Brown Note / Real Life

Natural phenomena

• Certain sounds are known to cause specific reactions in humans:
  • Crying babies will cause painful reactions in humans — specifically, the sound will force itself to the forefront of humans' attention, which is useful to alert them that the baby's in danger and they need to step in right away. If the baby's actually in danger, it's a darn useful phenomenon. It's less useful when it's someone else's Screaming Plane Baby.
  • Cats' meows will cause humans to feel empathy. Interestingly, wild cats almost never meow unless they're really young kittens; this suggests that domesticated cats learned to do it (or at least retained the habit from kittenhood) in order to attract humans' attention. They're on to us, everyone. (There may be an echo of this in the expression "poor little meow meow" used on Tumblr and Twitter for characters who evoke pity despite their dubious moral quality.)
  • Dogs' yelping will immediately cause any human to immediately check if they are OK or (if they are the cause) to feel irredeemably guilty for hurting the dog. A lot is said about cats, but dogs are more manipulative: if they know that yelping or whining will get a human being to give them attention or something they want, expect them to do it every single time, because they know it is a trigger.
  • The Nails on a Blackboard sound is believed to be particularly grating because of this phenomenon. Some suggest it's because it sounds similar to a baby in distress; others theorize that it sounds a lot like a predator of humans from prehistory (or a warning sign of that predator among humans), which alerts us to a danger that no longer exists.
  • Yawning is known to be contagious. Even reading about yawning can make you yawn. (Sorry about that, by the way.) It even crosses between species — it's been proven to happen between humans and dogs. One researcher embarked on a quest for "the Ultimate Yawn", something so contagious that it would be impossible to resist — his results are fascinating.
    • There's also "sympathetic vomiting", where the sight, sound and/or smell of one person's emesis can trigger others to react in kind. This is thought to be an evolutionary response to the threat of mass illness from contaminated food, and has shut down schools and diverted cross-country flights.
  • The concept of "mass psychological illness" can manifest itself in this way — it's basically when human behavior becomes contagious among really stressed-out populations, so seeing a large group of people doing something causes you to join them. It's classified as a disease. It's particularly common among schoolchildren (particularly susceptible to stress), like the Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic, which caused people to laugh so hard they suffocated and died.
  • Misophonia (literally "hatred of sound") is a condition where this instinct goes very wrong, and ordinary everyday noises can trigger fight-or-flight responses that cause that can cause unexplained, full-blown anger or even violence. It's not known exactly what causes it, but it is particularly prominent in the autism spectrum and those with ADHD. An even more unpleasant variant of this condition, called hyperacusis, causes the sufferer to experience physical pain as a result of hearing the triggering noise. The triggering sounds are usually unique to the person, but can be as innocuous as rubber squeaking or Velcro ripping.
  • "The Hum" is heard by about 2% of the population, for whom it can be incredibly debilitating. Since most people can't hear it, it was dismissed as a symptom of mass hysteria. Speculation among some hearers that it might be caused by alien spacecraft or secret government projects didn't help. As the Internet allowed more hearers to report their experiences and a few researchers decided to take it seriously, it is now known to be real and has a variety of causes depending on location. If you hear it, you can register with The World Hum Map and Database.
• The McCollough effect is a distortion of a viewer's ability to perceive tightly grouped horizontal and/or vertical lines, induced by around three minutes of exposure to a pair of innocuous "induction" images. Pursued for fifteen minutes, this induction can screw with a viewer's sight for up to three months.
• Unlike the louder bellow of a lion, the roar of a tiger up-close can send humans and other animals into a state of shock. It's not just how loud it is that causes this, but how sharp and aggressive it sounds. There's a reason why most films use tiger roars for lions.
  • Speaking of dangerous animals, humans' anxious reaction to infrasound (see below) may have served as an evolutionarily-advantageous warning system for our prehistoric ancestors. Many of the largest and most dangerous animals in our species' native Africa - elephants, rhinos, hippos, Nile crocodiles, buffalo - vocalize in infrasound or near-infrasound, making paranoia a wise reaction for early hominids who encountered such noises.
• Nuclear technology gone wrong can lead to people looking at critical fissionable material close-up — which can indeed be fatal. All you'll experience is a glimmer of light and a weird buzzing. It's the light itself that kills you, as it contains deadly gamma rays. It's as close to the Medusa phenomenon as you're going to get.
  • The Chernobyl disaster led to the creation of the "Elephant's Foot", a formation of reactor core lava shaped like the foot of an Eldritch Abomination. At the time the workers found it eight months after the accident, standing next to the thing for just a handful of minutes would have been enough to kill you. They sent in a robot to take a picture of it, but the radiation fried its circuits. A heroic Russian scientist volunteered to go down and take pictures himself (they would all be dead soon from the background exposure anyway), and he needed to take the photos using a mirror from an adjoining hallway. Many people consider this to be the most dangerous room in the world.
    • Thankfully the Elephant's Foot has largely decayed in the decades since the incident and while it's not a room where you would want to set up a bed and live in it's perfectly safe to be in the room for several minutes if you're wearing a Hazmat Suit.
  • The "Tickling the Dragon's Tail" criticality accident, the second of two that involved the infamous "Demon Core", claimed the life of Los Alamos scientist Louis Slotin in this way; he saved the lives of seven other scientists by dismantling the core's reflector himself and reducing the core to sub-critical mass.^note The experiment required holding the upper half of the reflector in his hand during the accident, but Slotin separated it from the bottom using a screwdriver instead of the shims required by protocol. The screwdriver slightly slipped out, causing the reflector to completely encase the core and trigger a supercriticality, and Slotin instinctively threw the top half off before it got worse. Slotin knew immediately he had screwed up and was a dead man walking. "Well, that does it," he commented. He remained composed enough to document his own symptoms as he expired from acute radiation syndrome over the next few days. The survivors claimed to have seen a blue flash, but it wasn't recorded in the video footage; it turned out to be the Cherenkov effect causing the flash in the victims' eyeballs.^note The Cherenkov effect is caused by particles being so energized that they move faster than light within a certain medium, such as air or water, where light is slower than in a vacuum. An analogy may be drawn to objects moving faster than the speed of sound in a given medium causing a sonic boom—an optic boom, if you will. It's perfectly normal to see it in reactors that are submerged under water. It's less normal to see it in the air or in your own eyeball fluid.
• Those with photosensitive epilepsy, or other forms of sensitivity to flashing lights may experience seizures trigged by rapidly flashing lights.
  • Rapidly flashing lights, delivered through a strobe light, are used by neurologists to test for photosensitive epilepsy known as Intermittent Photic Stimulation. These consist of headsets designed to deliberately cause epileptic seizures, which neurologists then analyze through EEG readings.
  • Cyberpunk 2077 was infamous for having a light sequence that caused seizures, due to the flashing lights, similar to the above devices.
• Infrasound, or sound in frequencies below the range of human hearing, is reputed to cause anxiety and fear in those exposed to it, and in at least one case a hallucination. As such, it's speculated to be responsible for the "haunted house" phenomenon, present in the background in some form or another. It's also been proposed as a weapon of psychological warfare (as seen in Robert A. Heinlein's novel Sixth Column), and a few musicians and artists like to use it deliberately to cause discomfort in the audience (many such artists are listed on Drone of Dread). Most infamously, Gaspar Noé's notorious 2002 film Irréversible specifically includes lengthy portions of almost sub-audible 28hz frequencies on the soundtrack for the first half-hour, which the DVD sleeve proudly claims caused 200 walk-outs at the film's Cannes premiere alone.
• Ultrasound, which is higher in frequency than human hearing, has the same phenomenon, but not as much — at least partly because people lose the ability to hear high frequencies as they get older. People who don't like teenage loiterers have weaponized the phenomenon in the form of an "anti-teenager" weapon, which supposedly caused a Brown Note effect in teenagers but not adults; teens turned it around to make their ringtones ultrasound, so that they could hear them in class without the teacher knowing^note These are far from foolproof, as a particularly young teacher — or even a teacher whose hearing is just particularly good — can hear it just fine. Don't Try This at Home, kids.. While ultrasound "weapons" do cause serious discomfort in those who can hear it, they can cause serious damage to even younger kids, and in babies can cause permanent hearing loss. The city of Washington, D.C. installed one at a particular Metro station with an abnormally high number of teenage gang fights.
• Certain musical intervals are intensely unpleasant to hear, The most infamous of them is the tritone, a.k.a. diabolus in musica, Other dissonant intervals are the minor 2nd and the major 7th. If used sparingly along with mellower intervals, they allow us to write tense, emotional music (they are often encountered in blues, rock and metal, for example). Too much, and the music becomes almost painful to listen.
• Thioacetone is considered as such a dangerous chemical not because of reactions, and not because it wrecks havoc on your systems. It's so smelly, that you can smell a single drop from hundreds of meters. Its stink is so intense, even at those hundreds of meters it will cause vomiting and even unconsciousness from the nausea alone. Breaking Tri-thioacetone once set off a panic and evacuation in a half-mile chunk of the city of Freiburg in Germany, even as they were working with minute amounts.
  Derek Lowe: But today's compound makes no noise and leaves no wreckage. It merely stinks. But it does so relentlessly and unbearably. It makes innocent downwind pedestrians stagger, clutch their stomachs, and flee in terror. It reeks to a degree that makes people suspect evil supernatural forces. It is thioacetone.

For bonus points, recommended lab cleanup is to bathe everything exposed in Potassium Permanganate (a powerful caustic), cleansing the air with the toxic fumes generated by the reaction of copper and HNO3, and dumping any byproducts, leftovers, and expendable equipment in a wood fire.

• The Sun. Sure, it's far enough away that it most likely won't kill you (although if you ever got close enough, it would be a particularily agonizing end), but it shines bright enough that looking at it even for just a few seconds can cause permanent blindness, even 150 million kilometers away. Being under its rays for too long is also likely to cause great pain at best and serious health issues at worst.

Accidentally (or not) discovered

• In the late 1940s, jet engines were the absolute cutting-edge of aircraft propulsion, but they had some pretty major drawbacks: Their top speed was far in excess of a conventional propeller engine but their acceleration was poor, meaning they needed a lot more runway to take off and could barely operate off an aircraft carrier. In an attempt to design something that could offer the best of both worlds, Republic Aircraft designed the XF-84H, was a turboprop version of the existing F-84F Thunderstreak whose propellers spun so fast that they generated sonic booms. It showed a certain amount of potential, but the engine was not only excruciatingly loud but put out subsonic and ultrasonic vibrations that were linked to headaches, nausea and even acute bowel discomfort suffered by the ground crews.
• Police in the U.S. have sought to develop a weapon which they referred to as a "sonic cannon" as a riot-control device. It's designed to emit a long and powerful directional sonic burst at the exact resonance frequency of cranial fluid. Supposedly, after 10 seconds of exposure, it can knock a whole crowd of people unconscious by mimicking the effects of a severe concussion without the accompanying impact trauma (assuming, you know, that they don't get any from hitting the floor after losing consciousness). Here's its debut at the 2009 G20 summit in Pittsburgh. Later models forgo that by just being able to cause deafness incredibly quickly if you're anywhere near its front or sides.
• The Church of Scientology thought they had one, a loud organ tritone, which they tested against an Anonymous protest at "Gold Base", the Church's headquarters/armed compound in Hemet, California. It didn't work; protesters humorously dubbed it the "Gold Note", then recorded it and used it against the Scientologists at a later protest. But then they found a better "Brown Note": a recording of L. Ron Hubbard reciting the infamous Xenu story, which Scientologists say will make you sick and die if you hear it before you're "spiritually ready" (i.e. before you've paid enough to reach OT3). Playing the recording was actually quite successful...in dispersing lower-level Scientologists, if not for the exact reasons the trope contemplates.
• Some locations, known as "gravity hills", have a reputation for having strange angles which distort the background and make everything look like it's made of Alien Geometries. It's basically an illusion created largely by obstructing the horizon (thereby removing visual references for discerning the actual local inclination), making things going downhill look like they're going uphill. Places like the Oregon Vortex and Santa Cruz Mystery Spot became tourist attractions for their weirdness, and if you're not ready for it, it can actually cause brief disorientation and nausea.
• The glass harmonica developed a reputation in the 18th century for causing both its players and listeners to go insane or die, including a report of a baby who died in its mother's arms during a show in Germany. The modern theory is that the instrument used lead glass and people got sick from lead poisoning, but there's no scientific basis for it (even if merely touching lead glass could give you lead poisoning, the trace amounts you'd get would be easily dwarfed by the many other sources of lead poisoning around in the 18th century such as medical lead compounds and lead cookware) and it does not explain how the listeners got sick.
• In a 1999 lecture (recounted in more detail in Last Chance To See), Douglas Adams described how the blind dolphins in the Yangtze River were suffering from human industry adding weird sounds to the river and messing with their echolocation. He and his camera crew went to Shanghai to try to record the river, and (after a frenzied search across the city for condoms), they dipped a microphone into the river to catch a sample. Adams attempted to emulate the sound for the benefit of the audience:
  Adams: PPPPFFFFFFPPPPFFFFFFTTTT. The Yangtze River, ladies and gentlemen.
• An early security flaw in Google's "Glass" goggles (since patched) would cause them to immediately process any QR code it looked at. Hackers discovered they could easily plant QR codes in the wild that would cause unwitting users to immediately process the code and connect them to a malicious website or connect to an insecure wireless network that could spy on them.
• There are a couple of real-world examples of books or artworks which pose a hazard to viewers because of their physical properties:
  • The notorious limited editions of Fahrenheit 451 and Firestarter which were bound in asbestos as publicity stunts, before the hazards of the material were fully appreciated. It is now recommended that they be stored in plastic bags and handled as little as possible.
  • Near the end of her life, Marie Curie conducted several experiments with radioactive materials inside her home, which ultimately led to her death from radiation poisoning. The health risks of radiation weren't acknowledged at the time and so she never used protective equipment, which means many of her possessions, including her lab notes and even her cookbooks are so radioactive they have to be stored in lead-lined boxes, and anyone who wants to handle her notes or effects has to wear protective gear.
  • Ai Weiwei's "Sunflower Seeds", an installation consisting of 100 million porcelain sunflower seeds spread across a gallery floor. Original plans to allow visitors to walk on the seeds were abandoned after warnings from occupational health experts that it could lead to gallery employees inhaling dangerous quantities of ceramic dust.
  • Alexander Calder's "Mercury Fountain" is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. It is displayed at the Fundació Miró in Barcelona, where it is housed in an airtight chamber and maintained by staff in full hazmat gear due to the extreme toxicity of mercury vapour.
• A digital example. Playing Janet Jackson's "Rhythm Nation" on or in close proximity to certain 5400RPM hard drives (which are rare these days, but were widely used in laptops circa 2000-2005) could cause the drive to crash. This was due to harmonics in the music matching the resonance of the spinning drive, causing it to malfunction. Despite the issue being big enough to be declared a cybersecurity risk, complete with a CVE ID, it went unreported until 2022.
• At the start of Chill Season 2023, Splatoon 3 introduced the Splattercolor Screen as one of the new specials. The screen is meant to invoke Interface Screw on any member of the opposing team that passes through it, by having their view rendered in grayscale for several seconds in addition to taking damage. The original version of the screen did its job of disorienting the player a bit too well however, as the effect delivered a sudden onslaught of white noise and increased brightness that caused nausea, dizziness, and migraines (among other issues) for several players. While no seizures were ever reported, those in the community who did have photosensitive conditions were widely urged to stay away from the game. The issue would be mostly remedied in the 6.0.2 update three weeks later, which kept the audio effect for the special, but changed the visuals to lower the brightness instead.

Probably just coincidence

A good work of art is designed to move the audience, and sometimes they can move the audience in unconventional ways:

• Fast-moving images on TV, such as the Shaky Cam or poorly done 3D effects, can cause headaches and motion sickness — and depending on what it's footage of, it can also make people oddly susceptible to whatever threat the footage seems to present:
  • The Blair Witch Project made prolific use of the Shaky Cam, which caused many moviegoers to suffer from headaches and motion sickness, which may have been fodder for Paranoia Fuel and heightened the film's creepy nature.
  • Avatar caused several people to walk out of the film suffering from motion sickness after watching it in 3D, which is normal. What's not normal is for the film's blue tint to cause depression and suicidal thoughts, and one man apparently died from over-excitement.
  • The BBC revamped its nationwide weather forecast to a 3D map that moved and changed focus quickly, causing viewers to complain of nausea and disorientation. It also meant that when people saw the blue rain map superimposed on the country, it looked startlingly like a tsunami, and people started ringing up the BBC asking if they were all about to die.
• When The Beach Boys were recording their album Smile, one of the songs was a rather creepy instrumental called "Fire" or "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow"^note A reference to the cow who supposedly kicked over a lamp and started the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. To get the atmosphere in the studio right, the band wore toy fireman's helmets and lit a firepot to emit smoke. That night, a building down the street caught fire and burned to the ground, and the rest of the summer was punctuated by a Heat Wave that caused an unusual number of fires to break out in Los Angeles. Brian Wilson, believing that There Are No Coincidences, was so freaked out that he buried the tracks in a vault, went into seclusion for decades, and refused to finish the album until 2004. Listen to it here.
• The Rite of Spring has this reputation; its debut in 1913 caused a near-riot in the audience, for reasons that even now remain unclear. It's theorized that for its fairly restrained day, the experience might just have been too unsettling and evocative for the unprepared audience to handle.
• A 1991 news article reported that a woman suffered epileptic seizures upon hearing the voice of Entertainment Tonight host Mary Hart. This was so funny and weird that an episode of Seinfeld had Kramer suffer from the phenomenon.
• The Pokémon: The Series episode "Electric Soldier Porygon," is notorious for an effect in which repetitive red and blue flashes triggered epileptic seizures in viewers, with 685 children being taken to hospitals complaining for blurred vision, headaches, dizziness, and nausea; a few even had seizures, blindness, convulsions, and loss of consciousness. The episode was pulled from circulation, video games started adding safety warnings not to watch the TV too closely and in dim light, and the strobe effect now legally cannot be used. But this only was an issue for people prone to seizures; many of the hospital cases were traced more to hysterical media coverage (which also played the offending clip for everyone to get exposed to). The coverage was so famous that it was parodied in several places:
  • The episode of The Simpsons where the family travels to Japan had them catch a show called Battling Seizure Robots, with the expected result.
  • In Drawn Together, Ling-Ling (a parody of Pikachu) proudly exclaims his motivation for participating in the show thus:
    Ling-Ling: I come to destroy all! And give children seizure!
  • The South Park episode "Chinpokomon", which spoofs the Pokémon fad, has the boys watch an episode of Chinpokomon, only for Kenny to suffer a seizure.
• Some people have died of laughter — i.e., they watch something so funny that they suffer a fatal heart attack.
  • The Greek philosopher Chrysippus is said to have died laughing after witnessing a donkey eating figs, then telling a joke in which he asked his servants to give it some wine to wash its meal down; he died laughing at his own joke!
  • In 1975, a British man died of a heart attack watching the "Ecky Thump" episode of The Goodies. His widow wrote to the producers to thank them for making her husband's final moments so happy.
  • In 1989, a Danish audiologist died from watching A Fish Called Wanda. The film made him laugh so hard that his heart lethally beat upwards up 500 beats a minute. Proof that Monty Python really did know a lethal joke all along, then.
• The Frank Sinatra song "My Way" has this reputation in the Philippines, with an urban legend suggesting it's responsible for 70% of karaoke bar fights, some of them fatal. The real problem is that it's such an extraordinarily popular song that people are tired of it, so impatient patrons will attack someone who not only has the gall to sing it, but sucks at it as well. That said, there's a legend of a guy (named Frank) who sang "My Way" at a karaoke bar in Singapore and was supposedly so nervous he dropped dead of a heart attack immediately afterward — on the same date as Sinatra's death.
• The infamous "Blaster Beam" musical instrument, most notably employed in Star Trek: The Motion Picture and by Japanese musician Kitaro, is reputed to cause female audience members a... climactic degree of stimulation. It's probably coincidence or placebo, and it's definitely only a thing in live performances (so a copy of Star Trek won't help you there).
• Certain fields of science and maths are said to be so weird and amazing that people who study them too closely go insane.
  • Statistical mechanics is infamous for the number of famous suicides among the scientific founders. One text book has this as the opening paragraph:
    Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the same work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics. Perhaps it will be wise to approach the subject cautiously.
  • Several of the founders of modern metamathematics — George Cantor and Kurt Gödel being the two most notable — suffered from serious mental problems. Cantor's studies of orders of infinity straight-up led to him being institutionalized in his later years. Makes sense, given how the field includes such gems as "there are as many rational fractions as there are counting numbers, but there are more numbers between 0 and 1 than there are rational fractions." This lead to the idea of the "Black Theorem", a mathematical result that, once proven, drives the prover insane. There's even a BBC documentary.
  • The simple fact that 0.999... = 1 is a mild, yet common Brown Note among mathematics newbies, just from the mind-blowing simplicity — and counterintuitiveness — of the phenomenon.
  • The book Murderous Maths by British author Kjartan Poskitt had a rather... intimidating prospect near the end, once it had taught the reader all the basics of mathematics. It came in the form of a very complicated, yet reasonable formula which straight-up proved that any number is equal to zero. Cue collapse of time-space continuum. At least, until you realize that the proof asks you at one point to essentially Divide by Zero — meaning the whole proof is one final joke to test the reader.
• The short story "Guts", part of the Haunted (2005) anthology by Chuck Palahniuk, has this reputation due to the graphic detail and lingering on a character's large intestine being sucked out, as well as the effects it causes. Over 60 people are said to have fainted during readings of the book, a phenomenon Palahniuk himself discusses here. Interestingly, Palahniuk thinks "Guts" is far from the scariest story in the book.
• The Sorrows of Young Werther has a reputation of inducing suicidal thoughts in its readers. Its protagonist indeed eventually commits suicide out of unrequited love, so there were a number of copycat suicides, but just because the character resonated a little too well among lovesick young men. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had to add a brief warning to later editions: "Be a man, and do not follow me!"
• The twenty-first century equivalent of Young Werther was the TV adaptation of 13 Reasons Why, which was accused of glorifying suicide and inciting suicidal thoughts in young viewers. In particular, a graphic suicide scene in the final episode was cut following arguments that, while it had been intended to discourage suicide, it was having the opposite effect.
• The Indian classical pieces of music known as raga are said to produce strange effects when played in certain conditions. A story tells of the sixteenth-century musician Tansen who, singing before the skeptical emperor Akbar, set himself (and the surrounding palace) on fire by merely singing the raga "Deepak." His daughter came to the rescue by singing the rain raga "Megh Malhar" to extinguish the flames. One researcher noted that many raga musicians still avoid performing the "Deepak."

Straight-up Urban Legends

• The Wyoming Incident refers to a supposed TV signal hijacking that took place in 2006. It featured ominous music, disembodied heads, and eerie, sometimes oddly inspiring text appearing on the screen. The footage was said to be "cursed" and to cause vomiting and hallucinations in its viewers. The broadcast was slowly leaked piecemeal online by members of "the Happy Cube", supposedly an occultist forum, which invited users to join a text-based "game" to discover the truth behind the hijacking. The whole thing turned out to be a prank started on Something Awful, which went completely off the rails and turned out to be so unnerving that even when they came clean, many people refused to believe it. Viewers really were watching the video for hours on end and developed a strange set of religious beliefs regarding it. Prank or not, some people think it really is cursed and won't touch it.
• Pokémon Red and Blue were subject to an Urban Legend of Zelda that the original version of the Lavender Town music had such prominent ultrasound frequencies that it caused suicidal tendencies, hallucinations, and all sorts of other things, causing it to be toned down in later releases. It was a regular feature in Creepypasta about the game. In real life, the song was not altered in any way for Red and Blue and can only cause mild discomfort, not suicidal thoughts.
• "Mereana Mordegard Glesgorv" was a video that briefly went viral on GameFAQs in 2008; it would supposedly cause you to go insane, tear your own eyes out, and commit suicide. Then people discovered that the creepy guy in the video was a tech support worker from Florida, and the hype mostly died down.
• The song "Gloomy Sunday", sung originally by Hungarian musician Rezső Seress in 1933 but later translated into several languages, has a reputation for causing people who hear it to turn suicidal, fueled by the song's depressing-sounding music and Seress's own suicide in 1968. It became known in popular culture as the "Hungarian suicide song", was blamed for a number of suicides, and was subject to an Urban Legend saying it was banned by "the authorities". One performance in Paris parodied the phenomenon when all the members of the orchestra interrupted the performance to fake committing suicide.
• Polybius is an arcade game that doesn't exist but supposedly had Brown Note qualities. The legend says that players would become addicted to it and suffer stress, insomnia, nightmares, and suicidal tendencies — and also that shady men in black would frequently visit locations that hosted the game. Some believe that the rumors originated from an early defective version of a Tempest arcade game that caused problems with epilepsy and motion sickness.
• Recordings of binaural beats are said to create a powerful brainwave stimulation which simulates the effects of recreational drugs. They became popular among teenagers looking to get high, who paid high amounts of money for "doses" on the Internet (when you can make them for free with audio editing freeware, but whatever). In reality, Binaural beats can be quite relaxing and aid concentration, with some evidence of helping calm migraines and similar disorders rooted in discoordinated brain activity, but are a far cry from the auditory hallucinogen of urban legend.
• The total absence of sound is reputed to be able to drive you crazy. While it's true that a specially constructed "anechoic chamber" can reduce ambient noise to -9 decibels^note Yes, it's negative — it's a logarithmic scale, so it's not broken. For reference, the average "quiet" room generally has ambient noise of 20-30 decibels., which is quiet enough that you can hear your organs working. The urban legend is that no one has been able to remain inside such a chamber for 45 minutes, but you get used to it.
• When locomotives were first becoming popular, there was a myth that something so fast would be destructive to witness, curdling milk, blighting fields, and driving people to madness. The panic was prevalent enough that there were plans to build walls around train tracks so no one would ever have the misfortune of witnessing something so awful. Similarly, it was believed that anybody traveling at such a speed wouldn't survive (the most common claim was that it would be impossible to breathe). Needless to say, this wasn't true.
• The script for the never-made film Atuk is said to have caused the deaths of six celebrities who have read it: John Belushi, Sam Kinison, John Candy, Michael O'Donoghue, Chris Farley, and Phil Hartman.

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