Speaker 1: Detective, What do you make of it? Here we have
Speaker 1: yet another body, another skull opened up with clinical precision.
Speaker 1: What manner of monster are we dealing with here? I
Speaker 1: don't believe we're dealing with the monster at all, certainly
Speaker 1: not of the brain gobbling ghoul sort sensationalized in the press.
Speaker 1: I've studied the ways of ghouls, inspector, and they consume
Speaker 1: all hard and soft tissues. But they prefer the brain. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: as does the common zombie or Mexican vitellius. But look
Speaker 1: at what we see here. Not only was the brain
Speaker 1: and only the brain targeted, but different regions of the
Speaker 1: brain have been removed from victim to victim. Not a
Speaker 1: monster or even a cannibal, then, but a a brain thief. Indeed,
Speaker 1: And look at the profiles of the victims and the
Speaker 1: portions of the brain pilfered from each one of them.
Speaker 1: The vernicus area and the angular gyrus of the noted
Speaker 1: ling list, the Broca's area of the Soliloquist, the best
Speaker 1: parts of the best brains. Our murderer is building himself
Speaker 1: the perfect brain out of stolen parts. But to what end?
Speaker 1: Welcome to stot to blow your mind. The production of
Speaker 1: my Heart Radio. Hey, you welcome to stuff to blow
Speaker 1: your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick.
Speaker 1: And this is my second take at pronouncing my own name.
Speaker 1: I'm glad I got it right this time. Today we're
Speaker 1: gonna be talking about our stolen brains, our stolen heads. Uh.
Speaker 1: This is a topic that yet again, like another one
Speaker 1: we did recently, This started as uh an artifact episode
Speaker 1: that I was trying to develop, but then it quickly
Speaker 1: became clear to me that this was not a short topic.
Speaker 1: This was a huge topic with all kinds of bizarre
Speaker 1: tangents and and and dark alleys down which to tread. Uh.
Speaker 1: So I'm so excited to to embark on this two
Speaker 1: parter about removing and stealing people's heads and people's brains.
Speaker 1: That's right, This one just keeps growing and expanding, dragging
Speaker 1: in more heads, more brains. That has an insatiable appetite
Speaker 1: this topic. Yeah. One of the so one of the
Speaker 1: original stories that I was looking at that got me
Speaker 1: interested in this was the theft of the Austrian composer
Speaker 1: Franz Joseph Haydn's head in the early nineteenth century and
Speaker 1: that's a story that that we're going to come back
Speaker 1: to at the end of this first episode part one here,
Speaker 1: but before that, I think it makes sense to to
Speaker 1: back up and look at the removal of heads in
Speaker 1: the context where it's probably more familiar to everyone, which
Speaker 1: is not in reality but in you know, fiction. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and we promised not to spend too long here because
Speaker 1: I know some of you might be saying, look, you
Speaker 1: guys have Friday's Weird House Cinema episodes. Now you can
Speaker 1: pour all of your enthusiasm for horror movies into their
Speaker 1: uh and maybe a little less gets used in the
Speaker 1: core episodes. But but there's still some important stuff to
Speaker 1: touch on here, and I think that the fiction sums
Speaker 1: up a lot of what's going on when we think
Speaker 1: about these topics. So yeah, brain and head theft are
Speaker 1: frequent trokes in horror and science fiction, particularly of the
Speaker 1: twentieth century, and a lot of this seems to be
Speaker 1: centered in notions and fears concerning identity and the scientific
Speaker 1: understanding of the brain is the seat of consciousness, explored
Speaker 1: in such thoughtful science fiction films as Tammy and the
Speaker 1: t Rex, one of one of the all time great
Speaker 1: brain theft movies. Yeah, yeah, uh, there there are various
Speaker 1: versions of this, right, you know, because sometimes the brain
Speaker 1: is just stolen. Uh. Sometimes it's kept alive. Sometimes the
Speaker 1: head is kept alive free of the body of a
Speaker 1: you know, jan in the pan situation. Um. Sometimes it's
Speaker 1: a human transplant, putting the head of one person under
Speaker 1: the body of another, sometimes next to the original head
Speaker 1: of the other um you know, the other in in
Speaker 1: a way in their own way. Sometimes a kind of
Speaker 1: a thoughtful attempt to get at something, you know, culturally,
Speaker 1: but other times just kind of this another rumination on
Speaker 1: the bizarre idea of what if my head but different body,
Speaker 1: What if two heads same body? You know. Uh, there's
Speaker 1: just so much about this idea that continues to amaze.
Speaker 1: What if my brain in a dinosaur exactly? Not what
Speaker 1: if my brain in a robot um, you know, etcetera. Uh. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: you'll you'll find so many different versions of this, living
Speaker 1: heads and jars, living brains and jars, head transplants between humans,
Speaker 1: brain transplants into other human beings, and of course brain
Speaker 1: transplants into machines. And there's plenty to talk about here,
Speaker 1: even if we're just dealing with consensual brain and or
Speaker 1: head transplant. But then what if your head or brain
Speaker 1: were stolen? Right, that becomes the extra level of potential horror.
Speaker 1: What do you have some mad science maniac were to
Speaker 1: plug your brain into the body of a hideous monster
Speaker 1: by or a killer robot. Or what if you were
Speaker 1: just reduced to nothing but a head bobbing around in
Speaker 1: a jar, or even even more limiting, a brain just
Speaker 1: shut off in alive inside of some sort of contraption.
Speaker 1: H I mean this is explored to some degree in
Speaker 1: things we've talked about on the show before. For example,
Speaker 1: the the Thought Experiments Lash short story where Am I
Speaker 1: by Daniel Dennett, which is all about brains being removed,
Speaker 1: and that's ultimately trying to get at the question of
Speaker 1: what is the seat of consciousness and is it located
Speaker 1: in a place uh, you know, given various you know,
Speaker 1: constraints and and and thought experiments about like how brains
Speaker 1: could be replicated with machinery. But but also there are
Speaker 1: I guess, much less technical explorations of the subject where
Speaker 1: it's just kind of like, uh, you know, the Futurama
Speaker 1: model where you're just preserving ahead or preserving a brain
Speaker 1: to supposedly keep the keep the consciousness alive after the
Speaker 1: body dies or after the body is superseded by some
Speaker 1: period technology. I think both of us really enjoy um.
Speaker 1: The character Kane from RoboCop two a noon in brain
Speaker 1: in a jar, uh, powering a mechanized death machine. Yeah,
Speaker 1: tom noonan uh. And he's just like pain embodied controlling
Speaker 1: a killer robot, which is a brilliant idea. There's even
Speaker 1: like a drug insertion because he's he was he's addicted
Speaker 1: to some sort of super drug, right. Oh yeah, the
Speaker 1: the drug called nuke. Yeah. So Robo Cup two is amazing. Um,
Speaker 1: there's a there's actually a really excellent Star Wars tie
Speaker 1: in here as well. I mean, you have a lot
Speaker 1: of cybernetic stuff going on in Star Wars, but you
Speaker 1: have this one creature. I don't know if you remember it, Joe,
Speaker 1: because it kind of just walks around in the background
Speaker 1: briefly in Return of the Jedi. But it looks like
Speaker 1: a mechanical spider. And then it has this glass looking
Speaker 1: container or sphere hanging underneath it, and inside there's fluid
Speaker 1: and what appears to be a brain of some sort.
Speaker 1: I don't think I made the brain connection when I
Speaker 1: watched for Turning the Jedi as a kid, but just
Speaker 1: looked like a big mechanical spider. I think the brain
Speaker 1: things explored more in I don't know what you call it,
Speaker 1: the the supplementary Star Wars universe material, the encyclopedias and
Speaker 1: all that. Yeah, I remember reading. I think there's a
Speaker 1: whole story about them entales from Java's Palace, or at
Speaker 1: least it's a story that concerns them to some degree.
Speaker 1: But we are told in in other forms that this
Speaker 1: these are the remains of the Bomar monks. Um. And
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna read this quick passage from Wikipedia. UM.
Speaker 1: It says this follows quote. The Bomer Order, which consisted
Speaker 1: of Bomar monks, was a religious order that believed in
Speaker 1: isolating themselves from all physical sensation to enhance the power
Speaker 1: of their minds. To that aim, in enlightened monks had
Speaker 1: their brains transplanted into nutrient filled jars. Whenever they wanted
Speaker 1: to move, those bottled brains used spider like droid walkers.
Speaker 1: I can just imagine the purer hierarchy. It's like, oh,
Speaker 1: you're you're gonna walk around in your spider today instead
Speaker 1: of just sitting there and a jar doing nothing. Okay, Well,
Speaker 1: I mean sometimes you have to have your nutrient fluid
Speaker 1: switched out, right. I'm guessing there's like win me one
Speaker 1: machine in job As Palace that does that, and you've
Speaker 1: gotta get there early. I mean, I guess if you're
Speaker 1: addicted to the pleasures of the flesh. So that's just
Speaker 1: that's just a brief glance at some of the many,
Speaker 1: many variations of this you'll find in sci fi and
Speaker 1: horror because we can't get enough of it, because at
Speaker 1: the heart of it, there are so there are several
Speaker 1: different um you know, enigmas and conundrums and paradoxes that
Speaker 1: that emerge, you know, because it's dealing with what we
Speaker 1: are and who we are and just sort of that
Speaker 1: some of the mysteries that that seem to revolve around
Speaker 1: are are fleshly self and some of the more supernatural
Speaker 1: ideas about what we are, and of course some of
Speaker 1: the you know, the mysteries of consciousness itself. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: that's the true when when you get into mysteries, one
Speaker 1: of the great things to wonder is um as far
Speaker 1: as consciousness and its relationship to different types of tissue,
Speaker 1: in the body, nervous system, tissue in the brain versus
Speaker 1: other parts of the body. You always kind of wonder, um,
Speaker 1: what did ancient people know, you know, or what did
Speaker 1: they suspect before we had modern neuroscience and anatomy and uh,
Speaker 1: and there is something interesting you can observe. Is not
Speaker 1: necessarily going to be theft, like we're talking about it
Speaker 1: in a lot of our examples, though in some cases
Speaker 1: it probably is. But there are interesting cases you can
Speaker 1: observe from the ancient world and from ancient religion where
Speaker 1: sometimes the head or the brain were treated differently than
Speaker 1: some other parts of the body were, which indicated at
Speaker 1: least something some interesting belief. Yeah, yeah, this is this
Speaker 1: gets really fascinating. Now. First of all, we should stress
Speaker 1: that we modern humans are probably just mostly focused on
Speaker 1: the idea of the brain being the seat of the
Speaker 1: mind and the self, because we also paradoxically carry along
Speaker 1: other ideas with us. You know, there's so many just
Speaker 1: parts of our language and just the way think about
Speaker 1: ourselves that we may talk talk about feeling something with
Speaker 1: our heart, and when we do that, we may on
Speaker 1: some level position our our our center of being and
Speaker 1: position our mind in the middle of our torso uh
Speaker 1: my gut feeling, yeah, yeah, your gut feeling, etcetera. And
Speaker 1: you can take this even further, of course, getting into
Speaker 1: various um uh you know, supernatural and religious ideas about
Speaker 1: say various chakras and energy points in the body, um,
Speaker 1: you know, and the and we can carry this around
Speaker 1: with us and also carry around a science more or
Speaker 1: less scientific understanding of the brain, um, you know, and
Speaker 1: we can we can believe in both. We can we
Speaker 1: can you know, dip out of both steamer trays as
Speaker 1: it suits us. Yeah, obviously people do. I mean like that,
Speaker 1: a lot of people probably believe in some type of
Speaker 1: supernatural mind in one way or another. But then also
Speaker 1: like you would consult a neurologist if you needed to,
Speaker 1: right and and you know, I'm I'm always a kind
Speaker 1: of two minds on all of this because on one hand,
Speaker 1: you know, we we the brain is is the the
Speaker 1: the author of of all these ideas, you know, I mean,
Speaker 1: it is the center of our being. And we see that,
Speaker 1: um you know, and that that bears out anytime there's
Speaker 1: a brain injury, etcetera. But then also we're not just
Speaker 1: the brain. We're also the body, and while you know,
Speaker 1: you might be stretching it to say that you're you know,
Speaker 1: you're thinking something or feeling something with your heart in
Speaker 1: the same way that you would with your mind. You know,
Speaker 1: there is this um we are more than just the brain,
Speaker 1: we are this entire organism. Yeah, that's something that I
Speaker 1: think is often overlooked in these like so the Beaumar
Speaker 1: monks or whatever, the brain in a jar with a
Speaker 1: spider body, and you think like, well, that's just pure
Speaker 1: mental existence, you know, as if you you'll just live
Speaker 1: forever in this mechanical set up and you can have
Speaker 1: your your pure mind continue young to do whatever it does,
Speaker 1: meditation or whatever. But I think that might be really
Speaker 1: underappreciating how much your mental life would be changed if
Speaker 1: you were only your brain and did not have the
Speaker 1: rest of your body for the brain to interact with. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's why General Grievous got to bring his guts with him,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah, he's not just a brain. He's also
Speaker 1: eyeballs and guts in there so well, I mean, and
Speaker 1: there's even literal feedback. I mean, in some ways, the
Speaker 1: brain is influenced, for example, by hormones that are secreted
Speaker 1: by organs in other parts of the body. Absolutely, uh.
Speaker 1: In thinking about what ancient people's thought, though, it's it's
Speaker 1: impossible to get into this discussion without, of course touching
Speaker 1: on the ancient Egyptians, because, as in many of you
Speaker 1: are probably already thinking about, they famously removed and discarded
Speaker 1: the brain, dering and balming, while taking great care to
Speaker 1: store various other organs economic jars. Yet at the same time,
Speaker 1: the ancient Egyptians are responsible for the oldest written record
Speaker 1: using the word brain. I mean, it wasn't brain. You
Speaker 1: know obviously that it was the higheroglyphics for brain aren't known.
Speaker 1: We see it in a sevent BC text that was
Speaker 1: in turn apparently based on texts that go back to
Speaker 1: about three thousand BC. Uh. This is the so called
Speaker 1: Edwin Smith's Surgical Papyrus, named for the American Egyptologists who
Speaker 1: discovered it. Okay, so we're looking at it now. The
Speaker 1: the hieroglyphic word form that meant the brain. The oregan
Speaker 1: it's like a bird, and then something that looks maybe
Speaker 1: like a feather or a knife, and then like a
Speaker 1: hook shaped thing, and then what looks like maybe a
Speaker 1: b or a fly. Yeah, yeah, I guess the hook.
Speaker 1: I have no idea, but the hook thing is very suggestive,
Speaker 1: of course, uh, not being entirely sure what this this
Speaker 1: these hieroglyphics um individually, these parts of it mean because
Speaker 1: of where we think about the hook that is used
Speaker 1: to carefully remove the brain um tissue during embalming um,
Speaker 1: which was a delicate procedure because you had to do
Speaker 1: it apparently as well without you had to take care
Speaker 1: not to damage the facial features during the removal. And
Speaker 1: and one thing that's important to realize here is that
Speaker 1: the Egyptians didn't necessarily think the brain was garbage or anything,
Speaker 1: but it was one of the first organs to go foul.
Speaker 1: Part of their practice was to first remove the organs
Speaker 1: that decayed rapidly, and this certainly included the brain. This
Speaker 1: is going to tie directly into an account from the
Speaker 1: early nineteenth century that we're going to talk about later
Speaker 1: in the episode, about a very prominent and fascinating case
Speaker 1: of head theft. All right, UM, just briefly some other
Speaker 1: tidbits about our history of understanding the brain. In the
Speaker 1: fourth century BC, Aristotle considered the brain to be a
Speaker 1: secondary organ that cooled the heart, a place where the
Speaker 1: spirit could circulate. The heart was the center of thought,
Speaker 1: though now in the second century, ce Galen concluded that
Speaker 1: the brain was the seat of the animal soul uh,
Speaker 1: one of three souls in the body. But this was
Speaker 1: based in part on his observations of the efects of
Speaker 1: brain injuries on mental activity. So again, even if you
Speaker 1: even if you you you were really clinging to some
Speaker 1: idea that uh, that thought and being is tied up
Speaker 1: in the torso you know, after a while, it becomes
Speaker 1: clear that when things happen to the head um, it
Speaker 1: can it can drastically affect how we think and how
Speaker 1: we uh we process. Yeah, that seems like that would
Speaker 1: have probably been one of the earliest ways that people
Speaker 1: could deduce the important role of the brain. Not just
Speaker 1: because you could make the argument that sometimes it's somehow
Speaker 1: kind of feels like thought is taking place in the head.
Speaker 1: Obviously it didn't always feel like that to everybody. Some
Speaker 1: people must have thought it felt like it was happening
Speaker 1: somewhere else. But but yeah, you noticed that you hit
Speaker 1: somebody in the head. It is much more likely to
Speaker 1: have a complex and profound effects on how they think
Speaker 1: and how they feel. Than hitting them in any other
Speaker 1: part of the body. Yeah, it's interesting. How again, it's
Speaker 1: an unavoidable in our language. Right, So we talked about
Speaker 1: like putting our thinking cap on, and you know, we're
Speaker 1: just so many times like we're thinking really hard. We
Speaker 1: might do something involving our head, we might touch our head.
Speaker 1: But if you were living in a culture that was
Speaker 1: more based in an idea that would that thinking was
Speaker 1: based in the chest, would you put your I don't know,
Speaker 1: you're you're thinking brazier on? Would you would you sort
Speaker 1: of like hold your chest a little bit as you
Speaker 1: as you think? I don't know. Yeah, And I also
Speaker 1: wonder what are the limits to that? Like is is
Speaker 1: that is it possible that if you just had the
Speaker 1: right cultural ideas fed into you as you were growing up,
Speaker 1: that it would literally feel to you like you were
Speaker 1: thinking with your feet or thinking with your knees or something,
Speaker 1: or is there a sort of limited range of where
Speaker 1: it can feel like thinking is happening. I don't know.
Speaker 1: This is fascinating. I hadn't really thought about all this before.
Speaker 1: But maybe there's some papers out there that get into
Speaker 1: it that would it would be interesting to read about. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but any your right. From here, we gradually built up
Speaker 1: an improved understanding of how the brain function, though much
Speaker 1: remained unknown for a considerable amount of time, leading to
Speaker 1: what I've seen referred to as a quote cultural anatomy
Speaker 1: of the brain pane that doesn't necessarily match up with
Speaker 1: the neurological reality. Yeah, that's interesting, Thank you, Thank you.
Speaker 1: Now there's one example from ancient history I guess actually
Speaker 1: this would be prehistory, uh, of how heads were treated
Speaker 1: in a way that was somewhat different than how the
Speaker 1: rest of the body was treated. And this comes from
Speaker 1: the ancient Neolithic or Chalcolithic Neolithic settlement known as Chattel
Speaker 1: hu Yok from Turkey. That's a place in southern Turkey
Speaker 1: that was thousands of years BC. Did did you have
Speaker 1: the date on that? Um? I I read that it
Speaker 1: thrived back in seven thousand BC. Yeah, I mean it
Speaker 1: was around for a while, but I think that was
Speaker 1: like the period of its the height of its population
Speaker 1: and power, and so it's one of the earliest large
Speaker 1: human settlements that we have evidence of sustained habitation at.
Speaker 1: There were all of these houses that were a sort
Speaker 1: of built right next to each other. They were built
Speaker 1: up and you would enter them through the roof. It
Speaker 1: was like a grid of sort of cubicle houses. You'd
Speaker 1: go in through the roof, and there are these living
Speaker 1: spaces that archaeologists can still explore today. And it's fascinating
Speaker 1: to try to put together the culture of the people
Speaker 1: who lived at Chattahoyuk because one of the things observed
Speaker 1: there is sometimes, uh, sometimes there would be mortuary practices
Speaker 1: that would involve apparently incorporating the dead bodies of friends
Speaker 1: and family members into like the furniture, just into stuff
Speaker 1: inside the house where the people were living, so the
Speaker 1: body of a dead relative might be buried underneath the
Speaker 1: bed where you sleep. But one of the other really
Speaker 1: interesting things sometimes observed there is the removal of heads
Speaker 1: from dead bodies I presumably family members, where the head
Speaker 1: would be taken off and uh and then covered in
Speaker 1: some kind of plaster and just like kept in the house. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's really fascinating because in this we we get into,
Speaker 1: you know, you sort of have to strip away sort
Speaker 1: of your modern funerary customs and ideas about what is
Speaker 1: what is proper to do with the with the body
Speaker 1: of the deceased, etcetera. And you if you try and
Speaker 1: sort of put yourself in this this different mindset and imagine, like,
Speaker 1: how do we relate to the bodies that no longer
Speaker 1: have life in them? You know what what is the
Speaker 1: what is the skull of the dead? Uh? Now that
Speaker 1: they have you know that, now that the individual has
Speaker 1: passed on, you know, you you get into this sort
Speaker 1: of like base area. Then you you can build up
Speaker 1: from there and imagine how some of these these customs
Speaker 1: could have taken root. Yeah, and it it definitely signals
Speaker 1: like how variable and culturally determined our feelings about the
Speaker 1: treatment of dead bodies are. Because I think now and
Speaker 1: it's probably very somewhat to culture even today, but in
Speaker 1: most of the cultures were familiar with like if you
Speaker 1: were to take Grandma's dead body and like cut her
Speaker 1: head off and cover it with plaster and put it
Speaker 1: on a desk, that would widely be seen as like
Speaker 1: disrespectful in some way, But here it's the exact opposite.
Speaker 1: It seems to suggest that this is a way of
Speaker 1: revering the dead, and in some way it has some
Speaker 1: kind of religious significance or ritual use. Yeah, Like nowadays
Speaker 1: you sat down and you watch the Texas chainsaw mask
Speaker 1: you and you say this is not right, this family
Speaker 1: of texts and cannibals are are are not being respectful
Speaker 1: to the dead. But you can make a case for
Speaker 1: most of the things they're doing and say, no, they're
Speaker 1: being very respectful. Um to to a to a to
Speaker 1: a point. I'm only going to defend the sawyers so much.
Speaker 1: But um but but now there's a lot to consider, like,
Speaker 1: you know, what happens to the body when it dies?
Speaker 1: Wand or what do we do to the body when
Speaker 1: it dies? And how we approach these different views of death,
Speaker 1: like they have a huge impact on not only how
Speaker 1: we we treat the bodies of the dead, but then
Speaker 1: also like how we think about death itself. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: so we're gonna be focusing in these episodes on some
Speaker 1: cases of brains and heads being taken off of bodies
Speaker 1: um or or being stolen in one way or another
Speaker 1: without the consent of the person involved. But there we
Speaker 1: should at least know that there are plenty of cases
Speaker 1: where heads are removed, brains are removed and this was
Speaker 1: according to the wishes of the person from whose body
Speaker 1: they're being taken, right, Yeah, so a few I think
Speaker 1: mostly if not completely, consentually preserved brains, worth mentioning, uh,
Speaker 1: one of one of the big ones that that probably
Speaker 1: a lot of people were thinking of is is Broken's brain. Um.
Speaker 1: And one of the reasons, of course, is that Carl
Speaker 1: Sagan has a whole book titled Broker's Brain, because one
Speaker 1: of the essays in it deals with it specifically. And
Speaker 1: I'll get back to that in just a second. But
Speaker 1: Paul Broco lived through eighteen eighty. He was a French
Speaker 1: surgeon and neurologist who played a major role in the
Speaker 1: mid nineteen in mid nineteenth century medicine, and was the
Speaker 1: founder of modern brain surgery. He also supported some extremely
Speaker 1: prejudiced ideas, but his work with the brain itself was
Speaker 1: expressed it was it was extremely important. As such, he
Speaker 1: worked a lot with human brains, and many of the
Speaker 1: preserved brains that he worked with can still be found
Speaker 1: at the Pierre and Marie Curry University in Paris, and
Speaker 1: that potentially includes Brocco's own brain. The museum has apparently
Speaker 1: denied that it can be found there, but there are
Speaker 1: accounts that say that his brain ended up on a
Speaker 1: shelf alongside the others and Carl Sagan in the book
Speaker 1: Brokeer's Brain. In the the the chapter or essay dealing
Speaker 1: with this, he discusses holding the jar and that allegedly
Speaker 1: contained it, saying, quote, it was Broca himself whose brain
Speaker 1: I was cradling, who had established the macab collection I
Speaker 1: had been contemplating, and from their second goes on to
Speaker 1: question just how much of who Coroco was is still
Speaker 1: in there? You know, is the physical brain in the jar?
Speaker 1: Is that him? Is this some remnant of him? It's
Speaker 1: it's a wonderful, wonderful section of the book that you
Speaker 1: should you should read, but it's um uh, probably one
Speaker 1: of the more famous preserved or allegedly preserved brains. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and yeah, that raises really interesting questions, like in a way,
Speaker 1: is it possible even to think about the person as
Speaker 1: an object or as a person something more like a process? Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then also like the whole seeming mystery about whether
Speaker 1: there's there's an actual, uh specimen that is broke his brain,
Speaker 1: it does also bring up the question, you know, once
Speaker 1: the brain is removed, how do you tell whose it was?
Speaker 1: Especially when you're dealing with an old brain like this,
Speaker 1: you know, it's not like you can just hook it up,
Speaker 1: fire it up and see what memories are in there, etcetera. Right,
Speaker 1: But of course, so there's a question about this one.
Speaker 1: But there are examples of people who were just like, yep,
Speaker 1: you know, you use my brain, do something with it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Charles Babbage is a great exam pull of this, who
Speaker 1: have through eight seventy one, the father of the computer,
Speaker 1: as he's sometimes known, he donated his brain to science
Speaker 1: and today you can see it, uh in two halfs,
Speaker 1: one side of it at London Science Museum and the
Speaker 1: other at the Hunterian Museum in the Royal College of Surgeons.
Speaker 1: Wait a minute, did a Lovelace also have her brain
Speaker 1: preserved or just Babbage? It would be great if you
Speaker 1: could see him. I did not run across her brain,
Speaker 1: but I guess it would be great to see him
Speaker 1: side by side I hooked up to the same computer.
Speaker 1: It's it's interesting how um it is presented into how
Speaker 1: I mean, there's so much, so many directions you could
Speaker 1: go there with that, right, um, but yeah, you go
Speaker 1: to one place to see one hemisphere and the other
Speaker 1: to see the other hemisphere. Um. I wonder if I
Speaker 1: mean when you look at those hemispheres, do you, is
Speaker 1: there a feeling like this is wrong. They should be reunited,
Speaker 1: the brain should be It's okay to preserve a brain
Speaker 1: and display it, but it should be displayed as a whole,
Speaker 1: complete piece. But I don't know, maybe not now as
Speaker 1: far as famous people go, quote, quite a few athletes
Speaker 1: have pledged their brain to science and an effort to
Speaker 1: better understand concussions, you know. And then a lot of
Speaker 1: people just in general donate their bodies and or their
Speaker 1: organs to science. Um, and so a lot of brain
Speaker 1: study continues in this in this manner, by the way,
Speaker 1: by most all accounts, and certainly all accounts that matter,
Speaker 1: we should point out that Walt Disney did not have
Speaker 1: his body, brain, or head frozen following his death. Oh
Speaker 1: that's a popular myth, and it is, yeah, and I
Speaker 1: think I was reading about Apparently it's largely based on
Speaker 1: the fact that he was interested in the topic at
Speaker 1: some point and and in general was known to be
Speaker 1: interested in in in scientific topics, and therefore it just
Speaker 1: kind of carried away, like what you know about Disney.
Speaker 1: You're like, oh, well, it seems like something he would do.
Speaker 1: He did it. It's just like, oh, he's weird. Enough.
Speaker 1: So I guess if we're in in the modern era
Speaker 1: for for now and talking about brains that were actually
Speaker 1: straight up stolen. Probably the most famous brain theft uh
Speaker 1: in the modern world, happened to the body of Albert Einstein,
Speaker 1: And I guess we'll maybe come back and talk about
Speaker 1: that more later as we go on. But he is
Speaker 1: by no means the only one I want to back
Speaker 1: up and tell a story from the early eighteen hundreds
Speaker 1: about the famous composer Joseph Haydn uh. And so a
Speaker 1: couple of sources I was looking at here. One is
Speaker 1: a book by Francis Larson published called Severed, A History
Speaker 1: of Heads Lost and Heads Found. And the part of
Speaker 1: this that I was reading is just wonderful, So I
Speaker 1: might have to go back and read this entire book
Speaker 1: at some point, um. But the other is just a
Speaker 1: biography of Hayden called Hayden A Creative Life in Music
Speaker 1: by Carl Geyringer and Irene gey Ringer from University of
Speaker 1: California Press in nineteen two. And so just a brief
Speaker 1: background on on Franz Joseph Hayden, also just known as
Speaker 1: Joseph Hayden. He was a renowned classical composer from Austria
Speaker 1: who lived from seventeen thirty two until eighteen o nine.
Speaker 1: It was very influential. I think he was sort of
Speaker 1: a mentor figure to some other later composers like Mozart.
Speaker 1: And probably the fact that most people know about him today,
Speaker 1: or at least the one that I remember from school,
Speaker 1: is that he was the composer of what's known as
Speaker 1: the Surprise Symphony. It's a composition that is very kind
Speaker 1: of dreamy and sleepy and then has the sudden extremely
Speaker 1: loud chords that will almost like make you pee yourself,
Speaker 1: like they will wake you up if you are falling
Speaker 1: asleep at the at the on orchestra night. I wonder
Speaker 1: if we can play some some public domain selections of
Speaker 1: Hyden music while I'm telling the story of how his
Speaker 1: head was hacked off and stolen. Okay, So the story
Speaker 1: of Hyden around the time of his death, especially as
Speaker 1: told in the I Ringer book, here is what I'm
Speaker 1: starting with. So for a long time, Hayden was the
Speaker 1: court musician of a Hungarian noble family called the ester
Speaker 1: Hasy family. So I guess you can imagine something kind
Speaker 1: of like if you've seen the movie Amadeus, you know
Speaker 1: the roles Salieri plays in the Austrian Emperor's court in
Speaker 1: that movie. He's the the court composer, the court musician,
Speaker 1: kind of there to to do musical work for and
Speaker 1: flatter this rich family, except, of course, this would not
Speaker 1: have been the emperor. This was just one particular noble house,
Speaker 1: the ester Hazy line, and Hayden died in eighteen o nine.
Speaker 1: He died in Vienna, I think actually while Vienna was
Speaker 1: being occupied by Napoleon's troops, so there was a war
Speaker 1: zone situation happening, uh, and his body was not taken
Speaker 1: back to this uh, this remote castle where the ester
Speaker 1: Hazy family lived, because I think I think it had
Speaker 1: something to do with the war situations. Why he was
Speaker 1: kept in Vienna near where his house or apartment was,
Speaker 1: and he was buried in a local cemetery known as
Speaker 1: the hun Storm Cemetery. And that same year the prince
Speaker 1: of the ester Hassie line, I think it was Nicolaus
Speaker 1: ester Hasie, he put in an application to have Hayden's
Speaker 1: body dug up from the cemetery and transferred to Eisenstadt,
Speaker 1: which was the seat of the ester Hazie house. And
Speaker 1: permission for the disinterment was granted, but ester Hazi never
Speaker 1: actually did it. He got permission, but then he just
Speaker 1: kind of forgot about it, and Hayden stayed there. Hayden's
Speaker 1: tomb stayed as it was. But finally, in eighteen twenty,
Speaker 1: Ester Hazy, to quote from the Gey Wringer book quote,
Speaker 1: was reminded of his obligations by Adolphus Frederick, Duke of Cambridge.
Speaker 1: This distinguished visitor observed after attending a galla performance of
Speaker 1: the Creation, which was an oratorio of Hayden's given in
Speaker 1: his honor at Eisenstadt. Quote, how fortunate was the man
Speaker 1: who employed this Hayden in his lifetime him and now
Speaker 1: possesses his mortal remains, Which that moment, I'm just imagining that.
Speaker 1: Like Prince ester Hazzy must have been like, oh yeah, yeah, that.
Speaker 1: But apparently he did not correct his guest though. Immediately
Speaker 1: after this he gave orders to have the body exhumed
Speaker 1: from the cemetery in Vienna and brought over to Eisenstat
Speaker 1: and re entombed at a church there near the castle.
Speaker 1: The church was called berg Kircha, which was where Hayden
Speaker 1: had often performed some of the masses that he wrote
Speaker 1: for the ester Hazy family. Uh So the order goes through,
Speaker 1: and but then the guy Ringers right quote. When the
Speaker 1: coffin was open for identification, the horrified officials found no
Speaker 1: head on the body, but only the wig. And this
Speaker 1: seems especially bad because, like it would be harder for
Speaker 1: Esther Hassey at this point to pretend that he just
Speaker 1: had Hayden's body where it was supposed to be all along.
Speaker 1: It kind of reminds me that situation where like somebody
Speaker 1: gives you a gift, like an appliance that you don't
Speaker 1: really want, and you never opened and they keep asking
Speaker 1: you if you like it. You're like, yeah, we use
Speaker 1: it all the time. It's great. And then they're going
Speaker 1: to come over to your house and you're like, hey,
Speaker 1: let's use that blender whatever it was. And then you
Speaker 1: finally open it and discover that it's missing a piece
Speaker 1: or it's broken or something. But so obviously Prince ester
Speaker 1: Hassy was not amused that Hayden's head had been stolen.
Speaker 1: He was really mad, and he made inquiries about the
Speaker 1: missing head, and soon the mystery was solved. It turned
Speaker 1: out it was sort of an inside job. The culprits
Speaker 1: who stole the head were Hayden's friend, apparently not a
Speaker 1: super close friend, but they knew each other, a friend
Speaker 1: of Hyden's named Joseph Carl Rosenbaum who had been employed
Speaker 1: by the Ester Hassey family, and then another guy named
Speaker 1: Johann Napomuk Peter who was the administrator of a penitentiary
Speaker 1: somewhere in Austria. So why would these guys, including a
Speaker 1: former end of Haydn's, dig up his grave, steal his head,
Speaker 1: and then cover everything back up. Well, the answer is
Speaker 1: that they were amateur phrenologists. And I'll come back to
Speaker 1: the subject in more detail in in a few minutes,
Speaker 1: And I guess throughout a couple of both of these episodes,
Speaker 1: But the short explanation of what's going on here is
Speaker 1: that they were devotees of the then popular pseudo science
Speaker 1: of phrenology, and they were fans of its leading proponent
Speaker 1: at this time and place, the German anatomist friends Joseph Gall,
Speaker 1: who lived seventeen fifty eight eight. And yes, I did
Speaker 1: also notice that friends Joseph Gall has the same first
Speaker 1: and middle name is Hayden. I don't know if there's
Speaker 1: any reason for that. Maybe a bunch of boys were
Speaker 1: named after a king or something at this time. I
Speaker 1: don't know if you have any insights on the on
Speaker 1: the friends Joseph's. Maybe it's just a total coincidence. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure. Off the top of my head, I
Speaker 1: don't know any I don't know any friends Joseph's. But
Speaker 1: so they these two guys, Rosenbaum and Peter, wanted Hayden's
Speaker 1: head because they wanted to conduct a pseudo scientific dissection
Speaker 1: of the skull to determine its characteristics according to phrenological theory,
Speaker 1: to see if you could read his musical genius in
Speaker 1: the shape of his skull. So I'll come back to
Speaker 1: that aspect in a bit. But together these guys bribed
Speaker 1: a grave digger in the Vienna cemetery to dig up
Speaker 1: Hyden a few days after his funeral, hack off his
Speaker 1: head and deliver it to them quote to protect it
Speaker 1: from desecration. Um. So, according to to Larsen, the grave
Speaker 1: digger did this. It was a few nights after the burial.
Speaker 1: He chopped off the head, wrapped it up in some rags,
Speaker 1: and then handed it off to Rosenbaum. And Rosenbaum had
Speaker 1: a carriage waiting nearby. He was on the way taking
Speaker 1: the head to the carriage, but he was so curious
Speaker 1: to see it that he peeled back the rags uh
Speaker 1: to take a peek. But this was June, and Hayden
Speaker 1: had been dead for while at this point, and the
Speaker 1: body was already beginning to rot. And apparently Rosenbaum was
Speaker 1: so overwhelmed by the sight and the smell that he
Speaker 1: just vomited in the cemetery, but then got right back
Speaker 1: to business. So he got into the carriage, went straight
Speaker 1: to Vienna Hospital, where the skull was de fleshed and
Speaker 1: the brain was removed from its casing. And Rosenbaum described
Speaker 1: the scene later in his own writing. This is quoted
Speaker 1: in Larsen quote. The site made a lifelong impression on me.
Speaker 1: The dissection lasted for one hour. The brain, which was
Speaker 1: of large proportions, stank the most terribly of all. I
Speaker 1: endured it to the end. And that's what I was
Speaker 1: thinking of when you mentioned earlier that the brain, according
Speaker 1: to the Egyptians, at least you know, was one of
Speaker 1: the earliest parts of the body to spoil and smell bad,
Speaker 1: which might have had something to do with the process
Speaker 1: for its early removal. Yeah, well I've I've read this
Speaker 1: other places as well. In fact, tomorrow's episode of The
Speaker 1: Artifact will touch on how quickly a brain will rot. Well,
Speaker 1: apparently Rosenbaumb noticed like he could, despite the fact that
Speaker 1: they had a whole head there. He was like, the
Speaker 1: brain was the worst. But anyway, at the Vienna hospital
Speaker 1: here the skin muscle in the brain were burned in
Speaker 1: the furnace, and then the skull was soaked in lime
Speaker 1: to clean the bones so it could be measured for
Speaker 1: the phrenology purposes. And this soaking would take a while,
Speaker 1: So while that was going on, Rosenbaum went back home
Speaker 1: and he and Peter at some point designed a case
Speaker 1: with which to hold the skull the guy Ringers right quote.
Speaker 1: Peter had a black wooden box made with a golden
Speaker 1: lyre at the top and glass windows in it. The
Speaker 1: skull was placed on a white silk cushion trimmed with black,
Speaker 1: which reminds me very much of some of the displays
Speaker 1: I've seen of supposedly incorruptible saints bodies and the relics
Speaker 1: of saints and old Catholic and Orthodox museums or not
Speaker 1: museums cathedrals. Yeah, they didn't just stick it on the
Speaker 1: table and put a candle on top of it or
Speaker 1: let a raven perch on it. You know, they did
Speaker 1: it upright. Yeah, you get a nice glass box. But
Speaker 1: this one here has a golden lyre. And Larson actually
Speaker 1: has a very wonderful passage about this that I wanted
Speaker 1: to quote. She calls attention to the fact that this
Speaker 1: box was ornamented with a golden liar, and she asks
Speaker 1: if this might have been intended as a reference to
Speaker 1: the Greek god Orpheus. So here I'm quoting from larsen
Speaker 1: whose music carried him safely into the underworld to save
Speaker 1: his wife Eurydicy. Rosenbaum's own dark and earthy mission had
Speaker 1: been driven by his passion for music and his admiration
Speaker 1: of Haydn as a composer. He too, had retrieved his
Speaker 1: love from the rod of the nether world. If the
Speaker 1: liar did refer to Orpheus, there may have been other
Speaker 1: symbolic residences at work as well. In one version of
Speaker 1: the myth, Orpheus lost his own head when his body
Speaker 1: was ripped apart and thrown into the sea by the
Speaker 1: women of Thrace, and Macedonia. Later, Orpheus's head was found
Speaker 1: floating in the river Mela's, fresh and vigorous and still
Speaker 1: singing mournfully. The place where it was buried became a
Speaker 1: shrine and an oracle for pilgrims. And that is interesting
Speaker 1: to me because within the special box, Hydn's severed head
Speaker 1: would become kind of like a shrine within Rosenbaum's house.
Speaker 1: It's so weird to to to think about this in
Speaker 1: terms of patrons and artists, you know, um, like like
Speaker 1: what if what I have today on Patreon or or
Speaker 1: some sort of a kickstarter like that was a tier level,
Speaker 1: Like if you support me, then you can cut off
Speaker 1: my head when I'm dead and run off with my skull,
Speaker 1: or you will be you will be tasked with keeping
Speaker 1: my body and protecting it. That sort of thing. The
Speaker 1: Platinum Club membership. Yeah yeah, but to a certain extence,
Speaker 1: like at least a metaphorical level. Um, you know, a
Speaker 1: lot of this does kind of weirdly match up with
Speaker 1: some of our attitudes about celebrity you know, and celebrities
Speaker 1: and creators you know, and how we how we treat
Speaker 1: them and uh regard them after their death, you know,
Speaker 1: like literally turning turning their their their deaths into and
Speaker 1: sometimes their places of burial into the holy shrines, and
Speaker 1: like you're invoking this whole pseudo scientific field to come
Speaker 1: up with a physical explanation for their supposedly superhuman genius. Um. Anyway,
Speaker 1: so to come back to the story, years go by,
Speaker 1: we already narrated the intervening events, remember, so princester Hazy
Speaker 1: at some point he's reminded like, oh, yeah, Hyden's body,
Speaker 1: Oh I need yeah, that should be here. Uh So,
Speaker 1: so back to the investigation, because they discovered no head,
Speaker 1: only a wig in the in the coffin, and um,
Speaker 1: so they had Hyden's body moved to the castle at Eisenstock,
Speaker 1: where the Prince wanted it. But the Prince was furious
Speaker 1: because there was no head, and he had them investigate,
Speaker 1: and eventually, somehow it was figured out that Peter and
Speaker 1: Rosenbaum had been you know, the ones implicated here, that
Speaker 1: they would have been the people who took the head.
Speaker 1: And so the police went to interrogate Peter, who said
Speaker 1: that he had given the head to Rosenbaum, and then
Speaker 1: the investigators went to Rosenbaum's house and they searched for
Speaker 1: the skull, but they didn't find it. Quote since Rosenbaum's wife,
Speaker 1: the opera singer Teresa Gossman, hid the skull in her
Speaker 1: straw mattress and lay down on the bed. And then
Speaker 1: to to finish up the story, the guy ringers right. Quote.
Speaker 1: The prince now tried bribery, and his emissary promised Rosenbaum
Speaker 1: a large sum if he would deliver the skull, whereupon
Speaker 1: the skull of an old man was handed to the
Speaker 1: prince and buried with Hyden's body. Uh not unnaturally, Prince
Speaker 1: Princess Okay, so fake skull handed off for a bribe.
Speaker 1: Not unnaturally, Prince esther Hazy did not keep his promise
Speaker 1: of a reward, But neither had the wary ex secretary
Speaker 1: acted honestly since he had not delivered the right skull.
Speaker 1: So it's a double double cross. But I wonder if
Speaker 1: they both leave happy with that. You know, it's like,
Speaker 1: all right, I've got a skull can literally somebody's skull.
Speaker 1: It might not have the right kind of musical genius bump,
Speaker 1: but uh, yeah, somebody's skull is in there. And but
Speaker 1: the guy did not get his money. Uh. And then
Speaker 1: finally they say on his deathbed, Rosenbaum gave Hyden Skull
Speaker 1: to his collaborator, to Peter and quote made him promise
Speaker 1: to leave it in his will to the Museum of
Speaker 1: guessel Shoft dear music Freund in Vienna, the owner of
Speaker 1: a great number of valuable Hyden relics. So Hyden Skull
Speaker 1: stayed there from until nineteen fifty four, and then eventually
Speaker 1: there was a there was a mausoleum built in berg
Speaker 1: Church all that that church in uh in Nissenstock where
Speaker 1: the body was supposed to be. Eventually it was in
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty four that the skull was finally reunited with
Speaker 1: the rest of the body. But I think at least
Speaker 1: for a while, maybe maybe permanently after that, but at
Speaker 1: least for a while there were two skulls in the
Speaker 1: grave because they also had the original fake decoy skull
Speaker 1: that had been interred with the body and the wig.
Speaker 1: He had a friendly roommate, right exactly, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 1: But this brings me back to to the pseudoscience underlying
Speaker 1: uh this, this head theft mission here. Why did Rosenbaum
Speaker 1: and Peter steel the head again? They were enthusiastic amateur
Speaker 1: phrenologists they were students of the German anatomist friends Joseph Gall,
Speaker 1: who again he's credited with pioneering the now discredited field
Speaker 1: of phrenology. Now, Gall apparently made some legitimate contributions to
Speaker 1: the development of neuroscience and neuro anatomy, but I think
Speaker 1: whatever these legitimate contributions where they are now overshadowed in
Speaker 1: his legacy by the association with phrenology, which is just
Speaker 1: one of the most awful and rightfully infamous pseudosciences in
Speaker 1: human history. And we can explain more about phrenology across
Speaker 1: this couple of episodes, but the short version is that
Speaker 1: phrenologists incorrectly believed that you could make accurate inferences about
Speaker 1: human mental traits like uh like personality traits, moral characteristics,
Speaker 1: and intellectual aptitudes by measuring the shape and the contours
Speaker 1: of people's skulls, particularly bumps on the skull. So if
Speaker 1: there's a bump in a certain place right near the
Speaker 1: top of your head, that might show that you have
Speaker 1: a special propensity for veneration, maybe you'd be a good
Speaker 1: candidate for the clergy. But if there's a pronounced ridge
Speaker 1: over the top of your ear, that is a swelling
Speaker 1: of the organ of destructiveness, and you will surely become
Speaker 1: a violent criminal, etcetera. And I think you can pair
Speaker 1: phrenology along with what's known as physiognomy. More broadly, physiognomy
Speaker 1: is the belief that you can accurately assess a person's
Speaker 1: mental characteristics by looking at their outward appearance. Often, physiogo
Speaker 1: to me, would focus on the face. You'd see these
Speaker 1: charts of like, oh, somebody has a face like this,
Speaker 1: it means that they're they're very sanguine and uh and
Speaker 1: and they're you know, prone to laughter and to gluttony.
Speaker 1: And somebody has a face like this, and there, you know,
Speaker 1: without a doubt a murderer. Uh. And So phrenology and
Speaker 1: that kind of thing they led to all kinds of
Speaker 1: horribly misguided applications and pseudo scientific criminology supposed scientific justifications
Speaker 1: for racism and ethnic prejudice, for gender prejudice and so forth.
Speaker 1: And it's weird because phrenology, like if you explain it today,
Speaker 1: it's one of those things that sounds so stupid on
Speaker 1: its face. It's hard to see how people ever believed it.
Speaker 1: But phrenology was hugely influential, especially in the first half
Speaker 1: of the eighteen hundreds. Uh, though it was, it should
Speaker 1: be said, it was not like everybody believed it at
Speaker 1: the time. It was subjected to fierce scientific criticism even
Speaker 1: during its heyday, But that doesn't mean it did not
Speaker 1: find very popular applauding audiences. Yeah, like you said, so
Speaker 1: much of the time it ends up being this way
Speaker 1: of saying those horrible things you think when you look
Speaker 1: at certain people's skulls and faces, those feelings are backed
Speaker 1: up by scientific principles, and here they are, and and
Speaker 1: and that. You know, you can see why that would
Speaker 1: be enough to hook people who wanted to believe these things.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it's great to tell people like that. You know,
Speaker 1: you can have a scientific justification for whatever you gut
Speaker 1: feeling you get when you look at somebody like, oh,
Speaker 1: this guy he has the you know, the the pointy
Speaker 1: top of the head of a genius, or you know
Speaker 1: this late Yeah, my wife won't do what I tell
Speaker 1: her because there's something wrong with the shape of her skull,
Speaker 1: and science proves it. Now, the tragedy of phrenology is
Speaker 1: started with some premises that are basically true. Like it
Speaker 1: started with the idea that the personality and mental traits
Speaker 1: are in large part determined by processes in the brain.
Speaker 1: Of course, that's true, we know that today and uh
Speaker 1: and with the premise that some brain function and are
Speaker 1: especially dependent on localized regions in the brain, so we
Speaker 1: also know that's basically true. Like you know, visual processing
Speaker 1: depends especially on the visual cortex in the back of
Speaker 1: the head. Speech is especially dependent on the area now
Speaker 1: known as Broca's area, which is on the left side
Speaker 1: of the brain, near the front of the head. Uh.
Speaker 1: And these were real discoveries of early neuroscience that there
Speaker 1: were regions of the brain that correlated with certain types
Speaker 1: of mental activity, though not always as strictly as some
Speaker 1: people think. Um. But from these real discoveries was extrapolated
Speaker 1: this flawed chain of reasoning that led to chronology, and
Speaker 1: according to people like Franz Joseph Gall it would go
Speaker 1: something like this. So you'd say the mind is a
Speaker 1: product of the brain. You know, apparently true or at
Speaker 1: least mostly true. The brain is not a homogeneous mass,
Speaker 1: but they're you know, there are different parts of it
Speaker 1: that do different things. That's generally true. But then the
Speaker 1: next leap is to the size of a localized part
Speaker 1: of the brain will be correlated to how powerful it
Speaker 1: associated mental faculty is, which is not necessarily true. And
Speaker 1: then from there you get to well, you get bumps
Speaker 1: on the outside of the skull that will indicate the
Speaker 1: size and therefore the strength of the underlying regions of
Speaker 1: the brain, which that's pretty much not true. And then
Speaker 1: therefore you can make a generalized map of the skull
Speaker 1: to find which shapes and bumps and protuberances create which
Speaker 1: personality characteristics and aptitudes, which at this point is just
Speaker 1: completely wrong. You can just imagine the branch on the
Speaker 1: tree here just going growing gradually more crooked for the
Speaker 1: further you go. Right, yeah, um, But for a few
Speaker 1: decades at least, phrenology again proved extremely popular again, as
Speaker 1: it was especially during like the first half of the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century. Uh. And there's an interesting section in Lawson's
Speaker 1: book where she attributes at least some of the appeal
Speaker 1: of phrenology to Franz Joseph Skull's skills at public speaking
Speaker 1: and the allure of his lectures. She writes that he
Speaker 1: always gave his public addresses with props surrounded by his
Speaker 1: personal collections of heads, which he would pick up and
Speaker 1: use for demonstration to enraptured audiences. You know, here's the
Speaker 1: skull of a man who was consumed in life by vanity.
Speaker 1: You can see the bulge corresponding to his organ of conceit.
Speaker 1: Or here's the skull of a genius composer observed the
Speaker 1: swelling above his organ of music, etcetera. And then Larson
Speaker 1: writes quote, when fresh specimens were available, his assistant would
Speaker 1: dissect an animal brain or occasionally a human brain in
Speaker 1: front of the audience. Galls talks became famous in Vienna
Speaker 1: and later throughout Northern Europe, and they were attended by
Speaker 1: a wide cross section of the public, from tourists and
Speaker 1: tradesmen to ambassadors and academics. The combination of medical terminology
Speaker 1: visual aids few members of the public can have seen
Speaker 1: a dissection before, and talented oratory was intoxicating. After a lecture,
Speaker 1: people queued up to have their own heads read by Gall.
Speaker 1: This was science endowed with psychic powers, the scientists who
Speaker 1: knew you better than you knew yourself, and all thanks
Speaker 1: to the secrets inscribed in the shape of your head.
Speaker 1: But but I mean the horrible part being, of course
Speaker 1: that it was all just completely wrong. Phrenology had no
Speaker 1: empirically verifiable basis, its founding premises were incorrect, and it
Speaker 1: could not make accurate predictions about future findings. But it
Speaker 1: was popular nonetheless. And it seems like, at least to
Speaker 1: some extent, it's popularity had more to do with the
Speaker 1: personal flair and charisma of its founding popularizer than with
Speaker 1: its empirical merits. And this is something I think about
Speaker 1: a lot. I think this is always something to be
Speaker 1: really conscious of. It is so so easy to mistake
Speaker 1: good public speaking for truth. Uh, you know, the the
Speaker 1: allure of a weekly supported claim delivered by a charismatic
Speaker 1: voice is always present and something to you know, be
Speaker 1: conscious of, to like ask yourself if that's happening in
Speaker 1: your brain, if you are thinking something is true because
Speaker 1: somebody is good at talking and they're saying it. And
Speaker 1: I think about digital versions of this today, the digital
Speaker 1: versions of the Viennese lecture halls like YouTube, where you know,
Speaker 1: I get a feeling that there is a huge undercurrent
Speaker 1: of ideological shaping that often takes place on a similar
Speaker 1: basis here viewers of things like YouTube and even podcasts.
Speaker 1: So we could say, listen to somebody mainly because they're
Speaker 1: a compelling speaker. They're captivating to listen to. They you know,
Speaker 1: they they're good with words, there's something nice about their voice,
Speaker 1: whatever that is, and over time can end up adopting
Speaker 1: their beliefs or claims, regardless of whether there's a good
Speaker 1: reason for the claims themselves. Yeah, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: It makes me think back to uh, you know Carl
Speaker 1: Sagan I mentioned earlier. I mean, Sagan was an individual
Speaker 1: who every everything tended to line up for him. You know,
Speaker 1: a great scientific mind, an excellent speaker and science communicator.
Speaker 1: But you don't have to have every line up with
Speaker 1: a person, and many times it does not. You have
Speaker 1: plenty of great scientists who are not natural public speakers,
Speaker 1: and you have plenty of natural public speakers who do
Speaker 1: not have a mind for science or an appreciation for science,
Speaker 1: and maybe not interested in in impressing the science like that.
Speaker 1: They may use the science in some cases when it
Speaker 1: suits them, but that is not their their primary go Well,
Speaker 1: I would say one thing that really works against us
Speaker 1: here is the tragic disjunction of the fact that one
Speaker 1: of the most compelling qualities in a speaker, one of
Speaker 1: the things that makes people most fun to listen to
Speaker 1: as a speaker is confidence. And yet being a good
Speaker 1: communicator of science often requires you to be extremely circumspect
Speaker 1: and to repeatedly in tone, you know, communicate doubt and
Speaker 1: to repeatedly communicate you know, we're not sure about this,
Speaker 1: that you know that these are reasons for thinking so,
Speaker 1: but there are reasons against it and all that which
Speaker 1: goes exactly against some of the things that makes but
Speaker 1: the most fun to just like watch lectures from right right.
Speaker 1: And this is true at at various levels in different ways.
Speaker 1: It's certainly true at our level because we are we
Speaker 1: are not experts in the topics that we discuss, and
Speaker 1: therefore we always have to admit this could this could
Speaker 1: be wrong, and or this is changing, this could change,
Speaker 1: because then we get into the level of just that's
Speaker 1: what science is. So you'll encounter, you know, experts in
Speaker 1: their field who are also voicing the same level of uncertainty.
Speaker 1: And there are times where that is not as convincing
Speaker 1: as someone who, uh, you know, who's very sure of themselves,
Speaker 1: like the the the yeah. And you know, you can
Speaker 1: easily think of various examples of this um you know,
Speaker 1: you can see why they You can be drawn into
Speaker 1: the siren song of someone who's absolutely seems absolutely certain
Speaker 1: about what they're talking about, versus someone who says, well,
Speaker 1: we're still figuring it out. All right, Well, you know,
Speaker 1: we're almost out of time here. But I want to
Speaker 1: share another story of brain theft, and this one comes
Speaker 1: to us from two thousand sixteen. I don't know if
Speaker 1: you ran across this one, Joe, uh, but the basic
Speaker 1: premise here is summed up well in the headline, this
Speaker 1: headline from the Daily Mail. My nemesis, are you're gonna
Speaker 1: make me click on a Daily Mail article? Uh? Well?
Speaker 1: I also I also provided you with or maybe I didn't. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I did provide you with another uh report as well
Speaker 1: from CBS Pittsburgh your choice. Okay, thirty thousand caveats to
Speaker 1: whatever this story is, but I do want to hear it. Okay.
Speaker 1: So the Daily Mail headline was burglar stole human brain,
Speaker 1: nicknamed it Freddie and used the embombing fluid to get high. Um.
Speaker 1: And there were various versions of this this headline that
Speaker 1: were that were traded about in So what happened here
Speaker 1: is Okay, this is Pennsylvania where Allegedly, a twenty six
Speaker 1: year old uh individual was in jail on burglary charges
Speaker 1: when his grandma discovered a human brain underneath the porch
Speaker 1: in a Walmart path. Okay, allegedly the stolen brain, named
Speaker 1: Freddie by the year old individual. Okay, he named it,
Speaker 1: He named it. Freddie was being used for its embalming fluid,
Speaker 1: which the accused and and a friend used to soak
Speaker 1: their marijuana in prior to smoking said marijuana. Oh no,
Speaker 1: if that's true, that no, no, no so um. According
Speaker 1: First of all, according to CBS Pittsburgh reporting on the incident,
Speaker 1: the brain was most likely a stolen teaching specimen. So basically,
Speaker 1: go back to the original Frankenstein. That's scene where was
Speaker 1: his named. Fritz goes in to steal a brain, and
Speaker 1: there are the two brains, there's the normal brain and
Speaker 1: the criminal brain, and he accidentally smashes one of the
Speaker 1: jars and steals the other one. Basically that scenario um,
Speaker 1: except in this case, Uh, I guess Fritz had other
Speaker 1: ideas in mind. So to two tips I want to
Speaker 1: share for everybody here. First of all, and obviously, do
Speaker 1: not steal a human brain. I mean it's it's illegal
Speaker 1: in the United States to possess a human brain like this.
Speaker 1: It's illegal to own or possess the remains of a
Speaker 1: human being other than ashes. Uh. You know, with certain
Speaker 1: caveats obviously, if you're like a teaching institution, etcetera. But
Speaker 1: for the just a random individual, No, you can't have
Speaker 1: a brain. You can't have a skull. Um. So that
Speaker 1: means no head, no brain, no skull, none of that.
Speaker 1: Second smoking formalde hide laced anything is just a terrible idea.
Speaker 1: Do not do it, um. It can result in a
Speaker 1: host of issues including brain damage to your brain, not Freddy,
Speaker 1: your brain, lung damage, and body tissue destruction. So just
Speaker 1: a some bad choices were made here regarding Freddy. Never
Speaker 1: smoked Freddy. Yeah, so uh with that, I think we're
Speaker 1: gonna close out part one here, but I'm excited to
Speaker 1: come back in part two because we're gonna we're gonna
Speaker 1: get into other cases of head and brain theft. We're
Speaker 1: gonna get into some ancient traditions. We're gonna talk a
Speaker 1: little bit about mythology and folklore. Uh, it should be
Speaker 1: a really fun time. I can't wait. And then at
Speaker 1: the end of the week, are are weird how cinema
Speaker 1: selection is also going to concern brains. We have a
Speaker 1: really brainloaded week here. I'm so excited, as chop Top
Speaker 1: would say, my brain is burning. All right. Well, if
Speaker 1: your brain is burning and you would like to listen
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Speaker 1: As always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson.
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Speaker 1: a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
Speaker 1: you can email us at contact at Stuff to Blow
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