On the evening of 16 December 1997, approximately 685 Japanese children were hospitalised after watching an episode of the *Pokémon* television series. The triggering element was a four-second sequence of alternating red and blue flashes. At what frequency?
12 Hz. The photosensitive-trigger band for inducing seizures runs from about 5 Hz to about 30 Hz; 12 Hz is squarely in the most-provocative range. Most of the 685 hospitalised children did not actually have photosensitive epilepsy and did not experience seizures — they had mass psychogenic illness propagated through evening news coverage of the original cases. About 80–100 of the 685 had genuine photosensitive seizures; the remaining 500–600 had MPI. The TV Tokyo network suspended *Pokémon* for four months. International broadcasting standards subsequently limited flash rates to a maximum of three per second.
Read the full story →On the evening of 16 December 1997, approximately 685 Japanese children were hospitalised after watching an episode of the *Pokémon* television series. Most of them did not have photosensitive epilepsy. They had mass psychogenic illness propagated entirely through broadcast television — the first time the disease had ever spread that way.
Related questions
- Who began the 1518 Strasbourg dancing plague?
- After the Strasbourg city council's first chosen treatment for the 1518 dancing plague (hire musicians, build stages, encourage the dancing) had visibly failed, they tried a second approach. What was it?
- Robert Koch identified the cholera bacterium in 1883 in Alexandria and confirmed the finding in Calcutta a few months later. But an Italian had identified the same comma-shaped organism nearly 30 years earlier, and been ignored. Who?
- Saladin's senior court physician at Cairo — a man who fled the Almohad persecution in Córdoba as a teenager, ended up in Egypt by way of Morocco and Palestine, and on the side wrote the most influential medieval Jewish philosophical work ever — was?