability to see, demonstrating to enemies and
predators that we archaic
humans weren’t dangerous.
But I doubt that a sobbing caveman aroused
much sympathy with, say, your average, everyday
saber-toothed
predator.
Reflex tears, also known as irritant tears,
are much more explicable.
They come to one’s eyes when a stimulus
appears...such as - obviously
- an irritant.
They appear when - for example - you cut an
onion, or sit
close to a fire and the smoke gets in your
eyes.
In such cases, the
sensory nerves in the cornea notice a foreign
object in your eye and
report this to the brain.
In turn, the large hemispheres of grey matter
in
your skull send a signal back, commanding
the interlopers and invaders
to be immediately rinsed off with moisture
and washed out and away.
The second most common cause of tears is emotions.
When a strong
feeling such as pain, happiness, or fear overwhelms
you, the brain
reacts to the stress by activating the lacrimal
glands...those are the
glands that pump out the tears...the eyes’
waterworks, as it were.
Fascinatingly, the composition of the tear
fluid varies depending on the
cause of the cry.
Reflex tears are 98% water.
But emotional stress
causes us to excrete a substance that includes
some chemical elements
that help to relieve pain and improve mood.
Long story short, if
you cut an onion - an onion you don’t have
any feelings for - then you
get reflex tears.
But if you are a fruitarian, and genuinely
pity the poor
vegetable - then those are emotion tears running
down your cheeks!
However, if crying for adults is a way to
wash tiny invading substances
out of their eyes, or to express their feelings,
for babies it’s an entire
language!
And each one of them has its own.
An international group of
researchers from the University of Würzburg
came to the conclusion that
the cry of a baby is directly dependent on
the type of language that the
mother uses.
If the mother uses a tonic form of speech,
where the stress
in words is shown by an increase in tone,
then the cry of her baby will be
rather diverse in sound frequencies.
And on the contrary - if the mother
speaks in an atonic or monotonic form, where
all of syllables in words
are spoken at the same frequency, then her
baby will cry more steadily
Fortunately, after a period of time, we start
using human speech instead
of tears and crying to request that our parents
feed us, whereupon we
then only cry on specific occasions and for
very particular reasons.
For
example, crying from happiness when a new
Ridddle video episode is
released.
There is a difference in how long you may
cry, depending upon
the level of your emotional attachment to
my show, and also depending
upon you gender, as some Dutch researchers
documented not so long
ago.
To wit: A team of scientists from Tilburg
University in the
Netherlands determined the average duration
of a good cry.
For this they
had to get 5000 intrepid men to weep... these
courageous fathers, son,
uncles and grandpas emotionally sacrificing
themselves for the sake of
science…
According to the results, guys cease crying
much faster than girls.
65%
of men return to baseline in about 5 minutes,
with longer crying spells
associated with intense fear, humiliation,
and disappointment.
As for the
fairer sex, the most common cause for a woman
to cry is helplessness,
or happiness... with only 40% of returning
to a normal emotional state
after 5 minutes.
But to recover from very strong negative emotions
like
guilt, fear, or humiliation, the females of
our species need up to 15
minutes.
And there were a few
subjects of both sexes who shed tears for
over half an hour.
Luckily,
after a while any cry jag will end - they
don’t go on forever... thank
goodness, or we might create whole rivers
out of our tears...
But before
you get the bright idea of travelling to the
Sahara Desert and trying to
humidify that parched wilderness with your
waterworks, let’s figure out if
such a thing is even possible...
Lucky for us, some students at the University
of Leicester in England
decided to find out if it would be feasible
for all the humans on Earth to
weep a river, and fill an Olympic sized swimming
pool.
Replication of the
smallest river in the USA was decided upon
as a goal for the research:
it’s called the Row River, and is just about
200 feet, or 61 meters in
length.
The average volume of a single cry is 6 microliters.
And a standard
Olympic size pool holds 2.5 million liters
of water.
So... if every inhabitant
of the planet captured just 55 of their tears
and dropped them in...it
actually would be enough to fill the pool.
Draining the pool would create
a river somewhat like the Row.
Remarkably, the Row - at 61 feet - is the
smallest in the States, but it is a veritable
Mississippi compared to the
smallest river in the world - the 10 foot,
or 3-meter-long Kuokanjoki river
in Finland.
So, I guess Justin Timberlake really knew
what he was
talking about when he sang “Cry me a river”
…
So, unfortunately, if you want to swim in
the tears of your enemies, this
can only be done metaphorically… but back
to where we started: crying
in the absence of eyes - yes - can literally
be accomplished!
After all, the
organs which give us sigh, and those that
shed tears, are not actually
connected to each other...they are just really
close!
As previously
mentioned, tears come from the special lacrimal
glands, in the corner -
or right next to - the eye.
As long as they are not damaged, you can cry
as much as you want, with or without eyes.
Only those people whose
lacrimal glands are damaged, cannot cry.
The difference for people who
have no eyes?
They only cry for emotional reasons, so their
tears are
the more sincere...
But you might wonder: is the opposite situation
possible?
By this I mean:
can a person with eyes cry but without any
tears?
In fact, there are
people who cry completely dry, while experiencing
incredible agony,
pain, and misery.
This phenomenon is called “xerophthalmia”
- a disorder involving a
painful drying of the cornea.
This terrible disease isn’t new, and has
been well-studied by doctors.
It appears due to
chemical burns, infections, and hypovitaminosis...specifically
a lack of
vitamin A. Children suffering from nutritional
deficiencies are hurt the
most with condition.
With around 250,000 cases of childhood blindness
still being recorded each year in developing
countries!
If an outwardly completely healthy adult person
began to cry but his eyes
remained dry, you’d better take him or her
to the hospital.
Xerophthalmia
is one of the main signs of the infamous Sjogrens
syndrome - a terrible
disease which has no known cure.
The disease damages
connective tissues, and destroys the salivary
and lacrimal glands.
A
person affected by this disease suffers from
excruciating eye pain, and
has difficulty speaking or even chewing food.
With time the syndrome
progresses and affects the vital organs.
But even in the early stages, life
for a sufferer of this syndrome turns into
pure torture.
At the moment,
modern medicine can only try to treat the
symptoms of this malicious
malady, by replacing the missing fluids of
the body.
It’s pitiful to think that
even the sadness caused by the suffering of
those struck by this
disorder must be expressed somehow differently,
as they have no tears
to express just how much pain they are in.
But there is one person on Earth who would
be more than happy to do
away with their tears completely.
This is because when this person cries,
solid crystals form in their eyes.
And no, we’re not talking about Chuck
Norris, who, if he cries at all, probably
weeps tears of hot lava.
We’re
actually talking about one Laura Pons - a
simple primary school teacher
from Brazil.
This poor womans lacrimal glands secrete white
matter
which, upon contact with air, hardens and
turns into sharp edged
crystals, causing incredible pain.
This school teacher often has to take
sick-days in order to rid herself of the accumulation
of her unusual and
painful tears.
The first time this incomprehensible substance
appeared in her eyes
was at the age of 15, and for the next 20
years Laura and her family
dedicated themselves to finding an explanation
for where these crystal
tears came from.
After a series of studies, it turned out that
this
unusual disorder is caused by an excess of…
keratin - the protein that
helps make hair, nails, and the outer layers
of the skin.
This protein can,
unfortunately, appear at inappropriate times
and in the wrong places…
Under normal conditions, when a human is “attacked”
by bacterial
parasites, they get into a fight with a special
substance called mucin.
But
in Laura’s case, this doesn’t happen,
and so her body created a “second
line” of protection: Her cornea secretes
keratin, which - when mixed with
other substances - turns into tiny little
hard and sharp crystals.
Doctors
have, thankfully, finally figured out how
to treat the appearance of these
unusual tears.
There is, however, still no cure for this
bizarre disease.
Thankfully, for rest of us, whether we have
just tears, or eyes, or both, or
neither, we are all able to experience these
feelings of joy and sorrow
that make us truly human...
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