Love it or hate it, “Subspace Rhapsody,” a second season episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, was unique to the long-lived franchise. In the nearly six decades of Trek on TV and in film, it’s the first story where the characters sang and danced throughout an episode. It turns out this was actually inspired by the episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Once More, With Feeling,” where this also happened. The Strange New Worlds episode even contained at least three Easter eggs referring to the older show (including Spock’s line, “I doubt we will be bunnies”).
Other TV drama series have done musical episodes, but these two stand out because there were “logical,” in-universe reasons for the characters to be acting oddly — demonic possession for Buffy, and an astrophysical explanation in Strange New Worlds. In “Subspace Rhapsody,” the Enterprise crew even repeatedly expressed their befuddlement at being compelled to sing and dance, and a fundamental element of the plot was figuring out how to make it stop before disaster struck.
Surprisingly, this sort of thing happens outside of fiction all the time. Really! But without the singing Klingons. Throughout history, groups of people have behaved strangely and claimed it was due to reasons as outlandish as those dreamed up by TV writers.
Perhaps closest to the behavior depicted in Buffy and Strange New Worlds, in Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries, there were many instances of what’s been called dancing mania, when people couldn’t stop dancing, and sometimes were also compelled to sing. In some cases, thousands of people were affected, with many unable to stop until they collapsed from exhaustion or injuries, sometimes even dying. Since the 15th century, outbreaks of unusual behavior have been reported in nunneries, where sisters would uncontrollably use crude language and engage in what was described as “suggestive behavior,” and just like in the Buffy episode, this was attributed to demonic possession.
If you think these types of events can’t happen in modern times, consider the 1962 Tanganyika laughing epidemic that affected a thousand children in 14 African schools, over the course of 18 months. Besides exhibiting uncontrollable laughter and crying, the victims experienced fainting, pain, and a long list of other seemingly inexplicable problems.
In the 1970s, there were week-long outbreaks among employees in Singapore factories, characterized by groups of workers experiencing trance-like states, uncontrolled screaming, and even becoming violent. Some complained of unprecedented fear, or of being cold, numb, or dizzy. The popular explanation was that these people were all under the influence of spirits, or jinn.
In 2010, at two secondary schools in Brunei, students experienced screaming, shaking, fainting, and crying, and they claimed to have been possessed by jinn. In 2011 in New York State, many students temporarily exhibited tic symptoms resembling Tourette syndrome. Health professionals ruled out all known environmental and infectious factors. In an even more recent case, in late 2023 in Kenya, 100 schoolchildren were hospitalized when they began convulsing uncontrollably and were temporarily paralyzed. No real-world cause was discovered.
So, what’s going on? Were all these people sickened or controlled by demons? The contemporary explanations are aspects of human psychological behavior which are not widely understood: social contagion and mass psychogenic illness (MPI).
Social contagion involves behavior, emotions, beliefs, or other conditions which spread through a group of people due to spontaneous, unconscious imitation of others in that group. If physical symptoms and illness also occur and spread when there is no infectious agent or other cause, the description of the phenomenon is MPI.
MPI can be caused by the nocebo effect: if you believe an unexpected odor is a poison gas, you may actually get sick. It can also be caused by reframing, which is when someone blames their illness not on the actual cause, but on whatever other people are publicly blaming for similar symptoms.
The Dancing Mania by Hendrick Hondius (1642) after Pieter Brueghel
The fact that this aspect of psychology is often disregarded played an important role in what is called Havana syndrome. Beginning seven years ago, the U.S. government claimed there were ongoing attacks against its embassy personnel in Havana by unknown forces using unknown weapons. In subsequent years, the groups of claimed victims broadened to include other government officials and active military (plus their family members), stationed all around the world. It was even claimed there had been people attacked by secret weapons at the White House. The reported symptoms included everything from fatigue, to dizziness, to nausea, to hearing loss, to (supposed but unproven) brain damage.
For years, the U.S. blamed this all on mysterious energy weapons wielded by unidentified enemies, and it maintained that the “anomalous health incidents” were due to “neurological attacks.” This was despite expert scientists in applicable fields publicly declaring that the theorized weapons technology (including sonic, microwave, and pulsed EMF weapons) were not possible, and were more “science fiction” than science. Psychological explanations provided by experts were largely ignored and disparaged.
This situation lasted over seven years, through two U.S. Presidential Administrations, until March 1, 2023, when the government did an about-face. Seven U.S. intelligence agencies released a report concluding that “available intelligence consistently points against the involvement of U.S. adversaries in causing the reported incidents [of Havana Syndrome],” and that the involvement of a foreign adversary was “very unlikely.”
The report did not provide any alternate explanations, but apparently, the social psychologists had it right. Social contagion and MPI, including the nocebo effect and reframing, can explain it all. In fact, this was precisely the conclusion documented in the 2020 book, Havana Syndrome: Mass Psychogenic Illness and the Real Story Behind the Embassy Mystery and Hysteria, by neurologist Robert W. Baloh and social psychologist Robert E. Bartholomew.
Bartholomew has said, “Havana Syndrome is actually the story of how much of the world came to believe in something that never happened.” In the book, he and Baloh make the case that Havana Syndrome is just one more example of social contagion and MPI by detailing its similarity to many other historic cases originally blamed on mysterious (sometimes demonic) villains. To quote the book, Havana Syndrome “is an extraordinary tale of bad science, political ineptitude, public confusion, and the nature of the media, which is prone to promoting false narratives, because most journalists … are not experts on exotic and highly specialized subjects—like neuroweapons.”
So if, like in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, you feel the uncontrollable urge to sing and dance in an inappropriate situation, or if you begin to experience unusual health problems, please realize that it’s a good bet the cause isn’t demons, unknown subspace phenomena, or even sci-fi weapons wielded by unknown assailants. It’s always wiser to assume an explanation based on something we know exists in the real world.
Every February, to help celebrate Darwin Day, the Science section of AIPT cranks up the critical thinking for SKEPTICISM MONTH! Skepticism is an approach to evaluating claims that emphasizes evidence and applies the tools of science. All month we’ll be highlighting skepticism in pop culture, and skepticism *OF* pop culture.
AIPT Science is co-presented by AIPT and the New York City Skeptics.
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