The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Ancient Brain Surgeons, the Crows Have Eyes, Why Radiators are so Annoying

Episode Date: November 10, 2021

Actor and famous Schitt's Creek impersonator Michael Judson Berry joins the show this week! The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories!  Click here to follow our sibling podcast, Ask Us Anything!  Follow our team on Twitter! Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Sara Kiley Watson: www.twitter.com/SaraKileyWatson Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Produced by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Theme music by Billy Cadden: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ Season 5 of The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week was recorded using the Shure MV7 podcast kit. The kit includes a Manfrotto PIXI mini tripod, so everything you need to get recording straight away is included—that’s super-helpful if you’re a creator who’s buying their first mic set up. Check it out at www.shure.com/popsci. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Did you know that there's an online cannabis company that ships federally legal THC right to your door? And talking about mood.com, they have an incredible line of cannabis, dummies, and a lot more. And you can get 20% off your first order at mood.com with promo code Weirdest. It's third party lab tested and ships directly to you in a discreet box. Best of all, everything's backed by Mood's 100-day satisfaction guarantee. And like I said, you can get 20% off with code Weirdest. So if you're looking to try some new cannabis products, head on over to mood.com. Get 20% off your first order now with code weirdest.

That's code weirdest for 20% off. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room.

Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or The Hilton.com. Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and heck stories every week. And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not sure those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors

of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Fultman. I'm Sarah Kylie-Watson. I'm Sarah Kylie-Watson. And I'm Michael Judson Barry. Michael, welcome to the show. Thank you. I'm so excited. Listeners, some of you may already know Michael, and if not, you may come to recognize him soon from the very distinctive and TikTok famous sound of his voice. Well, hello, both of you. Thank you for having him beyond the weirdest thing I've learned this week.

Oh, my gosh. I'm going to pass away. It's a two-fer. It's like having one. of our favorite fans and one of my favorite actresses of the stage and screen here with us today. So thank you. Thank you. So, Michael, before we get into it, why don't you tell listeners who do not yet know a little bit about who you are and what you've got going on? Thank you. Yes, I guess I'm not your traditional guest. I'm an actor and I'm during lockdown a creative

did this little, what started as a little Instagram slash TikTok parody show of Schitts Creek, where I did Moira Rose in lockdown as if she had her own sort of like talk show. And it was an inside joke for me and my friends. And it has no snowballed into this big thing. And even Catherine's talked about me in interviews. And so yeah, so definitely if you if you don't know how I am, my TikTok and Instagram is M. Judson Barry. And it's called quarantine time. And every week I have another couple episodes of the Rose family living in a pandemic world. And just absolutely delightful. Thank you.

So let's get into the show. On the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little bit of a tease about some kind of fact or story we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, making TikToks, etc. And decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Then once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Sir Kylie, how about you start with your teas? Okay, so today I am talking about why you'd rather have skull surgery during the Incan Empire in Peru than you would ever want to have it done on the Civil War battlefield. Wow, a choice I have to make every day. Finally.

Just the essentials. Just the essentials. just the essential things you must know. That is weirdest thing. All right, and Michael, what about your teas? So we all know that the crows have eyes, but we have recently learned that they also understand the very abstract concept of zero. Oh, that's pretty smart.

I feel like I don't need to understand that sometimes. I was about to say that. I feel like I took it for granted until I read the article and I was like, whoa. I knew I was bad at math, but like, wow. All right. The concept of nothing. Yeah, bird brains.

We'll talk about that. Okay. My tease is that I'm going to talk about why New Yorkers can thank the 1918 pandemic for their hyperactive radiators. Really? Yes. Indeed. Those radiators have ruined so many self-tapes of mine trying to watch.

addition for things. Oh my gosh. Well, yeah, I mean, definitely many weirdest thing recordings have been paused for steam pipes of various sorts over the years. It's like the Starbucks clerk is not in a rainforest. Should we start with radiators then? I feel like that was a good reaction. I'm happy to just segue.

Excellent. Okay. Yes. Yes. So anyone who lives in a city is probably familiar with the radiator. problem. They hiss, they rattle, they smell kind of weird when they turn on for the season. And most importantly, they're really hot. Maybe this isn't quite as prevalent in other urban areas, but I don't know a single New Yorker who hasn't lived in at least one apartment where it was like

sweltering all the time in the dead of winter. And in a lot of cases, the only options are to physically turn off the radiator, like at the valve, which means having no heat, or to open your window, which feels like such a waste of the gas that they're using to power the steam radiators. But thanks to a late 2020 tweet from director and producer Anna Braton, I have a newfound appreciation for all of those dang radiators that kept me up at night and made what I can only describe as a wet marble slot machine noise when I lived in pre-war building. in Harlem. Here's the main takeaway. The, the radiators get too hot on purpose. It is by design. And they were designed that way to help lower disease transmission during the 1918 influenza

pandemic. I will explain. But first, I think we should do a little primer on the 1918 flu, because it's one of those things that everyone has started to kind of pretend to be an expert on in as much as it can be used as like a point of comparison for our current pandemic. And look, no shade to anyone. And obviously there are people in the world who are literal experts on this period of history and the epidemiology of said pandemic. But like, let's be real. Most people don't, don't really know anything about it.

I didn't really know much about it. So yeah, like, you know, listeners, consider this your opportunity for a judgment-free rundown a little 101. to inform you the next time you come across a topical Twitter thread that mentions the 1918 pandemic. First of all, do either, does anyone on the call know why it was referred to as the Spanish flu and often still is? Somewhere in the recesses of my brain, there's a file that knows this. Excellent. My filing system is terrible.

So, no, nope. I feel like I should know, but it's, no, it's gone. No, it's okay. It's okay. Nobody knows, but I found out. Great. So this really blew my mind. The flu started wreaking havoc on the world in the spring of 1918, and it persisted until the summer of 1919.

But World War I was still raging for the first few months of that period. And as a result, most countries, including most of Europe and the entire U.S., they were censoring coverage of the virus. I guess the rationale was that it would hurt morale. or like, I imagine, broadcast weakness to the enemy. But Spain was neutral in World War I. And because of this, their news broadcasts weren't censored in that same, like, wartime propaganda sort of way. That meant it was one of the first countries to just publicly acknowledge that there was a dangerous virus spreading.

So we actually still don't know where the 1918 pandemic started. it's possible it came from the U.S., Europe and Asia are also probable candidates. But the point is, there's no reason to think it was Spain. Spain is no more likely a candidate than any other country. It's just the first big country that, like, cocked to there being a problem, which it's kind of, I was like, it's a shame to have the virus associated you with you for the rest of history because you just were like, it exists. It's happening. And yeah, the 1918 pandemic, it was historic and remained so to this day. It was terrible, horrifying.

It killed at least 50 million people, which was about 2.5% of the population at the time. And unlike most strains of the flu, it was more likely to kill young, healthy men than any other demographic. One theory on this holds that your immune system is always going to be primed to mount the best defense against the first strain of flu you ever encounter. Of course, the flu mutates a lot. That's why we need a new vaccine every year. Different strains of it are always emerging and circulating, and the annual flu vaccine is just selected based on what strains epidemiologists think are going to be a big problem. It's actually this huge herculean effort.

I'll link to more info on popside.com slash weird in the article for this show. Get your flu shot. Anyway, it's possible that most young people in 1918 had first been exposed to the H3N8 subtype of the flu, which is about as different as you can get from the H1N1 subtype that the 1918 strain belonged to. We don't know this for sure, but it's a pretty good theory. For most people, the 1918 flu was, to quote an adage that's all too common these days, just the flu. The flu is bad, like just the flu means pretty bad. But people were 25 times more likely to develop serious illness and die than a typical flu season. And

And like COVID-19, the 1918 flu when it was bad wasn't just a respiratory disease. It caused systemic problems. It was, again, really horrifying. And that pandemic had a huge impact on global culture. For one thing, eugenics was very much the prevailing pseudoscience of the day, and it was mainstream science. We've talked about this a lot on weirdest thing. You can look back at our episodes on sideshow baby hospitals, on naked air bathing,

and the origin of the word moron for more on that. I know those all sound very silly, but they all involve the American eugenics movement, a thing that I am passionate about people understanding because we made it here first. You heard it here first, eugenics in America, and then the Nazis just copied it. I think that's something we shouldn't have forgotten.

It's on us. Anyway, to be honest, eugenics stayed very mainstream in America until World War II when, doctors started to like not want to be compared to Nazis. But the fact that the 1918 flu was worse for people thought to be of, you know, less pure stock like immigrants are the poor. But like anyone could get it, including young, healthy, you know, quote unquote, well-bred white men. That definitely put like a crucial ding in eugenics armor as a school of thought.

And the pandemic is also credited with encouraging a lot of European countries to turn to nationalized health care to ensure that even the nation's most vulnerable residents could protect themselves from disease, not necessarily for any altruistic reasons, but because it was very clear that if you didn't have access to health care, if you lived in tenements, then diseases like this would transmit really rampantly. And that then that would hurt the whole country, including rich people. So great, health care for everyone. The resulting labor shortage because of how it struck healthy young men led to strikes and better worker conditions. It helped get women into the workforce, though, of course, that really took off during World War II. And it's probably not a coincidence that women got the vote in the U.S. in 1920. But getting back to radiators. The impacts of this 20th century pandemic weren't just visible in the way we run health care or the makeup of the American workforce.

we can also see its lasting legacy in our built environment. So in 1918, our understanding of viruses was new and, shall we say, incomplete. But health officials had like caught wind of the fact that better ventilation and more fresh air seemed to fight off airborne diseases like the flu. In fact, it actually like started beating the strum even back in the 1800s, including before anyone knew what a virus was. people had been studying tuberculosis and saw that it spread more in unventilated homes. So they didn't really get why, but they were like stuffiness as a scourge. It is the root of disease. Open your windows.

And then, you know, once we discover viruses, then it was like, yeah, open the windows so that like a little bug can fly out and not be in your face. When the pandemic persisted into winter, New York City officials were asking residents to keep their windows open so that we could get more of that good air going. And so, yeah, lots of U.S. cities with high population density and cold winters, like New York, started using these like overpowered steam radiators to keep homes toasty, even when the windows were open. That's actually why they're generally placed under a window so that the idea is that, like, you're heating the fresh air as it blows in. Now, because a huge chunk of the available living space in New York City was built between 1900 and

1930. We still have this public health hack at our disposal. Meanwhile, the power source for the boilers that power those steam radiators switched from coal to oil and then to natural gas, which means they've gotten more powerful. Meanwhile, new windows have been put in that provide much better insulation. So not only are we using heaters designed to be used with an open window, which is something that like many of us feel guilty doing. But they're actually even hotter than they were designed to be. And our apartments are now even toastier with windows shut than 20th century engineers ever intended. So in the years following the pandemic, engineers figured out that you could cut the heat output of a radiator by around 20% by covering it in some kind of metallic paint, which is why generally they're shiny.

And then they figured out you could further reduce the output by covering it with like a cozy. But yeah, as any New Yorker will tell you, the problem is far from solved. Radiators remain too hot. But there was a time when this was really useful and helpful. And thank goodness for it. I was wondering why they always are painted that sort of like shiny. It is a very, it's not very aesthetic, and they are all painted that color. I too was like, ah, a reason.

And that they are so hot. Yeah, well, and it's like, it's not just the radiators, it's also those steam pipes. And I feel like it's a right of passage in New York to have a tiny bathroom with a steam pipe where it's impossible to get into like your bathroom cabinet without burning your butt on the steam pipe. I think if that the day that happens to you, you're a true New Yorker. And until that, I don't care how long you've lived here. It's not real. But yeah, you know, it's, I mean, obviously that the 1918 pandemic was, was horrifying. And we learned a lot from it.

We forgot a lot from it. But, you know, I am, I'm really curious to see, like, what kind of things a hundred years from now, people will be going like, yeah, you know. how the radiators are always too hot. It's because of the weird decisions they made in 2020 to try to beat the pandemic. And you know what? As long as they work as well as opening windows, great. I can't wait for our like, you know, great, great grandchildren to be complaining about whatever the equivalent of a too hot radiator is.

I love that like Europe's like answer to the flu is like, let's reform healthcare. And New York was like, no, it's just going to be, we're going to make. your room so hot that you literally can't live without there being ice cold New York January air blowing on you at the same time. Great point, Sarah kindly, really. Like, what, what? It's refreshing that some things never change. Yeah, I did, in reading some articles about, you know, the larger impacts of the 1918 pandemic,

you know, they were like nationalized health care in lots of European countries and the U.S. Implemented insurance. Like, we, well, we tried. We tried something. You know, we're good at so many things. That's true. All right, we're going to take a quick break, and then we'll be back with some more facts. Did you know that there's an online cannabis company that ships federally legal THC right to your door?

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That's s-h-U-R-E-com slash P-O-P-S-C-I. Okay, we're back. And, Michael, I would love to hear about some crows. I'm excited to talk about crows. This was such a fun rabbit hole that I went down. So, yes, we recently discovered that crows understand the concept of zero. So we as humans didn't even adopt the concept of zero as a member of our numerical family until roughly the fifth century AD. Oh, wow.

Right? Yeah. Later than I expected. Yeah. Yeah. As like a thing where they were like, oh, like eight times zero is still zero or like 10 plus zero is still 10. You know, it joined. Which to us that, you know, sounds very, you know, we all learn that when we're kids.

We're like, well, yeah, this is, this is simple. But apparently, according to Professor Andreas Nieder, who is a professor of animal physiology at the Institute of Neurobiology at the University of Turenberg. I think that's how you say it in Germany. Professor Nieder said, if you ask mathematicians, most of them will probably tell you that the discovery of zero was a mind-blowing achievement. So don't take zero for granted everybody, except it blew everyone's minds in the fifth century. because the special thing about zero is that it doesn't fit into the routine of counting real objects, like real tangible things and real integers. So, you know, you have a basket of apples, one, two, three apples.

If there's nothing there, there's, if it's just an empty basket, you're like, well, there's no apples, so there's nothing here to count. So, you know, it just represents empty nets. So obviously, this is a very abstract way of thinking when it comes to numbers, or as they say, detached from empirical reality, which people are so much more eloquent than I will ever be. I know right. So, but, you know, as we all know, crows are, we're learning are more and more brilliant. So they did this study with them.

This just came out, was published on June 2nd in the Journal of Neuroscience. The team had two male crows, and they did this experiment where they put them on a little perch that just makes me think of Alexis hands. I'm so used to doing Schitt's Creek things. There's like a cute little perch with their cute little crows. Crow feet. You, David, you look like a crow. Anyway, so they put them on this, though, and they had a monitor in front of them,

and they would show them two images back to back. So it would be either a blank screen or a screen with one dot to three or four dots. And so they were trained where if it was, they matched, if it was one screen with one dot, and then the following one had one dot, they were trained to react, either like peck at it or move their head or have a little like crow kerfuffle moment. If they didn't match, say it was one dot and then four dots, they just were trained to stay still and just sort of chill

and just be like, those don't match. So they had done this before with dots, but they recently just tried this with zero. And they found that they actually did that as well. So it was a blank screen. They knew the difference between a blank screen and like four dots. But what surprised them even more is that they also have this thing called numerical distance effect,

which I just learned about. And it's where humans do this too. We also have these neurons in our brains that detect this. But we're more likely to sort of mess up numbers that are close together. So say it's two dots and then three dots. That's when they were getting it wrong. Because they were getting these answers right 75% of the time. And the only times they didn't was when it was close numbers, like three or four or one and two.

And what they found was that when they would mess up the zero slide, the one, it was really only with one dot. So they realized that not only do they get that zero is different from the other ones, but that it falls before the number one. Oh. Which is nuts, because so far only, like, humans and, like, great apes and stuff understand that that's where zero would fall in the numerical order. So that was very exciting that they could discriminate zero.

And I got so excited about this. I've now lost my place in my notes. Yes, because they're, so this is a very exciting thing, obviously, and they're still trying to figure out why, because the animals that do understand numbers and numerical systems, it's, you know, fout of survival. So when they're looking at food, they can tell the difference between, like, one berry and five berries. You know, this is an evolutionary survival instinct to be able to count. Because then they're like, can I carry a bushel of berries or just two to my nest? So they're still trying to figure out, like, why? Why have they developed this sense of zero, especially since it took us so long to figure it out for ourselves?

And it's only when we started to do math. And so they're like, so that's the next thing. But they found that other things, even honeybees, actually have the same neuron that we do, that crows do, that some mammals do, that lights up whenever they see a blank thing versus a number thing. So all that to say, there's more to come from Professor Nieder in Dernberg, in Germany. I'm so sorry for butchering that name. There's an umlau in the name somewhere, and I'm trying desperate. Remember how you pronounce that.

But so all this to say, this crow's thing of mine, so thank you for going on this journey with me. So the rabbit hole where it continued was I found these other studies because now I'm like, well, they're terrifyingly smart. And I had read once, or not read,

this is sort of a family story. I'm going to spin another plate real quick. Years ago, I had my tonsils out. And an adult tonsillectomy, if you've never had one, is a truly wretched experience. It's extremely painful. It's awful.

If you can avoid it at all costs, please do. And I was living in L.A. at the time, and my mom flew out to take care of me for two weeks because everything hurts. And you can't speak. And so my mom's a big reader. And one of the books she brought was the book, The Genius of Birds. And I feel no need to read it now because she would read a chapter and then just sort of recount to me what she'd read.

And I couldn't say anything. I just sat there like little mermaiding it. I was like, smiling enough. But I'll never forget. The one chapter she talked about was crows and their understanding of water displacement. And so when I was researching this concept of zero, I was like, let me see about this. And I found videos of this. And they've done multiple studies where crows understand water displacement.

And actually, ASAP even wrote a story a long time ago called The Crow and the Pitcher, all about a crow. Yes. Who fills a pitcher with stones that has some water so we can get to the water. And I learned, I never knew. this, but we as humans don't even understand water displacement until we're roughly five to seven years old. Apparently, it's a tricky concept. But crows, they did this initial study, this is a while ago, where they gave them two cylinders, and they were half filled, one with water, half with sand,

and then they put food in there, you know, so it's just far enough down where they couldn't reach it. And the crows kind of packed it both, and then they identified one was water, one was sand, and there was all these little objects. And some objects floated, some didn't. And they chose the denser objects like stones and plunked them in the water with the food and they kept doing it until the food rose and they could grab it. I would not like obviously it would be a really weird set of circumstances for me to be in that same situation. But I'm just saying I would not I would not be able to think my way out of that. I would just be hungry. Well and that's most children. It's like a three-year-old.

Three-year-old Michael would sit there and just starve. Or like get angry and just knock it over. Or dump the water gloss out yet. Jump the water out. That would be my move for sure. I feel like crows. It's because they don't have thumbs yet. They're just like waiting for us. They have to outthink us because of the thumb problem. That's it. For real. They're like just waiting. They're like humans. Either you mess up or we grow thumbs, but one of these things is going to happen and we're going to take over. Like you can go focus on dolphins and whales and elephants who you think are smart. That's really cute. We're just going to chill up.

here on this like telephone wire and just watch you. We're learning. They don't call us a murder for nothing. But and then if we have time, the last one that this one just, but I actually just saw this morning when I was doing like a last minute deep dive. And again, you can tell I'm such a fan girl. I'm just like fanning being on here at all. So the last one I found was that so we all know that birds, especially crows use tools.

And they have their favorite tools that they like can. carry around with them. And they'll like use things and reshape them into hooks and things like that. But they found that birds are now the only other species than humans that can use, that create compound tools of more than two pieces. So they did this another amazing study, where they had crows and they put food in like a clear, a plastic box that you could see in with two holes on either side and too far for the crows to reach and they gave them a stick. And the crows figured out very fast that if they took the little stick and like poked it, they could poke the food far enough over to where they could reach it. And they were like, well, this was too easy. So let's give them

a more tricky tool. So they took syringes, like large plastic syringes and they took the plunger bit out of the pipe bit, which I learned is the technical term. And they put them in front of them. And the crows, they said within four to six minutes, figured out to put the plunger bit into the pipe bit and then poke that through to get the food out. And so they were like, well, this again was too easy. So we're going to break it down. They just kept giving them more different objects into smaller and smaller pieces. And they continue to figure it out. Wow. Yeah, which is amazing. They had one, in that particular study, they did it at Oxford. And they had one crow, who I think is now my favorite, is one of my heroes. His name was Mango. And they said he had apparent fluctuating

motivation, which I think we all can relate to that. Because he was very successful at first and then just refused to participate in the two follow-up trials. Like, I'm not doing this. Literally was like seriously, bros, like, we know I can do this. And you're going to feed me eventually. I have nothing to prove. Nothing. Good for you, Mingo.

But then they were like, we found out Mingo was just a moody genius. Because in subsequent trials, Mingo was the best one at using tools of three to four pieces and use them successfully nearly every single time. And sometimes when Mingo would assemble them wrong and they would start to break, he would then try again but with the same pieces in a different order and would actually problem solve how to make the best, like, food poker. Mango? So Mango for the win. I love that Mango is like, no, I need a proper challenge.

Yeah. No, mango is like the kid who gets put in, like, gifted and talented classes and then stops doing their homework. They're like, for real. That was my sister. It bores me. My sister did that. And she didn't go to school on Mondays for an entire year.

She was like, I only need four days of school when everybody else needs five. My sister is the one that got me into this podcast. She's an engineer who's getting a PhD or going back to get a PhD in biomedical engineering. She's like crazy, legit genius and researches for funsies. But that was her in school. It was this big battle in seventh grade. She wouldn't go to school on Mondays because she was like, I don't need to. Yeah, I would get in trouble for not trying at school.

And I'd be like, why do I have the best grades in class then? And my teachers would be like, yeah. Yep. You can't argue with that. And that was her thing, too. She was like as long as my GPA is at a certain point. The minute at slacks I'll go to school. I was a little.

I didn't learn how to study. There were many skills. I just did not learn because I was too busy being a little shit. So. I think I turned in the same algebra homework like as all of my algebra homework for a year. I just changed like what the chapter was at the top and I was fine. Oh no. You're so crappy.

I don't know. Smart kids listening to this show. I know school is boring but like try to find something to engage your brain with Yes And like Learn skills, please

Yes And try to Like college statistics is harder What do you don't know how to do See that's why That's why I went to drama school And this is Mr. Levecchio My 10th grade math teacher

Would be like If I could see his face right now Me attempting to talk about anything to do with math Like Because I was like I'm going to be an actor I don't need this I was like

Yeah we had to have a lot of down chit chats about how I still, math is still useful in life as an adult. Well, you know. I don't know. And I found this, so this is kind of a long quote. But to sum up, this is my final note. This author David Quaman. Oh, yeah, David Quaman.

Yes. He had this great thing. He hypothesized that the crows are simply the bored teenagers of the world. And so he said, crows are bored. They suffer from being too intelligent for their station in life. respectable evolutionary success is simply not for these brainy and complex birds enough they are dissatisfied with the narrow goals and horizons of that tired old darwinian struggle on the lookout for a new challenge see them there lined up conspiratorially along a fence rail or a high wire shoulder to shoulder alert self-contained missing nothing feeling discreetly thwarted waiting like an ambitious understudy for their big break which boy do we know that dolphins and whales and chimps Pinsies get all the fawning, publicity, and great fuss made over their near human intelligence. But don't be fooled.

Crows are not stupid. Far from it. They are merely underachievers. They are bored. Wow. I love that. Are you sure that's not the pitch for the crows have eyes? Like, that's what like...

Like, I could just... If that was a book, it'd be on the bat. For real. You know what I mean? Oh, gosh. Or even that movie The Birds, I feel like Tipy Hedron would not like this episode at all. It'd be like, oh, God. I feel like...

that quote is like crows are the opposite of pandas who have evolved to just eat be so big and eat a food that's so low in calories and nutrients that all and so hard to digest they just have to literally spend all day eating and then digesting and that's all they can do that's all they're designed to do and they're just like this is fine i have never never related so much to an animal as to what you just described. I didn't know that about pandas, but I didn't know better. If I didn't know better, I think you were just like describing me. All right. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with one last fact. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're

built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Okay, we're back. And Sarah Kylie. Tell us about head surgery, brain surgery, skulls, something. The whole lot of it. Yeah. So to start off with, I feel like head wounds make me very nervous. And in general, getting a head wound should make everybody nervous, you know, even getting a bonk on the head or getting a concussion or anything like that can really alter your day-to-day life even in, you know, today's world. But, you know, back of the day, everyone was still hitting each other on the heads with clubs as far back as you can imagine. So there was always some kind of skull surgery around.

And so basically what that's called is trepination. And trapanning, in its simplest form, is drilling a hole into a live person's head to relieve some of the pressure and tension that comes from a traumatic head wound. And as you can imagine, there's, you know, lots of clubs hitting heads throughout history, lots of people fall and, you know, we do that. And so there was a lot of this going on throughout history. and there's evidence of this going back thousands of years, you know, scraping off layers of somebody's skull,

like as far back as the Neolithic era in Europe. But today, we're talking about the rock stars of trepination, the Incas, and the Peruvians who came before. So we're going to back it up a little bit to the 1800s. So in 1865, anthropologist Ephraim George Squire was gifted a skull from his hostess, a woman named Senora Zentina, who was an art collector down in Peru.

And so the skull came from an ink and burial ground, but it was a little bit weird because what they came to realize is the skull had a square hole about an half inch in size just drilled into it. So if you can picture just a skull, he's got like a hole in there. More than the usual number of holes. Yeah. This is a big, all honking hole. And so what, what Efron or squire came to realize is that this was due to deliberate surgery. This isn't just experimenting on a deceased person, but the skull actually showed signs of healing. So this person had been walking around just fine after having a square cut out of their head. And so, yeah, just chill and having a hole in his head.

So this is a big hoopla for a lot of reasons. First of all, so it's 1800s. There are still people doing trepination in modern day medical settings. And the procedure was afar from a walk in the park. So neuroscientist Charles G. Gross wrote about this in his book, quote, a hole in the head, more tales from the history of neuroscience. A hole in the head is like the cute word for trepination. People talk about it a lot is everybody's book title.

So basically. Sarah Kylie calling out lack of creativity and neuroscientist writing popular science books. I would also call it that. Yeah. No, it's good. I mean, it's good. I see what they were all going for. It was.

It's like, it's absolutely right. And so basically in this book, he talks about how even the best hospitals during Squire's Day. Survival rates of this surgery were kind of around 10% on the field in the Civil War, which is happening a couple years before. Field docs were treating head wounds in a similar drill manner, cutting around broken bones of injured skulls and doing their best to not touch anything important, like the Dura matter. But at least half of those patients died according to Civil War and medical records. So obviously this isn't something that, you know, even in the most modern of these people's time. They're like, okay, this is a very risky surgery. I can't believe anybody was still

bopping around really after this. So Squire brought on another noted anthropologist and surgeon, Paul Broca, for some more investigation of the skull. And around 10 years later, he brought his findings out that, yep, this school had been trepened back in the Inca era. And the patient went on for, you know, a little bit more of his life. And so he brought that all to the Anthropological Society of Paris. And perhaps surprisingly, the audience was a bunch of European people. And and they were kind of swayed by just, you know, racism and general belief that Westerners were the bomb at medicine and nobody could really do better. So they're kind of like, there's no way.

Like, hmm, I don't think so. But years later, broke out, discovered an even older skull this time from France that showed somewhat similar results. So, Gross wrote in his book, A number of skulls in a Neolithic grave site were found with roundish holes two or three inches wide. The skulls had scalped edges as if they'd been scraped with a sharp stone. Even more remarkable, discs of skull of the same size as the holes were found in these sites. Some of the disks had small holes bored in them, perhaps for stringing as amulets. Although a few of the discs had been chiseled out after death,

in most cases it was clear from the scar formation at the wound's edge that the interval between surgery and death must have been years. So basically, as far back as, you know, we can really even think about, people were doing this surgery and people were surviving. So they were just bopping around. So since, you know, since all of these discoveries we found even more proof of these things happening. So scientists have been able to find and explore all manners of trepidation throughout the years, Hippocratic medical methods in ancient Greece, ancient China, Polynesia, Africa, you name it. But non-Western or quote-unquote primitive trepening has also often been associated with some kind of like superstitious, primitive thinking, magic, or exorcism.

So it was really hard for, you know, modern scientists of the day. we're finding this to kind of believe like, okay, like this is actual medical stuff. This isn't just, you know, we're trying to enlighten and we're trying to open up our brains. It's not, it's more than just ritual. But unlike the skull surgery that was happening at the same time as a lot of these discoveries, these patients were surviving, you know. So, Gross wrote in his book again, finally, the apparently excellent survival rate meant that the procedure, at least until moved into a hospital setting,

may have met the prime requirements of medicine do no harm. But recent findings have found that the Inkins were like the best of the best at this. So a 2018 study, a group of scientists from Tulane, University of Arizona, and University of Miami, and Florida did some deep diving into Peruvian trepidation. And so they found these three big groupings of skulls. One of them was from 400 to 200 BCE, and that was on the coast. And it's a group of people called the Paracas. And so, you know, for some context, that's when the wheel was being invented. And then there was a bunch more in highlands from 1,000 CE to 1,400 CE.

And then there was about 160 that were found around Cusco in the highlands during the Incan Empire 1400 seed mid-1500s. And so these scientists go and look at these, you know, skulls with holes in them. And they're like, okay, how do we know if somebody survived? And basically the cure is healing. So with any, you know, wound, if it heals, you know, that person's been alive and working on it. And it's, it's like if you chop off your arm and it heals up, and your heart's still beating. You know, it's not like you didn't die right then and there and it healed up without you. So what they found was that, you know, in this time, first time zone around, you know, we're talking wheel time.

About 40% of the patients that underwent this surgery or this, you know, prehistoric thing, 40% of them survive. That's pretty good. I feel like. 40%. Like, that's a big deal. What I think about like that period of prehistory? I assume most things would kill about half the people who did that. Oh, yeah.

And we're talking eating a fruit. We're talking open school. Trying to light a fire. Yeah. There's a hole in school. Getting a scratch. Literally. Like.

Seems good. So they just have a hole and they're doing fine. And it helped whatever was going through for 40%. And in the next group, which is this like kind of in between, which is about a thousand years later, it goes up to a little bit over 50%. So we're seeing some growth, but not like any. crazy. But let's get to the Incas. So by the time we're at the Incan Empire, 75 to 83% of the patients were surviving. And some of them had multiple holes in their skull. So I think the like record

breaker is like seven holes in a skull and the guy was still, you know, bopping around, guy or lady, whoever it was. I just, I just want to imagine that that person was like a wellness influencer. It was like, you have to, I just, once a year, I got to pop in. I just have to. I just have to do it. Hashtag self-care. Oh my gosh. I'm sure they probably had something very serious going on that I shouldn't be being light of, but what if they were just Gwyneth Peltro?

And that's like... The ink and goop. They were like, it's spring. Time to put another hole in your head. Get those winter demons out. Oh my gosh. Yeah. And I literally got to talk to one of the authors on the studying.

That's pretty much what he said. He's like, we have hypochondriacs today. Like, they definitely were there. Like, still like, okay, I am still dealing with some problem. WebMD and it said I need another holes. It will not take no verdict. Inkin WebMD. I walked past a cliff and I saw an image in the stone.

It's time for another drill to enter my head. But yeah. So just a reminder. And so Incan Empire and then 300 years or so later we are doing more or less the same surgery in America and people are just dying left and right. And so what's going on here? And basically the findings that people were surviving are kind of a good sign that this wasn't just for funzies. Like this wasn't just some kind of ritual. There was something more going

on. And so John Verano's the author who I got to talk to. And so he's the second holes in the head, the art and archaeology of Trepanation and Ancient Peru author. So he also has a hole in the head's book. Basically what he's kind of come up with is the way that trepination kind of evolved throughout these three stages, it really looks like just, you know, first aid emergency medical care instead of like something weird. So basically, so he told National Geographic a couple years ago, it probably started as a very simple thing, cleaning the scalp after a blow to the head and doing some simple things like picking out broken pieces of bone, which would be dead. They learned early on that this was a treatment that could save lives. We have an overwhelming amount of evidence that

trepidation was not done to increase consciousness or is a purely ritual activity that is linked to patients with severe head injury, especially skull fracture. Of course, there's some instances throughout history where holes are found in heads of people that didn't have brain injury. But also, like, we didn't have any kind of, like, surgery for the brain. So if you had epilepsy or maybe if there was, like, something else going on, like this. Right. There wasn't a lot of, there weren't a lot of diagnostic options. Right.

So it's like, let's just, let's take a little peek in there. And the way to do that was to scrape away. There's still some debate over, like, how much. Because I think sometimes scientists are like, oh, it's like letting the headache. out or especially like back when this was first getting discovered and that's still debated if this was possibly a thing where it's like, oh, like drill a hole to like relieve some of the pressure alone instead of just anything else. But we'll get back to that. But yeah. So how did they get so much better at this is also part of the question. So we go from like 40% and then we get to like

almost everybody's surviving this. And I think in one case they found like a group of skulls that like pretty much everybody had made it. And so what we're looking at here is after years of practice, this process became more refined. There's smaller holes. There's more careful grove-groving. So like you can kind of see that it's more like a crater in the moon. It's just like a knock versus cutting or sawing, not to mention in Incan culture, this wasn't happening in like a hospital setting. A lot of times it happened outdoors, using tools that they didn't just like pass around to other doctors and patients. And they had an advanced knowledge of local flora for potentially pain relieving or any,

even antiseptic purposes. And fast forward to the 1800s, these battlefields and hospital rooms, it is not like a good look. They were gross. They were really awful. And we didn't really understand antiseptic in the setting. So like, you know, he had a doctor and they had these fancy kits. So like, they had thought about it. But they were getting passed around or just rinsed. And like, sometimes people were just like really getting in there without proper cleaning. And so a lot of the times what happened with Civil War soldiers and other people during this during that time, why they were dying is because of infection. It's not even necessarily like just the fact that they have a hole in their head. It's like they have an unclean hole in the head that is,

I mean, there's just a lot going on here. But yeah, and so if we're going to fast forward to today, this doesn't really happen as much, but we have learned from this process now in craniotomies, which is how doctors kind of get in there into your skull. you just, they remove a piece of the skull and they put it back instead of just grinding it to dust and leaving a hole. But, yeah, there's still some places that do this. And a lot of times it's in places that there aren't neurosurgeons, like, available to everybody. But there's also some people out there, some hippie-dippy people who might try to drill a hole in their brain for the Enlightenment stuff. But there's not really any science saying that if you have a hole in your brain that it's going to, you know, help you think better. there's a big thing in the 70s, this one guy named Joe Mellon,

read a whole book about it called Borhole after he drilled into his own skull. And then there was another person who did it to herself. So would not recommend, don't drill into your own skulls, people at home. Like, it's making me, like, flushed. Like, I'm nervous just thinking about it. Yeah, please don't. Yeah, like, I just had a, although I had an image of people doing it as, like, a decorative thing, where they were like, I'm going to put a little hole in there instead of, like,

that's what I'm used to play this. Yeah, no. like really get flushed but yeah do not do that but um yeah self-surgery aside you know there's a lot of reasons that we should still pay attention to this and john verano is like there should be a chapter in every medical book about you know the inkins doing this because you know knowing about this today it just shows us that like giving credit where credits do um learning from each other and paying attention to cultures outside of western medicine like really does save lives you know because we weren't doing this right and people in history

doing it correctly and just learning from people and not saying this is just ritual because clearly they were onto something here. Yeah, totally. I mean, so much of that in in archaeology, I mean, luckily getting a bit better now, but for, you know, for a very long time, it was just assumed that everywhere you looked in history or in a place, outside of white Europe was backwards and anything you found there needed to be explained in those contexts. And yeah, there's been throughout history, there's been a lot going on all over the world. People have been getting up to interesting things everywhere. I think that is, it's surprising that that was such a subversive idea for so long. Yeah. Wow. Well, I

I'm glad we have better options than head drilling. This is true. Although when you're talking about Kusko, is it bad that one of my thoughts is I was like, why isn't this a scene in the Emperor's New Groove? Oh my gosh. I'm trying to, they probably have cut it. Why is there? I feel like there must be a cut scene where Eismas is like,

Krunk, let us drill the hole. Like, wrong hole. Like. Kronk, meanwhile, has like four little holes in his head. That's what like his little cap is covering. We're going to work on this. Croc keeps getting hit. We have to keep replacing his head.

Another hole in the head more broccoli. Oh, my God. So what was the weirdest thing we learned this week? I'm trying to think what. It was all weird. Yeah, it was a weird day. We had a lot of weird things. I have to say that the, I mean, all of the Crow facts were fantastic.

And I love a spooky, smart lurker, you know, Sulker. I have to say that crows have the win for me. I think crows has it. I think learning that crows are definitely smarter than me is a little, that's going to be something to dwell on for a couple of hours at least.

I know. It's going to haunt us. Oh my God. That, that... You won! I'm so excited. My sister's going to be so proud of me. I'm so proud of me. This was awesome. But I am really excited to hear why the radiators are so bright and shiny and so hot.

Thank you. I hope that as we get into winter, and New Yorkers and other U.S. city dwellers are shaking their fists at their radiators, that they remember the good they once did. And also know that, like, just you can open your window. It's okay. That's like, that's the way it's meant to be. You're not a bad person. Michael, thank you so much for joining us. This has been great. Oh, well, thank you for having me. It was a treat to say the list. Oh, my goodness. And congrats on your win and remind our listeners where they can find you. Yes. So on the TikToks and on the Instagrams, I'm M. Judson Barry.

On the tweeters, I'm M. Judson Oneberry because I had a previous account and I'm not tech savvy enough to know how to find it and delete it. And then on the YouTube's as well, if you look up Michael Judson Barry or quarantine time, my little Moira Rose show. Perfect. Thank you so much. Thank you. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast. We're available on all major podcast platforms, so subscribe wherever you're listening now. And if you like what you hear, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.

It helps other weirdos find the show. For more information on the stories you heard in this episode, come find us at popsai.com slash weird. You can buy our merch, including weirdest thing, t-shirts, totebags, and mugs at popsai.threadlist.com. The show is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Fultman, with editing, and audio engineering by Just Bodie. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at Weirdest underscore thing.

Thanks for listening, Weirdos.