June 26, 2025 • 56 mins
Today, we all generally understand that the brain is responsible for what we call personality and thought -- yet this wasn't always the case. Once humans figured out the brain was more than a weird lump in the skull, it took centuries of trial and error, along with quack science, to really understand how it works. In today's episode, the guys welcome back special guest Jorge Cham, the creator of ScienceStuff, to lear more about the ridiculous history of brain science.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
(00:27):
the show. Thank you, as always so much Ridiculous Historians
for joining us. Let's hear it for the man the
myth our super producer mister Max Williams Imax. All right, yeah,
we're getting some snapping fingers. This is part two of
a continuing exploration. The guy who just said Imax is
(00:48):
mister Noel Brown, none other than.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Oh thanks buddy, You're welcome, Buckeroo.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
They called me Ben Bullen in this part of the world,
and Noel, if we could do a previous on Ridiculous History,
the smoke Monster was bullsh wasn't anything, well, it was
the thing. It was the man in Black, it was
you know, that's the show Lost, which dated references.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
But that's what we're here for. No, it's true.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
We did previously on Ridiculous History talk with the brilliant
and lovely doctor Jorge at Sham, who helped us navigate
the universe a little bit, from the Big Bang to
the singularities to AI and the way that artificial intelligence
may well be close to, if not already at a
(01:40):
place where it resembles the human brain.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
Yes, that is true. And Noel, as you know, I'm
really proud of you and Maxim myself for being quite
transparent and forthright with the fact that we are ourselves
not experts.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Folks.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
We know everybody enjoyed the first part of our conversations
with doctor or a Champ, and believe it or not,
we were able to get Orgey back for another episode
or Hey, welcome, thank you for joining us.
Speaker 4 (02:17):
Hey, super fun to be here. Thanks for having me back.
Speaker 3 (02:20):
Of course, of course you're helping us out as well.
We love a good two part, especially one that we
decide on in advance.
Speaker 4 (02:27):
Yeah, and this will be the Empire Streks back of podcasts.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
Oh, that's the film. It's a universe.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
We're talking about the history of what we call the
Big Bang in our previous exploration, which led us to,
as you were saying, Noel, an exploration of so called
artificial intelligence, the nature of reality, the observable universe. And
we tease just a bit episode two. This is our
(03:05):
exploration of the ridiculous history of a thing that studies
itself the science of the human brain. So real quick
I could if we could open it up this way, Orgey,
just small talk, What is the human brain.
Speaker 4 (03:28):
Was this little about sixty eight pound organ that you
have in your head. And it's just another organ in
your head.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
You know.
Speaker 4 (03:34):
It's a lump of fleshy stuff that basically makes who
you are happen, Like your conscious experience, all your memories,
how you feel, that's all happening in that little gelatinous
blob inside your skull.
Speaker 3 (03:50):
I've always felt calling the brain an organ was selling
it short just a little bit. When I think of
an organ, I guess I think of just like guts.
You know, it's important. But the brain is a very
peculiar and powerful and incredible organ.
Speaker 4 (04:04):
It is it is. People say it's the most complex
organization of matter that we know about in the whole universe.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
And it's also the biggest erogenoist zone.
Speaker 4 (04:14):
In the human we go. It's the biggest everything zone.
Basically hunger, heye, love, it's all happening in your head.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Now, this is fascinating. I love that phrase because we
also have to acknowledge an inherent dilemma. We're asking a
thing to research and explain itself, to measure itself. Could
you tell us a little bit about the philosophical quandaries
(04:43):
involved with that like because ordinarily, you know, if you
asked if you asked a duck its opinion about ducks,
you would get a weird you know, not completely objective.
Speaker 4 (04:58):
Right, right, right, and everyone knows are just a bunch
of quacks. Now it's a super interesting philosophical conversation, right,
because right, there's eighty six billion neurons in your head,
and so the idea that eighty six billion neurons could
ever really really understand what's happening in eighty six billion neurons,
(05:23):
even if somebody else's eighty six billionaires, it's sort of impossible, right.
It's sort of like a car understanding a car, or
you know, a switch understanding a switch. So it's probably
not possible for the human brain to really understand everything
that's going on in your brain, like down to the tee.
But you know, we have science, and so we can
make kind of generalizations, we can make certain rules, we
(05:44):
can understand the general structure and organization of the brain,
but like totally understanding the brain and predicting what it's
going to do, it's probably impossible for our brains. But
you can imagine, like maybe aliens who have four hundred
billion neurons, you know them, we might be like, oh,
look at these cats, you know, running around, We can
totally understand what's going on in their heads.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
So this leads us to the ridiculous history of neuroscience
or brain science. Could you tell us a little bit
about the first I guess there was a moment in
human civilization, or a series of moments more accurately, wherein
people realized this gelatinous blob in their head was doing something.
(06:31):
We're under the impression that for a lot of human history,
various cultures believed that the soul or the consciousness maybe
resided in other organs, like the heart or the I'll
say it, sorry, substitute teachers, genitalia.
Speaker 4 (06:52):
Was there a lot of it? A lot of our
actions do come.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
From it's like a second brain.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
So what was there any sort of inflection point or
crossroads in history of humans where they started to look
at the brain as a seat of consciousness.
Speaker 4 (07:15):
Yeah, yeah, now, yeah, it's a pretty interesting history because,
as you mentioned, probably for most of human history, we
had no idea what was going on inside of our bodies.
How though our bodies work, much less how our brains
worked or what it did Aristotle back in the ancient
Greek era. Uh, basically agree with what you just said,
which is he thought that everything that makes us who
(07:38):
we are is in our hearts, like in our chest.
And he thought that the brain was really just like
a radiator, like a brain just there to like cool people. Yeah,
jes United has all these like lumps and wriggles like
that would make sense, right kind of.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
Yeah, sure, maybe dissipute the heat like coils like coils in.
Speaker 4 (07:57):
Area, Yeah, yeah, like increasing the surface area.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
Uh.
Speaker 4 (08:00):
And if you think about it, it kind of makes sense, right,
Like if you are designing a human being, Like, why
would you put the most important part on this little
like appendage sitting at the top, you know, exposed to
Yeah it's exposed. Yeah yeah what did you put it?
Like in the chest right protected by ribs and organs
Like that would make a little bit more sense. But no,
(08:22):
it's like it's sticking up in our hands. It's a
little peninsula on the box. Yeah yeah, so easy to
knock or or chop off. So he didn't quite have
it right, But people think that maybe the Egyptians knew
a little bit more about the brain. So there's this
famous papyrus papyrus scroll, yeah, that they found made by
(08:47):
the ancient Egyptians where they kind of like documented medical cases.
It's called the Edwin Smith Papyrus.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
Yes, like the thought yeah.
Speaker 4 (09:02):
Oh that's another brain game right there. So we know,
like the Addigus catalog all these medical things like oh,
if you break an arm, this is what happens. If
you sever your spinacle, this is what happened. And there's
like an entry number twenty in this squirrel that says,
you know, if you get hit in the head card,
we know that sometimes you can lose the ability to talk.
(09:24):
So like in their heads they're thinking, oh, your brain
is good for things like talking. So that's kind of
like the earliest we think kind of a record of
people humans kind of understanding what the brain is doing.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
Oh wow.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
And this this also reminds us clearly of a similar
practice indicative of recognizing the importance of the brain as
an organ, which is the practice of trepan nation, right. Uh,
trepanation being.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
The demons.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, venting relieving pleasure, yeah, drilling a
physical hole somewhere in the cranium. I think for a
lot of us lay for the primary amazing thing about
the practice of trapanation is that people survived somehow.
Speaker 4 (10:27):
Yeah right, Yeah, it's wild. Basically, there's not much activity
going on like understanding the brain up until about the
eighteen hundreds, and that's when people really started to record
things like hey, if you open up your skull and
you dig a hole through here, this can happen. Or
if you open up this part of the brain and
you kind of like mess around with it or apply
(10:48):
electricity like that, your arm will move and so yeah,
so that's one of the things that people did in
the eighteen hundreds, which which opened up your brain and
pok it. And it's sort of dubious to us.
Speaker 2 (11:01):
Now that's not to say.
Speaker 3 (11:04):
Syram that gave us that information, but which is often
the case with early discovery, it's like, yeah, you know,
you gotta break a few eggs to make a science online.
Speaker 4 (11:14):
Be a little bit of a mad scientist. Yeah, but
it taught us a lot, Like it started to kind
of piece everything together. People started to figure out, oh,
like the brain has parts. You know, it's not just
like one giant computer chip. It's got like a little
processor for this over here and a little processor for
that out over there, and so that's kind of how
it started, really kind of ramping up the history of
(11:35):
brain science.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
Now we're talking the eighteen hundreds at this point, which
means from what Noel and I understand, this means this happens,
this great scientific inquiry occurs in the same sort of
historical milieu as a lot of quack science. Right, I
(11:56):
guess we should talk about phrenology a little bit.
Speaker 4 (11:59):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Well it's it's sort of a it's
a bit of a sketchy thing to delineate between quack
science and really thought right, you know what I mean.
Like back then, it's like it's like accusing a cavement
of not being good scientists. You know, they just didn't know,
and so they were just trying all these different theories.
They had all these ideas. They were going on vibes
basically vibes, and yeah, it's a Phrenology was a huge
(12:24):
deal in the eighteen hundreds. People thought that, you know,
there was this idea that the brain is mapped, like
there's areas that do different things. But so people would
just guess, like, oh, the part of the back part of
your rank, that's where that's where your love is located
and the front part is where your egoism is located,
and so they just if you look it up phrenology,
there's all these like maps. I think most people have
(12:45):
probably have probably seen them, just like a human head
with like areas kind of like a like a meat
diagram and a cow for one little.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
Regions where the tenderline is exactly.
Speaker 4 (12:55):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
And that was informed, unfortunately by a lot of confirmation bias,
we could argue from Western Europe at the time, wherein
people would say, oh, we've made this rough Butcher's diagram
or topography of a cranium, and based on this bump,
(13:19):
this guy is going to be good at what's a
silly thing to be good at?
Speaker 2 (13:25):
In the unicycle.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
This guy's great at unicycles. Yeah, look at the other bump,
you know, right there by the temple. This is our
unicyclist juggler phrenology.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
Jorge.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
Was it widely accepted in its day.
Speaker 4 (13:41):
I think it was, you know, as accepted as like
you know, somebody selling tonics, you know, going from town
to town in the Old West selling tonics to rejuvenate
your vigor or something like that. You know, it's something
that people weren't quite sure it was true or not,
and some people claim that they were starting up it
and you know, people rolled the dice.
Speaker 3 (14:03):
Not a far jump from things like the humors, you know,
the idea of leeching and blood letting in order to
balance out these supposed you know, materials within the body.
And then honestly, I'm not trying to poop anybody's beliefs here,
but not too too far off from things like chakras
and meridian lines in some you know, Eastern medicine that
(14:24):
some people think is quackery and some people swear by.
So I mean, it's just interesting the way some of
that stuff is still around and believed in or not
believed in depending.
Speaker 4 (14:32):
No, no, that stuff is quackery.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
No okay, Oh the.
Speaker 1 (14:37):
Professor came out on that one.
Speaker 4 (14:40):
No fense to the Crystal fans.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
Yes, yes, yes, we just being diplomatic.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
We are being diplomatic, and we we share the same pursuits,
which is always going to be hopefully the collective, objective
interrogation of the world around us and within us. One
(15:06):
thing we were talking about a little bit off air.
It pertained to some some just phenomenal and again, as
you said Jorge. Ethically, dubious learnings that came. You mentioned
the earlier realization from humanity that certain parts of the
(15:30):
brain function in certain ways right and excel in certain things.
And at the end of our first conversation we introduced
a patient who for a long time was simply known
as HM, and HM, as we find, is pivotal to neuroscience,
(15:52):
perhaps because of well, gosh, can we tell can we
tell the story? Yes, super fasting story. This was a
little bit later. This was in the nineteen thirties that
this man came about. His name was Henry Malaysan, but
for a long time people didn't know his name because
when you become a medical subject, they kind of make
(16:14):
you anonymous. So for a long time, for many years,
he was just known as patient AHM. And so this
was a guy who had a lot of seizures as
a kid. Some people think it maybe happened after he
had like a bike accident and then he knocked his head.
Some people think he was just kind of he just
had these seizures for no reason. So it's not quite
clear how or why he got these features, but they
(16:34):
were like super intense, like he couldn't really function it
would really kind of make him not able to have
a job or go to school or things like that.
Speaker 4 (16:44):
And at the time, as you said, the doctors were like, oh,
I know how to cure it this. I'll just poke
a hole in your head and mess around with it.
And so a common procedure back then was basically a lobotomy,
Like they would just kind of stick this long needle
kind of through your eye socket, did you like move
(17:04):
your eye a little bit out of the way, and
then you stick it in there and then kind of
mess around. And what they did for him specifically was
they destroyed most of his hippocampus, so like deep inside
your brain you have this little these little lumps called
the hippocampus. And you know, his seizures were so severe
(17:24):
that this doctor called Williams Coville thought that he needed
to take out both his hippocampus, and so he did.
And the amazing thing is it sort of worked, like
his seizure stopped. But unfortunately it had a bad side effect,
which is that Henry Molaysan was not able to make
new memories. So like he remembered his whole life, his childhood,
(17:49):
you know, his early adulthood, right up until the day
he had his surgery. But after that he couldn't remember
more than thirty minutes at a time.
Speaker 1 (17:58):
He couldn't encode information.
Speaker 4 (18:02):
Right, Like if you met him and you said hey,
and he like, he could tell you where he grew up,
who his mother was, and everything, but thirty minutes later
he would totally forget he met you, Or thirty minutes later,
he couldn't tell you how he got to where he was,
what he had for breakfast, you know, any he couldn't
tell you anything beyond thirty minutes ago.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
Okay, well, we've all met executive producers and before you see.
Speaker 4 (18:26):
A botimized Oh.
Speaker 1 (18:29):
So this this is a moment of tremendous significance to
the history of neuroscience when and first off, him's existence
at this point is cursed. You mentioned earlier that this
was this was a primary source for the film Momento.
Speaker 2 (18:55):
Is that correct?
Speaker 4 (18:56):
Yeah, the Christopher Nolan film The When He Got kind
Of I got famous for initially Memento. It was this
guy who basically lived this life, but in our modern
world right now and so he couldn't remember more than
thirty minutes ago, and so and so that movie's kind
of told backwards in time. It's like he's you're sort
of living the movie like he is living in It's like, oh,
(19:17):
I'm here, Why am I here? I don't know why
I'm here? And then you flash back to like thirty
minutes ago to figure out how he got there, and
then you keep flashing back thirty minutes at a time.
That's the movie. And this guy like actually lifted. He
just woke up every day and thirty minutes the world
was brand new to him.
Speaker 2 (19:35):
That's a good yeah.
Speaker 3 (19:36):
Yeah, And I don't know if that's like terrifying or
kind of awesome, but now I think it's terrifying.
Speaker 2 (19:40):
I don't think it would a good way to experience
the world.
Speaker 4 (19:43):
Well, it wouldn't make you useful for pretty much anything
except subject There's.
Speaker 3 (19:48):
There's something to be said about, like, you know, if
we could just wipe our memories or do a little reset.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
But no, I'm sorry not making life.
Speaker 3 (19:56):
This is a very very serious condition, but one that
shut up lot of light on some things that didn't
require people to go necessarily digging around in people's brains, right.
Speaker 4 (20:06):
Right, right, yeah. In particularly, she had a lot of
light on how memory works in our brain, so, like
before this patient, mostly people thought that memory was something
that was spread across your brain, Like people thought your
brain was used to giant kind of a computer ship
and you had just like you know, you store memories
in a little bit here, a little bit there, a
little bit everywhere. It's just kind of like evenly spread out.
(20:29):
But what was fascinating about patient HM is that he
could remember his childhood, his early adulthood. He couldn't make
me memories, but you could teach him motor skills like
he could. Yeah, Like you could teach him how to
play tennis, and the first day he would be terrible
at it, but if he kept practicing, he would get
better at it, but he wouldn't remember having practice.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
So every time this guy, for example, plays tennis, he's
just a little bit better, right, but he doesn't know why.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
He's just really good at it.
Speaker 4 (21:04):
Yeah, Like you know, by session thirty, I imagine, right,
this is hypothetically because I don't think they really has
them to play tennis, But like by session thirty, he'd
be like, you know, hitting aces and returning loves and
he'd be like, oh my god, I had no idea
I could play tennis. That was basically his experience.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
I hope he has a I hope he has a
lived perception that he is a virtuoso. You know what
I mean, because it's always the first thirty minutes that
he's played tennis.
Speaker 4 (21:34):
Yeah, right right, But then in the next session if
he doesn't play tennis, he has no idea he's good
to play tennis.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
Al true periodic victory.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
Yeah, real conundrum.
Speaker 3 (21:42):
So what did this teach us though about the brain?
That there are certain things that could not be recalled,
but yet certain things had a bit more of a
sense memory perhaps.
Speaker 4 (21:54):
Yeah. Mainly what it taught people is that there are
different kinds of memory. Like I think most people who
are listening to about short term memory long term memory.
So those are two separate things in your brain. But
for a long time, we didn't know that, and we
didn't know there was such a thing as motor memory.
Like when you like your signature, you can do you
write your signature without thinking about it. It's just in
(22:14):
your muscle memory. Or some people can play the piano
with is your muscle memory. So that's in a different
part of your brain than the long term. The short
term even your verbal and language all that is just
in separate areas. It's still in areas, but it's a
little bit more spread out of the brain. And so
that's kind of what it unlocked for scientists is like,
oh wait, memory is not just this like one hard drive.
(22:36):
It's like a whole bunch of little hard drive and
a whole bunch of different ways that memories gets stored.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
So that teaches us as well about that reminds us
of things like what is it called broksophasia or something?
So patient HM was capable of retaining and speaking the
language she had learned in his childhood. What we're talking about,
we talk about brocos of phasia is of course the
breakdown of as you said, Jorge, a different version of
(23:06):
the hard drive, right, the one that controls linguistic aptitude.
Did he I don't know the answer. I'm asking honestly,
did sense memory impact anything?
Speaker 2 (23:20):
Like?
Speaker 1 (23:21):
Could he the same way he was hypothetically taught to
be good at tennis? Could he be taught to and
we're breaking tons of ethical experimentation laws on this, but
could you possibly teach this patient to be avoidant of
or attracted to, say, a certain stimuli like a smell
(23:45):
and then wait for that reset in the brain function.
You know, is this guy? Is it possible to make
a world where this guy is waking up experiencing lucidity
every thirty minutes and now he just hates the No,
what's a good smell to hate? Oh, my gosh, the
(24:05):
smell of coffee, like coffee, coffee, coffee is a great one.
Is it possible to uh, would it be possible to
teach sense memory in an olfactory way or what does
that take? Right?
Speaker 4 (24:20):
I think the idea is that he couldn't make long
term memories, so and I'm not sure that like our
associations with certain smells, I'm not sure quite sure where
that is in the brain. So it might some of
it might be in our long term memory, in which
case he couldn't. You couldn't train that in him. But
some of it might be automatic, in which case you
(24:42):
probably could.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
That is fascinating, and it occurs in step with we
wanted to ask you about this with another pivotal moment
in neuroscience understanding and and folks, by the way, I
feel like we've been very very clear about this. Do
not try this at home, no matter how mad you
(25:06):
are at your sibling. Do not try this at home.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
Right.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
There is another case that occurred in the eighteen hundreds,
so a little bit prior to HM, the infamous Phineas Gauge.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
Yes, yeah, railroad tie.
Speaker 1 (25:25):
Yeah yeah.
Speaker 4 (25:26):
So Finished Gage was a railroad worker. He's just a
regular dude in eighteen mid eighteen hundreds up there in Vermont,
and you know, by all accounts, he was a nice guy,
you know, lived his life, worked hard. One day, he
was like installing these long metal rods on a rock
to make way for like a railroad. And what they
(25:49):
do is they pack some dynamite in there, they stick
the rod, and then they light the fuse and then
that blows up the rock. What could go wrong? Right,
thing exploded on him and this meter long iron rod
basically went through his head. So he kind of went
in through his left cheek, kind of up and above,
(26:12):
kind of behind his eyeballs, through the front part of
his brain, and then it came out the top. Gar
He did not. He survived, that is the fascinating thing.
And so he got better and everyone's like, oh, oh
my god, that's amazing. He's a miracle. I guess the
(26:35):
brain is not that important. For take away. Yeah, for
a long time, he was basically used as an example
of like, oh, the brain is like, you know, just
one big amorsive most mass, and if you lose a
little bit, it's like, you know, you lose a little bit,
but whatever, your brain has the risk of itself to
like make you who you are. And so he's revived.
(26:56):
People thought he was fine, but literally little people sort
of realized there was something a little off about him,
like he quite wasn't quite himself like he reportedly, he
just had like a he kind of basically became an
a hole.
Speaker 2 (27:10):
I don't know if I can say that.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
Yeah, he had a he had a market change in
his temperance, right he was he was now seen as yeah,
like you said, a whole and thank you for keeping
it a family show.
Speaker 4 (27:27):
But he was not a nice guy. Not a nice guy.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
Oh by all accounts.
Speaker 3 (27:30):
Before that though, he was a perfectly nice fellow, a
hard worker, like you said, and in fun and fine
to be around, jovial. And then after this people started
noticing that something in his personality had shifted.
Speaker 4 (27:42):
You know, Yeah, his personality had shifted from being like
a nice guy to like being very ill tempered, like
he just grumpy all the time. But and then beyond
his personality, he also kind of had a little bit
of ADHD now, like he could he find it hard
to focus, He couldn't really concentrate, and so he's just
he was just kind of like a frustrated person all
the time. And you know, people who knew me were like,
(28:04):
this is not the same person. And so only later
when the people realize, like, oh, this is perfectly explained
because the front part of your brain, that's kind of
where your personality is and where your ability to focus is.
So that was another big part of kind of like
mapping the brain and figuring out that there are parts
(28:24):
to it that do different things and which parts do
different things.
Speaker 3 (28:27):
I gotta say, there's a really great episode of our
sister podcast, Stuff You Missed in History Class, all about
Phineas Gage back in the Archives. I remember back when
I produced that show, that was the first time I'd
heard of him, and I thought it was super fascinating.
So do check that one out for a deep dive
on this fascinating character.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
Also fascinating to borrow that word there. It's also fascinating
that his treating physician was a guy named jam Horlow
and jam Harlow, like many Western physicians of his day,
held in abiding interest in phrenology. So maybe if you are,
(29:12):
if you are a boffin or a doctor of the day,
maybe it's not the fact that this meter long rod
went through the front part of this human brain, it's
that it altered the shape of the cranium. So now
he doesn't have good guy bumps.
Speaker 4 (29:29):
Well, what's interesting is that, you know, this idea sounds crazy, right,
like you could judge how a brain works by how
well brain is good at something by its shape. But
that's actually something they found kind of in the nineties
early two thousands, was that they looked at brain scans
of taxi drivers in London.
Speaker 2 (29:48):
The knowledge, yeah, the knowledge of this, the way it
sort of changed the pathways, right.
Speaker 4 (29:55):
Yeah, yeah, So they studied the brains of taxi drivers
in life then, and they talk about the knowledge, right, like,
you know, if you're brand new at driving a taxi
in London, you're clueless. You have no idea where anything
is if you've ever been there, there's like alleys everywhere
with all these it's impossible to navigate. But once you've
done it for a while you know, the whole day
of the land, you can take anyone anywhere. They studied
(30:17):
the brains of these people, and they found that people
who've been doing it for a long time, that part
of your brain that stores like locations and spatial memory
that's actually bigger, like it grows.
Speaker 2 (30:30):
The mind is shriveled. Y'all. I'm so bad at directions.
I have no sense of geography.
Speaker 3 (30:36):
It's really bad because yeah, because maybe it was, it's
been bad even since before, you know what. It's just
funny though, I will say this, I have recently been
trying to actively not use maps, and I have found
that it improves my sense of direction overall.
Speaker 2 (30:56):
So I think it can be almost relearned or you know, improved. DuPont.
Speaker 5 (31:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (31:01):
My wife just talked to a coworker who said he's
taking his son out for walks just to teach him
how to go on walks.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
Yeah. Yeah, he's and it's not always inherent, you know, Yeah.
Speaker 4 (31:15):
Because he's going out to college and you know, kids
do they basically maybe don't have that ability to walk around.
Speaker 1 (31:22):
Yeah. I haven't had to uh be lost in the woods,
right like our four bears. Uh Yeah, It's funny. It's
funny you say that because we we've talked in the
past about these arguments regarding you know, regarding the advent
of offloading uh, some sort of process right from the
(31:44):
human machine to an external machine. And I love that
you're bringing up the knowledge because that was a revolutionary
study in neuroscience. It reminds me as well of a
study I want to say it was in Why You
in two thousand and eight, admittedly small sample size, but
(32:09):
they studied people who meditate, Buddhist monks in particular, and
they found something similar similar to the similar to how
the use of the part of the brain that is
occupied with spatial positioning appropreception. You could argue, similar to
(32:31):
how their continued practice of knowing where they are and
where they're going literally became mind over matter and increased
the I believe the argument is not just the increase
in size, but the increase in density of synaptic connections.
(32:52):
The study in eight with Buddhist monks found, and I'm
going to sound so pops, I hear, and I apologize,
it found that the part of the brain position toward
or associated with things like empathy and compassion was actually
(33:13):
denser and larger and exhibited more activity in those Buddhist
monks versus a sample size of you know, jerks like.
Speaker 4 (33:25):
Us, non Buddhist monks, not.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
Enlightened, not yes, not enlightened, perfect diplomacy. So this brings
us to I think I think the general umbrella term
for this concept is neuroplasticity. Is that what we're kind
of talking about? What is neuroplasticity.
Speaker 4 (33:53):
Yeah, it's kind of this idea that your brain is
not static, like at all, Like your brain is constantly
kind of rewiring itself, kind of constantly tuning itself. And
it's not like you're necessarily growing new neurons, but these
neurons are making new connections between themselves. And also kind
(34:14):
of more importantly is that these the connections that they have,
they're constantly kind of recalibrating themselves. And actually that's kind
of what's happening. That's how like ais learn. You know,
if you look at these neural net models, basically what
they're changing when they're learning stuff is the weighing of
(34:37):
the synaptic connections. So like how strong priority wise or
yeah kind of priority wise. Yeah, Like each neurons is
connected to like let's say a hundred other neurons, and
like it's getting all these inputs, so which ones do
you ignore? Which ones do you listen to? And so
that happens at what are called synapses, which is kind
(34:57):
of where like you know, the little branches of two
neurons kind of mean.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
And firing, right, firing synapses.
Speaker 4 (35:04):
Firing, yeah, firing synapses where that gets transmitted from one
to the other. So that's that's where that's happening.
Speaker 3 (35:10):
Yeah, And when you look at a brain scan or
an MRI, if I'm not mistaken, you can literally see
this activity right lighting up in different regions of the brain.
Speaker 4 (35:20):
Kind of these these are like almost like molecule size.
They're like super super tiny, so you can't see them
like an MRI, but you can see kind of like
when you're looking at MRI, what you're looking at is
like the oxygen consumption of your neurons. So you can
tell like, oh, these neurons are being active because they're God, drinking.
Speaker 2 (35:35):
Up a lot makes a lot of sense. So it's
an indicator, got it. Yeah, Yeah, that's fascinating.
Speaker 1 (35:40):
So now we have learned that in given that the
universe observable according to Big Bang theory is about fourteen
billion years old. Humans are real up and coming fad overall.
Speaker 4 (35:58):
Right, we're the latest it beings. Yeah we are, We
sure are, and for long. That's how fads work.
Speaker 1 (36:08):
And and we we also learned in that very brief
span of time that we call humanity. Uh, people went
from totally thinking the soul was in the most protected
part of the body, the torso right to figuring out, oh,
that fatty thing in your head does something. Right after
(36:30):
we figured out just how to stop eating each other's brains. Uh,
just gonna throw that in there, and and and then
from there we see this, this vast series of at
times problematic innovations, sometimes based in accident, sometimes based in
(36:52):
confirmation bias or as you said, quack science of phrenology
or hate. Where does the exploration of consciousness and neuroscience
go in the future, By the way, just going to
put this out there for posterity. Jorge, Noel Max and
I are recording this on Monday, June twenty third, twenty
(37:14):
twenty five, So no pressure, Orge. Next thousand years, where
are we at.
Speaker 4 (37:21):
No set, assuming we survived the next I don't know months,
Oh my god, existence here you know. I think these
things are like Pandora's blogs. You know, once you open them,
you can't go back, you know. And so I think
we're going to be understanding the universe a lot more,
We're going to be understanding things at the quantum level
(37:43):
a lot more. And who knows what's going to happen
with AIS. You know, it's quite I think possible that
within I don't know, twenty years, there'll be a conscious
AI who is smarter than us.
Speaker 3 (37:59):
I think can That is the term that gets thrown
around a lot, is singularity in terms of AI. But
then we also in talking about the Big Bang that's
referred to as a singularity event, and maybe the terms
are sort of used loosely, But can you kind of
talk about that term and how it applies to both
of those different things. Is it really just kind of
like an it moment where a big thing happens.
Speaker 2 (38:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (38:19):
So consciousness is one of the most debated things in
like neuroscience psychology. Like if you ask any scientist like
what is even consciousness? You'll get one hundred different answers.
Some people think it's like totally kind of biologically based,
like it's you know, a dog can have some kind
of consciousness and can have a little bit of a consciousness,
(38:41):
you know, machine can have a consciousness the material materialist philosophy. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And some people think there's something kind of special and
almost supernatural about it, you know, even scientists sometimes think
that when it happens, it's like this kind of indescribable
(39:03):
thing that happens.
Speaker 1 (39:04):
Yeah, Promethean lighting in a bottle. Yeah, And this is
where we get to the vast precipice, some would say,
or the vast horizon, depends upon your interpretations of as
you said, Nol, singularity or transhumanism and future futurism. Nolan
(39:30):
and I were talking off air or at length about
the concept of AI, artificial intelligence large language models. We
touched on it naturally a little bit in part one,
but perhaps we close out chapter two of our conversation
on the history of brain science by exploring the nature
(39:55):
of AI just a bit further. Now you have you have,
through your work explore human human computer interaction in depth,
right and yeah, and so where do you see the
future of human interaction with AI going? You already said,
(40:21):
you know, there is a horizon where this kind of
thing exists. What will that tell us about the human brain? Oh,
my goodness, small dog. Well, it kind of depends on
where you land about how special the human brain is.
You know, like I personally am an engineer by training,
(40:41):
and to me, brains are really just like meat machines.
You know, It's like it's mechanical, there's chemicals, involves some
people think like quantum physics and quantum and certainly plays
a role in like those little tiny synapsis that we have,
in which case, you know, there is maybe some magic
to how the human rain works.
Speaker 2 (41:00):
I think we're all made of star stuff.
Speaker 1 (41:04):
Well, if the Big Bang is true, then technically that
that's also true, right.
Speaker 3 (41:08):
Well yeah, we arose from something like that, right, and
we had to have.
Speaker 4 (41:12):
Yeah yeah, well most of our the atoms and our
bodies were made inside of a star. Yeah, because the
universe at the beginning was just all hydrogen, and so
anything other than hydrogen was basically made by a star
and usually starts dying.
Speaker 1 (41:26):
So yeah, this podcast brought to you by hydrogen. So
we're saying then that the nature of consciousness is still
something that the world's smartest people past, present, and possibly
future have debate, have debated, right, the materialist view of
(41:51):
this one thing in this one case, these physical processes,
these mechanics, and these chemical interactions, and then there's the
larger question is there something bigger? Right? Is an individual
consciousness only a node for a larger system which gets
(42:12):
little It's a lot of my old professors hate that idea.
Speaker 4 (42:19):
Yeah, it's this idea like humans are the way that
the universe understands itself kind of. Is that what you're
talking about a little bit, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (42:27):
Because you're talking about we're talking about now what we
would call Homo sapiens exceptionalism, right, yeah, right, the idea
that although one can observe perhaps emotions in a pet,
or what seems to be emotions in a pet, even
(42:50):
on the strength of various cognitive diagnostics, you could observe
maybe the way an octopus dreams, or the the functions
of certain higher order mammals.
Speaker 3 (43:03):
To take what we're talking about metacognition here, right, like
the fact that humans are uniquely built to think about thinking,
to analyze themselves, sometimes into oblivion, which is why maybe
sometimes I'm jealous of the guy that can't remember anything
for more than thirty minutes, because it can be a
awaking nightmare at times what we do to ourselves in
(43:25):
terms of like thinking about thinking and all of the possibilities,
and it can be really exhausting, right.
Speaker 4 (43:31):
Yeah, yeah, And they're fascinating cases in the history of
brain science to the kind of speak to consciousness. So
one fascinating case that is pretty recent are conjoined twins.
So there's a pair of famous twins called the Hogan twins,
and these are two girls who were born conjoined were
they basically share a brain, or they share parts of
(43:53):
the brain, and specifically they share like this part called
the thalamus, which is kind of like a kind of
a hub inside of your brain kind of relays information
and so it's too definitely to people, like you can
talk to one of them, you can talk to the
other of them. But they sort of share their consciousness
almost in a way like like one of them can
sense what when the other person. Sometimes one of them
(44:21):
can sort of sense what the other person is thinking,
and they can sort of each control different parts of
the other person's body kind of like one of them
controls the left leg of the other one, the other
one controls the right arm of the other one. I
forget the exact details, but it's kind of like, like
you said, kind of like we sometimes think being conscious
(44:42):
the only way to be conscious is to be conscious
like humans are right now, But there are other ways
that we can be conscious.
Speaker 3 (44:48):
Well, I mean, even other non conjoined twin studies yield
some pretty interesting results, like in terms of potentially some
kind of link, you know, where there's at the very
least a what's the word I'm looking for, a kind
of intuition, you know, in terms of like that would
you know, surpass normal intuition maybe between regular siblings. I've
(45:08):
met known in my life multiple sets of identical twins,
and there's something to it.
Speaker 2 (45:13):
It's very fascinating.
Speaker 3 (45:14):
I would say that is a different kind of consciousness
in some ways where you are. Maybe it's a product
of sharing the same space so much and you know,
spending so much time around each other. But I have
seen something, some things that have a hard time explaining
in terms of the way twins can kind of know
what each other are thinking and feeling.
Speaker 4 (45:32):
Yeah, I mean, there's definitely a role for intuition there,
and you know, it doesn't have to be physical consciousness,
Like you know, I kind of personally think that we
all kind of share as a human species some sort
of consciousness.
Speaker 1 (45:43):
You know, through the collect it's unconscious, Yeah, like the
young and super consciousness, right right, Like that just.
Speaker 2 (45:51):
Adds to that. You're right.
Speaker 3 (45:52):
I'm sorry I didn't interrupt, but that's a really good point.
The Internet is, in and of itself, a super scaled
version of that just contributes to what we're talking about.
Speaker 4 (46:02):
Yeah, it just really all depends on how you define
this word consciousness.
Speaker 2 (46:06):
Mm.
Speaker 4 (46:07):
Like if it means, like, you know, being able to
write poetry and understand Shakespeare, that's one you might not
get very far there. But you know, I've talked to
scientists basically, just define it as our sense are as
one of our senses that keeps track of our internal state.
(46:28):
So like you have a visual sense that tells you, oh,
I'm in the room, there's a door over there, that's
an apple over there. You have kind of an inner
looking sense that just tells you like, oh, I'm feeling
this way, I'm thinking about this, I'm having this memory
of the apple eight this morning. It's just kind of
like something that tells your body, Oh, this is what's
going on inside your brain.
Speaker 3 (46:48):
Well, the key word there also is I you know,
and this idea of identity and this idea of consciousness
revolving around.
Speaker 2 (46:55):
Who we are and when who we are.
Speaker 3 (46:57):
Being ultimately a collection of experience is that are in
many ways influenced by the society we live in and
you know, and if you want to take it further
than them people trying to achieve enlightenment, the idea is
sort of disconnect from all of those aspects and like
truly experience the spiritual part of what it is to
have me have a soul or to like, you know,
what it means to be part of the universe, rather
(47:18):
than this identity, this construct that we sort of you know,
force upon ourselves or is forced upon us oftentimes.
Speaker 2 (47:25):
It's fascinating. Obviously I'm super into this.
Speaker 4 (47:28):
Well did this gets We just did an episode about
this on Signed Stuff, the podcast on and about near
death experiences.
Speaker 2 (47:37):
Oh, we just.
Speaker 3 (47:38):
Talked to an incredible podcast creator and friend of the show,
Dan Bush on stuff that I want you to know
about his incredible podcasts Alive Again. That is all about
interviews with folks who've experienced your experiences.
Speaker 1 (47:50):
I'm going to connect you with those folks. You guys
should hang out can you tell us just a bit
of a tease as we wrap up what you found
in your explorations on ND or near death experiences in
science stuff.
Speaker 4 (48:06):
Yeah, well, it kind of goes back to this idea
of what consciousness is and because you know, a big
part of near death experiences is this out of body experience.
People feel like they're outside their body, and what we
found was that it can it can all be explained
by science by how your brain works, and but whether
(48:27):
that's actually what's going on, like you know, scientists can't
answer that because you know, we can't test someone while
they're having it experience. But basically all of these phenomena
near thats you know, feeling outside of your body, having
weird visions, talking to people who are already dead, there
are brain processes that you can say, Okay, I think
(48:49):
that's what's going on there, and that we can replicate
that in the lab. If I give you, you know,
a hallucinogen, well in a control environment, you're also going
to have these experiences. If I take i'm achine that
disrupts this part of your brain, I can make you
feel like you're stepping outside your body.
Speaker 1 (49:05):
Or experiencing divinity like the famous god helmet experiments, and
and also very well done doctor cham to note that
we cannot ethically pursue some direct experiments that would lead
to breakthroughs there because it would require doing kind of
(49:29):
evil things to innocent people, even if they signed up.
You know, we've all seen flatliners. Yeah, classic Julia Roberts movie. Yeah,
oh yeah, that was joy, that was yeah, young Sutherland,
Yeah yeah yeah. And uh, you know, I've got to
be honest. Uh, it's a super up to date pop
(49:50):
culture reference, I'm sure, but I remember seeing flatliners and
being convinced that this is why people join med school and.
Speaker 2 (50:03):
So they can do the flat so they can do flatliners.
Speaker 1 (50:05):
Yeah. Luckily, Luckily, my uncle, a very nice, very learned man,
assured a young Ben Bullen that it would still be
illegal to quote unquote flat line people to quote unquote
see what happens.
Speaker 2 (50:23):
Well, And speaking of other cinematic masterpieces, we were talking
a little earlier about the idea of Vibes, and I
have to take this opportunity to recommend the movie Vibes.
Oh my god, it's one of your favorites, Ben. I
actually recommended it to a friend the other day.
Speaker 3 (50:36):
Seminole Ghostbusters slash Indiana Jones mashup slash Ripoff that everyone
should see, starring Jeff Goldbloom and Cindy Love Hare, No
True No Vibes. Well, get you to a cinema or hey,
hopefully they're doing a revival screening of Vibes somewhere in
your neck of the woods.
Speaker 4 (50:56):
I think I missed that seminal moment in neuroscience.
Speaker 2 (50:59):
It's okay, Yeah, it explains a lot. It's a real breakthrough.
Speaker 1 (51:05):
It's sort of like the Police Academy four of its time.
Speaker 2 (51:09):
It's probably contemporary with Police Academy. It probably is. Actually
I've come out the same year with that.
Speaker 1 (51:15):
Thank you so much, Orgee for spending time with us
and making this Orgey and Science Stuff Week. Where can
people learn more about your explorations.
Speaker 4 (51:28):
Yeah, so right now my big project is sign Stuff.
It's a new iHeart podcast. You can find it anywhere
you get your podcasts. Search for sign Stuff one word
and look for the purple icon. That's us. And we
asked her awesome questions like do animals understand death? Or
do they like to get drunk? Or what's inside of
(51:48):
a black hole? Or oh, grow limb Yeah, that's the
one that was super fascinating recently. Why can't we regrow limbs?
There are animals who, like you, cut up their arm,
don't just grow a brand new one. Why can't we
do it? And we find out the answer is maybe
we can.
Speaker 1 (52:06):
And while you are on the internet, please do check
out one of our favorite aspects of Doctor Chimp or Hey.
In addition to being one of, if not the smartest
people on the history of this show, definitely in this episode.
(52:27):
You are not just a mechanical engineer Stanford graduated. You
did not just attend Georgia Tech, one of the most
difficult schools of its caliber. You are also the creator
of a comic strip called PhD Comics. Could you tell
us a little bit about that?
Speaker 4 (52:49):
Yeah, PhD Comics. You can find out a PhD Comics
dot com. It's a comic strip I started when I
was in grad school, and it's all about what it's
like to do science, what it's like to be an academic.
It's kind of people describe it as the Dilbert of academia.
Speaker 2 (53:06):
I don't know this, guys. I'll have to check it
out next trip in my life.
Speaker 4 (53:10):
Yeah. Yeah, and so I was super lucky to be
able to do that for many many years on the internet,
huge amount of support for people out there, and then
that translated to me doing movies and then a TV show.
Recently you can find that one on PPS Kids. It's
called Eleanor Wonders Why. And I've also gone in to
write and draw a lot of books. So my probably
(53:31):
my most famous one I've worked on is called We
Have No Idea, which is a guide to everything we
don't know about the universe. And now the most popular
one is something called Oliver's Great Big Universe, which is
for kids. If you have a kid who's really curious
and like science but also likes, you know, far jokes
and really fun, fun middle school middle grade stories, please
(53:55):
check it out.
Speaker 3 (53:56):
A polymath and renaissance man, indeed, doctor Horte Sham, thanks
again for joining us on Ridiculous History.
Speaker 5 (54:03):
For Hoorte Sham week, oh thank you, and well well
well bully for us, congratulations and tally ho Wecei Thury, Yes,
Noel we once again, my friend, uh.
Speaker 1 (54:20):
We managed to speak with a world class expert uh
in science, and I think we post some interesting questions.
Speaker 3 (54:31):
I think so, I think we held our own with
doctor cham Jorge to his friends. I'd like to think
that we walked away from these recordings as friends. He said,
like said, he wanted to come back on again, and
that we made him laugh and smile.
Speaker 2 (54:43):
That made us feel really good. That's true.
Speaker 5 (54:45):
Our neurons were firing, were they which whichever part is associated.
Speaker 1 (54:51):
With learning and with us?
Speaker 2 (54:53):
And joy?
Speaker 1 (54:54):
And joy? That's the word we were looking for. Uh
we I don't know. No, this guy is so close
to getting a cool ridiculous history, street name, a nickname,
an operator name.
Speaker 2 (55:06):
You know it's doctor horget riverside Champ. Oh, that's true,
he made his own.
Speaker 5 (55:11):
There we go.
Speaker 3 (55:12):
Now we can do better, we'll workshop that one, but
for now. Huge days to you, Ben. That was a
fun exploration of all things heady and universal.
Speaker 1 (55:22):
Huge thanks to you know, huge thanks to our super producer,
mister Max Frictionless. Williams got a nice haircut there. Also,
big big thanks to aj Bahama's Jacob's Jonathan Strickland aka
the Twister. Okay, yep, big thanks to him.
Speaker 2 (55:42):
Oh yeah, of course. Sure, the rude dudes over a
ridiculous crime.
Speaker 3 (55:46):
We've got Chris Praciota's and Eve Jeff Coates here and
Spirit you know what, I think.
Speaker 4 (55:51):
We'll see you next time, folks.
Speaker 3 (55:59):
For more podcast from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
(00:27):
the show. Thank you, as always so much Ridiculous Historians
for joining us. Let's hear it for the man the
myth our super producer mister Max Williams Imax. All right, yeah,
we're getting some snapping fingers. This is part two of
a continuing exploration. The guy who just said Imax is
(00:48):
mister Noel Brown, none other than.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Oh thanks buddy, You're welcome, Buckeroo.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
They called me Ben Bullen in this part of the world,
and Noel, if we could do a previous on Ridiculous History,
the smoke Monster was bullsh wasn't anything, well, it was
the thing. It was the man in Black, it was
you know, that's the show Lost, which dated references.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
But that's what we're here for. No, it's true.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
We did previously on Ridiculous History talk with the brilliant
and lovely doctor Jorge at Sham, who helped us navigate
the universe a little bit, from the Big Bang to
the singularities to AI and the way that artificial intelligence
may well be close to, if not already at a
(01:40):
place where it resembles the human brain.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
Yes, that is true. And Noel, as you know, I'm
really proud of you and Maxim myself for being quite
transparent and forthright with the fact that we are ourselves
not experts.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Folks.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
We know everybody enjoyed the first part of our conversations
with doctor or a Champ, and believe it or not,
we were able to get Orgey back for another episode
or Hey, welcome, thank you for joining us.
Speaker 4 (02:17):
Hey, super fun to be here. Thanks for having me back.
Speaker 3 (02:20):
Of course, of course you're helping us out as well.
We love a good two part, especially one that we
decide on in advance.
Speaker 4 (02:27):
Yeah, and this will be the Empire Streks back of podcasts.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
Oh, that's the film. It's a universe.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
We're talking about the history of what we call the
Big Bang in our previous exploration, which led us to,
as you were saying, Noel, an exploration of so called
artificial intelligence, the nature of reality, the observable universe. And
we tease just a bit episode two. This is our
(03:05):
exploration of the ridiculous history of a thing that studies
itself the science of the human brain. So real quick
I could if we could open it up this way, Orgey,
just small talk, What is the human brain.
Speaker 4 (03:28):
Was this little about sixty eight pound organ that you
have in your head. And it's just another organ in
your head.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
You know.
Speaker 4 (03:34):
It's a lump of fleshy stuff that basically makes who
you are happen, Like your conscious experience, all your memories,
how you feel, that's all happening in that little gelatinous
blob inside your skull.
Speaker 3 (03:50):
I've always felt calling the brain an organ was selling
it short just a little bit. When I think of
an organ, I guess I think of just like guts.
You know, it's important. But the brain is a very
peculiar and powerful and incredible organ.
Speaker 4 (04:04):
It is it is. People say it's the most complex
organization of matter that we know about in the whole universe.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
And it's also the biggest erogenoist zone.
Speaker 4 (04:14):
In the human we go. It's the biggest everything zone.
Basically hunger, heye, love, it's all happening in your head.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Now, this is fascinating. I love that phrase because we
also have to acknowledge an inherent dilemma. We're asking a
thing to research and explain itself, to measure itself. Could
you tell us a little bit about the philosophical quandaries
(04:43):
involved with that like because ordinarily, you know, if you
asked if you asked a duck its opinion about ducks,
you would get a weird you know, not completely objective.
Speaker 4 (04:58):
Right, right, right, and everyone knows are just a bunch
of quacks. Now it's a super interesting philosophical conversation, right,
because right, there's eighty six billion neurons in your head,
and so the idea that eighty six billion neurons could
ever really really understand what's happening in eighty six billion neurons,
(05:23):
even if somebody else's eighty six billionaires, it's sort of impossible, right.
It's sort of like a car understanding a car, or
you know, a switch understanding a switch. So it's probably
not possible for the human brain to really understand everything
that's going on in your brain, like down to the tee.
But you know, we have science, and so we can
make kind of generalizations, we can make certain rules, we
(05:44):
can understand the general structure and organization of the brain,
but like totally understanding the brain and predicting what it's
going to do, it's probably impossible for our brains. But
you can imagine, like maybe aliens who have four hundred
billion neurons, you know them, we might be like, oh,
look at these cats, you know, running around, We can
totally understand what's going on in their heads.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
So this leads us to the ridiculous history of neuroscience
or brain science. Could you tell us a little bit
about the first I guess there was a moment in
human civilization, or a series of moments more accurately, wherein
people realized this gelatinous blob in their head was doing something.
(06:31):
We're under the impression that for a lot of human history,
various cultures believed that the soul or the consciousness maybe
resided in other organs, like the heart or the I'll
say it, sorry, substitute teachers, genitalia.
Speaker 4 (06:52):
Was there a lot of it? A lot of our
actions do come.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
From it's like a second brain.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
So what was there any sort of inflection point or
crossroads in history of humans where they started to look
at the brain as a seat of consciousness.
Speaker 4 (07:15):
Yeah, yeah, now, yeah, it's a pretty interesting history because,
as you mentioned, probably for most of human history, we
had no idea what was going on inside of our bodies.
How though our bodies work, much less how our brains
worked or what it did Aristotle back in the ancient
Greek era. Uh, basically agree with what you just said,
which is he thought that everything that makes us who
(07:38):
we are is in our hearts, like in our chest.
And he thought that the brain was really just like
a radiator, like a brain just there to like cool people. Yeah,
jes United has all these like lumps and wriggles like
that would make sense, right kind of.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
Yeah, sure, maybe dissipute the heat like coils like coils in.
Speaker 4 (07:57):
Area, Yeah, yeah, like increasing the surface area.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
Uh.
Speaker 4 (08:00):
And if you think about it, it kind of makes sense, right,
Like if you are designing a human being, Like, why
would you put the most important part on this little
like appendage sitting at the top, you know, exposed to
Yeah it's exposed. Yeah yeah what did you put it?
Like in the chest right protected by ribs and organs
Like that would make a little bit more sense. But no,
(08:22):
it's like it's sticking up in our hands. It's a
little peninsula on the box. Yeah yeah, so easy to
knock or or chop off. So he didn't quite have
it right, But people think that maybe the Egyptians knew
a little bit more about the brain. So there's this
famous papyrus papyrus scroll, yeah, that they found made by
(08:47):
the ancient Egyptians where they kind of like documented medical cases.
It's called the Edwin Smith Papyrus.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
Yes, like the thought yeah.
Speaker 4 (09:02):
Oh that's another brain game right there. So we know,
like the Addigus catalog all these medical things like oh,
if you break an arm, this is what happens. If
you sever your spinacle, this is what happened. And there's
like an entry number twenty in this squirrel that says,
you know, if you get hit in the head card,
we know that sometimes you can lose the ability to talk.
(09:24):
So like in their heads they're thinking, oh, your brain
is good for things like talking. So that's kind of
like the earliest we think kind of a record of
people humans kind of understanding what the brain is doing.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
Oh wow.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
And this this also reminds us clearly of a similar
practice indicative of recognizing the importance of the brain as
an organ, which is the practice of trepan nation, right. Uh,
trepanation being.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
The demons.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, venting relieving pleasure, yeah, drilling a
physical hole somewhere in the cranium. I think for a
lot of us lay for the primary amazing thing about
the practice of trapanation is that people survived somehow.
Speaker 4 (10:27):
Yeah right, Yeah, it's wild. Basically, there's not much activity
going on like understanding the brain up until about the
eighteen hundreds, and that's when people really started to record
things like hey, if you open up your skull and
you dig a hole through here, this can happen. Or
if you open up this part of the brain and
you kind of like mess around with it or apply
(10:48):
electricity like that, your arm will move and so yeah,
so that's one of the things that people did in
the eighteen hundreds, which which opened up your brain and
pok it. And it's sort of dubious to us.
Speaker 2 (11:01):
Now that's not to say.
Speaker 3 (11:04):
Syram that gave us that information, but which is often
the case with early discovery, it's like, yeah, you know,
you gotta break a few eggs to make a science online.
Speaker 4 (11:14):
Be a little bit of a mad scientist. Yeah, but
it taught us a lot, Like it started to kind
of piece everything together. People started to figure out, oh,
like the brain has parts. You know, it's not just
like one giant computer chip. It's got like a little
processor for this over here and a little processor for
that out over there, and so that's kind of how
it started, really kind of ramping up the history of
(11:35):
brain science.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
Now we're talking the eighteen hundreds at this point, which
means from what Noel and I understand, this means this happens,
this great scientific inquiry occurs in the same sort of
historical milieu as a lot of quack science. Right, I
(11:56):
guess we should talk about phrenology a little bit.
Speaker 4 (11:59):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Well it's it's sort of a it's
a bit of a sketchy thing to delineate between quack
science and really thought right, you know what I mean.
Like back then, it's like it's like accusing a cavement
of not being good scientists. You know, they just didn't know,
and so they were just trying all these different theories.
They had all these ideas. They were going on vibes
basically vibes, and yeah, it's a Phrenology was a huge
(12:24):
deal in the eighteen hundreds. People thought that, you know,
there was this idea that the brain is mapped, like
there's areas that do different things. But so people would
just guess, like, oh, the part of the back part of
your rank, that's where that's where your love is located
and the front part is where your egoism is located,
and so they just if you look it up phrenology,
there's all these like maps. I think most people have
(12:45):
probably have probably seen them, just like a human head
with like areas kind of like a like a meat
diagram and a cow for one little.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
Regions where the tenderline is exactly.
Speaker 4 (12:55):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
And that was informed, unfortunately by a lot of confirmation bias,
we could argue from Western Europe at the time, wherein
people would say, oh, we've made this rough Butcher's diagram
or topography of a cranium, and based on this bump,
(13:19):
this guy is going to be good at what's a
silly thing to be good at?
Speaker 2 (13:25):
In the unicycle.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
This guy's great at unicycles. Yeah, look at the other bump,
you know, right there by the temple. This is our
unicyclist juggler phrenology.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
Jorge.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
Was it widely accepted in its day.
Speaker 4 (13:41):
I think it was, you know, as accepted as like
you know, somebody selling tonics, you know, going from town
to town in the Old West selling tonics to rejuvenate
your vigor or something like that. You know, it's something
that people weren't quite sure it was true or not,
and some people claim that they were starting up it
and you know, people rolled the dice.
Speaker 3 (14:03):
Not a far jump from things like the humors, you know,
the idea of leeching and blood letting in order to
balance out these supposed you know, materials within the body.
And then honestly, I'm not trying to poop anybody's beliefs here,
but not too too far off from things like chakras
and meridian lines in some you know, Eastern medicine that
(14:24):
some people think is quackery and some people swear by.
So I mean, it's just interesting the way some of
that stuff is still around and believed in or not
believed in depending.
Speaker 4 (14:32):
No, no, that stuff is quackery.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
No okay, Oh the.
Speaker 1 (14:37):
Professor came out on that one.
Speaker 4 (14:40):
No fense to the Crystal fans.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
Yes, yes, yes, we just being diplomatic.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
We are being diplomatic, and we we share the same pursuits,
which is always going to be hopefully the collective, objective
interrogation of the world around us and within us. One
(15:06):
thing we were talking about a little bit off air.
It pertained to some some just phenomenal and again, as
you said Jorge. Ethically, dubious learnings that came. You mentioned
the earlier realization from humanity that certain parts of the
(15:30):
brain function in certain ways right and excel in certain things.
And at the end of our first conversation we introduced
a patient who for a long time was simply known
as HM, and HM, as we find, is pivotal to neuroscience,
(15:52):
perhaps because of well, gosh, can we tell can we
tell the story? Yes, super fasting story. This was a
little bit later. This was in the nineteen thirties that
this man came about. His name was Henry Malaysan, but
for a long time people didn't know his name because
when you become a medical subject, they kind of make
(16:14):
you anonymous. So for a long time, for many years,
he was just known as patient AHM. And so this
was a guy who had a lot of seizures as
a kid. Some people think it maybe happened after he
had like a bike accident and then he knocked his head.
Some people think he was just kind of he just
had these seizures for no reason. So it's not quite
clear how or why he got these features, but they
(16:34):
were like super intense, like he couldn't really function it
would really kind of make him not able to have
a job or go to school or things like that.
Speaker 4 (16:44):
And at the time, as you said, the doctors were like, oh,
I know how to cure it this. I'll just poke
a hole in your head and mess around with it.
And so a common procedure back then was basically a lobotomy,
Like they would just kind of stick this long needle
kind of through your eye socket, did you like move
(17:04):
your eye a little bit out of the way, and
then you stick it in there and then kind of
mess around. And what they did for him specifically was
they destroyed most of his hippocampus, so like deep inside
your brain you have this little these little lumps called
the hippocampus. And you know, his seizures were so severe
(17:24):
that this doctor called Williams Coville thought that he needed
to take out both his hippocampus, and so he did.
And the amazing thing is it sort of worked, like
his seizure stopped. But unfortunately it had a bad side effect,
which is that Henry Molaysan was not able to make
new memories. So like he remembered his whole life, his childhood,
(17:49):
you know, his early adulthood, right up until the day
he had his surgery. But after that he couldn't remember
more than thirty minutes at a time.
Speaker 1 (17:58):
He couldn't encode information.
Speaker 4 (18:02):
Right, Like if you met him and you said hey,
and he like, he could tell you where he grew up,
who his mother was, and everything, but thirty minutes later
he would totally forget he met you, Or thirty minutes later,
he couldn't tell you how he got to where he was,
what he had for breakfast, you know, any he couldn't
tell you anything beyond thirty minutes ago.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
Okay, well, we've all met executive producers and before you see.
Speaker 4 (18:26):
A botimized Oh.
Speaker 1 (18:29):
So this this is a moment of tremendous significance to
the history of neuroscience when and first off, him's existence
at this point is cursed. You mentioned earlier that this
was this was a primary source for the film Momento.
Speaker 2 (18:55):
Is that correct?
Speaker 4 (18:56):
Yeah, the Christopher Nolan film The When He Got kind
Of I got famous for initially Memento. It was this
guy who basically lived this life, but in our modern
world right now and so he couldn't remember more than
thirty minutes ago, and so and so that movie's kind
of told backwards in time. It's like he's you're sort
of living the movie like he is living in It's like, oh,
(19:17):
I'm here, Why am I here? I don't know why
I'm here? And then you flash back to like thirty
minutes ago to figure out how he got there, and
then you keep flashing back thirty minutes at a time.
That's the movie. And this guy like actually lifted. He
just woke up every day and thirty minutes the world
was brand new to him.
Speaker 2 (19:35):
That's a good yeah.
Speaker 3 (19:36):
Yeah, And I don't know if that's like terrifying or
kind of awesome, but now I think it's terrifying.
Speaker 2 (19:40):
I don't think it would a good way to experience
the world.
Speaker 4 (19:43):
Well, it wouldn't make you useful for pretty much anything
except subject There's.
Speaker 3 (19:48):
There's something to be said about, like, you know, if
we could just wipe our memories or do a little reset.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
But no, I'm sorry not making life.
Speaker 3 (19:56):
This is a very very serious condition, but one that
shut up lot of light on some things that didn't
require people to go necessarily digging around in people's brains, right.
Speaker 4 (20:06):
Right, right, yeah. In particularly, she had a lot of
light on how memory works in our brain, so, like
before this patient, mostly people thought that memory was something
that was spread across your brain, Like people thought your
brain was used to giant kind of a computer ship
and you had just like you know, you store memories
in a little bit here, a little bit there, a
little bit everywhere. It's just kind of like evenly spread out.
(20:29):
But what was fascinating about patient HM is that he
could remember his childhood, his early adulthood. He couldn't make
me memories, but you could teach him motor skills like
he could. Yeah, Like you could teach him how to
play tennis, and the first day he would be terrible
at it, but if he kept practicing, he would get
better at it, but he wouldn't remember having practice.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
So every time this guy, for example, plays tennis, he's
just a little bit better, right, but he doesn't know why.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
He's just really good at it.
Speaker 4 (21:04):
Yeah, Like you know, by session thirty, I imagine, right,
this is hypothetically because I don't think they really has
them to play tennis, But like by session thirty, he'd
be like, you know, hitting aces and returning loves and
he'd be like, oh my god, I had no idea
I could play tennis. That was basically his experience.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
I hope he has a I hope he has a
lived perception that he is a virtuoso. You know what
I mean, because it's always the first thirty minutes that
he's played tennis.
Speaker 4 (21:34):
Yeah, right right, But then in the next session if
he doesn't play tennis, he has no idea he's good
to play tennis.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
Al true periodic victory.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
Yeah, real conundrum.
Speaker 3 (21:42):
So what did this teach us though about the brain?
That there are certain things that could not be recalled,
but yet certain things had a bit more of a
sense memory perhaps.
Speaker 4 (21:54):
Yeah. Mainly what it taught people is that there are
different kinds of memory. Like I think most people who
are listening to about short term memory long term memory.
So those are two separate things in your brain. But
for a long time, we didn't know that, and we
didn't know there was such a thing as motor memory.
Like when you like your signature, you can do you
write your signature without thinking about it. It's just in
(22:14):
your muscle memory. Or some people can play the piano
with is your muscle memory. So that's in a different
part of your brain than the long term. The short
term even your verbal and language all that is just
in separate areas. It's still in areas, but it's a
little bit more spread out of the brain. And so
that's kind of what it unlocked for scientists is like,
oh wait, memory is not just this like one hard drive.
(22:36):
It's like a whole bunch of little hard drive and
a whole bunch of different ways that memories gets stored.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
So that teaches us as well about that reminds us
of things like what is it called broksophasia or something?
So patient HM was capable of retaining and speaking the
language she had learned in his childhood. What we're talking about,
we talk about brocos of phasia is of course the
breakdown of as you said, Jorge, a different version of
(23:06):
the hard drive, right, the one that controls linguistic aptitude.
Did he I don't know the answer. I'm asking honestly,
did sense memory impact anything?
Speaker 2 (23:20):
Like?
Speaker 1 (23:21):
Could he the same way he was hypothetically taught to
be good at tennis? Could he be taught to and
we're breaking tons of ethical experimentation laws on this, but
could you possibly teach this patient to be avoidant of
or attracted to, say, a certain stimuli like a smell
(23:45):
and then wait for that reset in the brain function.
You know, is this guy? Is it possible to make
a world where this guy is waking up experiencing lucidity
every thirty minutes and now he just hates the No,
what's a good smell to hate? Oh, my gosh, the
(24:05):
smell of coffee, like coffee, coffee, coffee is a great one.
Is it possible to uh, would it be possible to
teach sense memory in an olfactory way or what does
that take? Right?
Speaker 4 (24:20):
I think the idea is that he couldn't make long
term memories, so and I'm not sure that like our
associations with certain smells, I'm not sure quite sure where
that is in the brain. So it might some of
it might be in our long term memory, in which
case he couldn't. You couldn't train that in him. But
some of it might be automatic, in which case you
(24:42):
probably could.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
That is fascinating, and it occurs in step with we
wanted to ask you about this with another pivotal moment
in neuroscience understanding and and folks, by the way, I
feel like we've been very very clear about this. Do
not try this at home, no matter how mad you
(25:06):
are at your sibling. Do not try this at home.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
Right.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
There is another case that occurred in the eighteen hundreds,
so a little bit prior to HM, the infamous Phineas Gauge.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
Yes, yeah, railroad tie.
Speaker 1 (25:25):
Yeah yeah.
Speaker 4 (25:26):
So Finished Gage was a railroad worker. He's just a
regular dude in eighteen mid eighteen hundreds up there in Vermont,
and you know, by all accounts, he was a nice guy,
you know, lived his life, worked hard. One day, he
was like installing these long metal rods on a rock
to make way for like a railroad. And what they
(25:49):
do is they pack some dynamite in there, they stick
the rod, and then they light the fuse and then
that blows up the rock. What could go wrong? Right,
thing exploded on him and this meter long iron rod
basically went through his head. So he kind of went
in through his left cheek, kind of up and above,
(26:12):
kind of behind his eyeballs, through the front part of
his brain, and then it came out the top. Gar
He did not. He survived, that is the fascinating thing.
And so he got better and everyone's like, oh, oh
my god, that's amazing. He's a miracle. I guess the
(26:35):
brain is not that important. For take away. Yeah, for
a long time, he was basically used as an example
of like, oh, the brain is like, you know, just
one big amorsive most mass, and if you lose a
little bit, it's like, you know, you lose a little bit,
but whatever, your brain has the risk of itself to
like make you who you are. And so he's revived.
(26:56):
People thought he was fine, but literally little people sort
of realized there was something a little off about him,
like he quite wasn't quite himself like he reportedly, he
just had like a he kind of basically became an
a hole.
Speaker 2 (27:10):
I don't know if I can say that.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
Yeah, he had a he had a market change in
his temperance, right he was he was now seen as yeah,
like you said, a whole and thank you for keeping
it a family show.
Speaker 4 (27:27):
But he was not a nice guy. Not a nice guy.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
Oh by all accounts.
Speaker 3 (27:30):
Before that though, he was a perfectly nice fellow, a
hard worker, like you said, and in fun and fine
to be around, jovial. And then after this people started
noticing that something in his personality had shifted.
Speaker 4 (27:42):
You know, Yeah, his personality had shifted from being like
a nice guy to like being very ill tempered, like
he just grumpy all the time. But and then beyond
his personality, he also kind of had a little bit
of ADHD now, like he could he find it hard
to focus, He couldn't really concentrate, and so he's just
he was just kind of like a frustrated person all
the time. And you know, people who knew me were like,
(28:04):
this is not the same person. And so only later
when the people realize, like, oh, this is perfectly explained
because the front part of your brain, that's kind of
where your personality is and where your ability to focus is.
So that was another big part of kind of like
mapping the brain and figuring out that there are parts
(28:24):
to it that do different things and which parts do
different things.
Speaker 3 (28:27):
I gotta say, there's a really great episode of our
sister podcast, Stuff You Missed in History Class, all about
Phineas Gage back in the Archives. I remember back when
I produced that show, that was the first time I'd
heard of him, and I thought it was super fascinating.
So do check that one out for a deep dive
on this fascinating character.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
Also fascinating to borrow that word there. It's also fascinating
that his treating physician was a guy named jam Horlow
and jam Harlow, like many Western physicians of his day,
held in abiding interest in phrenology. So maybe if you are,
(29:12):
if you are a boffin or a doctor of the day,
maybe it's not the fact that this meter long rod
went through the front part of this human brain, it's
that it altered the shape of the cranium. So now
he doesn't have good guy bumps.
Speaker 4 (29:29):
Well, what's interesting is that, you know, this idea sounds crazy, right,
like you could judge how a brain works by how
well brain is good at something by its shape. But
that's actually something they found kind of in the nineties
early two thousands, was that they looked at brain scans
of taxi drivers in London.
Speaker 2 (29:48):
The knowledge, yeah, the knowledge of this, the way it
sort of changed the pathways, right.
Speaker 4 (29:55):
Yeah, yeah, So they studied the brains of taxi drivers
in life then, and they talk about the knowledge, right, like,
you know, if you're brand new at driving a taxi
in London, you're clueless. You have no idea where anything
is if you've ever been there, there's like alleys everywhere
with all these it's impossible to navigate. But once you've
done it for a while you know, the whole day
of the land, you can take anyone anywhere. They studied
(30:17):
the brains of these people, and they found that people
who've been doing it for a long time, that part
of your brain that stores like locations and spatial memory
that's actually bigger, like it grows.
Speaker 2 (30:30):
The mind is shriveled. Y'all. I'm so bad at directions.
I have no sense of geography.
Speaker 3 (30:36):
It's really bad because yeah, because maybe it was, it's
been bad even since before, you know what. It's just
funny though, I will say this, I have recently been
trying to actively not use maps, and I have found
that it improves my sense of direction overall.
Speaker 2 (30:56):
So I think it can be almost relearned or you know, improved. DuPont.
Speaker 5 (31:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (31:01):
My wife just talked to a coworker who said he's
taking his son out for walks just to teach him
how to go on walks.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
Yeah. Yeah, he's and it's not always inherent, you know, Yeah.
Speaker 4 (31:15):
Because he's going out to college and you know, kids
do they basically maybe don't have that ability to walk around.
Speaker 1 (31:22):
Yeah. I haven't had to uh be lost in the woods,
right like our four bears. Uh Yeah, It's funny. It's
funny you say that because we we've talked in the
past about these arguments regarding you know, regarding the advent
of offloading uh, some sort of process right from the
(31:44):
human machine to an external machine. And I love that
you're bringing up the knowledge because that was a revolutionary
study in neuroscience. It reminds me as well of a
study I want to say it was in Why You
in two thousand and eight, admittedly small sample size, but
(32:09):
they studied people who meditate, Buddhist monks in particular, and
they found something similar similar to the similar to how
the use of the part of the brain that is
occupied with spatial positioning appropreception. You could argue, similar to
(32:31):
how their continued practice of knowing where they are and
where they're going literally became mind over matter and increased
the I believe the argument is not just the increase
in size, but the increase in density of synaptic connections.
(32:52):
The study in eight with Buddhist monks found, and I'm
going to sound so pops, I hear, and I apologize,
it found that the part of the brain position toward
or associated with things like empathy and compassion was actually
(33:13):
denser and larger and exhibited more activity in those Buddhist
monks versus a sample size of you know, jerks like.
Speaker 4 (33:25):
Us, non Buddhist monks, not.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
Enlightened, not yes, not enlightened, perfect diplomacy. So this brings
us to I think I think the general umbrella term
for this concept is neuroplasticity. Is that what we're kind
of talking about? What is neuroplasticity.
Speaker 4 (33:53):
Yeah, it's kind of this idea that your brain is
not static, like at all, Like your brain is constantly
kind of rewiring itself, kind of constantly tuning itself. And
it's not like you're necessarily growing new neurons, but these
neurons are making new connections between themselves. And also kind
(34:14):
of more importantly is that these the connections that they have,
they're constantly kind of recalibrating themselves. And actually that's kind
of what's happening. That's how like ais learn. You know,
if you look at these neural net models, basically what
they're changing when they're learning stuff is the weighing of
(34:37):
the synaptic connections. So like how strong priority wise or
yeah kind of priority wise. Yeah, Like each neurons is
connected to like let's say a hundred other neurons, and
like it's getting all these inputs, so which ones do
you ignore? Which ones do you listen to? And so
that happens at what are called synapses, which is kind
(34:57):
of where like you know, the little branches of two
neurons kind of mean.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
And firing, right, firing synapses.
Speaker 4 (35:04):
Firing, yeah, firing synapses where that gets transmitted from one
to the other. So that's that's where that's happening.
Speaker 3 (35:10):
Yeah, And when you look at a brain scan or
an MRI, if I'm not mistaken, you can literally see
this activity right lighting up in different regions of the brain.
Speaker 4 (35:20):
Kind of these these are like almost like molecule size.
They're like super super tiny, so you can't see them
like an MRI, but you can see kind of like
when you're looking at MRI, what you're looking at is
like the oxygen consumption of your neurons. So you can
tell like, oh, these neurons are being active because they're God, drinking.
Speaker 2 (35:35):
Up a lot makes a lot of sense. So it's
an indicator, got it. Yeah, Yeah, that's fascinating.
Speaker 1 (35:40):
So now we have learned that in given that the
universe observable according to Big Bang theory is about fourteen
billion years old. Humans are real up and coming fad overall.
Speaker 4 (35:58):
Right, we're the latest it beings. Yeah we are, We
sure are, and for long. That's how fads work.
Speaker 1 (36:08):
And and we we also learned in that very brief
span of time that we call humanity. Uh, people went
from totally thinking the soul was in the most protected
part of the body, the torso right to figuring out, oh,
that fatty thing in your head does something. Right after
(36:30):
we figured out just how to stop eating each other's brains. Uh,
just gonna throw that in there, and and and then
from there we see this, this vast series of at
times problematic innovations, sometimes based in accident, sometimes based in
(36:52):
confirmation bias or as you said, quack science of phrenology
or hate. Where does the exploration of consciousness and neuroscience
go in the future, By the way, just going to
put this out there for posterity. Jorge, Noel Max and
I are recording this on Monday, June twenty third, twenty
(37:14):
twenty five, So no pressure, Orge. Next thousand years, where
are we at.
Speaker 4 (37:21):
No set, assuming we survived the next I don't know months,
Oh my god, existence here you know. I think these
things are like Pandora's blogs. You know, once you open them,
you can't go back, you know. And so I think
we're going to be understanding the universe a lot more,
We're going to be understanding things at the quantum level
(37:43):
a lot more. And who knows what's going to happen
with AIS. You know, it's quite I think possible that
within I don't know, twenty years, there'll be a conscious
AI who is smarter than us.
Speaker 3 (37:59):
I think can That is the term that gets thrown
around a lot, is singularity in terms of AI. But
then we also in talking about the Big Bang that's
referred to as a singularity event, and maybe the terms
are sort of used loosely, But can you kind of
talk about that term and how it applies to both
of those different things. Is it really just kind of
like an it moment where a big thing happens.
Speaker 2 (38:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (38:19):
So consciousness is one of the most debated things in
like neuroscience psychology. Like if you ask any scientist like
what is even consciousness? You'll get one hundred different answers.
Some people think it's like totally kind of biologically based,
like it's you know, a dog can have some kind
of consciousness and can have a little bit of a consciousness,
(38:41):
you know, machine can have a consciousness the material materialist philosophy. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And some people think there's something kind of special and
almost supernatural about it, you know, even scientists sometimes think
that when it happens, it's like this kind of indescribable
(39:03):
thing that happens.
Speaker 1 (39:04):
Yeah, Promethean lighting in a bottle. Yeah, And this is
where we get to the vast precipice, some would say,
or the vast horizon, depends upon your interpretations of as
you said, Nol, singularity or transhumanism and future futurism. Nolan
(39:30):
and I were talking off air or at length about
the concept of AI, artificial intelligence large language models. We
touched on it naturally a little bit in part one,
but perhaps we close out chapter two of our conversation
on the history of brain science by exploring the nature
(39:55):
of AI just a bit further. Now you have you have,
through your work explore human human computer interaction in depth,
right and yeah, and so where do you see the
future of human interaction with AI going? You already said,
(40:21):
you know, there is a horizon where this kind of
thing exists. What will that tell us about the human brain? Oh,
my goodness, small dog. Well, it kind of depends on
where you land about how special the human brain is.
You know, like I personally am an engineer by training,
(40:41):
and to me, brains are really just like meat machines.
You know, It's like it's mechanical, there's chemicals, involves some
people think like quantum physics and quantum and certainly plays
a role in like those little tiny synapsis that we have,
in which case, you know, there is maybe some magic
to how the human rain works.
Speaker 2 (41:00):
I think we're all made of star stuff.
Speaker 1 (41:04):
Well, if the Big Bang is true, then technically that
that's also true, right.
Speaker 3 (41:08):
Well yeah, we arose from something like that, right, and
we had to have.
Speaker 4 (41:12):
Yeah yeah, well most of our the atoms and our
bodies were made inside of a star. Yeah, because the
universe at the beginning was just all hydrogen, and so
anything other than hydrogen was basically made by a star
and usually starts dying.
Speaker 1 (41:26):
So yeah, this podcast brought to you by hydrogen. So
we're saying then that the nature of consciousness is still
something that the world's smartest people past, present, and possibly
future have debate, have debated, right, the materialist view of
(41:51):
this one thing in this one case, these physical processes,
these mechanics, and these chemical interactions, and then there's the
larger question is there something bigger? Right? Is an individual
consciousness only a node for a larger system which gets
(42:12):
little It's a lot of my old professors hate that idea.
Speaker 4 (42:19):
Yeah, it's this idea like humans are the way that
the universe understands itself kind of. Is that what you're
talking about a little bit, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (42:27):
Because you're talking about we're talking about now what we
would call Homo sapiens exceptionalism, right, yeah, right, the idea
that although one can observe perhaps emotions in a pet,
or what seems to be emotions in a pet, even
(42:50):
on the strength of various cognitive diagnostics, you could observe
maybe the way an octopus dreams, or the the functions
of certain higher order mammals.
Speaker 3 (43:03):
To take what we're talking about metacognition here, right, like
the fact that humans are uniquely built to think about thinking,
to analyze themselves, sometimes into oblivion, which is why maybe
sometimes I'm jealous of the guy that can't remember anything
for more than thirty minutes, because it can be a
awaking nightmare at times what we do to ourselves in
(43:25):
terms of like thinking about thinking and all of the possibilities,
and it can be really exhausting, right.
Speaker 4 (43:31):
Yeah, yeah, And they're fascinating cases in the history of
brain science to the kind of speak to consciousness. So
one fascinating case that is pretty recent are conjoined twins.
So there's a pair of famous twins called the Hogan twins,
and these are two girls who were born conjoined were
they basically share a brain, or they share parts of
(43:53):
the brain, and specifically they share like this part called
the thalamus, which is kind of like a kind of
a hub inside of your brain kind of relays information
and so it's too definitely to people, like you can
talk to one of them, you can talk to the
other of them. But they sort of share their consciousness
almost in a way like like one of them can
sense what when the other person. Sometimes one of them
(44:21):
can sort of sense what the other person is thinking,
and they can sort of each control different parts of
the other person's body kind of like one of them
controls the left leg of the other one, the other
one controls the right arm of the other one. I
forget the exact details, but it's kind of like, like
you said, kind of like we sometimes think being conscious
(44:42):
the only way to be conscious is to be conscious
like humans are right now, But there are other ways
that we can be conscious.
Speaker 3 (44:48):
Well, I mean, even other non conjoined twin studies yield
some pretty interesting results, like in terms of potentially some
kind of link, you know, where there's at the very
least a what's the word I'm looking for, a kind
of intuition, you know, in terms of like that would
you know, surpass normal intuition maybe between regular siblings. I've
(45:08):
met known in my life multiple sets of identical twins,
and there's something to it.
Speaker 2 (45:13):
It's very fascinating.
Speaker 3 (45:14):
I would say that is a different kind of consciousness
in some ways where you are. Maybe it's a product
of sharing the same space so much and you know,
spending so much time around each other. But I have
seen something, some things that have a hard time explaining
in terms of the way twins can kind of know
what each other are thinking and feeling.
Speaker 4 (45:32):
Yeah, I mean, there's definitely a role for intuition there,
and you know, it doesn't have to be physical consciousness,
Like you know, I kind of personally think that we
all kind of share as a human species some sort
of consciousness.
Speaker 1 (45:43):
You know, through the collect it's unconscious, Yeah, like the
young and super consciousness, right right, Like that just.
Speaker 2 (45:51):
Adds to that. You're right.
Speaker 3 (45:52):
I'm sorry I didn't interrupt, but that's a really good point.
The Internet is, in and of itself, a super scaled
version of that just contributes to what we're talking about.
Speaker 4 (46:02):
Yeah, it just really all depends on how you define
this word consciousness.
Speaker 2 (46:06):
Mm.
Speaker 4 (46:07):
Like if it means, like, you know, being able to
write poetry and understand Shakespeare, that's one you might not
get very far there. But you know, I've talked to
scientists basically, just define it as our sense are as
one of our senses that keeps track of our internal state.
(46:28):
So like you have a visual sense that tells you, oh,
I'm in the room, there's a door over there, that's
an apple over there. You have kind of an inner
looking sense that just tells you like, oh, I'm feeling
this way, I'm thinking about this, I'm having this memory
of the apple eight this morning. It's just kind of
like something that tells your body, Oh, this is what's
going on inside your brain.
Speaker 3 (46:48):
Well, the key word there also is I you know,
and this idea of identity and this idea of consciousness
revolving around.
Speaker 2 (46:55):
Who we are and when who we are.
Speaker 3 (46:57):
Being ultimately a collection of experience is that are in
many ways influenced by the society we live in and
you know, and if you want to take it further
than them people trying to achieve enlightenment, the idea is
sort of disconnect from all of those aspects and like
truly experience the spiritual part of what it is to
have me have a soul or to like, you know,
what it means to be part of the universe, rather
(47:18):
than this identity, this construct that we sort of you know,
force upon ourselves or is forced upon us oftentimes.
Speaker 2 (47:25):
It's fascinating. Obviously I'm super into this.
Speaker 4 (47:28):
Well did this gets We just did an episode about
this on Signed Stuff, the podcast on and about near
death experiences.
Speaker 2 (47:37):
Oh, we just.
Speaker 3 (47:38):
Talked to an incredible podcast creator and friend of the show,
Dan Bush on stuff that I want you to know
about his incredible podcasts Alive Again. That is all about
interviews with folks who've experienced your experiences.
Speaker 1 (47:50):
I'm going to connect you with those folks. You guys
should hang out can you tell us just a bit
of a tease as we wrap up what you found
in your explorations on ND or near death experiences in
science stuff.
Speaker 4 (48:06):
Yeah, well, it kind of goes back to this idea
of what consciousness is and because you know, a big
part of near death experiences is this out of body experience.
People feel like they're outside their body, and what we
found was that it can it can all be explained
by science by how your brain works, and but whether
(48:27):
that's actually what's going on, like you know, scientists can't
answer that because you know, we can't test someone while
they're having it experience. But basically all of these phenomena
near thats you know, feeling outside of your body, having
weird visions, talking to people who are already dead, there
are brain processes that you can say, Okay, I think
(48:49):
that's what's going on there, and that we can replicate
that in the lab. If I give you, you know,
a hallucinogen, well in a control environment, you're also going
to have these experiences. If I take i'm achine that
disrupts this part of your brain, I can make you
feel like you're stepping outside your body.
Speaker 1 (49:05):
Or experiencing divinity like the famous god helmet experiments, and
and also very well done doctor cham to note that
we cannot ethically pursue some direct experiments that would lead
to breakthroughs there because it would require doing kind of
(49:29):
evil things to innocent people, even if they signed up.
You know, we've all seen flatliners. Yeah, classic Julia Roberts movie. Yeah,
oh yeah, that was joy, that was yeah, young Sutherland,
Yeah yeah yeah. And uh, you know, I've got to
be honest. Uh, it's a super up to date pop
(49:50):
culture reference, I'm sure, but I remember seeing flatliners and
being convinced that this is why people join med school and.
Speaker 2 (50:03):
So they can do the flat so they can do flatliners.
Speaker 1 (50:05):
Yeah. Luckily, Luckily, my uncle, a very nice, very learned man,
assured a young Ben Bullen that it would still be
illegal to quote unquote flat line people to quote unquote
see what happens.
Speaker 2 (50:23):
Well, And speaking of other cinematic masterpieces, we were talking
a little earlier about the idea of Vibes, and I
have to take this opportunity to recommend the movie Vibes.
Oh my god, it's one of your favorites, Ben. I
actually recommended it to a friend the other day.
Speaker 3 (50:36):
Seminole Ghostbusters slash Indiana Jones mashup slash Ripoff that everyone
should see, starring Jeff Goldbloom and Cindy Love Hare, No
True No Vibes. Well, get you to a cinema or hey,
hopefully they're doing a revival screening of Vibes somewhere in
your neck of the woods.
Speaker 4 (50:56):
I think I missed that seminal moment in neuroscience.
Speaker 2 (50:59):
It's okay, Yeah, it explains a lot. It's a real breakthrough.
Speaker 1 (51:05):
It's sort of like the Police Academy four of its time.
Speaker 2 (51:09):
It's probably contemporary with Police Academy. It probably is. Actually
I've come out the same year with that.
Speaker 1 (51:15):
Thank you so much, Orgee for spending time with us
and making this Orgey and Science Stuff Week. Where can
people learn more about your explorations.
Speaker 4 (51:28):
Yeah, so right now my big project is sign Stuff.
It's a new iHeart podcast. You can find it anywhere
you get your podcasts. Search for sign Stuff one word
and look for the purple icon. That's us. And we
asked her awesome questions like do animals understand death? Or
do they like to get drunk? Or what's inside of
(51:48):
a black hole? Or oh, grow limb Yeah, that's the
one that was super fascinating recently. Why can't we regrow limbs?
There are animals who, like you, cut up their arm,
don't just grow a brand new one. Why can't we
do it? And we find out the answer is maybe
we can.
Speaker 1 (52:06):
And while you are on the internet, please do check
out one of our favorite aspects of Doctor Chimp or Hey.
In addition to being one of, if not the smartest
people on the history of this show, definitely in this episode.
(52:27):
You are not just a mechanical engineer Stanford graduated. You
did not just attend Georgia Tech, one of the most
difficult schools of its caliber. You are also the creator
of a comic strip called PhD Comics. Could you tell
us a little bit about that?
Speaker 4 (52:49):
Yeah, PhD Comics. You can find out a PhD Comics
dot com. It's a comic strip I started when I
was in grad school, and it's all about what it's
like to do science, what it's like to be an academic.
It's kind of people describe it as the Dilbert of academia.
Speaker 2 (53:06):
I don't know this, guys. I'll have to check it
out next trip in my life.
Speaker 4 (53:10):
Yeah. Yeah, and so I was super lucky to be
able to do that for many many years on the internet,
huge amount of support for people out there, and then
that translated to me doing movies and then a TV show.
Recently you can find that one on PPS Kids. It's
called Eleanor Wonders Why. And I've also gone in to
write and draw a lot of books. So my probably
(53:31):
my most famous one I've worked on is called We
Have No Idea, which is a guide to everything we
don't know about the universe. And now the most popular
one is something called Oliver's Great Big Universe, which is
for kids. If you have a kid who's really curious
and like science but also likes, you know, far jokes
and really fun, fun middle school middle grade stories, please
(53:55):
check it out.
Speaker 3 (53:56):
A polymath and renaissance man, indeed, doctor Horte Sham, thanks
again for joining us on Ridiculous History.
Speaker 5 (54:03):
For Hoorte Sham week, oh thank you, and well well
well bully for us, congratulations and tally ho Wecei Thury, Yes,
Noel we once again, my friend, uh.
Speaker 1 (54:20):
We managed to speak with a world class expert uh
in science, and I think we post some interesting questions.
Speaker 3 (54:31):
I think so, I think we held our own with
doctor cham Jorge to his friends. I'd like to think
that we walked away from these recordings as friends. He said,
like said, he wanted to come back on again, and
that we made him laugh and smile.
Speaker 2 (54:43):
That made us feel really good. That's true.
Speaker 5 (54:45):
Our neurons were firing, were they which whichever part is associated.
Speaker 1 (54:51):
With learning and with us?
Speaker 2 (54:53):
And joy?
Speaker 1 (54:54):
And joy? That's the word we were looking for. Uh
we I don't know. No, this guy is so close
to getting a cool ridiculous history, street name, a nickname,
an operator name.
Speaker 2 (55:06):
You know it's doctor horget riverside Champ. Oh, that's true,
he made his own.
Speaker 5 (55:11):
There we go.
Speaker 3 (55:12):
Now we can do better, we'll workshop that one, but
for now. Huge days to you, Ben. That was a
fun exploration of all things heady and universal.
Speaker 1 (55:22):
Huge thanks to you know, huge thanks to our super producer,
mister Max Frictionless. Williams got a nice haircut there. Also,
big big thanks to aj Bahama's Jacob's Jonathan Strickland aka
the Twister. Okay, yep, big thanks to him.
Speaker 2 (55:42):
Oh yeah, of course. Sure, the rude dudes over a
ridiculous crime.
Speaker 3 (55:46):
We've got Chris Praciota's and Eve Jeff Coates here and
Spirit you know what, I think.
Speaker 4 (55:51):
We'll see you next time, folks.
Speaker 3 (55:59):
For more podcast from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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