We recently found an article with a promising headline: "'Radioholics' beware! Headphones may cause 'heartache.'"
"Interesting," we mumbled at our computer, readying headphones-attack.jpg for another hilariously sarcastic blog post.
As it turns out, however, the article doesn't really deliver. There is one (1) line in the entire write-up that talks about headphones' effect on our heart. The claim is that, other than causing deafness, listening to really loud music, "may develop psychogenic disorders and hypertension which will end up in cardiac ailments." That's it. The rest of the article continues on to elaborate about why loud music is bad for your ears, but doesn't mention these "cardiac ailments" again in any sort of detail.
We were expecting lots of quotes from "doctors" making outlandish claims! What about errant soudwaves getting lodged in your left ventricle, or perhaps cardiac arrest induced by an overdose of binaural beats (digital drugs)?
Like most insinuated threats, we're guessing this story will soon be picked up by countless other news publications, who plan on interviewing doctors and doing a lot of journalism. We're going to take the high road, however, and offer up some good, old-fashioned hearsay. We write about headphones, so we're just as good as any doctor at guessing how headphones affect the human body. Therefore, we hope to beat mainstream media to the published punch: here are just a few educated guesses as to what horrors can befall your heart when... headphones attack!
1. Hypertension sends your heart into overdrive. The article describes hypertension, which is basically a fanciful word for high blood pressure. Prolonged headphone use can jack up your blood pressure that even a slight impact will make your heart -- your entire cardiovascular system, in fact -- burst, not unlike a really gross water baloon, or a really gross piñata.
2. Psychogenic disorders reprogram your brain. According to our sources -- which could very well include an entire platoon of doctors for all you know -- psychogenic disorders can refer to any problem involving the frontal lobe of the brain and maybe a few other areas (we're not sure, the wikipedia article was vague). Really, there's no limit to the damage that can be done to your heart in this scenario. Maybe the headphones make you hallucinate vividly, which leads to heart attack. Maybe the brain convinces your heart to just stop beating. Really, once your brain gets messed up, anything is possible. For further research on the matter, see The Happening, by M. Night Shymalan.
3. Loud, rhythmic music alters the way your heart beats. Everyone's been in a club and felt the loud, booming bass in their chest. Well, if you're listening to loud music with your headphones, you're essentially applying a weak defibrillator to your heart all day long. Gradually, your heart will begin to grow accustomed to the loud, bassy drums helping it beat. Eventually, your heart will be so lazy, that it totally depends on a booming bass to function. Take off your headphones and your heart will stop. Therefore -- if your one of the lucky few to catch this disorder before it kills you -- you'll be forced to continue to listen to your loud music for the rest of your life. The whole scenario is kind of what Tony Stark deals with in Iron Man, only you'll have a significantly higher risk of hearing loss.
4. Soundwaves build up in your heart until it explodes. On average, one out of every twelve soundwaves blasting into your ear will worm its way into your bloodstream like an obnoxiously loud nematode. Now, typically your white blood cells will attack and neutralize the soundwave, but some soundwaves are heartier than others (particularly those in the 7-8 kHz range). Now, as any doctor will tell you, the human cardiovascular system is entirely soundproof: otherwise, the sound of your own pumping blood would be nearly deafening. Therefore, that soundwave isn't going to escape on its own. So the soundwave is in your blood, immune to your body's self-defense system, and not dissipating on its own. What happens to it? It winds up in your heart, bouncing around like a caged ferret. If you keep listening to loud music, it's just time before statistics dictate another soundwave makes it into your heart. Then another. And another. Before you know it, your heart will be infested with ricocheting soundwaves, making it look like the 49th level of JezzBall. Eventually, your heart will literally explode. The sudden dispersement of bottled-up soundwaves can contain enough raw decibels to level an entire city block, shaking it to rubble with sub-sonic sound frequencies.
To summarize, it's getting harder and harder to enjoy your headphones without dying. Sure, we might have made up the above examples for the purpose of entertainment, but it doesn't mean they can't happen to you -- or to your children.
You know, after completely fabricating the above list, we found ourselves reminiscing about the days, when wearing headphones just meant you were doomed to be hit by a train. Such innocent times.
As always, if you have any first-hand experiences with the dangers of headphones, feel free to email us. Think of it both as a kind of catharsis and a way for us to phone in some kind of mailbag post at a later date.
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