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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