June 2, 2015 • 32 mins
Trepanation is an ancient surgical procedure and we've found the millennia-aged skulls to prove it - each punctured and gouged to relieve inner-pressure and inner-madness. But is such cranial perforation truly a relic of a primitive age or do modern trepanation advocates have a point in their quest to free the brain's heartbeat from its prison of bone? Tune in to this classic STBYM episode of to find out.
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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 Douglas. And
you know, summer's here and with summer comesfation drilling holes
in your skull to uh improve your mindset, to treat
(00:25):
the traumatic injuries, that sort of thing. Yeah, people often
think summer pools swimming, but what about creating pool in
your forehead? Indeed, Yeah, So we are going to rerun
this episode because we have a special uh hole in
our hearts, hole in our brains for this um for
this episode, and we hope you enjoy. And also wanted
(00:46):
to mention that if you don't know about the stud
it's called the NIB dot com. Uh. Emmy Dennis, a cartoonist,
has a great little bit on trepi Nation here is.
She even recreates one of these trepre Nations posts that
we talk about. Well, I'll make sure to include a
link to that on the landing page of this episode,
(01:06):
as well as a link to a new Forbes article
that came out. It has to do with three a
trepan skulls from the Copacabana Peninsula. And the Kitty Kaka
Basin of Olivia and these days back somewhere between BC
and A thousand, uh see, so it's pretty interesting stuff.
Will also include a link to the video we did
because there's a there's some particular footage that we mentioned
(01:29):
in the episode and you might be thinking, oh, I'd
really love to see that. You might think you would
love to see that, and if you would, then check
out the video. I'll include the link on the landing page. Indeed,
(01:50):
this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind does in
fact deal with the brain, the physical aspect of the mind,
and some rather radical things that have and can be
done to it, like drilling a hole in it, yes,
or particularly drilling a hole in the skull to create
a pathway to the brain. Yes, that kind of a
(02:12):
cranial release point. Yeah. I mean, we are talking about
trepid nation, which is something that has been performed since
prehistoric times, and we'll get more into that, but it's
pretty much mostly associated with which doctors. But we're going
to talk about it today in a medical sense, historical sense,
and what it may or may not have to do
(02:34):
with Alzheimer's. Yes, um, I do want to just go
ahead and get this out of the way right now,
and we'll probably touch on this some more. But no
matter what you hear in this episode, do not drill
a hole in your skull or the skulls of anyone
you know. Um, it's a bad idea best left to
professionals that you know. We we have caution you guys
(02:56):
a lot before. We've talked about like you get stung
by uh jelly fish, do not pee on yourself for others,
because it's not gonna work. It might actually make things worse.
But we are super serious when we talk about trepen nation. Um,
and we're kind of laughing about it right now. But
as we will go into later, people have performed self
trepennations before and we'll talk about the reasons for that.
(03:17):
But again, this is something that is uh, it's just
not something that you do. I mean, it's brain surgery,
right exactly. And uh, in a sense, the the oldest
form of brain surgery now when we're talking about about
trepid nation. Essentially, this is the surgical removal of bone segments,
often circular, but sometimes it will be a square. It varies,
(03:38):
but but you see a lot of circles from the
skull in order to treat the symptoms of real or
imagine brain maladies. It was practiced by the ancient Egyptians, Chinese, Indians, Romans, Greeks,
and the early Mesoamerican civilizations. The earliest example that has
been found of a skull with trepen nation marks goes
(03:58):
back to the beginning of the Neolithic period some ten
thousand years ago, and the procedure is still performed today,
both for medical and non medical reasons. Yeah, today doctors
tend to call it a craniotomy instead of trepidation, just
because trepination is kind of a for many good reasons,
kind of a stigmatized term, because it does just bring
(04:20):
to mind drilling a hole through the skull and uh,
as as we'll discussed, there's a lot of baggage that
comes with that. A lot of that baggage it does
not deserve, but some of it it does. Yeah, and
when doctors do it today, it's because there's been some
sort of head trauma and uh, some sort of injury
that now only a sort of trepination would help to
reduce swelling in the build up of blood and other
(04:41):
fluids which can kill brain cells. Yeah, we're talking about
epidural or subdural hematomas here. Uh. And and also portions
of the skull will be reviewed, will be removed in
order to access parts of the brain. And in those cases,
of course we're taking this brain flap off in your
replacing it with a titanium plate, uh, screwing it on,
(05:04):
or using some of the forum to to fix it
back in position. Yeah, And then again these are our
medical reasons for undergoing this procedure. Non medical, there there
are quite a few reasons, it turns out, through history,
and one could be a kind of symbolic trepanning, in
which you know, there's not there is a little bit
of a hole made in the head, that it's more
(05:24):
of a symbolic thing, a sort of third eye that
mystics might say that you know, would help to expand
your consciousness. Um, I do know that. Archaeologist Bob Arnott says,
and this isn't a new scientist article the skull doctors
that some holes were made after death as part of
a burial right or to allow removal of the brain
before mommification. And he says that in some societies people
(05:47):
actually wore bone ambulance little discs that were cut out
from the skull of a leader or a great warrior.
So it's kind of like the the whole symbolic transaction
that happens there. If you have a little bit of
warrior or leader, perhaps you possess some of their power. Yeah,
and undoubted, undoubtedly trepid nation was used to treat various headaches, epilepsy,
(06:11):
mental disorders. There's even in the most basic forms of
trepid nation, with like the least medical ideas, there's still
this notion that there is an essential link between what's
going on inside the skull and the human condition and
your experience of reality, and that you can somehow adjustice,
tap into it, treat it by breaking down the barrier
(06:33):
between the world and the brain. Um and in this
you do see some of these ideas there in many
cases misapplied, but undoubtedly there have been holes drilled in
heads to release spirits, demons, etcetera. Yeah, the spirit and
demons things is something that that seems as though the
Western world has applied to what they might have deemed
(06:56):
as a primitive culture. Yeah, I think it's it's from
what I've read, is definitely overstated, but it's difficult for
anyone to say, no one ever drilled a hole in
the head to release the spirit or demon. But but
it is, it is over applied, and we'll get into
the details on that. It kind of gets, you know, treprenation,
gets into that weird territory that cannibalism gets into, where
(07:17):
there's so much myth and it's freighted with with so
much morality that it's sometimes hard to suess out the
truth from fiction. Over a historical amount of time, Yeah,
because certainly, especially really you know, Western European culture in
the over the last a few centuries, really into the
ideas of primitive, primitive people's or people who were deemed
(07:40):
as primitive eating each other and eating foreigners. Uh, certainly
into the idea of of some sort of a primitive
witch doctor just uh, you know, treating some sort of
malady by saying, oh, must free ghost from skull with
hammered you know, because it's just it's it's a demeaning ideas.
It limits those individuals to most primitive modes of human behavior. Yeah.
(08:04):
But then we have seen this in in Westerners for
a long time, this idea that you know, a Western
must be much more sophisticated. So therefore it must be
that they felt as though they were possessed by demon
and they had to let it out. But according to
Dr John Verano, who looked at something like ten years
of schools that we're in museums and private collections in
(08:26):
the U s and prow and he came to the
conclusion that there's plenty of evidence for advanced surgical skills
among the prehistoric people of the Andies. So that's for
one um. And if you start to look at this
a little bit more, then you you will stumble across
someone called Ephraim George Squire, who back in eighteen sixty
three already knew this. He already suspected this um, but
(08:50):
he actually had a different hypothesis of why this was,
and it didn't have anything to do with demons um.
He was an American diplomat and he was journeying across
Peru when he met Senora Zanito, who had in her
possession a skull with a perfectly square uh cut in it.
And what he notices that it had healing scar marks
(09:12):
and it had new bone growth, which would indicate the
person whoever inhabited that school before survived the trepid nation. Yeah,
they were healing, They were going on with their lives
despite and maybe even because of this hole. That's right.
This if you want to look more into this to
this specific example, it is from the mental fALS article headcase,
(09:33):
and it goes into detailing trepid nation in various ways.
And Squire, who is a rather interesting individual on his own,
I mean, a self taught archaeologist that was sent by
Abraham Lincoln to South America to deal with the guano,
the guana guano business, the guano problem, and then he
ends up immersed in this issue of of these skulls
(09:56):
in ancient neurosurgery. And and and at the time, you know,
we were talking about Western ideals and not what primitives,
primitive so called primitive societies did and do. Um. This
was a time where certainly that western white Westerners we
were like to view themselves as this superior species, almost
(10:17):
certainly a superior race, and everybody uh else was just
kind of piddling about. So the idea that ancient ancient
Meso Americans had advanced neurosurgery was kind of was a
radical idea, and in some sense it's a dangerous idea
to those who wanted to hold onto these these notions
of Western superiority. That's right, because we'll talk more about
(10:40):
this in a little bit. But you know, nineteenth century,
they're not having a lot of success with the procedure itself,
and it had been largely abandoned by this time. So
to think that a civilization, um, you know, five thousand
years ago, seven thousand years ago, could have carried this
out successfully seemed to fly in the face of logic.
(11:01):
And what Squire did is he presented, um, this this skult.
Paul Broca, who was a French or was a French
neurosurgeon and also the person for whom Broca's area in
the brain is named for, and he corroborated Squire's discovery
and said, yes, this is intentional. This looks like neurosurgery. Um.
But Broca thought it was done for primitive reasons, again
(11:26):
releasing the demons the ghost of the mind. And Squire said, no,
I don't think so. And he was the first, I
believe at that time, to come out and say I
think that it has more to do with perhaps combat. Yes. Um.
I should also point out that Broke also thought that
it was done almost exclusively on children. Yeah, this is
(11:49):
which he collaborated by saying, they look, I used a
glass instrument to to to gouge holes in the corpses
of children and adult dead adults, and I found that
it was far the far faster procedure with the child.
And therefore he concluded that it was used exclusively on children,
which was his experience with his instruments. Right. So it's
(12:11):
not a great way to sort of test out that hypothesis,
but that's what he came to. Um. In the meantime,
you have things like inc and pots that are showing
up depicting trepen nation, further evidence that this was happening. Um,
you have a survey of ancient inc and skulls showing
that more males than females had trepennation holes, probably because
(12:34):
most warriors were men. And in addition, the majority of
man made holes in the skull would occur on the
left side of the school. And the idea is that
right handed assailants, of which we know there are more of, Um,
those the blows of those assailants would land on the
left side of the school. We're talking about from a
(12:54):
club sword, a slingshot, Um, so that's sort of more
evidence that in this case, in the Incan's case, this
kind of trepidation was more of an e er procedure. Really, right,
you have individuals who sustained massive damage to the head.
They've essentially sustained brain trauma, and so the surgical procedure
of the day was to try to relieve that pressure. Yes,
(13:16):
so let's let's give it a look, see and try
to imagine what this might be. You're an Incan warrior. Yeah,
I'm just stumbled in from the battlefield. I took a
club blow to the head. I'm in pain, I'm bleeding.
What can you do for me? Doc? Ah, Well, I
see that you might have some shards of your own
skull in your brain. We've got to pick this out.
Let's clamp your head between minknees, pour some coconut juice
(13:40):
on your scalp, and then we've got some freshly cut
leaves that we can just put on this wound to
dull the pain. Oh, okay, that would be coca leaves.
Coco leaves exactly. And maybe you want to even have
a little bit of our homemade alcohol because things are
going to get I might need that crazy. Maybe some
tobacco as well, even yes, some tobacco. I'm going to
(14:01):
take the sharp object. It could be perhaps a tooth
from the animal. Good. Good, sounds good. Okay, I'm gonna
cut into your skull and I'm gonna groove it around
and around this fracture you have deeper into your skull
and uh, you have a little bit more of those
cocoa leaves, by the way, and then you're going to
feel this kind of sucking feeling when this plug of
(14:23):
bone comes off of your brain, so rather your skull,
because it's kind of like my brain is sealed in
a in a tupperware, right, and you have just drilled
through that type of ware with your animal tooth. Yes,
but it's not over yet because I have these Greek
forceps that I've fashioned out of bamboo, and now I'm
just gonna kind of pick around the wound, wash it
(14:44):
out with a little bit more coconut milk, and take
out any other sort of splinters because you know you
don't want that. And I'm gonna dress it with leaves,
a plaster of pepper, lime and beetlenut. Excellent. Now, is
there any way you could you could sew things up
there as well. Oh yeah, that's a good point. That's
we should really sew you up with some bat bones
and banana fibers. Good, good before putting that dressing on.
(15:06):
Thanks for reminding me, because that could have been really bad. Yeah,
I would have had to come back and you know,
and then that's two visits and I don't know how
my incot insurance covers those, uh, those postop visits. Also
count yourself lucky because if this were happening in the future,
in like the nineteenth century, you might be toast because
you know that coconut juice super good for keeping bacteria out,
and it turns out that that's a real killer. Yeah,
(15:29):
this is this touches on the really one of the
really interesting parts about it, especially when you're looking at
it from Squire's point of view in his time, because again,
Western society had pretty much abandoned trepid nation. Because despite
improving tools, you know, moving from more primitive instruments to
two instruments of metal and devices and clamps and whatnot
(15:49):
to put on top of the head like you see
in the woodcuts. Um, despite all these advancements, there was
still pretty high mortality rate for individuals sustaining any kind
of nursery on up into to uh the eighteen seventies
when a survey found that it's many as seventy of
neurosurgical patients died now mostly from infect mostly from infection
(16:10):
because there's one thing to to dig around in there,
but then everything has to heal and and it's very
susceptible to infection. Now you compare this to New Guinea
tribes and uh, you see just thirty percent of those
patients died. So obviously there's something here to keeping the
wound infection free. And you think about this too, even
like with childbirth fatalities, once things were sterilized and a
(16:35):
good practice was put into place that really got people
over the hump of of the actual procedure itself and
you know, help them to heal and And here's a
great example of Wow, I um survived this Trepi nation,
but now I might pass away from an infected wound. Yeah.
So it's kind of a champion of the little man
(16:56):
in a sense, because the squire ended up end up
being the victor in this uh in this argument was indicated. Yeah,
this self taught archaeologist won over the esteemed French neurologists
broke up. So kind of like that, and it's a
champion for these the so called primitive societies that were
looked down on. H Suddenly people had to realize, Hey,
(17:18):
the ancient Incans, they knew what they were doing indeed,
and they were doing it in a way that was
more successful than they're more modern counterparts. All Right, we're
gonna take a quick break. Uh So when we get back,
we're going to talk about Amanda Fielding, who is best
known for performing her own trep nation. Alright, we're back,
(17:45):
and you know, it's easy to think at this point
in the podcast, well, all right, we've discussed some of
the ideas about wine. People would drill a hole in
the head wine tref nation was practiced wine wine is
still practiced today, and you might think, well, case club,
we've sort of we've sort of figured it out. There
are a few cases in which we need to apply
(18:05):
this procedure in order to deal with some sort of
injury to the to the skull in some sort of
brain trauma or some sort of neurosurgery that requires access
to the brain. There couldn't be any wacky or pseudo
scientific or controversial reason to drill a hole in your head. Well, miss,
(18:27):
you decided to drill a hole in your head. Maybe
you're trying to widen your consciousness. Yes, is that the
wacky reason? I think so? Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, the
idea of performing trepination generally on yourself because it's hard
to find somebody to do it for you if your
whole goal is to expand human consciousness. Yeah, if it's
(18:49):
not an emergency medical situation, most likely the person the
surgeon is not going to perform, right. That person agreeing
to do it is probably not an actual doctor, and
you're probably not in a hospital. Yeah, you should check
references and look around. But yeah, I mean we are
talking about Amanda fil Fielding, who documented her own trepid
(19:09):
nation and this is a nineteen seventy film called Heartbeat
in the Brain. She is now seventy one years old
and is the director of the Beckley Foundation, a trust
that for over a decade has been carrying out research
into consciousness, including the use of LSD and other psychoactive substances.
She also ran for British Parliament twice on the platform
of trepid nation and these great posters but she has
(19:33):
that shows her with a bird on her shoulder looking
out in the distance, and then it says trepa nation
for the national health. You know, that's an interesting way
to sell trepid nation, just with sort of an abstract
bird like because I can easily imagine, and not to
poke fun at or anything, but I can imagine her
(19:54):
bringing up this. This is being her number one focus
point for the campaign, and in her campaign people saying, well,
we need to present that in a way that's a
little maybe a little less on the nose. Uh, maybe
no images of anyone actually drilling into their head if
we're saying more just a bird staring off in the distance.
I feel like she took both tacks though, because I
(20:16):
think there's another one around him, which it's the sort
of iconic image from the documentary which her head is
wrapped up and looking in the mirror. She look in
the mirror and there's some blood going down her face. Um,
so maybe she was testing out, you know, a b
situations there that she was advocating trepidation. She was saying,
we would be better off if we if we all
(20:37):
did this. Before we go into the wise of why
she did it, let's talk about how she did it,
because again she's filming herself. She's in the mirror. She
said in an interview with Vice magazine. I was obviously
very cautious and prepared myself very carefully. I used an
electric drill with a flat bottom and a foot pedal
and tested the drill head on the membranes of my
hands to see if it would damage the skin. The
(21:00):
old thing was carefully prepared. But more than anything, I
prepared myself psychologically. It's the last thing you want to do.
After I'd performed the procedure, I wrapped up my head
with a scarf, had a stake to replace iron from
the lost blood. I think almost a point by the way,
and and went to a party. It doesn't set you
(21:20):
back at all. It doesn't incapacity incapacitate you. It is
just a half hour operation. But in no way am
I advocating the idea of self trepnation. It should always
be carried out by members of a medical profession. So,
and that's key here again. If anyone reads this and
here's this and thinks I want to that sounds interesting,
I'd like to give that a go. The the world's
(21:42):
foremost trepennation advocate says, do not do this at home,
and only that. She says that, yes, she had a
change in dream pattern. She says her dreams became less anxious,
But she says, could all of that be described as
a placebo? There is, of course that possibility, and I
am very conscious of that. So she acknowledges, Yeah, I
drolled a hole in my head. I felt better for it.
(22:04):
But you know what, I'm aware of the placebo effect
and this could perhaps be just a psychological state for me.
So let's talk about why she did this to herself. Well,
for starters, she was the pupil of Bart Hugos, a
Dutchman who in the nineteen sixty five carried out his
own self trepi nation in order to expand his consciousness
and uh and was a huge advocate of it himself,
(22:26):
claiming that it was a way to essentially be high
all the time. Yeah, and it's side note too, he
named his daughter Maria Juana marijuana. Well I read that
that's he was actually kicked out of medical school because
he was a huge marijuana advocate. Yes, yeah, so I
just thought there's an interesting side note since we just
did an episode on names and how they have these
(22:47):
sort of self fulfilling prophecies sometimes. Anyway, I digress, Yeah,
a very interesting character. He came up with a concept
called brain blood volume, and this is this idea that
trepanning allows the full heart beat to express itself. And
Fielding says, hey, when a baby is born, the top
of the skull is really soft and flexible, and you
(23:07):
have a fontanelle closing and then the skull bones closed.
And she says this inhibits the full pulsation of the heartbeat,
so it's denied its full expression of the brain, so
to speak. That loss of pulse pressure results in a
change of ratio between the two fluids and the brain
blood and cerebral spinal fluid, which is important and won't
get to that in a moment. She says, it is
(23:28):
blood that feeds the brain cells with what they need,
such as glucose and oxygen. That's cerebral spinal fluid removes
some of the toxic molecules. So she's saying that trepre
nation essentially works by restoring the full pulse pressure of
the heartbeat. And she has been doing some research lately
about this as it relates to Alzheimer's. But before we
(23:51):
get into that, I thought it would be helpful for
us to kind of give a call back to a
past episode called The Night Janitor, in which we talk
talked about the glymphatic system. Yeah, we're talking about the
glymphatic system or the glymphatic clearance pathway. It's a functional
waste clearance pathway in the mammalian central nervous system. And
(24:13):
this discovery really lands the feat of Danish biologists making
nater guard um. She was leading research into sleep function
at the University of Rochester's Medical school, and uh, she
didn't think everything was really stacking up and making sense
that I figured that the brain is too busy to
recycle all this energy, that there's essentially a waste disposal
problem with the human brain. Yeah, because she was looking
(24:35):
at the lymphatic system. So muscles um create toxic by products, right,
and those build up and then they're ushered out by
the lymphatic system. So she was thinking, I don't think
the brain can't be doing that. The brain is so
active during the day. Maybe we can look at this
at night and see what's going on in terms of
waste removal. Yeah, she suspected that the brain shared a
(24:56):
similar system that the muscles had, and the in o
lymphatic system offered um but instead of it's predicated on
cerebro spinal fluid in what she called the glymphatic system
with a nod to the brains glial cells, which maintain
homeostasis and protect neurons. So what she did she and
(25:16):
her team injected anesthetized mice with fluorescent tracers into their
cerebro spinal fluids. So this allowed them to track where
the fluid was traveling in their bodies, in their brains,
and during the mice's waking hours, that fluid barely made
it into the brain, but once sleep was induced, the
brain cells of the mice actually shrunk, and that made
(25:38):
way for a flood of the cerebro spinal fluid, essentially
hosing down the brain of waste with the proteins and
that the toxic byproducts and ushering them out. And here's
the weird thing. Are not weird, but very very interesting,
and humans with dementia in Alzheimer's, there's an excess of
(25:59):
the rains toxic byproduct beta amyloid. So that is giving
researchers a really big reason to look into cerebro spinal
fluid and see how it takes away these these byproducts.
Because the idea is that if there is a build
up well that can cause disease, it's kind of like plaque,
It's like brain plaque. So now you have Russian neuro
(26:22):
physiologist Uri muson Nico who believes that tref nation could
act as a kind of release valve and allow better
circulation of the cerebro spinal fluid. And he says that
as we age the proteins in the brain hard in
preventing this system from working as it should, and as
a result, the flow of both blood and cerebro spinal
fluid is reduced and impairs the delivery of oxygen and
(26:44):
nutrients as well as a removal of waste. Now, if
I'm understanding this, right Fielding is actually working with that
Russian researcher and has the same beliefs about this. And
you know, almost didn't want to even point these two
things together with the night janitor that we discussed in
(27:06):
the cerebrospinal fluid being attached to um the build up
of proteins and disease. But it's so interesting that this
trepin nation aspect of it would come into play. Yeah,
we were talking about this earlier, you know, hesitant to
draw any lines between um, such an extreme activity as
(27:28):
a self trepination or even advocating self trefination and an
actual grounded science. But the way I like to look
at it is, this is an extreme view, and it's
kind of like taking the train to the end of
the line. Not everybody takes the train to the end
of the line of the tracks maybe uh maybe you know,
completely ironed out with with real science, but you can
(27:51):
follow the tracks. It's too far, you can go a
little too far down the line. And even someone in
an extreme position, that extreme position is going to be
in paying old with with some truths a lot of
the time. And so who knows where this exactly pans
out in the end? Yes, well, of course research is needed,
right and then the problem is hiding research funding for trefination,
(28:15):
and um, you know, I know that they have looked
at Alzheimer's patients before, and people who have had head
traumas and then had trepronation, and they have seen that
when they are trepinated, that the that that blood flow increases,
and then when they replace that bone fragment or they
seal it up that it reduces. So, yes, that's true,
(28:37):
but there's not enough research here to say, ah, yes,
this is the thing that will cure Alzheimer's or dementia.
And in fact, I think the real star of this
story is crebro spinal fluid, the fact that this is
the stuff that hosts down the works in your brain
and takes out the toxic byproducts. And then the second
real story is that happens when you sleep, So you
(29:00):
have to have enough sleep in order for you to
get enough of that in your brain to take away
these toxic byproducts. Now, where this where my brain goes
in all of this is is not so much imagining
a future where everybody goes to the doctor and has
a whole drilled in their head. But but where this
might lead as we understand more about the subrospinal fluid,
do we reach a point where there is some other
(29:22):
kind of trans human fix in place to sort of
tweak our evolved form for operable performance, Like maybe it
ends up being something that's achieved with nanotechnology. That's true,
that's the possibility, right, Or is there a way to
induce sell shrinkage in your brain without any adverse side effects. Um,
(29:44):
that would allow an easier path for the fluid. I
don't know. These are all really interesting questions, UM, but
I thought what was most interesting, UM in terms of
Amanda Fielding, is that she's not entirely on board word
with the trepidation. Like she's definitely interested in pursuing it
as a path to understanding consciousness and disease, but she says,
(30:09):
in response to the question by advice, would you be
doing the research even if you weren't trepanned? She says, yes,
I think so. But I suppose that my personal experience
of getting trepanned, which I of course would not put
total faith in, gave me the feeling that it's worthy
of research. So again here she is sort of she's saying, yeah,
it's giving me a perspective that I want to pursue,
(30:30):
but I'm not sure that it's the way to go.
M Do I think is helpful? Yeah? Yeah, she seems
for a person that that did undergo self trepination, you know,
she's she's seemed to be a very self conscious and
very grounded individual. So there you have trepidation, which, in
a very loose sense is is kind of like loosening
(30:52):
the belt on your brains pants. Yeah, eating a big meal,
You've been thinking a lot of thoughts that meal, and
then pop, Yeah, a little bit more room, I suppose,
a little bit more room to expand. Yeah, that's the
idea at least. Um again, it's it's kind of a
gruesome topic and sort of it was hard to look
at the footage. If anybody's curious, it's definitely out there.
(31:14):
That documentary is on YouTube and little um smatterings, not
in its entirety, but it's very interesting stuff, all right,
so they you have it trepidation in all it's uh
grizzly details and up potentially um you know, mind altering details. Yes,
(31:41):
we hope that we haven't caused any trepidation about trepidation
for you. If you'd like to check out more episodes
of Stuff to Blow your Mind, be sure to go
to the mothership Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
That's where you'll find all the episodes, uh been podcast form,
you'll find the videos, you'll find a blog post, links
out to social media accounts you name it. And if
you have any thoughts on treport Nation or these sort
(32:01):
of feats of enlightenment. Let us know. You can email
us at below the Mind at how stuff works dot
com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Does it How stuff works dot com.
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 Douglas. And
you know, summer's here and with summer comesfation drilling holes
in your skull to uh improve your mindset, to treat
(00:25):
the traumatic injuries, that sort of thing. Yeah, people often
think summer pools swimming, but what about creating pool in
your forehead? Indeed, Yeah, So we are going to rerun
this episode because we have a special uh hole in
our hearts, hole in our brains for this um for
this episode, and we hope you enjoy. And also wanted
(00:46):
to mention that if you don't know about the stud
it's called the NIB dot com. Uh. Emmy Dennis, a cartoonist,
has a great little bit on trepi Nation here is.
She even recreates one of these trepre Nations posts that
we talk about. Well, I'll make sure to include a
link to that on the landing page of this episode,
(01:06):
as well as a link to a new Forbes article
that came out. It has to do with three a
trepan skulls from the Copacabana Peninsula. And the Kitty Kaka
Basin of Olivia and these days back somewhere between BC
and A thousand, uh see, so it's pretty interesting stuff.
Will also include a link to the video we did
because there's a there's some particular footage that we mentioned
(01:29):
in the episode and you might be thinking, oh, I'd
really love to see that. You might think you would
love to see that, and if you would, then check
out the video. I'll include the link on the landing page. Indeed,
(01:50):
this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind does in
fact deal with the brain, the physical aspect of the mind,
and some rather radical things that have and can be
done to it, like drilling a hole in it, yes,
or particularly drilling a hole in the skull to create
a pathway to the brain. Yes, that kind of a
(02:12):
cranial release point. Yeah. I mean, we are talking about
trepid nation, which is something that has been performed since
prehistoric times, and we'll get more into that, but it's
pretty much mostly associated with which doctors. But we're going
to talk about it today in a medical sense, historical sense,
and what it may or may not have to do
(02:34):
with Alzheimer's. Yes, um, I do want to just go
ahead and get this out of the way right now,
and we'll probably touch on this some more. But no
matter what you hear in this episode, do not drill
a hole in your skull or the skulls of anyone
you know. Um, it's a bad idea best left to
professionals that you know. We we have caution you guys
(02:56):
a lot before. We've talked about like you get stung
by uh jelly fish, do not pee on yourself for others,
because it's not gonna work. It might actually make things worse.
But we are super serious when we talk about trepen nation. Um,
and we're kind of laughing about it right now. But
as we will go into later, people have performed self
trepennations before and we'll talk about the reasons for that.
(03:17):
But again, this is something that is uh, it's just
not something that you do. I mean, it's brain surgery,
right exactly. And uh, in a sense, the the oldest
form of brain surgery now when we're talking about about
trepid nation. Essentially, this is the surgical removal of bone segments,
often circular, but sometimes it will be a square. It varies,
(03:38):
but but you see a lot of circles from the
skull in order to treat the symptoms of real or
imagine brain maladies. It was practiced by the ancient Egyptians, Chinese, Indians, Romans, Greeks,
and the early Mesoamerican civilizations. The earliest example that has
been found of a skull with trepen nation marks goes
(03:58):
back to the beginning of the Neolithic period some ten
thousand years ago, and the procedure is still performed today,
both for medical and non medical reasons. Yeah, today doctors
tend to call it a craniotomy instead of trepidation, just
because trepination is kind of a for many good reasons,
kind of a stigmatized term, because it does just bring
(04:20):
to mind drilling a hole through the skull and uh,
as as we'll discussed, there's a lot of baggage that
comes with that. A lot of that baggage it does
not deserve, but some of it it does. Yeah, and
when doctors do it today, it's because there's been some
sort of head trauma and uh, some sort of injury
that now only a sort of trepination would help to
reduce swelling in the build up of blood and other
(04:41):
fluids which can kill brain cells. Yeah, we're talking about
epidural or subdural hematomas here. Uh. And and also portions
of the skull will be reviewed, will be removed in
order to access parts of the brain. And in those cases,
of course we're taking this brain flap off in your
replacing it with a titanium plate, uh, screwing it on,
(05:04):
or using some of the forum to to fix it
back in position. Yeah, And then again these are our
medical reasons for undergoing this procedure. Non medical, there there
are quite a few reasons, it turns out, through history,
and one could be a kind of symbolic trepanning, in
which you know, there's not there is a little bit
of a hole made in the head, that it's more
(05:24):
of a symbolic thing, a sort of third eye that
mystics might say that you know, would help to expand
your consciousness. Um, I do know that. Archaeologist Bob Arnott says,
and this isn't a new scientist article the skull doctors
that some holes were made after death as part of
a burial right or to allow removal of the brain
before mommification. And he says that in some societies people
(05:47):
actually wore bone ambulance little discs that were cut out
from the skull of a leader or a great warrior.
So it's kind of like the the whole symbolic transaction
that happens there. If you have a little bit of
warrior or leader, perhaps you possess some of their power. Yeah,
and undoubted, undoubtedly trepid nation was used to treat various headaches, epilepsy,
(06:11):
mental disorders. There's even in the most basic forms of
trepid nation, with like the least medical ideas, there's still
this notion that there is an essential link between what's
going on inside the skull and the human condition and
your experience of reality, and that you can somehow adjustice,
tap into it, treat it by breaking down the barrier
(06:33):
between the world and the brain. Um and in this
you do see some of these ideas there in many
cases misapplied, but undoubtedly there have been holes drilled in
heads to release spirits, demons, etcetera. Yeah, the spirit and
demons things is something that that seems as though the
Western world has applied to what they might have deemed
(06:56):
as a primitive culture. Yeah, I think it's it's from
what I've read, is definitely overstated, but it's difficult for
anyone to say, no one ever drilled a hole in
the head to release the spirit or demon. But but
it is, it is over applied, and we'll get into
the details on that. It kind of gets, you know, treprenation,
gets into that weird territory that cannibalism gets into, where
(07:17):
there's so much myth and it's freighted with with so
much morality that it's sometimes hard to suess out the
truth from fiction. Over a historical amount of time, Yeah,
because certainly, especially really you know, Western European culture in
the over the last a few centuries, really into the
ideas of primitive, primitive people's or people who were deemed
(07:40):
as primitive eating each other and eating foreigners. Uh, certainly
into the idea of of some sort of a primitive
witch doctor just uh, you know, treating some sort of
malady by saying, oh, must free ghost from skull with
hammered you know, because it's just it's it's a demeaning ideas.
It limits those individuals to most primitive modes of human behavior. Yeah.
(08:04):
But then we have seen this in in Westerners for
a long time, this idea that you know, a Western
must be much more sophisticated. So therefore it must be
that they felt as though they were possessed by demon
and they had to let it out. But according to
Dr John Verano, who looked at something like ten years
of schools that we're in museums and private collections in
(08:26):
the U s and prow and he came to the
conclusion that there's plenty of evidence for advanced surgical skills
among the prehistoric people of the Andies. So that's for
one um. And if you start to look at this
a little bit more, then you you will stumble across
someone called Ephraim George Squire, who back in eighteen sixty
three already knew this. He already suspected this um, but
(08:50):
he actually had a different hypothesis of why this was,
and it didn't have anything to do with demons um.
He was an American diplomat and he was journeying across
Peru when he met Senora Zanito, who had in her
possession a skull with a perfectly square uh cut in it.
And what he notices that it had healing scar marks
(09:12):
and it had new bone growth, which would indicate the
person whoever inhabited that school before survived the trepid nation. Yeah,
they were healing, They were going on with their lives
despite and maybe even because of this hole. That's right.
This if you want to look more into this to
this specific example, it is from the mental fALS article headcase,
(09:33):
and it goes into detailing trepid nation in various ways.
And Squire, who is a rather interesting individual on his own,
I mean, a self taught archaeologist that was sent by
Abraham Lincoln to South America to deal with the guano,
the guana guano business, the guano problem, and then he
ends up immersed in this issue of of these skulls
(09:56):
in ancient neurosurgery. And and and at the time, you know,
we were talking about Western ideals and not what primitives,
primitive so called primitive societies did and do. Um. This
was a time where certainly that western white Westerners we
were like to view themselves as this superior species, almost
(10:17):
certainly a superior race, and everybody uh else was just
kind of piddling about. So the idea that ancient ancient
Meso Americans had advanced neurosurgery was kind of was a
radical idea, and in some sense it's a dangerous idea
to those who wanted to hold onto these these notions
of Western superiority. That's right, because we'll talk more about
(10:40):
this in a little bit. But you know, nineteenth century,
they're not having a lot of success with the procedure itself,
and it had been largely abandoned by this time. So
to think that a civilization, um, you know, five thousand
years ago, seven thousand years ago, could have carried this
out successfully seemed to fly in the face of logic.
(11:01):
And what Squire did is he presented, um, this this skult.
Paul Broca, who was a French or was a French
neurosurgeon and also the person for whom Broca's area in
the brain is named for, and he corroborated Squire's discovery
and said, yes, this is intentional. This looks like neurosurgery. Um.
But Broca thought it was done for primitive reasons, again
(11:26):
releasing the demons the ghost of the mind. And Squire said, no,
I don't think so. And he was the first, I
believe at that time, to come out and say I
think that it has more to do with perhaps combat. Yes. Um.
I should also point out that Broke also thought that
it was done almost exclusively on children. Yeah, this is
(11:49):
which he collaborated by saying, they look, I used a
glass instrument to to to gouge holes in the corpses
of children and adult dead adults, and I found that
it was far the far faster procedure with the child.
And therefore he concluded that it was used exclusively on children,
which was his experience with his instruments. Right. So it's
(12:11):
not a great way to sort of test out that hypothesis,
but that's what he came to. Um. In the meantime,
you have things like inc and pots that are showing
up depicting trepen nation, further evidence that this was happening. Um,
you have a survey of ancient inc and skulls showing
that more males than females had trepennation holes, probably because
(12:34):
most warriors were men. And in addition, the majority of
man made holes in the skull would occur on the
left side of the school. And the idea is that
right handed assailants, of which we know there are more of, Um,
those the blows of those assailants would land on the
left side of the school. We're talking about from a
(12:54):
club sword, a slingshot, Um, so that's sort of more
evidence that in this case, in the Incan's case, this
kind of trepidation was more of an e er procedure. Really, right,
you have individuals who sustained massive damage to the head.
They've essentially sustained brain trauma, and so the surgical procedure
of the day was to try to relieve that pressure. Yes,
(13:16):
so let's let's give it a look, see and try
to imagine what this might be. You're an Incan warrior. Yeah,
I'm just stumbled in from the battlefield. I took a
club blow to the head. I'm in pain, I'm bleeding.
What can you do for me? Doc? Ah, Well, I
see that you might have some shards of your own
skull in your brain. We've got to pick this out.
Let's clamp your head between minknees, pour some coconut juice
(13:40):
on your scalp, and then we've got some freshly cut
leaves that we can just put on this wound to
dull the pain. Oh, okay, that would be coca leaves.
Coco leaves exactly. And maybe you want to even have
a little bit of our homemade alcohol because things are
going to get I might need that crazy. Maybe some
tobacco as well, even yes, some tobacco. I'm going to
(14:01):
take the sharp object. It could be perhaps a tooth
from the animal. Good. Good, sounds good. Okay, I'm gonna
cut into your skull and I'm gonna groove it around
and around this fracture you have deeper into your skull
and uh, you have a little bit more of those
cocoa leaves, by the way, and then you're going to
feel this kind of sucking feeling when this plug of
(14:23):
bone comes off of your brain, so rather your skull,
because it's kind of like my brain is sealed in
a in a tupperware, right, and you have just drilled
through that type of ware with your animal tooth. Yes,
but it's not over yet because I have these Greek
forceps that I've fashioned out of bamboo, and now I'm
just gonna kind of pick around the wound, wash it
(14:44):
out with a little bit more coconut milk, and take
out any other sort of splinters because you know you
don't want that. And I'm gonna dress it with leaves,
a plaster of pepper, lime and beetlenut. Excellent. Now, is
there any way you could you could sew things up
there as well. Oh yeah, that's a good point. That's
we should really sew you up with some bat bones
and banana fibers. Good, good before putting that dressing on.
(15:06):
Thanks for reminding me, because that could have been really bad. Yeah,
I would have had to come back and you know,
and then that's two visits and I don't know how
my incot insurance covers those, uh, those postop visits. Also
count yourself lucky because if this were happening in the future,
in like the nineteenth century, you might be toast because
you know that coconut juice super good for keeping bacteria out,
and it turns out that that's a real killer. Yeah,
(15:29):
this is this touches on the really one of the
really interesting parts about it, especially when you're looking at
it from Squire's point of view in his time, because again,
Western society had pretty much abandoned trepid nation. Because despite
improving tools, you know, moving from more primitive instruments to
two instruments of metal and devices and clamps and whatnot
(15:49):
to put on top of the head like you see
in the woodcuts. Um, despite all these advancements, there was
still pretty high mortality rate for individuals sustaining any kind
of nursery on up into to uh the eighteen seventies
when a survey found that it's many as seventy of
neurosurgical patients died now mostly from infect mostly from infection
(16:10):
because there's one thing to to dig around in there,
but then everything has to heal and and it's very
susceptible to infection. Now you compare this to New Guinea
tribes and uh, you see just thirty percent of those
patients died. So obviously there's something here to keeping the
wound infection free. And you think about this too, even
like with childbirth fatalities, once things were sterilized and a
(16:35):
good practice was put into place that really got people
over the hump of of the actual procedure itself and
you know, help them to heal and And here's a
great example of Wow, I um survived this Trepi nation,
but now I might pass away from an infected wound. Yeah.
So it's kind of a champion of the little man
(16:56):
in a sense, because the squire ended up end up
being the victor in this uh in this argument was indicated. Yeah,
this self taught archaeologist won over the esteemed French neurologists
broke up. So kind of like that, and it's a
champion for these the so called primitive societies that were
looked down on. H Suddenly people had to realize, Hey,
(17:18):
the ancient Incans, they knew what they were doing indeed,
and they were doing it in a way that was
more successful than they're more modern counterparts. All Right, we're
gonna take a quick break. Uh So when we get back,
we're going to talk about Amanda Fielding, who is best
known for performing her own trep nation. Alright, we're back,
(17:45):
and you know, it's easy to think at this point
in the podcast, well, all right, we've discussed some of
the ideas about wine. People would drill a hole in
the head wine tref nation was practiced wine wine is
still practiced today, and you might think, well, case club,
we've sort of we've sort of figured it out. There
are a few cases in which we need to apply
(18:05):
this procedure in order to deal with some sort of
injury to the to the skull in some sort of
brain trauma or some sort of neurosurgery that requires access
to the brain. There couldn't be any wacky or pseudo
scientific or controversial reason to drill a hole in your head. Well, miss,
(18:27):
you decided to drill a hole in your head. Maybe
you're trying to widen your consciousness. Yes, is that the
wacky reason? I think so? Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, the
idea of performing trepination generally on yourself because it's hard
to find somebody to do it for you if your
whole goal is to expand human consciousness. Yeah, if it's
(18:49):
not an emergency medical situation, most likely the person the
surgeon is not going to perform, right. That person agreeing
to do it is probably not an actual doctor, and
you're probably not in a hospital. Yeah, you should check
references and look around. But yeah, I mean we are
talking about Amanda fil Fielding, who documented her own trepid
(19:09):
nation and this is a nineteen seventy film called Heartbeat
in the Brain. She is now seventy one years old
and is the director of the Beckley Foundation, a trust
that for over a decade has been carrying out research
into consciousness, including the use of LSD and other psychoactive substances.
She also ran for British Parliament twice on the platform
of trepid nation and these great posters but she has
(19:33):
that shows her with a bird on her shoulder looking
out in the distance, and then it says trepa nation
for the national health. You know, that's an interesting way
to sell trepid nation, just with sort of an abstract
bird like because I can easily imagine, and not to
poke fun at or anything, but I can imagine her
(19:54):
bringing up this. This is being her number one focus
point for the campaign, and in her campaign people saying, well,
we need to present that in a way that's a
little maybe a little less on the nose. Uh, maybe
no images of anyone actually drilling into their head if
we're saying more just a bird staring off in the distance.
I feel like she took both tacks though, because I
(20:16):
think there's another one around him, which it's the sort
of iconic image from the documentary which her head is
wrapped up and looking in the mirror. She look in
the mirror and there's some blood going down her face. Um,
so maybe she was testing out, you know, a b
situations there that she was advocating trepidation. She was saying,
we would be better off if we if we all
(20:37):
did this. Before we go into the wise of why
she did it, let's talk about how she did it,
because again she's filming herself. She's in the mirror. She
said in an interview with Vice magazine. I was obviously
very cautious and prepared myself very carefully. I used an
electric drill with a flat bottom and a foot pedal
and tested the drill head on the membranes of my
hands to see if it would damage the skin. The
(21:00):
old thing was carefully prepared. But more than anything, I
prepared myself psychologically. It's the last thing you want to do.
After I'd performed the procedure, I wrapped up my head
with a scarf, had a stake to replace iron from
the lost blood. I think almost a point by the way,
and and went to a party. It doesn't set you
(21:20):
back at all. It doesn't incapacity incapacitate you. It is
just a half hour operation. But in no way am
I advocating the idea of self trepnation. It should always
be carried out by members of a medical profession. So,
and that's key here again. If anyone reads this and
here's this and thinks I want to that sounds interesting,
I'd like to give that a go. The the world's
(21:42):
foremost trepennation advocate says, do not do this at home,
and only that. She says that, yes, she had a
change in dream pattern. She says her dreams became less anxious,
But she says, could all of that be described as
a placebo? There is, of course that possibility, and I
am very conscious of that. So she acknowledges, Yeah, I
drolled a hole in my head. I felt better for it.
(22:04):
But you know what, I'm aware of the placebo effect
and this could perhaps be just a psychological state for me.
So let's talk about why she did this to herself. Well,
for starters, she was the pupil of Bart Hugos, a
Dutchman who in the nineteen sixty five carried out his
own self trepi nation in order to expand his consciousness
and uh and was a huge advocate of it himself,
(22:26):
claiming that it was a way to essentially be high
all the time. Yeah, and it's side note too, he
named his daughter Maria Juana marijuana. Well I read that
that's he was actually kicked out of medical school because
he was a huge marijuana advocate. Yes, yeah, so I
just thought there's an interesting side note since we just
did an episode on names and how they have these
(22:47):
sort of self fulfilling prophecies sometimes. Anyway, I digress, Yeah,
a very interesting character. He came up with a concept
called brain blood volume, and this is this idea that
trepanning allows the full heart beat to express itself. And
Fielding says, hey, when a baby is born, the top
of the skull is really soft and flexible, and you
(23:07):
have a fontanelle closing and then the skull bones closed.
And she says this inhibits the full pulsation of the heartbeat,
so it's denied its full expression of the brain, so
to speak. That loss of pulse pressure results in a
change of ratio between the two fluids and the brain
blood and cerebral spinal fluid, which is important and won't
get to that in a moment. She says, it is
(23:28):
blood that feeds the brain cells with what they need,
such as glucose and oxygen. That's cerebral spinal fluid removes
some of the toxic molecules. So she's saying that trepre
nation essentially works by restoring the full pulse pressure of
the heartbeat. And she has been doing some research lately
about this as it relates to Alzheimer's. But before we
(23:51):
get into that, I thought it would be helpful for
us to kind of give a call back to a
past episode called The Night Janitor, in which we talk
talked about the glymphatic system. Yeah, we're talking about the
glymphatic system or the glymphatic clearance pathway. It's a functional
waste clearance pathway in the mammalian central nervous system. And
(24:13):
this discovery really lands the feat of Danish biologists making
nater guard um. She was leading research into sleep function
at the University of Rochester's Medical school, and uh, she
didn't think everything was really stacking up and making sense
that I figured that the brain is too busy to
recycle all this energy, that there's essentially a waste disposal
problem with the human brain. Yeah, because she was looking
(24:35):
at the lymphatic system. So muscles um create toxic by products, right,
and those build up and then they're ushered out by
the lymphatic system. So she was thinking, I don't think
the brain can't be doing that. The brain is so
active during the day. Maybe we can look at this
at night and see what's going on in terms of
waste removal. Yeah, she suspected that the brain shared a
(24:56):
similar system that the muscles had, and the in o
lymphatic system offered um but instead of it's predicated on
cerebro spinal fluid in what she called the glymphatic system
with a nod to the brains glial cells, which maintain
homeostasis and protect neurons. So what she did she and
(25:16):
her team injected anesthetized mice with fluorescent tracers into their
cerebro spinal fluids. So this allowed them to track where
the fluid was traveling in their bodies, in their brains,
and during the mice's waking hours, that fluid barely made
it into the brain, but once sleep was induced, the
brain cells of the mice actually shrunk, and that made
(25:38):
way for a flood of the cerebro spinal fluid, essentially
hosing down the brain of waste with the proteins and
that the toxic byproducts and ushering them out. And here's
the weird thing. Are not weird, but very very interesting,
and humans with dementia in Alzheimer's, there's an excess of
(25:59):
the rains toxic byproduct beta amyloid. So that is giving
researchers a really big reason to look into cerebro spinal
fluid and see how it takes away these these byproducts.
Because the idea is that if there is a build
up well that can cause disease, it's kind of like plaque,
It's like brain plaque. So now you have Russian neuro
(26:22):
physiologist Uri muson Nico who believes that tref nation could
act as a kind of release valve and allow better
circulation of the cerebro spinal fluid. And he says that
as we age the proteins in the brain hard in
preventing this system from working as it should, and as
a result, the flow of both blood and cerebro spinal
fluid is reduced and impairs the delivery of oxygen and
(26:44):
nutrients as well as a removal of waste. Now, if
I'm understanding this, right Fielding is actually working with that
Russian researcher and has the same beliefs about this. And
you know, almost didn't want to even point these two
things together with the night janitor that we discussed in
(27:06):
the cerebrospinal fluid being attached to um the build up
of proteins and disease. But it's so interesting that this
trepin nation aspect of it would come into play. Yeah,
we were talking about this earlier, you know, hesitant to
draw any lines between um, such an extreme activity as
(27:28):
a self trepination or even advocating self trefination and an
actual grounded science. But the way I like to look
at it is, this is an extreme view, and it's
kind of like taking the train to the end of
the line. Not everybody takes the train to the end
of the line of the tracks maybe uh maybe you know,
completely ironed out with with real science, but you can
(27:51):
follow the tracks. It's too far, you can go a
little too far down the line. And even someone in
an extreme position, that extreme position is going to be
in paying old with with some truths a lot of
the time. And so who knows where this exactly pans
out in the end? Yes, well, of course research is needed,
right and then the problem is hiding research funding for trefination,
(28:15):
and um, you know, I know that they have looked
at Alzheimer's patients before, and people who have had head
traumas and then had trepronation, and they have seen that
when they are trepinated, that the that that blood flow increases,
and then when they replace that bone fragment or they
seal it up that it reduces. So, yes, that's true,
(28:37):
but there's not enough research here to say, ah, yes,
this is the thing that will cure Alzheimer's or dementia.
And in fact, I think the real star of this
story is crebro spinal fluid, the fact that this is
the stuff that hosts down the works in your brain
and takes out the toxic byproducts. And then the second
real story is that happens when you sleep, So you
(29:00):
have to have enough sleep in order for you to
get enough of that in your brain to take away
these toxic byproducts. Now, where this where my brain goes
in all of this is is not so much imagining
a future where everybody goes to the doctor and has
a whole drilled in their head. But but where this
might lead as we understand more about the subrospinal fluid,
do we reach a point where there is some other
(29:22):
kind of trans human fix in place to sort of
tweak our evolved form for operable performance, Like maybe it
ends up being something that's achieved with nanotechnology. That's true,
that's the possibility, right, Or is there a way to
induce sell shrinkage in your brain without any adverse side effects. Um,
(29:44):
that would allow an easier path for the fluid. I
don't know. These are all really interesting questions, UM, but
I thought what was most interesting, UM in terms of
Amanda Fielding, is that she's not entirely on board word
with the trepidation. Like she's definitely interested in pursuing it
as a path to understanding consciousness and disease, but she says,
(30:09):
in response to the question by advice, would you be
doing the research even if you weren't trepanned? She says, yes,
I think so. But I suppose that my personal experience
of getting trepanned, which I of course would not put
total faith in, gave me the feeling that it's worthy
of research. So again here she is sort of she's saying, yeah,
it's giving me a perspective that I want to pursue,
(30:30):
but I'm not sure that it's the way to go.
M Do I think is helpful? Yeah? Yeah, she seems
for a person that that did undergo self trepination, you know,
she's she's seemed to be a very self conscious and
very grounded individual. So there you have trepidation, which, in
a very loose sense is is kind of like loosening
(30:52):
the belt on your brains pants. Yeah, eating a big meal,
You've been thinking a lot of thoughts that meal, and
then pop, Yeah, a little bit more room, I suppose,
a little bit more room to expand. Yeah, that's the
idea at least. Um again, it's it's kind of a
gruesome topic and sort of it was hard to look
at the footage. If anybody's curious, it's definitely out there.
(31:14):
That documentary is on YouTube and little um smatterings, not
in its entirety, but it's very interesting stuff, all right,
so they you have it trepidation in all it's uh
grizzly details and up potentially um you know, mind altering details. Yes,
(31:41):
we hope that we haven't caused any trepidation about trepidation
for you. If you'd like to check out more episodes
of Stuff to Blow your Mind, be sure to go
to the mothership Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
That's where you'll find all the episodes, uh been podcast form,
you'll find the videos, you'll find a blog post, links
out to social media accounts you name it. And if
you have any thoughts on treport Nation or these sort
(32:01):
of feats of enlightenment. Let us know. You can email
us at below the Mind at how stuff works dot
com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Does it How stuff works dot com.
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