THE BRAIN: A User’s Guide to the Blob Between Your Ears

The Next Big Idea

Next Big Idea Club

Self-improvement, Arts, Books, Society & Culture, Education

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 17 March 2021

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

If you managed to stay awake during Bio 101, then you probably think you have a basic understanding of how your brain works. Not so, says neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett. In this cerebral yet highly entertaining conversation with Next Big Idea Club curator Daniel Pink, Lisa says our brains are made for budgeting, not thinking. She debunks the myth of the lizard brain. And she makes the far-out claim that everything you see and hear, including this podcast, is a hallucination.

Transcript

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0:00.0	your brain is like a master of deception. It seamlessly creates experiences for you and gives you
0:12.8	confidence that these experiences reveal how it works when in fact nothing could be further from
0:18.0	the truth. I'm Rufus Griskem and this is the next big idea. This week, a guided tour of your
0:26.2	brain with Lisa Feldman-Barritz.
0:46.0	I want to begin today's episode with the story of Einstein's brain. You're not going to believe
0:51.1	this one. It starts on the evening of April 17, 1955. After complaining of chest pain, Albert
1:00.0	Einstein was admitted to Princeton Hospital. There a few hours later, his aorta burst like a
1:05.6	bike tire. He said a few words in German, took two breaths, and that was that. He was 76 years old.
1:13.2	He asked that his ashes be scattered in a secret location. The last thing he wanted was for his final
1:18.9	resting place to become a tourist destination. But when his obituary ran on the front page of
1:24.2	the newer times, it contained a detailed but shocked Einstein's heirs. It turned out the body
1:29.3	that just cremated was missing something. It's brain. They later found out the pathologist who
1:35.0	conducted Einstein's autopsy, a doctor by the name of Thomas Harvey, had sawed open the dead man's
1:41.1	skull, harvested the brain, taken it home, and sliced it into 240 pieces, which he then stored in
1:48.0	some jars in his basement. Unsurprisingly, Harvey lost his job. But he kept the brain for decades.
1:56.8	By 1988, he was working on an assembly line in Kansas and living in an apartment next to a gas station.
2:03.8	His neighbor was famed beat generation writer William Burrows. They used to get together for drinks,
2:09.6	and Harvey would talk about the brain, which he sometimes kept safe in a beer cooler.
2:14.8	He explained how he was sending slices to researchers all over the world.
2:19.4	Harvey hoped that one of those scientists would agree with him that Einstein's brain was worth
2:24.4	studying. He believed that mapping its lobes, contours, and divots would reveal the secret of what
2:29.6	had made it so remarkable back when it was up and running. In other words, he hoped he could
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