Hey there Brainstuff!
If you’re a person who has a nose and eyeballs,
you’ve probably noticed that when you sneeze,
your eyelids naturally snap shut.
It’s the reason that sneezing while driving
is a terrifying roulette game of death.
I’ve got a question for you: When you were
a kid, did you hear the story that if you
manage to resist this reflex and hold your
eyes open during a sneeze, they’ll pop out
of your head?
Is that true?
Short answer: Almost definitely not, but unfortunately
we can’t be as perfectly certain as we would
all like to be about this particular topic.
Here are the facts:
Fact 1: Your eyes can pop out of their sockets.
It’s not very common, but it can happen.
Doctors call anterior bulging of the eye beyond
its normal orbit a case of “exophthalmos.”
If the eyeball gets dislocated from its socket
enough that its equator is literally outside
your retracted eyelids, this is known as “globe
luxation.”
Fact 2: If you want to sleep soundly tonight
and every other night for the rest of your
life, you should not search the web for images
of “globe luxation.”
Fact 3: Globe luxation is rare, but can be
caused by a number of conditions.
Of course gouging at the eyeball with a finger
or other instrument will do it.
Some various types of traumatic head injury
can cause the eyeballs to pop out of their
sockets.
Violent vomiting has also been cited as a
cause of eyeball dislocation (and I might
add that whoever this refers to has my sympathies,
because that sounds like the worst day ever).
A 2002 ophthalmology study reviewed the 26
cases of spontaneous globe luxation then known
to the medical record.
While most of the cases they found were triggered
by manipulation of the eyelids, the authors
did also claim that a small number were brought
on by other triggers, including things like
crying, coughing, nose-blowing, bending over,
and, yes, sneezing.
So sneezing might have caused the dislocation
of the eyeball in a very, very small number
of known cases.
But does keeping your eyes open during the
sneeze have anything to do with it?
As I said before, almost definitely not.
You can go to YouTube right now and look up
videos of people sneezing with their eyes
open.
It’s not easy, but some people can do it,
and their eyeballs are fine.
The complete lack of correlation between open
eyes and eyeball poppage is a combination
of the fact that sneezing almost never, if
ever, causes the eyes to pop out, and the
fact that your eyelids don’t really do any
of the work of keeping your eyeballs in their
sockets to begin with.
Instead, your eyeballs are primarily held
in place by a combination of six muscles known
as the extraocular muscles, which control
the movements of the eyes and are much stronger
than the eyelids.
So whether or not you can manage to keep your
eyes open during a sneeze probably has little
to no effect on the chances that your eyes
will pop out, and those chances are very,
very slim in the first place...
though possibly not zero...
Sleep tight!
What body health myth drives you up the wall?
Let us know in the comments!
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