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Courtesy of Dimitris Xygalatas
Fire-walking isn't just an intense experience for participants. Spectators who are relatives and friends can feel it, too.
Fire-walking is a feat few of us want our bare feet to attempt. But should your tootsies traipse over a bed of red-hot coals, scientists have discovered an unusual phenomenon that occurs during it.
A fire-walker's heart rate appears to match the rhythm of his relatives and close friends on hand to watch the offbeat event, a new study finds.
The annual fire-walking ceremony in San Pedro Manrique, Spain, provided an odd backdrop for a unique experiment. In this research, scientists wanted to find out if the social effects of a "high-arousal ritual" such as fire-walking, which brings together large groups of people as either participants or bystanders, could influence people's physiology.
To test this idea, researchers strapped heart rate monitors on the chests of 12 out of 28 fire-walkers (11 were men) involved in the yearly June ritual. In addition, they measured the heart beats per minute of nine spectators who were relatives or friends of one of the fire-walkers and also tested 17 onlookers who did not know the participants. Data was collected several hours before the event and during it.
(Fire-walkers at this Spanish ritual also carry another person on their backs as they cross the coals, but the spectators tested for this experiment were all in the crowd.)
The study, published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that the heart rates of the fire-walkers and their related spectators showed a similar pattern: Their pulses peaked in sync as they made their way barefooted across glowing coals reaching temperatures of 1250 Fahrenheit.
But the heart rates of observers who were not family or friends did not resemble the fire-walkers.
"We were surprised to find synchronized arousal between fire-walkers and spectators," says Ivana Konvalinka, a doctoral student at the Center of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience at Aarhus University in Aarhus, Denmark, and the study's lead author. They had very different bodily behaviors at the event, she points out, since the fire-walkers performed the activity, while the spectators watched.
The researchers also had not expected to see such big differences in cardiac effects between the related and non-related spectators. "Both groups had superficially the same experience -- they both merely observed, and had the same information available to them," explains Konvalinka.
She suspects the similarities between the heart rates of the fire-walkers and their related spectators throughout the event because of shared information and familiarity. During a shared emotional experience the related spectators have a kind of empathic mirroring as if they were involved in the actual walk.
"The implications of our findings could perhaps be extended to various forms of collective action, such as corporate team-building, sports, public riots, warfare, and so on," says Konvalinka. "Shared arousal might be one mechanism driving these collective actions."
And in case you were wondering, Konvalinka tells us fire-walking should not cause burns on people's feet since the blood flow in this area tends to carry heat away from the foot.
If you've ever tried fire-walking, please let us know exactly what it was like. If you haven't -- would you?
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I firewalked at a personal empowerment event a few years back and the experience was incredible. I had an amazing rush (probably from fear) right before walking across the burning hot coals and then when I walked across, it was almost like I was floating across them. I didn't feel any pain at all. And, after the walk, I was incredibly pumped up. It was amazing!
Perhaps you'd had some deep-seeded fear(s) and you were moved by this experience, but often, people are easily moved by these group experiences and they perceive these events as cathartic when they are quite the opposite. The energy of the speaker, the crowd and their own need(s) for acceptance makes those in attendance feel as if they've had an epiphany of some sort. Faith healers and motivational speakers take advantage of this type all the time, using the atmosphere and the desperation of those in attendance for their own personal advantage. They create the impression that they are the one who has "the answer(s)" to all your problem(s) hoping that you'll develop a dependency on them and/or their philosophy. My guess is that you attended a Tony Robbins seminar which makes an excellent example of what I've just described.
@11Summerwind - You're a real buzzkill. You must be a blast at parties.
Let ejdmom enjoy her moment!
BlueMist, how truly pathetic that understanding something would keep you from enjoying it.
It's not pathetic, it's just the way it is. Is a magician still exciting to watch if you know how he does his tricks? No. Will ejdmom look back on her experience with the same feeling of amazement now that she has been told that she was taken advantage of and manipulated? Probably not. There is a reason why we try to let kids believe in Santa for as long as possible. Once you know the truth, it isn't the same. The magic is gone.
Firewalking is unfortunately a little bit mundane. It's more of a 'get over your fear' sort of thing. I've done it plenty of times. There isn't anything to it. You just keep those feet moving.
If you want a true miracle, try Firestanding :) There is a reason people don't stand still on the coals.
There was an article about 30 years ago in Scientific American that described the physics of firewalking. Although the science is strong, I've never felt the urge to actually do the experiment myself. I can imagine that overcoming the fear can be a life-changing experience.
I've fire-walked hundreds of times and it's about as life changing as any other new experience. Just like learning to ride a bicycle or ski, one experiences some fear(s) that they need to overcome. Once done, fire-walking is as profound as learning to swim or to a hold a snake; it's all a matter of what you fear and how deep those fears run.
Back in the 1980s I walked on hot coals (fire-walking) over a hundred times and never suffered so much as even one burn. My longest walk was approximately 25 feet. As it turns out, there is nothing special about fire-walking if and when proper preparations and precautions are taken.
We used aged hard wood (maple) and burned it down for several hours. The coals were spread out on fresh sod in lengths of twelve feet or more and participants were able to walk across the coals multiple times.
There is no magic or great secret to fire-walking. Pure and simple science tells us that certain substances don't conduct heat very well. Hot coals from hard woods burn at temperatures above 1000 degrees Fahrenheit, but they don't conduct heat very well. When an individual walks across a bed of hot coals, twenty feet or less, prepared from a hard wood, like maple, his or her feet generally aren't in contact with the coals long enough to get burned.
When you're baking a cake at 350 degrees you check to see if the cake is ready by briefly touching the cake while it's still in the oven. As long as you only touch the cake briefly you won't get burned. This is because cake doesn't conduct heat very well. Accidentally touch the metal cake pan or the sides of the oven and you'll get burned. This is because metals conduct heat much faster than less dense materials (cake in this instance).
Put another way, you couldn't walk on steel heated to over 1000 degrees, even for a fraction of a second, without receiving severe burns. This is why the materials used in fire-walking are so critical. If you attempt to fire-walk on the materials that are efficient heat conductors (dense metals or stone for example) you're in for a nasty surprise and expensive burn therapy.
Actually the attached photo is somewhat comical. The fire-walker is running and the participant on his back is excited; both their heart rates would be elevated. It's no wonder their heart rates matched or were very close to matching. I often wonder how much "science" is applied when certain claims are made.
Good ponit. I live in San Pedro Manrique, and just for your information, this guy is carrying his father...
"(Fire-walkers at this Spanish ritual also carry another person on their backs as they cross the coals, but the spectators tested for this experiment were all in the crowd.)" It pays to read carefully!
Amazing...The heartbeat of relatives and friends increases more than the heartbeat of strangers! Never could have figured that out without a study.
If people knew how mundane the science behind fire-walking was, they wouldn't get so excited. It's amazing that people still think this is some kind of mind over matter accomplishment.
This article is listed on my news feed as "fire-walkers' hearts beat in sync with spectators". How misleading and even somewhat sensationalist. When I saw that, I was hoping that I wouldn't be reading some pseudo-scientific article about fire-walking being some big spiritual test of will, as some people claim.
Gladly, all the study really shows is that those who know the fire-walkers get nervous for them more than those who don't know them... which is obvious, really. Hardly even worthy of an article, but I bet some people will still take this as proof of the whole hippy, motivational aspect of fire walks.