Good Job, Brain! - 181: Good Job, BRAIN!

Episode Date: May 10, 2016

We want your brains......to be smarter and stronger! This week we found weird trivia stories about our weirdest and most mysterious thinkin' organ. Ever been impressed by someone with a photographic memory? Dana finds out what exactly is photographic memory and now we all want to be memory athletes for the Olympics of memorization. Karen revisits Temple of Doom and tries to pinpoint the real origin of the monkey brains dish and why is it in popular culture so much. And believe it or not, Colin dons his Ripley mustache and shares a brainy story of a remarkable man named Phineas Gage. ALSO: More audio palindromes, Chris' Boston trivia Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast. Hello, breathing, breezy, brave brigade of brains, brachiating into brilliance. This is good job, Brain, your weekly quiz show and offbeat trivia podcast. Today shows episode 181. And of course, I'm your humble host, Karen, and we are your branch of brabbling braggadocios who brunch on breadsticks and brandies at brasseries. I'm Colin.

I'm Dana. And no Chris this week. He is off in Boston at the Penny Arcade Expo. But he actually recorded something for us. We can't keep them down. We can't keep them, yeah. And he specifically told me not to listen to it first. And so I'm playing this blind.

And I don't know what it is. So here I'm going to play it and we'll see what it is. All right. Hello, my fellow good job brainers, and hello to you, home audience. I am not present for the recording sessions this week because I am on the east coast of these great United States visiting the Pax East Gaming Convention in Boston. But I didn't want to leave you without some trivia, so I would like to tell you about a famous building in downtown Boston. It's technically called the Berkeley building, but everyone knows it as the old John Hancock building, since it used to be the offices of the John Hancock Insurance Company. It's a 26-story office building designed with a vertical column of bright lights in its spire.

This is actually a weather beacon, and the specific pattern of lights tells you about the coming weather, and you can see it for miles around. The beacon can display red and blue lights, either solid or flashing, and you can remember what pattern means what weather by using the following mnemonic. Steady blue, clear view. Flashing blue, clouds do. Steady red, rain ahead. Flashing red, snow instead. Now, here's a trivia question.

If you were to look up and see the old Hancock Tower's weather, Beacon flashing alternating red and blue lights, what would that mean? Here's a hint for you. Over the last 15 years, this has happened three times. Okay. I'm guessing it's something that hasn't been talked about. Thunder, thunderstorms? They've had thunder and lightning in Boston hurricane.

Flushing blue was Cloud. Flashing blue was cloud and what was flashing red. Snow. I mean, sleet? Sleet? This seems like Boston. I mean, that seems hard to believe

that would only have happened three times in Boston or whatever. I think it's something really exotic. What was that molasses flood or whatever? It's molasses. Right. That's right. Right.

It's frozen molasses, right. Well, the thing is, it's supposed to be an indicator So if you're at home and you see it I feel like if it's hailing It's like well yeah I see ice cubes fall from the sky I don't really need lights to tell me what it is

Tornado Flood or mud? I don't think there's tornadoes in that part of the that's what I'm saying I think it's got to be something that's rare If it only happens I know what it is I know what it is Three times the last 15 years

It's the Red Sox win the World Series It must be It's not a weather-reliar event at all. That's my guess. Okay. Hold on. So, do you think you have it? To recap, I asked, what does it mean when the lights on the top of the old Hancock building are flashing blue and red,

with the hint that this has happened three times in the last 15 years? The answer? The lights flash blue and red when the Boston Red Sox win the World Series. You got it! Did you get it? Our Boston listeners probably new. Thanks for playing, everybody, and I'll see you when I get back. gives me a shame that he's like he wasn't adult when Carmen San Diego was

because that was like a perfect clue for a Carmen San Diego TV show thing he's got that voice and everything well thank you Chris and I know you're having fun working and parading your baby around at Penny Arcade Expo I'm sure getting a lot of love very exciting news you know this is kind of an excuse why we've been a little bit spotting our recording. It's a very busy month for us. Not only was my laptop stolen, but more importantly, with good news, we have

been working on the good job brain book. Yay! I think we made some social posts, and it's on the blog, but listener, if you're you don't read any of those things, well, we're telling you now, we got a book deal from Ulysses publishing.

Our deadline is very soon. Yeah. It's shaping up. It is. Good. Yeah. I've got like three pages written. I'm feeling pretty good. You know, knock out the next 50. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, it is very exciting and it is a lot of work, stressful and fun and exhilarating all at the same time. I know.

I mean, this is my first time ever publishing a book. Not for Chris. Yeah. It's a old hat for Chris. Yeah. He's like, I'm professional writer. Whatever. But it's very exciting regardless. So the number one question we get is so what's in the book? Oh. How would you answer that? Oh, you're putting me on the spot here. Well, I think on the cover, we promised.

I think we're contractually obligated to deliver puzzles, quizzes, and more fun. So, yeah, you know, I would say it's maybe a little heavier on the quizzes than the show. The show is a nice mix of quiz and story segments, maybe. But it's a lot of good stuff. There's also stuff that we can't do on the show. Visual puzzles. Yep, yep, crosswords. a very cool connect the dots that Dana put together.

Just a lot of awesome stuff. And drawings. We've been doing a lot of our original drawings as well. I mean, this is not an insult. I hope readers and listeners, you guys have this in your bathroom. I think it was designed. It's perfect for that.

It's designed for a nice bathroom read. Well said. Yeah. Yeah. And for the whole family to enjoy. Not at the same time. I mean, I don't know. I'm not going to tell you how to run your family's bathroom.

You know, yeah. So it is. available on Amazon for pre-order now. So we have to do it. So we have to finish the book. It's going to be available in September. Yeah, in time for a holiday gift. So it's very exciting.

All right. Without further ado, let's jump into our first general trivia segment, pop quiz, hot shot, and it's just you two, Dana versus Colin. And I have two specific cards. It can be random. Okay. One is... One of those doesn't even look like a trivial pursuit.

You won is TV trivia on the go from a listener from a while back. All right. All right. Okay. Okay. Right hand or left hand. Left hand. Left hand.

It is Trivial Pursuit Genus 4. All right. Here we go. Blue Wedge for people and places. What European city decided new names were in order for foul lane, stinky lane, and bladder street. Wow. Fowl Lane, Stinky Lane, Blatter Street. Yeah.

European? London. Correct. It is London. Blatter Street sounds so British. It reminds me of Sweeney Todd. Yeah. What was the street Sweeney Tau was on?

They were on Fleet Street. Fleet Street, okay. But just like how... It was bleak. It was bleak. Blatter Street. All right, Pink Wedge for Arts and Entertainment. What debut book did Tom Clancy unleash on the world in 1984?

Four. Unleash. Is that a clue? The first... Something with a dog. So the first Tom Clancy novel. Yeah. Interesting.

The first... Well, I mean, man, I mean, if it's based on the movies... Is it? Right. Yeah, I don't know. Like, where was the Hunt for Red October in the sequence? Patriot Games. Dan, do you want to take a guess?

Clear and present danger. Well, that is a Tom... That's a good guess. That's a good guess. It is the hunt for Red October. Okay. All right. Was that the first Tom Clancy movie?

I think so. I believe it was. What year was that? 90... Oh, we just had this at Pub Quiz the other night. We got it wrong. Yeah, we did. And then we were trying to use Chris's encyclopedic knowledge of movies from 1992 to help us figure it out.

Yeah, that's right. We were one year off. It was 1990, yeah. All right. Yellow Wedge for History, who was dubbed Lennon's Left Legg during the early stages of Russia's Marxist Movement? Oh, interesting. Dana Trotsky? Not so I would guess too.

Incorrect. That would have been my guess. It is Joseph Stalin. Oh, okay. I guess that's the other, yeah. Linen's left leg. Yeah. And it doesn't sound like a compliment.

You know, right? It's kind of weird. All right. Brown Wedge for sports and nature. Sorry, not sports in nature, science in nature. What freshwater mollusks produce red or pink color pearls. Fresh water mollusks. Red or, so like some special kind of oyster then? Or just snails? Is it just looking for oyster, do you think? It's not oyster. Oh, okay. It is mussels.

Oh, okay. I don't know. I didn't even know they produced pearls. Yeah, they totally do. I was looking up pearls the other day for our book. And did you know that the inside of pearls is often parasites, like worms? Oh. That's the inside of a natural pearl. Yeah, because it irritates. It's often. I mean, I knew it was like grit or sand. I didn't know that they could do parasites, too. It's almost never sand. They're very good at getting the sand out. It's like a jawbreaker.

Yeah, the parasites burrow a little hole in their shell and get in there. So sometimes it's a snail that's in there. Sometimes it's a fish. And when they put a hole in a natural pearl, like brown ooze comes out from the parasite. And I was like, it's what's left of the corpse. Gross. They don't tell you that in the Tiffany's egg. I don't.

You don't tell you it's a big pearl. It's trying to keep that knowledge. I wonder if you can X-ray pearls. I'm sure you can. I'm sure you can. I'm sure you can. I always thought it was like sand or something. That's such a horror movie.

Yeah. Oh my. It's alive. It was alive and now it's just dead brown ooze. All right. Next question for sports and leisure green wedge. What NFL season was dubbed Jerry and Jimmy's last roundup? Oh, geez.

Okay, so it's a reference to Jerry Jones and Jimmy Johnson. So I'm guessing Dallas Dallas Cowboys last, I'm guessing. If all of this is correct, they're guessing like the last year that Jimmy Johnson coached the Dallas Cowboys, man. 90, 94, I don't know. God, you're so close. One year off. What was it? 93.

93. Okay. Good. Wow. Still impressive. Yeah. Still impressive. I didn't even know who that was a reference.

Yeah. A lot of J names. A lot of J names, yeah. Last question. Wildcard, orange wedge. What European countries' drivers were the first to fill up tanks with a scented gasoline called fruity vanilla super? What? Whoa.

A scented gasoline? Germans. Fruity vanilla super. Sure. I'll go in with Germans. Why not? Are they that silly? Are the Germans frivolous enough to have?

Oh, they're so science. Or France, because French vanilla. It is not Germany. It is France. I like, okay, nice, nice. I need to read more about this. Yeah. I mean, it has to also smell like gasoline.

You can't cover it off. This is just to get kids interested in gasoline. It's such a transparent. Why do I pick a food flavor? Yeah, I want to drink it. Like, ideally, if your car is in good operating working condition, you don't smell the gas as you're driving. That's a problem. All right, good job, Brains.

So today is episode 181, 181. And it's not very common that we have a palindrome number for our episode number. So I decided to revisit one of my favorite things that we talked about on the show. And I was like, a while ago, I think it was in our music episode. And I was like, well, are there audio palindromes where you say something? Oh, because Colin, you had like a whole section on backmasking, playing things in reverse. Are there any palindromes that you say, and when you play in reverse, it sounds like the same thing. We found a couple before.

And what was the name for them? Was there a special name for it? Audio palindrums. Oh, okay. We did a couple, we did three on the show, and I believe it was New Moon, work crew, and ominous cinema. And ominous cinema did in reverse sound like onus. Right, right, right. I remember again, you reversed it, right?

Yeah, and the other ones sound kind of alien-y. Yeah. It was like, new, moon. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, uh, I have another batch. Oh, all right. I want you guys to read out. I wrote on a piece of paper, read out what your phrase is, and then we'll play it backwards

and see if it sounds like the original. Okay. All right. Or does it sound like crazy alien language? And I have a long one. you're caught talk roy like i guess a person called roy sure turns up when you play something backwards all right let's let's play backwards and let's see how it sounds hey oh talk girl no no that's your no that's that that's that that is that was in decipherable

i think the yore and roy maybe does work does work something okay yeah yeah you're right you're right the very beginning and the very end you're right you're right dana y'all lie yeah la you know like like a ghost oh let me hear that again oh yeah yeah law all right colin you have funny enough and then this is a funny enough funny enough funny enough funna enough that's pretty good it sounds like it sounds like real words at least yeah fun enough I hear it again fun enough oh it sounds like fun enough that's not yeah it does it does I bet I could get that better with a little practice yeah yeah say funny fun e enough oh okay well that's the winner that was good yeah woo nice funny enough you know I just want to loop it and turn into a song

Thank you guys for participating. That was fun. All right. Thank you for finding those. And so today's show, it's kind of weird that we've done four years and never did a topic on this. We decided to do a whole episode on Brain. Our show's Good Job Brain. We each have one.

I mean, we've talked about, yes. No, I mean, there's one for the three of us. Yeah. Yeah. We share it. And we talked about a lot of cognitive stuff before, but never a whole episode dedicated to Brain. So today, it's good job, Brain! Oh, I could tell you why, the ocean's near the shore.

I could think of things I never thought before. And then I'd sit and think some more. I would not be just a nothing. My head all full of stuff and my heart all full of pain. I would dance and be merry life would be a ding, a dare. If I only had a brain So when we settled on the topic of brains My first thought, I have to admit, was zombies.

Like, did I want to do something with zombies and brains? You know, and then it was like, what, if I could get into the science of, well, a zombie wouldn't actually want your brain because... Wait, really? I don't know. I'm saying, like, that's kind of my point. It's like, it's just conjecture. A little off topic.

I do like talking about things. as if they're real. And me and my friends, we were debating how do fairies reproduce, do fairies reproduce, like, birds? You need to write a book because you had mermaids also in how they reproduce. Or do they reproduce, like, you know, like, I would assume fairies are more, like, they're more like insects. Do you remember Thumbolina? Like, she grew, she was a plant.

Yeah. And then, uh, she wasn't a fairy, but the fairies gave her to the people. So maybe that's how, like, from a little pepots. I think that's, like, more, more bug-like, how they lay their eggs in the, in a plant or something. I mean, it's all magic, but. Yeah, fascinating. Yeah, go on. No, please, go on.

Yes, yes. Anyway, yeah. I would zombies. We'll explore the topic of zombies and brains, maybe on Brains part two. No, that the second thing that came to mind, and I immediately decided I want to talk about this, is one of my favorite stories from history is about a man, who you may have heard of, a man named Phineas Gage. and it's a great very kind of... It's a very potter name. Yeah, or like a jewels verne.

Jules Verne. It was like a jeweler's tool. What kind of gauge is it? It's a Phineas gauge. All right, well, I'm glad you guys haven't heard of him. Let me show you a photo here. Actually, this is a Deggerotype, strictly speaking. This is a photo of Phineas Gage.

And he's, you know, not a bad looking... He's holding a gun in his hand. Yeah, what is he holding there in his hand? It kind of looks like maybe a harpoon or a spear of. some kind, maybe. It's like a pointy bow staff. Why is his face all weird? His face is a little weird. He's not winking. His left

eye is actually stitched shut in an accident that he had. He's an attractive person overall. I would say objectively he's up He looks like Christopher Reeves. Yeah. He looks like an actor. He does. It almost looks like in a movie where they got

an actor to sit for the photo of the character. Yeah. Let me tell you about Phineas Gage. In the 1840, he made his living as a foreman on a blasting crew. Okay, so like using gunpowder to blast away rocks. Oh, okay, okay. For like railways and things like that. And as a kid, I remember seeing a video reenactment of his life and the accident that cost him the vision in his eye.

And what happened to Phineas Gage is that he had the thing that he is holding there, which is a large metal rod, flew completely in one side and out the other side. of his head. Oh my God. Why is he posing with it? Look, Karen, hey man, if something flew through your head and you live to tell about it, wouldn't you want to kind of carry it around as a trophy? Yeah. So this is one of my all-time favorite stories. He is, he is a trivia legend. I first heard about him, I think, through Ripley's believe it or not. It was one of these really super fantastic kind of things. I have here some gruesome, you know, illustrations of Phineas Dage's skull, you know, which, of course, was examined after he passed away. There is a hole right through the skull where the rod passed.

And he survived. So, yeah, so let me tell you about what happened. So, as I say, he was a foreman on a blasting crew. And in the 1840s, he and his crew were clearing some rock away. They were working in Vermont. And he was using what's called, it looks like, you know, as I say, it looks like a javelin almost. It's a long metal rod. It's called it a tamping iron, tamping, like to tamp down something.

And the way they would blast away rock is they would. drill a hole into a rock, put some powder in, tamped down the powder, put in like a filling agent, like some earth or clay or sand, something like that, tamp it down a little bit more, clear the people out of the way, and then blow the rock. That's what they do to whales. That's so. They're like the dead whales, the dead beach whales. Right, right.

So the details of what led up to the accident are a little unclear, but he had his partner. they were drilling a hole in the rock, putting in the blasting powder. He was tamping down the powder, and he turned away a look or talk to someone else at the crew, and it gets a little hazy from here. But what happened next was the powder went off, possibly prematurely, possibly there was a spark in there, while the tamping rod was still in the hole, and while he, Phineas Stage, was standing directly in front of it. And the blast shot the rod directly back out of the hole, directly up. under his chin, up through the top of his head, and out the other side landing some good distance

away. It didn't get stuck in there. It just cleanly, like, went through his head. He sat on the ground. They say he kind of just twitched a little bit. Sat up was, was by all accounts, conscious. He could talk, but he was acting a little funny, you know, as you might. Yeah, you know.

So, like, his entire work crew was like, oh, my God, this guy just had a spike blasted through his head, through his brain, you know, blood everywhere, little bits of brain matter everywhere. But he was talking and alive, you know. So they load him up on the cart and they bring him in to get medical attention, you know, the best medical attention they can at the time. So what year? This was 1848. Okay. So it's not like modern medicine is not that. It's, you know, it's, like, right in the period when the medicine was modern enough to save his life, you know, but we're talking like Civil War era medicine, basically.

Right. That's a great question, Dana. Yeah. I mean, the germs alone, it's amazing that this guy lived after this, like, not just in the moments after, but in the weeks and months and some years after. So they loaded him up on the cart, took him a mile back into town where they got, you know, Dr. Kame looked at him and basically is like, holy crap son. You got a hole in your head. Because if I were a doctor, be like, I've never seen this.

What do I do? Right, right. And so now this is where, so remember I told you, I had seen a video reenactment of this when I was a kid. So at this point in the video reenactment, the doctor,

this is like, I was just like wrapped as a child. The doctor puts his hand. No. Under Gage's chin, puts his other hand in the top of his head and can reach in his head and touch his fingers together.

Why would he do that? What a bad doctor. It's like the moment he dies. As I say, he could talk, he could walk. He did lose vision in his left eye. You know, okay, fine. Yeah, some damage. It appears by all accounts, I mean, most physicians today, they look at the damage and

they're like, oh, his frontal lobes were just totally destroyed, okay? Like, just obliterated. But, you know, that part of the brain wasn't responsible, isn't responsible for a lot of the types of sort of functions that they were testing him for, you know, so you could kind of look at him and be like, okay, yeah, he's generally okay after this, you know, because he can walk and talk and, you know, remembers his name and things like that. So the story that I was always taught was that, like, right from the get go, things were different. He was just like, oh, he isn't the same Phineas anymore. Yeah. And, you know, I had heard that there was stories, like, he reverted almost to

like an animalistic state, you know, people were like, oh, it's, it's severed the part of his brain that made him, you know, a civilized man. Yeah. In recent years, more recent historians have shed a lot of light that that probably was not true. That, you know, again, he did have his frontal lobes just shattered. So it is going to change him a little bit. But that the thinking now is there's probably, you know, given an amazing turn of events

and enough luck that he couldn't sort of resume a functional life after all and not actually be just this sort of half man beast. And indeed, you'd look at the man in that photo that I showed you guys. It seemed like a perfectly respectable guy, except for the weird habit of carrying around a metal spike that flew through his head and having his eyes sewn shut. There was a great article on Slate.com a couple years ago by Sam Keene, who Karen wrote The Disappearing Spoon.

Yeah. And other great historical science books. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, even if you think you've heard about Phineas Age before, I encourage you to go find this article. It's a really interesting read about, what has happened to the legend of him in the later years. And I'll make a very long story short for you guys,

which is that, you know, historians today have made any number of attempts to kind of reconstruct the exact path that the rod took through his skull. You know, and I'll show you here a photo really quickly. Okay. Is it growth? Yeah, I mean, it's a skull. Oh, okay. It's like, oh, okay.

So here's his skull, which is currently in the Harvard Medical School repositories. And you can see, I mean, it, it, it may. Man, there's a hole in the guy's skull, yeah. So they've tried to do, like, you know, computer reconstructions and digital, you know, we're never going to know. We're never going to know exactly what part of his brain was destroyed, not just by the rod, but by bone fragments and whatever chunks of rock, the gunpowder, you know, whatever infections he may have had. Possibly doctors sticking their hands down there. Yeah, right. Doctor is like, a bowling ball.

He's like, yeah, if you cough up an engagement ring, that's, yeah. Yeah, no, no, no. So, yeah, so Sam Keen, like, doing some really good research here, basically, found out that in his later years, Gage, you know, he recovered enough to live a reasonable life. He moved to Chile. He became a coach driver, you know, and, I mean, like, his point is that somebody who was reduced to sort of a weird, quasi-human state would not be able to go and take on a new life and drive a coach and do things like that. Yeah. He did, he did eventually, I mean, he didn't live long. He was only in his 30s when he died.

And he died actually not far from here in San Francisco, California. Oh. Yeah. So even though he's... From what? Do we know? Yeah, he had had a seizure in 1860. You know, entirely possible the seizures were related to the accident.

Yeah. But, I mean, he lived 12 years after a spike flying through his brain with 1848 medical technology. And I doubt they plugged it up. Oh, man. There are some crazy stories about what he would do. So apparently, so, like, it healed over well enough. I mean, and they had to do, they had to remove a lot of debris, you know, to clean him up. I'm trying to keep this as a stomach turning as I can.

But apparently, like, almost as like a party trick or a novelty, like in his later years, like, you could part his head and you could see, like, the, his scalp pulsating, like, below because there's no, there was no bone right there. Like, it was just flesh and skin, yeah, an interesting party trick to be sure. Sure. Yeah. And, like, if you walk into a party and you're carrying a metal rod, you know, you're going to ask that guy, hey, what's up with the metal rod, buddy? It's protection. It's peacocking. Man, yeah.

He was. And then he shows you there. It is like he needs some attention. He's like the ultimate definition of, hey, man, walk it off. Yeah. Like, when he was getting treated to the doctors, like, he was telling him he's like, oh, yeah, you know, I want to get back out to the blast site as soon as possible. No, son. You're going to be off the job for a few weeks at least.

Yeah. It feels really good to be productive, but a lot of the time it's easier said than done, especially when you need to make time to learn about productivity so you can actually, you know, be productive. But you can start your morning off right and be ready to get stuff done in just a few minutes with the Inc. Productivity Tip of the Day podcast. You'll hear advice on everything from how to build confidence to how to get the best night's sleep. New episodes drop every weekday, and each one is five minutes or less, so you only have to listen a little to get a lot more out of your weekdays. Listen and subscribe to Inc. Productivity Tip of the Day, wherever you get your podcasts.

That's Inc. Productivity Tip of the Day, wherever you get your podcasts. There are really many reasons to listen to our podcast, Big Picture Science. It's kind of a challenge to summarize them all, Molly. Okay, here's a reason to listen to our show, Big Picture Science, because you love to be surprised by science news. We love to be surprised by science news. So, for instance, I learned on our own show that I had been driving around with precious metals in my truck before it was stolen. That was brought up in our show about precious metals and also rare metals, like most of the things in your catalytic converter.

I was surprised to learn that we may begin naming heat waves, like we do hurricanes. You know, prepare yourself for heatwave Lucifer. I don't think I can prepare myself for that. Look, we like surprising our listeners. We like surprising ourselves by reporting. the new developments in science, and while asking the big-picture questions about why they matter and how they will affect our lives today and in the future. Well, we can't affect lives in the past, right? No, I guess that's a point. So the podcast is called Big Picture Science, and you can hear

it wherever you get your podcasts. We are the host. Seth is a scientist. I'm a science journalist, and we talk to people smarter than us. We hope you'll take a listen. Wow. So almost on the opposite end of the spectrum when it comes to brains. I wanted to talk about photographic memories. When I was a kid, I was really into the idea of having a photographic memory. Me too. I wanted to practice. Me too. You could look at it. You could look at a page and like just look at it and then you remember you can remember every word that's on the page and how it's arranged exactly. And I mean, I don't have a photographic memory. Could you guys do it?

No. But I was just like you. I was fascinated with the idea. I have a very good memory. Like visual memory, yes. But I wouldn't say it's photographic. Well, I'm hoping you're going to get here. But like I, like when I was a kid, I totally believed it was real.

And as I got older, I had less and less belief in it. So let me tell you about photographic. Okay. All right. Apparently, there's only been one person, one person in the world who has been, who has claimed to have a genuine photographic memory. There was a professor at Harvard in the 70s, late 60s, 70s, named Charles Stromeyer, the third. And he was really interested in memories and finding somebody with a photographic memory.

And there was a teacher there, an art teacher, that he called Elizabeth in his research. And she had a photographic memory. Like she could recall poems and other languages that she didn't understand and be able to, like, write them. She could— That's a good test. She could recall images perfectly and draw them. So his test, though, he took stereographic images, which are images made up of little dots,

and you look at it with your left eye, you look at it with your right, and it kind of looks 3D. So he would show her with one eye, one of the images, then wait a period of time, a few minutes, show her the other one. She could remember the dots from the first image, 10,000 dots from the first image.

my god and from the second image interesting and put it together really know what the 3d object is and when you look at it by itself it's just dots you cannot read it there's 10,000 of them she couldn't like take a shortcut no so he tried like oh well wait a day between them we'll show one eye one of them wait a day show that she could remember it and do the 3D they got up to like a million dots and four hours like show a million dot image he like rotated them sometimes and she would know that it was rotated and turn her head and see it. Whoa. Sounds too good to be true.

She's a real person? Too good to be true. Oh. So people are like, that's fascinating. Can we meet her? He married her and never let anyone interview her. Again, she never was researched again. He published this article about her nature.

I'm going to sound a little fishy. I mean. What? Really? Canadian supermodel. Well, like, yeah. He published it in nature. I believe she existed.

Nobody says that Elizabeth got somebody that he married. He did marry her, but then no one was ever allowed to test her again. And she is the only one they have ever found in the world. And they've done newspaper things where millions of people have tried. Like no one else has ever had this superpower to do this. The fact that they won't let other researchers test her. That's like the biggest red flag for me. Yeah.

Uh-huh. Yeah. Well, yeah, because it's like, then you make money off of like going on speaking tours and, you know, going to different universities and holding symposiums and stuff. And that didn't happen. I mean, that's, people would be able to learn so much from her because the human brain doesn't work that way. Like, the way we look at photographs is different from that. It's impressionistic. We don't like, yeah. There's a lot of memory. There is such a thing as idetic memory. And, like, if you, if you Google photographic memory on Wikipedia, it just redirects you to idetic memory, which is not photographic memory. Oh, I was always told those were the same thing. No.

Oh, okay. It's the closest humans have photographic memory, but it's not actually. Oh, but idetic memory is real. It is real, real. Basically, pre-adolescent children have it, like six to 12 are mostly the people who have it. It's not a lot. It's very few children. Maybe one or two adults have ever had it, something like that.

Like, it's a very, it's usually kids. And how do they define idea? Yeah, what is it? So it's basically, the way they test for it is you are looking at an easel. They put a picture on the easel. You look at it for 30 seconds. They take the picture away. And then you're recalling the picture that was there.

The problem is they don't have perfect recall of the image when they're doing that. And if they blink or if you, like, distract them a bit, like, it'll go away and they won't be able to remember it at all. And it's like they just took a snapshot in their brain maybe for a moment of what it was. It's not photographic because it's not precise and it doesn't last forever. Got it. It's not like Elizabeth with her 24 hours memorizing, 10,000 dots. No, no, no. There's also a thing called hyperthymesia, which is also known as highly superior autobiographical memory.

So people remember everything that has happened to them in their lives. Okay, I've read about people who claim to have this experience. Yes. So there was a woman who had that, and she was asked about, like, the day that the mash finale aired, and she knew exactly what day. Wow. She could remember the weather. There's some thought that maybe this is just, like, a part of an obsessive, compulsive

memory. Like, you just remember everything. You're always going over it with yourself and reminding yourself. Oh, okay. That makes sense. Yeah. But there are some people who have amazing memories. That's the other thing I've unearthed with this.

There's the, yeah, the world memory championships. Yeah, I was just going to say, yeah. And those are, I mean, you put you up on stage and you don't know what they're going to tell you, right? Yeah. So last year. It's like the memory games. Yeah, it is the memory. So those people use mnemonics.

Like they have, that's different from photographic memory. Yeah. Yeah, they have memories. It's like Sherlock or something. Yeah. Like they're making a picture of it. They're books about how to develop your memory and become much better at it. Last year, an American won the world memory championships.

Ooh. That's right. I was going to bring it. So Alex Mullen had one hour to memorize as many numbers as he could. He got 3,029 digits. Gee. After three, staring at it for an hour. That's bananas. He could recall. Yeah, you're just wired differently. Yeah. Yeah. You've figured out how to organize your brain in such a way that you can. That's just amazing. There's, I mean, they have all sorts of things like spoken numbers, like you hear them and then you have to say them back or. cards like you have to remember the order of cards come out and people get into the

thousand or it's like they're athletes they call the memory athletes oh that's cool because they are yeah yeah actually i saw um um because we talk we love talking about rubyx cube and speed cubing yeah there is another another mode of competition they give you and i saw a video of a kid they give you a scrambled rubic's cube and you look at it and then for like maybe like two minutes and then when you're ready you put blindfolds on and you basically solve the cute oh right right yeah that's crazy and it's like because you can't feel the colors you just have to memorize what move what move what move oh my goodness there was stuff where they thought um chess players expert chess players maybe had photographic memories because they could remember every move that happened in the game but then they were like well what if we make it move in patterns that don't match the rules of the game and they couldn't do it very oh interesting Yeah, so it's like, it is a domain-specific knowledge. Yeah. I had a friend in college who cleaning out the house, I think, that they lived in,

they found an old, like, improve your memory kit or something from the 70s. And so they're like, on a lark. He's like, yeah, I'm going to try this. Yeah. All I remember is that one of the techniques they had, and, you know, it was fairly reasonable stuff. It was just, it's a skill. You have to learn techniques.

So, like, the technique I remember they had was the house technique. So you imagine, you were trying to remember. I don't know, a list of 30 things. So you set yourself up in a house that you know. Oh, memory palace, yeah. So you go into a room, this on the wall, it's on this, yeah, same kind of thing. And you have to practice. You do have to practice.

To visit your house. Like an athlete, you have to put in the time training. There's a book by another slate author named Joshua Fowler, F-O-E-R. It's called Moonwalking with Einstein. With Einstein, yeah. And that was his mnemonic for remembering cards because he was imagining like a diamond gloves and a penny loafers and it's every everyone's different everyone's different all right well I'm happy to hear I'm happy to hear that like photographic efficient yeah I mean I guess I was wasting time

as a kid but yeah it sounds so glamorous it does well like in like spy movies or something like that you know it's be like oh she saw the map once and it's in her head yeah the idea that you can basically your head is like a camera yeah store pictures at any given it's so appealing yeah They also found, though, that people who had, like, idetic memories or whatever, like, are not more intelligent than normal people. Like, it doesn't have to do with your, like, synthesizing the information. You can just recall it. Oh, okay.

Yeah. So it's like, oh, you don't feel so bad. You know, Scrabble players, it's not like they know the, you know, the definition. Yeah, they don't know the definition. A lot of them don't even speak English. Yeah, they just memorize all the words. Very cool.

No frills, delivers. Get groceries delivered to your. door from No Frails with PC Express. Shop online and get $15 in PC optimum points on your first five orders. Shop now at nofrills.ca. Um, so when we talk about brain, uh, the first thing that came to mind was not zombies, but, um, I was scarred for life as a kid. Indiana Jones, Temple of Doom.

The monkey brains. There is a scene where they're eating dinner. I believe they're in some exotic local. Pencott Palace. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Some, some exotic place with exotic food. And there was a food where there was like a, they serve snakes and they open up the snakes.

A bunch of baby snakes come out and eat it. There was like a soup with a, with a goat eyeball that floated to the top. I forgot all of these. Yeah. Really? It was just like one after the other. The one thing. The one thing that just when I talk, when I think about brains, I just think of as dessert in the movie, it was chilled monkey brains.

And it was like a head of, I mean, obviously now when you watch the movie, you're like, oh, that is so fake, right? Yeah, yeah. But it's like a monkey head. And then you open up the little scalp and there's like, the skull cap comes up. Yeah. And you know, and like I remember like in the movie,

it made like a little like sound too. It was like, ah, I got it. It's a jelly. And then like I realize there's so many different movies talking about the, the idea of eating monkey brains. There's another clue.

Clue. It was a plot device in, in the movie Clue with Tim Curry where they talk about eating monkey brains in D.C. because that's like a Cantonese, a Hong Kong delicacy. So I was like, so here's the thing. I believe people do eat monkey brains because a lot of us eat animals and you eat, you know, a lot of people like a pig. You eat all of the animals, including the organs and, you know, brain. I just believe that humans have eaten every part of every animal at some point.

For survival, right? And so I decide to look into eating. Is that a real dish? Okay. Okay. I'm going to guess. I'm going to guess, I'm going to guess yes, but not in the way that it was shown in Indiana Jones. Yes, you are correct. There are a lot of tribal diets that consists of eating an animal, and that includes eating them all of it, right? Eating all of it. And this is not just in Asia. This is not in the Middle East. Also in Africa. Just different because that's what they need to eat to survive. High protein. Yeah, hunter, gather, high in fat. There is no written document that any restaurant has served a dish.

with monkey brains. There isn't, you know, there might be like folklore that gets passed down. A lot of like online chain email, you know, urban legends that, you know, the Chinese do this. And it's like a really gruesome operation where they take a live monkey and then the guests strap the monkey down and you like beat the monkey with a hammer. And then you're like, who would do this? Yeah. This is not a real recipe.

Yeah. So that is a very, very widespread. bread. You know, this coupled with movies and depiction and Indian Jones are like, oh, this must happen somewhere. But no, that seems like that's an urban legend. And yes, there may be cultures that eat it, but there's no, there's no written document.

It's not a ritualized delicacy. It's not. Like we talked about the orde-a-lone. The Ordon is, you know, people still practice it. There's documentation on it. That one seems fake, though. The Oralan almost seems fake because it was so ritualistic. It did find this

And it's so interesting Because it's in the Chinese culture And there is a Chinese Like a phrase that we use To describe a really great smorgasbord Like a really impressive array of food Mahan Chen Shi That's why we say

Man that party had a real Put out a lot of stuff Like a buffet line like a feast However I did not know That this is referencing A real feast Specifically this is called The Manchurian Han

imperial feast in Chinese history, and this is like in the Qing dynasty, so it's the 1700s, there was one legendary feast that happened over the course of three days. And it was to celebrate at that time, China was ruled by the Manchurians from the north. And there's also the Han Chinese, which is another people group in China. And so the emperor, Kangxi, he thought, you know, in order to consolidate, like, the North and South China, the different powers and bring everyone together. And it was his 66th birthday. He decided to do this elaborate, legendary Chinese feast for his officials, for some of the

people in court. And it is just so extravagant using. And, you know, his thought was, let's highlight all the different. I mean, China's a big country. There's a lot of tribal groups, a lot of ethnic groups. It's almost like a world's fair. It is. It's a feast.

That's what I put in. It's the World's Feast of Chinese Banquet. It highlighted different cultures cooking methods, different schools of cooking. And there were like 300 dishes. I'm feeling inspired. Yeah. It's making me real great. The meal itself, there were like 300 dishes.

And then they had different like facets too. So there's like the, you know, like eight treasures is a very common Chinese saying. Right. Eight treasures this. Eight treasures are this. There's eight treasures are that. There's eight treasures of the mountain, eight treasures of the sea, eight treasures of the, you know, blah. And very exotic, weird animal meats used in this.

So like shark fin. Okay. And even going crazy or this has been validated. It's very poetic. It's called snowy palm. And I've heard about it in Chinese. What is that? It's a bear claw because it's gelatinous.

What? You eat the bear paw. It's like gelatinous. It's kind of like pigs feet. Wow. supposedly is a camel hump. You know, they could camel hump

because they're like the more desert- Because they can. Because they can. So, I mean, this is one of the judges called for monkey brains. Okay.

And it's actually, Jingyan Huanang, which means golden eye fire brain. So some say, very poetic. Not to oversell it. You know, some say that this could be monkey brain.

Some say there could be goat brain. It could be some other animal's brain. But, Some historians say that this was, they used monkey brain. And this is probably the only time in actual official records that said that at this kind of restaurantee feasts that this was served. Okay. Not like a tribe trying to survive and eating, you know, like in terms of like a dish that

is presented in a ritualistic way. Okay. Yeah. And the sad thing is because of the cultural revolution, a lot of old books, historical books and literature got burned and got destroyed. So this legendary. feast there's not there it's almost passed on you know kind of by story you know hearsay and it used to be written down it used to there used to be like ingredients or talking about the dishes but

we don't have like those records anymore and so now that whole feast has just got kind of boiled down to our vocabulary as calling something a real nice feast but really it's this legendary of epic proportions that you know serve weird things you know not to say that it was the feast that did it, but like that emperor, Emperor Kangxi, he was one of China's most respected and longest reigning emperors. And, and maybe his whole World's Fair feast kind of worked out. I could totally see, yeah. And that also like trickling down into Indiana Jones. Yeah, hundreds and hundreds of years later. Yeah. I heard this culture did this and, oh, must be monkey brains. I can see that. If you're going to have monkey brains, got to serve it in a head.

There was an Italian, like, a lock softcore porno movie that had like a very, you know, very exaggerated scene that is that urban legend of like oh there's a live monkey and at a restaurant oh okay i was wondering where you're going with this yeah i was like what part of the monkey are they serving for dinner wow and and so that may be the source of a lot of the urban legend came from that made up scene in the movie even director said that was all fake got it right it was foam hammers it was just like a kind of like a weird scene people made up and and somehow that trickled into to like, oh, this happened for real, you know, journey into monkey brains. I'm happy to hear that it is most likely not a real thing.

I think I kind of always suspected that, but yeah. Eating animal brains is not a... That happens. It happens. It happens. It does. It does. Actually, for a quick story, one of my first projects when I became an art director at GamePro,

I had to do this, this photo shoe for a story. And it's like the impact on brains from video games. and so our photo show was like let's get some fake brains and we'll have controllers in them and we couldn't find fake brains so I was like oh let's see if we can find real brains and like I went to the Chinese market and they sold pig brains

like by the bag probably fairly cheap I would imagine that was such a good photo that was a good layout you did that was a good layout yeah very very visceral you could post it on the website it's really good yeah so yeah so that's my adventure down in monkey brain chilled monkey brain still haunts me to this day

Yeah, me too. For me, it's the snakes, but that, that, yeah, that scene was just seared in my memory as a kid. Yeah, it was, it was the, the skull cap coming off. Yeah. Like, it didn't, you weren't sure. You're like, oh, those are monkey heads. And then the, like, the top of the head just comes off so perfectly. Yeah.

And the brain's there. Yeah. And you're like, oh, all right, woo. What a weird episode, you guys. So that's our episode on brains. really went in three different directions. It did. It did. Yeah. We covered all the corners of the globe too.

I hope you learned a lot of stuff about memory, about chilled monkey brains, and about Phineas Gage and his brain hole. You can find our show on iTunes, Stitcher, SoundCloud, Spotify, and our website, good jobbrain.com. And we'll see you guys next week. Bye. What does Sputnik have to do with student loans?

How did a set of trembling hands end the Soviet Union? How did inflation kill moon bases? And how did a former president decide to run for a second non-consecutive term? These are among the topics we deal with, on the My History Can Beat Up Your Politics Podcast. We tell stories of history that relate to today's news events. Give a listen. My History Can Beat Up Your Politics wherever you get podcasts.