Brain In A Jar

Hey, true weirdos, we just wanted to take a minute and thank you so much for your support. True Weird Stuff has won the Best History Podcast and the Women in Podcasting Awards and we've also won a Signal Award in the Paranormal category. And that's only happened because of you, our fellow strange people. Thanks. Stick around if you want after the episode for a little bonus content and conversation.

The 1968 TV movie, They Saved Hitler's Brain, might just be one of the worst movies ever made. So here's the premise. Adolf Hitler didn't commit suicide in his Berlin bunker on April 30, 1945. The flatulent monster had other plans and no intention of ever dying. So he demanded that the best scientific minds in the world come up with a plan.

Mr. H was convinced that they could give him perpetual life. And so, as the Red Army pounded Berlin, Hitler took to the lower level of the bunker, a quieter spot for the odiferous dictator to catch a nap as he waited for his Waffen-SS and the German Ninth Army to annihilate the Russians marching on Berlin. It didn't work out for the Dolph.

Hitler flew into a weepy rage and declared that the war was lost and that he intended to shoot himself. He would never surrender. He would never, ever be taken alive. Not so fast, Herr Fuhrer. If you have figured out a way, then remove your head and then store it in a jar. You'll be alive, Fuhrer. We shall take your head to a special hiding place in South America.

And there we will wait patiently, patiently, until the time is right to revive the Third Reich. Allied bombs were raining from the skies. And as he stared down his only alternative to capture, or a bullet between the eyes, the Dolph was like, Schnell! Schnell! And that's how Adolf Hitler's head ended up in a jar, alive and talking.

It's crazy, right? Unless maybe it kind of isn't. True weird stuff. You would not believe what people used to think about the brain. Aristotle in the 4th century BCE thought that the brain's main job was to cool off the heart. And its other job was to give the spirit a place to hang out. It took until the 1st century AD for a Roman physician named Aelius Galenus to challenge Aristotle.

Galenus was like, No, thinking, all mental activity happens in the brain, not the heart. And the brain, by the way, is a cold and moist organ made up entirely of sperm, since you asked. Now jump to the Middle Ages, where it was widely believed that the brain was divided into three sections, which they called ventricles.

Imagination came from the front ventricle, memory occupied the rear ventricle, and reason filled the middle space in between. And if you're getting the feeling that people were just spitballing like crazy and making up any old theory to explain human behavior and consciousness, you're right. What other option did they have?

It's not like you can see a human brain working. The ancients didn't even have the benefit of an x-ray machine, much less the super sophisticated imaging technologies that we take for granted. Of course, we might as well be the ancients, since health insurance companies can and do refuse to cover that kind of testing anyway.

It took till the Renaissance for physicians to roll up their sleeves and really dive into the dissection of the human brain. They had plenty of interesting theories about the organ. The Italian doctor Jacopo Berengario da Carpi, known far and wide for his use of mercury to treat syphilis, had this to say about the brain.

If you should cut an onion through the middle, you could see and enumerate all the coats or skins which circularly clothe the center of this onion. Likewise, if you should cut the human head through the middle, you would first cut the hair, then the scalp, the muscular flesh, and the pericranium, then the cranium, and in the interior, the oramater, the pia mater, and the brain, then again the pia, the oramater, the reti mirabila, and their foundation, the bone.

Oh, wah, wah, wah. Let's not even try to figure out all those pias and ares and maters and just let the horrifying visual of slicing a human head like an onion haunt our dreams forever. It's hard to visit the Renaissance without bumping into Leonardo da Vinci, and the study of the human brain is no exception. da Vinci was fascinated with the brain, with anatomy in general, and the more he looked at the brain, the less convinced da Vinci was by the earlier theories.

Those ventricles home to imagination, memory, and reason wasn't adding up for Leonardo. He was also on the hunt for the soul, which he and many others believe was seated somewhere in all of that wrinkly goo. You just can't overstate how little was known. For example, picture a human skull. It's not a single piece of bone like a helmet.

The skull is made up of many bones that fuse together as we age. The lines where the bones have fused are called sutures, and there are 17 of those sutures on the human skull. Back then, it was theorized that those sutures existed to help the brain release its vapors as needed. Spoiler alert. The brain has no vapors, unreleased or otherwise, and it's also not a cold, jiggly mound of sperm either.

So it took hundreds of years, okay, for people to start making sense of what the brain was and how the brain worked. Doctors and anatomists chipped away at the problem, making slow but steady progress. 16th century Belgian anatomist Andreas Vesalius figured out the central nervous system. 18th century Italian physicist Luigi Giovanni proved that electrical impulses, bioelectricity, were critical to the central nervous system.

Can you endure a little fun fact? The writer Mary Shelley was keenly interested in Galvani's work, and had read reports on bioelectricity. And although Galvani isn't mentioned by name in the novel Frankenstein, it was his work that inspired Victor's technique to bring his monster to life. And also, Galvani's name is where we get the word galvanize.

Okay, back to the brain. It took the weirdest way imaginable to finally figure out that the brain is divided into regions, with each region controlling certain functions. And it all began with one really bad day on the job for one very unlucky American railroad worker. On the 13th of September 1848, Phineas Gage, a young man of 25, shrewd and intelligent, a contractor on the Burlington Railroad.

Anyone named Phineas Gage is bound for some kind of glory, right? It just wasn't the best kind of glory that was about to come calling for Phineas as he prepped that day for the fateful blast that would rocket him into medical history. If you're like us and everything you know about dynamite comes from watching cartoons as a kid, you're probably imagining a bright red cylinder with a long fuse that looks like a piece of string.

But that's not what Phineas Gage was working with at all. They were making holes in the rock and then filling those holes with gunpowder and sand. Gage charged with gunpowder to a hole drilled in the rock and directed his assistant to fill in the sand. According to witnesses, Gage assumed that the assistant had done just that.

Gage dropped his tamping iron into the hole to drive the sand down. It happened, however, through some inadvertence that the sand had not been poured in. Yeah, uh-oh. Because Phineas Gage is about to blow the wrong thing up. Gage dropped the iron and the iron struck fire upon the rock. The gunpowder was ignited. The iron was blown out from the hole like a ramrod shot from a gun.

That tamping iron was over three and a half feet long, an inch and a quarter in diameter, and tapered at one end to a point. It weighed more than 13 pounds. Striking Gage on the face just below his cheekbone, it forced itself through the skull near the top of the head. When picked up, it was found to be actually greased with the matter of the brain.

You're probably not expecting to hear that Phineas Gage, though a little unsteady on his feet, was, despite having had an iron javelin blown right through his head, he was able to get himself into a cart to be taken home. He'd been blown off his feet. Bits of his brain were smeared on the ground, but he never lost consciousness, which is astounding.

As the cart trundled away from the blast site, Gage called out to a co-worker that he'd see him tomorrow. Then he was delivered to the house where he rented a room on the upper floor. Gage climbed the stairs and sat down to rest. He had no idea that railroad officials were contacting his mother in nearby New Hampshire to come quickly.

No one expected Phineas Gage to survive the night. The physicians who dressed the wound found the fractures of the skull to be fearful. The wound bled freely and portions of the substance of the brain, intermixed with blood, kept filling Gage's throat, causing vomiting. Meanwhile, Phineas Gage's mother was racing to his side, fully expecting her son to be dead before she could even arrive.

And who could blame a person for thinking that no one could survive having an iron rod shot straight through their head? Oh, but how wrong they were. Because Phineas Gage, against all odds, incredibly, unbelievably, did survive. It was touch and go for sure. The wound bled for several days. Not surprisingly, a violent infection set in, which probably was to be expected given the filthy metal rod that had torn through Gage's brain.

For a solid month, Phineas Gage was barely conscious. So sick that the order was given to prepare a coffin for his funeral. And then the most unexpected thing happened. The fever broke. The infection cleared. Gage woke up blind in his left eye with obvious muscle weakness on the left side of his face. But otherwise, okay.

At least it seemed that way. Gage's physician, Dr. John Harlow, didn't think his patient was okay. Not at all. It was super obvious to Harlow that the Phineas Gage who woke up five weeks after that horrific accident was a different Phineas Gage. Gage remembers passing and past events correctly as well before as since the injury.

Intellectual manifestations feeble, being exceedingly capricious and childish, but with a will as indomitable as ever, is particularly obstinate, will not yield to restraint when it conflicts with his desires. Dr. Harlow, who knew Gage very well, wasn't the only one who noticed that Phineas was a changed man. Gage's employers, who regarded him as the most efficient and capable foreman, considered the change in his mind so marked that they could not give him his place again.

He is fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity, manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice when it conflicts with his desires. A child in his intellectual capacities and manifestations, he has the animal passions of a strong man. The days passed and the wound in Gage's head slowly healed, but the man himself seemingly did not.

His mind was radically changed so decidedly that his friends and acquaintances said he was no longer Gage. With the loss of his railroad career, Gage took the tamping iron that had pierced his skull and hit the road. He did a brief stint with Barnum Circus as a sideshow attraction. He worked as a hand in livery stables.

He lived in Chile for seven years before returning home to his family in San Francisco. And Dr. Harlow continued to follow Gage's progress for all that time. Mentally, the recovery certainly was only partial. His intellectual faculties being decidedly impaired, but not totally lost. Nothing like dementia, but they were enfeebled in their manifestations.

His mental operations being perfect in kind, but not in degrees or quantity. It seems obvious to us that having a hole punched in one's brain would probably lead to some changes in personality and behavior. That's because we live in a time when the human brain has been mapped and we have a far better understanding of traumatic brain injuries.

But the people of Phineas Gage's time did not. Even the medical establishment resisted what Dr. Harlow was trying to tell them. They were like, please, like having a dirty piece of metal ripped through the brain would cause a person to change. Be so for real, Dr. Harlow. Dr. Harlow didn't publish a single report about Gage until 20 years after the accident.

Harlow was more concerned with protecting his patient's privacy than he was with any kind of professional acclaim. By that point, Gage was gone. He passed away in 1861. Gage had developed epilepsy and died while having a seizure. He was only 37. But it was a miraculous 37, given what had happened to the man. It took the work of a Scottish neurologist and psychologist named Sir David Ferrier to convince the skeptics that Harlow had been right about the connection between Phineas Gage's brain injury and the changes to his personality.

Ferrier worked with the brains of monkeys and said, There are certain regions in the cortex to which definite functions can be assigned and that the phenomena of cortical lesions will vary according to their seat and also according to their character. Dr. Harlow was like, Oh, you don't say. Do go on. Tell me more about what you observed when you reached into those little monkey brains and pulled out the prefrontal cortex.

Removal or destruction by the cautery of the anterofrontal lobes is not followed by any definite physiological results. And yet, notwithstanding this apparent absence of physiological symptoms, I could perceive a very decided alteration in the animal's character and behavior. While it is difficult to state in precise terms the nature of the change, while not actually deprived of intelligence, they had lost to all appearance the faculty of attentive and intelligent observation.

And then, sweet validation. Ferrier applied what he'd learned in his animal studies to the peculiar case of Phineas Gage. By tracing the path the metal rod had taken on its trip through Gage's head, Ferrier declared that the damage done was to the prefrontal cortex. This, he said, is why Gage suffered no obvious physiological impact from the accident.

In other words, Dr. Harlow was right in theorizing that an injury to the prefrontal cortex of the frontal lobes of the brain can cause profound changes in personality with no other obvious neurological damage. Dr. Harlow lived long enough to get his propers from Sir David Ferrier, but not long enough to see science make the huge leaps in the understanding of the brain that we kind of take for granted now.

Harlow knew, but he couldn't prove, that the prefrontal cortex basically controls our attention, our emotions, our ability to learn and perform complex tasks. Our personality lives there. Planning and decision-making are handled there. It's the part of our brain that manages goals and impulses and the understanding of consequences.

Harlow knew that the changes in Gage were the direct result of the assault on his brain. It just took a Scotsman and some heroic monkeys to convince the rest of the world. We can say this for poor Phineas Gage. While no one wants to have a metal rod blasted through their skull, at least Gage didn't suffer in vain. He wasn't scraped up off the ground and forgotten.

Researchers are even today still exploring Gage's injury, still learning from his terrible catastrophe. Which is why Phineas Gage is the most famous patient in the history of neuroscience. At least so far. 13 years after the death of Phineas Gage, it was a woman named Mary Rafferty's turn to teach science a thing or two about the brain.

Mary Rafferty was an ignorant servant girl who fell into the hands of Dr. Roberts Bartholo of the Good Samaritan Hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio. Mary Rafferty had burned her scalp some years before, and in the scar tissue, an eroding ulcer had occurred, progressing to a point where the skull was completely gone. The brain substance being exposed.

I'm sorry, what? No skull? Just her brain exposed to the world? Surely not. How? At the outset, the experiment seems to have been cautiously made. Slow down. What experiment? Turns out that Mary Rafferty was an Irish immigrant in her 30s. The burn to her scalp had occurred in childhood and she fell into a fire. The damage was so severe that Mary had to wear wigs, which at that time could be miserably uncomfortable.

The wigs were typically made of goat or horse hair. Human hair was out of the question for a poor person, far too costly. The goat or horse hair was sewn onto a piece of fabric and sometimes shaped and reinforced with whalebone. It was hot and heavy and scratchy. As if things weren't already hard enough for Mary, a piece of whalebone in her wig rubbed at her scalp and rubbed and rubbed until it made a sore.

That sore became infected and ulcerated. There was no neosporin back then, no antibiotics at all. There also wasn't much in the way of sympathy for a poor and disfigured woman. Put the wig back on, Mary. No respectable household would dream of employing a creature so frightful as yourself. The sore on Mary's scalp had grown to two inches in diameter by the time Dr. Bartholow got his hands on her.

As he peered at the wound, Bartholow said that the pulsations of the brain were clearly visible. He also declared that what he could see of Mary's brain was very much diseased, which was a puzzle. Why? Because in spite of the gruesome ulcer and the obviously unhealthy brain tissue, Mary showed no signs of any sort of cognitive impairment.

How in the world Mary ended up at Good Samaritan Hospital is unknown. It's also pretty unclear as to whether or not she consented to Dr. Bartholow's plan, which was less about treatment and more about experimentation. As portions of brain substance have been lost by injury or by the surgeon's knife, and as the brain has been deeply penetrated by incisions made for the escape of pus, it was supposed that fine needles could be introduced without material injury.

Oh, look, that's Dr. Bartholow himself supposing that. Notwithstanding my sanguine expectations based on the facts above stated that small insulated needle electrodes could be introduced without injury into the cerebral substance. I know now that I was mistaken. All right, back it up. Are you saying that you poked needles into this suffering woman's head and made everything worse?

Yeah, that's just what happened to Mary Rafferty. See, Bartholow did as he pleased to Mary. His experiment, which was already not exactly ethical, amped up. Over the course of a week, he probed her brain with electrified needles. His agenda had nothing to do with healing. It was all about his own curiosity. He had a powerful wondering that man did about the brain-body connection, and here was a living brain to play with.

Unlike his colleagues who only had animal brains to study, Dr. Bartholow was the first to experiment on a human brain. Presently, the experiment grew bolder. The needle was withdrawn from the left lobe and passing the same way into the brain substance of the right lobe. When the needle entered the brain substance, Mary complained of an acute pain in her neck.

Bartholow watched Mary's response to the needles and decided to increase the electrical current. Her countenance exhibited great distress, and she began to cry. Very soon, the left hand was rigidly extended. The arm was agitated with clonic spasms. Her eyes became fixed with pupils widely dilated. Her lips were blue and she frothed at the mouth.

She lost consciousness and violently convulsed. That seizure lasted for more than five minutes and left Mary Rafferty in a coma. She died not long after. Dr. Bartholow showed so little remorse for Mary Rafferty. Other doctors were outraged. Bartholow was forced to make an apology, even if it wasn't much of an apology at all.

To repeat such experiments with the knowledge I now have that injury will be done by them would be the highest degree criminal. I can only now express my regret that facts which I had hoped would further in some slight degree the progress of knowledge were obtained at the expense of some injury to the patient. And by some injury to the patient, he meant suffering, anguish and death.

Here's a guy that would have made a great politician. The medical establishment was like, OK, I guess we're cool now. And to prove it, Dr. Bartholow continued to climb the ranks and enjoy a prestigious career. He accepted a position at the Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia. Bartholow retired in 1893. By that point, his health was poor and in a stroke of insane karmic justice.

He was bedeviled by mental torment right up to his death in 1904. And maybe he should have tried giving his own brain a little poke with an electrified needle. We're about to hop an express train to the future of brain science, but not before we pause to remember Mary Rafferty, a terrible accident in childhood condemned her to a life of pain and hardship and then a premature death at the hands of a man who believed that his coldness and cruelty were justified in the name of knowledge.

It's Dr. Bartholow who gets all the credit for being the first scientist to prove what we call cortical excitability in a human being, something that laid the foundation for the brain mapping that's still used in modern neuroscience. It's only in recent history that Mary Rafferty's contribution and sacrifice has really even been acknowledged.

So if you ever find yourself in a neurologist's office, and we hope you don't, maybe give a silent thanks to Phineas Gage and Mary Rafferty for enduring a Frankenstein-flavored nightmare. So you won't have to. Now it's 2015 and the announcement that a team at Ohio State University had successfully grown a human brain in the lab for the very first time.

Now it wasn't a big brain, just about the size of a pencil eraser, and it wasn't a conscious brain, but it was the most complete model of a brain ever developed. The team grew their lab brain from skin cells taken from an adult human, which is trippy enough, right? But that's not hardly the trippiest part. Earlier attempts to grow a human brain had resulted in woefully incomplete little blobs, equivalent to that of maybe a nine-week-old fetus, but missing critical components.

The 2015 lab brain, that was another story. The scientists at Ohio State said that their brain had 99% of the brain's very diverse cell types and genes. And even more sci-fi, their brain had a spinal cord and a retina. But this wasn't a thinking brain. To grow a thinking brain, the Ohio State spokesperson said, you'd need a whole network of blood vessels and an artificial heart, too.

At least that was the theory. So why did they grow that brain? What was the purpose? Research for the military, an investigation into the effects of traumatic brain injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder. Three years later, big questions were being asked about growing human brains in laboratories. Questions like...

Well, what if you grew brain tissue in a lab, and that brain tissue appeared to be conscious in some way? I mean, what would that mean? Would that clump of brain tissue be entitled to the same protections that we require for human subjects? And how would we even know if that brain in the jar was aware or conscious? That's a great question.

In the Ohio State case, the researchers were pretty forceful in denying that their brain clump even had the capacity to process stimuli. It was, they said, just more or less sitting there and existing, not perceiving or processing the way your brain does. They call these lab-grown brains brain surrogates. Oh my gosh, wait, I apologize.

You might be hearing that we can even do this kind of thing for the first time. It's a lot to take in. Growing a human brain in a petri dish? What if something went wrong? And now you have a disembodied brain looking for trouble? That was pretty much the plot of the 1957 movie, The Brain from Planet Arus. A giant criminal alien brain named Gore came to Earth and took control of a nuclear scientist named Steve.

Your feeling of helplessness is your best friend, savage. When I am occupying your body, or in my present transitory form, I am without substance and indestructible. You are fortunate that Gore, one of the greatest intellects in the world where intelligence is all, has chosen to use your body. I, Gore, in your stupid body, will have power of life or death over this civilization.

Through me, you shall have powers such as no man has ever seen before in the history of your planet. The power of pure intellect. That's just a cheesy movie though. Here in the real world, there are three types of brain surrogates. The most basic is ex vivo tissue. That's a little chunk of brain about the size of a sugar cube that's removed from a person during a surgical procedure.

Slice it up real thin and researchers can study circuitry and synapses and even take a peek at RNA and see how genes get expressed. Ex vivo tissue is just that, a lump of tissue. It has no sensory inputs and can't communicate with any other part of the brain. So there's zero chance of it waking up and trying to take over the world.

Then there's the chimerics. This one's a little bit creepier. That's where we transplant human brain cells into the brain of an animal, like a rodent, for example. We don't sneak those brain cells out of your head. We clone them from other human cells. But why put human brain tissue into the head of the mouse? What's the point of that other than to create a nightmare?

Well, the brain of a mouse offers a more natural environment for the transplanted human brain cells to grow. And they do grow. Want to hear something cool? Mice with those transplanted cells perform better in certain tasks that require the ability to learn, which is good for the mice, right? But what about people? What do people get from experiments like this?

What's the point? The point is a better understanding of disease in the hopes of finding more effective treatment and in some cases, cures. Chimeras are the stuff of sci-fi, except these chimeras are real. Slightly smarter mice are a cool idea. But what else is possible? Now get ready, because this is wild. Researchers injected human stem cells into very early stage pig embryos.

Those embryos were then implanted into the wombs of surrogate sows. They halted development after the first trimester. I'm saying this as gently as I can, because the word halted is doing a lot of unpleasant heavy lifting here. Here's what they found. 150 of those pig embryos were successful chimeras. In what would develop into those pigs hearts and livers, about one in every 10,000 cells was human.

Which could make for both a very creepy story and a staggering leap forward in the world of organ transplantation. People die on the transplant list waiting for a heart or a liver to become available. Like 17 people dying every single day waiting for a donor organ. Imagine being able to grow those organs, all the lives that could be saved.

Or worst case scenario, we're going to have to add scheming human hog hybrids to our apocalypse bingo cards. Let's stay positive though and focus on one great thing that's happening with mouse chimeras. Research into Parkinson's disease. Those mice might be the key to a cure. And then there's the third kind of brain surrogate, the organoid.

An organoid is just a miniature version of an organ that's been grown in a lab from stem cells. Scientists have already managed to create tiny beating hearts about the size of a sesame seed. After exposing a clump of stem cells to the proteins and molecules involved in the development of the heart and the womb, it only took a week for those cells to arrange themselves into hollow chambers, which then began contracting rhythmically.

You know, in just the same ways the walls of the heart contract. The heartbeat. Scientists also whipped up some tear ducts in a petri dish and then grafted those into the eyes of mice. The lab grown tear ducts had no openings, so they just puffed up like balloons in their petri dishes, but seemingly worked just fine with a few adjustments once the mice got them.

This isn't as nuts as it sounds, given how many people suffer from dry eyes. Let's be real and remember that your insurance company doesn't even want to pay for prescription eye drops, much less tear duct transplants. So good luck to anyone with dry eyes who isn't a laboratory mouse. And now we come to brain organoids.

Grown from human stem cells in a petri dish, fed by a nutrient broth, brain organoids consist of 2 to 3 million cells, which sounds impressive until you learn that a mature human brain has roughly 170 billion cells. The organoids are tiny, about the size of an adult fruit fly. So why exactly are we making tiny human brains in petri dishes?

Lots of good reasons. For starters, brain organoids develop in ways that are very similar to the human brain in utero. And that makes them good models to study things like neurodevelopmental disorders. And what are those? How about ADHD, Tourette's syndrome, cerebral palsy, autism spectrum disorder, intellectual disabilities, and even learning disabilities like dyslexia.

And this is huge because up till now, researchers were trying to figure it all out using animal brains, which worked a little the way someone can learn to drive by playing a video game. It seems close enough to the real thing. But when it comes to the human brain, close enough just ain't good enough. And last, brain organoids have given science a whole new way to understand the development and progression of brain cancer.

That's a whole lot of incredible progress being made from studying a blob of brain in a dish. But it's weird as hell, too. This is from a news story published in 2018 in the Los Angeles Times. These organoids are tiny facsimiles of a part of the human brain. It is hardly beyond imagining that one day researchers could create a miniaturized model of the exquisitely complex organ that can create, store, and retrieve memories, love and hate other creatures, and contemplate its own place in the universe.

A fully functional brain in a jar. You people have small minds. You are unable to grasp the importance of today's events. Oh, there goes gore from the planet Eris making big threats again. Back in the day, people were as nervous about scientific progress as they were excited. All those old scary movies are a peek into the psyche of the people who made them.

A peek into the anxieties and worries of the time. If it seems silly to us that their darkest daydreams were made up of stuff like a brain being cut loose from its body to wreak havoc on the world, it shouldn't. Not now that we're growing human brains in labs. We laugh at the idea that the head of a monstrous freak like Hitler could somehow survive death and return to finish the evil he began.

Today, people joke about hoping a giant disembodied alien brain shows up to take over Earth. What does that say about us? Maybe that we're so scared of the monsters we see in each other that we just about welcome some strange outside threat. Anyway, it's been nearly seven years now since that LA Times story ran. How close are we to that miniature fully functional laboratory brain?

Getting closer for sure. Scientists at the Mayo Clinic are using brain organoids to study Lewy body dementia. That's the incurable disease that took the great Robin Williams from us. Researchers at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine are using brain organoids to look at how compounds in certain cleaning products are damaging to a kind of brain cell called oligodendrocytes.

And if you're screaming, who cares? Boring. Well, those brain cells are super critical in allowing neural signals to zip around the brain. And the chemicals we're talking about, quaternary ammonium compounds or quats, are like absolutely toxic to those specific cells. And those quats are all over your house. Fabric softener, dryer sheets, some baby wipes, hand soap, and dozens of other things.

Don't sweat it though. One, because the damage is done. And two, maybe a slightly slower brain will help make reality easier to endure. Glass half full and all that. Here's where it gets creepy. Brain organoids may not look like tiny brains. They look like whitish blobs floating in a brownish broth. But those blobs are busy doing exactly what brain cells do.

Which came as a bit of a surprise. The thinking was that brain organoids were basically, you know, just chaotic clumps of cells. The brain organoids simply couldn't organize themselves and do what embryos do so naturally. They were wrong about that. Instead of just chaotically sitting there in their nutrient broth, the brain organoids got busy.

Busy spontaneously developing the rudimentary structures for eyes. As in a lens and a retina. A retina capable of sending signals to that brain tissue. Oh sure, the organoids in this case did have an assist. The German scientists who found themselves eye to eye with a brain in a dish, had introduced something called retinoic acid on day 20 of the organoids development.

Retinoic acid is derived from vitamin A. And you guessed it, it's critical to the development of embryonic eyes. It took just 10 days for the organoids to begin assembling the basic ingredients for optics. Visible eye structures could be seen by day 60. And yes, you can see them. It's a little blob with even littler dark eyes.

It's really something to behold. And those primitive eyes, they call them eye cups. Oh buddy, they are responsive to light. Now we're a long way away from one of these things becoming sentient and diabolical and trying to take over the world. And I'm also sad to say that given what's happening right now to science and medicine in this country, we may never really know what amazing things might come from this.

These little brains and jars. Cures for diseases like glaucoma and macular degeneration. Stuff like that. Because, and you may not know this, once your eye cells die, your body can't regenerate them. Could these organoids with their odd little eye cups be the answer? Who knows? Maybe we'll never know. But we do know this.

We used to be able to keep brain organoids alive for just a few months. That's changed now too. Now scientists can keep brain organoids alive for years. And the discovery that made it possible for brains and jars to survive for a long time also made this possible. The longer lived organoids do what your brain does. The neurons begin connecting in very organized and specific ways.

Here's an example. The scientists placed the organoids next to a piece of spinal cord tissue along with the adjacent back muscle. This was taken from mouse embryos. Guess what happened in less than a month? The neurons in the organoid began extending branches into that spinal cord tissue. And the back muscle, the organoid made it twitch.

Can you see the possibilities? From the most horrifying to the most miraculous. What we don't yet know or understand about these lab-grown brains is enough to give you the willies. Neurons in these organoids are signaling. Sporadic and random at first, but then over time, faster and more regularly. At rates close to that of the human brain.

Just like human embryos in the womb. In fact, the organoids generate electrical activity that looks awfully similar to the brain waves of a newborn baby. There are even signs that these brain organoids show potential for the capacity to learn. But while the human embryo is connected to its mother and receives all sorts of signals from outside itself, the brain organoids floating in their little soup, they aren't connected to anything.

They're not receiving those inputs or signals. They're just doing what brains do. Nothing to be scared of. At least that's what Dr. Thomas Hartung, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing says. These cells have no input or no output. They cannot recognize anything happening in the world.

So they are definitely not conscious. As it happens, not everyone in the world of neuroscience is so sure about that. As Dr. Alysson Muotri, one of the lead researchers in the field of brain organoids put it, Neuroscientists can't even agree on how to probe whether the organoids are conscious or not. But the ethical implications of growing little 3D brains and labs are very, very real.

Consciousness, pain, suffering, all possibilities that can't really be dismissed. Not yet anyway. And if we don't even know how to test these tiny brains for consciousness, for the ability to perceive pain, to know that it is suffering and is aware of that suffering, then how will we ever know when we've crossed the line?

Parts of experimentation twist and turn through mountains of miscalculation and often lose themselves in error and darkness. Maybe those campy old movies have a point? Next time on True Weird Stuff. Bedtime stories, fairy tales, things that are just made up to teach children a lesson. You know, a lesson about stranger danger or a lesson about obeying your parents or a lesson about not accepting a beautiful red apple from a seemingly friendly old woman.

But what if I told you that a lot of those stories are based on real people and real events? Your mirror on the wall was Snow White, a real person. After all, that's the next True Weird Stuff. Special thanks to our voice talents on this episode. Lamar Richardson, Kary "Doc" Bowser and Don Morgan. Good morning, guys. This is Regina from Lexington, South Carolina.

And I was just listening to the show. You're talking about the tiny brains that are being grown in petri dishes and put in to mice and that it's for they're looking to cure diseases like Alzheimer's and stuff. Can I just remind everybody that the last time we tried to find a cure for Alzheimer's, we turned into Planet of the Apes.

So and it was a form of covid that killed off all of the humans. So next, we're going to have Planet of the Mice and all the mice are going to be smarter than we are and they're just going to take over the world. That's a frightening experience. I'm just saying. Yeah, we talked about this is an upcoming episode on our radio show, our day job.

There's a lot of really spooky stuff here. But I completely understand why people push back on this, because it's one thing to grow a skin graft in the lab, right? It's another thing to transplant a valve from a pig's heart into a human heart. But making little brains that show the same level of electrical activity as a newborn baby.

Oh, Siri, I don't know what made you. My goodness. Thank you. You know, I should be more worried about my devices listening to me than a brain in a jar. But can't you see like you can see the possibilities for good? Yeah, you can also see how this could get creepy fast. Yeah. So can I ask a question about Phineas Gage, the man towards the beginning of this, where they had the spike go through his head?

He worked for Ringling Brothers. Did they take the spike out? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So when they got him back to his boarding house, so here's the thing about like the olden times that should really give you pause because a lot of people suffer from near toxic malignant nostalgia for the good old days. So poor Phineas Gage is just doing his job.

And he took for granted that the assistant had poured sand into the hole. So apparently you drill the hole, the gunpowder goes in, the sand goes on top, then you tamp it down with the iron and light it up and it explodes. But when metal strikes gunpowder, isn't that the basic principle of how a bullet is fired from a gun?

That is. The strike pin hits the primer pin and the gunpowder ignites when metal hits gunpowder and there's no sand in between horrific explosion. So the first lesson of Phineas Gage is don't take for granted that somebody did the work, check and then check again. So the iron spike goes through his head. And I have to remind you that it weighed 13 pounds, was three and a half feet long, pointed at one end an inch and a quarter in diameter.

That's not a chopstick, y'all. That's a damn iron rod. It goes through his head. They put him in the wagon. They take him to the boarding house where he's staying. They did not take him to a doctor's office or a hospital, mostly because there probably wasn't either of those options available. And they did remove the iron rod from his head.

And he took that iron rod on the road with him when he was working as a sideshow attraction. A couple things about that. The fact that he survived the iron rod going in his head and remained conscious, by the way, and then survived the removal of the iron rod through his head, even though that was a less great outcome because he bled.

He was comatose. It was a hot mess. It's unbelievable that Phineas Gage lived as long as he did after this. It takes your breath away when you think about it. It is amazing. It really is. I was just wondering when they came to the sideshow, what they were seeing, what was it that was interesting about him? The fact that this has happened and he had the spike in his hand.

That was all I was thinking about because. Well, his head was pretty, pretty solidly scarred up. I mean, they didn't have cosmetic surgery then, and he was missing like his bits of his bone had been pulverized. The part I thought you were going to bring up is, you know, when you have any kind of injury like your nose, your sinuses, that blood does drain down your throat and you swallow it and it makes you sick.

I mean, he was swallowing blood and brain matter. Oh, my God, this poor man, this poor man, how he suffered. And you have to know that the painkillers were not optimal back then for him. So he would go on the sideshow circuit and the carnival barker would do this whole, you could probably do it off the top of your head, Max.

Step right up and see the man who survived an explosion that drove a spike through his head. People were willing to drop a nickel just to stare. And, you know, he would turn from one side to the next so that you could see the scars. And he would, he would, the people were allowed to like, hold the rod and heft it to see how heavy it was.

You know, people bitch and moan about too much screen time, but this is what folks did before they had screens. This is an FYI. It's fascinating that he lost a lot of his impulse control through the course of that. I mean, that really is, it is, it's interesting. And the first time that that connection was made between, because it's so, like, I think it's hard for modern people to get our heads, sorry, Phineas, our heads around the idea that not that long ago, because this is not that long ago.

Not that long ago, people didn't really think of the brain as where personality came from or impulse control or lack thereof. Like they, you know, just didn't know that. I don't, I don't know what they thought the brain was jostling around inside your head for, but the very concepts of like psychology and psychiatry had not yet been invented.

And we didn't know. And so Phineas was the first person that doctors could make a case for. This man has suffered this traumatic injury, and these are the ways he's different as a result of it. And Dr. Harlow was right. He was right about all of it, which makes him kind of a visionary for the time. Right. Then we get to Dr. Bartholow, who's kind of, you know, his own version of like Dexter or something, because what Dr. Bartholow did to Mary Rafferty is obscene.

It is. I was just trying to think, I was trying to keep in my mind how many episodes we've had where doctors have performed experiments on people who are unaware of what was going on. This is, I mean, I can think of three other ones that we've done right off the top of my head, no pun intended, where those things were done.

And it's just, it's monstrous. You know, we talk about what the Nazis did during World War II with their experimentation. Everything that was done in this country, if you put it all together, you'd say, so to which country was doing this? You wouldn't have said the United States. You would have said, you know, the Nazi Germans.

But here we are. You can always see in a story like this, a true historical tale like this, you can see the dynamics of race and class and gender playing out. Because Mary Rafferty was a poor, uneducated, Irish immigrant, serving girl who was disfigured. That is five whomping strikes against you at that time in history.

And because of that, I think Barthelot saw her as a person of diminished humanity, certainly not as his equal in any way. And it's monstrous. When we see, like on this podcast, when we come across doctors doing dirty, who are they often doing dirty to? I want you to think about the number of times that it's been. People who have no advocate.

Yeah. The number of times it's been women and children. Look at the story we did on what the CIA had going on with the radiation experiments. Right. The African-American man that was in the car accident. And they were like, well, he's in a car accident. Let's see what happens if we shoot some plutonium into his brain.

And by the way, let's not repair any of his broken bones until we get the experiment done. So the guy's, you know, in agony in his hospital bed with broken bones for three weeks, getting plutonium injected directly into his brain. And poor Mary was wearing those whale bone wigs. Goat hair wigs. Goat hair with whale bones and goat hair.

This is the part where we gather around the campfire and I say this unto you. Pay attention to who is being dehumanized and being othered in a society at any given moment in history. Those are the people where the atrocities will play out. Well, let me rephrase that. Those are the first people where the atrocities will play out.

They'll come for you eventually. Because that is what history has to teach us. Is that we may start with this very oppressed and vulnerable person who has no advocacy or voice, but eventually we'll find you. And you see that over and over and over again. And at the same time, we've had huge breakthroughs with stories like this.

Phineas Gage is an example of moving the ball of knowledge so far down the field, right? Mary Rafferty is an example of what happens when ethics are not brought into the room and you just feel like you can do whatever the hell you please to a person because they have no voice to stop you. What did we really learn from what was done to Mary Rafferty?

What did we really learn? We learned that there needs to be checks on power. And there needs to be review and careful consideration of what kinds of experimentation is done on a human being and have they consent it? And do you have a clue what you're doing? Or are you just going, wow, let me see what happens if I poke an electrified needle?

And he watched. He watched as this woman, as he's poking around in her brain, he's watching her spasming and weeping. It's it's unbearable. It's unbearable. So we talked about this a little bit at the beginning, where we were talking about Adolf Hitler's head was saved in that movie. But we really have done that because the great baseball player, Ted Williams, his head was frozen and I think it's still frozen somewhere.

Did it accidentally get defrosted? It seemed to me that something happened where it was abused in some kind of way, that it was mishandled, mistreated, I think is the word they used, mistreated by the company. So we still don't know whether, you know, they've actually saved his brain that someday that they can bring his brain back to life.

Walt Disney did that, too, I believe. Cryogenics. Yeah, I'm super skeptical. I'm just going to be so honest. I'm super skeptical because we had a few episodes early in the life of True Weird Stuff when we did the mommy and daughter body snatcher story. There was a facility in Las Vegas, I think it was, where they had some frozen corpses.

Remember in the in the older gentleman, the employee was defrosting one with a garden hose? Yes, that's right. In the parking lot. Good Lord. I just can't with people, we're just so terrible. The other thing that is really fascinating, of course, you had talked about psychology and neurology. You know, Sigmund Freud started out as a psychologist and then became a neurologist, which is very interesting.

No, he started out as a neurologist and then became a psychologist. I'm sorry, the other way around. But this business about what happens with your brain, the neurons, the routing of the messages that go around in your brain, they have found people who have had traumatic brain injuries who have, through the course of time, almost like your neurons are like cars trying to get down the interstate in a traffic jam and all of a sudden everybody starts getting off at the exits because they go, well, we're going to we're going to go on the back roads because we've got to find a way to get to our destination.

Well, neurons do the same thing. And eventually they end up those those pathways end up becoming their own little super highways through the course of time and grow that way. It's a fascinating thing where people have had these injuries and then after years they're able to start functioning normally again. The human brain, like they're so we're just at the beginning of knowing really anything.

Right. And the word you're looking for is plasticity. The human brain is plastic, meaning it can compensate. Right. We had a story on the radio show, a guy, married father of two or three kids was having some, he had some muscle weakness in one of his legs of all the weird things. And when he couldn't get it to resolve, he ended up going to the doctor.

And one thing led to another. And they did a brain scan and he only had half a brain where the rest of his brain should be was fluid. Remember that? Right. And so we're pretty magical in that way. And there was a thing that was said years ago that we only use 10 percent of our brain or something like that. That's been proven to be absolutely false.

I don't know who floated that, but it went around a lot. Yeah, that's not true. And I'm using 100 percent of my brain plus three hard drives on my desk. Ain't nothing untapped here. And I'm still barely getting through. The Phineas Gage is an example of like a horrific freak show event. And a lot of times if you stumble across Phineas Gage, it'll be the shock factor.

Oh, he got a pole planted through his head. But if you don't follow it, if you don't follow that trail, you don't realize that that poor guy, that poor guy opened an entire universe of knowledge that led to whole categories of treatment that help people's lives be better. Yeah. And we owe him. We owe him a little bit better than, oh, there's a guy with a pole in his head.

Mary Rafferty teaches us that just because someone is an expert or has a doctor title in front of their name, it's no guarantee that they are going to be ethical, good, decent people who are doing rigorous and appropriate science. How many times have we had people with doctor in front of their name that have done some horrific things on some of the episodes of this podcast?

And in the world, right? And in the world. We think, you know, we equate certain things with virtue. Oh, well, he or she's a doctor. OK, but that does not guarantee that they're also a mentally and emotionally sound human being with functional morality and ethics, which doesn't guarantee anything. And I understand. Go ahead.

Finish what you're going to say. And then you see that these two these two truly tragic figures, neither one of whom should have ever been famous or infamous. They should have just been born and lived and died and disappeared like most of us do. But these two figures, Phineas Gage and Mary Rafferty, show us both sides of that coin, the potential for greatness and discovery and the potential for exploitation and abuse.

And I know people have some ethical dilemmas about doing some of this stuff, but I I don't know. I'm not a scientist, obviously, but I do believe that if you're just doing this in a Petri dish, you know, it's just what it is. It's not it doesn't have a soul. It doesn't you know, it's it's you haven't turned it into a human being.

Now, maybe someday that would happen, but I think that we need to be able to explore this to be able to to cure some of these diseases and to be able to have a better quality of You know, I'll bet you would have a theory about it unless it was your own family member. You have a family member that you love who's, you know, going through something and you say, well, we're going to do these experiments with these brains in a Petri dish that's going to solve whatever it is.

Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, you know, the idea that we're that we could cure Parkinson's disease, which steals people's lives and their it steals their it steals the person. I mean, you the I think the highest profile example of it is Michael J. Fox. Yeah. And his tireless efforts to raise money to fund research for Parkinson's is in the background of this story.

Like we could we could maybe cure Parkinson's disease. So in the episode we did, it dropped in January of this year, 2025 called Human Cloning. We we did a deeper dive on how they what how they turn a cell from like your cheek into a brain and it's how they can make that be a brain cell. So it's really fascinating because human babies, human embryos were like filled with something called pluripotent cells and every cell can turn into everything.

And that's kind of a really simplistic and half assed way of saying it. Right. But as we are born and grow and age, cells lock in. This is skin. This is a skin cell. That's a bone cell. That's a cell for your cornea or whatever. So how do we how do we create how do we turn a cell from your cheek, Max, into a cell that can become a brain?

Science is a process and it's not even well understood by science where they're able to flip the switch on that skin cell and turn it back into that pluripotent anything can kind of a cell, which is amazing to think about. Now, it would be maybe even more amazing if they understood exactly how they were making it happen, but they're making it happen.

So when people say you can't kill a baby to grow a human brain. Well, they don't need to because they can take a scrape right here inside your cheek and grow a human brain that way. So if you're interested, if you didn't hear that episode and you're kind of intrigued by the way all of that works, we did our usual talking monkey layman's breakdown of it.

Sherry, you said you act like you did it in some sort of half-assed way. It was very thorough and very clinical, yet understandable. But it's so confusing and hard because it's so confusing and hard. And then when you come to the point, like I'm over there going, but how? How did you turn that cheek cell? How did you make it be like an embryonic cell that can do anything?

And the answer is the process is unclear. That's worrisome, Dr. Frankenstein, but it is what it is. So just getting from a cell of a cheek to a miniature 3D brain in a dish, that's a good day's work all by itself, right? It is. It's just incredible. The organoids themselves, the primitive eye structures. So I had sent Max a picture of an organoid with what they call eye cups.

I'm sorry, it's mind-blowing. Yeah, it really is. And the idea that you might be able to grow somebody an eye to cure macular degeneration or glaucoma, the idea that you'd be able to fix that is just amazing. I didn't know that, by the way, about eye cells, that they don't. Yeah, they're one and done. They're one and done.

That's why you got to take good care of your eyes and why it's a tragedy for people with eye diseases. So any advances that are made in this area won't come in time to help my mom, who is probably going to soon be blind in one eye. She's had incredible issues with detached retina and macular degeneration. And the idea that once those cells are damaged and gone, they don't come back.

Think for a second. You burn your hand tonight cooking, and it hurts like a mofo. But your skin cells are going to regenerate. It's going to heal eventually. That's right. And that's just not true for your eyes. It's just not true. And there was a thing in there for everybody that grew up with a certain generation of parents that were obsessed with eat your carrots so that you can have good night vision.

Did you have that? Was your mom one of those? Yeah, you know where that came from, don't you? So during World War II, the British had radar, right? And so they had certain technological advances over the Germans. And so they did this whole thing that carrots make your eyesight better. And so their eyesight was so much better.

But in reality, it was the technology that was beating the Germans. That's how all of that started with the carrots and the eyesight. But every person alive has only heard of carrots. We've had generation of eat your carrots. Here's the thing. There is something in vitamin A, retinoic acid, that is critical for the development of eyes in the human embryo.

So maybe eat your carrots, right, if you're pregnant. And it was those German scientists. They had their little brains floating in the little nutrient soup. And they were like, hmm, let's hit it with a little of this retinoic acid. And I'll be damned if the structures for eyes didn't immediately begin developing. That's amazing.

Oh, it's so, so, so cool. Really, it really is. Now let's look at that really super freaky instance where they put the brain next to the cells from the mouse spinal cord and muscles from the mouse back tissue. And the brain started reaching over to connect the spinal cord and reaching over to connect with the back muscles.

And when it was all said and done, that brain organoid was making the back muscles twitch. That may seem like no big deal to you, but that's because you haven't suffered a catastrophic injury that maybe left you paralyzed. This is what I was talking about before, about how there's damage. And neurologically, we can create new pathways.

When you were talking about that, that's what I was sort of referring to. And it is fascinating to see how that happens. First of all, second of all, there are neurologists who still don't understand about certain how some of this stuff works, how that works. It's an exciting, we're at such an exciting time. But I think we're also at such a, oh, what's the word?

Tragic and vulnerable time as well, because a lot of what we're talking about here is so difficult to understand. And if you only glance at it, you come away going, oh, this is wrong. We should not allow this. They're doing terrible things. But you look at the people who've suffered traumatic brain injuries. You look at our military veterans who suffer from not just devastating injuries to their bodies, but the assault on their mind and their wellness that is PTSD.

And you go, well, I think that we should do what we can to help these people. And we're making progress. And we got a ways to go. We're not anywhere near it, but we're closer than we were. And now things are being shut down and snatched away. So yeah, I'm sad. I'm really sad. I'm disgusted and angry, too, but for sure sad.

I don't personally have Parkinson's disease at the moment, and hopefully I don't get it. But man, if that's you, that's your dad or somebody you love. The idea that they're inching toward maybe a cure, does that not just fill your heart with gladness? It really does. It really does. I mean, Max, I just don't even know.

Like, there is a lot and we cover it here in one way or another. We touch on it in almost every story. There is a lot that is wrong. People being people are going to be short-sighted and selfish and lazy and all of the things that people can be. And so you look at it, oh my God, they're growing brains in jars and your mind immediately goes to all of the abuses.

But people can also be noble and brilliant and creative and willing to give their whole lives to stare down into a microscope in some climate controlled lab, knowing that their small effort, their small contribution may lead to this miracle, but that they may not even live to see it. Like, we should remember that that's the other side of the coin of human beings are awful, that they can also be pretty amazing.

Yeah. Now, it is unsettling the way we ended this story. So Dr. Allison Moultrie is like the figure in this world saying that, you know, hey, we don't even know how to test for the perception of pain or sentience or consciousness. These little brain organoids, here they are. Hmm. We're saying that they're just sitting there in their soup.

But we don't know how to test if that's really true, which does open a whole can of sci-fi ethical worms. Do we just say that they aren't just to make ourselves feel better about ourselves and feel better about the situation? That seems to be the plan at the moment. Yeah, it does. I often do that in my life, Sherry, with all kinds of things.

So I think I'll do it with this one, too. I just had a perfect instance of me doing exactly what you're describing. So in the past year and a half, my husband was in a horrific car accident that wasn't his fault. We're thankful he walked away. My older daughter, car accident, totaled her vehicle, hydroplaning on a rainy highway.

My younger daughter, fender bender in the parking lot at her job. I just got a notification that my insurance company is like, see you later, alligator. Oh, no. I've been put into some high risk pool and they've canceled my collision coverage. Well, one of these things is not like the other, and it would be this thing who hasn't wrecked a car, who now does not have coverage on my vehicle, which is I bought it used.

It's a 2020. I bought it in 2021. It was a year old. I got a five-year-old car, flash, news flash, and a payment and no collision coverage. And you have to. Because whoever your lender is requires that. Yeah. So when I got the notice in the mail, I didn't even understand what I was reading, and I just folded it back up and put it back into the envelope and I said, I shall call the insurance company soon to deal with this.

But I haven't done it yet because we had a lot of other stuff going on, including we just lost a beloved pet. And so, you know, the nightmare with the car insurance gets pushed back and back. And like you, I'm saying, it doesn't seem like it's all right, but hopefully it'll be all right. And I'm at the point where a brain in a jar has better chance of driving than the people I love because look at them one after another crashing cars.

And let me also say one more thing, because you know that I am a firebrand of the revolution. Let me speak directly to the automobile insurance industrial complex. I was paying big bucks for car insurance to carry collision on all those vehicles, to have, you know, young drivers who don't have a ton of experience. I was paying you for that.

And I've been paying you that for my entire adult life. And you assholes just stabbed me in the back when I finally need it, when I finally need it. The insurance that I've been paying you for. We have a saying for that, where I come from, and that saying is get the fuck out of here. What kind of racket is this? Because I do feel that way, Max.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. My father was with an insurance company for years, and I had a couple accidents. And I mean, I had two. And then I had an accident that was not my fault. And they dropped us because of the accident that was not my fault, because they said, you seem to be in a lot of accidents. I'm so pissed off. I am so pissed off.

It's like, you know, a guy we used to work with used to be like, I don't want to drive with you, Sherry. And I'm like, really? No, why is that? I don't have any tickets. I don't get into wrecks. Like, why don't you want to? Yeah, you have to listen to murder podcasts and Taylor Swift. But that doesn't seem like such a whoopin', does it?

No. So here I'm walking around, you know, with my clean driving record, and I'm getting punched in the face by my insurance company. And I'm pissed about it. But like everybody else in America, suck it up, buttercup, because that's just the way the game gets played. Yeah, so anyway, back to brains in jars. I'm talking about the insurance industry.

You know, one of these days, I'm going to find a diabolical doorway, and I'm just going to kick their ass one side up and down the other in one of these episodes. I will find it. I will find it. Soon as I decide to go looking for it, I'll find you, you sons of bitches. And I will tell a story that makes you look as bad as you are.

But back we go to the brain in the jar. So that's kind of where we are. We started with, you know, the ancients, no clue about the brain, just a lot of guesses. You know, oh, the vapors. Oh, it's made of sperm. You can tell it's a man's fucking world that you think that people's heads are packed with Justify that in any rational way you can.

We come from that to this poor Phineas Gage teaching us that the brain, very specific parts of the brain are responsible for very specific parts of us. And here we are in the present, where we're discovering that we might be able to cure things that have just seemed impossible to cure. And all you can do is hope that we're able to keep going with that, no matter how grim things look for the sciences at the moment.

And I don't think we have anybody listening to this show that is rabidly anti-science because if you're listening to this show and you're rabidly anti-science, you're a masochist and should hire a woman to walk on you in her high heels while calling you a sniveling worm. I think you'd enjoy the hell out of that. I don't think we have those people here.

You know, some people believe in science and would like that, too. So just so you know. Hey, and you do you, Boo. I want everyone to be happy. This weird contemporary backlash against science just feels so medieval to me. And I think that it's trendy. I think it's trendy to jump on that bandwagon because of the social media echo chamber effect.

But I think a lot of the very same people that are ranting and howling on the social platforms about how bad medicine is and how bad science is and what we really need to be doing is, I don't know, leeches and raw milk. I think a lot of those people that are keyboard warriors for that, if you sat them down and went, is that your dad?

He's got Parkinson's. Hey, did you know that we're kind of inching closer and closer to maybe being able to help Did you know that we're beginning to make connections inside the body between gut health and inflammation that may explain why some people get full blown Alzheimer's and other people in the same family that you would think had the same genetic vulnerability don't like, you know, we're starting to figure some stuff out and you and people you love could be better for it.

That that's the like I said, it's you can have your philosophies galore. But if you're if you're in a situation where it's somebody that you love, you know, you're going to say, what can you do to help them? You would do anything. You do anything to help you. I wish that people could expand their membrane of empathy outward to complete strangers.

You know, I wish that we didn't have to say, but what if it was your mom? What if that was your dad? How about if that was your daughter? I wish that we didn't have to ask people to have a direct personal stake in progress and But we do because, you know, human nature and all that. But man, you know, we're just we're doing some pretty miraculous things.

And it would be nice to be able to keep them going. Because you don't want to go back to the days of Phineas Gage and Mary Rafferty. There are people that we talk about on this show that their ghosts just take up residence in my house. And she's one of them. You know how many kids in the in during the like pre like the early first days of the Industrial Revolution, we'll keep it real current, you know, so that it's vaguely relatable.

You know how many kids were injured and died falling into fires in the household? Like household accidents? How many how many people were disfigured and killed by those? Mary Rafferty was just a little girl who who was burned. And look what the rest of her life was as a result. Because you can be damn sure that when that accident happened when she was little, there were there was no care.

Like there were no burn centers. There was no 911. There were no skin grafts. There was nothing. There was nothing but suffering. And I just do not understand why anybody would go back to that. And the only answer I can come up with is, you don't know. Because if you knew, you'd be team progress. And it's easier for me to go, oh, these this person who's ranting at me about, you know, my flu shot simply just doesn't know how how it used to be.

Or they wouldn't feel maybe feel this way. You go one of my favorite hobbies is old cemeteries. Like I love an old cemetery. I will drag you through an old cemetery. If you even look like you're agreeable, we're going to the cemetery together. And all those tombstones, all those kids who died in outbreaks of diseases that, you know, we thought we eradicated.

Smallpox and measles and all those dead kids, all those dead babies. There's a reason why when you walk into a modern cemetery, there's not an acre of dead kids. And yeah, polio. There's a reason. And progress is that reason. And progress can be ugly and exploitive. And it comes in fits and starts. And it can be really, really scary.

The first waves of radiation treatment for people with cancer were monstrous. And terrible. But look where we are now. Look where we are now. So yes, it's to be feared and respected. But the answer is never to turn off the light and go back to the dark. Because the dark was bad. Life was brutal and short and hard. And folks like Phineas Gage are the exception.

An exception so profound that he changed history. Because most people back then, if they took a head injury like that, they died an agonizing, awful death. Without anything approaching like palliative care or even a freaking Tylenol. So yeah. What are you going to do? People. Until those little brains and jars start talking, we're stuck with each other.

I'm not going to wear a wig made out of wool. Goat hair. Goat hair and whale bone. Just look how much progress we've made in wigs. I'm looking at you, RuPaul's Drag Race. We have made so much progress in wigs. Now, next week's episode is going to be super fun and a real departure from brains and jars and Phineas Gage getting a spike in his head.

Next week, we're going to tell a fairy tale. We're going to take a look at, is it possible that Snow White is based on a real person? And I think when you get to the end of that one, you'll be going, huh, now do Rapunzel. And that is on the next True Weird Stuff. Thank you so much for listening to this. Thank you. And if you listen to us on Apple Podcasts, hit the plus button in the top right corner.

And now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered. And we really appreciate it if you subscribe, rate and review True Weird Stuff. Hit our website, trueweirdstuff.com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it and bonus content. Everything True Weird is waiting for you at trueweirdstuff.com.

And follow True Weird Stuff on Instagram. True Weird Stuff is a Now! Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Sweeten. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser. Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call.

Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr. Original graphics by Kevin Nash. Original artworks by Olivia Axlen. True Weird original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and Zane Nash. Copyright 2025 Now! Media. All rights reserved. All wrongs remembered.