This video, which made the rounds on the internet a week or so ago, depicts the effects of eating a really hot pepper. the bhut jolokia, which has a Scoville rating of 1,000,000. (In comparison, the habenero has a rating of 33,000.)
Anway, you’ll see that this guy ends up all sooty at the end, 3 hours after ingesting … or maybe that should be “in jesting.”
(More videos after the jump.)
Benito describes the experience like this:
“Surprisingly the first sensation was sweetness, with a carrot flavor. This stage did not last long. The heat came next, a pretty standard hot pepper sensation, with nice burning around the entire mouth. My eyes watered a bit. As I chewed, things got strange. It doesn’t take long for the heat to get so intense that it’s no longer hot and your nerve receptors go sideways. At one point it was kind of cold, like the effect produced by mint. Then it would go back to feeling like a bee sting–not a burn, but a piercing sensation of poison being injected. These sensations (plus several others difficult to describe) came and went in waves. Tears were profuse and my nose was running. It burned a lot on swallowing. It was difficult to speak more than a word or two at a time. I enjoyed the mild euphoria that comes with hot peppers, though my left foot was tingling and my right arm got itchy. I don’t think it was an allergic reaction, but I’m sure my peripheral nervous system was having trouble handling the overload. Whitman’s opening line “I sing the body electric” ran through my head, and somehow I knew what it felt like to be a Christmas tree when the lights are switched on. Residual effects lasted for a few hours. Symptoms included laughing, drastic changes to depth perception, and the occasional sensation that ants were crawling over me.”
(Note: the audio tracks of these videos do have quite a few curses, so you might want to turn it down if you view it at work.)
Here’s another video, though, of a man claiming to do the same thing, and he doesn’t seem to have as dramatic a reaction as the first.
Here’s a few more … they all have much more dramatic reactions. Apparently it’s almost a religious experience.
“It’s like a scorpion, digging into your tongue.”
