Out-of-Context Screencaps vol. 1

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Your Subconscious is Burning - an Investigation

Ladies and gentlemen, MS Paint.

There's a knowledge tidbit that states that people who only know a little about something are more dangerous than those who know nothing, as the ones who know a little tend to know just enough to be wrong - as well as just enough to think they're right.  There's also a knowledge tidbit that states that people who simply repeat tidbits without researching them will be sent through the spanking machine.  Tidbits can be dangerous, that's what I'm trying to say, and no tidbits are arguably more dangerous than medical speculation, a practice as old as pain itself and responsible for a lot of deaths across the intelligence spectrum.  The most publicized are most likely deaths from drug overdoses and combinations, as hard info on illegal drugs can be difficult to find due to the lack of participants willing to risk their lives breaking the law for the speculation of medical doctors.  Less lethal but equally publicized are speculations on supposed aphrodisiacs, a mostly worthless area of study that causes people to consume all sorts of nonsense, the most damaging of all the horns of rhinoceros.  Most of these fall under the banner of the Old Wive's Tale, a nebulous designation that indicates something that isn't proven in the least but is often repeated and has seemingly been around since time immemorial, i.e. "High heart rate means your fetus will be a girl." and "Eating a lot of chocolate will give you acne/warts."  Sometimes, in the case of Tales such as "People swallow an average of eight spiders a year while asleep.", the source of the myth can be traced to within an average lifetime, though usually those sources are difficult to trace.  That particular myth was investigated by the brilliant YouTube video educator CGP Grey after he used it in a different video as a joke and then wondered where it came from.  He didn't get terribly far (mostly because of a source having different titles for different countries) but the lengths he had to go to get his dead end were interesting enough.

I've come across my own Old Wive's Tale of dubious origins and veracity, and like the spider myth it seems to have persisted more for its prank value than its believability.  In multiple instances, from Double Indemnity to Channel Awesome reviewer Bennett the Sage, I've heard of people mentioning that they smell burnt toast shortly before dying, either of a stroke, tumor or seizure, and web searches reveal that this is a widespread and specific belief (for example, a forum user in this link heard it on an episode of Archer).  It's reasonable to assume this is one of those tidbits that gets passed on because of the desire to frighten people for a laugh, kind of like when my grade school friend Michael tried to convince me that white Tic Tacs were poisonous right after I ate a handful of them.  This might help explain how the toast smell preceding a seizure or stroke was much more common than an indication of a tumor, as we fear violent, sudden deaths far more than drawn-out affairs with the possibility of recovery.  Human beings are generally poorly trained in scent identification and because the olfactory system is deeply connected with the memory centers of the brain false connections get made all the time, making misidentification extremely easy.  An interesting case came from the life of Top Gear co-host James May who thought he was smelling burnt toast and went to Twitter for answers using the hashtag #GhostToast, Twitter obviously being a first responder in olfactory confusion.  An unhelpful fan responded "stroke!" and gave May a scare before he found the source of the smell outside of his brain.  He then said to his followers "You've all scared the shit out of me."  The article this all appeared in linked to a thread on Straight Dope asking about the toast-stroke connection and a particular comment got my curiosity up:

Notice the "Canadian joke" signifier?  How is smelling burnt toast before a seizure Canadian, and is that really so funny as to be a joke?  matt mcl wrote this as if he'd heard it a hundred times, so it must have gained some traction across the dirt pond.  Luckily for me, this gelled with my other major toast-seizure connection, Wilder Penfield.  Penfield was a Spokane-born Canadian neurosurgeon whose research into epilepsy was groundbreaking, so groundbreaking he was apparently dubbed "the greatest living Canadian" during his lifetime.  The link I provided was to his Wikipedia page and near the bottom it mentions that Penfield was featured in a CBC series called Heritage Minutes, a series of minute-long profiles of great Canadians.  The scene was a reenactment of an apparent incident in 1934 where a woman claimed to be smelling burning toast and then had a seizure.  Penfield took her into surgery and started using an implement to stimulate different areas of her brain, causing her to sense different things, and finally he stimulated a part that caused her to smell burnt toast, and she exclaimed accordingly.  The clip is, of course, totally hilarious:

I don't care how many seizures you've had, there is no way to keep from laughing at that.  This is prime '90's cheese we're dealing with here, complete with canned-ass dialogue and horrid acting.  And the best part is that I haven't been able to confirm this incident from Penfield's life in the slightest.  It isn't mentioned in Penfield's two books on epilepsy, though his 1941 book Epilepsy and Cerebral Localisation did mention this: "A sudden unexplained sensation of smell may constitute a seizure, or more often be the initial stage in a more elaborate seizure.  The sensation seems to be always disagreeable, a sharp or smoky or disgusting odor." (p. 106).  Toast in particular is never mentioned in any of his books, nor is the incident or toast itself mentioned in Jefferson Lewis's Something Hidden: A Biography of Wilder Penfield, the only biography of Penfield.  Every search I made trying to link Penfield and toast led back to the Heritage Minutes episode, and as far as I can tell the incident was an amalgamation of similar incidents written specifically for the special.  It's not totally unbelievable, as there's been a long history of guys poking the brain with sticks to get different reactions, so I don't blame the writers for their choice of imagery, but the line "I smell burnt toast!" delivered with a big smile while stirring music plays is too funny to resist meme status.  This show was scene all over Canada and in precisely zero other countries, making its case as a pre-internet, memetic inside joke very strong, and if I was a Canadian at the time I probably would've laughed, too (though I would have been 2 or 3 so most things were funny).  The only loose end is that Double Indemnity line, though I could have imagined it.  If it really was there it could have just been a coincidence but it does stand as a piece of evidence of the toast incident being real - it could have been reported in the news and read by either Indemnity's original author James M. Cain, screenwriter Raymond Chandler or whoever felt it would be a cool thing to reference.  However, it's probably more worthwhile to think about how we'd feel if Fred MacMurray called us "baby" all the time.

I'd like to point out that Penfield made a connection between unpleasant smells and seizures, not strokes, which is more reasonable as a seizure is a neural overload in a specific area whereas a stroke is a severe lack of blood oxygen in the brain, often due to a blood clot, but then again I'm not a doctor.  It is important to note that scaring people with faulty medical information is not only not funny but also quite cruel if the prankee is particularly gullible.  An Old Saw said about medicine is that there are no statistics, only individuals, and every seizure, stroke and tumor have different effects on different people, so if you find yourself leaving the toast in your toaster too long and don't immediately see it I'd keep your fingers off the 911 speed dial - they'll charge you for improper use of emergency lines and you might be ignoring perfectly good burnt toast for too long.

~PNK