Speaker 1: Hey, Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Speaker 1: Time to go into the vault. This episode originally aired
Speaker 1: on June eleventh, nineteen, and it was called Brain Soup
Speaker 1: and Liquid Brains. Uh. I don't know what to say
Speaker 1: about it beyond that it's about liquid brains. Huh. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's it's there is kind of this um,
Speaker 1: you know, yucky horror vibe to our sort of selling
Speaker 1: of the concepts certainly, but it really gets into like
Speaker 1: what we can figure out via the liquefocation of brains
Speaker 1: um regarding like the nature of intelligence in an organic brain.
Speaker 1: This one was one that I was inspired to pick
Speaker 1: up after the twenty nineteen World Science Festival in New York.
Speaker 1: So yeah, so yeah, it's a pretty good one. Let's
Speaker 1: jump right in. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
Speaker 1: a production of I Heart Radios has to ports. Hey,
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is
Speaker 1: Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. Joe, what what kind
Speaker 1: of image enters your head when I say the words
Speaker 1: brain soup? Brain soup? That's a Green Day song. Isn't it?
Speaker 1: Is it? I'm having trouble making soup. I don't know.
Speaker 1: I'm not I'm not I'm not not dukie, right, I
Speaker 1: only know like green Green Day songs. I think I'm
Speaker 1: getting this wrong. H No. I also think of there's
Speaker 1: a horrible scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of
Speaker 1: Doom where they're they're eating all kinds of weird foods
Speaker 1: that are parts of animals that you shouldn't eat, but
Speaker 1: why not. But one of those parts is they eat
Speaker 1: a monkey brain. I don't think that's supposed to be soup.
Speaker 1: By the way, one of my favorite things on the
Speaker 1: Internet is a total tangent is uh is franchise specific
Speaker 1: WICKI entrees for inanimate objects. Allow me to explain, So,
Speaker 1: there is like an Indiana Jones wiki that's just a
Speaker 1: website out there. It's got entries on it for all
Speaker 1: the characters minor characters in Indiana Jones movies, all the
Speaker 1: adventures he went on. But then also they're just entries
Speaker 1: because it's a wiki of just objects that appear in
Speaker 1: the Indiana Jones movies. So this will include like individual
Speaker 1: pages for each course of the meal in Indiana Jones
Speaker 1: and the Temple of Doom, and one of them, the
Speaker 1: one that's got all the snakes in it, is called
Speaker 1: coiled Wrigley's. So it is it just it's just about
Speaker 1: a fictional food, or is it attempting to draw lines
Speaker 1: between these outrageous and you know, like shock oriented foods
Speaker 1: and in some actual traditions, because that if they're not
Speaker 1: doing it, that would actually be kind of a fun
Speaker 1: thing to do to sort of take the shock that
Speaker 1: they're that they're trying to to utilize in that scene
Speaker 1: and say, we'll hold on. Actually, here are some actual
Speaker 1: culinary traditions that are not really that shocking. Uh no,
Speaker 1: it's not at all that informative mind opening. Just let
Speaker 1: me allow me to quote directly from the page for
Speaker 1: coiled Wriggles. Coiled Wriggles, also known as snakes Surprise, was
Speaker 1: a dish served at the Guardian of Tradition dinner given
Speaker 1: at Pancock Palace in n five As the second course.
Speaker 1: It was live baby eels stuffed inside a moist boa constrictor.
Speaker 1: One of the guests at the dinner, a merchant, was
Speaker 1: very pleased when the dish was served. Another guest enjoyed
Speaker 1: the eels with great gusto. I have not seen that
Speaker 1: film in a very long time. I really don't know
Speaker 1: how it would hold up. Some elements certainly do not.
Speaker 1: You know, I should point out that, like you know,
Speaker 1: talking about brain soup, actual brain soup does exist. Do
Speaker 1: you have you know, various pork brain soups, etcetera. And
Speaker 1: even though I'm a I'm a pet scutarian these days,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't order pork brain soup at a restaurant. I
Speaker 1: looked at some photos and it looks perfectly delicious and
Speaker 1: not at all weird. Uh So I just want to
Speaker 1: drive that home regarding the consumption of of brain based
Speaker 1: soups before I bring up, uh something that comes to
Speaker 1: my mind when I when I hear brain soup and
Speaker 1: what came into my mind when I heard it recently,
Speaker 1: I instantly think back to the film. It came from Hollywood. Oh, yes,
Speaker 1: so this was this is a film. It's it's I
Speaker 1: think you can watch most of it on YouTube these days.
Speaker 1: But as Dan Ackroyd, John Candy Cheech and Chong Gilda Radner,
Speaker 1: that whole crew, and sort of before Mystery Science Theater,
Speaker 1: there was this movie it was just a clip show
Speaker 1: of like bad sci fi films and stuff, with the
Speaker 1: hosts of the movie making jokes about them. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: so a lot of trailer clips, a lot of weird clips.
Speaker 1: And there's a whole section that I that I loved
Speaker 1: as a kid about brains. You know, all these weird
Speaker 1: fifties and sixties brain monster films, which which I think
Speaker 1: are probably expressing a certain amount of anxiety regarding like
Speaker 1: post war advances in neuroscience and the sort of existential
Speaker 1: conundrums that are raised. You know, like, am I just
Speaker 1: a brain? What does it mean to be just a brain? Well,
Speaker 1: a brain jump out of someone's ed and attacked me
Speaker 1: with its tentacles. There was a lot of revolutionary neuroscience
Speaker 1: going on in the nineteen fifties, and yeah, I can
Speaker 1: see exactly why people would be concerned about this kind
Speaker 1: of thing, though some of them are just more like
Speaker 1: I think there's one called like the Brain from Planet
Speaker 1: Rouse or something that, yeah, just giant brains swarming at people.
Speaker 1: So I don't know exactly how much that plays on
Speaker 1: anxieties about neurology, but I mean I get that what
Speaker 1: I really get a sense of it when I see
Speaker 1: clips from Fiend without a face because as we have
Speaker 1: the fabulous stop motion brains and kind of like spinal
Speaker 1: column tentacles people, yeah, all over the furniture. We just
Speaker 1: sprayed for brains last week. But anyway, this particular segment
Speaker 1: on brains was introduced by Dan ackroyd Uh and he's
Speaker 1: he's he's in this this scene. It's like he's in
Speaker 1: a butcher's shop and he's playing a maniacal Perhaps he's
Speaker 1: supposed to be like a mad brain scientist, or a
Speaker 1: brain butcher, or like a brain addict cannibal. It's it's
Speaker 1: kind of hard to say, it's not entirely clear, but
Speaker 1: it's it's silly and it's gross, and it's I was
Speaker 1: tempted to play a clip from it here, but it's
Speaker 1: just so over the top that I don't I don't
Speaker 1: think it would translate well to an audio only environment.
Speaker 1: You are correctly capturing here the strangeness of the premise
Speaker 1: for this sketch in the movie. I don't just blithely
Speaker 1: throw around the phrase cocaine fuel. But there there are
Speaker 1: some cases where you get you get a suspicion. But
Speaker 1: also in that scene, I remember Dan Ackroyd is doing
Speaker 1: a voice that sounds a lot like a Monty Python voice.
Speaker 1: It's he sounds like the leader of the Knights who
Speaker 1: say knee, Yes he does. It's that kind of like
Speaker 1: ridiculous cartoonish voice. Uh yeah, the whole segment is is fabulous,
Speaker 1: all right, But all this sort of these sort of
Speaker 1: visceral reactions to the idea of brain soup. Aside, we
Speaker 1: are not going to be talking about eating brains today
Speaker 1: on the show. We're going to to talk about the
Speaker 1: very real practice, the scientific practice of making brain soup
Speaker 1: to better understand the neural power of animal brains. Well,
Speaker 1: I am very intrigued already now, Robert, I know this.
Speaker 1: The subject is not coming out of nowhere. This is
Speaker 1: inspired by something that you just saw when you were
Speaker 1: at the World Science Festival in New York City last week.
Speaker 1: That's right, Yeah, I just got back and uh yeah.
Speaker 1: This is held every the last week of May every year,
Speaker 1: and as usual I got to hear some of the
Speaker 1: world's leading scientists and thinkers discussed a number of exciting topics,
Speaker 1: and one of the talks I attended was rethinking thinking
Speaker 1: how intelligent are other animals? This is always a great
Speaker 1: subject and something we've revisited quite a few times on
Speaker 1: the podcast before. One time we talked with friends devol
Speaker 1: here on the podcast in an interview about his book.
Speaker 1: His book, I remember had a kind of awkward title.
Speaker 1: It was something it was something like, are we smart
Speaker 1: enough to know how smart animals are? Doesn't really roll
Speaker 1: off the tongue. But it's actually a really good book. Uh.
Speaker 1: And and this has come up with reference to the
Speaker 1: intelligence of birds, and and quite a few cases. Actually, yeah,
Speaker 1: and so this particular talk was loaded with interesting participants,
Speaker 1: but the participant that got me thinking about brain soup
Speaker 1: was Susanna or Kolana Uzel, PhD, biologist and neuroscientists at
Speaker 1: Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where she is Associate professor
Speaker 1: in the Department of Psychology and Biological Sciences, and her
Speaker 1: research focuses on what different brains are made off. Now, Robert,
Speaker 1: I envy you getting to see a panel that involved her,
Speaker 1: because I've actually watched a TED talk that she did
Speaker 1: back from I think it was twenty thirteen. She's she's
Speaker 1: a fantastic public speaker, So yeah, she seems like a
Speaker 1: really good public science communicator. Yeah, Like when I say
Speaker 1: you know that you have a panel of of leading
Speaker 1: scientists there on the stage, like, don't don't imagine something stuffy,
Speaker 1: because you often have some just really wonderful science communicators
Speaker 1: up there that you know, are experts in their field,
Speaker 1: but are also able to talk about that in a
Speaker 1: way that people at you know, various levels of expertise
Speaker 1: can can jump in on. And that's certainly the case
Speaker 1: with Susanna her Colono Ozel. Now I do want to
Speaker 1: mention you're probably you're hearing this last name. Sometimes you
Speaker 1: will hear people pronounce it her colono hose l um.
Speaker 1: If you're trying to look it up, it's h e
Speaker 1: r c u l a n O dash h o
Speaker 1: u z e l. Trying to to do the name
Speaker 1: justice here with our bungling mouths. So, as she tells it,
Speaker 1: her Colona Hoose was working as a science educator um
Speaker 1: in Rio de Janaro, Brazil, and uh and she kept
Speaker 1: running into an old myth that I'm sure many of
Speaker 1: you have run into before as well. Now this is
Speaker 1: not when we use the word myth too. In the
Speaker 1: non derogatory sciences foundational story maybe involving supernatural elements. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is the derogatory myth, and that myth is we
Speaker 1: only use ten percent of our brain. And this has
Speaker 1: been used really overused in I FI movies, especially over
Speaker 1: the years, as recently as Teens Lucy and twenty eleven
Speaker 1: is Limitless Um, which by the way, decided to double it,
Speaker 1: but still but still stuck to this idea that there's
Speaker 1: only a small percentage of the human brain that is available. Uh.
Speaker 1: And of course, all these these films and pretty much
Speaker 1: anytime you see this trouted out, it's it's with the
Speaker 1: idea like there's there are ways to open up the
Speaker 1: rest of the brain. There's like this dormant brain. Uh,
Speaker 1: these dormant brain portions that can be utilized if only
Speaker 1: you have the key. And the key, of course is
Speaker 1: left of the cage, right, and it's supplied by you know,
Speaker 1: some sort of mad science. If you're in a fiction
Speaker 1: or if you're encountering it saying some sort of self
Speaker 1: help scenario, then they're going to sell you the key
Speaker 1: or yeah, if you're encountering it, and uh, it's say
Speaker 1: nutritional supplement marketing. I mean, this is a big thing
Speaker 1: out there. Yeah, but we say it's a myth because
Speaker 1: and we'll break this down a little bit here, but
Speaker 1: but basically, there's nothing to these numbers. Now, we we
Speaker 1: all use of our brains. Well, when you instart, when
Speaker 1: you start to look at the claim, it becomes less
Speaker 1: and less clear what it even means. What does it
Speaker 1: mean we only use ten percent of our brain at
Speaker 1: a time? Do we only use ten percent of it
Speaker 1: ever in our whole lives? Like what even counts as
Speaker 1: quote using the brain in the first place. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: feel like we've talked about about neuroscience on the show enough,
Speaker 1: you know, and talking about various f m r I
Speaker 1: S studies and like what parts of the brain are
Speaker 1: lighting up, what parts of the brain, and what networks
Speaker 1: of the brain are associated with different thoughts and behaviors, etcetera.
Speaker 1: That it's it's clear that like there's there is definitely
Speaker 1: a lot of stuff in play, and that virtually and
Speaker 1: then really everything is in play. Um I guess, I
Speaker 1: guess the confusion could be if you're looking at various
Speaker 1: images of fMRI I s and you're thinking, oh, well,
Speaker 1: that looks about like ten percent. That looks about like
Speaker 1: ten percent. That's a really good point when people talk
Speaker 1: about f m r I studies, sometimes they will loosely
Speaker 1: and casually try to explain the findings of an fMRI
Speaker 1: I study by saying, hey, when somebody was doing this
Speaker 1: to ask with their brain, you know, they were trying
Speaker 1: to tie a knod or they were you know, whittling
Speaker 1: a whittling a horsey out of soap. When they're doing
Speaker 1: this task, this part of their brain lights up. That's
Speaker 1: the phrase this lights up, which implies to the entire
Speaker 1: rest of the brain is dark until it just lights up,
Speaker 1: as if it's like totally dormant. And that's not true.
Speaker 1: I mean brain imaging studies like you know, PT scans
Speaker 1: and fm r I that they show relative activity, so
Speaker 1: that they're charting activity and seeing what areas, uh get
Speaker 1: get surges of activity relative to what they were doing
Speaker 1: at other times. Right there, the areas that are not
Speaker 1: lit up are not lifeless. Right. But I mean, even
Speaker 1: back to this, I want to know again what what
Speaker 1: would actually mean to use your whole brain or to
Speaker 1: use certain percentages of your brain. I was reading around
Speaker 1: about this and I found one pretty interesting thing. So
Speaker 1: the neuroscientist Gabrielle and Torrey. I think she's at Boston
Speaker 1: University now. She wrote an interesting post about this myth
Speaker 1: that I found on a website Knowing Neurons, and in
Speaker 1: one section of her article, she discusses difficulties determining what
Speaker 1: it would actually mean to use quote a hundred percent
Speaker 1: of your brain, Like, there's no single way to measure
Speaker 1: what portion of the brain is being used at any
Speaker 1: given time. The default mode network, of course, is in
Speaker 1: operation throughout the brain pretty much all the time. But
Speaker 1: does that not count as the brain being used? I
Speaker 1: mean that even when you're at rest, the default mode
Speaker 1: network is whirring away all throughout the brain. Ye, quite
Speaker 1: unfortunately in some cases. In some case I don't know
Speaker 1: if you'd want to be without your default Well now
Speaker 1: I wouldn't want to give it up, but it it
Speaker 1: is kind of thorn in my side at times. It
Speaker 1: certainly can be. But then interesting, I really like this part.
Speaker 1: So she tries to take this claim seriously, like this
Speaker 1: ten percent of the brain is being used claim, and
Speaker 1: she's like, what would that actually mean? Well, she offers
Speaker 1: one interpretation of what it would mean to use a
Speaker 1: dred percent of your brain, and it would mean a
Speaker 1: grand moll seizure, So it would be like limitless except
Speaker 1: Bradley Cooper takes a magic and it just makes his
Speaker 1: brain like like we almost explode. Yeah, exactly. So, to
Speaker 1: read from tories where quote, seizures are defined by excessive
Speaker 1: and synchronous neural activity. If we wanted to use a
Speaker 1: hundred percent of our brains to stimulate each of the
Speaker 1: brains one hundred billion neurons, this is funny. We should
Speaker 1: come back to this in a second, to maximum capacity
Speaker 1: firing would result in a likely fatal physical experience. To
Speaker 1: hope for synchronous exit. Tory activity across the cortex is
Speaker 1: in many ways synonymous to a Grand Mall seizure. Uh.
Speaker 1: This is the most severe type of seizure and leads
Speaker 1: to loss of consciousness and severe muscle contractions, not the
Speaker 1: unlocking of superhuman abilities. So I think obviously we don't
Speaker 1: just want universal synchronous patterns of excitation of every neuron
Speaker 1: in the cortex. That's stupid. That's not something to wish for, right.
Speaker 1: It's like, you don't want the brain working that hard universally.
Speaker 1: It's like you don't want your your you don't want
Speaker 1: your xbox to be clearly just just heating up and
Speaker 1: that the fan is about to explode like that, you know,
Speaker 1: something's wrong with it. Yeah, my CPU is constantly And
Speaker 1: she also mentions the default mode network. You know, it's
Speaker 1: this diffuse, interconnected set of activity notes that show activation
Speaker 1: when the brain is otherwise at rest. You know, it
Speaker 1: shows the brain is pretty much never dormant. There's activity
Speaker 1: throughout most of the brain most of the time. So
Speaker 1: where did this clearly false claim come from? The answer
Speaker 1: actually isn't known for sure, but I found one commonly
Speaker 1: cited early example is a quote falsely attributed to the
Speaker 1: American psychologist William James, the author of a great classic text,
Speaker 1: The Varieties of Religious Experience, which is still interesting to
Speaker 1: read parts of today. Yeah, we've cited him a few
Speaker 1: different times on the show. Yeah, but apparently James did
Speaker 1: write something generically kind of like this, but without a
Speaker 1: number sited uh, in a piece called The Energies of Men,
Speaker 1: where you wrote, quote, we are making use of only
Speaker 1: a small part of our possible mental and physical resource
Speaker 1: is which is a very different kind of statement, right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's not putting a fine number on it or saying like,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean that that statement alone is not
Speaker 1: not implying that the portions of the brain are inactive,
Speaker 1: just that, you know, we're not taking full advantage of
Speaker 1: our neurological potential. And I want to mention a bit
Speaker 1: more about that in a second. Uh So, as to
Speaker 1: the origin of the phrase, the ten percent figure is
Speaker 1: also cited in the nineteen thirties, and this has been
Speaker 1: pointed out by quite a few investigators by the author
Speaker 1: of an introduction to Dale Carnegie's classic self help book
Speaker 1: How to Win Friends and Influence People, which possibly little
Speaker 1: known fact Charles Manson's favorite book Really Yeah, a classic
Speaker 1: of business leaders and serial killers alike. But this explains
Speaker 1: it a bit though. Right We have here an introduction
Speaker 1: to a widely read popular book. Yeah, and the author
Speaker 1: of the introduction says, we only act, you know, we
Speaker 1: only use ten percent of our brains. The vast amount
Speaker 1: of our mental potential is untapped. And I mentioned this
Speaker 1: minute ago, but I just want to hammer home again.
Speaker 1: I feel like I've seen this nonsensical ten percent fact
Speaker 1: invoked by people selling some of the various like brain
Speaker 1: booster pills and supposed new tropics supplements. Uh. I would
Speaker 1: advise people to be cautious about that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: And I'm not ruling out the possibility that there are
Speaker 1: some nutritional supplements or drugs that might in some cases
Speaker 1: have a small effect on mental performance. But if somebody
Speaker 1: is trying to sell you pills that will unlock the
Speaker 1: untapped godlike potential of the you know, the paid access
Speaker 1: part of your brain, the brain is premium content. As
Speaker 1: a general rule, be suspicious of this. I would I
Speaker 1: would advise in general, don't trust them and don't give
Speaker 1: them your money, because they're certainly tapping into something I
Speaker 1: think we all know to be true, and we all
Speaker 1: certainly want to be true, the idea that there is
Speaker 1: room for improvement exactly know that we can learn new things,
Speaker 1: that we can we can take on new patterns, and
Speaker 1: all of these things are true. You don't need a
Speaker 1: phony number to back that up, exactly right. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think a large part of the basis for false
Speaker 1: fact about ten percent lies not in how much of
Speaker 1: our brains we use as a as a ratio, but
Speaker 1: in the way that we use our brains. And the
Speaker 1: most salient example that comes to my mind is the
Speaker 1: psychologist Daniel Konomon is really useful metaphors of system one
Speaker 1: versus system to thinking. You know, so system one we've
Speaker 1: discussed on the podcast before, but system one is a
Speaker 1: suite of human brain functions that allow us to process
Speaker 1: information in a fast, easy, automatic, and approximate way. It's intuition,
Speaker 1: so you know, think rules of thumb, stereotypes, intuitive and
Speaker 1: reactive thinking eyebawling it. Meanwhile, system two is described as
Speaker 1: the slow, deliberate, effortful thinking, the kind of reasoning you
Speaker 1: use when you make a list of pros and cons,
Speaker 1: or you solve a math problem, or you carefully plan
Speaker 1: a route of movement somewhere, or you effortfully trace out
Speaker 1: the logic of an argument. We're all capable of both
Speaker 1: kinds of thinking, but we also rely on systum tim
Speaker 1: one most of the time for most things. And that's
Speaker 1: because of efficiency. Like you can't process all information in
Speaker 1: a slow, effortful way you don't have time. And system
Speaker 1: one is not all bad in some tasks. I think
Speaker 1: it might actually be superior. Like consider the way that
Speaker 1: overthinking some athletic tasks like shooting a basketball actually makes
Speaker 1: you worse at them, you know, like a lot of
Speaker 1: players find that they sink more baskets if they just
Speaker 1: try to relax and let the shot happen rather than
Speaker 1: focusing on the distance and the angle and everything. And
Speaker 1: I think this actually even comes through in some more
Speaker 1: abstract tasks like sometimes I think people can be better
Speaker 1: writers if they if they just kind of enter a
Speaker 1: flow state and not sitting overthink over, deliberative lee about
Speaker 1: the sentences they're constructing. This is very interesting and hopefully
Speaker 1: this won't be too much of a tangent here, but um,
Speaker 1: but it's also we have to be careful about thinking
Speaker 1: about like system one a system to being just complete
Speaker 1: like jackal and hides because actually the World's Science Festival,
Speaker 1: another Penelty attendant had to do with risky behavior and
Speaker 1: risk taking, especially in extreme sports UH such as say
Speaker 1: free solo climbing UH and like free cloaks of solo
Speaker 1: climbing is a great example because you have you have
Speaker 1: certain individuals who definitely display more of a system to approach,
Speaker 1: like they are methodical. They're they're not they're not climbing
Speaker 1: at climbing that that that that that sheer cliff without
Speaker 1: the aid of ropes, you know, without having practiced it
Speaker 1: many times, without having climbed it many times with ropes
Speaker 1: and thinking through several moves ahead, you see where you're
Speaker 1: going to go. On the other hand, you have individuals
Speaker 1: who do have more of an impulsive approach to risky behaviors,
Speaker 1: risk taking activities. But like with the basketball, you can say,
Speaker 1: well you can perhaps you're engaging in system too to
Speaker 1: practice so that you can reach the point where you
Speaker 1: can engage with the challenge with a system one mindset.
Speaker 1: I think that's exactly right. So, yeah, system one is
Speaker 1: not necessarily bad. It's not all bad. Sometimes it's bad.
Speaker 1: And I think we're all aware of cases where we
Speaker 1: have used fast, intuitive, reactive, likely inaccurate thinking when we
Speaker 1: know that we probably could have and should have stopped
Speaker 1: to think things out slowly and deliberately. Like you can
Speaker 1: probably immediately think of examples where you really wish you
Speaker 1: had switched over to system to thinking, but you made
Speaker 1: a fast, intuitive decision and you came to regret it.
Speaker 1: And I think it's this kind of frequently squandered mental
Speaker 1: potential that becomes the nugget of truth in the ten
Speaker 1: percent factoid. We use our whole brains, but we don't
Speaker 1: always use our brains as effectively as we know we're
Speaker 1: capable of in every scenario, because it's hard because we're
Speaker 1: in a hurry. Does that make sense? Absolutely? Yeah, We we
Speaker 1: we delive life. We have to engage both approaches to
Speaker 1: our decision. Make yeah. All right, On that note, we're
Speaker 1: going to take a quick break. But when we come back,
Speaker 1: we're going to return to the idea of brain soup
Speaker 1: and to the work of Susanna or Colna Ozel. Alright,
Speaker 1: we're back. So we got sidetracked on the the idea
Speaker 1: of whether or not people actually use more than ten
Speaker 1: percent of their brains. We do in pretty much anyway
Speaker 1: you interpret that. But that came up because it was
Speaker 1: the basis of a journey of research that the neuroscientist
Speaker 1: Susannah Orku Lana Zel went on. And so let's pick
Speaker 1: back up with her story from the event you saw
Speaker 1: in New York City. All right, So she was talking
Speaker 1: about another number that she kept coming across that she
Speaker 1: found curious, that she found suspicious, and that is the
Speaker 1: number one billion. Oh. Now, this just came up a
Speaker 1: minute ago when we were talking about an approximation. Now,
Speaker 1: I don't want to indict the author that cited and
Speaker 1: because it's a reasonable approximation. But well, yeah, and we'll
Speaker 1: get into we'll get into that. But but yeah, she
Speaker 1: kept running across this idea that the human brain contains
Speaker 1: a hundred billion neurons and ten times as many glial cells.
Speaker 1: But the thing is unlike that ten percent of the
Speaker 1: brain thing. This was not merely the domain of pop
Speaker 1: culture or in science fiction. No, this figure freak was
Speaker 1: frequently cited by neuroscientists, by psychologists, and and sometimes applied
Speaker 1: as a as a comparison to the number of stars
Speaker 1: in the Milky Way. I imagine a number of you
Speaker 1: have heard this one before. What a hundred billion stars
Speaker 1: in the Milky Way. Yeah, So the idea of being like, hey,
Speaker 1: you have a hundred a hundred billion eurons in your head.
Speaker 1: That's as many stars as there are in the Milky Way,
Speaker 1: which I mean, on one level, I think that's a
Speaker 1: useful metaphor because you're basically making the statement that, um,
Speaker 1: that that inner space is as complex and vast as
Speaker 1: we take outer space to be. But on the other hand,
Speaker 1: when you start looking at those actual numbers, uh, there's
Speaker 1: some problems on both sides, because for starters, the hundred
Speaker 1: billion star estimate in the Milky Way is not a
Speaker 1: solid number. By some estimations, the Milky Way has the
Speaker 1: mass of a hundred billion solar masses, but other estimates,
Speaker 1: say four hundred billion or even seven hundred billion solar
Speaker 1: masses is more accurate. Yeah, this is a fascinating question
Speaker 1: on its own because so it's difficult to know the
Speaker 1: number of stars in the mill Key Way galaxy because
Speaker 1: obviously we can't just count them, as you can't look
Speaker 1: up there and count them. The best we can do
Speaker 1: is estimate on the basis of the mass and luminosity
Speaker 1: of the galaxy as a whole. But this presents difficulties
Speaker 1: too because there are plenty of things in the galaxy
Speaker 1: other than stars. Right, the vast majority of the mass
Speaker 1: of our galaxy is not even normal matter. It seems
Speaker 1: to be dark matter, which is still an unsolved mystery
Speaker 1: and astrophysics. And dark matter, of course, is this hypothetical
Speaker 1: stuff that we detect by measuring its mass, in other words,
Speaker 1: the gravitational effect it has on stuff around it, But
Speaker 1: it doesn't appear to interact with electromagnetic radiation like light,
Speaker 1: making it unlike any other ordinary matter that we know of.
Speaker 1: So at this point we don't know what that stuff is,
Speaker 1: and that's most of the mass out there. And then
Speaker 1: past that, we know that a lot of the ordinary
Speaker 1: matter in the galaxy is not just stars. Some of
Speaker 1: it is uh like unincorporated debris, cosmic gas and dust,
Speaker 1: just hydrogen clouds out there. Of course that's not the
Speaker 1: majority of the luminous matter, but it's enough to complicate
Speaker 1: the problem of estimating star counts. And then on top
Speaker 1: of that, you've got ice and comets and planets and
Speaker 1: black holes and a supermassive black hole at the center
Speaker 1: of the galaxy. And on top of that also stars
Speaker 1: are of dramatically different masses, so you have to figure
Speaker 1: out the right average stellar mass to divide by. So
Speaker 1: it's it's almost like this isn't a perfect metaphor, but
Speaker 1: I was trying to think of one. It's almost like
Speaker 1: catching an unknown species of fish and then weighing it
Speaker 1: and then trying to guess how many bones it has.
Speaker 1: You know, like you can't count them just from looking
Speaker 1: from the outside, uh. And the bones aren't all the
Speaker 1: same size and weight. Uh. And there's a lot of
Speaker 1: other stuff in there too that's not bones. But so
Speaker 1: you can sort of estimate based on a number of
Speaker 1: likely assumptions, but you can't get an accurate count, which
Speaker 1: leads us back to the human brain. And this idea
Speaker 1: of this number that was thrown around again not non
Speaker 1: inscience fiction films, but in pure viewed papers and in
Speaker 1: in in textbooks as well. It was just out there
Speaker 1: and sort of the scientific zeitgeis the idea that there
Speaker 1: were a hundred billion neurons in the human brain. And
Speaker 1: we didn't know where this number comes from, right, And
Speaker 1: so Susannah Rocolano Hozel she was wondering too, and so
Speaker 1: she she started looking into it, and she looked and looked,
Speaker 1: and she found no pre existing count, no scientific basis
Speaker 1: for the number at all. The number was just floating
Speaker 1: around in the scientific world. So the obvious solution is, well,
Speaker 1: somebody's got to to look it up. Somebody's got to
Speaker 1: count these neurons. And so she set out to do
Speaker 1: just that via a novel tool that she developed in
Speaker 1: the lab in two thousand five, and that is turning
Speaker 1: brains into soup. The cification of the of of of
Speaker 1: the animal brain. Question, did she say, what the soup
Speaker 1: tastes like? No? I believe she said that the soup
Speaker 1: looked like unfiltered apple juice and apparently turned some of
Speaker 1: the students off of apple is perhaps forever it looks.
Speaker 1: I mean, I've seen it looks like murky swamp water. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I doubt that anybody tasted it, because this is
Speaker 1: sort of like priceless research material. But uh I don't know.
Speaker 1: Then again, you wonder if somebody got curious at some point.
Speaker 1: I don't know. She's she's a she's a pretty good
Speaker 1: she's a wonderful communicator, and she has a wonderful sense
Speaker 1: of humor. I imagine if somebody had tasted it, even accidentally,
Speaker 1: she would she would have mentioned it in one of
Speaker 1: the talks or or write ups or interviews that we
Speaker 1: looked at. You know what, I've got a guess as
Speaker 1: to what it tastes like. I bet it tastes like
Speaker 1: chicken stock probably probably a good good guess, and well
Speaker 1: and perhaps from Mount hot but we'll get into that.
Speaker 1: Uh So, Basically, yeah, so she she set out to
Speaker 1: make brains into soup. Uh So, Basically she came across
Speaker 1: previous lab efforts from the nineteen seventies to turn the
Speaker 1: brain into soups to measure DNA concentrations um. And one
Speaker 1: of the keys here is that soup is a homogeneous solution.
Speaker 1: So if you reduce something like like the brain that
Speaker 1: to soup, then you have a better ability to like
Speaker 1: get a sample of that soup, do account within that sample,
Speaker 1: and then apply that, you know, to the full volume
Speaker 1: of the soup. So anyway, she said, well, well I
Speaker 1: could use this method then, uh, to figure out how
Speaker 1: many neurons during the brain. You know, liquefy cell membranes
Speaker 1: leave the nuclei intact, allowing them, allowing everyone to you know,
Speaker 1: to count the remaining nuclei in a small sample and
Speaker 1: then multiply the number by the overall volume to get
Speaker 1: the whole brain total of neurons. This is great. You
Speaker 1: can't do this with a galaxy, can you, Like, you
Speaker 1: can't just look at one section of a galaxy and say, okay,
Speaker 1: now multiply that by the total area of the galaxy.
Speaker 1: Because galaxies are not homogeneous. You would have to turn
Speaker 1: it to soup first, which you cannot do or I
Speaker 1: mean not on our scale. Anyway, you would have to
Speaker 1: have godlike powers, and then you would destroy the universe.
Speaker 1: Maybe that's how the world ends. That's their shrewd Ragnarock scenario.
Speaker 1: As the god or god's asked the question, how many planets,
Speaker 1: how many stars are kicking around this thing? Well, let's
Speaker 1: turn it to soup and find out exactly, Loki says,
Speaker 1: or you can't count the number of stars in the sky,
Speaker 1: and he's like, watch me, Well this sounds this is
Speaker 1: exactly the kind of gamble that that ancient gods would
Speaker 1: get into. You know, um, just a mere bet and
Speaker 1: everything for mortals is at stake, right, But anyway, or
Speaker 1: Colono was not interested in that. She's interested in the brain.
Speaker 1: So the main challenge with souping the brain was souping
Speaker 1: it just enough to retain the cell nuclei, but without
Speaker 1: breaking any of that down. Initial souping experiments via essentially
Speaker 1: a detergent went too far and attempts to flash freeze
Speaker 1: them with wickid N liquid nitrogen and then blend them. Well,
Speaker 1: that just caused a cracked mess. And she says that
Speaker 1: there were like frozen pieces of brain all over the place.
Speaker 1: I think if anyone was going to taste her brain soup,
Speaker 1: that was probably gonna be when it would have occurred.
Speaker 1: But Anyway, then she found a solution fixing the brain
Speaker 1: tissue with from all the eyed before the dissolving it.
Speaker 1: And the result, she says again, looks like unfiltered apple
Speaker 1: juice and allows this kind of count to take place. Right, So,
Speaker 1: you can pull out a small sample, you know what
Speaker 1: the volume of that is compared to the entire volume
Speaker 1: of the sample, and then you count the number of
Speaker 1: neuron nuclei in the small sample and then multiply that
Speaker 1: by the total volume exactly. Okay, So I think I
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier there's a TED talk she did in where
Speaker 1: she shows off anyway. In the middle of this this
Speaker 1: TED talk, she shows off a vial of this brain
Speaker 1: soup on the stage. It's a little glass jar of
Speaker 1: mouse brain souper. It might be plastic, I don't know.
Speaker 1: It's a jar of mouse brain soup. It looks like
Speaker 1: murky swamp water. It's kind of sort of like an
Speaker 1: off beige kind of color. One of the best things
Speaker 1: about this particular talk, though, is that when she shows
Speaker 1: off the jar, she doesn't go and pick it up
Speaker 1: from a table or demonstration stand or something. She's just
Speaker 1: got it tucked into the back of her belt like
Speaker 1: a gun just pulls it out, and then when she's
Speaker 1: done showing it off, she just slips it right back
Speaker 1: in under the belt. I mean, I guess it must
Speaker 1: have been there all day. Well. You know, one of
Speaker 1: the things that she pointed out in the talk is
Speaker 1: that some when she started doing these experiments, some uh
Speaker 1: people objected. They were like, what are you doing through
Speaker 1: these precious brains, as if she were wasting brains, as
Speaker 1: if she were essentially the dan ackroid character from it
Speaker 1: came from Hollywood just you know, massacuring brain material. But
Speaker 1: she pointed out that, you know, the aside from it
Speaker 1: being highly useful, as they will explore the rest of
Speaker 1: this episode, also they freeze it and so they can
Speaker 1: save it for later. She says, she has a whole database.
Speaker 1: The freezer is full of brain soup. I'm sure, all
Speaker 1: properly labeled and dated. Yes, So what they did is, yeah,
Speaker 1: they apply to fluorescent stain to differentiate the neurons from
Speaker 1: other cells. And she started with rats and other rodents,
Speaker 1: eventually working up to human brains, and eventually she had
Speaker 1: a verified count not one billion neurons, but eighty six
Speaker 1: billion neurons. Though apparently this can be higher as high
Speaker 1: as say ninety one billion, for instance, but eighty six
Speaker 1: billion is the like the ballpark account. That's uh, well,
Speaker 1: that that doesn't seem too far off. I mean, that
Speaker 1: seems within a rough order of magnitude level of reasonableness.
Speaker 1: Well it does, and it doesn't like you know, she
Speaker 1: points out that this may not may not sound like
Speaker 1: much of a difference to a lot of us. And
Speaker 1: I have to admit when I first heard it it,
Speaker 1: I didn't really register that it was that much different
Speaker 1: thundered billion verses six. It sounds like, all right, well,
Speaker 1: we almost got it right. And uh, the thing is,
Speaker 1: you know, she says that ten billion neurons is really
Speaker 1: is not a small sum when it comes to neural change,
Speaker 1: and when we're talking about the evolution of of of brains,
Speaker 1: she says, the difference there is an entire baboon brain
Speaker 1: and chain. So so yeah, that's a lot of neural
Speaker 1: power we're talking about there, and to be off on
Speaker 1: that can you know, can have consequences as well, explore
Speaker 1: when we're talking about like what makes the human brain
Speaker 1: seemingly special. Yeah, that that's interesting, I mean, and that's
Speaker 1: where it ties into her larger theory about what it
Speaker 1: is that special out human brains. So obviously, neuro anatomists
Speaker 1: and other scientists have long debated this question, what makes
Speaker 1: human brains unique? Why? Why are we the only ones
Speaker 1: with computers? You know? Why don't rabbits have computers and
Speaker 1: all that? Uh? And so what is the physical property
Speaker 1: that gives the human brain its power? Is its size?
Speaker 1: I mean that clearly doesn't make any sense because sperm
Speaker 1: whales have brains there's something like, I think at least
Speaker 1: six or seven times larger than human brains, and yet
Speaker 1: they don't seem to be smarter than us. Likewise, the
Speaker 1: elephant brain is much bigger and exactly and we're not
Speaker 1: discounting the intelligence of whales and elephants, but but but
Speaker 1: clearly their their neural power is not on the same
Speaker 1: scale as as human power. And we have to ask
Speaker 1: the question why, right, so we're able to do things
Speaker 1: that they're not able to do. And is that difference
Speaker 1: related to sheer size of the brain? Clearly not? Could
Speaker 1: it be? Another thing that's often put forward is the
Speaker 1: ratio of brain size to body size. Right? Uh, the
Speaker 1: the encephialization quotation that actually doesn't seem to quite cover
Speaker 1: it either. Right. So one of the things you pointed
Speaker 1: out here is that we'll just consider a couple of
Speaker 1: these neuron counts again, humans eighty six billion neurons, uh.
Speaker 1: And then we have something like like a rat two
Speaker 1: hundred million neurons uh. On a goody, which is a
Speaker 1: South American like rather plump kind of critter, but it
Speaker 1: is a rodent eight hundred fifty seven million neurons. Al
Speaker 1: monkeys have a one thousand, four hundred sixty eight million neurons,
Speaker 1: while a cappy bara again a rodent one thousand, six
Speaker 1: hundred million neurons. Okay, so they're up into the billion range,
Speaker 1: but the difference here is still orders of magnitude of difference, right.
Speaker 1: And in her argument is like when you compare like
Speaker 1: like sized rodents and primates the primate brains, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe the same size, but there are more neurons in
Speaker 1: the more advanced primate brains. Right. So what seems to
Speaker 1: be going on here is that it's not so much
Speaker 1: that there's something really special about human brains, but there's
Speaker 1: something special about primate brains. Primate the brains of monkeys
Speaker 1: and apes, you know, the primate creatures like us, that
Speaker 1: they have these densely packed neuron heavy cortex cortices. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then it comes down to concentration of urons. And
Speaker 1: by the way, she also has found that birds have
Speaker 1: primate like concentrations in the forebrain, which lines up with
Speaker 1: the with their intelligence despite much smaller brains than other
Speaker 1: intelligent animals. Yeah, we mentioned this before, but this really
Speaker 1: comes through in the sometimes startling intelligence of birds like
Speaker 1: Corvid's and parrots. Yeah. You look at a parrot, like,
Speaker 1: how big is it's brain? Right, It's like, you know,
Speaker 1: you you snack on nuts larger than this creature's brain,
Speaker 1: and yet it has this startling intelligence about the efficiently
Speaker 1: packed to the neuron crammed forebrain sort of like a primate. Yeah. Yeah. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: whale brain, you could climb inside of it and it's
Speaker 1: and it's it's it's not quite there. All right. On
Speaker 1: that note, we're gonna take a quick break, and when
Speaker 1: we come back, we're gonna or more of Susanna or
Speaker 1: colono Ozell's ideas about the human brain, how it is
Speaker 1: evolved and whine has so many neurons than all right,
Speaker 1: we're back, so more about brains, all right, So One
Speaker 1: of the big take aways from Susanna or Colono Ozell's
Speaker 1: work is that, of course a big brain doesn't necessarily
Speaker 1: mean high levels of cognition. Again, it's more about the
Speaker 1: neuron concentration. Yeah, this is what we were just talking
Speaker 1: about with the fact that obviously, you know, like whales, elephants,
Speaker 1: all these have much bigger brains than us. But there's
Speaker 1: a lot that our brains seem able to do that
Speaker 1: those brains can't. So it's not just size. There does
Speaker 1: seem to be something special about the way that primate
Speaker 1: brains are organized. And that's the thing, primate brains not
Speaker 1: not just human brains, Because that's something that Orcolano Ozel
Speaker 1: really drives home, is that the human brain is just
Speaker 1: a scaled up primate brain. There's nothing special about the
Speaker 1: human brain beyond that, nothing God touched or anything of
Speaker 1: the sort. She says that this is very much in
Speaker 1: line with what Darwin thought and was criticized for. Darwin
Speaker 1: thought the human brain was just another primate brain, but
Speaker 1: those who came after him, they often took their evolution
Speaker 1: with a hefty dose of human exceptionalism. Wanting to think
Speaker 1: about us is a special case that the rules of
Speaker 1: life don't apply to like they apply to every other
Speaker 1: animal on earth, right And likewise, Umsel says that she
Speaker 1: faced resistance to a results due to the fact that
Speaker 1: they didn't support this view of human brain exceptionalism versus
Speaker 1: the brains of other primates. Again, it's just a scaled
Speaker 1: up a scaled up primate brain, right. So her idea,
Speaker 1: what she argues, is that what the human brain is,
Speaker 1: you start with the primate brain, which primate brains, like
Speaker 1: brains of monkeys and apes in general, are more crammed
Speaker 1: with neurons than other types of brains in the animal
Speaker 1: kingdom usually. And then you look at all the primates,
Speaker 1: and humans have by far the guest primate brain. And
Speaker 1: then because it's the biggest version of this densely packed
Speaker 1: primate neuron housing center, we are the smartest. That's essentially
Speaker 1: what makes us the smartest. And we'll get into why
Speaker 1: this seems to be the case and why um the
Speaker 1: the argument that Susanna rocol Hosel makes for it as well. Uh,
Speaker 1: But before we do that, I want to I want
Speaker 1: to touch base in another area that she lines up
Speaker 1: with all of this, and that is the subject of
Speaker 1: longevity in warm blooded vertebrates anyway, um, because it seems
Speaker 1: to be the case that neurons are more important than
Speaker 1: body size here as well. So in two thousand eighteen,
Speaker 1: research that was published in the Journal of Comparative Neurology
Speaker 1: UM Rocolno Mozel and co authors found that in primates, birds,
Speaker 1: and other warm blooded creatures, the number of neurons that
Speaker 1: you have in the core in the cortex of a
Speaker 1: species predicts about seventy five of all the variation in
Speaker 1: the longevity across species. Body size and metabolism the usual
Speaker 1: standard because usually that's what we think of, right. An
Speaker 1: elephant lives a while it's big, whales oft a while big. Right,
Speaker 1: She says that this only predicts around tw of of
Speaker 1: of the cases of longevity. And here's another slice of
Speaker 1: enough human non exceptionalism. If you do the math, she says,
Speaker 1: this means that humans live about as long as you
Speaker 1: expect based on their neuron load. In this particular brain
Speaker 1: soup study examined more than seven hundred warm blooded animal species.
Speaker 1: I want to see a list of those soups flavors. Yes,
Speaker 1: the sou menu is it's quite extensive. At her lap now,
Speaker 1: why is there a connection between neurons and the cerebral
Speaker 1: cortex and longevity. Well, she says more work is required
Speaker 1: to figure this out, but she does have some ideas,
Speaker 1: and here's what she said in a press release on
Speaker 1: the paper from quote. The data suggests the warm blooded
Speaker 1: species accumulate damages at the same rate as they age,
Speaker 1: But what curtails life are damages to the cerebral cortex,
Speaker 1: not the rest of the body. The more cortical neurons
Speaker 1: you have, the longer you will still have enough to
Speaker 1: keep your body functional. The cortex is the part of
Speaker 1: your brain that is capable of making our behavior complex
Speaker 1: and flexible. Yes, but that extends well beyond cognition and
Speaker 1: doing mental math and logic reasoning. The cerebrial cortex also
Speaker 1: gives your body adaptability as it adjusts and learns how
Speaker 1: to react to stresses and predicts them. That includes keeping
Speaker 1: your physiological functions running smoothly and making sure your heart rate,
Speaker 1: your respiratory rate, and your metabolism are on track with
Speaker 1: what you're doing and how you feel uh and with
Speaker 1: what you expect to happen next. And that apparently is
Speaker 1: a key factor that impacts longevity. Fascinating. Yeah, so I
Speaker 1: love how already just this this concept of of brain,
Speaker 1: not this concept of brain soup, but this tool of
Speaker 1: making brain soup. It already you know, is turning certain
Speaker 1: things that uh we used to think we knew about
Speaker 1: brains and the human brain and how it's different from
Speaker 1: other animals and indeed how how other animals think, turning
Speaker 1: all of that on its head and us another way
Speaker 1: of thinking about it. Yeah. So one thing that this would, obviously,
Speaker 1: I think, have somebody wondering about, is, Okay, if if
Speaker 1: humans are the upper end of the primate brain, you know,
Speaker 1: with your neuronal loads, you've got a lot of neurons
Speaker 1: in the human human brain, how did we get that way?
Speaker 1: Does it happened? Because again, we can't go with any
Speaker 1: mythic interpretation here, whether there's no ancient alien or gods
Speaker 1: scenario where where the this particular primate was was touched
Speaker 1: and made special. No, we we need to look to
Speaker 1: something in the natural world, something that that that explains
Speaker 1: this or like rapid growth of the brain, and uh
Speaker 1: Erculano Uzel's hypothesis has to do with straightforward energy economy,
Speaker 1: the energy that different species are able to take into
Speaker 1: their bodies. Right. She says that she thinks it all
Speaker 1: comes down to the calories and mass via a very
Speaker 1: early technological development that our ancestors made, that being cooking. Now,
Speaker 1: this is an interesting hypothesis. I like this. Yeah, we know,
Speaker 1: we've discussed the essential role that cooking played in human
Speaker 1: advancement before. How it externalized. Digestion allows you to uh,
Speaker 1: sort of to you know, heat up this pod or
Speaker 1: not even necessarily a pod, just you know, a pit
Speaker 1: with fire even and partially digest various organic matter before
Speaker 1: you give your own digestions, a digestive system a shot
Speaker 1: at it. This makes it easier to digest you know
Speaker 1: a lot of foods that would be impossible or difficult
Speaker 1: to consume otherwise, either because of their chemical components, or
Speaker 1: maybe they're just tough they're hard to chew, or or
Speaker 1: or they can't be chewed and cooking can make them softer,
Speaker 1: and of course just speed up overall digestion. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: just gives your digestive system much more access to the
Speaker 1: nutrients inside through a variety of means. Yeah. Because and
Speaker 1: this ties into neurons, because neurons require energy, a lot
Speaker 1: of energy actually, Yeah, and the more neurons you have
Speaker 1: and the more energy you require fire to charge them up. Like,
Speaker 1: your brain consumes energy at a rate that is not
Speaker 1: proportional to its size relative to the rest of your body.
Speaker 1: It is the the great energy hog of your body. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're talking. Neurons require six kilo calories per billion neurons
Speaker 1: per day, so um urkileno. Ozell points out that the
Speaker 1: human brain costs on average five kilo calories per day, so,
Speaker 1: in her words, not quite a whole hamburger. But but
Speaker 1: I mean, when you think about that in terms of food,
Speaker 1: the types of calories you can acquire in the wild,
Speaker 1: without grains, without access to easy meat and all that,
Speaker 1: that that's that's a tough requirement. Yeah, let's take a
Speaker 1: moment to just realize how how, how how amazing the
Speaker 1: hamburger is. I mean, and just in terms of like
Speaker 1: how much uh, you know, protein and potential nutrition is
Speaker 1: just jammed into that thing. There's a lot of energy
Speaker 1: in the hamburger, like it or not. And we you know,
Speaker 1: we take for granted, you know what a robust chunk
Speaker 1: of energy that is. And if we had and if
Speaker 1: we had we didn't have the hamburger, and of course
Speaker 1: all the things that are comparable to the hamburger and
Speaker 1: modern culinary tradition. And if we didn't have that to
Speaker 1: to eat, if we had to eat like our primate
Speaker 1: brethren did and still do without cooking and modern food. Uh.
Speaker 1: She points out that we'd have to spend nine point
Speaker 1: five hours every day eating so instead of so you're
Speaker 1: just eating like raw vegetable matter most all that you
Speaker 1: like a lot of animals do in the world. If you,
Speaker 1: if you like, like we do, watch a lot of documentaries,
Speaker 1: you'll frequently encounter, uh, you know, some an animal or
Speaker 1: another of panda, and you're like, oh, all it does
Speaker 1: is eat because it has to. It has to eat
Speaker 1: all the time, you know, to maintain um uh, this
Speaker 1: this body and ultimately it's brain as well. But of
Speaker 1: course our brain again has tremendous energy requirements. It only
Speaker 1: makes up two percent of our body, but it requires
Speaker 1: twenty five of the body's energy. So that five calorie
Speaker 1: burger is just part of a two thousand calorie per
Speaker 1: day diet. So kolona Ozel contends that without cooking, we'd
Speaker 1: be in the same state we'd evolved to one point
Speaker 1: five million years ago, we'd be small primates with essentially
Speaker 1: the brain power of a modern guerrilla, but with some
Speaker 1: stone tool making abilities. This is kind of encouraging as
Speaker 1: a as a hypothesis for people who love cooking kitchen
Speaker 1: culinary enthusiasts. You you may well be taking part in
Speaker 1: the most crucially human of all activities. Yeah, and I
Speaker 1: believe that Michael Pollen has made a very very similar
Speaker 1: argument before in terms of like why we we we
Speaker 1: love cooking, and why even if we don't cook, we're
Speaker 1: drawn to the myriad cooking shows that are out there.
Speaker 1: You know, we want to watch somebody cook, We want
Speaker 1: to learn about about different culinaries, traditions, and even for
Speaker 1: my own part, I've never been much of a chef.
Speaker 1: I am not much of a chef either, but I've
Speaker 1: been enjoying some of these various like meal box things
Speaker 1: recently and it's teaching me some of like the basics
Speaker 1: of cooking. And you know, I'll still curse at a tomato,
Speaker 1: but there's something fulfilling about going through all the instructions
Speaker 1: and in turning this sack of raw materials into a
Speaker 1: delicious meal. Well, Uh, tomatoes are tricky devils. That can
Speaker 1: be seriously, I there, they're at both ends of my
Speaker 1: you know, food love and hate spectrum. Basically, my favorite
Speaker 1: food in the entire world is a really good ripe
Speaker 1: summer tomato, and my least favorite food in the entire
Speaker 1: world is like a mealy white winter tomato. It's the
Speaker 1: worst thing on earth. Yeah, it's there's It's kind of
Speaker 1: I feel a similar way with cantalope, Like, there are
Speaker 1: a lot of mediocre cantle loopes out there, and if
Speaker 1: you have one, you could easily turn your back on
Speaker 1: cantal loops forever. But when you have like a really
Speaker 1: good cantlelope, there's nothing else that can beat it. Well,
Speaker 1: it's funny we talked about these extremes that agriculturally produced
Speaker 1: fruits and vegetables. Arcleanoz l points out in somewhere I
Speaker 1: was reading or one of her talks, I think where
Speaker 1: she says, you know, it's kind of funny that the
Speaker 1: inherent logic of of what she's showing here is even
Speaker 1: there in some of the diet trends where like what
Speaker 1: do people do when they want to lose weight? Well,
Speaker 1: one popular thing is the raw food diet, because suddenly
Speaker 1: you're condemning yourself to a forging type existence without you know,
Speaker 1: without the calorie benefits of cooked food. Yeah, exactly, but
Speaker 1: but cook But cooking food is something we did develop again,
Speaker 1: and that was roughly one point five million years ago. Um.
Speaker 1: And this is the key technology, she says. It changed
Speaker 1: what was possible energy wise for the evolving brain. Our
Speaker 1: brains got big in a hurry after this, and our
Speaker 1: food technology, of course, continued to evolve, most notably via
Speaker 1: the agricultural revolution. Definitely. I mean that the history of
Speaker 1: of of human civilization is the history of our manipulation
Speaker 1: of food really and our stockpiling of food, and then
Speaker 1: our trade of food and our wars for food. So
Speaker 1: we are using research that makes use of the brain
Speaker 1: soup technique to discover the possibility to discover how important
Speaker 1: the invention of literal soup might have been. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: love the cyclical nature of this particular episode. We started
Speaker 1: with with the brain soup and we came back to
Speaker 1: brain soup. It's glorious, Okay. Introducing a new show segment,
Speaker 1: Soup Facts, Soup Facts Facts with Joe McCornick. Here's something
Speaker 1: if you're ever trying to figure out how much to
Speaker 1: season your soup. You know, you don't want it to
Speaker 1: be too salty, of course, but you also don't want
Speaker 1: to underseason. And how much salt should go in a soup.
Speaker 1: The best way to figure that out is to get
Speaker 1: the soup to the temperature that you plan to serve
Speaker 1: it at, and then taste and see how much salt
Speaker 1: it needs there. Because the amount of salt that we
Speaker 1: can taste when we taste something for seasoning varies drastically
Speaker 1: depending on what temperature the food is at. So you
Speaker 1: might you might taste it and it tastes like it
Speaker 1: needs more salt, or it already has enough salt at
Speaker 1: one temperature, but in a different temperature might taste totally different. Interesting,
Speaker 1: I hadn't thought about that. I will use that the
Speaker 1: next time. I'm I'm, I'm following instructions from a box
Speaker 1: and have the mix soup all right. Another place I
Speaker 1: always mess up with salt is with with pasta. If
Speaker 1: I'm boiling pasta like I keep putting into little soup,
Speaker 1: like I'm so afraid of oversalting something. Well, then i'm i'm,
Speaker 1: and then my my wife will come in and say, oh,
Speaker 1: then you're supposed to be throwing like a whole fistful
Speaker 1: assault in there. Basically, it's a reasonable concern. I mean,
Speaker 1: you can if you under salt something, you can always
Speaker 1: add more. But if you over salt, you can't take
Speaker 1: it out right. Well, you know, I think back to
Speaker 1: the cocktail scenario, like if I mix up, if I
Speaker 1: mess up a cocktail to the point where I can't
Speaker 1: fix it, um, then I've wasted like two drinks, you know.
Speaker 1: But if I do that with a super stew and
Speaker 1: I've ruined dinner, like I have to then go and
Speaker 1: get a pizza or something, and I've wasted all of
Speaker 1: these resources. And you know, the most heartbreaking thing you
Speaker 1: can do is have to potentially throw food away. And
Speaker 1: I have, I have got I have over salted things
Speaker 1: in the past to that point, you know where it's
Speaker 1: just basically inedible. There was some recipe where I had
Speaker 1: to and this was like a box meal years ago
Speaker 1: when I was first figuring it out, and I had
Speaker 1: like a thing of salt and a thing of sugar,
Speaker 1: and the sugar went into one component salting the other
Speaker 1: flipped them which made like a pretty sweet cole slab
Speaker 1: that also just did whatever the other thing was was
Speaker 1: just inedible. No, that's a sad story, all right, So
Speaker 1: I guess we're gonna leave it there. Uh again Susannah
Speaker 1: Roclinol wonderful science communicator. Uh look her up. She's all
Speaker 1: over the internet. You can find her ted talk readily easily,
Speaker 1: and they're also various interviews with her. And then of
Speaker 1: course the scientific papers are out there to look at
Speaker 1: as well. Uh. So also thanks to the World Science
Speaker 1: Festival um for letting me attend and uh and you know,
Speaker 1: taking in all of this data. Look at the World
Speaker 1: Science Festival as well. Uh. They have a wonderful YouTube page.
Speaker 1: They'll put a lot of these talks up um, you know,
Speaker 1: over the course of the weeks and months ahead moving
Speaker 1: into next year. And in the meantime, if you want
Speaker 1: to check out more episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind,
Speaker 1: head on over to Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1: That's the mother ship. That's where you'll find them all.
Speaker 1: And if you want to support our show, we commend
Speaker 1: you for wanting to do so. The best thing you
Speaker 1: can do is to just rate and review us wherever
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Speaker 1: about us, uh, tell your friends, tell your family, and
Speaker 1: then tell them how to find this show. Huge thanks
Speaker 1: as always to our excellent audio producer, Tari Harrison. If
Speaker 1: you would like to get in touch with us with
Speaker 1: feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a
Speaker 1: topic or a guest for the future of the show,
Speaker 1: or just to say hello, you can email us at
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Speaker 1: to Blow Your Mind. It's a production of i Heeart
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