Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know
Speaker 1: from House toff works dot com. Sometimes science goes too
Speaker 1: far dog matters twisted but true. Wednesday's attend on Science. Hey,
Speaker 1: and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with me
Speaker 1: at long last is Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And this
Speaker 1: is special like eight ways from Sunday? This episode is,
Speaker 1: isn't it. I've changed my name over the weekend. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I've changed the jan Michael Vincent finally. All right, you've
Speaker 1: been talking about that forever, Chuck. I'm glad you finally
Speaker 1: did it. And you showed me your driver's license and
Speaker 1: it's official. Pretty neat. And what's cool is, um you
Speaker 1: did your hair for the photo. It looks kind of
Speaker 1: like the air Wolf Airwolf era, Jane Michael Vincent. Is
Speaker 1: there any other era the Mechanic? That's true? That those
Speaker 1: are his two eras Hooper. Was he in that? Yeah?
Speaker 1: He was the young buck stuntman to Burt Reynolds's aged veteran.
Speaker 1: Really he played that role a couple of times. Then
Speaker 1: I guess, huh, okay, Well, that's enough for the Jim
Speaker 1: Michael Vincent shout outs. Is he around still? Uh? I
Speaker 1: mean I haven't seen him in a decade and he
Speaker 1: was in pretty bad shape a decade ago. Was he
Speaker 1: really Yeah? From the from what I think drugs, I
Speaker 1: might be wrong though, or maybe he was not. He
Speaker 1: was injured or something. Do you just told everybody Jim
Speaker 1: Michael Vincent likes drugs. He's self experimented. Great one, Thank
Speaker 1: you very much for that. Um. This is a special
Speaker 1: episode because we are good good friends of the Science
Speaker 1: Channel and they have a very very cool show that
Speaker 1: an ad played for at the beginning of this episode,
Speaker 1: Dark Matters. It comes on. It premiered last Wednesday. It
Speaker 1: comes on tomorrow Wednesdays at ten pm. Have you have
Speaker 1: you looked at the episodes? Have you seen any of
Speaker 1: the video? It's pretty awesome. It is UM and I
Speaker 1: was going through the episode guide of the stuff they
Speaker 1: have coming up. It's like, um, really like a dark
Speaker 1: version of Unsolved Mysteries? Remember that? Yeah? Yeah? So UM.
Speaker 1: The A couple of the episodes have stuff that we've covered,
Speaker 1: like Einstein's brain, c I A lsd UM, and then
Speaker 1: they have a bunch of stuff we have. I didn't
Speaker 1: get that impression, but it's it's possible. They can do
Speaker 1: anything they want. But imitation is the greatest form of flighters, right,
Speaker 1: And that's actually we get asked to do stuff sometimes
Speaker 1: and you'll know if we really want to do it
Speaker 1: because we do it. And we did this one. Like
Speaker 1: this is literally being recorded today. Yeah, Like that's crazy.
Speaker 1: That is definitely different. Yeah, Jerry's turning this one around
Speaker 1: like hours later. Yeah, or earlier. We recorded this. It
Speaker 1: is as fresh as it gets. It still has the
Speaker 1: peach fuzz on it. Depeche Mode. By the way, de
Speaker 1: pech Mode is in no way related to a rare
Speaker 1: the founding He was a founding member of the h
Speaker 1: Mode and later went on to Founderation. Really Vincent Clark really, yes, wow,
Speaker 1: I knew there was some tie. I had no idea
Speaker 1: we're talking about this because we were having rarely do
Speaker 1: we let you in on our pre record conversation. But
Speaker 1: Josh went saw Ratio this weekend and I knew it
Speaker 1: was awesome and it was great, and there was some
Speaker 1: tie to another band. I couldn't remember it, and it
Speaker 1: was depeche Mode. Well, it was either depeche Mode or
Speaker 1: the pet Boys, probably, but I had cheez Did I
Speaker 1: just say that that? He said the pet Boys, which
Speaker 1: is an auto part score. They're really good on the
Speaker 1: keyboards and they had these gigant or heads and bodies.
Speaker 1: All right, So Chuck, you're ready ready. We're talking about
Speaker 1: scientists who self experiment and we've talked about UM crazy
Speaker 1: experiments before. So this UM episode actually forms a trifecta
Speaker 1: with two other previously released episodes that if you haven't heard,
Speaker 1: you should go listen to. What's the third UM? There
Speaker 1: is the human Experimentation sure episode, and then five Crazy
Speaker 1: Government exp Oh yeah, all those are pretty pretty well
Speaker 1: mixed together. So if you listen to that the if
Speaker 1: you listen to those two and self Experimentation, you're gonna
Speaker 1: have a very robust understanding of just how nuts some
Speaker 1: scientists are. You know what they call that around here?
Speaker 1: What a bucket? Yeah, they do a bucket of content. Heck,
Speaker 1: that's almost channel. That's right. Ah, this is good man.
Speaker 1: You threw this together like lickety split last week and
Speaker 1: found some really cool things. I think. Yeah, there's there's
Speaker 1: UM you could do way more than ten Yeah, sure, UM,
Speaker 1: like the guy who cracked his own knuckles for thirty years,
Speaker 1: just in his left hand. I believe he found nothing right.
Speaker 1: It does not cause arthritis. Um. We've talked before about
Speaker 1: Albert Hoffman, the Swiss chemist who um took the world's
Speaker 1: first acid trip that's on purpose, Um, on a bike.
Speaker 1: But can you imagine like never having known anything about it,
Speaker 1: Like I think generally when people do that kind of
Speaker 1: thing these days, you've heard of it and you know
Speaker 1: what's coming. But for it to be this brand new thing,
Speaker 1: he was probably like I bet there was along bike crack. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like kids, kids grew up on the Great Space Coaster,
Speaker 1: so they know it's coming, you know. Um, But yeah
Speaker 1: he said that. Um. He he laid down at home
Speaker 1: and UM, these these bizarre but not altogether unpleasant visions
Speaker 1: started coming to him and yeah, he was whacked out
Speaker 1: for many hours. Um. But we've talked about him before. UM.
Speaker 1: A guy who we haven't talked about who I find
Speaker 1: just fascinating. His name Santorio Santorio. It's the the researchers
Speaker 1: so nice. They named him twice, Sordio Sthordio. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: take a check. Well, he was a self experimenter and
Speaker 1: one of the earlier self experimenters. Um, we're talking sixteenth
Speaker 1: century style. And uh, what he did is he wanted
Speaker 1: to find out about and I guess they didn't call
Speaker 1: it metabolism at the time, did they, No, he he
Speaker 1: later ending the study. Okay, yeah, back then they had
Speaker 1: no I But basically that's what he was doing, was
Speaker 1: kind of learning about the human metabolism. And he did
Speaker 1: so by h being very meticulous about recording what he
Speaker 1: eat eated, what he ate and what he drank, and uh,
Speaker 1: weighing his stools and his urine. And I guess he
Speaker 1: formed some equation what comes in what goes out? Well,
Speaker 1: he found that it doesn't equal. And you you can't
Speaker 1: take into account the weight you put on. There's still
Speaker 1: some um difference. And he wanted to figure out where
Speaker 1: that went. And he came up with the idea of
Speaker 1: insensible perspiration, which I thought was going to be all
Speaker 1: about sweat. So I was a little disappointed. Well it is, yeah,
Speaker 1: but really, I mean it's just like constant, little sweat
Speaker 1: weight like that. But the cool thing about Santorio Squared
Speaker 1: is that, um, he lived for thirty years chuck essentially
Speaker 1: every every day, every every single day for thirty years,
Speaker 1: and he basically lived on this machine. It was like
Speaker 1: a huge beam scae and he constructed like a little
Speaker 1: chair and like a work table and all that. And
Speaker 1: he weighed all the food and drink that came on,
Speaker 1: and he weighed all the poop and urine that went off.
Speaker 1: But he lived on this thing. Well. And what's sad
Speaker 1: is that he did all this and it really wasn't
Speaker 1: super useful, no, but it opened the doors though for
Speaker 1: things like that. It definitely did. And um, one of
Speaker 1: one of the other things that did was, um, he
Speaker 1: had the idea of insensible perspiration before he did this,
Speaker 1: so he was one of the first people to say,
Speaker 1: you know what, I'm not just gonna say something. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna subject this to scientific rigor. I'm gonna put my
Speaker 1: money where my mouth is. I'm gonna scale and weigh
Speaker 1: my pooop. Yeah, he's like a stockbroker in the eighties
Speaker 1: looking for brand, you know. So that's number one. Uh,
Speaker 1: number two, we come to eighteen o three is a
Speaker 1: little bit of a jump there to Frederick Wilhelm Adam
Speaker 1: Certnir and Um, what he ended up doing was actually
Speaker 1: pretty useful for everyone even today, because he did he
Speaker 1: discover morphine he isolated did it isolated it from opium? Yeah,
Speaker 1: and through two steps got a few friends together. Well,
Speaker 1: at first he tested it on animals until they started dying,
Speaker 1: sleeping and dying, right, and then he was like, well,
Speaker 1: maybe I should try to some people and see what happened.
Speaker 1: Because he said, um that animals do not give exact results.
Speaker 1: I guess that's true, right, So he and his seventeen
Speaker 1: year old friends give exact results. Also, dying is a
Speaker 1: pretty exact result. Yeah, So he ouedied a bunch of
Speaker 1: animals and he got three uh you pointed out seventeen
Speaker 1: year olds plus himself, and I think he was like
Speaker 1: twenty at the time he was, so that's like right
Speaker 1: in the wheelhouse. Still today, I think he's a middle
Speaker 1: age back then though, yeah. Uh. And so he dosed
Speaker 1: himself and his friends on a low dose at first,
Speaker 1: about a half a grain of morphine, which is thirty mgs.
Speaker 1: It's a comparatively low dose to what he took, right,
Speaker 1: and that produced a little flushing. He was like, hey,
Speaker 1: this is kind of neat, but I'm I'm looking for
Speaker 1: more than flushing, so let me take a little more more.
Speaker 1: After about fifteen minutes, took a similar dose, started feeling
Speaker 1: a little queasy and faint and sleepy, of course, and
Speaker 1: to the point where I guess he thought it might
Speaker 1: be getting a little dangerous, so he threw up, made
Speaker 1: all his friends throw up to get it out of
Speaker 1: their system. Well, yeah, he started to get a little
Speaker 1: worried that they were all gonna die because they've taken
Speaker 1: ninety milligrams of morphine in less than an hour, which
Speaker 1: today we realized is ten times recommended us. So yeah,
Speaker 1: he he um, he gave everybody like eight ounces of
Speaker 1: vinegar to drink and made him throw up and save
Speaker 1: their lives. Yeah, imagine they probably huh. Yeah. And then
Speaker 1: he did another experiment later because he had a toothache,
Speaker 1: and he found that if he just took opium for it,
Speaker 1: the toothache wasn't cured, but if he took some morphine
Speaker 1: it was cured. Oh, I thought he discovered that by accident,
Speaker 1: Like he was like, wait a minute, my toothache. You know,
Speaker 1: he kept going, this is the only experiment, Like he
Speaker 1: had like many many brushes with death. As far as
Speaker 1: self experiment any scientists go, he was probably one of them,
Speaker 1: one of the toughest ones, or at least or the
Speaker 1: most as the one most addicted to morphine. That's right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: but that was a pretty big contribution to humanity. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's still like the go to um pain killer today,
Speaker 1: I imagine or not imagine, I know this to be true.
Speaker 1: Uh up next, Josh, we have Henry Head, Sir Henry Head,
Speaker 1: and he got together with his buddy w HR Rivers
Speaker 1: and um they this one's a little crazy to meet.
Speaker 1: They knew at the time that nerve damage can repair itself,
Speaker 1: but what they didn't have was uh documentation, right, because
Speaker 1: people couldn't describe it. Good night. They'd be like yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess that kind of hurts, yeah, and like yeah,
Speaker 1: so what they needed at the time there was no documentation.
Speaker 1: So they were like, well, let me cut out a
Speaker 1: sliver of my nerve on my arm and sew it
Speaker 1: back together. Unless since I can talk about this stuff intelligently,
Speaker 1: just I'll do it myself and not just any nerve.
Speaker 1: This is a radial that his the radial nerve in
Speaker 1: his left arm. Right, he was right handed, which is
Speaker 1: why he did this to his left arm because he's no,
Speaker 1: he's no dumb right, Um and he had it surgically
Speaker 1: removed and the radial nerve, dude goes to the spinal
Speaker 1: calm and then all the way down branches all the
Speaker 1: way down to the hand, so it's like a major nerve.
Speaker 1: And he had a section cut out and then tied
Speaker 1: back together with silk and then said, Okay, I'm just
Speaker 1: gonna spend the next five years paying attention to how
Speaker 1: the um sensation uh semantaception comes back. That's right, and
Speaker 1: not only that, chuck. So, dude, I got a root
Speaker 1: canal the other day, as you know, he said, it
Speaker 1: wasn't too bad. Huh, No, it wasn't. But I was
Speaker 1: thinking about Henry Head because while it was going on,
Speaker 1: I kind of went off to my happy place. I
Speaker 1: just like left my body as much as possible in
Speaker 1: case any pain did come along, it would be kind
Speaker 1: of muted. What Henry Head did that work? Was it did? Yeah?
Speaker 1: You know, like you're not looking for the pain, You're
Speaker 1: trying to avoid it mentally. Yeah, and it definitely makes
Speaker 1: it worse if you're attention, yes, he But what Henry
Speaker 1: Head did was create this kind of trance like state
Speaker 1: called negative attitude of attention, where he focused his attention
Speaker 1: inward on pain, looking for it, so he could, you know,
Speaker 1: I guess, experience it more fully and pay attention to
Speaker 1: the type of pain it was. This guy went on
Speaker 1: this journey of pain, excruciating pain at times. Yeah. What
Speaker 1: was his quote to his wife? He said, I shall
Speaker 1: know a great deal about pain by the time this
Speaker 1: experiment is over. And he was right, yeah, whatever, But
Speaker 1: he was a bad dude. She's like, what's this bringing
Speaker 1: in this eternal pain? But he, uh, you know that
Speaker 1: documentation was important because they've never been able to describe
Speaker 1: for they probably didn't follow patients up like they do now,
Speaker 1: you know, like five years later, right, Well, and this
Speaker 1: was over the course of five years, so like they
Speaker 1: they basically documented how sensation returns after a major nerve damage.
Speaker 1: And he also contributed a lot to experimental psychology with
Speaker 1: the negative attitude of attention. UM. Basically, there's this whole
Speaker 1: thing of reverie where you're just basically zoned out, like
Speaker 1: Ralphie in um a Christmas story like that that was
Speaker 1: never documented before. And basically what Henry Head did was say, oh,
Speaker 1: here's a way to explore that. I don't get the Ralphie.
Speaker 1: Remember where they're like Ralphie and he like comes to
Speaker 1: remember his his little daydream about getting the A plus
Speaker 1: plus plus plus plus. That's Reverie. Yeah, that's good. Family
Speaker 1: comedy is number four in our list. Josh, I could
Speaker 1: like to call the dude who loved drugs Alexandra Shulgin.
Speaker 1: We talked about him before, and he was a chemist
Speaker 1: for doll in the sixties. We talked about in the
Speaker 1: can Psychedelics treatmental Illness, that's the one he showed up in. Right.
Speaker 1: He was basically um toying with with mescaline and and
Speaker 1: compounds that later became ecstasy M D M A M
Speaker 1: D M A. I have a hard time saying that.
Speaker 1: And he and his wife took a lot of these
Speaker 1: psychoactive drugs, had parties and the Martini as the usual
Speaker 1: method of the sixties, put a little drugs in there,
Speaker 1: and uh, you know, that's basically his story. He he
Speaker 1: liked the drugs, and I guess he documented all this stuff, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: he went just partying, was he? I don't know if
Speaker 1: partying is the right word, But I don't know that
Speaker 1: he was always documenting. I don't know if it was
Speaker 1: always scientifically rigorous how many did he take here? So
Speaker 1: there's like an estimated three hundred psychoactive compounds in the world,
Speaker 1: and he estimated that he sampled between two hundred and
Speaker 1: two and fifty of them. So he liked the psychedelics
Speaker 1: a lot. He put into the dead Simothy Learry to shame,
Speaker 1: didn't he They were probably buddies? Was he American? Yeah? Okay,
Speaker 1: So let's go back a little bit from the drug
Speaker 1: adult sixties to nineteenth century. Yeah, eighteen nineteen, Right, there's
Speaker 1: a Czechoslovakian monk who um at age thirty two, became
Speaker 1: a doctor because, um, he didn't think that the whole
Speaker 1: recommended dosage thing that was being doled out at the
Speaker 1: time was he called it nothing but mysticism. He thought
Speaker 1: it was way too low and basically, um was homeopathy.
Speaker 1: I think he had a problem with homeopathy. His name
Speaker 1: is yam Per Kenny, and he uh, he basically said, Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna become a doctor so I can learn more
Speaker 1: about this, and then I'm gonna take as many drugs
Speaker 1: as I can get my hands on, and um overdose
Speaker 1: and then pay attention to what happens to me, because
Speaker 1: I want to figure out what the recommended dosage should be. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The coolest part about this guy's story, I think is
Speaker 1: that after he started doing this, like taking things like
Speaker 1: fox glove to blur his vision and then writing about
Speaker 1: that night shade Ah, the word got out and people.
Speaker 1: I got the sense that other doctors were like, Hey,
Speaker 1: there's this dude that you'll let you do anything. Do
Speaker 1: it right, He'll take anything, So they started doing that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: One of his teachers, UM at med school, said Hey,
Speaker 1: I've got these three different extracts of epocac, and I
Speaker 1: need to find out which one's best. So what do
Speaker 1: you think which one? Is there anything that that does
Speaker 1: besides make you vomit? Nope, Okay, that's it's sole purpose
Speaker 1: as far as I know, that's it. Have you ever
Speaker 1: ever heard of it used for anything else? No? I
Speaker 1: haven't either. No, I don't ever want to have it,
Speaker 1: but um, I want to try it this, so yeah,
Speaker 1: PERKINI UM conducted a three week trial of these three
Speaker 1: extracts of ipecac, and by the end of the trial,
Speaker 1: he'd conditioned like a vomiting response whenever he saw like
Speaker 1: a brown powder that looked like iocac. Again, this life's
Speaker 1: like you want some cinnamon TOAs well. You know, it's
Speaker 1: interest seeing his wife died and he became um in
Speaker 1: charge of raising his three boys, and he said, okay,
Speaker 1: I'm not a self experimenting anymore. I gotta I have
Speaker 1: to stick around and take care of these these jokers. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was pretty cool. He said he was leaving it
Speaker 1: to the younger generation. But he's been doing it for
Speaker 1: twenty years already. And um, not just ipecac and uh
Speaker 1: fox glove, but also um nightshade. We now use atropine,
Speaker 1: which is the active ingredient night shade to dilate pupils
Speaker 1: thanks to him, because he overdosed on night shade to
Speaker 1: find out what would happen. And he would also make
Speaker 1: himself very dizzy to study vertigo on carousels. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: the type of vertigo named after him. Yeah, because he
Speaker 1: he studied it and figured it out. So he would
Speaker 1: just like get on the carousel until it and then
Speaker 1: stand up and yeah. But rather than this is a
Speaker 1: common thread in in self experimentation, like with my root
Speaker 1: canal or if you're dizzy on a carouself, you go inward.
Speaker 1: You you you shy away from it. You don't want
Speaker 1: to pay attention to any details. You just want everything
Speaker 1: to end right with self experimenting researchers do is throw
Speaker 1: themselves into the experience and pay attention and gain all
Speaker 1: that knowledge from it that you know, any one of
Speaker 1: us could do if if we were good at describing
Speaker 1: things scientifically, but we don't because we want to avoid
Speaker 1: pain and discomfort. Guys did it for us, they did, thankfully. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well that's why we're doing this one too. It's like,
Speaker 1: hats off to him. If you haven't gotten that impression yet,
Speaker 1: thank you, hats off. What if I just did that
Speaker 1: and I had like a reversal and I like, you
Speaker 1: couldn't say anything about it, all right? George Stratton is next,
Speaker 1: and he uh did something a little crazy. You know.
Speaker 1: He wore reversing lenses in the nineties. So he learned
Speaker 1: that our visual information comes in in an inverted manner.
Speaker 1: We all know this, right, well, he knew that, but
Speaker 1: there were theories that said this, that's how it has
Speaker 1: to be, and he wanted to find out if that
Speaker 1: was true, Like, does visual information have to be inverted
Speaker 1: for us to see upright? Because you know that it
Speaker 1: flips over in the brain exactly right. So can you
Speaker 1: imagine what he did to his brain by doing this? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's pretty crazy. He wore these reversing lenses, which basically
Speaker 1: presented the visual information right side up, um, and were
Speaker 1: them for eight days straight. So it provided it right
Speaker 1: side up to the brain. But if we wore that,
Speaker 1: everything would look upside down. And he did. He like
Speaker 1: you said, eight days straight, unbelievable. He said. The thing
Speaker 1: that got him the most was like he would put
Speaker 1: his hand out moving right. Well, he had to just
Speaker 1: sit there for like the first four days. He couldn't
Speaker 1: move at all. Yeah, but um, he would put his
Speaker 1: he would stretch his hand out and it would come
Speaker 1: in from the top rather than the bottom. He said,
Speaker 1: everything was just like a dream. Um, I'd like to
Speaker 1: try that out for like a second, you know, I'd
Speaker 1: just like to put some on and be like, oh right,
Speaker 1: that's weird. Let me take them right back off exact,
Speaker 1: not leave them on for eight days. Apparently, by the
Speaker 1: fifth day, everything started to um show up as upright again. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then if you really concentrated on it, it would
Speaker 1: go back to being upside down. But so did he
Speaker 1: rewire his brain? Yeah, he proved that the visual information
Speaker 1: doesn't have to be inverted to be seen upright, um,
Speaker 1: and that the brain is really capable of adapting in
Speaker 1: a fairly short time to basically the most radical changes
Speaker 1: in in the stations it is presented. So I guess
Speaker 1: that's sort of helped. I mean, it's not like that
Speaker 1: led to any huge breakthrough that I think it probably gave. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I would think that it probably formed the basis of
Speaker 1: like neural plasticity surely, all right. Yeah. Plus also, I mean,
Speaker 1: anybody who does that, that's mind bending. You know, he
Speaker 1: gets a he gets a pat on the back for that,
Speaker 1: no matter what. Well. And he also found too that
Speaker 1: after taking them off that it took a little while
Speaker 1: to get back to normal, which the process something too
Speaker 1: about your brain unlearned and his brain was. Yeah. He
Speaker 1: said that he had like glasses at first, and he
Speaker 1: said it was just too much. He couldn't do it.
Speaker 1: So he blindfold of one eye for eight days and
Speaker 1: had like basically a monocle like a little yeah, just
Speaker 1: single lens and that's the one he wore for eight days.
Speaker 1: He said it was just too much to have two lenses.
Speaker 1: So you want to do Carl lon Steiner. Uh yeah,
Speaker 1: he he actually did do a lot of good work.
Speaker 1: He was Viennese and he was a physician, and he
Speaker 1: basically came up with the blood typing system, the A
Speaker 1: B O blood typing system, because he noticed that red
Speaker 1: blood cells and some people clump in the presence of
Speaker 1: the fluid component, which is serum, but not everybody. So
Speaker 1: we thought it's almost as if their blood is a
Speaker 1: different type from one another. Well, at the time, like
Speaker 1: they knew that that would happen because you give people
Speaker 1: blood transfusions and then they die and um they because
Speaker 1: BO was clumped. Yeah, but at the time everybody thought
Speaker 1: it was because those people had some unknown disease. And
Speaker 1: lon Steiner was like, I think that people just have
Speaker 1: different types of blood. So he used his own blood
Speaker 1: in some of his colleagues, we should do one on
Speaker 1: blood type. I think we should. Is that true? Like
Speaker 1: your body cannot literally cannot accept another blood type. It
Speaker 1: depends I think, oh is the universal type, so you
Speaker 1: can um except but if you have like A can
Speaker 1: you can't have B at all because the red blood
Speaker 1: cells clump and your blood doesn't flow and you die.
Speaker 1: So it's like putting diesel in a very much in
Speaker 1: a regular very much. So yeah, um so what like
Speaker 1: you said, what Lon Steiner did was a huge contribution
Speaker 1: because he showed, you know, there's different anigens in different
Speaker 1: types of blood, and that creates this different blood type
Speaker 1: a bo or a b um. And when you when
Speaker 1: you if you tell if you test people first and
Speaker 1: say oh, they're a type and we've got some a
Speaker 1: type blood over here, a blood transfusion will work, and
Speaker 1: so will oregan donation and all the other huge. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was enormous. I bet doctors were like, oh, well
Speaker 1: that's good to know in these people. Um. So yeah
Speaker 1: he won the Nobel Prize in ninety that rightly, so yeah,
Speaker 1: he should win it every year. But what's crazy is
Speaker 1: you know he he just he experimented on himself. It's
Speaker 1: kind of cool. Um. But what's nuts is that he
Speaker 1: also uses colleagues blood. And it just so happened that
Speaker 1: out of like five people, they all had different blood types,
Speaker 1: like types were present. It could have gone the exact
Speaker 1: opposite way and just everybody had a type and then
Speaker 1: he said no, they're the same, yeah exactly. So I
Speaker 1: thought that was pretty cool and it was almost providence
Speaker 1: well and he he led that led to Dr Jack
Speaker 1: Goldstein UM in the nineteen eighties to do He was
Speaker 1: a biochemist that did more experimenting and this one confused
Speaker 1: not confused me. But he found out that an enzyme
Speaker 1: and coffee, when injected into BE blood removes anigin and
Speaker 1: basically makes it the universal blood type. How did he
Speaker 1: figure that out? I don't know. The coffee, I don't know,
Speaker 1: but he figured it out. But I just injected coffee
Speaker 1: one day to see what that would do and in
Speaker 1: my blood. Right, So he he had O type blood,
Speaker 1: so that that this enzyme changes B type blood O
Speaker 1: type blood. UM, and he had O type blood. So
Speaker 1: to prove that this worked, he got a blood transfusion
Speaker 1: of this treated B blood that was ostensibly now OH blood.
Speaker 1: So he got a blood transfusion, a small one, but
Speaker 1: he did it himself, UM to see if you know,
Speaker 1: his arm would fall off or something like that, or
Speaker 1: if his blood would clump. And it worked. And it's
Speaker 1: still being worked out. But apparently, UM, you know that
Speaker 1: opens up like the donation pool. If you can just
Speaker 1: take all this B type blood and you need OH,
Speaker 1: which is the universal type. Just injected with this enzyme,
Speaker 1: and I wonder how much blood you have to have
Speaker 1: transfused before it, Like how much diesel can you put
Speaker 1: in there? I don't know, Like if you if they
Speaker 1: just did like a vial with that, like what would
Speaker 1: that do to your body? I don't know, because Goldstein
Speaker 1: did like eleven billion, eleven and a half billion red
Speaker 1: blood cells, and I don't know if that's just a
Speaker 1: few drops or if that's like half a pine or
Speaker 1: a pine or what. Yeah, well we'll have to find
Speaker 1: that out in the blood typing episode. Okay, well I
Speaker 1: have I've been wanting to do the blood one for
Speaker 1: a while, but it's just like, let's do it right now.
Speaker 1: It's tough. I'm gonna need a little while on that one. Okay, Okay,
Speaker 1: do we have a blood typing article? Well, we have
Speaker 1: an article on blood that's like really dense. Oh yes,
Speaker 1: we started to do that when we're like, yeah, we're
Speaker 1: not doing this right now. It was I thought I
Speaker 1: think it was written by an M. D. Wasn't it.
Speaker 1: It read like it. Yeah, So look for the revised
Speaker 1: version coming in the future. All right. I like number
Speaker 1: nine Erman is it Herman or Erman Ebbing? House. I
Speaker 1: don't think he's Portuguese. He was a German. Would Airman Portuguese? Yeah, Erman,
Speaker 1: I don't know he's Herman. Then let's just call him Herman.
Speaker 1: He was German. And uh he was the first guy
Speaker 1: to really study memory and a really maybe at all,
Speaker 1: but in a really scientific way, which was which was
Speaker 1: unusual at the time to apply scientific research principles to
Speaker 1: psychological matters. Right that it was like basically taking the
Speaker 1: way the hard science is doing and applying it to
Speaker 1: the soft science of psychologists. But he formed the methodology
Speaker 1: that's still in use today and proved that it can work. Like, yes,
Speaker 1: you can study you know, cognitive faculties like memory in
Speaker 1: a science way, in a science way, science e way. Um,
Speaker 1: so what he did was pretty cool. He created Uh,
Speaker 1: the first thing he did was he created these non
Speaker 1: syllable nonsense syllable of them with two consonants with a
Speaker 1: vowel in the middle, like nog this is one example
Speaker 1: you used. And he had to make them nonsense because
Speaker 1: there had to be like no so ciation with like
Speaker 1: previous words that he had learned that had to be
Speaker 1: brand new things in his brain because I mean, if
Speaker 1: you if you have a previous association with a syllable,
Speaker 1: right like SKay. Okay, and you have a great memory
Speaker 1: of ice skating as a child, and SKay brings that
Speaker 1: to mind. Of course you can remember SKay. I'm surprised
Speaker 1: he came up with I would that'd be tough for me. Uh.
Speaker 1: So what he did was he basically, over the course
Speaker 1: of a year, uh learned these words and then to
Speaker 1: the point where he could recall them perfectly, and then
Speaker 1: recorded how long it took for him basically to forget
Speaker 1: them and then relearn them again. And that taught us
Speaker 1: all sorts of cool things about memory. Yeah. He he
Speaker 1: figured out that um and a lot of this stuff
Speaker 1: you know is so commonplace. We we know it, we
Speaker 1: take it very much for granted. But this guy is
Speaker 1: the one who figured out that UM, meaningless stuff is
Speaker 1: harder to learn than meaning full stuff. Um. He gave
Speaker 1: us the idea of the learning curve. The more stuff
Speaker 1: you have to learn, the longer it's going to take
Speaker 1: to learn it. Yeah. I think he was the first
Speaker 1: person actually name it to the learning curve. I think
Speaker 1: so it's possible. I believe so Okay, um and uh
Speaker 1: forgetting happens most rapidly right after learning and then kind
Speaker 1: of evens off and slows down. Um. And he taught
Speaker 1: us that cramming doesn't work, that learning is best when
Speaker 1: it's done over a longer time than you know, a
Speaker 1: single Yeah, because boy, I used to cram pretty well.
Speaker 1: Did you stunk at it? I was good at it?
Speaker 1: I was not. I just I would just be too
Speaker 1: stressed out. Well, and I short changed myself though, because
Speaker 1: I would do well in the test and then forget it,
Speaker 1: which was I mean, I wasn't doing myself any favors
Speaker 1: as far as gaining knowledge. You know, I took Italian
Speaker 1: um in college, and it was the only language that's
Speaker 1: ever clicked for me, Like I got a town in
Speaker 1: on a fundamental level. Yeah, and just aced the class
Speaker 1: until the final, and I studied for the final. I
Speaker 1: don't think I crammed it, just you know, I didn't
Speaker 1: take it for granted that I was gonna ace the final.
Speaker 1: But I for some reason I got there and forgot
Speaker 1: everything when I sat down, and well then I panicked, Yeah,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't panic until I realized that I had
Speaker 1: forgotten everything. And I still did this day. Don't understand
Speaker 1: what happened, and I don't remember. It's not like it
Speaker 1: came back after the test. It just went away right
Speaker 1: before the final. You know what happened? What Centorio Sordio,
Speaker 1: That's what happened. I started, I started weighing my feces,
Speaker 1: and it chased away all my understanding of battalion, and
Speaker 1: I stopped after one trial. Did you? I'm just saying,
Speaker 1: I've waited my feces once, and I know you gotta
Speaker 1: do it more than once. He also created the ebbing
Speaker 1: House illusion. Have you ever heard that? That's that thing?
Speaker 1: Right there? Is that the same size that is not
Speaker 1: the same size, It is not the same side. It's
Speaker 1: a very famous illusion where there are two same sized circles,
Speaker 1: they're not the same size. And then the one on
Speaker 1: the left has these very large circles around it and
Speaker 1: the one on the right has very small circles around it,
Speaker 1: and it gives the appearance that they're different sizes, but
Speaker 1: they are not so. Eving House is a pioneer in
Speaker 1: experimental psychology, which is pretty cool, absolutely, and in experimental
Speaker 1: psychology still today. Self experimentation is um fairly commonly used
Speaker 1: UM because it's not nearly as dangerous as it is
Speaker 1: in say medicine. For that reason, science today is basically
Speaker 1: like you can't self experiment. That's so nineteenth century. Well,
Speaker 1: and beyond the dangers of it, there's something called double
Speaker 1: blinds and placebos that you know, if you know, if
Speaker 1: you're self experimenting, then there that's going to affect the
Speaker 1: outcome of the experiment almost time with the double blind
Speaker 1: is like a hallmark of science, the inquiry, and you
Speaker 1: it's impossible with when you're experimenting on yourself. So, uh,
Speaker 1: if you're looking for grant funding and you're saying, well,
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna try this drug on myself and see
Speaker 1: what happens, You're not gonna get that funding, but probably
Speaker 1: won't get published either, right, Well, it depends. There's this
Speaker 1: guy named Seth Roberts who published a paper about his
Speaker 1: twelve years of self experimentation. And he's a psychologist, um,
Speaker 1: but the paper that he published was about the self
Speaker 1: experimenting he did in his spare time. So if you're
Speaker 1: not an experimental psychologist, um, probably if you're into self experimentation,
Speaker 1: you're either um some sort of pro scientist doing it
Speaker 1: in your spare time, or you're an amateur. There's a
Speaker 1: there's a been a movement called an equals one, which
Speaker 1: is you know, in his scientific notation for the study
Speaker 1: sample size or population size, didn't called quantified self though.
Speaker 1: That's a movement. Well, that's the um, that's the website.
Speaker 1: There's like a group where it's kind of like this
Speaker 1: hub of like, hey, I want to figure out why
Speaker 1: I had migraine. So I started tracking like my food
Speaker 1: and they were wired editors. I think, yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: did not know that. Yeah, yeah, So there's a quantified self.
Speaker 1: Dot com is basically this awesome place where you can
Speaker 1: go see how other people are carrying out their own
Speaker 1: self experiments and gets a little wacky. Yeah, there's just
Speaker 1: one lady that drinks her first yurine of the day
Speaker 1: each day she records all that. Are you sure you
Speaker 1: saw that? I read it. I didn't see her do that. Well,
Speaker 1: but he didn't click on the YouTube. Know, there's all sorts.
Speaker 1: There was a big Forbes. Forbes had a big article
Speaker 1: on this movement, which is some people call it naval
Speaker 1: gazing at its finest. Other people think it's valid. Well
Speaker 1: that's the point that Seth Roberts made. He was saying like,
Speaker 1: I don't need funding for this because I'm just doing
Speaker 1: it my spare time. It costs like basically no money.
Speaker 1: Get off my back. I just pay attention. But he
Speaker 1: also said that, um, he was motivated. He had the
Speaker 1: motivation of a person looking to solve a problem, like
Speaker 1: he wanted to control his weight or mood or make
Speaker 1: himself a happier person, um, get better sleep. So he
Speaker 1: just carried out all these self experiments and he could
Speaker 1: conduct more than one at a time. So yeah, he
Speaker 1: was like, get off my back. I think it's kind
Speaker 1: of cool though, Like I have lactose issues and I
Speaker 1: could see myself getting into um eating to tracking that
Speaker 1: and and isolating exactly which foods. I mean, that's basically
Speaker 1: all it is. That's it's kind of cool. And drinking
Speaker 1: your own urine type will draw the line there. So, UM,
Speaker 1: we should probably say thanks to some of the sources
Speaker 1: that helped us with this podcast Clark Oscillatory Thoughts Blog. Um,
Speaker 1: let's see Tiffany Watt Smith wrote Henry Head in the
Speaker 1: theater of Reverie. Scientific American had a cool article self
Speaker 1: experiment and step up for science. Alan Neringer had a
Speaker 1: paper from one called self experimentation a call for change.
Speaker 1: Lawrence kay Altman literally wrote the book on this. Um
Speaker 1: who goes First? The Story of Self Experimentation in Medicine? Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: Um A. Cohen wrote an article in the British Journal
Speaker 1: of Clinical Pharmacology about UM Sara Turner's experiments. He in
Speaker 1: his good Time Buddies. Um Salvatore Kurri did he rideout sad?
Speaker 1: He wrote about George Stratton. Uh, the University of Indiana
Speaker 1: has a cool human intelligence department quantified self dot com.
Speaker 1: If you want to get into self experimentation and don't
Speaker 1: feel like suing us for mentioning it, it's interesting to
Speaker 1: look at at the very least. Yeah, I agreed, and
Speaker 1: then Seth roberts the unreasonable effectiveness of my self experimentation
Speaker 1: is the name of the paper. So those are all
Speaker 1: the ones, and then pretty soon there'll be a list
Speaker 1: top ten list on the site. It's not published yet,
Speaker 1: it's practically done. I would assume, and Chuck, if you
Speaker 1: forgot the name of the show that we were promoting
Speaker 1: on sign channel, why don't we do a little ad
Speaker 1: for it? That's true? Yeah, um chuck. A couple more
Speaker 1: shout outs are good, good friend Wyatt Senak. Yes, his
Speaker 1: stand up special Wyatt Sanak Comedy Person is out on DVD,
Speaker 1: very funny stuff and if you've only seen why it
Speaker 1: on the Daily Show he is. Uh, he's great on
Speaker 1: the Daily Show. But his stand up is hysterical and
Speaker 1: different than you would think it would be. It is.
Speaker 1: He's much more like lively and animated and he's awesome.
Speaker 1: He's a good guy too. Um. And we have a
Speaker 1: happiness audio book out, that's right, the Grammy nominated nominated
Speaker 1: Happiness Audio book, The super Stuff Guide to Happiness. That's right. Um,
Speaker 1: it's up on iTunes for three nine nine. You're gonna
Speaker 1: end up selling out more if you're in Australia. We're sorry.
Speaker 1: Um let's see what else. Oh, it's got all sorts
Speaker 1: of great sound design interviews. It's just cool. We've got
Speaker 1: some experts on the horn. Ye, my niece, yes, starts
Speaker 1: it out. Um and uh, yeah, it's up on iTunes.
Speaker 1: Just search for super Stuff Guide to Happiness and that
Speaker 1: will also bring up, um, the super Stuff Guide to
Speaker 1: the Economy, which is still evergreen and good. Are we
Speaker 1: gonna do any more of those? I think we should
Speaker 1: just I mean I would feel like I just we
Speaker 1: should okay, we would it feel like a quitter if
Speaker 1: we just had to. Yeah, we need at least three.
Speaker 1: I would like four at least okay, okay, and then
Speaker 1: one more administrative detail. We have a cool little thing.
Speaker 1: If you text um s y s K to eight
Speaker 1: zero five six five, it texts you back a link
Speaker 1: to listen to the podcast on your iPhone without going
Speaker 1: through iTunes if you're not in the mood. Is that
Speaker 1: what it did? Yeah, it's cool. It brings up our
Speaker 1: r S speed and you can just listen to it.
Speaker 1: I think it's quick time, so it'll work on your
Speaker 1: iPhone or your droid or whatever. That's our latest marketing invention. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's pretty cool. So UM just text s y s
Speaker 1: K two eight oh five six five. If you ever
Speaker 1: are having a stuff, you should know Jones. It's right.
Speaker 1: Friedrich's turners not around. Yeah. By the way, we're we're
Speaker 1: working on there's been some issues with the apps, I
Speaker 1: think refreshing the podcast less lately, and we are working
Speaker 1: Our tech department is working on that. So keep your
Speaker 1: pants on, as they say, so this will be up eventually.
Speaker 1: You can look for UM ten ten scientists who were
Speaker 1: their own guinea pigs love it. In the search bar
Speaker 1: at how stuff works dot com, you can also type
Speaker 1: in human experimentation and five crazy government experiments and they'll
Speaker 1: bring up those articles. Um, and I said, handy search
Speaker 1: bar finally somewhere in there, which means it's time. We're
Speaker 1: a listener, man, Josh, I'm gonna call this, uh well,
Speaker 1: first of all, quickly, if you're from Berkeley, California and
Speaker 1: you went to UC Berkeley, we had a slight slip
Speaker 1: of the tongue. Seriously, we said, U C l A Berkeley.
Speaker 1: We know it's UC Berkeley, we know you see l
Speaker 1: A is in Los Angeles. Yes, it was just a
Speaker 1: little slip of the dog. That's it. We're not dummies.
Speaker 1: And sometimes if you live in or have been to Netterling, Colorado,
Speaker 1: and are a fan of the Frozen Dead Guy Days
Speaker 1: and are mad we didn't bring it up in our
Speaker 1: Cryonics episode, go listen to ten odd town Festivals. It's
Speaker 1: in there. It's in there, all right. So back to
Speaker 1: the listener mail. This is from Stephen H. And this
Speaker 1: was just cool information. I'm a huge fan of the show. Guys,
Speaker 1: loved the depth and breadth of the presentations. I'm not
Speaker 1: sure how far I uh I am from this week.
Speaker 1: He's pretty far, but I just listened to the Black
Speaker 1: Death episode. I thought you might be interested to know.
Speaker 1: While the plague was a horrible affair with millions of
Speaker 1: deaths and an interesting effect on our language today, many
Speaker 1: scholars of the history of the English language, myself included,
Speaker 1: hold that the plague in England is a major reason
Speaker 1: why we write in English today. You see, after the Normans,
Speaker 1: which were French vikings, took England at the Battle of
Speaker 1: Hastings in ten sixty six, Anglo Norman, French and Latin
Speaker 1: became the two major languages of administration and literature because
Speaker 1: all the important rich folks were chum. However, for reasons unknown,
Speaker 1: the plague seems to have hit the mid range nobility
Speaker 1: harder than other groups, resulting in a desperate need for administrators.
Speaker 1: The only people left to fill the jobs were regular
Speaker 1: joe's who only spoke English. So the theory goes, because
Speaker 1: of the plague, the nobility was forced to learn English
Speaker 1: to communicate with their administrators, resulting in the re emergence
Speaker 1: of English as the language of law, administration, and literature
Speaker 1: from Stephen h pretty neto. Yeah, I love supplemental information.
Speaker 1: That's those are my favorite ones. So thanks a lot,
Speaker 1: Stephen h um and since chucks such a big fan
Speaker 1: of supplemental information. UM, if you have any supplemental information
Speaker 1: about experimentation, specifically self experimentation, we want to hear it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you've done this yourself, I'd like to hear about it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but don't do it yourself just to tell us about it, No,
Speaker 1: because we don't want even get hurt. That seems like
Speaker 1: in the gray area that I'm not comfortable with it.
Speaker 1: If you've done like your own lactose study on yourself,
Speaker 1: something like that, sure, something harmless, Yeah, like you didn't
Speaker 1: inject lactose. Um. You can tweet to us at s
Speaker 1: y s K podcast UM. You can go onto Facebook
Speaker 1: dot com slash stuff you should know that's our page, UM,
Speaker 1: or you can send us a plain old fashioned email
Speaker 1: to stuff Podcasts at how stuff works dot com. Be
Speaker 1: sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from
Speaker 1: the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore
Speaker 1: the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow, brought to
Speaker 1: you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera, it's ready.
Speaker 1: Are you