How to Survive a Lightning Strike

How to Survive a Lightning Strike

Ferris Jabr

When lightning hits a human being, a survivor must reconcile not only what happened but why it happened. Why me? For most victims, it is not the unforgettable horror of an agonizing ordeal that haunts them—many can’t even recall the incident itself; it’s the mysterious physical and psychological symptoms that emerge, often long after their immediate wounds have healed and doctors have cleared them to return to their normal routines. But nothing is normal anymore. Chronic pain, memory trouble, personality changes, and mood swings can all follow an encounter with lightning, leaving friends and family members confused, while survivors, grappling with a fundamental shift in identity, feel increasingly alienated by the incomprehensible nature of their condition. Something happened in a single moment—something strange and rare, something unbelievable—and after that moment, everything has changed.

Even more confounding is that almost no one in the mainstream medical community can explain what’s happening to them. Although many scientists have spent their careers examining the physics of lightning, only a handful of doctors and researchers have devoted themselves to the study of how lightning damages the human body. The incident rates are simply not high enough to warrant an entire subfield of science. Nearly everything we now know about treating lightning victims concerns the immediate wounds, many of which don’t even require special medical knowledge.

After leaving the hospital, Utley spent months relearning to swallow, move his fingers, and walk. Rehab was just the first chapter of his ordeal, however. In his previous life, Utley was a successful stockbroker who often went skiing and windsurfing. Today, at 62, he lives on disability insurance in Cape Cod. “I don’t work,” he says. “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. I walk and talk and play golf—but I still fall down. I’m in pain most of the time. I can’t walk 100 yards without stopping. I look like a drunk.”

Lightning also dramatically altered his personality. “It made me a mean, ornery son of a bitch. I’m short-tempered. Nothing is fun anymore. I am just not the same person my wife married,” says Utley, who is now divorced. Like many survivors, Utley sees his fateful union with lightning as more than just a close call he was lucky to survive. It marks a moment in which he was split from himself.

How to Survive a Lightning Strike

Ferris Jabr

probably messed up the electrical impulses in his brain, poor dude.

The answer to the question is this. When thunder roars go in doors.

I figured it was time to go indoors when I noticed my colleague's hair was standing on end, as was mine.

probably messed up the electrical impulses in his brain, poor dude.

What is curious to me is the potential for lightning [to] alter the speculated upon endogenous field that works in tandem with the gray matter of the brain.

We're seeing more and more research about fields effecting consciousness, survivors of lightning strikes may provide a novel avenue of investigation...

The problem is that there’s no objective means to measure any subtle change to consciousness. It might not be the lighting strike itself that hs caused his personality change. Could just be a post traumatic stress syndrome.

PSTD does also cause changes to the fMRI readouts, but all it probably tells us it that fMRI is a pseudo science.

PSTD does also cause changes to the fMRI readouts, but all it probably tells us it that fMRI is a pseudo science.

Care to explain why?

PSTD does also cause changes to the fMRI readouts, but all it probably tells us it that fMRI is a pseudo science.

What... the heck?

Why should that be a pseudo science.

Some years ago there was weekly headlines in newspapers about all sorts of correlations between fMRI data and ‘subjectivity’. like this study: Brain Scans on Mormons Show Religion Has a Similar Effect to Taking Drugs Number of participants: 19

Thankfully a study by Eklund et al. kicked of a criticial debate about statistical methods in fMRI studies, which apparently is taken very serious by the ‘fMRI business’.

Abstract from Eklund et al.

Functional MRI (fMRI) is 25 years old, yet surprisingly its most common statistical methods have not been validated using real data. Here, we used resting-state fMRI data from 499 healthy controls to conduct 3 million task group analyses. Using this null data with different experimental designs, we estimate the incidence of significant results. In theory, we should find 5% false positives (for a significance threshold of 5%), but instead we found that the most common software packages for fMRI analysis (SPM, FSL, AFNI) can result in false-positive rates of up to 70%. These results question the validity of a number of fMRI studies and may have a large impact on the interpretation of weakly significant neuroimaging results.

In a follow-up study a year later another group writes: 

The current discussion shows that the validity of fMRI data analysis paradigms has not been uniformly established and needs continued in-depth investigation. fMRI is a complex process that involves biophysics, neuroananatomy, neurophysiology, and statistics (experimental design, statistical modeling, and data analysis). fMRI data have a low signal-to-noise ratio (14, 15). As a consequence, all of the biophysics, neurophysiology, and neuroanatomy that underlie fMRI should be used to design experiments, formulate statistical models, and analyze the data to increase the signal-to-noise ratio and information extraction. Achieving more accurate fMRI data analyses is a challenging interdisciplinary task that requires concerted collaborations among physicists, statisticians, and neuroscientists who, together, can question the current approaches more deeply and construct more accurate analysis methods.

In an ideal fMRI statistical analysis, the relationships among the voxels would take account of the spatial and temporal properties of the experiment and the scanner thermal noise (16). The experiment’s spatial and temporal properties are dictated by the physiological changes (neural activity, blood flow, and blood oxygenation levels) induced by the particular behavioral task and background physiological activity and anatomy (white matter, gray matter, the ventricles, and blood vessels) of the relevant brain regions. The ideal fMRI acquisition scheme would be accompanied by a characterization of these spatial and temporal processes so that the subsequent data analysis can correctly take them into account (16). Improving fMRI statistical methods must combine research to decipher the meaning/origins of the blood oxygen level-dependent signal with characterizations of the spatiotemporal properties of task-related activity, background physiological activity, and scanner properties. Sharing data and methods would greatly expedite validation (9).https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/article...po=2.50000

My personal hunch is that on top of the 3500 studies invalidated due solely due to statistichal methods, several thousands more studies would be invalidated if someone actually tried to reproduce them as is the case in several other studies in the various sciences.