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