FACTORALY - E104 BRAINS

Episode Date: September 4, 2025

Where would we be without our brains? The fact that we don't know the answer is because our brains find that question tricky. From regulating our breathing and heart rate, to propelling us from one place to another physically, literally, and virtually, our brains are fantastic. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, Bruce. Hello, Simon. Gosh, I'm not sure if that was relaxing or creepy. Creepy. Good. Okay. How are you doing? I'm all right, thank you. How's your good self?

I'm feeling brainy, thank you very much. Oh, you're always. feeling brainy. I try. I have a friend staying with me at the moment who you may have heard in a previous episode of Factorily, an Australian called Craig. And last night we caught up on the Monday evening sort of BBC quiz, like the quiz triple. Nice. Where you have like sort of university challenge, mastermind and only connect. Oh, cracky. That's a cerebral evening. Yeah. And we got to Only Connect and Greg was saying, I thought I was clever. our regular listeners may remember Greg from such episodes as kangaroos and telegraph

he's guest appeared a couple of times with us here on factorily yeah it's nepotism really I basically like having friends along so for the uninitiated what is factorily Bruce how would you describe it to someone who's never been here before okay so factoryly is 30 minutes of stuff sorry i was waiting for more uh good yep it's it's um interesting and not very interesting facts about interesting and not very interesting subjects that's a beautiful summarization yeah it is and the the thing that makes us do it is obviously our brains yes they'll do that um absolutely because we have we have brains we do i like my brain actually do you know what somebody once said to me

what's your favorite bit of your body and i said my brain yes i i like that as well it's uh yeah yeah I'm reasonably proud of it. It's not, you know, it's not the best one in the world by any stretch, but, you know, you and I are both inquisitive fellows. We like, we're like looking things up. We like understanding things. We're like working things out and puzzling things and so on. I think our brains are a good defining, well, that and our glorious beards as well.

Brains and beards. So today we're going to be talking about. brains. We are. It's a massive old subject. It leads to so many other things. So many other things. You know, we're talking about brains. We could go down the route of psychology. We could talk about moods and emotions. We could talk about all sorts of different things that come from the brain. But that's just too big. I mean, if you think about what, if you think about what the brain thinks about, yeah, it's everything. It's massive. Absolutely. The brain does everything from, you know, sort of telling you to breathe. Yes.

to telling you to think, to tell it to remembering stuff. So I think we need to keep it simple and just keep it about sort of the actual brain. The actual brain. The actual brain. Rather than, yeah, exactly. Well, I'm looking forward to seeing how concise we can make this epic, epic subject. So welcome to this 10 minutes digest. No, it's not going to be 10 minutes.

Two hour. Yeah. Well done for editing it down from the two hours then, Simon, I appreciate it. Oh, pleasure. Oh, pleasure. That's what I'm here for. So let's start with. Sorry, before we start, you talk about it can take you to so many places.

It took me to Braintree. Brain tree? In Essex. Yes, that's a funny name, isn't it, for a place? Yeah, it's from Viking. Oh, is it? It's like brawn. Oh, strength.

It's got nothing to do with trees or brains. Great. It's fine. So let's begin with one of the most boring and least cerebral things we're probably going to talk about. The etymology of the brain, we've had a few of these recently. It means exactly what it means and has always meant that. It comes from an old English word,

Braian, which comes from the proto-Germanic Branja, which just means brain. It's always been the word for it. Also interchangeable with the definition of what we would now call the skull. So your head, the bony part of your head and the brain would all be called brain back in old English times. But in French it's Le Cervo. It's a what now? Servo, C-E-R-V-E-A-U. Is that right? Yeah. Huh. In Latin, the word for brain is cerebrum, which gives us cerebral, which we've already used a couple of times to do with the brain. There's a part of the brain

called the cerebellum, et cetera, et cetera. They all come from the Latin origin. It's such a medical, scientific bit of the body, it's, you know, the words in there, the different parts of the brain, the amygdala, the hippocampus, loads and loads of Latin scattered all the way throughout. Yes. I mean, bear in mind that this entire episode is being brought to you by the thing we're talking about. Oh, that's deep. Wow. Do you have a clear definition of what a brain is so that we all know what we're talking about? I think it's a center of intelligence. So it's something that can motivate so you can make people sort of get from a to b walk uh talk listen all that stuff see yeah um it's something that uh holds memories so you don't so you you remember that fire is hot

so you don't keep putting your fingers in it yeah um you remember also you remember people you remember relationships you remember faces yes well remembering faces is something that i can't do that's why i mentioned it. Yeah, so I have had brain damage. If you put some echo on that, it'd be quite fun. Yeah, I've had, apparently I've had three strikes. I didn't realize it. Really? I thought you'd only had two. I thought I'd only had two, but apparently I've had three. Pretty guts. I didn't notice that. But yeah, so I don't recognize people's face. I think we've mentioned this before. I have a thing called prosopagnosia. Yes, that's true. And I don't recognize faces. And I don't know where I am, which is called topographic agnesia.

Oh, really? I didn't realize you had that as well. Yeah. Gosh, that must be disorienting. That's the worst thing. I don't like not knowing where I am. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, strange. So, yes, brains can be damaged. You know, they're just another part of the human body, just like anything else can get injured and not work very well. So the brain can get injured and, and lose some of its functionality. Yes. What we didn't know is that bits of the brain influenced different things. We kind of know that the left-hand side of the brain influences the right-hand side of the body and the right-hand side of the brain influences the left-hand side of the body.

But we sort of only within the last couple of hundred years have we worked out that there are bits of the brain that control various different functions like walking and seeing and hearing. Yes. Yes, you sort of hear about medical trials where they sort of actively stimulate different parts of the brain and it has a physical reflex action, doesn't it? So they poke that bit and your vision goes blurry or they poke that bit and your left arm twitches or whatever. Well, this whole area of neurology kind of started with a railway worker. Oh, did it?

I don't know if you've heard of Phineas Gage. Oh, I have heard of him purely because of the word gauge being a word that refers to the width of a railway track. Yes, except it's got nothing to do with that. It's just it. That happens to be his... No, I know. I just remember hearing the name and thinking that's ironic. Yeah. This was back in 1848.

And what he was doing, he was laying a railway. Yeah. And he put an iron tamping rod into an explosive base to basically just to knock this rod into the ground. Right. And the explosive went off before he was ready. It went through his cheek, up through his face and through his brain. Ouch. And he didn't die.

Huh. And actually, it went straight through his brain, landed about 85 meters away. Gosh. So it went pretty fast through his head. Yeah. And afterwards, he sort of went, oh, that was a bit scary. Right. Well, I don't know if I should carry on or maybe go to the doctor.

So he went to the doctor and they put him straight into hospital. The story goes that it was about half past four in the afternoon. And he was distracted by men working behind him. And he looked over his right shoulder. and he inadvertently brought his head into line with the blast hole and the tamping iron. I mean, this tamping iron is 3.2 centimetres in diameter. Gryky. And about a metre long, and it weighed about six kilos.

And that shot directly through this fellow's brain without killing him outright. Yep, it went through the lower jaw, upward, upper jaw, maybe fracturing the cheekbone, passed behind his left eye, and through the left side of his brain, and then completely out the top of his skull. I mean, it doesn't sound comfy. No. What was interesting was that afterwards, his personality changed. Oh, right.

So it went through his temporal lobe. And doctors asked his friends and said, well, he's not Phineas anymore. He's much more aggressive, much more angry. He used to be a nice guy. No, he's not. And they worked out that there was an area of the brain that affected your personality. which is the front, front temporal lobe, which is where the spike had gone straight through. It's not just he was a little bit miffed by having a hole in his head.

No, not at all. No, no, no. It was fine. Right. So purely accidentally, people began to realize that different parts of the brain are responsible for different functions and moods and personality traits and so on. So from that, they realized that that particular part of the brain affected something. So therefore, the rest of the brain must also affect things. That makes sense. So at about the same time, there was the practice. of phrenology oh that's um oh we've talked about that somewhere on another episode as well haven't we

we may well the study of the lumps and bumps in the head yes exactly it's a pseudoscience yeah yeah it's a load of bunk but what they did was they said oh well this part of your brain affects your life and your living and how you react to people and whether you like tea or coffee all sorts of weird things um but what it did do is it brought attention to the fact that Maybe there are parts of the brain that affect different. I mean, for example, the part of my brain that was affected by my stroke is called the fusiform gyrus. Oh, is it? And that bit now is dead, which means I don't recognize people's face.

Right. Which you think, well, how is there one bit of your brain just for recognizing people's faces? That's weird. That's a very niche function for a particular piece of brain, isn't it? Yes. How interesting. Although 12% of your brain is to do with processing vision. Is it, 12%?

It's quite a lot. That is quite a lot, isn't it? An eighth of your brain is all about processing what you see. Gosh. And of course, what you see is all upside down, so your brain has to turn it the right way up. Yes, it's a clever old thing, isn't it, without losing your balance? Yes. It's why when you're reading, you don't really hear very much.

Because the majority of your brain power is focused on doing what you're doing and it blocks out other things. Yes, she's very interesting. That is clever, isn't it? Brain surgery is quite interesting Because A, your brain doesn't have any pain receptors in it So you can't feel pain when somebody's cutting into your brain Yes, I read that as well Apparently, I had always sort of thought that a headache

Is your brain hurting, but it isn't It's the lining tissue around your brain, the meninges, I think Yes It's those being sort of swollen and inflamed And creating pressure inside your skull It's not that your brain hurts, it's just the area around it Yes. I mean, people had been practicing trepanning, trepination. Oh, I don't know that word. What's that?

So trepination is where you drill a hole in someone's head. Oh, okay. To relieve the pressure. Yes. And people have been doing that for a long time. Yeah. And in fact, it was banned by the Catholics in 1863. The Catholic Church said you're not allowed to do that anymore.

Oh, really? Yeah, which is good. There was a guy called Walter Freeman, who was greatly into lobotomies. That's a thing to be into, isn't it? Well, he had a lobotomobile. He had a vehicle that he would go around and actually do lobotomies, like from town to town. Mobile lobotomies? Yes.

Just in case anyone needed it. Yeah. Yeah, it was basically like a VW camper. And he called it the lobotomobile. And he reckoned he could do an ice pick lobotomy in under 10 minutes. Really? And although he was a neurologist, he'd never had any surgical training, quite scary. gosh

there are lots of different types of brain through different animals and different creatures and so on I found it a little bit complicated to actually getting hold of a definition of a brain because every main definition seems to describe it within the context of vertebrates it said the brain is the main central processing unit I guess located in the skull at the top of the spine

and it refused to give me an option for one that isn't that. Yes. But it sort of seems that brains in invertebrates, people struggle to call them brains per se because they don't look like ours and therefore that's their frame of reference. But human brains, I've just got a plethora of facts and interesting bits and bobs about human brains. They are just fascinating things. The average human brain weighs about three pounds. It consists of about 75% water. The rest is made up of fat, proteins, carbohydrates and salts. It's about 60% fat.

The weight of it is 60% fat. The actual construct, the size of it is 73% water, which is just bizarre. Which is why if you get dehydrated, your brain stops working? It affects your brain power. Exactly, yeah. You know how a brain is all sort of wrinkly? It's kind of all folded in. upon itself and coiled up.

That is something called cortical gyrification, which is fantastic phrase. It just means that your brain is all folded up. Apparently, if you were to unfold those folds in a brain, in a human brain, the surface area would be roughly one and a half times the size of an A4 sheet of paper.

Okay, that's smaller than I would have thought. Is it? Yes. It's about what I thought it would be. I was expecting you to go tennis court. Oh, no. No, no, no. You know, it's sort of like a prune, isn't it?

If you rehydrated a prune, it would roughly be the size of a prune and a half. But what's interesting is for its size, right? People used to think that there were as many neurons in a brain as there were stars in the Milky Way. Yes, they did, didn't they? It's fewer than that. They've proved that wrong. A, because they think there are more stars and B, because they think there are fewer neurons. It's still a heck of a lot of neurons.

I read that there are about 86 billion neurons in the human brain. Yes. Which is a lot. And they all, you know, interconnect with each other. And, you know, the signals that are transmitted between these neurons travel at about 270 miles per hour. Crazy. It's blooming quick.

It's very efficient and it's very fast. Okay. Imagine a piece of brain the size of a grain of sand. Mm-hmm. That has 100,000 neurons in it. Gosh, does it really? And a billion synapses. Wow.

A grain of sand. That's crazy. So it's a really powerful thing. Gosh. I mean, and it needs feeding. Yeah, of course. Because it's only, what, 2% of your body weight. And it uses 20% of the body's energy.

It's quite disproportionate, isn't it? Yeah, and also oxygen as well. It uses loads of oxygen. Yeah, yeah. So you can actually lose weight just by thinking. There you go. your new health tip go and do a crossword and uh yeah wow and actually that that idea of um exercising your brain just like you exercise other parts of your body you know for ages it was sort of

assumed that once a child developed into an adult your brain is set it you know it is what it is and it doesn't change but actually mental activity physically changes the the shape and the construct and the constitution of your brain, you know, the grey matter and the white matter, the more you use it, the stronger it gets, new pathways, new neural links are created by exercising it. Yeah. And, you know, the more you exercise and train and stretch your brain in your younger years, the better it will serve you in your older years. So are you saying that listening to factorily is actually healthy? I think I am. There you go. to go back to something you said earlier um you talked about where brains are the giant squid

has a donut shaped brain it does doesn't it it's weird and there are spiders that got brains in their legs yes now i saw this this um again this sort of goes back to the the idea of it's so easy to think of a brain as being one lumpy thing inside your head but in other animals that just doesn't doesn't necessarily apply. Leaches have 30-odd small brain-like structures scattered throughout their nervous system. There are some here and some there. Octopuses, octopods, octopi. Octopuses. Those things have multiple brains. A lot of their neurons are actually located in their tentacles, so much so that their tentacles can operate completely separately from each other. because they have their own brain-like function

in each of the tentacles. So the left tentacle doesn't necessarily know what the right tentacle is doing. Brilliant. I read somewhere that you have a brain in your stomach, is that right? Oh, really? Because in our stomachs we have a thing called the enteric nervous system,

which is like a complex network of neurons within the walls of your digestive tract. Really? Yeah. I mean, it's not, you can't think. It can't sort of, it's not sort of a man. you'll count, but it's definitely able to control things. Interesting. One area I did go down a little bit of brain function was memory, largely because long story short, I recently

lost an awful lot of photos that I've taken over the last handful of months. Bruce knows this story. I won't go into it. And I've suddenly found myself relying on my memory instead of my photos to remind myself what I've done in the last six months. My memory isn't what it used to be. So I started thinking about memory as being one of the functions of the brain. And memory is just such a weird thing. I hadn't realised this, but the human brain has such a capacity for memory. It's estimated to be around roughly 2.5 petabytes, which in computer terms, that's 2.5 million gigabytes.

Can I make it easier for you to get? Sure. It's the equivalent to about 20,000. iPhones. Crikey. It's enough storage to store approximately three million hours of TV shows. Isn't that staggering? Yeah.

I can't even work that out. And yet, you know, I forget where I put the marmalade this morning, you know? I mean, you generate a lot of power to do that, don't you? To actually have that memory. There's apparently enough power generated by your brain to power a 20 watt light bulb. Is there? Yeah. That's impressive.

So if you put one electrode in one ear and one electrode in the other and a light on your forehead, you'll be able to see where you go. Oh, that's great. Oh, interesting. And in terms of memory function, we've sort of said there are different parts of the brain that are allocated to different functions. There is no one single part of the brain that's responsible for memory. Different memories are stored in different areas scattered throughout the brain. and one of my favourite facts about memory that I keep on quoting because I just find it so interesting

they reckon they've figured out why deja vu happens didn't you just say that nice good yeah well done and they reckon it's because of short term long term memory so ordinarily you see something

let's say a cat walks in front of you as you're walking along the pavement your short term memory goes oh there's a cat just there so you know it's there it's not a surprise when you look down and you see it again because you already know it's there the long term memory is a few days later

you go to yourself oh do you remember that cat we saw the other day I'm not 100% convinced about this argument really I'm not sure it's true well the argument goes that in deja vu a little glitch in the brain means that it happens the other way around you see the cat and it enters into your long term memory

and then a fraction of a second later your short-term memory catches up and goes, oh, haven't we already seen that cat? Because it got stored in the long-term memory first. Didn't you just say that? Who knows? I'm going all matrixy on you. Oh, we're talking of the Matrix. Oh, good. It's based on somebody called Hillary Putnam.

Is it? So they had a thought experiment about a brain in a van. Basically, whether you actually need a body at all. Ah, right. Whether you could just be a brain in a vat, and you could experience the world through various other outside influences that bring information to your brain in the vat. And it's a very, it's a thought experiment that's very interesting to read about.

And what I'll do is I'm going to put a link to the thought experiment in our blog, which is where our show notes are. Wonderful. Where would people find that then? Brain fade. One second. Factorily. That's the one, factorily.com.

So that's where we put all the show notes. So you'll find lots more information about brains and all sorts of things. And actually, I think, you know, that idea of a brain in a jar, you know, you sort of picture an evil crazy scientist with a brain in a jar. He's, you know, lobotomized his wife in order to preserve her or whatever it might be. So many movies, books, whatever, you know, have been made around this idea. Yes. Yeah, I mean, you know, young Frankenstein with Abe normal.

Yes. Very good. After JFK was shot, his brain was put into a vat and stored. And then lost. Lost. And nobody knows where JFK's brain is. Really? To this day.

Yeah. It just disappeared. That's odd. Yeah. I blame the aliens. It could have been zombies. It could have been some peckish zombies just going past. Yeah.

Well, you think that. See, there's this myth that zombies eat brains. Right. Are you telling me that's not actually factually accurate? It's not factually accurate because the man who invented the zombie film, a guy called George A. Romero, like Dawn of the Dead or all those kind of films. Everything ending with The Dead. Yes, sure.

In an interview, he said that he didn't ever say that zombies ate brains and he has no idea where it came from. Really? Yeah. But that's what zombies do. We all know that's what zombies do. They go around eating brains. I know. Very odd, isn't it?

you can eat brains right um i wouldn't eat the actual brains but there is a there is a company called mr brains okay and they and they make a thing called pork faggots oh yes okay so they do so brains faggots is a thing there's a chap called herbert hill brain right who was a butcher in bristol in 1925 okay and he started to make faggots which is basically just bits of pork yes put together in the kind of like meatballs kind of things aren't they yeah in meatballs in gravy but made from pork and they're faggots yeah so you can eat brains faggots if you're in um if you're in indiana jones in the temple of doom you eat monkey brains oh monkey brains yes talking of brains and cooking we're going on some wonderful tangents here aren't we this is funny cooking food is actually good for brains

Okay, right. If you eat raw food, then you need a lot of energy to break down that raw food into calories. I see. If you've cooked it first, then your body doesn't have to spend so much effort turning it into calories. So you can get more calories from food. In fact, there's, again, on the show notes, I'll leave a thing. There's a guy who believes that you should put the caloric value of cooked food on packaging, rather than the calerific value of the raw food.

Oh. Because nobody's going to eat it raw. No, sure. And the caloric value goes up when you cook stuff. Oh, I see. So one of the reasons why Homo erectus and us lot became much more intelligent than anybody else and any other animal is because we started to cook food. And therefore, we started, because the brain uses 20% of all the energy that you ingest, you could get a bigger brain from the same amount of food if you cooked it.

Yes. So this is a really. reason why we're actually who we are just because of the invention of fire and some caveman suddenly went you know what that that bit of steak tastes better if you hover it over this hot orange stuff yes yes likely seared yes well you've talked about mr brain with his meatballs um i had a look at a at a particular fellow called brain um to this day i can't hear the word brain without going brain brain brain brain brain brain what's that this is in reference to a cartoon called pinky in the brain okay pinky in the brain was one of my favorite cartoons it came out in 1995

a spin-off from a Warner brother's cartoon series called anima maniacs and it was about these two lab mice who every night tried to take over the world that was their catchphrase I've always wondered about the best laid plans of mice. Oh, not none. Well, yeah, I mean, men fine. But the best laid plans of mice? Yeah, you would think that they're not very well laid plans. No.

But this cartoon series, it was directed by Stephen Spielberg, which is quite unusual for a TV show. Okay. The voice of one of the characters, the brain, who was the intelligent, the more intelligent of the two lab mice. he said and this will make much more sense if you actually know what the character sounds like but he said he based the voice of the brain

roughly on 70% Orson Wells, 20% Vincent Price and 10% who knows what Well that sounds like a good voice Yes it is, a very good voice One of the writers of Pinky in the Brain was Alex Borstein who ended up playing Lois

Griffin in The Family Guy Okay The TV series had guest voices like Eric Idol, Dick Clark, Mark Hamill, Jim Belushi. Goodness. It was a fantastic TV show, and I literally, the age I am, I cannot hear the word brain without internally humming the theme tune, brain, brain, brain, brain, brain. I really hope there are people out there who are with me.

Yeah, yeah. Well, if they aren't with you, they'll be with me because the thing that I think of when I think of brains is five, four, three, two, one. And I think of brains. And I think of the Thunderbirds puppet with the milk bottle bottom glasses. Yes. Voiced by David, because we're voiceovers. Naturally.

This is where we're going. I mentioned it before. We may not. But only, so if you ever want a voice like ours, you're welcome to get in touch with us. Yes, please do. We are available for hire. So the chap who voiced brains in Thunderbirds was a guy called David Graham. Right.

And David Graham did other things as well. He invented, apart from the voice of brains, on Thunderbirds, he was also the voice of Parker, Lady Penelope's chauffeur. And he was the first voice of the Daleks. Oh, was he really? Yeah. God, what a career. And he's the voice of Grandpa Pig.

Oh, stop it, in Pepper Pig. Yes. Gosh, that is a diverse range. Yeah. I mean, he died last year in 2024, at the age of 99. But David Graham sort of set the style for all of these types of puppets. And I've read the history of where brains came from. He was like an orphan that was adopted by a Cambridge Don.

Oh, they've written him a backstory. Oh, yes. Oh, he's got a backstory. Yeah. Again, show notes. Great. Can there be any records? Are there any Guinness records about brains?

Yes, there are. There are Guinness records for every type of thought process and intellectual thing. Yeah, but that's not, that's just what brains do. That isn't actually brains there, is it? No. So the records actually regarding physical brains are few and far between, but I've got a couple. Okay. The record for the world's heaviest human brain, bearing in mind earlier on, I said that the average human brain is about three pounds. Yes. In 1899, a fella called Gerard Christian Van Walsam. Of course. Of course. who was a doctor at the Mirrenberg Asylum in the Netherlands,

he performed an autopsy on one of his patients who died for unknown reasons. And they removed his brain and found that it weighed six pounds double the average weight of a human brain. The deceased in question was never named and they never came to any conclusion as to why his brain was so heavy. It was roughly average size, but it was just really dense. the Guinness Record

for the largest collection of human brains which instantly sounds creepy Was it Dr. Fafur? For who? Fafur in The Man with Two Brains. No, no, no, it wasn't him. Okay. This is the University of Southern Denmark

in Odense. They have 9,479,479 human brain specimens in storage. I don't know. But yes, just under 9,500,000 individual brain specimens last counted in 2022. Wow. You know Einstein's brain

went missing? Yes, I wonder if it's in the same place as JFKs. I don't know but in 1955 the doctor who was performing the autopsy stole his brain and sliced it up into bits. Right. And it was found again and given to various institutions including the National Museum of Health and Medicine

in the Mutton Museum. Oh, so different locations own different slices of Einstein's brain. Yes. Wow. And the last record I found, a little bit whimsical, the largest human image of a brain, which is to say there's a group of people in different coloured shirts standing in such a way that from the air, it looks like a brain. Okay.

And the different coloured shirts represent the different parts of the brain. 1,202 participants did this on behalf of the Alzheimer's Association at Washington University. Oh, nice. So yeah, there's a picture online. of these people standing in the shape of a brain. Fantastic. Well, I think that's all our brain facts, isn't it?

Yes, my brain is completely worn out now. So thank you very much for listening. We'd like you to do some things, please. Oh, yes, we would, very much. So if you think we're brainy, tell us that we're brainy and give us a really nice five-star review on your podcast player, please. That would be very kind of you. And if you happen to know some other brainy people

who would be interested in this brainy, podcast please tell them about it so that they can tune in and join in the fun yes and then of course if you don't want to miss another episode of factorial you should subscribe to the podcast so every Thursday you'll wake up and go my brain thinks it's time for some exercise there you go your weekly exercise for your brain you can do exercise in bed without moving isn't that good such good news well thank you so much for coming along we do hope you'll join us again next time the next thrilling instalment of factorily.

Goodbye. Auvoir.