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Podcast: Nudge
Episode: Is mass hysteria more common than you think?
Description: In the middle ages hundreds of thousands of Europeans danced themselves to exhaustion. Some danced for weeks on end, many ended up dying of heart attacks and heat stroke. But why? What strange illness was causing this oddity? Turns out, it was all psychological. The dancing epidemic of the middle ages was one of the first noted examples of mass hysteria, a phenomenon where these individuals experience real illness, brought on by imagined ailments. Mass hysteria has been documented in 19th century nunneries, 20th century Palestine and 21st century CIA agents. Today, I attempt to figure out if mass...