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If somebody puts a voodoo curse on you, might it kill you?
If you think it might, it might. In "Essentials of Psychology, Exploration and Application, 6th Ed.," Dennis Coon tells of a terrified young woman admitted to a hospital because she believed she was going to die. A midwife had predicted that the woman's two sisters would die on their 16th and 21st birthdays, and that the woman herself would die on her 23rd birthday. Her sisters had died as predicted, and now it was three days before her 23rd birthday. Then the following day the woman was indeed found dead in her hospital bed, "an apparent victim of her own terror." There are other cases of people dying of fright, such as soldiers in particularly savage battles, or of people being stricken at very emotional times, such as Louis Armstrong's widow suffering a heart attack during a memorial concert for her husband just as the final chord of "St. Louis Blues" was played. Such victims may die in one of two ways, says Coon: Physiologically, the intense arousal causes a sharp rise in blood sugar, the heart beats faster, digestion slows or stops, blood flow to the skin is reduced. These "fight-or-flight" reactions generally increase the chances of survival in an emergency, but in an older person or someone in bad health, they can kill. And if the initial emotion doesn't prove fatal, "parasympathetic rebound" might: Following heightened arousal, the body works to calm all the accelerated processes and, in doing so, may go too far: Even in a young, vigorous person, the counter-slowdown may actually stop the heart. Thus voodoo, like all terrors, can get you coming or going.

Ask a mixed group how turned on they get watching erotic movies and the men will mostly smile sillily, some of the women will express disgust. But aren't these socialized responses? How might you get at their true reactions?
By taking them into a laboratory and hooking them up to a genital strain gauge or a photoplethysmograph, and a polygraph recording device. Then let the cinematic good times roll. When this type of tell-it-like-it-is study is done, report Robert Crooks and Karla Baur in "Our Sexuality: 5th Edition," it becomes readily apparent that there is no visual-stimulation-threshold difference between the two highly sexy sexes.

Don't laugh. It was hard work developing the flush toilet.
For instance, careful thought had to go into what test materials to use in simulated flushings, for certainly the real stuff was inadvisable. What did the developer use? As recounted in the book "Flushed with Pride: The Story of Thomas Crapper," one of his early "super-flushes" successfully cleared away 10 apples averaging 1 3/4 inch in diameter, 3 air vessels, a pan coated with Plumber's "Smudge" and 4 pieces of paper adhering to the soiled surface.

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