Brain Waves

The brain works in mysterious ways, as is demonstrated by both exhibits on our tour of the Cabinet today.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcomed Aaron Manky's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of I
Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is full
of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book,
all of these amazing tales are right there on display,
just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet

(00:27):
of Curiosities. Medicine has come a long way from the
days of blood letting and drilling holes in skulls to
release the demons. The more we learn about the human body,
the better we get at curing what ails us. Surgeries
are more precise, computerized scans give us a clear picture

(00:50):
of what might be going on inside us, and tiny
cameras can access areas previously unseen. But some problems cannot
be cut out or removed. In fact, some problem can't
be fixed at all. But that doesn't mean we can't try.
Back in nineteen seventeen, one man believed that he could
cure the brain of a common and debilitating disease, one
that plagued humanity across the globe. That man was Nicola Tesla,

(01:14):
the inventor and electrical engineer known for his work on
the modern alternating current. Decades before we could charge our
phones and earbuds simply by dropping them onto an inductive
charging pad. Tesla was working on a way to transmit
AC power from his Tesla coil using inductive and capacity
of coupling. That's just a fancy way of saying that
he was inventing wireless lighting. He was even seen on

(01:36):
stage a few times lighting various tubes and incandescent bulbs
from several feet away. Tesla poured his heart and soul
into electricity. He wanted to change the world with it,
from wireless power to bladeless turbines. Edison gets all the
credit these days, but Tesla was the true genius. However,
there was one area where the ingenious inventor saw a

(01:58):
perfect application for his new technology, the medical field. Tesla
noticed that one of his assistants was performing tests with
high frequency current, but wasn't following directions properly. After a while, though,
and with more exposure to the current, the assistant started
doing better. Tesla was quoted as saying, a high frequency
current intensifies the action of the brain. It is a

(02:21):
mental stimulant like alcohol, but instead of hurtful to the
brain cells, the electricity is beneficial. He believed that he
could use high frequency current to improve brain functions. In
other words, Nikola Tesla wanted to electrocute the stupidity out
of people. To test his theory, he sought out a
group of people whose brains had not fully developed. Children.

(02:45):
Tesla hypothesized that special wiring inside the insulated walls of
school classrooms could amplify millions of electric waves into the
local atmosphere, waking up dormant brain cells in the fresh
faced kiddos, and he put that hypothesis to work in Stockholm, Sweden.
Two different classrooms were used, one of which was outfitted
with Tesla's special wiring. Fifty children sat in that room,

(03:08):
while another fifty sat in a normal classroom without the wiring.
Both groups completed their schoolwork each day over the course
of six months, with one set of kids getting bombarded
by electric waves in the air the whole time. According
to Tesla's findings, the end of the six month projects
saw that children in the wired room grow by two
and a half inches, while those in the normal room

(03:28):
only grew by one and a quarter inches. The electrified
children also gained weight and became more physically developed than
their counterparts next door. But the most important question, of course,
was how did their brains fair while exposed to a
constant flow of electric current. Well, unsurprisingly, the children in
the room that wasn't wired performed the same as they
had at the start of the study. The other kids, however,

(03:50):
saw a stark change. They averaged a twenty increase in
their grades compared to those in the regular classroom. Tesla's
research became quite popular, after all, imagine what could be
accomplished with a quick jolt to the brain. Of course,
we know how that turned out. For decades, hospitals and
mental facilities used electro shock machines to induce seizures and

(04:11):
modify the brain's functions, especially to cure various mental disorders,
and though many places have banned the practice, it's still
used today all over the world despite its controversial effects.
But Nikola Tesla didn't think about that. He just wanted
to make us all smarter the only way he knew how,
by electrifying the stupid out of us, one current at

(04:32):
a time. Unfortunately, it's not that simple. There's no real
proof that constant exposure to electric current can improve one's intelligence.
Put another way, as Blue collar. Comedian Ron White has
often said, you can't fix stupid. Everyone makes mistakes, but

(05:02):
as anyone who was picked on at school can tell you,
people are often remembered for their tiniest slip ups. They're
given nicknames and often become the butts of countless jokes.
But not Monica. For one English writer, her faux pause
didn't lead to a life of shame. It actually gave
a name to one of the most recognizable dialects in
the world. Monica, often called Monty by her family and friends,

(05:24):
was born in Paris, France, in nineteen fifteen, but she
was raised in London. Her parents were fairly wealthy, and Monty,
being from a well to do family, was expected to
follow certain customs of her social class. However, she refused,
choosing instead to be something of an iconoclast. For one,
she was expelled from her private girls school after she
chucked her uniform into the Thames River. Monty had been

(05:46):
on her way to court to be presented as a debutante.
She also chose to work as a cook and servant
rather than enjoy the life of leisure that would have
been afforded to her. In fact, Monty did a number
of jobs throughout her life. She was a nurse, a
fact reworker, and she worked for a small town newspaper.
The amount of experience that she acquired could have filled
several books, which it did. You see, Monty was also

(06:10):
a prolific author. She used her time as a cook
and a nurse, and all her other occupations to fuel
her true passion writing. Her first book, One Pair of Hands,
was published in nineteen thirty nine and told the story
of her time as a domestic servant. Her nineteen forty
two memoir, One Pair of Feet, described her work as
a nurse during World War Two. Over the course of

(06:32):
her career, Monty wrote dozens of books for both adults
and children, going on to great literary success. Then, in
the nineteen fifties, Monty married an officer in the United
States Navy, and the two moved to America to raise
a family, and she continued to write, publishing a new
book nearly every year or two for the next thirty years.
But it was on a trip to Sydney, Australia in

(06:53):
nineteen sixty four where Monty would make a mistake that
would change the future of an entire country and its language.
She was at a book signing when a young woman
approached her. In her hands was a copy of one
of Monty's books. She held it out and asked how
much is it? But Monty couldn't understand the woman's Australian accent.
She thought the customer had said her name, and so

(07:14):
Monty inscribed the book to one Emma chise It. The
story of the misunderstanding made its way to a man
named Alistair Ardoc Morrison, an Australian writer and graphic artist.
He saw an opportunity to capitalize on an honest mistake
and have a bit of fun at Monty's expense. In
the process, he adopted the pseudonym afribec Lauder, a variation

(07:34):
on the phrase alphabetical order, as if it had been
said in an Australian accent. Under his new moniker, Morrison
wrote a number of articles for The Sydney Morning Herald
about the strange and exotic dialect that had perplexed Monica.
He called it strine. Say it out loud and you
might be able to hear its origins. It's how the
word Australian might sound in that accent. Morrison wrote several

(07:57):
books on Strine, in which he took on the persona
of Afribet Lauder, professor of Strine Studies at the University
of Sydney, with Sydney being the Strine form of Sydney.
The books detailed the fictional professor's journey with the dialect.
Within their pages, readers were given phonetic diagrams of different
words and phrases that had been translated from Strine into

(08:17):
common English. Morrison even published a dictionary jam packed with
entries for things like split their dyke, fraf lee and
eggnersher Did you catch those? They were the Strine versions
of phrases splitting, headache, frightfully an air conditioner. Morrison kept
the identity of afribet Laud hidden for only a few years.

(08:38):
The truth finally came out in nineteen sixty eight, but
that didn't negate the work he had done for Australian culture.
In fact, the country adopted the term strine as the
official description of its accent, and thought there might be
variations depending on where in Australia it's spoken or the
speaker's social status. It's all strine in the end, as Fermonty,
while she didn't let her gaff get her down. She

(09:00):
continued to write and publish books for the rest of
her life. After all, it was in her blood. Literally,
Monica Monty Dickens was none other than the great granddaughter
of the legendary English author Charles Dickens. I hope you've
enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe

(09:22):
for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the
show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was
created by me Aaron Manky in partnership with how Stuff Works.
I make another award winning show called Lore, which is
a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can
learn all about it over at the World of Lore

(09:43):
dot com. And until next time, stay curious.