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Medicine Science

The Odd Effects of Being Struck By Lightning 191

HughPickens.com writes: "Ferris Jabr reports in Outside Magazine that every year, more than 500 Americans are struck by lightning. Roughly 90 percent of them will survive, but those survivors will be instantly, fundamentally altered in ways that still leave scientists scratching their heads. For example, Michael Utley was a successful stockbroker who often went skiing and windsurfing before he was struck by lightning. Today, at 62, he lives on disability insurance. "I don't work. I can't work. My memory's fried, and I don't have energy like I used to. I aged 30 years in a second." Lightning also dramatically altered Utley's personality. "It made me a mean, ornery son of a b****." Utley created a website devoted to educating people about preventing lightning injury and started regularly speaking at schools and doing guest spots on televised weather reports.

Mary Ann Cooper, professor emerita at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is one of the few medical doctors who have attempted to investigate how lightning alters the brain's circuitry. According to Cooper, the evidence suggests lightning injuries are, for the most part, injuries to the brain, the nervous system, and the muscles. Lightning can ravage or kill cells, but it can also leave a trail of much subtler damage and Cooper and other researchers speculate that chronic issues are the result of lightning scrambling each individual survivor's unique internal circuitry (PDF). "Those who attempt to return to work often find they are unable to carry out their former functions and after a few weeks, when coworkers get weary of 'covering' for them, they either are put on disability (if they are lucky) or fired," she writes.
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The Odd Effects of Being Struck By Lightning

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 27, 2014 @07:19PM (#48011411)
    Having millions of volts of electricy pumped through a person's body causes nervous system damage and changes. Who would have guessed?
    • by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Saturday September 27, 2014 @08:11PM (#48011581) Journal
      What is interesting, though, is how relatively subtle the changes are. Death and/or ghastly electrical burns? Unpleasant; but likely enough. It's the relatively modest changes to things like personality or perceived energy level that really take some unraveling.
      • by Traf-O-Data-Hater ( 858971 ) on Sunday September 28, 2014 @12:26AM (#48012363)
        I heard a news report - might have been BBC - years ago that a study had found that a high correlation between lightning strike victims and the probability of developing Multiple Sclerosis later in life.
      • by AK Marc ( 707885 ) on Sunday September 28, 2014 @02:18AM (#48012615)
        The after effects sound like the longer term effects of a stroke. I'd guess that both kill some brain cells (or at least fry some pathways). Most of the time, a well treated stroke victim has subtle changes. It's the 80+ year old victims who already could only just barely dress themselves who have a stroke that end up massicely affected. "aged 30 years in a stroke (of lightning)" when you are already feeling like 120 years old leaves you 150 years old, and that's the traditional drooling incontinent stroke victim. That and the untreated stroke victim - the one where they had the stroke sometime in the night, and didn't get any treatment until noon the next day, so they went 16 hours with an untreated blockage or bleed.

        For me, I had a massive stroke at 35. Treated within a couple hours (at the hospital within 15 minutes of the first symptom), and the only effects are the very subtle ones. Nobody guesses that I had a stroke, let alone that was one of the biggest the stroke specialists had ever seen. But I know the difference. It does affect energy levels and patience.

        I had a 2-year MRI, and 25%+ of my brain was still "darker" than the rest. At least with a stroke, the MRI will show exactly where the damage is, years later. The lightning would affect random connections spread to where there's no identifiable damage area. We aren't smart enough to be able to see brain damage as minor and random as the effects reported here.
    • by Bob_Who ( 926234 )
      Why would I have guessed?
  • Bummer... (Score:5, Funny)

    by MindPrison ( 864299 ) on Saturday September 27, 2014 @07:23PM (#48011427) Journal
    ...The Odd Effects of Being Struck By Lightning...

    And here I was hoping for special powers like instant genius or telepathic abilities, and it turns out that the best we can hope for is instant Alzheimer?
    • by PPH ( 736903 ) on Saturday September 27, 2014 @07:42PM (#48011495)

      Super powers. Check.

      But it still didn't get me out of having to do community service.

    • Undoubtedly, rereading all those comic books made it likely you scored high on the SAT, but nevertheless left an impression that every lab accident could result in superpowers.

      Ah, to be naive again.

      People always speculate they would like to return to an earlier version of themselves, if they could know what they know now, but forgetting the the awesome sauce of youth is inexperience.

  • striking distance (Score:5, Informative)

    by ThorGod ( 456163 ) on Saturday September 27, 2014 @07:30PM (#48011451) Journal

    I worked for a lightning research lab in college. From what I remember, lightning can strike up to 60 miles (?) from the host cloud if the internal charges of the cloud are "right" for it. My take away was if you can see bolts of lightning then you're (possibly) within range.

    • I worked for a lightning research lab in college. From what I remember

      Well, if you were hit by lightning during that time, you probably won't remember!

      That's the whole point of the article . . . or don't you remember what the article was all about . . . ?

      • Re:striking distance (Score:5, Informative)

        by ThorGod ( 456163 ) on Saturday September 27, 2014 @08:21PM (#48011613) Journal

        This is /. We don't read the articles. We maybe read a sentence from the summary and the title of the post then say whatever comes to mind first.

      • by s.petry ( 762400 ) on Saturday September 27, 2014 @11:21PM (#48012185)

        I was struck as a kid, probably 11 or so years old, when a thunderstorm rolled in during a little league baseball game. I happened to be opening a car door, so was grounded when I was hit. My forearm turned black and blue, like a massive bruising, but I didn't feel any pain in my arm. I was blinded for a short time, my eyes were not closed when the lighting struck. Outside of a headache from the flash, I had no short or long term damage. Yes, I was extremely lucky to have been mostly grounded.

        The Guinness record holder was struck 7 times, and lived to 71. Hard to say if the long term effects led to suicide, but an interview of him I heard long ago seemed to indicate a pretty normal guy.

        TFA also indicates that not all incidents lead to permanent damage, physical or psychological. As with most events dealing with electricity, there are a massive number of factors involved making each event unique. For example, when I was in the military I saw two people guy get popped by a 550KW generator. Both guys mishandled the same coupling, both were in Texas and on similar training grounds. The primary different was weather and luck. One guy's clothing caught fire and he suffered only minor burns as they put his clothing out, the other guy died almost instantly. It was winter so rainy and wet when the first guy was popped, making its likely that his wet clothing caused a grounding effect which saved him. The second happened in the summer, extremely dry and hot.

        • by Osgeld ( 1900440 )

          grabbing a car door does not make you grounded, it makes you a bigger target yes, but there's seveal inches of isolation tween the car and ground, as if that mattered at all, lightning travels several miles though the air to get stopped by a 4 inch rubber sidewall lol yea sure

          • by s.petry ( 762400 )
            The car is wet so has direct to ground connection since said car was parked in the dirt next to the baseball field. I didn't fill in every minor detail, but assume that people can read a bit into "a thunderstorm rolled in" which usually indicates lot of water is also coming down. I surely hope I don't have to point out that water is conductive.
    • by ihtoit ( 3393327 )

      out of interest, what's the propagation speed of an AG lightning bolt? I've heard various figures bandied about from 35 to 90 miles a second. Care to weigh in as more of an expert than a lot of people who have ventured a guess?

    • by Osgeld ( 1900440 )

      how does a 4th grade hearsay make it as informative on slshdot, my god are all the nerds just stupid code monkeys now?

    • by kbahey ( 102895 )

      In August 2009, a boy was hit by lightning and later died in hospital. Witnesses said the sky was blue above them, and there was no thunder or rain.

      Link [thestar.com]

  • by billstewart ( 78916 ) on Saturday September 27, 2014 @07:31PM (#48011455) Journal

    The main change is that when I hear people say "You're more likely to get hit by lightning than to have X happen" I can say "I've already been hit by lightning."

    Back around 2000, I was with a group of people at an observatory up in the mountains, which we'd reached by ski-lift-gondola, after some discussion about whether the weather was turning thundery and we should cancel it because we might get stuck there for the day which would mess up our schedule. The thunderstorm decided to show up, and I was outside the observatory looking at the mountains. A few raindrops started to fall, and a bolt of lightning bounced off the building and hit me on the head. The impact wasn't very hard, maybe like dropping a pen onto a hard floor from 5 feet. My wife yelled at me to get in out of the rain. And we did in fact get stuck up there for a few hours - the gondola system shut down when the lightning struck, leaving a gondola full of kids hanging about 100 feet from the observatory for a while before they could restart it, and once they had them safely unloaded they left it stopped until the storm was over.

    The other effect was that I had to tell my wife about the previous time when the group I'd with had almost been hit by lightning, hiking at the top of Colorado mountains when the early-afternoon thunderstorm set in. We'd sat down in a low rock shelter, and some of the folks were having sparks from their fingers to the wet rocks, which were making a bit of a sizzling noise.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      This is a serious question: Did you notice any impact on your ability to obtain and maintain an erection after you were hit by lightning?

      Years back, I worked with one fellow who survived a lightning strike. He said it was actually the best thing that had ever happened to him. Before being hit, he suffered from extreme difficulties obtaining an erection, and even when he managed to get one he couldn't sustain it for more than a minute or two. But after being hit, he said those problems went away. As he descr

    • by Anubis IV ( 1279820 ) on Saturday September 27, 2014 @10:22PM (#48012005)

      Years ago when I was in junior high or early high school, my father was taking my younger brother and I to go shopping. I could hear a thunderstorm outside as we were shopping, but we lived in south Florida, so that was nothing out of the ordinary.

      As we were heading out to the car after our shopping was done, something occurred that never happened to me before or since: I heard a crack at the exact same time that I saw a flash of light. I didn't see a source for the flash, just the light, seemingly all around. I had been standing next to my dad, who was holding my brother's hand while we were in the parking lot, but when I turned to see what their reactions were to what I assumed was a REALLY close strike, my dad was on the asphalt on his knees with his hands gripping the top of his head. The umbrella he had been holding had fallen to the ground, my brother and I were getting soaked, and my father wasn't responding to us when we asked him if he was all right.

      After about a minute, my father was finally able to respond, and was actually rather embarrassed by the whole thing, since he could see and hear us, but was simply incapable of responding. We didn't know exactly what had happened, since none of us had actually seen the lightning strike, but we knew it had to have hit close, given that none of us had ever heard the crack of the strike happen at the exact same time that we saw the flash of light. My brother mentioned that his heart was racing oddly as well.

      When we got home, sure enough, we found a little scorch mark on the top of my father's head that was hot to the touch, and over the course of the next week or so, he discovered that his sense of smell had been damaged, with things smelling differently than they should. It ended up being about a year before he could smell things correctly again. We figure that my brother may have also gotten some of it through him, given that he was holding my dad's hand at the time that it happened.

      It was probably a good 5 years before the three of us stopped being skittish when outside in a lightning storm, and even to this day I treat them quite a bit differently than I used to, despite having grown up with them around all the time and generally having practiced good habits around them (even at the time of our strike, there were tall poles and trees (that we weren't under) all around us, so it always seemed odd to me that the strike landed where it did).

    • I've had a near miss. I was standing nearby when there was a ground strike. I didn't see it though - I was facing the wrong way. I did see the sky flash white as the light was reflected from raindrops, and it was so loud it set off a couple of car alarms.

  • by MyLongNickName ( 822545 ) on Saturday September 27, 2014 @07:36PM (#48011475) Journal

    The last sentence of the summary explains a lot:
    "Those who attempt to return to work often find they are unable to carry out their former functions and after a few weeks, when coworkers get weary of 'covering' for them, they either are put on disability (if they are lucky) or fired or made Slashdot editors (if they are really unlucky)," she writes."

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) *

      It sounds a lot like chronic fatigue. Something breaks and your body just doesn't deliver energy to the muscles properly any more, including the brain. As well as being tired you can think straight and become forgetful. There is no way to fix it.

  • A local doctor [wikipedia.org] was struck by lighting and became a concert pianist as a result. You never know what might change your life forever.
  • by Champaklal ( 3411751 ) <spam DOT me DOT bich AT outlook DOT com> on Saturday September 27, 2014 @07:54PM (#48011527)
    1. Lightning partially passes through the body, because body gives a lot of resistance to the charge. Remaining charge flows through air to the ground.

    2. it looked to me as if the frontal lobe of the person in story was affected. Frontal lobe is associated with such changes in personality

  • by PPH ( 736903 ) on Saturday September 27, 2014 @08:14PM (#48011595)

    I was recently struck by lightning. I am writing you to renew my request for a date per your stated conditions.

    • by Bob_Who ( 926234 )

      I was recently struck by lightning. I am writing you to renew my request for a date per your stated conditions.

      So, she let you slide on the subterranean ski-lift tickets?

  • by ihtoit ( 3393327 ) on Saturday September 27, 2014 @08:32PM (#48011637)

    I was part of the ground circuit when lightning struck my house and blew the ring main on its way through - I had the misfortune of happening to be plugging in the TV at the time, got thrown across the room. Only permanent effect as far as I can tell is a marked reduction in tolerance for idiots.

  • by Osgeld ( 1900440 ) on Saturday September 27, 2014 @08:40PM (#48011667)

    the brain an nervous system is a complex and fragile low voltage electrical signaling system

    lets zap it with lightning

    best we can guess is that "Mary Ann Cooper, professor emerita at the University of Illinois at Chicago" who by the way retired in 2008 says that lighting fucks shit up

    good god damn job

    • by Nemyst ( 1383049 ) on Saturday September 27, 2014 @11:48PM (#48012271) Homepage
      Does your grumpiness originate from getting struck by lightning?
    • BS. The nervous system is an electrochemical system, not an electrical one; and, while it is physically fragile, it is not nearly as electrically fragile as you suggest, exactly because it is electrochemical rather than electrical in nature. This is a significant reason why 90% of lightning strike victims survive (the skin's lower resistance being another), and why execution through electrocution is nowhere close to being an instant process.
      • by Osgeld ( 1900440 )

        how fragile do I suggest

        assumption made

        • by Prune ( 557140 )
          The only assumption made is that of standard semantics of the use of a qualitative term to indicate a quantity in an imprecise or relative manner. In the case of your post, "fragile" stands for "fragile relative to the average expectation of a population relevant to the context of this subject or discussion". Of course, the assumption of standard language semantics presupposes a more basic one: that one's interlocutor is an entity to which assignment of semantic understanding is apropos; I must admit, thoug
  • by Anonymous Coward

    reaction time suffers as well

  • by AbRASiON ( 589899 ) * on Saturday September 27, 2014 @08:58PM (#48011737) Journal

    Michael Utley was a successful stockbroker who often went skiing and windsurfing before he was struck by lightning. Today, at 62, he lives on disability insurance. "I don't work. I can't work. My memory's fried, and I don't have energy like I used to. I aged 30 years in a second." Lightning also dramatically altered Utley's personality. "It made me a mean, ornery son of a b****."

    Had it been an example where he became a greenpeace or PETA speaker or something, it might be more shocking but this doesn't come across as entirely surprising.

  • by __aaltlg1547 ( 2541114 ) on Saturday September 27, 2014 @09:17PM (#48011805)

    I would assume that most lightning injuries wouldn''t have any observable effects on personality, because more often than not they're not going to hit the brain. But that could be a wrong impression. Maybe a high voltage jolt to the peripheral nervous system always carries back to the brain along nerve fibers and does damage there.

  • by kcelery ( 410487 ) on Saturday September 27, 2014 @09:31PM (#48011855)

    Once met with a guy who install lightning rod in 80+ storeys buildings.

    He said, grounding the current from above is not enough. When lightning strikes,
    the current is ground, but then the many computers in the building would malfunction.

    Special technique is required that only few companies can get it right.

    I would suspect the current has to be shield like coaxial cable or the circuits along
    the current path will got damaged. In this case the victim's brain.

  • Extremely Unlikely (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bob9113 ( 14996 ) on Saturday September 27, 2014 @09:46PM (#48011897) Homepage

    "Ferris Jabr reports in Outside Magazine that every year, more than 500 Americans are struck by lightning. Roughly 90 percent of them will survive, but those survivors will be instantly, fundamentally altered in ways that still leave scientists scratching their heads.

    Yes, sure, it has some unpleasant effects, but keep it in perspective. How much resources should we as a society be dedicating to lightning strike victims? Nearly ten times as many people die drowning every year as get struck by lightning (including non-fatal strikes). In fact, you're only about twice as likely to get struck by lightning as to die from a terrorist attack, which a statistical non-risk. And we don't go running around panicking about terrorism... oh, wait...

    • Wrong question: fundamentally it's neurological damage. How many resources should we dedicate to helping people who suffer it by some means?

      • Wrong question: fundamentally it's extremely rare. How many resources should we dedicate to helping people who suffer it by some means?

        That's more like it.

    • Conclusion: Lightning is an act of terror, and yet we don't go off and build a dome over the entire country, closing ourselves inside our new "safe" structure, opening new agencies that get endless funding, secret courts... all in the name of, maybe, preventing it from ever happening again.

      Very good point, sir.
  • I was struck by lightning in April of 2004. After that, all I wanted to do was smoke weed and play computer games.

    Of course, that's all I wanted to do before I was struck by lightning, so clearly the effects were very subtle. I no longer wanted to play JRPGs, text based adventures or 2D platformers. Plus, there is a strange blue glow emanating from my scrotal sack. It's kind of like superpowers, except not really useful, except at Halloween parties where I go dressed as a partially bioluminescent Michel

  • by unity ( 1740 ) on Saturday September 27, 2014 @11:30PM (#48012215)
    I was having a safety meeting with a guy when he told me how he had been hit by lightning once on a construction site. I said, "what'd you do?" He said, "I got up and ran! The only thing I could think of was that I didn't want to get hit again!"
    He seemed like a normal enough guy, but he was adamant about not wanting to get struck again, that's for sure.
  • by future assassin ( 639396 ) on Sunday September 28, 2014 @12:13AM (#48012329)

    This was 1991 I belive. I was sitting on this tire swing looking at the thunder storm coming into the valley over the city. Next to me 30 feet infront and 20 to the side was a tennis court all fenced off with a 20 foot fence.

    As I was sitting there for a bit watching lightning strikes all of a sudden everything went white for a second and when it dissapeared I heard a huge bang and while looking at the sand below my feet, I saw electricity flying around on the ground. Took me a few secs to get orientged again and all I herd was "Holly Fuck", "Holly fuck" "Did you feel that all over your body" from the two guys that were playing in the tennis court.

    Nex thing I know some panic attack hit me and I booted it home about 20 feet away. I started to get a clod sweat and when I felt my heart it must have been going 400 + beats per minute. Then it slowed down rapidly and all I could do is sit on the couch and go WTF?!!!

    So for about a few weeks after that everytime there was a thunder strom and the lightning strikes got close to home I always felt wird electric charge aroung me. Well I never stuck around and booted it home the second I got the feeling.

    Can't say it changed me but was a weird experience.

    • I was sitting on this tire swing looking at the thunder storm coming into the valley over the city. Next to me 30 feet infront and 20 to the side was a tennis court all fenced off with a 20 foot fence.

      ...

      Nex thing I know some panic attack hit me and I booted it home about 20 feet away.

      So, you were in your yard, where you have a tennis court? Maybe the lightning did have some effect...

  • Lightning can easily give off Xrays and even Gamma rays. So would it also be possible that these people who have this blast right along their skin are also getting a solid dose of radiation.
  • Mary Ann Cooper, professor emerita

    Stop this shit, academia. Learn Latin if you want to use Latin words to make yourself sound special. The word is for soldiers. No fucking professor called themselves "emeritus" until the late 18th century. And now you've got dipshits getting it doubly wrong with gender. Emeritus is specifically a masculine noun.

    An emeritus is a retired soldier (noun). Emeriti are retired soldiers (plural noun).

    If you want to use it as an adjective it has to agree in with the noun it modifies.

    A soldier emeritus is a so

    • by AK Marc ( 707885 )
      http://www.thefreedictionary.c... [thefreedictionary.com]

      In current usage, it's now an English, not Latin word meaning "retired, but wishing to use the pre-retirement title". Like how all Presidents of the USA are "president". President Bill Clinton is still "president" by title, even if "retired".

      And make no mistake, it's an English word, like so many foreign words, used without great change for a meaning slightly different than the "original".

      It's not "wrong". It's language. That's how English works. Much like the ori
  • We already knew Lightning Can Do Anything [tvtropes.org]. :)

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