Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 3: My name is Robert Lamb and I am Joe McCormick.
Speaker 3: And Hey, it is no longer October. But is this
Speaker 3: still a topic that we planned on doing in October
Speaker 3: and never got to Possibly. We'll let you guess if
Speaker 3: that is the case or not.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And you might be like, I don't know, Joe
Speaker 2: and Robert, I don't know if I wont Halloween content
Speaker 2: and the early part of November, shouldn't we be doing
Speaker 2: Christmas content now? No, absolutely not. There will be Christmas
Speaker 2: content in due time, but it will not be this month.
Speaker 2: It'll barely be next month. So you're getting more Halloween
Speaker 2: content whether you want it or not.
Speaker 3: Are your Halloween decorations still up or do you get
Speaker 3: them down yet?
Speaker 2: We took them down over the weekend, but the jack
Speaker 2: O Landin's are still out there. They haven't turn to
Speaker 2: jelly yet, but I'm having to give them the tap
Speaker 2: test every day. If they jiggle, then it's dangerously close
Speaker 2: and I have to get them to the backyard and
Speaker 2: spill them there.
Speaker 3: I know exactly what you're saying. We have squirrels very
Speaker 3: slowly eating our pumpkins. It's like they take one bite
Speaker 3: out of them every day.
Speaker 2: It's weird. We have plenty of squirrels around here, but
Speaker 2: I don't think they ever messed with the pumpkins. But
Speaker 2: it has been I feel like more people are chronicling
Speaker 2: the decay and or consumption of their jack lanterns and
Speaker 2: pumpkins this year, and it's been nice to watch.
Speaker 3: I'm curious why just the like one bite and run away,
Speaker 3: Like it can't be that delicious if they don't stay
Speaker 3: to take a few more bites.
Speaker 2: Unless it's you know, just gnawing. It's gnawing action. I'm
Speaker 2: not sure.
Speaker 3: But Okay, what was this Halloween related topic that we
Speaker 3: didn't get to in October and they're covering now.
Speaker 2: It's headlessness, Yeah, which ties in nicely with the idea
Speaker 2: of jackal lanterns. I mean, these two concepts are are
Speaker 2: connected in many ways. Yeah, we're going to discuss the
Speaker 2: idea of headless entities, mostly in the human imagination, but
Speaker 2: it probably makes sense to think about what's lacking in
Speaker 2: these fantastic creatures and what we tend to take for granted.
Speaker 2: It's we're going to get into just the concept of
Speaker 2: why do creatures have heads? What is a head? Even
Speaker 2: it's easy to just take that whole idea for granted,
Speaker 2: because I mean, the basics I think are pretty obvious,
Speaker 2: and you know, we have to stop and look them
Speaker 2: in the mirror and realize. A head is the top
Speaker 2: or front part of an organism, the upper or anterior
Speaker 2: division of the animal body that contains the brain, most
Speaker 2: of the sense organs, and the mouth. It is the
Speaker 2: communication array as we've described it many times before. It's
Speaker 2: the matter consumer, and it's also the nerve center of
Speaker 2: the organism.
Speaker 3: Now, most of the animals you can probably think of
Speaker 3: off the top of your head do have heads, but
Speaker 3: actually a head is not a necessary part of what
Speaker 3: it means to be an animal. There are animals without heads,
Speaker 3: So that raises the question of why do certain animals
Speaker 3: have heads and not others? What causes this difference?
Speaker 2: Yeah, we have to realize that heads emerge in organisms
Speaker 2: over the course of evolutionary time and a process referred
Speaker 2: to as cephalization, during which the mouth, sense organs and
Speaker 2: nerve ganglia moved toward the front or what would we
Speaker 2: would come to think of at the front of the creatures,
Speaker 2: resulting in head morphology and the emergence of complex brains
Speaker 2: and arthropods, cephalopod mollus and invertebrates. So these organisms tend
Speaker 2: to be cephalized or semi cephalized. And would that mean
Speaker 2: that a creature in fantasy that has lost its head
Speaker 2: and continues to move around and act and behave is decephalized.
Speaker 3: Well, I think that would be the term. The head
Speaker 3: is removed, a thing is decephalized. But whether or not
Speaker 3: a thing can continue to act without its head, it
Speaker 3: probably depends on the degree to which it was originally
Speaker 3: cephalized as a matter of its innate anatomy. I'll get
Speaker 3: back to that in a few minutes. Actually, So I
Speaker 3: was thinking about this, and it probably helps to put
Speaker 3: cephalization within the broader evolutionary history of bilateral animals or bilatarians.
Speaker 3: These are animals that have a left side and a
Speaker 3: right side of the body that are roughly symmetrical, that
Speaker 3: are mirror images of each other. So we are bilatarians,
Speaker 3: and again, most of the animals you can think of off
Speaker 3: the top of your head are bilatarians. The symmetry does
Speaker 3: not have to be exact. It refers to the overall
Speaker 3: body plan and how the animal develops in its earliest
Speaker 3: phases of growth. So even in the case of animals
Speaker 3: that happen to have evolved wildly asymmetrical features. One example
Speaker 3: we've talked about on the show before is male fiddler crabs,
Speaker 3: which have one claw that's much bigger than the other,
Speaker 3: in some cases half of the crab's body weight, So
Speaker 3: you know, roughly on the scale of a human with
Speaker 3: one regular sized hand and then another hand that's four
Speaker 3: feet in diameter and weighs eighty pounds, even that animal
Speaker 3: is a bilatarian because the animal's body plan has bilateral
Speaker 3: symmetry overall, with the exception of the claw, And it's
Speaker 3: also a question of its evolutionary clade. It is descended
Speaker 3: from the evolutionary clade of bilateral animals. So bilateral symmetry
Speaker 3: is not just a feature of an animal body, but
Speaker 3: a particular branch on the evolutionary tree, going back to
Speaker 3: a common ancestor. As I was saying a minute ago,
Speaker 3: though most of the animals you can think of are bilateral,
Speaker 3: not all animals are. There are lots of sea creatures
Speaker 3: like sponges, jellyfish, hydri and corals, that are animals but
Speaker 3: are not Bilatarians. We don't know for sure when exactly
Speaker 3: this split took place, when the last common ancestor of
Speaker 3: all bilatarians split off from the ancestors of other animals,
Speaker 3: but based on what I've been reading, I think it's
Speaker 3: probably sometime between roughly five hundred and fifty and six
Speaker 3: hundred million years ago. Is clearly it pre dates the
Speaker 3: Cambrian Explosion, because in the Cambrian era, starting around five
Speaker 3: hundred and fifty million years ago, you see a great
Speaker 3: diffusion or profusion of different animal body plans that exhibit
Speaker 3: bilateral symmetry. So clearly their last common ancestor was before that.
Speaker 3: There's still debate about exactly what that animal was like,
Speaker 3: but whatever its exact features were, it is mind boggling
Speaker 3: to imagine the common ancestor of all of the world's fish, crabs, cats, squid, slugs,
Speaker 3: barnacles and worms all in one body.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you can't just combine all those things in your
Speaker 2: head and say, like, all right, a little bit of
Speaker 2: the cat, a little bit of the squid. It's a
Speaker 2: different sort of arithmetic in play.
Speaker 3: But one of the things, apart from bilateral symmetry that
Speaker 3: makes Bilatarians unique is their degree of cephalization. That they
Speaker 3: these animals really started to develop heads in ways that
Speaker 3: non biletarian animals did not. And the authors of a
Speaker 3: paper I was looking at, they they define cephalization as
Speaker 3: quote anterior concentration, and remember anterior means front, so front
Speaker 3: facing concentration of nervous tissue, sensory organs, and the appearance
Speaker 3: of dedicated feeding structures surrounding the mouth. Now, one question
Speaker 3: I was wondering about was how to even decide which
Speaker 3: is the anterior part of an animal that doesn't already
Speaker 3: have a head. I think the answer is it's where
Speaker 3: the mouth is. Makes sense. Yeah, Now to get some
Speaker 3: more perspective on why and how a head developed in Bilatarians,
Speaker 3: I was reading a few chapters from a book. It
Speaker 3: was a book called Creatures of acxis The Rise of
Speaker 3: the Animal Kingdom, published by Hill and Wang two thousand
Speaker 3: and seven by an author named Wallace Arthur.
Speaker 2: So.
Speaker 3: The author of this book, Wallace Arthur is an evolutionary
Speaker 3: biologist who was a professor at the University of Galway
Speaker 3: in Ireland. I looked him up and it seems like
Speaker 3: his work focused a lot on the interplay between evolution
Speaker 3: and development and the emergence of animal body plans, which
Speaker 3: is what we're talking about here, And in a couple
Speaker 3: of chapters of this book he has a very nice,
Speaker 3: plain language summary of the likely pressures leading early by
Speaker 3: leetarians to acquire ahead. So one interesting thing to think
Speaker 3: about here is that the early evolution of the animal
Speaker 3: lineage found different types of symmetries. So the first animals
Speaker 3: were not symmetrical, and there are animals today that are
Speaker 3: not symmetrical in their bodies, like sponges. You know, you
Speaker 3: can't cut them down the middle and get a mirror
Speaker 3: image in any direction. Then there came animals with radial symmetry,
Speaker 3: where the body is symmetrically reproduced around an axis in
Speaker 3: the middle. And a great example here would be a jellyfish. Jellyfish,
Speaker 3: they're not bilaterally symmetrical, but they're radially symmetrical. Finally, there
Speaker 3: came animals with bilateral symmetry, tracing back to a common
Speaker 3: ancestor that is known in the literature as the ur bileatarian,
Speaker 3: so biletarian with the letters you are in front of it,
Speaker 3: you are meaning like original or first. And again we
Speaker 3: don't know exactly what this animal was like, but Arthur
Speaker 3: thinks the best guess is that it was somewhat similar
Speaker 3: to modern flatworms. This, he acknowledges this is debatable, and
Speaker 3: I was reading a bit about the modern debate here
Speaker 3: it seems like this is still one of the one
Speaker 3: of the possible pictures of what this creature was like.
Speaker 3: So Arthur asks a question, if you compare a bilaterally
Speaker 3: symmetrical flatworm with a radially symmetrical animal like a jellyfish,
Speaker 3: can we really say that one is more complex than
Speaker 3: the other? He writes, quote, does a flatworm have more
Speaker 3: different types of parts than a jellyfish? Well, not really. Yes,
Speaker 3: it has left and right sides, which a jellyfish does not,
Speaker 3: but that's about it. Although the flatworm has head and
Speaker 3: tail ends while the jellyfish does not, The jellyfish has
Speaker 3: a top side and an underside, the latter having the mouth,
Speaker 3: which pretty much amount to the same thing. And the
Speaker 3: jellyfish has tentacles while the flatworm does not. And yet
Speaker 3: despite this basic parity, or maybe you might even say
Speaker 3: that the jellyfish seems more complex, we do tend to
Speaker 3: think of bilaterally symmetrical animals as more complex than animals
Speaker 3: with radial symmetry. Why do we think of them that way. Well,
Speaker 3: Arthur says that there could be a good reason for this,
Speaker 3: and it's that bilateral symmetry led to subsequent steps of
Speaker 3: increasing complexity. Bilateral symmetry was not itself necessarily more complex,
Speaker 3: but it became a platform for future complexity to emerge,
Speaker 3: making the point that some changes in evolution can seem
Speaker 3: really important to us because they are necessary precursors to
Speaker 3: other developments, maybe millions of years down the line, and
Speaker 3: you couldn't always necessarily predict what those future developments would
Speaker 3: be at the time. Like if we were standing there
Speaker 3: in the pre Cambrian era looking at the orbilatarian, you
Speaker 3: wouldn't necessarily be able to look at this little flatworm
Speaker 3: like creature or whatever it was that it looked like
Speaker 3: some kind of little little organism that has left and
Speaker 3: right sides that roughly mirror each other and think, well, yes,
Speaker 3: this is going to be big, This will turn into
Speaker 3: spiders and cats and octopuses.
Speaker 2: But that is.
Speaker 3: Exactly what happened. It became this sort of platform for
Speaker 3: future development. But to come back to the question, what
Speaker 3: is it about these early Bilatarians that favors the evolution
Speaker 3: of a head. Well, Arthur argues that it is the
Speaker 3: peculiarities of pre cam animal movement. It had to do
Speaker 3: with how animals move. So he says, you know, jellyfish,
Speaker 3: this animal with radial symmetry swims around in the open sea.
Speaker 3: You know, it floats in the water column. It kind
Speaker 3: of pulses to swim where it wants. And then you
Speaker 3: might have other animals that have radial symmetry, like the
Speaker 3: sea anemone. This lives it's a sessile organism, so it
Speaker 3: lives most of its life by sticking itself to a
Speaker 3: surface and staying there, you know, grabbing things from the water. Flatworms, however,
Speaker 3: creep across the two dimensional surfaces of solid objects like
Speaker 3: rocks in the water. So you can imagine what he
Speaker 3: thinks is likely the form of the orbiletarian traversing the
Speaker 3: face of a flat boulder in an archaic lagoon. And
Speaker 3: so he zeros in on the different ways that these
Speaker 3: creatures move. For the jellyfish with radial symmetry floating in
Speaker 3: the water, Arthur says, there is little reason to think
Speaker 3: of any direction as forward or backward. All directions are
Speaker 3: basically the same. The sessile sea an enemy doesn't generally
Speaker 3: travel around, so travel isn't a big issue for it.
Speaker 3: But for the flatworm like or biltarian, there is a
Speaker 3: very definite forward and backward regime in the way that
Speaker 3: this animal moves. You can think of the difference between
Speaker 3: a car and an aerial drone. You know, the jellyfish
Speaker 3: might be more like the aerial drone. It can kind
Speaker 3: of go in whatever direction a car has to like
Speaker 3: aim its movement. It crawls, it creeps along on a
Speaker 3: forward path.
Speaker 2: That's a good way of putting it. Yeah, yeah, drones
Speaker 2: versus cars.
Speaker 3: Yeah, now, no, there's absolutely nothing wrong with moving like
Speaker 3: a drone, you know, the jellyfish, and there's nothing wrong
Speaker 3: with these other lineages. Jellyfish can be highly successful without
Speaker 3: a brain and with limited range of behaviors. They're doing
Speaker 3: just find how they are, and this leads to what
Speaker 3: Arthur calls an evolutionary cul de sac. You know, they're
Speaker 3: just successful in the way they already are. But for
Speaker 3: the orbiletarian, with a definite bias for forward movement, there
Speaker 3: is a lot of reason to differentiate the front of
Speaker 3: the body from the back. There are reasons this animal
Speaker 3: needs to change based on the way it moves. Arthur writes, quote,
Speaker 3: it is more important to be able to detect the
Speaker 3: features of the area you are moving into than the
Speaker 3: one you're leaving behind. So it is to be expected
Speaker 3: that natural selection will favor variants that have more of
Speaker 3: their nerve net upfront. As part of this concentration of
Speaker 3: perceptive powers at the front of the animal, in the
Speaker 3: region that will one day merit the term head, there
Speaker 3: may be rudimentary forward pointing outgrowths densely populated with sensory
Speaker 3: nerves primitive antennae. And I was thinking about this. Maybe
Speaker 3: this is getting a little too philosophical about it, but
Speaker 3: you could argue that the evolution of the head in
Speaker 3: animals is related to the nature of time. For an
Speaker 3: organism that specializes in moving in one direction, moving like
Speaker 3: a car, or like a flatworm moving forward along varied terrain,
Speaker 3: the gathering of nerve cells and sensory organs in the
Speaker 3: front reflects the fact of reality that it is more
Speaker 3: important to sense and react to the future where you
Speaker 3: are headed than to the past where you've just been.
Speaker 3: The past can't hurt you anymore, but the future can no.
Speaker 2: I think that's a good way of looking at it.
Speaker 2: And it reminds me of some accounts. Off the top
Speaker 2: of my head. I can't recall how accurate these are
Speaker 2: held up to be, but there was at least an
Speaker 2: idea that was put forward in Western writing that certain
Speaker 2: members of Native Arctic groups kind of referred linguistically to
Speaker 2: something in the distance as being tomorrow, like this relationship
Speaker 2: between where you will be and how you think about
Speaker 2: what is ahead of you. And yeah, I can sort
Speaker 2: of see that reflected in what we're talking about here.
Speaker 3: Oh, this came up when we were talking about the
Speaker 3: cultural spatialization of time. Yeah, how people represent time in
Speaker 3: as a type of physical space or the metaphor of
Speaker 3: the space around them. And I don't remember if that
Speaker 3: example in particular was thought to be valid, but that
Speaker 3: there are cultural differences in the spatial metaphors people used
Speaker 3: to describe, like the future in the past and so forth.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, but even today, you know, we can easily
Speaker 2: think about everything that's coming into us is like our future.
Speaker 2: You know, it's the future of our body in that
Speaker 2: in what we are consuming the you know, the future
Speaker 2: of our thoughts based on the sense data that's entering
Speaker 2: entering our body and our mind and so forth. So
Speaker 2: uh yeah, I can see this this holding up. Whereas
Speaker 2: what is it like? I mean, to the limited extent
Speaker 2: you can even ask this question, what is it like then?
Speaker 2: For the creature that is not farward loaded, that is,
Speaker 2: you know, it's kind of like an a nowness. It's
Speaker 2: kind of perhaps something at least distantly comparable to that
Speaker 2: state of calmness and serenity that we aspire to, you know,
Speaker 2: or so many of us aspire to to try and
Speaker 2: get out of that forward headlong you know, sprint into
Speaker 2: the future.
Speaker 3: Assume the mind of a jellyfish. Yeah yeah, okay. Next
Speaker 3: ecological consideration pressure on the creation of a head in
Speaker 3: the early piletarians. Arthur says that forward movement also favors
Speaker 3: the evolution of a front facing mouth. If you think
Speaker 3: about this, this will make sense. It's kind of obvious.
Speaker 3: Like if you feed by taking things into an orifice
Speaker 3: in your body, it's best to be able to aim
Speaker 3: your body movement to engulf food matter with that orifice.
Speaker 3: So like, in the same way that it wouldn't make
Speaker 3: sense to build a combine harvester with its intake on
Speaker 3: the side. Right, you'd want it in the front of
Speaker 3: the vehicle so you can aim it at the thing
Speaker 3: you're trying to harvest.
Speaker 2: Essentially an eat the future approach. Basically we've covered so.
Speaker 3: Far right, So aiming the mouth orifice at food and
Speaker 3: making sure food gets inside also requires extra motor control
Speaker 3: around this region of the body. And this also favors
Speaker 3: nerve cells being concentrated at the anterior or the front
Speaker 3: of the bileatarian body. So nerve cells want to gather
Speaker 3: there not just to sense what is ahead in your
Speaker 3: movement schema, but also to control the mouth to eat
Speaker 3: what is ahead in the movement schema. And you can
Speaker 3: see this, this direct connection between nerve cell density and
Speaker 3: eating behavior in an example that Arthur sites, which are
Speaker 3: modern snails and slugs, some of the simpler bileateian animals
Speaker 3: extant today. These creatures, he writes quote, have a arrangement
Speaker 3: of mouth and nerve cells such that the nerves form
Speaker 3: a ring around the mouth or the esophagus, and at
Speaker 3: various points around this ring are expanded groupings of nerve
Speaker 3: cells called ganglia or mini brains if you like. So
Speaker 3: I love that. Of course, what begins as ganglia for
Speaker 3: control of just like a mouth, you know, the eating
Speaker 3: orifice could well evolve over millions of years into denser
Speaker 3: and more complex structures of neurons, and eventually could even
Speaker 3: become a brain. And so I thought this was fascinating.
Speaker 3: According to Arthur's argument here, so much of the strange
Speaker 3: and complicated and unpredictable evolutionary potential of the bileatarian body
Speaker 3: plan arises out of the simple circumstance that these animals,
Speaker 3: the Orbileatarians, had specific limitations on their range of movement,
Speaker 3: that their world was a world of moving forward. One
Speaker 3: more thing from this book I wanted to mention before
Speaker 3: I move on is something that he talks about in
Speaker 3: the next chapter, which is sort of the idea that
Speaker 3: cephalization is not a binary It's not like you are
Speaker 3: cephalized or not, but a question of degree. Some creatures
Speaker 3: are strongly cephalized, others are more weakly cephalized. And to
Speaker 3: illustrate this, Arthur begins by telling a story about a
Speaker 3: time he was collecting centipedes from an area along the
Speaker 3: coast of northeast England. He says he collected a number
Speaker 3: of centipedes. He brought him back to the lab for examination,
Speaker 3: where they seem to be functioning fine. Some of them
Speaker 3: had injuries, like they might be missing legs or parts
Speaker 3: of legs, but he explains that these centipedes have an
Speaker 3: adaptation where they cover the stumps of their missing appendages
Speaker 3: with a thick black substance that looks like tar, presumably
Speaker 3: to seal off the wound and prevent anything that's on
Speaker 3: the outside from getting in or anything on the inside
Speaker 3: from getting out.
Speaker 2: Seems like a solid approach, some sort of weird black
Speaker 2: centipede sealant.
Speaker 3: Okay, yep, yeap, seal it up. But then he came
Speaker 3: across something weird, he writes, quote to my surprise, I
Speaker 3: found that one specimen had lost its head and had
Speaker 3: used that same black tar technique to seal the wound. Strangely,
Speaker 3: it was moving around in a normal fashion, just like
Speaker 3: all its friends who had retained their heads. It walked
Speaker 3: in the way centipedes do, usually in a forward direction,
Speaker 3: but it was also able to retreat backward from threatening stimulis,
Speaker 3: such as my giving it a tap on its anterior
Speaker 3: end with a pair of tweezers. Not only did it
Speaker 3: do so for a considerable period in the lab hours,
Speaker 3: but it had probably done so for an even longer
Speaker 3: one days in the wild before I found it, because
Speaker 3: the wound looked old. Inasmuch as you can tell these things. Wow,
Speaker 3: So he says that this headless centipede eventually died because
Speaker 3: it probably starved to death. No mouth means it can't eat.
Speaker 3: But that's amazing. It's hard for us, being extremely highly
Speaker 3: cephalized organisms, to imagine that, Like the first problem to
Speaker 3: reach the crisis point with a headless animal would be
Speaker 3: that it starves to death. And the difference here is
Speaker 3: the level of cephalization in each organism. The centipede and
Speaker 3: the human are both cephalized. They both have heads, but
Speaker 3: the human is strongly cephalized and the centipede only weakly so.
Speaker 3: In humans, control of the body functions is strongly localized
Speaker 3: in the brain, which is in the head, and the
Speaker 3: body really can't do anything without the brain. Centipedes, on
Speaker 3: the other hand, they do have a brain of sorts
Speaker 3: in the head. There is a cluster of nervous tissue
Speaker 3: up there, but they also have clusters of nerve cells
Speaker 3: in each body segment that work as a distributed system
Speaker 3: of many secondary brains throughout the body. Even without the
Speaker 3: brain in the head, the body segments can keep on
Speaker 3: living and acting individually. They can make the centipede walk around,
Speaker 3: react to stimuli, and so forth, but not forever. But
Speaker 3: to come back to headlessness in nature, I want to
Speaker 3: emphasize again that not every animal naturally has a head. Jellyfish,
Speaker 3: for example, there's some disagreement to the extent to which
Speaker 3: you should say they are cephalized, but they really don't
Speaker 3: have anything you would normally call ahead. In fact, jellyfish,
Speaker 3: you don't even have brains or hearts, or even blood
Speaker 3: for that matter. They do have a nervous system, but
Speaker 3: it is distributed throughout the body tissues without a central
Speaker 3: like a major command center like a biletarian brain.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's fascinating and maybe a little treacherous right to
Speaker 2: look at some of these organisms and ask questions like,
Speaker 2: all right, where's the head? Where's the head at? Because
Speaker 2: sometimes an animal that seems to be headless may just
Speaker 2: be all head It's another way of sort of spinning it.
Speaker 2: This was an argument I was reading about from some
Speaker 2: researchers at Stanford University and UC Berkeley. This came out
Speaker 2: I believed this earlier this month. In a paper published
Speaker 2: in Nature, they found that ceased to once thought of
Speaker 2: as headless, actually exhibit gene expressions associated with head development
Speaker 2: all over their bodies. Meanwhile, genes related to torsos and
Speaker 2: tails were largely absent, so you could, I guess, think
Speaker 2: of them more as disembodied or never bodied heads than
Speaker 2: you would think of them as a body without a head.
Speaker 3: Another interesting fact about sea stars is that so they're
Speaker 3: thought of as animals with radial symmetry, not bilateral symmetry,
Speaker 3: but they are actually descended from Bileatrians, So these are
Speaker 3: animals whose ancestors are part of that group. They did
Speaker 3: have bilateral symmetry and they evolved to lose it.
Speaker 2: The idea of something having a head in a body
Speaker 2: and then becoming mostly head I was instantly reminded of
Speaker 2: a character from Marvel comics named Modoc. Included a picture
Speaker 2: for you here, Joe. You're not familiar with this guy,
Speaker 2: but essentially I believe he was supposed to have been
Speaker 2: a human at one point in the comics, and I
Speaker 2: think definitely in the movies, and he has, through you know,
Speaker 2: comic book events, become just this enormous head with much
Speaker 2: smaller arms and legs hanging off of him. You know,
Speaker 2: there's a sense that like even these may go eventually
Speaker 2: because he doesn't need them. It's all you know, cerebral
Speaker 2: power in there.
Speaker 3: I notice a strange body feature here, which is that
Speaker 3: Modoc's legs are not on the underside of his head body,
Speaker 3: but the front of his head body, almost like little
Speaker 3: tentacles or fe feeder jaws around the mouth.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, and this being, I guess, the first imagined
Speaker 2: being that we've referenced here. It's something to keep in
Speaker 2: mind with all of these is the question of like, okay, well,
Speaker 2: what was literally intended with this character, but also like
Speaker 2: how did the imaginations behind them? How did the creators
Speaker 2: behind them sort of channel some of these ideas we've
Speaker 2: already been discussed, either overtly or just sort of subconsciously,
Speaker 2: Like what do we think of when we have a head,
Speaker 2: what do we think of them when we imagine beings
Speaker 2: that have lost their head, that have a much larger
Speaker 2: head than a body, and so forth. Like there's a
Speaker 2: lot of you know, overt and then sort of hidden
Speaker 2: language in there.
Speaker 3: I think, yes, in some ways, it's kind of hard
Speaker 3: not to approach everything with a sort of vertebrate anatomical bias,
Speaker 3: where you, you know, you are looking for the analogies
Speaker 3: to the way your body is put together in everything
Speaker 3: in the world, even in even in you know, non
Speaker 3: living inanimate objects. I mean you often, Rob, I'm sure
Speaker 3: you have this experience. You look at some kind of
Speaker 3: inanimate object and look for the head or the legs
Speaker 3: or whatever.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, And and on top of that, like the
Speaker 2: other wrinkle for a human's especially is that in the
Speaker 2: head we see a centralization of the nervous system on
Speaker 2: the front and upper part of the creature amid its
Speaker 2: sense organs in its mouth. It's the defining feature of
Speaker 2: both humans and when humans are looking at animals, and
Speaker 2: certainly animals, it's you know, it's become it's come to
Speaker 2: be thought of as a center of personhood and self.
Speaker 2: It is the face, you know, at the front part
Speaker 2: of the head, if you will. And of course that
Speaker 2: that factors into a lot of our conceptions of not
Speaker 2: only people, animals, but also just inanimate things. We're always
Speaker 2: looking for the face. We're looking for that that front
Speaker 2: facing communication array of micro and macro expressions, you know,
Speaker 2: and we can also couple that with this idea of
Speaker 2: the head the face looking into the future, and what
Speaker 2: happens when these two future gazing facial arrays see each other. Then, Oh,
Speaker 2: you have to have all the computation. What does it
Speaker 2: mean that this person is in my immediate future? Am
Speaker 2: I going to eat them? Are we going to communicate
Speaker 2: on seven level? Or are we going to turn our
Speaker 2: eyes away and continue on our own forward core? Yeah?
Speaker 3: I mean, for a second there, I was thinking about
Speaker 3: the salients of faces. Why we notice faces everywhere? I mean,
Speaker 3: we see faces in electrical outlets, and we see the
Speaker 3: you know, the boxing octopus and the kadhook on the wall.
Speaker 3: Everything is a face. Part of me wanted to interpret
Speaker 3: that as a result of our highly social brains. You know,
Speaker 3: we're always looking at other people's faces to try to
Speaker 3: understand what they're thinking, how they're feeling towards us, and
Speaker 3: all that. That is very important. But then it could
Speaker 3: actually be even deeper than that in an ecological origin,
Speaker 3: because of course, understanding like looking for the face of
Speaker 3: a predatory animal could help you understand like, am I
Speaker 3: in the attentional zone of this this big looking animal
Speaker 3: over there? So it could go even deeper than social factors.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, that's a good point, and it goes back
Speaker 2: to numerous things we've discussed, but most recently talking about
Speaker 2: what happens when you meet eyes with just a household cat.
Speaker 2: Yeah know, and how that is maybe an anxious experience
Speaker 2: for the cat because again, it doesn't have all these
Speaker 2: layers of human cognition. It gets down to the basic
Speaker 2: interactions that a creature like a house cat that is
Speaker 2: both predator and prey would have when it's locking eyes
Speaker 2: with another organism. And so on top of all that,
Speaker 2: as we begin to venture into the world of fantastic beings,
Speaker 2: imagined beings, creatures of mythology, folklore, and much more. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's like to imagine something without a head is of
Speaker 2: course also to imagine something without a face, And you
Speaker 2: could just you can easily just you could focus on
Speaker 2: the facial aspect of this, and there's plenty of ways
Speaker 2: to cut that apart. But then on top of that
Speaker 2: this idea of here is a thing that has no
Speaker 2: head or separated from its head, and knowing like what
Speaker 2: that would mean for a human being, Like you said,
Speaker 2: survival is not possible even for a very short period
Speaker 2: of time. I mean there, of course, studies and there've
Speaker 2: long been some fascination about to what degree a human
Speaker 2: head can survive without its body. The answer still remains
Speaker 2: not very long at all. So to take all of that,
Speaker 2: these observations and knowledge about the importance of a human head,
Speaker 2: the role that a head plays in a human's life
Speaker 2: and personhood, what happens when that is cut away? What
Speaker 2: happens when you have an imagine being that can live
Speaker 2: without a head? And what does it mean? You know?
Speaker 3: When I go back in my history of taking in
Speaker 3: stories of headless beings, the main one that comes to mind,
Speaker 3: of course, is probably not a big surprise, is the
Speaker 3: headless Horseman story and Ichabod Crane and all that, which
Speaker 3: has been realized in many you know, Halloween specials on
Speaker 3: TV and stuff like that through all the years. And
Speaker 3: one thing I always remember thinking about the headless horsemen
Speaker 3: that made them different than other kind of ghosts and
Speaker 3: monsters is that the headless horseman seemed less like a
Speaker 3: personal entity and more like a machine or a robot
Speaker 3: than most other types of monsters and ghosts. Do you
Speaker 3: have this experience?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, And I think it's one of the reasons
Speaker 2: that at times, I mean, there's also the effects level
Speaker 2: of this, but it's one of one of the reasons
Speaker 2: that at times filmmakers have struggled with portraying it. I
Speaker 2: think of the Tim Burton film where you had Christopher
Speaker 2: Walken playing the headless being, and sometimes you see his head,
Speaker 2: you see his face, because that helps convey like the
Speaker 2: intent and the horror of the thing. You take that away,
Speaker 2: it's like, yeah, it's like a robot. It's like all action,
Speaker 2: but without cognition, all like physical It's certainly still a
Speaker 2: physical threat, but there is no mind communication. Will like,
Speaker 2: you take this entire aspect of what it is to
Speaker 2: be an entity in the physical world, and you remove
Speaker 2: this huge slice of it. How do you reason with that?
Speaker 2: How do you even comprehend it?
Speaker 3: I guess part of it is that even with a
Speaker 3: regular ghost, you know, this imagined entity that doesn't behave
Speaker 3: by normal biological rules, we still make biological inferences about it.
Speaker 3: So like with a ghost, a monster, you can tell
Speaker 3: you're in danger if it looks at you. You know,
Speaker 3: like you are still tracking its gaze to understand what
Speaker 3: its state of mind and attention is doing. And with
Speaker 3: a headless beast. You can't do that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So we're going to begin to go through some
Speaker 2: various ideas that, you know, especially with with what we've
Speaker 2: talked about so far, I think this will make for
Speaker 2: a nice discussion. The various examples of beings and entities
Speaker 2: that have lost their heads are separated from their heads
Speaker 2: and so forth, and in doing so they often have
Speaker 2: lost a face, though, as we'll discuss, sometimes the face
Speaker 2: finds a way. But let's start with roughly with the
Speaker 2: realm of the divine headless. And I suppose the notion
Speaker 2: of the divine headless is interesting to think of in
Speaker 2: light of some of the popular modern religious views that
Speaker 2: position a mon theistic God as being essentially bodyless. And
Speaker 2: in this respect you might well argue that, well God
Speaker 2: is headless, then if God has no body, then God
Speaker 2: has no head, at least in the literal sense. But
Speaker 2: of course it's hard to escape the head in virtually
Speaker 2: any sort of anthropomorphism or any number of linguistic uses
Speaker 2: of the word head. We even have the term godhead
Speaker 2: used to sum up different theological concepts, particularly in the
Speaker 2: Abrahamic and religions, and also in Hinduism, though.
Speaker 3: That is a false cognate. You know. The head in
Speaker 3: godhead actually has nothing to do with the biological head.
Speaker 3: I think it is derived from the term that essentially
Speaker 3: means like godhood. It is like the essence of godness.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but then you throw that into a language system
Speaker 2: where head means head. You can't help but think of
Speaker 2: it as such. Right now. Another thing to look at is, Okay,
Speaker 2: if your god or goddess of choice goes through different
Speaker 2: avatars or incarnations, then well, no matter what their pure
Speaker 2: form is, they're going to wind up having a head
Speaker 2: of some sort at some point, at least for a while.
Speaker 2: I think a fantasy example we might turn to if
Speaker 2: you think of a Sauron from The Lord of the Rings, right,
Speaker 2: he takes on a number of bipedal and headed being
Speaker 2: of forms, but ultimately assumes the physical form of a
Speaker 2: great disembodied eye, devoid of body and head in the
Speaker 2: literal sense.
Speaker 3: Though it is interesting that it's still the eyes at
Speaker 3: the top of a tower, making it kind of like
Speaker 3: a head.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, And I guess the idea is that during
Speaker 2: that incarnation, like it has, he has become all seeking
Speaker 2: all because there is only one thing that it wants.
Speaker 2: It is not consumption. It is just to find the
Speaker 2: one ring.
Speaker 3: It's kind of the opposite of the headless horseman issue,
Speaker 3: where like you can't tell where it's looking, all Sauron
Speaker 3: is is looking at something.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Now, in actual religions, though, gods do sometimes lose
Speaker 2: their head heads, but unlike with human beings, this doesn't
Speaker 2: spell the end of it, because here you're dealing with
Speaker 2: again divine beings and magical powers and so forth. We've
Speaker 2: discussed in the past. The Hindu god Rahu, this is
Speaker 2: the entity that is associated with eclipses. He was once
Speaker 2: a proud oserer, a demi god of immense power and
Speaker 2: hunger seeking immortality. For demi gods are just another realm
Speaker 2: in the wheel of Samsara. Rahu drinks the divine nectar
Speaker 2: known as Amrita, but before he can swallow it all
Speaker 2: the way, as it's passing down his throat, all powerful
Speaker 2: Vishnu decapitates him for the transgression.
Speaker 3: He wasn't supposed to drink the nectar.
Speaker 2: He was not supposed to drink it and was stopped
Speaker 2: in the act of drinking it. So the power of
Speaker 2: the nectar. In at least some tellings and understandings of
Speaker 2: the story makes his disembodied head immortal, and so this
Speaker 2: cleaved and fallen god continually seeks his revenge on the
Speaker 2: two planets jerry deities who ratted him out to Vishnu. However,
Speaker 2: in a lot of these tellings, his headless body is
Speaker 2: still in the mix under the new name of Ketu,
Speaker 2: so both Rahu and Katu take on the classification of
Speaker 2: shadow planets in Indian astronomy. Katu is indeed sometimes depicted
Speaker 2: in Hindu iconography as a body without a head. Interesting now,
Speaker 2: Hinduism also boasts a headless goddess of sorts by the
Speaker 2: name of Chinnamasta. She is depicted as a nude, red fleshed,
Speaker 2: self decapitating tantric goddess. She's generally depicted standing atop the
Speaker 2: bodies of a divine couple with a scimitar in one
Speaker 2: hand and her own head in the other, with three
Speaker 2: jets of blood spurting out of her neck, which her
Speaker 2: own severed head plus two attendants like gaze upward and
Speaker 2: open their mouths and drink like a fountain.
Speaker 3: So she's understood to have cut her own head off
Speaker 3: with the scimitar.
Speaker 2: Right right, now I suppose she is still head in
Speaker 2: body as one, even in separation, or at least that's
Speaker 2: my understanding. This might differ, you know, if one were
Speaker 2: to dive more into the theology of this particular god
Speaker 2: and what these depictions mean. But it's my limited understanding
Speaker 2: that you still think of them as as the same goddess,
Speaker 2: and she's associated with destruction and creation, but also apparently paradoxes,
Speaker 2: which I think is worth highlighting. Now, another headless divine
Speaker 2: figure can be found in Chinese mythology, and this is
Speaker 2: Sing Ten. As Anne Beryl describes in Chinese Mythology and introduction,
Speaker 2: Sing Ten is a failed hero in minor deity. His
Speaker 2: plight is described in the Shanghaijing, the Classic of Mountains
Speaker 2: and Seas, which we've talked about on the show before.
Speaker 2: This is a work from between five hundred and two
Speaker 2: hundred BCE. Taking into account of variations of his name,
Speaker 2: Beryl writes that we might very roughly translate his name
Speaker 2: as punished by heavens or formed by heavens or And
Speaker 2: I love this one because this one sounds like he
Speaker 2: could straight up be a death metal band. Is form
Speaker 2: prematurely dying? Who you can just imagine that in that
Speaker 2: nearly illegible script on a festival poster.
Speaker 3: Right right, yes, in the Batlord fond.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So Beryl points out that the story of Sing
Speaker 2: Ten kind of stands out for its gruesomeness in the
Speaker 2: in the classic, and this is partially thought to be
Speaker 2: because many instances of sex and violence were like edited
Speaker 2: a bit and cleaned up a bit over time in
Speaker 2: that work, and for one reason or another, this one
Speaker 2: was not. She describes Sington as an odentic warrior, and
Speaker 2: we might well think of him as kind of a
Speaker 2: Satanic figure as well, if you know, comparing him to
Speaker 2: modern Christian and certainly Western literature depictions of Satan, because
Speaker 2: we know, for what little we know about him is
Speaker 2: that he winds up in this position of having no
Speaker 2: head due to his hubris, due to his violent opposition
Speaker 2: to the supreme god Huangdi, the Yellow Emperor.
Speaker 3: So what's the story, all right?
Speaker 2: So the story goes that sing Ten, who sometimes described
Speaker 2: as a giant as well, challenges the Yellow Emperor on
Speaker 2: a particular battleground for a divine rule. You know, He's like,
Speaker 2: you shouldn't be ruined everything, I should. Let's battle it. Out. Now,
Speaker 2: the Yellow Emperor is victorious in the end, and he
Speaker 2: beheads his challenger and buries the head on cheng Yang Mountain.
Speaker 2: But Sing Ten is too proud to die. According to
Speaker 2: one translation, quote Ten made his nipples serve as eyes
Speaker 2: and his navel as his mouth, and brandishing his shield
Speaker 2: and battle axe, he danced. And we might well imagine
Speaker 2: this dance is a proud kind of war dance, a
Speaker 2: a vein dance, a spiteful dance. Again, he has been defeated,
Speaker 2: his head has been removed from his giant body, and
Speaker 2: yet he refuses to truly give up, to cease his
Speaker 2: opposition to the Yellow Wimperor, and continues to fight, though
Speaker 2: in time the body dies as well and the body
Speaker 2: is buried as well. Now I included some illustrations of
Speaker 2: this entity for you to look at here Joe, the
Speaker 2: first of which is an older illustration from the Shanghaijiing
Speaker 2: which folks can can look up. Is found in a
Speaker 2: lot of places, very very simple and kind of comical.
Speaker 2: But by doing image searches, especially using the Chinese characters
Speaker 2: for the entity, you can find a number of really
Speaker 2: cool like modern illustrations. I don't know to what extent,
Speaker 2: Like he's been utilized in Chinese comic books and video
Speaker 2: games and whatnot. But it looks like a lot of
Speaker 2: folks have done some very unique sketches of him that
Speaker 2: look very horrifying, very demonic, with like the belly erupting
Speaker 2: into a big fanged mouth and indeed the nipples becoming eyes,
Speaker 2: and you know, this is the ferocious form, you know,
Speaker 2: still carrying and brandishing its battle axe.
Speaker 3: At least one of these illustrations has a little bit
Speaker 3: of Critter's energy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, they have. Maybe there there's one thing to
Speaker 2: keep in mind, like ideas of like what happens when
Speaker 2: like the head is fused with the body, or thought
Speaker 2: to have fused with the body. We'll get back to
Speaker 2: that in a bit. But yeah, it's like there's also
Speaker 2: this kind of spirit of, well, you can't be head
Speaker 2: me again, Like my head is literally my torso. Now
Speaker 2: what are you going to do? Cut my torso off?
Speaker 3: I can't believe I didn't connect it to this earlier,
Speaker 3: but I mean when you were talking about Modoc, I
Speaker 3: mean the critters, the crits really sort of are all head.
Speaker 3: They're like a head, an eating head with legs and arms.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and what does it mean sort of conceptionally if
Speaker 2: we are imagining a creature that doesn't have a head
Speaker 2: with a mouth, but its body is the mouth, where
Speaker 2: like head and body are fused into one. You know,
Speaker 2: on some level, does that kind of mess with our
Speaker 2: concepts of head and body? Like one of the concepts
Speaker 2: we've discussed in the past is how arguably modern humans
Speaker 2: tend to think of body and head as horse and rider.
Speaker 2: You know, we're the head and there's the body. It's
Speaker 2: doing its thing. But of course there's really more of
Speaker 2: a centaur concept where horse and rider are one, and
Speaker 2: that breaks down in a number of different ways. But
Speaker 2: then what if we imagine, like the horse, human is
Speaker 2: just one entity, you know, Like, how are we supposed
Speaker 2: to take take account of that? Like, here is this creature,
Speaker 2: like the critter like sington, who now has its belly
Speaker 2: more or less in its body, its eyes or in
Speaker 2: its body. What does that mean about its volition and
Speaker 2: its intent?
Speaker 3: I don't have a good answer on this, but I
Speaker 3: was just trying to think, how would your vision be
Speaker 3: different if your eyes were in your nipples'd be farther
Speaker 3: apart than human eyes usually are. And I don't know
Speaker 3: exactly how that would change things.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, they would be wider apart, and certainly these
Speaker 2: depictions of like Singing ten. You know, he seems to
Speaker 2: be have a very broad giant's body, so the nipples
Speaker 2: are pretty far apart. Yeah, I'm not sure exactly how
Speaker 2: to cut that. But in a way, it's like by
Speaker 2: having the belly be the mouth, it's like it does
Speaker 2: tend to give us this idea that like the hunger
Speaker 2: is even more all consuming, like the belly itself is
Speaker 2: opening up and wishes to eat.
Speaker 3: There will not be like an esophagus in between the
Speaker 3: food and the stomach. You're just like chomping. It's like
Speaker 3: the stomach itself has teeth.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I don't imagine there's a lot of tasting.
Speaker 2: This critter is not going for the tasting menu, is
Speaker 2: going for the buffet. That's right by the way. If
Speaker 2: we dip back into Hindu epics for just a second,
Speaker 2: there is a demon with these basic features that pops
Speaker 2: up there, known as Kabanda, and the story goes that
Speaker 2: Indra stove this individual's head and thighs in stove them
Speaker 2: into his body with the celestial thunderbolt weapon known as
Speaker 2: the Vadra. But then Indra shows mercy and says, well,
Speaker 2: he's still alive, he should be allowed to eat. So
Speaker 2: Indra gives him long arms and a belly mouth. And
Speaker 2: I included one depiction of this creature here for you, Joe.
Speaker 3: On this drawing. He's kind of cute. He's like a
Speaker 3: blue Teddy bear.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. But this one's interesting too because it's like
Speaker 2: the head is not removed. The head is just kind
Speaker 2: of like apparently it's like driven down into the body
Speaker 2: with something like it's easy to imagine like some gruesome
Speaker 2: Mortal Kombat esque battle field fatality here, and then that
Speaker 2: is rectified by divine magic to some extent. Now, if
Speaker 2: we look to the world of Japanese jokai, there is
Speaker 2: also a creature there that is described as headless but
Speaker 2: with nipple eyes and a belly mouth. This is a
Speaker 2: donatsura or torso face, according to I couldn't find out
Speaker 2: a lot about this one. I was looking at yokai
Speaker 2: dot com where Matthew Meyer describes this entity and says
Speaker 2: that the main connotation here is to shame and some
Speaker 2: sort of saying in Japanese about lowering the lowering of
Speaker 2: one's face. I think the effectiveness of this is likely.
Speaker 2: You know, something that's lost in translation. M okay. There's
Speaker 2: another yokai that Meyer describes called Kuba kajiri, and this
Speaker 2: one is also apparently sometimes described as headless. It's a
Speaker 2: kind of ghoul that consumes the heads of the dead,
Speaker 2: though plenty of illustrations depict it as having a head,
Speaker 2: as being a being with a head that is gnawing
Speaker 2: on disembodied heads, and this may seem this seems to
Speaker 2: be maybe connected to the idea of bodies buried without
Speaker 2: heads coming back as vengeful spirits that seek out corpse
Speaker 2: heads to eat. It could also be linked to starvation,
Speaker 2: according to Meyer. But at this point, obviously we're our
Speaker 2: beginning to talk about things that are maybe less divine
Speaker 2: and maybe a little more diabolical, a little lower down
Speaker 2: the ladder of power when it comes to supernatural entities.
Speaker 2: And so this is where we're going to leave off.
Speaker 2: But in the next episode we're going to come back
Speaker 2: in and we're going to discuss other examples of more
Speaker 2: outright diabolical headless entities, and we'll also get into the
Speaker 2: works of antiquity and various descriptions of peoples in distant
Speaker 2: parts of the world or distant from the writers and
Speaker 2: observers here, that were said to have no heads, but
Speaker 2: of course to have faces on their bodies. And so
Speaker 2: we'll get into that and discuss like where these ideas
Speaker 2: came from and what they seem to mean. So we'll
Speaker 2: get into that on Thursday. In the meantime, we'll remind
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