You Might Be a Zombie . . . (18 page)

Um, what?

Your brain is constantly making guesses and predictions about what’s happening or about to happen around you, and once it has a good idea of what it thinks is about to go down, it acts on that prediction before you’ve made a conscious choice to act. In some cases, it will move parts of your body. Other times it will screw with your perception.

If it didn’t do this, we’d be the clumsiest creatures on the planet. Our brains have to make thousands of snap decisions throughout the day. Imagine if you needed to consciously decide to put one foot in front of the other while flying down those steps. Luckily, there’s a part of your brain that’s constantly making decisions you only find out about after they occur. The creepy part is that you don’t get to decide when it’s time to use autopilot.

Take the starburst il usion to the right. It takes advantage of the fact that your brain has
lots
of experience with converging lines. When we “see” the background starburst pattern in real life, we’re general y traveling toward a point of convergence, on a road or down a tunnel for instance. But no matter how much you try to convince your autopilot to shut the hel up, your brain adjusts your perception by enlarging and distorting the center, as though you were moving toward it. That’s why those perfectly vertical lines look like they’re bending outward in the middle.

Where it really gets weird . . .

In 2008, the
Wall Street Journal
reported on a series of experiments being conducted with brain scanners in Germany, Norway, and the United States.

The scientists found that if they hook you up to a scanner and ask you to make a decision, part of your brain lights up to take action up to ten seconds before you consciously make the decision. So when you’re working out in your head whether or not to go to work tomorrow, a part of your brain has already decided to cal in sick, several seconds before the voice in your head arrives at that same conclusion.

Think about what that means for free will , and prepare to have your mind blown (it should hit you in about ten seconds).

MOVIEGOERS
understand that
most
of what they’re seeing in action flicks is bul shit: Buses won’t jump a sixty-yard gap in the highway, a fire hose is not a bungee cord, and Steven Seagal is a bigger threat to a Sizzler buffet than a gang of criminals. Objectively, our brains
know
that, and yet most real-world bar fights feature at least one guy trying out a move he saw in a martial arts film—and being subsequently shocked to learn he would have been better off casting an ass-kicking spel he’d found in the pages of a Harry Potter novel.

5. BEER BOTTLE OVER THE HEAD

For years, a beer bottle shattered over the head has been the visual shorthand for “this person got knocked unconscious.” But when real people really smack a real beer bottle over someone’s head, one of two things happens: (1) It doesn’t break and they are enraged, or (2) their head gets wet. If you’re lucky, you might open up a cut. If you’re unlucky, it will be on your hand. Otherwise the body attached to the head it broke against can go about the business of kicking your ass while still ful y conscious and, if anything, somewhat refreshed.

You don’t have to take our word for it: Thanks to YouTube and the contents of the beer bottles themselves, there are hundreds of easily accessible failed bottle-over-head experiments. And though each of the amateur scientists involved clearly has a soft skul , they all remain wildly undevastated by their bottle-breaking field work. No one’s saying try this at home, just trust that the mil ions of years evolution spent building a helmet for your brain trumps an empty Bud Light every time.

The rest of
Road House
though? One hundred percent accurate. It’s basical y a documentary.

4. THE TWIST WITH YOUR HANDS/LEGS NECK BREAK

Even if you do it
really hard
and your victim is a
completely
incidental guard outside the enemy’s base, coming up behind someone and cranking their head to the side doesn’t break their neck. You probably suspected this the first time your chiropractor did it to you and you didn’t wake up rol ing through heaven in a wheelchair. When the spine is given a choice between simply turning in the same direction as the neck or detaching from the head, it usually picks the first one.

But what if you leap up, wrap your legs around his head, and kind of twist? Surely something that awesome-looking has to be effective! well, no. And what’s worse, the mythical leg-scissors neck break actually squanders a golden opportunity to do some
real
damage. If you find yourself in a position to execute a leg-around-the-head move, modern jujitsu would recommend a tight triangle choke, thus matching the puny muscles of your opponent’s neck against your comparatively immense leg muscles. If you instead take your pointers from Jean-Claude Van Damme movies and just twist your hips awkwardly, you’l be astonished at how much your opponent doesn’t die. In fact, you’l be lucky if you manage to give him an Indian burn with your jeans before he takes advantage of the prime penis-biting position you’ve put him in. In short: No one will be dead and you’l both go home with a lot of explaining to do to your wives.

3. THE STANDING ARM-BREAK

If Steven Seagal blocks your punch, there’s a really good chance you’re going to be the bad type of double jointed in the very near future. Whether he’s cracking arms over his shoulder or kicking knees in the wrong direction, all extremities turn to crispy breadsticks under Seagal’s awesome powers.

According to martial arts movies, a half pound of pressure shatters a kneecap, while according to real life Hollywood got all its information on bones wel before the invention of milk.

It takes a lot more than yanking on an arm to break it. Two much more likely things happen first: Either the body attached to the arm goes in the direction you pull it, or the shoulder simply dislocates. Trying to snap the bone before one of these things happens is like trying to knock a wall down by jumping into the window.

There is actual documentation of a forced arm-breaking, but it took more than Steven Seagal gently leaning his considerable bulk against an elbow to make it happen. At UFC 48: Payback, jujitsu expert Frank Mir locked his entire 250-pound body onto Tim Sylvia’s arm and cranked it as hard as he could, while six-foot-eight Sylvia stood up and pull ed in the opposite direction. His forearm snapped. To re-create these kinds of conditions outside the ring, you’d need a gal on of moonshine, a tractor, and the world’s dumbest volunteer.

2. KNOCKING A NOSE INTO A BRAIN

In 1991’s
The Last Boy Scout
, Bruce will is punched a henchman so hard he died. Another henchman exclaimed, “God, he punched his nose through his brains!” From that moment on, filmmakers no longer felt the need to explain why their characters die after getting hit in the nose. In reality, the henchman’s buddy might as wel have screamed, “God, Bruce will is hired elves to eat their way into his skul ! They’ve made it into a cookie factory!”

The human nose does not contain the brain’s off button. It’s made of soft cartilage. In the history of face punching, people have probably died, but it was not from a nose’s soft tissue traveling through skul bone and lobotomizing its owner. That would be like trying to hammer a crayon through a brick wall . If you final y break through, it ain’t gonna be the crayon that does the trick. That’s why you could get punched all day and you’d still have a better chance of dying from a winning lottery ticket fall ing out of the sky and slicing your wrist open than from a face-to-brain nose missile.

1. ALMOST ANY KICK YOU’VE EVER SEEN IN A MOVIE

Attackers are charging at you from both sides! Before you decide to leap into the air and kick them each at the same time, you should know that’s only going to make you go out looking like a cheerleader. A kick’s power is generated by your hips, and your hips can’t generate any power while they’re spreading in midair, thirsting for a man’s touch.

Most kicks in movies are designed around aesthetics rather than effectiveness. If Jean-Claude Van Damme was trying to break down the front door of your house, he wouldn’t twirl into the air and kick the door. It’s easier and more effective to kick the door in like a regular person, with one foot planted firmly on the ground (also, Van Damme would just come back as
Timecop
and hand himself the key). The one and only strategic advantage the door has is that it’s connected to something that’s connected to the ground. So are you, until you leap in the air like
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
and earn every bul et of the Darwinian reckoning about to be visited on you by the drug dealer who just heard you bounce off his front door.

The same goes for real combat. In Ultimate Fighting, all but two kicks have become extinct: the round kick (what it sounds like) and the front kick (what you should have done to the door a few sentences ago). If you are practicing a kick that involves a word like
spinning
,
crescent
,
flying
, or
cartwheel
, remember it’l only be useful in a real fight when you want to fall down extravagantly before getting choked.

EVERY
month magazines like
Cosmo
,
Playboy
, and
Boob Fancy
write up titil ating articles about places you just
have
to have sex at least once in your life. all of them seem to operate on the principle that having sex while, say, zooming down the Pacific Coast Highway on a motorcycle is wel worth the risks involved.

You should at least know the dangers before you get drunk enough to try five of the most popular.

5. SEX ON THE BEACH

Sex on the beach
sounds
pretty hot. It’s so popular that there’s even a drink named after it. Then again, there’s also a drink named the duck fart. In any event, it’s still a common motif in romantic films and books. What could be more romantic than some briny coitus between two half-naked adults while the waves crash around your suntanned bodies?

Just about anything, it turns out. As anyone who’s ever had sex on the beach probably already knows, if you’re not extremely careful, you’re going to discover what it feels like to exfoliate areas of your body you can’t see without a mirror. And while places that recommend sex on the beach will point out the sand issue with a little wink and a nudge, they rarely mention one important detail about the sand you’re cramming into your unmentionable areas: It’s often loaded with fecal bacteria.

Sand acts as a natural y occurring filth filter, so when a beach is closed due to high bacteria levels in the water, the sand is what makes it safe to swim again, col ecting big, fatty loads of turd with the ebb and flow of tides. Good news for the surfers, swimmers, and the mayor of Amity Island. It’s even good for the bacteria, which live ful er, more robust lives in the sand than in the ocean. The news is less good for couples grinding sand around one another’s sexual organs like a human pepper mil . Exposure to the bacteria can lead to fun things like typhoid fever, hepatitis A, and dysentery, all terrible diseases even when they’re not focused in your nether regions.