Will sneezing with your eyes open cause your eyeballs to pop out of your head?
No, the Mythbusters put that to the test, but that’s not to say it hasn’t happened before.
According to Dr. Rachel Vreeman, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the Indiana University School of Medicine, there is a New York Times report about a woman riding a street car in 1882 when she was, “seized with a sudden fit of sneezing and burst one of her eyeballs.”
Known as eyeball subluxing, an eyeball can be forced out of the eye socket during violent motions such as vomiting, she said, though this usually occurs when there are issues with the eye muscles.
However you may have noticed that when you sneeze, you uncontrollably close your eyes — the urban myth is that this is to keep your eyes from popping out, but the actual reason is not entirely understood.
A commonly held belief of why humans shut their eyes when they sneeze is that it is to protect them from bacteria and other unpleasantries rocketing from our noses. But others argue that the more likely reason that eyes may close during a sneeze is for the same reason your leg kicks out when your knee is tapped — it's just an involuntary reaction. Perhaps the reflex served some purpose in our recent evolutionary past, but now it's just an anomaly of the human body.
If you enjoyed this article, check out You’ve Been Lied to — Water Doesn’t Prevent Hangovers
Facebook comments