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