April 28, 2011 • 37 mins
When an iron rod shot through Phineas Gage's head, it destroyed the majority of his left frontal lobe. He survived, but his personality and behavior changed -- why? Tune in as Robert and Julie explore the relationship between the brain and the mind.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Julie Tuglas and
you know Julie. We uh we recently did an episode
about cyber immortality and about the idea of preserving who
we are in electronic form, and we got into ideas
(00:25):
of like what is the mind? What is the soul?
And uh, something came up in the research so we
didn't really go into was was how the more modern
medical science analyzed how damage to the brain changes the
expression of who we are. Um that that that initially
caused a lot of concern with people over over how
we would continue to view the soul or or or
(00:46):
even who we are, because the idea of you know, hey,
if if I am my soul, I am this person.
And then if something can just like if I get
kicked in the head by a horse, that can change
who I am? Does that change who what my soul is? Uh?
You know, you get into a lot of tricky area
there and and uh and it's interesting that that we
have the little turn of phrase, change your mind. We're
(01:09):
always changing our mind about something and our mind is
continually changing. Uh. The person we are a year ago
again is different than the person we are now, and
the person we're going to be tomorrow is different than
the person talking right now. And certainly things act upon
us at times to change our minds for us right right,
Our mind is a complicated system, and uh, every day
(01:30):
something changes, something upgrades. You know how your computer is
constantly needing to reboot because it just got new upgrades
and updates have been applied. Well, updates are always being applied.
And occasionally your mind, like a computer can uh can
something can spill some coffee in it, or um or
it'll get a virus, or name any conceivable computer related catastrophe,
(01:54):
and it could also happen to your brain. So it's
really illuminating to look at some examples of catastrophe happening
to the human brain and what the effects are. How
um external or internal stimuli alters the form of the
mind and then therefore alters the uh if if you
(02:15):
want to say it this way, the expression of our soul, right,
and and uh, and then going back to like the
neuroscience of it too. We've talked about neural plasticity, but
how your mind changes in that way, how it may
take up for one part of the other or you know,
how it might be completely changed forever. Um. So yeah,
it's kind of like, you know, it's like a new
(02:37):
car and then it gets sideswiped or something, and uh,
but we gotta keep driving this car, so let's find
out ways to make it work. Oh, I can't nobody
can set in the passenger side seat anymore because it's
caved in. That means more people have to go into
back seat. Thanks, like the same things of that nature,
except with the brain X channel isn't working anymore, so
we're gonna have to send more data through Y channel.
That's overly simplified, but that's kind of what happens. So
(02:58):
we're gonna look at a couple of example examples of
how this is played out in specific cases, um, particularly
with a guy, a very unfortunate guy I should say,
named Phineas Gauge. Yes, Phineas Gauge is this is this
is pretty awesome stuff. And I say that because right
now I'm I'm playing the new Mortal Kombat game at
(03:19):
home when I can, when I can squirrel away a
few moments here and there, and there are these moments
in the game where you'll you'll build up this bonus
meter and then you'll the you know everything, I'll go
into an X ray mode and you'll see like your
character like stabbing another character in the face or something,
and like, you know, something entering one side of the
school and going out the other. And that's exactly what
happens with Phineas Gauge back in all right. This guy's
(03:42):
a twenty five year old foreman for a New England railroad.
He's land track in Vermont, and each day he goes
through this particular job. It's like, you know, day in
day out. He drills a hole in a large rock,
he boares in, he pours in blasting powder, he lays
the fuse, and then he assistant covers the explosives with sand.
(04:02):
All right. Then he takes this uh three and a
half foot long inch quarter thick um camp what's called
a camping rod, the steel rod uh or iron nut,
and he uh he tamps the explosives down and then
he lights the fuse and he runs for cover. Alright.
So you know, like any act that you do over
and over again, you're your mind stunar to wander and
(04:24):
uh and and it's easy to make mistakes. It's that
whole like the more vegetables I cut, the more possible
it does. It will cut off my fingers sort of thing.
You should always tuck your fingers in, by the way,
you'll never cut yourself if you touch your fingers in
the interesting. I will try that next time, avoid mutilation.
But so he gets distracted, Old Phineas Gage and he
begins camping the blasting powder before his assistant adds the sand.
(04:49):
So there's an suddenly there's an explosion, all right, and
it fires that like the explosion blast this rod straight up,
all right, and it it connects with his face, uh,
just under his left cheek, all right, and it skewers
up behind his left eye, destroying it both the eye
and the entire front portion of his left brain hemisphere.
(05:10):
And then the rod goes through the top of his skull,
eggs to the top of his skull and continues to
fly on through the air and land several yards away.
And so then there, so here's Gauge standing with this uh,
this entry hole under his cheek, this exit hole through
the top of his skull, like a bit of his Um,
his scalp has flapped back, you know, to emerge, and
(05:31):
not only just standing, he's completely conscious. He's talking. Yeah,
he's not doing That's that's important to underscore here because
this sounds like like just a death blow. You just
had a metal rod dynamited through your skull, through the
through your face and out the top of your skull,
a three foot eight inch metal rod with a more
(05:53):
than an inch diameter by the way. Yeah. And but
almost immediately after the accident, he's conscious. He's tall, king
and and and and he insists of walking to the
cart that's going to take him down to town to
be treated, and and along the ride he's lucid. He's
rational during the ride, and he's he's able to speak
with his attending physician, a doctor John Martin Harlow. And
(06:16):
so he Carlo treats him and uh and uh and uh,
and Gauge is actually able to return home to New
Hampshire ten weeks later. Yeah. And the thing is too
just so everybody understands that he did he bled for
two days so um, and then he had an infection.
And what doctor Harlow did is that he he didn't um,
he didn't he wasn't able to suiture the hole in
(06:37):
his head, right, but he was able to cover it up,
and that's what got the infection. And it actually rendered
him semi conscious for about a month. And in fact,
his family started to prepare a coffin for him because
I didn't think that he was going to make it. Um.
But then the infection resolved itself after the fifth week,
and um, and he seemed to be completely fine. Seemed
(06:59):
to be right. I mean, we we know that he left,
he lost his eyesight, his left eye, and then some
of his motor abilities on his left hand side of
his face. But again here he is like he's he
can still talk, walk and cogitate. Yeah, because we're talking
the brain portion here is the prefrontal cortex. Uh, and
this is uh the anterior part of the frontal logo
(07:21):
of the brain, and generally it has to do with
motor and pre motor areas. But let's but let's talk
about just how Gauge was before the accident. In addition
to having a little more brain and one more eye, uh,
he was also supposedly a pretty you know, efficient, capable employee,
a decent guy to hang around. He's one of the
(07:42):
best foreman's They said, yeah, yeah, he was a good dude.
His only fault was one out of maybe thousands of
times he got a little distracted. Well well yeah, but
after this accident once he's you know, he's he's up
and about really and and recovered from this uh these
this bout of unconsciousness. Uh. They find that he is,
(08:04):
uh is fitful. He's uh, he's swearing like a drunken
sailor all the time. It's like he's got to rats
or something. And and he doesn't seem to care, and
and he's childlike and bulling. Yeah, he doesn't seem to
have like he's lost this ability this like ethical um,
moral um governor in his mind. That's right, he's he's
(08:27):
lost his social inhibitions essentially, which we know now that
the prefinal cortex is sort of tamping that kind of
down force, right, so that we're not all screaming at
each other all the time. So and we know that
that's where the tamping iron went through. But of course,
you know, back in the day, they did not know this.
And it was actually Dr Harlowe who was observing all
(08:48):
of this and saying, you know, my patient seems to
be physically fine, like there doesn't seem to be any
um neurological damage. But I think that his personality has
changed as a result of this accident. And people were like,
they just summarily dismissed him. And the reason for that
is because phrenology was really in vogue during those days,
(09:11):
and it was thought that the personality was influenced by
the size and the shape and even like the bumps
on your skull. So they couldn't conceive of how your
brain could be changed because you could say internally. They
thought it was sort of set in stone in the
structure um, and that your personality was sort of set
in the structure of your brain. So Dr Harlow was
(09:33):
dismissed on this count, while another doctor came in and said, oh, no,
this person is completely fine. I don't know what Dr
Harler was talking about, because I mean, his intelligence was
still fine. He in so many other respects, he seemed
perfectly normal. Studies have have suggested that the frontal lobe
actually has separate functional areas, one in the underbelly of
(09:53):
the frontal lobes and along the mid line between the
two brain spheres. That's that supposedly specialized for making social
decisions in an emotional context. In a second, more to
the side of the forehead, seems to specialize in abstract calculation,
other kinds of decision making that call upon lesser emotions. So, uh,
(10:14):
this this is basically like the case of Gauge here
in addition to being a really grizzly awful accident, yeah,
it's also yeah, more combat like incident. It's also just
a classic case in of a frontal cortex malfunction. And
uh in even these early studies about his condition were
(10:37):
really influential in neuro psychiatry uh and played a crucial
role in our discovery of behavioral syndromes resulting from frontal
low of dysfunction. And people continue to have dysfunctions in
this area the brain today, generally not due to dynamite
related rod insertion in the skull. But but there are
(10:57):
people that have dysfunction in this area and they perform
well and intelligence tests, speak normally, make new memories and
association and use use logic just fine. But you'll also
see similar disruptions in the expression of who they are. Yeah, yeah,
I mean he basically sort of had an unwinning lobotomy, um,
which ended up really helping science understand later on how
(11:19):
how the brain functions. This presentation is brought to you
by Intel Sponsors of Tomorrow. And like he said, the
other parts of the brain just kind of sort of
well function fine. But then you've got him, you know,
(11:40):
losing his job eventually because he became I guess you
could say that he became so I guess, ballistic and
not not the best foreman anymore. They felt like he
was kind of unemployable, like he worked for I think
for like a circus kind of thing for a while.
He took it on the road, he went to Chile,
(12:00):
and then finally in February eighteen sixty he began to
experience epileptic seizures and that led to his death on
May eighteen sixty. But, um, you know, he's famous now
we're talking about him now, many many years after his death.
And you can even see his skull and the rod
(12:22):
at the Warren Anatotomical Museum in Harvard Medical Schools count
Way Library of Medicine. I've seen the photos. Actually pretty
cool because I mean if you look at his skull
and you look at that three ft eight inch rod
and just amazing to think that that could have happened
and he would have survived it. Yeah, it really makes
you rethink. I mean, you know, life is fragile, biological
(12:42):
life is fragile and brief, but it's amazing some of
the damage that we can can be inflicted upon us
and we still survive. So yeah, and another another good example,
and this came out we actually spotted this when we
were doing research for the podcast about music Changing your Brain.
And this was about a guy named Tony Sistoria And
(13:06):
in four he was forty two years old and he's
this orthopedic surgeon was in a phone booth when the
phone was struck by lightning. It entered his foot and
then it exited his head and he was blown backwards
by that force. And then the weird thing is, as
if that weren't weird enough, is that he had like
(13:27):
a big near death experience, big near death meaning that
he was sitting there watching as you know, according to him,
as someone gave him CPR, and he was feeling this
sort of like one with oneness with the universe and
was submitting himself and he was actually trying to say
to the person performing in CPR, please don't do this,
(13:49):
and he could see his mother in law and you know,
he and he and all of a sudden he was
brought back in his in his words, was that all. Yeah,
I think we've discussed an unpassed podcast in the future
that all these near death experiences, there are a lot
of compelling scientific explanations for what's happening. So we're not
we're not attributing any kind of divine or or supernatural
(14:11):
occurrence here, No, but he is. Certainly this is a
big thing for Sosori and how he explains what happened
to him and and actually how he continues to live
his life. Um, so what happened then is that he
seemed to be fine, and actually they tried to call
an ambulance, but he said, no, no, I'm fine. It's
badly enough. I've been struck by lightning, struck by lightning,
(14:33):
or have rods fired through their head. And they're like, WHOA,
let's not don't call an ambulance. No, he's a surgeon,
he's an arthathic surgeon, and he has a PhD in neuroscience.
But he's stupid guy. Yeah, No, he's like he knows
what happened to him. Um, but he says, you know,
I feel kind of fuzzy or whatever, but let's not
do this. And so later on he does get checked out. Um,
(14:54):
he gets an e G. And this shows there's no
cardiac arrest. Right, he gets an m R. Everything seems okay.
About four weeks later, during this forty eight hour period,
he just has this incredible insatiable desire to hear piano music.
And previously he's more of a zepe fan, right and yeah,
(15:16):
and it probably doesn't even have NPR programmed into his
his car's stereo system. I bet he does secretly, but
I bet most of the time when he's he's doing
or he turns in, he's just tuning in for like
Marketplace or whatever, and then uh, you know, instantly clicks
off when the classical starts playing. Right. Yeah, So I mean, yeah,
this is someone who never had sort of a predilection
(15:38):
for classical music before, but all of a sudden is
just completely taken by it. Um, obsessed with it. Has
to play, it, has to hear it, gets sheet music,
begins to learn it. Uh. Serendipitously, his babysitter asked if
he can store her piano for him. So all of
a sudden, the piano shows up starts playing piano, and
(16:01):
you have to understand he's he's resumed his job, right,
He's had a little bit of temporary memory loss, like
he can't remember some of the surgical procedures the names
for him. But then that all falls away and he's
once again whole in the sense that he can perform
his jobs to the best of his faculties. Except he
has this maddening desire to play the piano and compose
piano music. Yeah. So I mean he literally runs home
(16:23):
from his job and that is what he does until
you know, four o'clock in the morning, and then he
gets up again, I don't know three hours later, goes
and perform surgery. Yeah, and comes back and does it again. Yeah.
I mean, there's no doubt here that there's something odd
going on that that before this he never could have
cared less about classical music playing it, so on and
(16:45):
so forth. And then he has a dream that he's
in a text and he's performing in front of an
audience a piece that he wrote, and he begins himself
to be flooded by compositions. So he begins composing. It's insane.
And he's actually talking to Dr all of our Sacks
about this, who's the author of Music Ophelia and other
(17:05):
books neuroscientists as well. So uh, Sacks was completely taken
by this case because he could not figure out what
had happened. Um. And and let's just kind of step
back for a second and remember that he was struck
by lightning, so obviously something tinkered with him. If well,
that the brain is basically an electronic system, and electronic
(17:30):
impulses are are a vital part of how it operates.
So you you're disrupting that with a bolt of lightning. Yeah, yeah,
not just in the bolt of lightning, which could be
as high as thirty thousand am piers with one million
or more volts and could last you know, something like
second Um. So yeah, we're talking about getting your brain fried.
(17:53):
And it's amazing to think too that this happened and
that he's pretty much intact, you know, plus this obsession. Um,
when something like twenty five percent of lightning strikes to
individuals results and fatalities, and then those who do survive
sustained permanent damage. So I mean, this guy is sort
(18:14):
of like a unicorn among you know, lightning. Yeah, the
damage sustained is like the best possible damage. You know.
It's like how many people out there wish they could
be struck by lightning and it would wake up some
artistic creative you know. Just I mean, because even assuming
even he and he's really good at playing piano and
and and composing, but even if he wasn't, like the
(18:36):
idea that lightning turned on this new area of his
life that he just criminously enjoys, you know, even even
if he just really sucked at playing piano, he would
at least be enjoying it. You're right, it wouldn't matter, right,
because he's he's getting so much out of it. And
I did actually wondered about that because I went online
to listen. I thought, oh no, I wonder if he's
put all this effort into it, and it's kind of
like my dog has please, you know. But he's actually right.
(18:57):
He's he's a very good pianist um and does compose
his own original material. UM. So it's kind of hard
to get some sort of medical revelation out of this
because Csoria, as we talked about before, he doesn't he
attributes this to some sort of um, mystical religious experience,
and he doesn't want to be studied because he doesn't
(19:19):
want to lose that feeling, which again is kind of
maddening because because he's he's a he's a surgeon, he's
he knows how the body works, he knows how the
brain works, and and so it doesn't really seem like
there would be much room, uh too, for the for disillusionment.
It seems like he would already basically have all the
answers right there before him. Yeah. And that's what Sax
(19:39):
has too, is like, Okay, this is again, this is
a guy who has a PhD in neuroscience. He knows
on some level that there's there's a basis for what
has happened neural neurologically. Um. And you can tell that
Sax really wants to get in there and like study
because he's because he's sitting there thinking, you know, there's
this one clip of sex and he's sitting there talking
about he's like, there's something that happened in that forty
(20:00):
eight hour period, um. And then he even talks to
about you know, there's we've seen correlations that parts of
the brain in the temporal lobe UM can give rise
to a mystical euphoric feeling. We know this when and
that part of the brain is stimulated um. And in fact,
when we sometimes talk about religious experiences or even experiences
(20:21):
with music, we know that that part of the brain
is going nuts, right right. Uh. So it's fascinating. You know,
I understand where he's coming from. I mean, this is
uh you know with sasoria, that this is something that
has happened to him and this is his great love
and obsession in his life, and he doesn't want to
look under um, you know, under the covers and see
(20:42):
what's going on. At the same time, it's like, and
why piano music? Like I think of all the the
the less appealing things he could have been struck with,
Like what if he was like struck by lightning. He
wakes up and he's like, I've got to become a
prop comic. Give me give me some watermelons in a
in a chest and a hammer I'm gonna yeah yeah,
and a big mustache. It could have been much worse. Yeah, yeah,
(21:06):
I know it is. It's fascinating. So it also brings
to mind, you know, we're talking about brain is an
electronic system UM. Lightning is electricity disrupts it UM. It
also brings to mind transcranial magnetic stimulation or TMS UM.
And this is a much it's kind of like a
much lighter controlled and uh and far far less severe technique,
(21:28):
and that is actually used in treatment of some cases
of depression and other anomalies. It's uh, you'll have what
basically looks like a little rod, a lower little paddle,
and you move it next to a person's skull in
just the right area, and it produces magnetic fields to
stimulate nerve cells in the brain. And and this can,
if used correctly, can improve symptoms of depression. So you
(21:51):
have people that will go in, you know, it's like
people who have generally it's people who have a number
of mental issues and you don't want to actually go
to the met to the extremes of using electro shock,
which is a more severe version of uh, you know,
a little more akin to lightning than this. But they'll
go in and they'll they'll get a TMS treatment for
like half an hour, and they found that they can
(22:12):
actually be pretty pretty successful. Yeah, and this is UM actually,
if if I remember correctly from John Horgan's book Rational Mysticism.
He goes to the doctor Michael Persinger who has the
God machine, right, which is along the same lines as
like this helmet that you put on, UM. And the
idea is that you could create these spiritual mystical experiences
(22:36):
by by messing with the magnets and the temporal lobe. UM.
And we've talked about this before too with alien abductions. UM.
That season Blackmore, who has looked into this before, actually
she herself went and had her temporal lobes manipulated. Comes
sounds kind of journey UM and had a feeling that
(22:57):
there was someone in the room actually and had this
sort of experience UM that had some of the hallmarks
of alien abduction. So we already know we know that
there's some manipulation that can happen here. Yeah, it comes
down to to the whole idea that there's the world
of our thoughts and then there is the external world
and uh and and some would argue that there's really
(23:18):
only one world, and that's the one in our brain
that everything we perceive, everything we feel really takes place
UM in the back corner of the fleshy electronic globe
that is in our skull. So you start messing with that,
you give it a shock, you fire a rod through it,
and you're you're you're changing the world as you perceive it. Yeah, yeah,
(23:42):
absolutely right, because I mean, I mean it sounds some
of that sounds kind of straightforward, right, but I mean,
I mean, how do you experience You can't experience someone
else's view, right, you can only experience your own. So, um,
it would make sense that, you know, even though there's
these commonalities of our existence, if you screw up the
wiring a little bit, then all lot of that will
(24:03):
get out out the window. Yeah, it's really in a way,
it's kind of an outrageous over statement of the obvious.
But but yeah, when a when a horse kicks somebody
in the skull, it's not simply a matter of changing
that person or changing that person's mind, but it changes
the universe from that one person's perspective, and ultimately that
one person that's the individual perspective, is the only perspective.
(24:26):
We can never know another person's mind completely. And uh, yeah,
so it changes the world. And Oliver sucks, don't He
has a book? Uh? Is it called The Man who
Mistook His Wife? For a hat, I believe, Yeah, and
talks a little bit more about this, right, like that
that these sort of assumptions that we make about you know,
a glass is a glass or a pen is a pen,
can you know, be quite jumbled up in the brain
(24:46):
when things go wrong. Yeah, the line between what we
call sanity and what we call insanity is often far
far briefer and far more fragile than we give it.
Give you credit, absolutely, and uh not not that I
would say that Jill Bolte Taylor is insane or sane. Um.
Actually she is quite sane. But using that sort of
(25:09):
example of how tenuous or you know, our existence is,
at least in our psyche. If you look at Jill
Bolte Taylor, she is the neuro anatomist who witnessed her
own stroke when a blood vessel exploded in the left
hemisphere of her brain. She documented that in a great
Ted talk. If nobody's ever seen that before, it's worth
(25:30):
checking out. We'll definitely put it up on the blog
post accompanying this podcast. Yeah. Yeah, and she, of course
she's a brain researcher. She was completely It's very interesting
to hear to talking about this because she was absolutely
astandard that she recognized that she was having a stroke,
and so she was sitting there as the events were unfolding,
sort of tagging every single thing that her brain was
(25:51):
doing as much as she could. It was December she
woke up, discovered she was having this stroke, and two
and a half weeks later she underwent major brain surgery
to remove a golf ball sized blood clot that was
placing pressure on the language centers of the left hemisphere
of her brain. Right. Yeah, and um, she does detail
(26:12):
this one part of when when she first started having
a stroke. I guess that the first four hours actually
before she was hospitalized, and she says she couldn't watch,
you couldn't talk, She couldn't read or write or recall
parts of her life. And she says that she essentially
became an infant in a woman's body. Um, and she
goes on to explain a little bit more to the audience.
She talks about how the right hemisphere is consciousness of
(26:35):
the right here, the right now, processing what we see,
what we smell in fear, it's it's very much part
of the limbic system, which is associated with emotion or
to get a little hippie dippy here. Um, it's like
the right hemisphere lives in the now, and the left
hemisphere is the brain chatter that is worrying about the
(26:57):
past or fearing the future. Um, Like, it's the left
brain that that you're always trying to turn off when
you're meditating or even when you're just like you're you know,
you're running or swimming or engaging in something, just trying
to turn off that chatter. Well, it's it's observing everything
that's going on. The right side of the brain, that's
the right side of his brain is processing what's going
(27:18):
on right now. But my left side of the brain
is tagging and categorizing little details from what's going on
right now, and it's applying it to what might happen
in the future. It's worried about the future. It's um,
it's very much concerned with um calculating intelligence, right, what
constitutes me or I? Yeah, so it's ego, it's yea
(27:39):
tied up and just a lot of very important aspects
of who we are, but also some of the more
problematic I would say like, yeah, well well this it's
the seat of judgment, right, so we're you know which
problem Yeah. One of the really cool things about this talk.
I mean, there are many cool parts, but um, she
brings out a brain and she actually, you know, with
with the smile and attached skull, Yeah, which is right, right,
(28:04):
And she said, you know, I told you someone in
the front row is going to get it. So I
don't know why they were surprised, but um. But she
pulls out the brain and that an assistant brings her brain. Um,
that was obtained by legal means. And she shows how
the right and left hemisphere are truly absolutely separated. Is
this the corpus close um in the middle that connects them, right,
(28:27):
So she she's doing this to demonstrate how very different
you have two very different machines in your brain working
in tandem. So the reason why she's talking about that,
and why we're talking a little bit more about the
left and the right is that because she had that
that blood clot on the left hemisphere, she was losing
temporary functionality. And during those four hours and and many
(28:48):
years after actually, um, and so she began to witness
herself blending with the rest of the world. That was
the result is that, you know, once she shut up
that part of her brain the right brain, the here
and the now. She started to see like the boundaries
of her body dissipate and sort of meld with the
rest of the world, which is like an incredibly zen
(29:10):
type moment like this kind of like home, you know,
universal frequency kind of a thing. She just kind of
melded into the universe. Yeah, and she was very much
and tranced by this and was sort of sitting there
thinking like, oh wow, my body is doing this. And
then she would say her her left part of her
brain would start to come back online and be like,
you need to get help. And then her right hart
(29:32):
of her brain would say, yeah, like I'm witnessing this
about myself, and so seriously when you go to hospital hospital, right,
And that's what the left side of the friend just
kept coming online trying together. And that's why it took
her sover and long to get to the hospital too,
because she couldn't she lost the ability to even read numbers,
so she was trying to you know, dial the phone
and so on and so forth. Um So, I think
(29:54):
it's fascinating that she had that experience in that it
took her eight years to recover. And she says that
the reason she knows it was eight years um and
there was the marker. There is that For eight years
after that she experienced herself as a fluid being. Yeah,
I'm gonna quote a real quick from her ted talk.
(30:15):
This was, you know, the whole fluid being a revelation.
She says, we are energy beings connected to one another
through the consciousness of our right hemispheres as one human family.
And right here, right now, we are brothers and sisters
on this planet, here to make a world a better place.
And in this moment we are perfect. We are whole,
and we are beautiful and it is. It is an
(30:36):
incredible talk. And I will have to say that if
you are uncomfortable with any of the sort of hippie
to be right here, right now stuff, it might make
you kind of cringe a little. But you know, I
think if someone's uncomfortable with it, this is just this
is just me. But like you should really stop and
try and disconnect yourself from fear of fear for the
future and worrying about the past, because there is that that,
(30:58):
it's right there in your head um. You know, each
side and if you could just give a little more
emphasis to the part of you that's living in the
moment um can it can be phenomenally um comforting. Well,
And this is what she's saying too. And the reason
why I brought that up is because there is sort
of like a spotty and part of me that when
I was watching it, I was like, oh, my goodness,
she is she is exhibiting a lot of emotion right now.
(31:22):
But then I was thinking about it, and she is.
She has lived in the state for so very long
where she you know, through therapy, she finally got you know,
both hemispheres of her brain functioning that she has. She
does have something to talk about here, that that you
can live, that you can learn something about living in
the right part of your brain and living in the
(31:43):
now and applying that to your life like that it
is a choice. But yes, you do have these two
different machines in your brain, but there is UM. But
there is this point of living that is accessible UM.
That that she said, that is her her The main
thing that she wants to tell people about her experience,
UM is that you don't have to be you know,
(32:06):
caught and under the glass of your left hemisphere all
the time and functioning, you know, and in serving your
ego all the time. So yeah, I thought it was
a really fascinating thing. Um, and then I did again,
like she's sort of she does sort of seem out there,
but this is a woman who has been living. She's yeah,
she's she's out there, but she's been there. You know.
It's like, this is not somebody just saying, hey, turn
(32:27):
off half of your brain and you know, drift free.
She's a path of her brain was turned off, you know,
for a for a period of time here and uh,
and she got to experience that for you for Yeah.
And at the very end, she says something that's really intriguing.
She says, okay that here's the right part of my brain,
which is one with the world, which sees this beautiful
(32:49):
of flowing existence, and here's the left part of my
brain that tells me. I'm Juel Bolte Taylor and I'm
a neuro anatomous and I'm esteemed researcher of the brain.
And which one would you pick? And I thought that's
such an interesting proposition. Yeah. Um. And she's not saying
you have to pick, that's whole that's her whole point.
But she's saying that you could if if, if you
(33:11):
were if you're bound to one part of your brain,
that that's uh, that's the sort of choice that you
could make for yourself. Yeah, it's enlightening stuff scientifically and
uh and and I think spiritually, if you know into
that kind of thing. Yeah, well, hey, we have we
have some some words from our listeners here under form
(33:33):
of emails. Well, actually one is from Facebook and I'll
read that one first. Uh, this is a response. We
received a lot of response to our five finger Evolutionary
Discount podcasts, which had to do with why we have
five fingers and how are our five fingers actually influenced
our number system? Uh. So, our listener Julia um who
(33:55):
I guess I can't read her last name, but she
has like a wonderful, beautiful sounding like I don't know
Icelandic last name or something, or perhaps green Landing because
she's writing about green Land. She says, by the way,
the word for the number twenty in green Landic is
in nuke nalu. And I'm probably saying that wrong, but
in nuke nalu, which translates to whole person tin fingers
(34:16):
tintoes awesome language. That's so cool. Yeah, because in the
podcast we were talking about how the word for seven
is something like one hand, two fingers. Yeah. Right, so
that's very cool to now listener. Emily writes the following,
I love the House of Works podcast, and you've been
a constant and informative companion as I'm toiling away rehabbing
my house. The podcast on brain function, neurology and its
(34:39):
ability to rewire inspired me to share my experience. A
few weeks before I started law school, I had a
seizure caused by a cavernous and nigoma. Imagine a vein
with a weak spot that balloons from the pressure and
then leaks are burst. The brain bleed was in my
visual cortex, and after brain surgery, the most challenging part
(34:59):
of my recovery was that I couldn't see properly. It
was double vision like a bad headache or vertigo causes.
I also was missing part of my visual field, like
a spot where objects would become invisible. Consequently, I had
trouble judging depth and typing or reading required uh nose
to the screen, one eyed closed typing. About four days
(35:20):
after the surgery, I was out on a wall with
my sister and all the anomalies vanished. I went. I
went to having double vision and no depth reception to
seeing normally. It was instantaneous. The brain was clearly rebuilding
its network and the final wire got connected. The missing
spot in my eyesight also diminished, but hasn't totally left.
If I moved my hand in front of my eyes,
(35:41):
it has one place where it will disappear. However, the
brain filled in the gaps, and unless I look for
the little black hole, I would forget it was there.
My recovery was fine, though a few weeks later I
was diagnosed with epilepsy. Epilepsy is a really interesting condition
and might make a good topic. I've always wondered how
many people have hidden or exploited it. I adjust to
my adjusted to my new identity as an as an
(36:03):
epileptic by blogging for six months and her blog address
is a Sacred disease dot blog spot dot com. Uh.
It's all one word, sacred disease. It is uh. It
has been almost eight years since that first seizure and
I continue to love hearing more about the brain it's
eccentricity and superpowers. Thanks for the great podcast, Emily, So
(36:25):
that was really illuminating, especially given some of the stuff
we were just talking about. Yeah, I was just thinking
about that too. Um, very cool stuff. Yeah. I love
hearing from listeners about their personal experiences with with various
neurological conditions or um, you know, or or anything that
could conceivably be viewed as a supernatural or weird. I mean,
(36:45):
I mean, how did people interpret this kind of thing
in the past before we understood how how the brain
affects how things work, you know, the idea that it
would be this invisible part in your in your sight. Yeah, yeah,
and then I'm sure that people didn't even tell someone
before just for fear of someone thinking that they might
be mad. Right, yeah, thanks turned invisible if I look
(37:07):
at them right, right. It's not something you would probably
say one years ago, yeah, but even fifty years ago. Yeah,
but thanks Simily that was it was really awesome insight
into into a personal neurological experience there. And if you
have experiences you want to share, or you just want
to see what we're up to online, you can find
us on Facebook and Twitter. We're blow the Mind one
(37:27):
word on both of those, or just go to Google
and type and blow the Mind and you can always
drop us a line at blow the mind at how
stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands
of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. To
learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon
in the upper right corner of our homepage. The how
(37:48):
stuff Works iPhone app has a ride. Download it today
on iTunes.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Julie Tuglas and
you know Julie. We uh we recently did an episode
about cyber immortality and about the idea of preserving who
we are in electronic form, and we got into ideas
(00:25):
of like what is the mind? What is the soul?
And uh, something came up in the research so we
didn't really go into was was how the more modern
medical science analyzed how damage to the brain changes the
expression of who we are. Um that that that initially
caused a lot of concern with people over over how
we would continue to view the soul or or or
(00:46):
even who we are, because the idea of you know, hey,
if if I am my soul, I am this person.
And then if something can just like if I get
kicked in the head by a horse, that can change
who I am? Does that change who what my soul is? Uh?
You know, you get into a lot of tricky area
there and and uh and it's interesting that that we
have the little turn of phrase, change your mind. We're
(01:09):
always changing our mind about something and our mind is
continually changing. Uh. The person we are a year ago
again is different than the person we are now, and
the person we're going to be tomorrow is different than
the person talking right now. And certainly things act upon
us at times to change our minds for us right right,
Our mind is a complicated system, and uh, every day
(01:30):
something changes, something upgrades. You know how your computer is
constantly needing to reboot because it just got new upgrades
and updates have been applied. Well, updates are always being applied.
And occasionally your mind, like a computer can uh can
something can spill some coffee in it, or um or
it'll get a virus, or name any conceivable computer related catastrophe,
(01:54):
and it could also happen to your brain. So it's
really illuminating to look at some examples of catastrophe happening
to the human brain and what the effects are. How
um external or internal stimuli alters the form of the
mind and then therefore alters the uh if if you
(02:15):
want to say it this way, the expression of our soul, right,
and and uh, and then going back to like the
neuroscience of it too. We've talked about neural plasticity, but
how your mind changes in that way, how it may
take up for one part of the other or you know,
how it might be completely changed forever. Um. So yeah,
it's kind of like, you know, it's like a new
(02:37):
car and then it gets sideswiped or something, and uh,
but we gotta keep driving this car, so let's find
out ways to make it work. Oh, I can't nobody
can set in the passenger side seat anymore because it's
caved in. That means more people have to go into
back seat. Thanks, like the same things of that nature,
except with the brain X channel isn't working anymore, so
we're gonna have to send more data through Y channel.
That's overly simplified, but that's kind of what happens. So
(02:58):
we're gonna look at a couple of example examples of
how this is played out in specific cases, um, particularly
with a guy, a very unfortunate guy I should say,
named Phineas Gauge. Yes, Phineas Gauge is this is this
is pretty awesome stuff. And I say that because right
now I'm I'm playing the new Mortal Kombat game at
(03:19):
home when I can, when I can squirrel away a
few moments here and there, and there are these moments
in the game where you'll you'll build up this bonus
meter and then you'll the you know everything, I'll go
into an X ray mode and you'll see like your
character like stabbing another character in the face or something,
and like, you know, something entering one side of the
school and going out the other. And that's exactly what
happens with Phineas Gauge back in all right. This guy's
(03:42):
a twenty five year old foreman for a New England railroad.
He's land track in Vermont, and each day he goes
through this particular job. It's like, you know, day in
day out. He drills a hole in a large rock,
he boares in, he pours in blasting powder, he lays
the fuse, and then he assistant covers the explosives with sand.
(04:02):
All right. Then he takes this uh three and a
half foot long inch quarter thick um camp what's called
a camping rod, the steel rod uh or iron nut,
and he uh he tamps the explosives down and then
he lights the fuse and he runs for cover. Alright.
So you know, like any act that you do over
and over again, you're your mind stunar to wander and
(04:24):
uh and and it's easy to make mistakes. It's that
whole like the more vegetables I cut, the more possible
it does. It will cut off my fingers sort of thing.
You should always tuck your fingers in, by the way,
you'll never cut yourself if you touch your fingers in
the interesting. I will try that next time, avoid mutilation.
But so he gets distracted, Old Phineas Gage and he
begins camping the blasting powder before his assistant adds the sand.
(04:49):
So there's an suddenly there's an explosion, all right, and
it fires that like the explosion blast this rod straight up,
all right, and it it connects with his face, uh,
just under his left cheek, all right, and it skewers
up behind his left eye, destroying it both the eye
and the entire front portion of his left brain hemisphere.
(05:10):
And then the rod goes through the top of his skull,
eggs to the top of his skull and continues to
fly on through the air and land several yards away.
And so then there, so here's Gauge standing with this uh,
this entry hole under his cheek, this exit hole through
the top of his skull, like a bit of his Um,
his scalp has flapped back, you know, to emerge, and
(05:31):
not only just standing, he's completely conscious. He's talking. Yeah,
he's not doing That's that's important to underscore here because
this sounds like like just a death blow. You just
had a metal rod dynamited through your skull, through the
through your face and out the top of your skull,
a three foot eight inch metal rod with a more
(05:53):
than an inch diameter by the way. Yeah. And but
almost immediately after the accident, he's conscious. He's tall, king
and and and and he insists of walking to the
cart that's going to take him down to town to
be treated, and and along the ride he's lucid. He's
rational during the ride, and he's he's able to speak
with his attending physician, a doctor John Martin Harlow. And
(06:16):
so he Carlo treats him and uh and uh and uh,
and Gauge is actually able to return home to New
Hampshire ten weeks later. Yeah. And the thing is too
just so everybody understands that he did he bled for
two days so um, and then he had an infection.
And what doctor Harlow did is that he he didn't um,
he didn't he wasn't able to suiture the hole in
(06:37):
his head, right, but he was able to cover it up,
and that's what got the infection. And it actually rendered
him semi conscious for about a month. And in fact,
his family started to prepare a coffin for him because
I didn't think that he was going to make it. Um.
But then the infection resolved itself after the fifth week,
and um, and he seemed to be completely fine. Seemed
(06:59):
to be right. I mean, we we know that he left,
he lost his eyesight, his left eye, and then some
of his motor abilities on his left hand side of
his face. But again here he is like he's he
can still talk, walk and cogitate. Yeah, because we're talking
the brain portion here is the prefrontal cortex. Uh, and
this is uh the anterior part of the frontal logo
(07:21):
of the brain, and generally it has to do with
motor and pre motor areas. But let's but let's talk
about just how Gauge was before the accident. In addition
to having a little more brain and one more eye, uh,
he was also supposedly a pretty you know, efficient, capable employee,
a decent guy to hang around. He's one of the
(07:42):
best foreman's They said, yeah, yeah, he was a good dude.
His only fault was one out of maybe thousands of
times he got a little distracted. Well well yeah, but
after this accident once he's you know, he's he's up
and about really and and recovered from this uh these
this bout of unconsciousness. Uh. They find that he is,
(08:04):
uh is fitful. He's uh, he's swearing like a drunken
sailor all the time. It's like he's got to rats
or something. And and he doesn't seem to care, and
and he's childlike and bulling. Yeah, he doesn't seem to
have like he's lost this ability this like ethical um,
moral um governor in his mind. That's right, he's he's
(08:27):
lost his social inhibitions essentially, which we know now that
the prefinal cortex is sort of tamping that kind of
down force, right, so that we're not all screaming at
each other all the time. So and we know that
that's where the tamping iron went through. But of course,
you know, back in the day, they did not know this.
And it was actually Dr Harlowe who was observing all
(08:48):
of this and saying, you know, my patient seems to
be physically fine, like there doesn't seem to be any
um neurological damage. But I think that his personality has
changed as a result of this accident. And people were like,
they just summarily dismissed him. And the reason for that
is because phrenology was really in vogue during those days,
(09:11):
and it was thought that the personality was influenced by
the size and the shape and even like the bumps
on your skull. So they couldn't conceive of how your
brain could be changed because you could say internally. They
thought it was sort of set in stone in the
structure um, and that your personality was sort of set
in the structure of your brain. So Dr Harlow was
(09:33):
dismissed on this count, while another doctor came in and said, oh, no,
this person is completely fine. I don't know what Dr
Harler was talking about, because I mean, his intelligence was
still fine. He in so many other respects, he seemed
perfectly normal. Studies have have suggested that the frontal lobe
actually has separate functional areas, one in the underbelly of
(09:53):
the frontal lobes and along the mid line between the
two brain spheres. That's that supposedly specialized for making social
decisions in an emotional context. In a second, more to
the side of the forehead, seems to specialize in abstract calculation,
other kinds of decision making that call upon lesser emotions. So, uh,
(10:14):
this this is basically like the case of Gauge here
in addition to being a really grizzly awful accident, yeah,
it's also yeah, more combat like incident. It's also just
a classic case in of a frontal cortex malfunction. And
uh in even these early studies about his condition were
(10:37):
really influential in neuro psychiatry uh and played a crucial
role in our discovery of behavioral syndromes resulting from frontal
low of dysfunction. And people continue to have dysfunctions in
this area the brain today, generally not due to dynamite
related rod insertion in the skull. But but there are
(10:57):
people that have dysfunction in this area and they perform
well and intelligence tests, speak normally, make new memories and
association and use use logic just fine. But you'll also
see similar disruptions in the expression of who they are. Yeah, yeah,
I mean he basically sort of had an unwinning lobotomy, um,
which ended up really helping science understand later on how
(11:19):
how the brain functions. This presentation is brought to you
by Intel Sponsors of Tomorrow. And like he said, the
other parts of the brain just kind of sort of
well function fine. But then you've got him, you know,
(11:40):
losing his job eventually because he became I guess you
could say that he became so I guess, ballistic and
not not the best foreman anymore. They felt like he
was kind of unemployable, like he worked for I think
for like a circus kind of thing for a while.
He took it on the road, he went to Chile,
(12:00):
and then finally in February eighteen sixty he began to
experience epileptic seizures and that led to his death on
May eighteen sixty. But, um, you know, he's famous now
we're talking about him now, many many years after his death.
And you can even see his skull and the rod
(12:22):
at the Warren Anatotomical Museum in Harvard Medical Schools count
Way Library of Medicine. I've seen the photos. Actually pretty
cool because I mean if you look at his skull
and you look at that three ft eight inch rod
and just amazing to think that that could have happened
and he would have survived it. Yeah, it really makes
you rethink. I mean, you know, life is fragile, biological
(12:42):
life is fragile and brief, but it's amazing some of
the damage that we can can be inflicted upon us
and we still survive. So yeah, and another another good example,
and this came out we actually spotted this when we
were doing research for the podcast about music Changing your Brain.
And this was about a guy named Tony Sistoria And
(13:06):
in four he was forty two years old and he's
this orthopedic surgeon was in a phone booth when the
phone was struck by lightning. It entered his foot and
then it exited his head and he was blown backwards
by that force. And then the weird thing is, as
if that weren't weird enough, is that he had like
(13:27):
a big near death experience, big near death meaning that
he was sitting there watching as you know, according to him,
as someone gave him CPR, and he was feeling this
sort of like one with oneness with the universe and
was submitting himself and he was actually trying to say
to the person performing in CPR, please don't do this,
(13:49):
and he could see his mother in law and you know,
he and he and all of a sudden he was
brought back in his in his words, was that all. Yeah,
I think we've discussed an unpassed podcast in the future
that all these near death experiences, there are a lot
of compelling scientific explanations for what's happening. So we're not
we're not attributing any kind of divine or or supernatural
(14:11):
occurrence here, No, but he is. Certainly this is a
big thing for Sosori and how he explains what happened
to him and and actually how he continues to live
his life. Um, so what happened then is that he
seemed to be fine, and actually they tried to call
an ambulance, but he said, no, no, I'm fine. It's
badly enough. I've been struck by lightning, struck by lightning,
(14:33):
or have rods fired through their head. And they're like, WHOA,
let's not don't call an ambulance. No, he's a surgeon,
he's an arthathic surgeon, and he has a PhD in neuroscience.
But he's stupid guy. Yeah, No, he's like he knows
what happened to him. Um, but he says, you know,
I feel kind of fuzzy or whatever, but let's not
do this. And so later on he does get checked out. Um,
(14:54):
he gets an e G. And this shows there's no
cardiac arrest. Right, he gets an m R. Everything seems okay.
About four weeks later, during this forty eight hour period,
he just has this incredible insatiable desire to hear piano music.
And previously he's more of a zepe fan, right and yeah,
(15:16):
and it probably doesn't even have NPR programmed into his
his car's stereo system. I bet he does secretly, but
I bet most of the time when he's he's doing
or he turns in, he's just tuning in for like
Marketplace or whatever, and then uh, you know, instantly clicks
off when the classical starts playing. Right. Yeah, So I mean, yeah,
this is someone who never had sort of a predilection
(15:38):
for classical music before, but all of a sudden is
just completely taken by it. Um, obsessed with it. Has
to play, it, has to hear it, gets sheet music,
begins to learn it. Uh. Serendipitously, his babysitter asked if
he can store her piano for him. So all of
a sudden, the piano shows up starts playing piano, and
(16:01):
you have to understand he's he's resumed his job, right,
He's had a little bit of temporary memory loss, like
he can't remember some of the surgical procedures the names
for him. But then that all falls away and he's
once again whole in the sense that he can perform
his jobs to the best of his faculties. Except he
has this maddening desire to play the piano and compose
piano music. Yeah. So I mean he literally runs home
(16:23):
from his job and that is what he does until
you know, four o'clock in the morning, and then he
gets up again, I don't know three hours later, goes
and perform surgery. Yeah, and comes back and does it again. Yeah.
I mean, there's no doubt here that there's something odd
going on that that before this he never could have
cared less about classical music playing it, so on and
(16:45):
so forth. And then he has a dream that he's
in a text and he's performing in front of an
audience a piece that he wrote, and he begins himself
to be flooded by compositions. So he begins composing. It's insane.
And he's actually talking to Dr all of our Sacks
about this, who's the author of Music Ophelia and other
(17:05):
books neuroscientists as well. So uh, Sacks was completely taken
by this case because he could not figure out what
had happened. Um. And and let's just kind of step
back for a second and remember that he was struck
by lightning, so obviously something tinkered with him. If well,
that the brain is basically an electronic system, and electronic
(17:30):
impulses are are a vital part of how it operates.
So you you're disrupting that with a bolt of lightning. Yeah, yeah,
not just in the bolt of lightning, which could be
as high as thirty thousand am piers with one million
or more volts and could last you know, something like
second Um. So yeah, we're talking about getting your brain fried.
(17:53):
And it's amazing to think too that this happened and
that he's pretty much intact, you know, plus this obsession. Um,
when something like twenty five percent of lightning strikes to
individuals results and fatalities, and then those who do survive
sustained permanent damage. So I mean, this guy is sort
(18:14):
of like a unicorn among you know, lightning. Yeah, the
damage sustained is like the best possible damage. You know.
It's like how many people out there wish they could
be struck by lightning and it would wake up some
artistic creative you know. Just I mean, because even assuming
even he and he's really good at playing piano and
and and composing, but even if he wasn't, like the
(18:36):
idea that lightning turned on this new area of his
life that he just criminously enjoys, you know, even even
if he just really sucked at playing piano, he would
at least be enjoying it. You're right, it wouldn't matter, right,
because he's he's getting so much out of it. And
I did actually wondered about that because I went online
to listen. I thought, oh no, I wonder if he's
put all this effort into it, and it's kind of
like my dog has please, you know. But he's actually right.
(18:57):
He's he's a very good pianist um and does compose
his own original material. UM. So it's kind of hard
to get some sort of medical revelation out of this
because Csoria, as we talked about before, he doesn't he
attributes this to some sort of um, mystical religious experience,
and he doesn't want to be studied because he doesn't
(19:19):
want to lose that feeling, which again is kind of
maddening because because he's he's a he's a surgeon, he's
he knows how the body works, he knows how the
brain works, and and so it doesn't really seem like
there would be much room, uh too, for the for disillusionment.
It seems like he would already basically have all the
answers right there before him. Yeah. And that's what Sax
(19:39):
has too, is like, Okay, this is again, this is
a guy who has a PhD in neuroscience. He knows
on some level that there's there's a basis for what
has happened neural neurologically. Um. And you can tell that
Sax really wants to get in there and like study
because he's because he's sitting there thinking, you know, there's
this one clip of sex and he's sitting there talking
about he's like, there's something that happened in that forty
(20:00):
eight hour period, um. And then he even talks to
about you know, there's we've seen correlations that parts of
the brain in the temporal lobe UM can give rise
to a mystical euphoric feeling. We know this when and
that part of the brain is stimulated um. And in fact,
when we sometimes talk about religious experiences or even experiences
(20:21):
with music, we know that that part of the brain
is going nuts, right right. Uh. So it's fascinating. You know,
I understand where he's coming from. I mean, this is
uh you know with sasoria, that this is something that
has happened to him and this is his great love
and obsession in his life, and he doesn't want to
look under um, you know, under the covers and see
(20:42):
what's going on. At the same time, it's like, and
why piano music? Like I think of all the the
the less appealing things he could have been struck with,
Like what if he was like struck by lightning. He
wakes up and he's like, I've got to become a
prop comic. Give me give me some watermelons in a
in a chest and a hammer I'm gonna yeah yeah,
and a big mustache. It could have been much worse. Yeah, yeah,
(21:06):
I know it is. It's fascinating. So it also brings
to mind, you know, we're talking about brain is an
electronic system UM. Lightning is electricity disrupts it UM. It
also brings to mind transcranial magnetic stimulation or TMS UM.
And this is a much it's kind of like a
much lighter controlled and uh and far far less severe technique,
(21:28):
and that is actually used in treatment of some cases
of depression and other anomalies. It's uh, you'll have what
basically looks like a little rod, a lower little paddle,
and you move it next to a person's skull in
just the right area, and it produces magnetic fields to
stimulate nerve cells in the brain. And and this can,
if used correctly, can improve symptoms of depression. So you
(21:51):
have people that will go in, you know, it's like
people who have generally it's people who have a number
of mental issues and you don't want to actually go
to the met to the extremes of using electro shock,
which is a more severe version of uh, you know,
a little more akin to lightning than this. But they'll
go in and they'll they'll get a TMS treatment for
like half an hour, and they found that they can
(22:12):
actually be pretty pretty successful. Yeah, and this is UM actually,
if if I remember correctly from John Horgan's book Rational Mysticism.
He goes to the doctor Michael Persinger who has the
God machine, right, which is along the same lines as
like this helmet that you put on, UM. And the
idea is that you could create these spiritual mystical experiences
(22:36):
by by messing with the magnets and the temporal lobe. UM.
And we've talked about this before too with alien abductions. UM.
That season Blackmore, who has looked into this before, actually
she herself went and had her temporal lobes manipulated. Comes
sounds kind of journey UM and had a feeling that
(22:57):
there was someone in the room actually and had this
sort of experience UM that had some of the hallmarks
of alien abduction. So we already know we know that
there's some manipulation that can happen here. Yeah, it comes
down to to the whole idea that there's the world
of our thoughts and then there is the external world
and uh and and some would argue that there's really
(23:18):
only one world, and that's the one in our brain
that everything we perceive, everything we feel really takes place
UM in the back corner of the fleshy electronic globe
that is in our skull. So you start messing with that,
you give it a shock, you fire a rod through it,
and you're you're you're changing the world as you perceive it. Yeah, yeah,
(23:42):
absolutely right, because I mean, I mean it sounds some
of that sounds kind of straightforward, right, but I mean,
I mean, how do you experience You can't experience someone
else's view, right, you can only experience your own. So, um,
it would make sense that, you know, even though there's
these commonalities of our existence, if you screw up the
wiring a little bit, then all lot of that will
(24:03):
get out out the window. Yeah, it's really in a way,
it's kind of an outrageous over statement of the obvious.
But but yeah, when a when a horse kicks somebody
in the skull, it's not simply a matter of changing
that person or changing that person's mind, but it changes
the universe from that one person's perspective, and ultimately that
one person that's the individual perspective, is the only perspective.
(24:26):
We can never know another person's mind completely. And uh, yeah,
so it changes the world. And Oliver sucks, don't He
has a book? Uh? Is it called The Man who
Mistook His Wife? For a hat, I believe, Yeah, and
talks a little bit more about this, right, like that
that these sort of assumptions that we make about you know,
a glass is a glass or a pen is a pen,
can you know, be quite jumbled up in the brain
(24:46):
when things go wrong. Yeah, the line between what we
call sanity and what we call insanity is often far
far briefer and far more fragile than we give it.
Give you credit, absolutely, and uh not not that I
would say that Jill Bolte Taylor is insane or sane. Um.
Actually she is quite sane. But using that sort of
(25:09):
example of how tenuous or you know, our existence is,
at least in our psyche. If you look at Jill
Bolte Taylor, she is the neuro anatomist who witnessed her
own stroke when a blood vessel exploded in the left
hemisphere of her brain. She documented that in a great
Ted talk. If nobody's ever seen that before, it's worth
(25:30):
checking out. We'll definitely put it up on the blog
post accompanying this podcast. Yeah. Yeah, and she, of course
she's a brain researcher. She was completely It's very interesting
to hear to talking about this because she was absolutely
astandard that she recognized that she was having a stroke,
and so she was sitting there as the events were unfolding,
sort of tagging every single thing that her brain was
(25:51):
doing as much as she could. It was December she
woke up, discovered she was having this stroke, and two
and a half weeks later she underwent major brain surgery
to remove a golf ball sized blood clot that was
placing pressure on the language centers of the left hemisphere
of her brain. Right. Yeah, and um, she does detail
(26:12):
this one part of when when she first started having
a stroke. I guess that the first four hours actually
before she was hospitalized, and she says she couldn't watch,
you couldn't talk, She couldn't read or write or recall
parts of her life. And she says that she essentially
became an infant in a woman's body. Um, and she
goes on to explain a little bit more to the audience.
She talks about how the right hemisphere is consciousness of
(26:35):
the right here, the right now, processing what we see,
what we smell in fear, it's it's very much part
of the limbic system, which is associated with emotion or
to get a little hippie dippy here. Um, it's like
the right hemisphere lives in the now, and the left
hemisphere is the brain chatter that is worrying about the
(26:57):
past or fearing the future. Um, Like, it's the left
brain that that you're always trying to turn off when
you're meditating or even when you're just like you're you know,
you're running or swimming or engaging in something, just trying
to turn off that chatter. Well, it's it's observing everything
that's going on. The right side of the brain, that's
the right side of his brain is processing what's going
(27:18):
on right now. But my left side of the brain
is tagging and categorizing little details from what's going on
right now, and it's applying it to what might happen
in the future. It's worried about the future. It's um,
it's very much concerned with um calculating intelligence, right, what
constitutes me or I? Yeah, so it's ego, it's yea
(27:39):
tied up and just a lot of very important aspects
of who we are, but also some of the more
problematic I would say like, yeah, well well this it's
the seat of judgment, right, so we're you know which
problem Yeah. One of the really cool things about this talk.
I mean, there are many cool parts, but um, she
brings out a brain and she actually, you know, with
with the smile and attached skull, Yeah, which is right, right,
(28:04):
And she said, you know, I told you someone in
the front row is going to get it. So I
don't know why they were surprised, but um. But she
pulls out the brain and that an assistant brings her brain. Um,
that was obtained by legal means. And she shows how
the right and left hemisphere are truly absolutely separated. Is
this the corpus close um in the middle that connects them, right,
(28:27):
So she she's doing this to demonstrate how very different
you have two very different machines in your brain working
in tandem. So the reason why she's talking about that,
and why we're talking a little bit more about the
left and the right is that because she had that
that blood clot on the left hemisphere, she was losing
temporary functionality. And during those four hours and and many
(28:48):
years after actually, um, and so she began to witness
herself blending with the rest of the world. That was
the result is that, you know, once she shut up
that part of her brain the right brain, the here
and the now. She started to see like the boundaries
of her body dissipate and sort of meld with the
rest of the world, which is like an incredibly zen
(29:10):
type moment like this kind of like home, you know,
universal frequency kind of a thing. She just kind of
melded into the universe. Yeah, and she was very much
and tranced by this and was sort of sitting there
thinking like, oh wow, my body is doing this. And
then she would say her her left part of her
brain would start to come back online and be like,
you need to get help. And then her right hart
(29:32):
of her brain would say, yeah, like I'm witnessing this
about myself, and so seriously when you go to hospital hospital, right,
And that's what the left side of the friend just
kept coming online trying together. And that's why it took
her sover and long to get to the hospital too,
because she couldn't she lost the ability to even read numbers,
so she was trying to you know, dial the phone
and so on and so forth. Um So, I think
(29:54):
it's fascinating that she had that experience in that it
took her eight years to recover. And she says that
the reason she knows it was eight years um and
there was the marker. There is that For eight years
after that she experienced herself as a fluid being. Yeah,
I'm gonna quote a real quick from her ted talk.
(30:15):
This was, you know, the whole fluid being a revelation.
She says, we are energy beings connected to one another
through the consciousness of our right hemispheres as one human family.
And right here, right now, we are brothers and sisters
on this planet, here to make a world a better place.
And in this moment we are perfect. We are whole,
and we are beautiful and it is. It is an
(30:36):
incredible talk. And I will have to say that if
you are uncomfortable with any of the sort of hippie
to be right here, right now stuff, it might make
you kind of cringe a little. But you know, I
think if someone's uncomfortable with it, this is just this
is just me. But like you should really stop and
try and disconnect yourself from fear of fear for the
future and worrying about the past, because there is that that,
(30:58):
it's right there in your head um. You know, each
side and if you could just give a little more
emphasis to the part of you that's living in the
moment um can it can be phenomenally um comforting. Well,
And this is what she's saying too. And the reason
why I brought that up is because there is sort
of like a spotty and part of me that when
I was watching it, I was like, oh, my goodness,
she is she is exhibiting a lot of emotion right now.
(31:22):
But then I was thinking about it, and she is.
She has lived in the state for so very long
where she you know, through therapy, she finally got you know,
both hemispheres of her brain functioning that she has. She
does have something to talk about here, that that you
can live, that you can learn something about living in
the right part of your brain and living in the
(31:43):
now and applying that to your life like that it
is a choice. But yes, you do have these two
different machines in your brain, but there is UM. But
there is this point of living that is accessible UM.
That that she said, that is her her The main
thing that she wants to tell people about her experience,
UM is that you don't have to be you know,
(32:06):
caught and under the glass of your left hemisphere all
the time and functioning, you know, and in serving your
ego all the time. So yeah, I thought it was
a really fascinating thing. Um, and then I did again,
like she's sort of she does sort of seem out there,
but this is a woman who has been living. She's yeah,
she's she's out there, but she's been there. You know.
It's like, this is not somebody just saying, hey, turn
(32:27):
off half of your brain and you know, drift free.
She's a path of her brain was turned off, you know,
for a for a period of time here and uh,
and she got to experience that for you for Yeah.
And at the very end, she says something that's really intriguing.
She says, okay that here's the right part of my brain,
which is one with the world, which sees this beautiful
(32:49):
of flowing existence, and here's the left part of my
brain that tells me. I'm Juel Bolte Taylor and I'm
a neuro anatomous and I'm esteemed researcher of the brain.
And which one would you pick? And I thought that's
such an interesting proposition. Yeah. Um. And she's not saying
you have to pick, that's whole that's her whole point.
But she's saying that you could if if, if you
(33:11):
were if you're bound to one part of your brain,
that that's uh, that's the sort of choice that you
could make for yourself. Yeah, it's enlightening stuff scientifically and
uh and and I think spiritually, if you know into
that kind of thing. Yeah, well, hey, we have we
have some some words from our listeners here under form
(33:33):
of emails. Well, actually one is from Facebook and I'll
read that one first. Uh, this is a response. We
received a lot of response to our five finger Evolutionary
Discount podcasts, which had to do with why we have
five fingers and how are our five fingers actually influenced
our number system? Uh. So, our listener Julia um who
(33:55):
I guess I can't read her last name, but she
has like a wonderful, beautiful sounding like I don't know
Icelandic last name or something, or perhaps green Landing because
she's writing about green Land. She says, by the way,
the word for the number twenty in green Landic is
in nuke nalu. And I'm probably saying that wrong, but
in nuke nalu, which translates to whole person tin fingers
(34:16):
tintoes awesome language. That's so cool. Yeah, because in the
podcast we were talking about how the word for seven
is something like one hand, two fingers. Yeah. Right, so
that's very cool to now listener. Emily writes the following,
I love the House of Works podcast, and you've been
a constant and informative companion as I'm toiling away rehabbing
my house. The podcast on brain function, neurology and its
(34:39):
ability to rewire inspired me to share my experience. A
few weeks before I started law school, I had a
seizure caused by a cavernous and nigoma. Imagine a vein
with a weak spot that balloons from the pressure and
then leaks are burst. The brain bleed was in my
visual cortex, and after brain surgery, the most challenging part
(34:59):
of my recovery was that I couldn't see properly. It
was double vision like a bad headache or vertigo causes.
I also was missing part of my visual field, like
a spot where objects would become invisible. Consequently, I had
trouble judging depth and typing or reading required uh nose
to the screen, one eyed closed typing. About four days
(35:20):
after the surgery, I was out on a wall with
my sister and all the anomalies vanished. I went. I
went to having double vision and no depth reception to
seeing normally. It was instantaneous. The brain was clearly rebuilding
its network and the final wire got connected. The missing
spot in my eyesight also diminished, but hasn't totally left.
If I moved my hand in front of my eyes,
(35:41):
it has one place where it will disappear. However, the
brain filled in the gaps, and unless I look for
the little black hole, I would forget it was there.
My recovery was fine, though a few weeks later I
was diagnosed with epilepsy. Epilepsy is a really interesting condition
and might make a good topic. I've always wondered how
many people have hidden or exploited it. I adjust to
my adjusted to my new identity as an as an
(36:03):
epileptic by blogging for six months and her blog address
is a Sacred disease dot blog spot dot com. Uh.
It's all one word, sacred disease. It is uh. It
has been almost eight years since that first seizure and
I continue to love hearing more about the brain it's
eccentricity and superpowers. Thanks for the great podcast, Emily, So
(36:25):
that was really illuminating, especially given some of the stuff
we were just talking about. Yeah, I was just thinking
about that too. Um, very cool stuff. Yeah. I love
hearing from listeners about their personal experiences with with various
neurological conditions or um, you know, or or anything that
could conceivably be viewed as a supernatural or weird. I mean,
(36:45):
I mean, how did people interpret this kind of thing
in the past before we understood how how the brain
affects how things work, you know, the idea that it
would be this invisible part in your in your sight. Yeah, yeah,
and then I'm sure that people didn't even tell someone
before just for fear of someone thinking that they might
be mad. Right, yeah, thanks turned invisible if I look
(37:07):
at them right, right. It's not something you would probably
say one years ago, yeah, but even fifty years ago. Yeah,
but thanks Simily that was it was really awesome insight
into into a personal neurological experience there. And if you
have experiences you want to share, or you just want
to see what we're up to online, you can find
us on Facebook and Twitter. We're blow the Mind one
(37:27):
word on both of those, or just go to Google
and type and blow the Mind and you can always
drop us a line at blow the mind at how
stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands
of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. To
learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon
in the upper right corner of our homepage. The how
(37:48):
stuff Works iPhone app has a ride. Download it today
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