Josh Clark

That'd be great if you had to say that every time you wanted to sneeze.

Right.

Expel air.

So it makes sense that there would be a region that was responsible for this.

Because we've already, we'd already seen it in cats.

Don't ask how we know where it is in cats, but in cats it's in the medulla.

And so it was hypothesized that it was in the lateral medulla in humans too.

And finally, I think around 2005, there was basically incontrovertible evidence that came in the form of this fisherman, I believe he might have been Spanish, who had this sneezing fit one day of like about 20 really violent sneezes in a few minutes.

And then all of a sudden, he stopped sneezing and couldn't walk right.

Like his gait was affected, almost like he had a stroke.

And apparently, either he...

caused a lesion on his lateral medulla from the sneezing or that violent sneezing was like an initial symptom of a lesion, kind of like here's your last sneezes ever.

And he went to the doctor and they started testing him and they would do things like put capsaicin in his nose, like red hot chili pepper in his nose, which makes everybody sneeze.

It's like a universal, um,

sternitatory right makes everyone sneeze and it wouldn't make this guy sneeze it would burn his nose and it would make his nose runny but it wouldn't make him sneeze on the other side it would make him sneeze the other nostril but not the right I think and so they found this lesion on his lateral medulla and they said sneezing center welcome to our understanding that's such a bad red hot chili peppers joke that I just sat on through that whole spiel that's very grown up of you

Should I say it?

Sure.

Whoever said we were grownups.

I was just thinking the doctor would do the capsaicin and ask him how he feels.

And he'd say, well, I don't know.