Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: How Lobotomies Work

Episode Date: January 19, 2019

Lobotomies -- brain surgeries to relieve psychiatric problems -- are rarely performed today, but they were once fairly common. Tune in to learn more about the controversial history and practice of lobotomies. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren in Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at Airbnb.ca.host.

This season on Running the Break with CJ and Alex. For Meek Mill, so obviously huge ties to Philly was at a Sixers game recently. And in what seemed like a real life curb your enthusiasm as an episode, he accidentally tripped a ref sitting courtside as the ref was running back up court. You know what CJ? I gotta say, I feel like that should be a technical foul, one free throw for the opposing team. Yes, if you rep your town and your team as much as you do Meek Mill, he's a Sixer, right?

So the opposing team's got to take free throws or unless, you know, if we're going off of the curb episode, does Meek have the discography of that compares to like Seinfeld tapes that he could bring to the ref's, you know, hospital bed. Shout out to curb. That was one of the greatest episodes ever. Listen to Running the Break with CJ and Alex on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by FanDuel, make every moment more with FanDuel Sportsbook, an official

partner of the NBA. Hi everybody. Welcome to the Saturday Stuff You Should Know Select edition. Chuck here with my pick of the week, all the way back to 2009, May 19th. Lobotomies. Man, this one is crazy. This is one of those that's so good. I wish we could go back and do it again for the first time.

So much fun to research. Really interesting and grisly history, medical history. Some of my favorite stuff lies in those topics and this one is all about lobotomies. Man, oh man, just get ready to learn about the frontal lobe ice pick lobotomy. They actually used to do that. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. It's called Stuff You Should Know.

It's Josh and Chuck, coms in and long beach together. Now you know you're in trouble. What's up, Chuck? How long you been sitting on that one for the week? It's good. Thanks. How are you doing? I'm well, sir.

You? Pretty good. I'm feeling great, actually, Chuck. I am glad to be alive. Yes, so, Chuck, yes, I think this could arguably pan out to be our greatest podcast ever. You just jinxed us. No, I really don't think so. Chuck did the cheek thing twice before this one, just kind of enough to do it a second

time. And I don't think we've ever had a topic that Chuck and I were more intensely interested in than this one. I know. Chuck and I just came out of nowhere and it's really, well, not out of nowhere because it's historical, but in our eyes, out of nowhere. Which if you... Funny I say, in our eyes.

Yeah, Lil for Shadowing from Charles Bryant. Nice one, Chuck. If you will get off of LOL Cats for a second and go check your iTunes, you'll find that the title of this one is How Lobotomies Work. Yes. And that's what we're going to be talking about, are lobotomies. So fascinating. It really is.

These kind of exist in this little segment of 20th century culture. Medical madness, I guess you could say, right? Right. And pop culture, because you still hear it being thrown around like, boy, somebody lobotomized me, scrambled my brain, but it's kind of exactly the way it happened. Yeah. Yeah, so Chuck, you're a lover of great cinema, right? Of course.

Of course you've seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, right? I have a poster. You do? Yeah, good one. Michaelson Laughing with the Watch Cap on, yeah, that's a good one. So of course you remember the pivotal scene of the movie, where McMurphy is lobotomized for being unruly, tries to kill all Nurse Hatchet, because... Nurse Ratchet.

Nurse Ratchet. Hatchet. That was a Freudian slip right there. It was. She was a Hatchet. Yeah. So... She was mean and...

No, I'm totally with you. It was a Freudian slip part that got me. I had like eight jokes going in my head at once, and I was like, can't say that, can't say that, can't say that. Like the Terminator. Yeah. Scanning for possible response. That's exactly right, yeah.

So yeah, so he tries to kill Nurse Ratchet, because she was a terrible nurse, and kind of evil. Yeah, very evil. And so he gets lobotomized, and they don't show the procedure. Don't worry if you ever want to know what one was like, we're going to go into grisly detail in a minute. And he comes out just kind of this drooling imbecile, which I have to remind everybody was actually a medical term before it was...

Imbicile was? Imbicile, moron, and idiot were all degrees of mental retardation. Wow. Uh-huh. Isn't that weird? Yeah, well of course, this is at the same time that people were performing lobotomy, so it seems like very archaic, even though it wasn't that long ago. Yeah, well let's set the scene, okay?

Okay. All right, so we're talking the 1930s. Right. And the 1930s were a terrible time to be nuts. Apparently you got locked up in a straight jacket to keep you from eating your own feces or throwing it at orderlies or doing anything really crazy, and that was about it. They had certain techniques like shock therapy, right? What did they use?

They still use shock therapy here and there actually. So you have like electroconvulsive therapy, and apparently they also used to use insulin. Oh, okay. Insulin, right? We know how bad that is from, I can't remember, one of our aging podcasts, right? Right. And they would basically inject a hefty dose of insulin into a patient to, you okay, Chuck? Yeah.

Okay. I thought my paper wrestling was going to get the wrath of Jerry. They know we use crib sheets, buddy. Sure. So they'd inject a patient with a hefty dose of insulin and would basically shock their system, possibly causing convulsions. There was another drug. Was this just to subdue them?

Hold on, I'm getting to that. This is the craziest part. This was the grasp that medical science had on mental illness at the time. There was another drug called Metrizol, which was a respiratory and circulatory stimulant, and in hefty doses, it too produced shock and convulsions. So if you'll notice, all three of these produced convulsions, shock therapy, and the reason that they did that was because there was a suspicion that there was a link between epilepsy, convulsions, and mental illness, and that if you had one, you couldn't have the other.

So by producing convulsions, they thought that they were treating mental illness. Wow. Unbelievable. Yeah. So you could have just had epilepsy and that they would sit you in the electroconvulsive shock therapy chair and to treat you. Yeah. They'd stick a little paddle in your mouth and turn on the juice.

I'll tell you what, man. I sometimes look back and say, boy, the 1950s, that would have been cool to look back then, but then you hear stories like this and you forget about the downside. Yeah. ECT is definitely one of the downsides of this era, right? So another problem with this was that the mental care. Wow. Have you had a lobotomy?

I had a little bit of one. Yeah. No, I had some Metrizol earlier. I'm all jacked up. Nice. So the state of mental hospitals in the US in the 30s and 40s was that they were overcrowded. Because I mean, if you can't treat anybody, really, you can't treat their mental illness once they come in, they're in.

Yeah. Right. And they wanted docile patients. They wanted people that didn't cause trouble. And really, any way that they could get there was kind of okay at the time. Right. And this was also before drug therapy was created. Right.

So in the 30s, 1936, this new procedure comes about. Right. Well, 1935. Oh, was it 1935? I thought it was 1936. In Portugal? 1935, you're right. Yeah.

Sorry about that. Yeah. That was Dr. Antonio Egas Moniz and Dr. Almeida Lima in Portugal performed the first lobotomies by drilling holes into the skull on either side of the prefrontal cortex and injecting alcohol in there to destroy the fibers that connected it. This was actually based on an earlier study from 1933 by a couple of Yale researchers who removed the prefrontal cortexes from a pair of monkeys. Yeah.

Lucy and... Who was the other one? Binky, we'll say. Okay. Lucy and Binky. Yeah. These two monkeys had their prefrontal cortexes removed. And the researchers found that they could still... they still had intellect.

Right. But they were lacking the emotion that led to violent outbursts when they didn't get their way. Yeah. Becky, by the way. I like Binky better. Can we stay with Binky? Sure.

Okay. So the... Dr... Oh, the Portuguese guy. Fulton and Carlisle. Oh, no. You're going back to Portugal? Yeah.

Dr. Moniz. Yes. Saw Fulton present... one of the Yale researchers saw Fulton present his findings. And he thought, huh, my mental patients act like monkeys in a violent outburst when they don't... Right. They think things that aren't really there, right? So let me get my hands on a cadaver and see what I can... see what I can work out with

the brain. Right. So this early... this early... it was called the prefrontal lobotomy. Right. Started out, like you said, by drilling holes in the skull and adding alcohol. And the whole reason why chuck the prefrontal cortex? Why the frontal lobe? What's so important about that?

Well, the prefrontal lobe cortex, Josh, has a number of complex functions called executive functions is what they're known as. We're talking high-level decision-making, planning, reasoning, understanding, personality, personal expression, that kind of thing. Right. So basically your personality, the way you create things, the way you see the world, and how you react to the world, energy, emotions, this is all generated here. It originates in the prefrontal cortex.

Yes. And you are stabbing the front of your head right now as you speak your forehead. Yes. Thank you. Thanks, Josh. And so that, as we all know, though, the brain is connected. It's all connected together. So you're sending and receiving signals like mass email.

And so what you have here, you've got two types of matter, gray and white matter. Gray matter includes neurons in brain cells and blood vessels and things like that. White matter is axons and nerve fibers, and they connect the gray matter and carry messages with electric impulses. So the gray matter is where these impulses are generated, the white matter translates them or transfers them. Yeah, transmits. It transmits.

Sure. One of the trans. So a lobotomy, what that does is it's intended to sever the white matter between the different areas of gray matter, thus interrupting the transmission, essentially. Right. And the problem with Dr. Moniz's technique, the early technique using alcohol, is like you said, the brain's all connected. And alcohol being a liquid is kind of hard to keep in one place.

So it started to go and destroy other areas of the brain, right? Yeah, not a very good idea. But he was on to something. He was on to something by destroying the white matter, right? Yes. So instead he decided to be a little more precise, and he kept with the whole drilling method, which is actually based on an ancient method of brain surgery called trepanation. Right.

Which actually, gosh, I'm going to be in trouble here. We had a fan right in and suggest trepanation, and that's what got me on lobotomies in the first place. Yeah, I apologize. So if you're out there listening. Oh, you don't remember the fan's name? No. Thank you, nameless fan.

We love you. This is for you. Binky. Thanks, Binky. Or Becky. Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn?

So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren and Nova Scotia, who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse, and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at Airbnb.ca slash host. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and

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Yeah, and actually in the article, How the Botomies Work, there's a cool relief from a Heronimus Bach painting of some early physician trepanning a patient. He's got a little segment of the skull lifted off and the brain's exposed, and he's just poking around in there. But okay, so Dr. Moniz is still using the drilling method, but now he's inserting instruments in there. Right. He inserted this one that sounded like it's a handle with a little loopy wire that comes

out, but it retracts. Lucatum? Yes, so when you push down the back of it, the loop extends out, and then you can pull it in and just basically remove hunks of prefrontal cortex. Yeah, of white matter. Right. And that's exactly what he did. Hopefully white matter.

Yeah, you would think. And it was successful. Right. Well, yeah, sure. To, again, to varying degrees, and maybe not again, because I think that's the first time we've said that, but yeah, the lobotomy was successful to varying degrees. Very varying degrees. But there was this guy who went and saw Dr. Moniz perform one of these.

Yeah, this work gets good. And this guy was named Dr. Walter Freeman, and for probably about, what, 50,000 people in the U.S. alone, this meeting between these two men was the worst thing that ever happened in the history of humanity. Right, because that's about how many people were lobotomized over about a seven-year period in the U.S. Was it just seven years? Yeah.

49 to 56. Wow. Okay. Heavy work. So then there was many, many more, actually. But yeah, Dr. Walter Freeman became an immediate evangelist, he was called, for lobotomies. Right. He tried Moniz's technique with a partner and did it successfully for a while.

But the problem is it was still surgery. Right. He required a surgeon to do it. Operating room. Right. And Freeman was actually not a neurosurgeon. He was a neurologist. Right.

It required anesthetic. Yeah. So there were some drawbacks to it in Freeman's opinion. Right. Expense being one of them time and resources. So he created something that was a lot handier, a lot easier, and a lot quicker. And that is what we call the transorbital or ice pick lobotomy. Right.

Can I say what this is? Yes. And if you took something, which is technically called an orbitoclast, but it really looks sort of like an ice pick. You said it yesterday on our webcast. It's an ice pick, yeah. Call it a rose by any other name, exactly. So you put this ice pick over the eyeball, but under the bone there.

What's that called? Between the eyeball and the eyelid. The eyeball and the eyelid. Until the back of the orbital bone. Right. When you look back at the orbital bone, there's a little resistance there because it's bone. And so enter a little silver hammer. And so he just tinks on that thing until it cracks through.

And then he's got a pretty clean passageway to the frontal cortex. And so you've got an ice pick sticking out of your eye. He scrambles it up a little bit once it's in there, and then he does the same thing on the other side. Yep. And 10 minutes later, you're lobotomized, literally. So he'd do both sides, right? He got kind of good at this.

Yeah. Dr. Freeman got really, I guess you could say good at this, or at least very fast. In one two-week period in West Virginia, he performed lobotomies on 228 people. And in one day, he performed lobotomies on 25 patients, right? In one day. In one day. So he's just basically bringing them in and sending them out. He's exactly doing that, actually, I read an interview with one of his assistants at

the time, and he said he would literally not take breaks as the patient left. Another one would be brought in 10 minutes later. Boom. And I don't think we mentioned yet, he, before he does this, he doesn't use anesthetic. He knocks them out with electroshock. Right. So it's making use of two extremely primitive and violent techniques, right? Yeah.

And the result was, like we said, varied. I mean, it ranged anywhere from people being satisfied and seemingly successful, like highly emotional people, suicidal, all of a sudden being more docile and not so worried to death, and people rendered vegetables, literally, so all over the map. Dr. Freeman actually referred to lobotomies informally as soul surgery. Yeah, I hate that. The reason why is because he was basically removing what makes us human. People could still function under a successful lobotomy.

People could still function. They could still talk, but they weren't doing anything. They weren't bringing anything to the table. There was no reason for them to exist so much anymore. It was personality surgery. Exactly right. And he did it, again, so fast, so often, and he had a touch of a showman to him that he basically did.

He had a lobotomobile in which he performed demonstrations, right? He toured the country, went all over the place. I think he ended up doing estimates run from 2000 to 5000 between 1946 and 1967 transorbital lobotomies in 23 states in the US, right? He performed with both hands. He would stick the ice picks in with both hands at once to add a little flair in showmanship. Yeah, so he was basically performing shows, lobotomy shows. And not everybody reacted well to these.

Right. There were seasoned surgeons who had seen tons of gore and blood and horrible things in their lifetimes would vomit watching these things. Some had to leave. There was a nurse whose account I read of watching a lobotomy said when he moved the ice picks back and forth, it made the sound of tearing cloth. Later on in the USSR, which actually banned lobotomies in, I think, 1953, before we did, which is embarrassing.

Yeah. Well, 14 years before we did, right? Yeah. Yeah. A physician named Nikolai Orsarenski. Orsarenski? Orsarenski. Thanks, dude.

Osarenski. Osarenski. He said that lobotomies violate the principles of humanity and change an insane person into an idiot. Again, remember a medical term at the time. So I imagine that there was something that affected you. Were you a human being, like a real human being, seeing this, this rough, violent, misguided or unguided procedure being performed that it would affect you in some way, like some

very primal part of you would say that's not supposed to happen. Right. And on an official scientific basis for this, it was basically, hey, look at the result in some cases, which is what they were kind of basing this whole thing on. And also, as we were saying about Freeman being a showman and doing it so fast, there was one visit to a mental institution in Iowa. I don't remember what year it was, but Freeman killed three people in one visit. And one of the people, this is so awful, he was doing his little show off thing with the

two pics at once instead of his own procedure dictated one and then the other side. He was doing two pics at once. So the patient's on the table with two ice picks sticking out of his eyes. And Freeman says, I'm going to take a photo of this, steps back to take a photo, one of the ice picks slips and kills the patient instantly. So apparently Freeman was said to have basically just packed up right then and moved on to the next place without missing a beat or saying, geez, that stinks. Pressed up the lobotomobile.

Yeah. Hit the road. You know, one person he lobotomized, Josh? I know you do. He lobotomized John F. Kennedy's sister, Rosemary. Yep. Dr. Freeman did in 1941. Rosemary was 23 years old and early on in her childhood, she was shy and easygoing,

they say. But as a teenager, shocker, she became rebellious and moody, which, and that's what struck me in a lot of these cases is so many of them were just normal human emotions, like anything from postpartum depression to, you know, an overactive child, you know, it's just unbelievable. Right. So she was lobotomized and afterward was rendered basically, she couldn't speak. She had the mental capacity of an infant, couldn't control her bodily functions. And the Kennedy family basically from that point on said that she was mentally retarded,

which they claim that she may have been before, but who knows. Do you want to talk about another guy? Howie. Chuck and I have a shared hero. He is an indomitable 350-pound, six-foot-three bus driver who has this gentle, tender personality. Right. And his name is Howard Dully. And at the age of 12, Howard Dully met Dr. Freeman under unfortunate circumstances,

meaning Dr. Freeman had a couple of ice picks on him when they met. Right. So Howard ended up under Freeman's care because of his stepmother, right, Chuck? Yeah. It was kind of the classic story. The father gets remarried to a stepmother who is not very patient and understanding with her son that sounded like, you know, sounded like he may have been a little rambunctious, but what 12-year-old boy isn't?

I think you have some good notes, actual notes. Yeah. Well, in Freeman's notes that Dully turned up later, and we should say Howard Dully created this great radio piece that's on NPR. You can actually find, by typing in My Lobotomy in Google, I think it's the first thing that comes up. Right. It's one of the most amazing things you've ever heard where he just goes and retraces

the steps of his lobotomy that he got when he was 12 and tries to get to the bottom of what happened. We typically don't recommend people go listen to other things that it's not us, but that's how good it is. Right. Yeah, exactly. It is that good. It's way better than us, actually.

Yeah, sure. But he finds that Dr. Freeman's notes on his case, and apparently his stepmother pled her case to get him lobotomized by pointing out that he daydreams a lot, and when you ask him what he's daydreaming about, he says, I don't know. Right. He doesn't want to go to bed, and when he does, he sleeps well. Right. And my personal favorite, he turns on the lights in rooms when there's broad daylight

streaming in. Unbelievable. I know. That kid deserves a lobotomy. Yeah. Well, one of the things, and I think one of the reasons why you and I both look up to Howard Doley was because he has wondered his whole life, how different would he be? Right.

Like, I lived hard and fast as a younger man, right? Yeah, not like your calm days now. Right, yeah. I think you're puritanical days. Actually, way, way harder and faster, but I've often wondered, you know, how much sharper would I be had I not lived like that? Right. Well, this was my own doing.

It was my own choosing. Sure. Howard Doley had to think that same thing, like, is there something wrong with me? Is there a part of me missing? Through no choice or fault of his own. We should also say that when Howard's stepmother found that he was not a vegetable, she just got him out of the house and he became a ward of the state. Yeah.

So he went to an institution anyway. She's an all-around bang-up lady. Yeah. So, again, in the end, he finds, you know, there really isn't something wrong with him. He's a pretty terrific person as it turned out, lobotomy or not. Right. Took him a long time though. I mean, he battled addiction and various forms of mental illness his whole life after

this. And I think going this, the special that aired and he wrote a book and went and talked to his father after 40 years, he actually finally spoke to his dad about it and that seems to have been the thing to get him over the edge to not feeling like a freak anymore, as he called it. Yep. You can actually hear him working it out in my lobotomy. Yeah.

That big, deep voice. Yeah. He sounds kind of like Sam, not Sam Shepard, Sam, what's the guy, the big Lebowski? Sam Elliott. Sam Elliott. Yeah. That's what he reminded me of. The dude.

Yeah. He also had that big mustache too, sort of like Sam Elliott. Yeah. That handlebar biker mustache. Hey, everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren and Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb

her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. But yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Which episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s? Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So Chuck, whatever happened to lobotomies?

Why'd they go the way of the dinosaur? Just go. Well, a couple of reasons. I mean, one, there was a lot of gaining steam with the criticism of it because they found that they were lobotomizing criminals. They were lobotomizing soldiers from World War II because... Criminals against their will sometimes. Right, but they lobotomized soldiers because hospitals were overcrowded.

Veterans. Yeah. Unbelievable. Yeah. There was a lot of gaining steam and then the introduction of Thorazine, basically, was kind of what started it all. Thorazine changed everything. I believe that somebody said that Thorazine was to the treatment of schizophrenia.

That insulin, or I'm sorry, that penicillin was to the treatment of infectious diseases. Which is a pretty big comparison. Yeah, big time. Thorazine was developed in 1950 and as it began to fall into widespread use, lobotomies kind of fell out of widespread use, and Dr. Freeman himself, he had one last lobotomy in 1967. Yeah, he killed a woman with a brain hemorrhage after the third try, I think. This was her third lobotomy and she wasn't just some mental patient in Iowa.

This is a housewife and when she died of, I believe, a hemorrhage after the procedure, that third procedure, that was it. He was banned from surgery, performing any kind of surgery from that point on, and actually spent the rest of his days until he died in 1972 traveling the country in a camper, which I wonder if it was his lobotomobile. Yeah, I don't know. He wasn't pitching it, he was actually going around trying to find, he was visiting old patients to prove that he had done good, and he had done some good in a couple of cases.

In several cases, I imagine. His first one was a woman, I can't remember her first name, but it was Ionesco. She was violently suicidal, as described by her daughter, and afterwards she went on to live a happy, fulfilled life. Yeah, but every successful case I read about, they would say things like, they weren't violently suicidal anymore, and they were just kind of happy, but it still seemed to be that lights are on but no one's home thing. Like the couple, the married couple.

Very Robert Palmer of you. Yeah, the married couple is, the husband had his wife lobotomized because she was so emotional, and she took pills. She was suicidal as well. And she says that she was happy as a clam, and he was satisfied, he said that she came home, and she never caused any more trouble, and she was just happy, and she could still back talk. Yeah, she could still cook and clean, and do all the things she could do before, and

she agreed. I just haven't been worried about things since then, and she was in her 80s, but you know, you read that, and emotions are normal. Mood swings are normal. I agree, but I do think that there is a certain threshold, and if you're violently suicidal, you know, maybe a lobotomy was a better option. Yeah, but I also want to know what the criteria for all this was back then. There wasn't any.

So, put that in your pipe and smoke it. One of the most unsettling things that I found from this article is that lobotomies are still performed today. Yeah, in England, right? The UK is one of a few countries where it's no longer called lobotomies, because lobotomy has such a horrible stigma attached to it, and for good reason. Neurosurgery for a mental disorder. NMD.

And today, apparently, they use MRIs as guides to be more precise, but pretty much this type of surgery, psychosurgery, as it's called, is pretty much the same thing. It's destroying white matter connections, and you're removing people's emotional cells. Right. I mean, there may be something to that, but certainly, it was so nonspecific and non-technical to jam ice picks and just blindly move them back and forth, but no wonder there was all kinds of results. Yeah.

So, Chuck, we are both kind of nuts, and I'm really glad it's not 1946, because we'd be in big trouble. Oh, yeah. Yeah. My wife, Emily, and I would both be on the lobotomy table, I think. I'd drive you to see Freeman. Thanks. Sure.

I appreciate that. Yeah. Well, that's it. That's it for lobotomies, buddy. I encourage people to go out and listen to Howard Dully's radio show there. It's really great. Okay. Hopefully, you guys enjoyed this one.

You can read all about lobotomies on howstuffworks.com. You know what to do, handy search bar, et cetera. And Chuck, let's hawk some Audible stuff, shall we? Our sponsor, audible.com. Hit it. Okay, so if everyone goes to www.audiblepodcast.com slash stuff and sign up to get one free download from audible.com's 50,000 plus titles of audiobooks, standup comedy, spoken word, speeches, pretty much anything you can listen to is right there.

Yes. And I was on there browsing just this morning, and I found one of my all-time favorite books, 1491 by Charles Mann. Good one. I haven't read that. Mann runs around the Americas, basically, to archaeological sites and gets the scoop on the most recent findings and finds that there were way more people in the Americas before Columbus showed up than we realized.

Really? And yeah, there's a lag between the arrival of Columbus to Hispaniola and the second wave that followed within the next 50 years. The second wave found that this, you know, it was virgin territory, there's almost no one there. It turns out it's because about 100 million people died of smallpox from Columbus's first arrival between then and the second wave. It's fascinating.

That's a mini-sode. Right there, you just did one. Well, maybe we'll do a bigger-sode on it. A bigger-sode? Yeah, what about you? You've been on? Yeah, I'm going to recommend just quickly Stephen Colbert of the Colbert Report. Nice.

Oh, I saw his portrait, his National Gallery portrait. It was Smithsonian recently. It was awesome. With his familiar scowl? Yeah. I love that guy. So, yeah, he has a very popular book that he reads himself called I'm an American and So Can You, and that's all I need to say about that.

It's hysterical. Nice chuck. So, you can get either one of those titles for free by going to www.audiblepodcast.com slash stuff and signing up. And that is Audible right there, baby. Let's do Listener Mail. Let's do it. Josh, I'm just going to call this, we got a lot of great feedback for the high fructose

corn syrup. Yeah, yeah. So much so that we're going to have probably like three podcasts in a row where we're going to be reading some of that mail. I don't know what it is. Really? Yeah. It's really, we should.

I can bring back haikus. Okay, all right. So, I'm just going to call it Intelligent Listener Mail because Max is a smart guy and I like these most of all. I'm a graduating senior in the business college, but when I'm not in class or listening to podcasts, I almost always enjoy listening to philosophy. It's more or less my passion. More specifically, I'm interested in world religion, metaphysical theory, and man's relationship

to nature in the universe. So this guy is obviously smarter than me, I'm heavy. To say that fructose corn syrup or any other man-made chemical compound does not occur naturally, you're speaking with a basic assumption that man is something different than nature. Unfortunately for those who can find themselves above nature in importance or authority, this is not the case. It's our Western culture and religion that strengthens this point of view. Man didn't plop into nature as a separate and flawed phenomenon in a stupid, natural

universe. Man came out of nature, man is nature, man is the universe. To borrow a quote from my favorite philosopher, Alan Watts, in your seeing, your hearing, your talking, your thinking, your moving, you express that which it is which moves the sun and other stars. So to perceive yourself as something different is only an inability to identify yourself with the cosmos. So Josh, man's manipulation of chemical compounds is really the world's manipulation of itself

or perhaps the universe manipulating itself. And that is certainly a natural occurrence. Boom. And that is what happens when I offhandedly say something is man-made. Right. Nice. Well, what's the guy's name? Max.

And I think philosophy too, so I thought it was kind of cool. We dig you, Max, and we really dig anybody who sends us something, especially if it's as intelligent as that. If you want to show off your ginormous brain, send us an email to stuffpodcastathowstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band or each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever

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