In the 1870s, French-Canadian lumberjacks working in a forest in Northern Maine started exhibiting some very strange symptoms: When they were startled, they would jump, yell, hit things, or even imitate those around them, completely involuntarily. Their disorder was named The Jumping Frenchmen of Maine, and experts still can’t fully explain it.
That startled jump took a bizarre variety of forms. Sometimes, the men would repeat back phrases they heard, a phenomenon called echolalia, or imitate how other people were moving, called echopraxia. They were also likely to follow random commands: “He described a 27-year-old patient who, while filling his pipe with tobacco, was slapped on the shoulder and told to ‘throw it.’ The patient threw the pipe and the tobacco on the grass automatically.” According to the National Association for Rare Disorders (NORD), afflicted people may also involuntarily swear or utter inappropriate phrases, a phenomenon known as coprolalia.
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