Science of the Incredible Hulk

[JulianKeller]

I read this in an article.

Anyone know if there is a possible way to stabilize the adrenal response to stress so that is can happen at will and give let's say the perks of it to a person? An possible give the skin a greenish tint as well as increase Muscle Mass while doing so?

Adrenaline boosts your heart rate and blood pressure, causes the liver to release stored energy in the form of glucose and sends blood to your large muscle groups. Cortisol tempers the bodily functions that aren't necessary when you're in a serious bind, such as digestion and growth. During fight-or-flight situations, your pupils dilate, and your visual scope focuses in, decreasing the number of things you notice. It impairs fine and complex motor skills as well, giving more energy to larger movement, such as lifting or running.

For brief periods of time, these hormones can send us into "Incredible Hulk" mode. In survival situations, our unconscious stress response can prod us to eliminate the immediate threats to our safety by building shelter, making fire and evading wild animals. In fact, people actually function at peak performance under the right amount of stress because of these physiological effects

HowStuffWorks "Survival Psychology: Negative Psychological Reactions"

[modest]

Originally Posted by JulianKeller

I read this in an article.

Anyone know if there is a possible way to stabilize the adrenal response to stress so that is can happen at will and give let's say the perks of it to a person? An possible give the skin a greenish tint as well as increase Muscle Mass while doing so?

No - but it would be useful to someone with severe allergies. Instead of carrying around that pesky epinephrine shot if in case they go into anaphylactic shock, they could just tell their adrenal gland "hey, get to work ya little bugger"

As far as the usefulness of turning green and going ballistic in inappropriate situations - we should probably leave that to the comic books (I'm sorry, graphic novels). If you're not in a fight or flight situation - do you need the adrenaline rush that comes with it? I don't think you do.

~modest

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by JulianKeller

Anyone know if there is a possible way to stabilize the adrenal response to stress so that is can happen at will and give let's say the perks of it to a person?

With a bit of practice, anyone can learn to “trick” his or her body into a fight-or-flight response, by intentionally induce a state of fear, for example, by vividly imagining a nearby thread of frightening image. A good indication that you’ve managed the trick is numbness in the fingers, toes, nose, etc. – and, if you have a thermometer of a human helper handy, a drop in temperature of these extremities. If you play violent videogames, you’ve likely induced FOFR accidentally, as indicated by the above hand numbness and chill, and afterwards, a sense of giddiness or even faintness when your arterioles relax, the blood supply to your extremities resumes, and your core/brain blood pressure drops. This also explains why people typically faint after not during, a frightening situation.

You won’t get much of a performance enhancement from FOFR, however, certainly nothing like the Incredible Hulk. The anecdotes you hear of frightened parents lifting thousands of kilograms of machinery to save endangered children, etc. are just that – anecdotes. Reported superhuman abilities are almost certainly due to psychological effects, such as a loss of inhibition and fear, not actual gains in muscle strength. In general, your physical strength and stamina will be slightly decreased by FOFR. If you’ve ever had to physically restrain an agitated person you’ve previously boxed or wrestled in a non-agitated state, you’ve experienced this lack of increase or slight decrease in performance (which can quickly become a substantial decrease, as people in the grips of FOFR tend to forget to breath properly and become oxygen-starved).

This is not to say that the FOFR is useless, or over-rated. It’s main value, however, is not in boosting physical performance, but in preventing dangerous reactions to injury, such as loss of consciousness. A practical learning from this is, if you find hurt and in danger (eg: lying in the road with broken bones), don’t panic, but be afraid. The FOFR will keep your pulse and blood pressure up (opposing other physiological responses working to lower them, and essentially put you into a healing coma), and allow you to stay conscious and moving until you can reach safety – that’s pretty certainly what it was evolved to do.

An possible give the skin a greenish tint …

The FOFR causes blood supply to your skin to be reduced, resulting in your skin become less red/pink. Depending on the amount of constriction, your complexion, and a lot of complicated perceptual cues, people may perceive you as become gray, brown, or even blue-green – though nothing like the vivid green of the comic, TV, or movie Hulks

… as well as increase Muscle Mass while doing so?

There’s no way a body, machine, or anything, can increase its mass without absorbing mass (or, in the case of, for example, subatomic particles, being accelerated to extreme speeds), so the common comic book phenomena of people increasing many times in mass is pretty implausible.

It’s not entirely impossible in principle, but it would take some unprecedented biological or artificial machinery. The Hulk would need to suck in a huge supply of chemical elements, mainly the essential quartet, CHON, and somehow rapidly assemble them into tissue. Air would do the trick, better if it’s very smoggy - full of H2O, for hydrogen, which 10% of tissue is by mass, and CO, CO2, or even unburned hydrocarbons, for carbon, 18%), but due to the rarity of the volume would be huge – something like 1000 to 100,000 times as much air as body mass gained. A full-blown Bruce Banner-to-Green Hulk transformation requires about 500 kg, so he’d have to process somewhere from 500,000 to 50,000,000 m^3 of air. A large jet engine sucks in about 2000 m^3/s, so for the Hulk to manage his transformation in, say, 10 seconds, he’d need to have the throughput of between 200 and 25000 big jet engines – not the sort of air moving you’d not notice, and potentially more destructive than the enraged Hulk. It would be much more practical for Banner/Hulk to just eat a tree, cow, pile or dirt or two – but again, not the sort of thing you’d fail to notice, so hard to accept as an explanation of the comic/movie look.

Playing fast and lose with mass and volume – sudden shrinking and growing without change in density – is a common unrealistic feature of superhero comics. As a rule, fans aren’t especially bothered or even conscious of this incongruity, but it you’re looking at comics in scientific terms, you should find it as unrealistic as the physics of Wile E Coyote.

Really attempting to engineer superheros, using real physics and biology, can be a great educational exercise. The Hulk, being basically physical (no supernatural characteristics) is, I think, a good choice for the exercise.

[mynah]

Why can't The Hulk have chlorophyll? Certainly, no member of the animal kingdom produces chlorophyll, but is it really impossible? (Some animals do have close symbiotic relationships with photosynthetic organisms, though, and therefore appear green.)

[freeztar]

He would have to be able to produce massive amounts of chlorophyl on demand and then consequently flush it out of the system. If this is even possible, which I highly doubt, it is even more improbable that it could happen so rapidly due to physical limitations such as those mentioned by Craig in his great post above.