Brain and Head Theft, Part 1

at what we see here. Not only was the brain and only the brain targeted, but different regions of the brain have been removed from victim to victim. Not a monster or even a cannibal, then, but a a brain thief. Indeed, And look at the profiles of the victims and the portions of the brain pilfered from each one of them. The vernicus area and the angular gyrus of the noted ling list, the Broca's area of the Soliloquist, the best parts of the best brains. Our murderer is building himself

the perfect brain out of stolen parts. But to what end? Welcome to stot to blow your mind. The production of my Heart Radio. Hey, you welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And this is my second take at pronouncing my own name. I'm glad I got it right this time. Today we're

gonna be talking about our stolen brains, our stolen heads. Uh. This is a topic that yet again, like another one we did recently, This started as uh an artifact episode that I was trying to develop, but then it quickly became clear to me that this was not a short topic. This was a huge topic with all kinds of bizarre tangents and and and dark alleys down which to tread. Uh. So I'm so excited to to embark on this two parter about removing and stealing people's heads and people's brains.

That's right, This one just keeps growing and expanding, dragging in more heads, more brains. That has an insatiable appetite

this topic. Yeah. One of the so one of the original stories that I was looking at that got me interested in this was the theft of the Austrian composer Franz Joseph Haydn's head in the early nineteenth century and that's a story that that we're going to come back to at the end of this first episode part one here, but before that, I think it makes sense to to back up and look at the removal of heads in the context where it's probably more familiar to everyone, which

is not in reality but in you know, fiction. Yeah, and we promised not to spend too long here because I know some of you might be saying, look, you guys have Friday's Weird House Cinema episodes. Now you can pour all of your enthusiasm for horror movies into their uh and maybe a little less gets used in the core episodes. But but there's still some important stuff to touch on here, and I think that the fiction sums up a lot of what's going on when we think

about these topics. So yeah, brain and head theft are frequent trokes in horror and science fiction, particularly of the twentieth century, and a lot of this seems to be centered in notions and fears concerning identity and the scientific understanding of the brain is the seat of consciousness, explored in such thoughtful science fiction films as Tammy and the t Rex, one of one of the all time great

brain theft movies. Yeah, yeah, uh, there there are various versions of this, right, you know, because sometimes the brain is just stolen. Uh. Sometimes it's kept alive. Sometimes the head is kept alive free of the body of a you know, jan in the pan situation. Um. Sometimes it's a human transplant, putting the head of one person under the body of another, sometimes next to the original head of the other um you know, the other in in

a way in their own way. Sometimes a kind of a thoughtful attempt to get at something, you know, culturally, but other times just kind of this another rumination on the bizarre idea of what if my head but different body, What if two heads same body? You know. Uh, there's just so much about this idea that continues to amaze. What if my brain in a dinosaur exactly? Not what

if my brain in a robot um, you know, etcetera. Uh. So, yeah, you'll you'll find so many different versions of this, living heads and jars, living brains and jars, head transplants between humans, brain transplants into other human beings, and of course brain transplants into machines. And there's plenty to talk about here, even if we're just dealing with consensual brain and or head transplant. But then what if your head or brain

were stolen? Right, that becomes the extra level of potential horror. What do you have some mad science maniac were to plug your brain into the body of a hideous monster by or a killer robot. Or what if you were just reduced to nothing but a head bobbing around in a jar, or even even more limiting, a brain just shut off in alive inside of some sort of contraption. H I mean this is explored to some degree in

things we've talked about on the show before. For example, the the Thought Experiments Lash short story where Am I by Daniel Dennett, which is all about brains being removed, and that's ultimately trying to get at the question of what is the seat of consciousness and is it located in a place uh, you know, given various you know, constraints and and and thought experiments about like how brains

could be replicated with machinery. But but also there are I guess, much less technical explorations of the subject where it's just kind of like, uh, you know, the Futurama model where you're just preserving ahead or preserving a brain to supposedly keep the keep the consciousness alive after the body dies or after the body is superseded by some period technology. I think both of us really enjoy um. The character Kane from RoboCop two a noon in brain

in a jar, uh, powering a mechanized death machine. Yeah, tom noonan uh. And he's just like pain embodied controlling a killer robot, which is a brilliant idea. There's even like a drug insertion because he's he was he's addicted to some sort of super drug, right. Oh yeah, the the drug called nuke. Yeah. So Robo Cup two is amazing. Um, there's a there's actually a really excellent Star Wars tie in here as well. I mean, you have a lot of cybernetic stuff going on in Star Wars, but you

have this one creature. I don't know if you remember it, Joe, because it kind of just walks around in the background briefly in Return of the Jedi. But it looks like a mechanical spider. And then it has this glass looking container or sphere hanging underneath it, and inside there's fluid and what appears to be a brain of some sort. I don't think I made the brain connection when I watched for Turning the Jedi as a kid, but just

looked like a big mechanical spider. I think the brain things explored more in I don't know what you call it, the the supplementary Star Wars universe material, the encyclopedias and all that. Yeah, I remember reading. I think there's a whole story about them entales from Java's Palace, or at least it's a story that concerns them to some degree. But we are told in in other forms that this these are the remains of the Bomar monks. Um. And I'm just gonna read this quick passage from Wikipedia. UM.

It says this follows quote. The Bomer Order, which consisted of Bomar monks, was a religious order that believed in isolating themselves from all physical sensation to enhance the power of their minds. To that aim, in enlightened monks had their brains transplanted into nutrient filled jars. Whenever they wanted to move, those bottled brains used spider like droid walkers. I can just imagine the purer hierarchy. It's like, oh, you're you're gonna walk around in your spider today instead

of just sitting there and a jar doing nothing. Okay, Well, I mean sometimes you have to have your nutrient fluid switched out, right. I'm guessing there's like win me one machine in job As Palace that does that, and you've gotta get there early. I mean, I guess if you're

addicted to the pleasures of the flesh. So that's just that's just a brief glance at some of the many, many variations of this you'll find in sci fi and horror because we can't get enough of it, because at the heart of it, there are so there are several different um you know, enigmas and conundrums and paradoxes that that emerge, you know, because it's dealing with what we are and who we are and just sort of that some of the mysteries that that seem to revolve around

are are fleshly self and some of the more supernatural ideas about what we are, and of course some of the you know, the mysteries of consciousness itself. Yeah, and that's the true when when you get into mysteries, one of the great things to wonder is um as far as consciousness and its relationship to different types of tissue, in the body, nervous system, tissue in the brain versus

other parts of the body. You always kind of wonder, um, what did ancient people know, you know, or what did they suspect before we had modern neuroscience and anatomy and uh, and there is something interesting you can observe. Is not necessarily going to be theft, like we're talking about it in a lot of our examples, though in some cases

it probably is. But there are interesting cases you can observe from the ancient world and from ancient religion where sometimes the head or the brain were treated differently than some other parts of the body were, which indicated at least something some interesting belief. Yeah, yeah, this is this

gets really fascinating. Now. First of all, we should stress that we modern humans are probably just mostly focused on the idea of the brain being the seat of the mind and the self, because we also paradoxically carry along

other ideas with us. You know, there's so many just parts of our language and just the way think about ourselves that we may talk talk about feeling something with our heart, and when we do that, we may on some level position our our our center of being and position our mind in the middle of our torso uh

my gut feeling, yeah, yeah, your gut feeling, etcetera. And you can take this even further, of course, getting into various um uh you know, supernatural and religious ideas about say various chakras and energy points in the body, um, you know, and the and we can carry this around with us and also carry around a science more or less scientific understanding of the brain, um, you know, and we can we can believe in both. We can we can you know, dip out of both steamer trays as

it suits us. Yeah, obviously people do. I mean like that, a lot of people probably believe in some type of supernatural mind in one way or another. But then also like you would consult a neurologist if you needed to, right and and you know, I'm I'm always a kind of two minds on all of this because on one hand, you know, we we the brain is is the the the author of of all these ideas, you know, I mean,

it is the center of our being. And we see that, um you know, and that that bears out anytime there's a brain injury, etcetera. But then also we're not just the brain. We're also the body, and while you know, you might be stretching it to say that you're you know, you're thinking something or feeling something with your heart in the same way that you would with your mind. You know, there is this um we are more than just the brain,

we are this entire organism. Yeah, that's something that I think is often overlooked in these like so the Beaumar monks or whatever, the brain in a jar with a spider body, and you think like, well, that's just pure mental existence, you know, as if you you'll just live forever in this mechanical set up and you can have your your pure mind continue young to do whatever it does,

meditation or whatever. But I think that might be really underappreciating how much your mental life would be changed if you were only your brain and did not have the rest of your body for the brain to interact with. Yeah, that's why General Grievous got to bring his guts with him, you know. Yeah, he's not just a brain. He's also eyeballs and guts in there so well, I mean, and there's even literal feedback. I mean, in some ways, the brain is influenced, for example, by hormones that are secreted

by organs in other parts of the body. Absolutely, uh. In thinking about what ancient people's thought, though, it's it's impossible to get into this discussion without, of course touching on the ancient Egyptians, because, as in many of you are probably already thinking about, they famously removed and discarded the brain, dering and balming, while taking great care to

store various other organs economic jars. Yet at the same time, the ancient Egyptians are responsible for the oldest written record using the word brain. I mean, it wasn't brain. You know obviously that it was the higheroglyphics for brain aren't known. We see it in a sevent BC text that was in turn apparently based on texts that go back to about three thousand BC. Uh. This is the so called Edwin Smith's Surgical Papyrus, named for the American Egyptologists who

discovered it. Okay, so we're looking at it now. The the hieroglyphic word form that meant the brain. The oregan it's like a bird, and then something that looks maybe like a feather or a knife, and then like a hook shaped thing, and then what looks like maybe a b or a fly. Yeah, yeah, I guess the hook.

I have no idea, but the hook thing is very suggestive, of course, uh, not being entirely sure what this this these hieroglyphics um individually, these parts of it mean because of where we think about the hook that is used to carefully remove the brain um tissue during embalming um, which was a delicate procedure because you had to do it apparently as well without you had to take care

not to damage the facial features during the removal. And and one thing that's important to realize here is that the Egyptians didn't necessarily think the brain was garbage or anything, but it was one of the first organs to go foul. Part of their practice was to first remove the organs

that decayed rapidly, and this certainly included the brain. This is going to tie directly into an account from the early nineteenth century that we're going to talk about later in the episode, about a very prominent and fascinating case of head theft. All right, UM, just briefly some other tidbits about our history of understanding the brain. In the fourth century BC, Aristotle considered the brain to be a secondary organ that cooled the heart, a place where the

spirit could circulate. The heart was the center of thought, though now in the second century, ce Galen concluded that the brain was the seat of the animal soul uh, one of three souls in the body. But this was based in part on his observations of the efects of

brain injuries on mental activity. So again, even if you even if you you you were really clinging to some idea that uh, that thought and being is tied up in the torso you know, after a while, it becomes clear that when things happen to the head um, it can it can drastically affect how we think and how we uh we process. Yeah, that seems like that would have probably been one of the earliest ways that people

could deduce the important role of the brain. Not just because you could make the argument that sometimes it's somehow kind of feels like thought is taking place in the head. Obviously it didn't always feel like that to everybody. Some people must have thought it felt like it was happening somewhere else. But but yeah, you noticed that you hit somebody in the head. It is much more likely to have a complex and profound effects on how they think and how they feel. Than hitting them in any other

part of the body. Yeah, it's interesting. How again, it's an unavoidable in our language. Right, So we talked about like putting our thinking cap on, and you know, we're just so many times like we're thinking really hard. We might do something involving our head, we might touch our head. But if you were living in a culture that was more based in an idea that would that thinking was based in the chest, would you put your I don't know,

you're you're thinking brazier on? Would you would you sort of like hold your chest a little bit as you as you think? I don't know. Yeah, And I also wonder what are the limits to that? Like is is that is it possible that if you just had the right cultural ideas fed into you as you were growing up, that it would literally feel to you like you were thinking with your feet or thinking with your knees or something, or is there a sort of limited range of where

it can feel like thinking is happening. I don't know. This is fascinating. I hadn't really thought about all this before. But maybe there's some papers out there that get into it that would it would be interesting to read about. Yeah,

but any your right. From here, we gradually built up an improved understanding of how the brain function, though much remained unknown for a considerable amount of time, leading to what I've seen referred to as a quote cultural anatomy of the brain pane that doesn't necessarily match up with the neurological reality. Yeah, that's interesting, Thank you, Thank you.

Now there's one example from ancient history I guess actually this would be prehistory, uh, of how heads were treated in a way that was somewhat different than how the rest of the body was treated. And this comes from the ancient Neolithic or Chalcolithic Neolithic settlement known as Chattel hu Yok from Turkey. That's a place in southern Turkey that was thousands of years BC. Did did you have the date on that? Um? I I read that it

thrived back in seven thousand BC. Yeah, I mean it was around for a while, but I think that was like the period of its the height of its population and power, and so it's one of the earliest large human settlements that we have evidence of sustained habitation at. There were all of these houses that were a sort of built right next to each other. They were built up and you would enter them through the roof. It

was like a grid of sort of cubicle houses. You'd go in through the roof, and there are these living

spaces that archaeologists can still explore today. And it's fascinating to try to put together the culture of the people who lived at Chattahoyuk because one of the things observed there is sometimes, uh, sometimes there would be mortuary practices that would involve apparently incorporating the dead bodies of friends and family members into like the furniture, just into stuff inside the house where the people were living, so the body of a dead relative might be buried underneath the

bed where you sleep. But one of the other really interesting things sometimes observed there is the removal of heads from dead bodies I presumably family members, where the head would be taken off and uh and then covered in some kind of plaster and just like kept in the house. Yeah, it's it's really fascinating because in this we we get into, you know, you sort of have to strip away sort of your modern funerary customs and ideas about what is what is proper to do with the with the body

of the deceased, etcetera. And you if you try and sort of put yourself in this this different mindset and imagine, like, how do we relate to the bodies that no longer have life in them? You know what what is the what is the skull of the dead? Uh? Now that they have you know that, now that the individual has passed on, you know, you you get into this sort of like base area. Then you you can build up from there and imagine how some of these these customs

could have taken root. Yeah, and it it definitely signals like how variable and culturally determined our feelings about the treatment of dead bodies are. Because I think now and it's probably very somewhat to culture even today, but in most of the cultures were familiar with like if you were to take Grandma's dead body and like cut her head off and cover it with plaster and put it on a desk, that would widely be seen as like disrespectful in some way, But here it's the exact opposite.

It seems to suggest that this is a way of revering the dead, and in some way it has some kind of religious significance or ritual use. Yeah, Like nowadays you sat down and you watch the Texas chainsaw mask you and you say this is not right, this family of texts and cannibals are are are not being respectful to the dead. But you can make a case for most of the things they're doing and say, no, they're being very respectful. Um to to a to a to a point. I'm only going to defend the sawyers so much.

But um but but now there's a lot to consider, like, you know, what happens to the body when it dies? Wand or what do we do to the body when it dies? And how we approach these different views of death, like they have a huge impact on not only how we we treat the bodies of the dead, but then also like how we think about death itself. Yeah, and so we're gonna be focusing in these episodes on some cases of brains and heads being taken off of bodies um or or being stolen in one way or another

without the consent of the person involved. But there we should at least know that there are plenty of cases where heads are removed, brains are removed and this was according to the wishes of the person from whose body they're being taken, right, Yeah, so a few I think mostly if not completely, consentually preserved brains, worth mentioning, uh, one of one of the big ones that that probably

a lot of people were thinking of is is Broken's brain. Um. And one of the reasons, of course, is that Carl Sagan has a whole book titled Broker's Brain, because one of the essays in it deals with it specifically. And I'll get back to that in just a second. But Paul Broco lived through eighteen eighty. He was a French surgeon and neurologist who played a major role in the mid nineteen in mid nineteenth century medicine, and was the

founder of modern brain surgery. He also supported some extremely prejudiced ideas, but his work with the brain itself was expressed it was it was extremely important. As such, he worked a lot with human brains, and many of the preserved brains that he worked with can still be found at the Pierre and Marie Curry University in Paris, and

that potentially includes Brocco's own brain. The museum has apparently denied that it can be found there, but there are accounts that say that his brain ended up on a shelf alongside the others and Carl Sagan in the book

Brokeer's Brain. In the the the chapter or essay dealing with this, he discusses holding the jar and that allegedly contained it, saying, quote, it was Broca himself whose brain I was cradling, who had established the macab collection I had been contemplating, and from their second goes on to question just how much of who Coroco was is still in there? You know, is the physical brain in the jar?

Is that him? Is this some remnant of him? It's it's a wonderful, wonderful section of the book that you should you should read, but it's um uh, probably one of the more famous preserved or allegedly preserved brains. Yeah, and yeah, that raises really interesting questions, like in a way, is it possible even to think about the person as

an object or as a person something more like a process? Yeah, and then also like the whole seeming mystery about whether there's there's an actual, uh specimen that is broke his brain, it does also bring up the question, you know, once the brain is removed, how do you tell whose it was? Especially when you're dealing with an old brain like this, you know, it's not like you can just hook it up,

fire it up and see what memories are in there, etcetera. Right, But of course, so there's a question about this one. But there are examples of people who were just like, yep, you know, you use my brain, do something with it. Yeah.

Charles Babbage is a great exam pull of this, who have through eight seventy one, the father of the computer, as he's sometimes known, he donated his brain to science and today you can see it, uh in two halfs, one side of it at London Science Museum and the other at the Hunterian Museum in the Royal College of Surgeons. Wait a minute, did a Lovelace also have her brain preserved or just Babbage? It would be great if you

could see him. I did not run across her brain, but I guess it would be great to see him side by side I hooked up to the same computer. It's it's interesting how um it is presented into how I mean, there's so much, so many directions you could go there with that, right, um, but yeah, you go to one place to see one hemisphere and the other to see the other hemisphere. Um. I wonder if I mean when you look at those hemispheres, do you, is

there a feeling like this is wrong. They should be reunited, the brain should be It's okay to preserve a brain and display it, but it should be displayed as a whole, complete piece. But I don't know, maybe not now as far as famous people go, quote, quite a few athletes have pledged their brain to science and an effort to better understand concussions, you know. And then a lot of people just in general donate their bodies and or their

organs to science. Um, and so a lot of brain study continues in this in this manner, by the way, by most all accounts, and certainly all accounts that matter, we should point out that Walt Disney did not have

his body, brain, or head frozen following his death. Oh that's a popular myth, and it is, yeah, and I think I was reading about Apparently it's largely based on the fact that he was interested in the topic at some point and and in general was known to be interested in in in scientific topics, and therefore it just kind of carried away, like what you know about Disney. You're like, oh, well, it seems like something he would do. He did it. It's just like, oh, he's weird. Enough.

So I guess if we're in in the modern era for for now and talking about brains that were actually straight up stolen. Probably the most famous brain theft uh in the modern world, happened to the body of Albert Einstein, And I guess we'll maybe come back and talk about that more later as we go on. But he is by no means the only one I want to back up and tell a story from the early eighteen hundreds about the famous composer Joseph Haydn uh. And so a

couple of sources I was looking at here. One is a book by Francis Larson published called Severed, A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found. And the part of this that I was reading is just wonderful, So I might have to go back and read this entire book at some point, um. But the other is just a biography of Hayden called Hayden A Creative Life in Music by Carl Geyringer and Irene gey Ringer from University of

California Press in nineteen two. And so just a brief background on on Franz Joseph Hayden, also just known as Joseph Hayden. He was a renowned classical composer from Austria who lived from seventeen thirty two until eighteen o nine. It was very influential. I think he was sort of a mentor figure to some other later composers like Mozart. And probably the fact that most people know about him today, or at least the one that I remember from school, is that he was the composer of what's known as

the Surprise Symphony. It's a composition that is very kind of dreamy and sleepy and then has the sudden extremely loud chords that will almost like make you pee yourself, like they will wake you up if you are falling asleep at the at the on orchestra night. I wonder if we can play some some public domain selections of Hyden music while I'm telling the story of how his

head was hacked off and stolen. Okay, So the story of Hyden around the time of his death, especially as told in the I Ringer book, here is what I'm starting with. So for a long time, Hayden was the court musician of a Hungarian noble family called the ester Hasy family. So I guess you can imagine something kind of like if you've seen the movie Amadeus, you know the roles Salieri plays in the Austrian Emperor's court in

that movie. He's the the court composer, the court musician, kind of there to to do musical work for and flatter this rich family, except, of course, this would not have been the emperor. This was just one particular noble house, the ester Hazy line, and Hayden died in eighteen o nine.

He died in Vienna, I think actually while Vienna was being occupied by Napoleon's troops, so there was a war zone situation happening, uh, and his body was not taken back to this uh, this remote castle where the ester Hazy family lived, because I think I think it had something to do with the war situations. Why he was kept in Vienna near where his house or apartment was, and he was buried in a local cemetery known as

the hun Storm Cemetery. And that same year the prince of the ester Hassie line, I think it was Nicolaus ester Hasie, he put in an application to have Hayden's body dug up from the cemetery and transferred to Eisenstadt, which was the seat of the ester Hazie house. And permission for the disinterment was granted, but ester Hazi never actually did it. He got permission, but then he just kind of forgot about it, and Hayden stayed there. Hayden's

tomb stayed as it was. But finally, in eighteen twenty, Ester Hazy, to quote from the Gey Wringer book quote, was reminded of his obligations by Adolphus Frederick, Duke of Cambridge. This distinguished visitor observed after attending a galla performance of the Creation, which was an oratorio of Hayden's given in his honor at Eisenstadt. Quote, how fortunate was the man who employed this Hayden in his lifetime him and now possesses his mortal remains, Which that moment, I'm just imagining that.

Like Prince ester Hazzy must have been like, oh yeah, yeah, that. But apparently he did not correct his guest though. Immediately after this he gave orders to have the body exhumed from the cemetery in Vienna and brought over to Eisenstat and re entombed at a church there near the castle. The church was called berg Kircha, which was where Hayden had often performed some of the masses that he wrote for the ester Hazy family. Uh So the order goes through,

and but then the guy Ringers right quote. When the coffin was open for identification, the horrified officials found no head on the body, but only the wig. And this seems especially bad because, like it would be harder for Esther Hassey at this point to pretend that he just had Hayden's body where it was supposed to be all along. It kind of reminds me that situation where like somebody gives you a gift, like an appliance that you don't really want, and you never opened and they keep asking

you if you like it. You're like, yeah, we use it all the time. It's great. And then they're going to come over to your house and you're like, hey, let's use that blender whatever it was. And then you finally open it and discover that it's missing a piece or it's broken or something. But so obviously Prince ester Hassy was not amused that Hayden's head had been stolen. He was really mad, and he made inquiries about the missing head, and soon the mystery was solved. It turned

out it was sort of an inside job. The culprits who stole the head were Hayden's friend, apparently not a super close friend, but they knew each other, a friend of Hyden's named Joseph Carl Rosenbaum who had been employed by the Ester Hassey family, and then another guy named Johann Napomuk Peter who was the administrator of a penitentiary somewhere in Austria. So why would these guys, including a former end of Haydn's, dig up his grave, steal his head,

and then cover everything back up. Well, the answer is that they were amateur phrenologists. And I'll come back to the subject in more detail in in a few minutes, And I guess throughout a couple of both of these episodes, But the short explanation of what's going on here is that they were devotees of the then popular pseudo science of phrenology, and they were fans of its leading proponent at this time and place, the German anatomist friends Joseph Gall,

who lived seventeen fifty eight eight. And yes, I did also notice that friends Joseph Gall has the same first and middle name is Hayden. I don't know if there's any reason for that. Maybe a bunch of boys were named after a king or something at this time. I don't know if you have any insights on the on the friends Joseph's. Maybe it's just a total coincidence. Yeah, I'm not sure. Off the top of my head, I

don't know any I don't know any friends Joseph's. But so they these two guys, Rosenbaum and Peter, wanted Hayden's head because they wanted to conduct a pseudo scientific dissection of the skull to determine its characteristics according to phrenological theory, to see if you could read his musical genius in the shape of his skull. So I'll come back to

that aspect in a bit. But together these guys bribed a grave digger in the Vienna cemetery to dig up Hyden a few days after his funeral, hack off his head and deliver it to them quote to protect it from desecration. Um. So, according to to Larsen, the grave digger did this. It was a few nights after the burial. He chopped off the head, wrapped it up in some rags, and then handed it off to Rosenbaum. And Rosenbaum had

a carriage waiting nearby. He was on the way taking the head to the carriage, but he was so curious to see it that he peeled back the rags uh to take a peek. But this was June, and Hayden had been dead for while at this point, and the body was already beginning to rot. And apparently Rosenbaum was so overwhelmed by the sight and the smell that he just vomited in the cemetery, but then got right back

to business. So he got into the carriage, went straight to Vienna Hospital, where the skull was de fleshed and the brain was removed from its casing. And Rosenbaum described the scene later in his own writing. This is quoted in Larsen quote. The site made a lifelong impression on me. The dissection lasted for one hour. The brain, which was of large proportions, stank the most terribly of all. I

endured it to the end. And that's what I was thinking of when you mentioned earlier that the brain, according to the Egyptians, at least you know, was one of the earliest parts of the body to spoil and smell bad, which might have had something to do with the process for its early removal. Yeah, well I've I've read this other places as well. In fact, tomorrow's episode of The

Artifact will touch on how quickly a brain will rot. Well, apparently Rosenbaumb noticed like he could, despite the fact that they had a whole head there. He was like, the brain was the worst. But anyway, at the Vienna hospital here the skin muscle in the brain were burned in the furnace, and then the skull was soaked in lime to clean the bones so it could be measured for

the phrenology purposes. And this soaking would take a while, So while that was going on, Rosenbaum went back home and he and Peter at some point designed a case with which to hold the skull the guy Ringers right quote. Peter had a black wooden box made with a golden

lyre at the top and glass windows in it. The skull was placed on a white silk cushion trimmed with black, which reminds me very much of some of the displays I've seen of supposedly incorruptible saints bodies and the relics of saints and old Catholic and Orthodox museums or not museums cathedrals. Yeah, they didn't just stick it on the table and put a candle on top of it or let a raven perch on it. You know, they did it upright. Yeah, you get a nice glass box. But

this one here has a golden lyre. And Larson actually has a very wonderful passage about this that I wanted to quote. She calls attention to the fact that this box was ornamented with a golden liar, and she asks if this might have been intended as a reference to the Greek god Orpheus. So here I'm quoting from larsen whose music carried him safely into the underworld to save his wife Eurydicy. Rosenbaum's own dark and earthy mission had been driven by his passion for music and his admiration

of Haydn as a composer. He too, had retrieved his love from the rod of the nether world. If the liar did refer to Orpheus, there may have been other symbolic residences at work as well. In one version of the myth, Orpheus lost his own head when his body was ripped apart and thrown into the sea by the women of Thrace, and Macedonia. Later, Orpheus's head was found floating in the river Mela's, fresh and vigorous and still singing mournfully. The place where it was buried became a

shrine and an oracle for pilgrims. And that is interesting to me because within the special box, Hydn's severed head would become kind of like a shrine within Rosenbaum's house.

It's so weird to to to think about this in terms of patrons and artists, you know, um, like like what if what I have today on Patreon or or some sort of a kickstarter like that was a tier level, Like if you support me, then you can cut off my head when I'm dead and run off with my skull, or you will be you will be tasked with keeping my body and protecting it. That sort of thing. The Platinum Club membership. Yeah yeah, but to a certain extence,

like at least a metaphorical level. Um, you know, a lot of this does kind of weirdly match up with some of our attitudes about celebrity you know, and celebrities and creators you know, and how we how we treat them and uh regard them after their death, you know, like literally turning turning their their their deaths into and sometimes their places of burial into the holy shrines, and like you're invoking this whole pseudo scientific field to come

up with a physical explanation for their supposedly superhuman genius. Um. Anyway, so to come back to the story, years go by, we already narrated the intervening events, remember, so princester Hazy at some point he's reminded like, oh, yeah, Hyden's body, Oh I need yeah, that should be here. Uh So, so back to the investigation, because they discovered no head, only a wig in the in the coffin, and um, so they had Hyden's body moved to the castle at Eisenstock,

where the Prince wanted it. But the Prince was furious because there was no head, and he had them investigate, and eventually, somehow it was figured out that Peter and Rosenbaum had been you know, the ones implicated here, that they would have been the people who took the head. And so the police went to interrogate Peter, who said that he had given the head to Rosenbaum, and then the investigators went to Rosenbaum's house and they searched for

the skull, but they didn't find it. Quote since Rosenbaum's wife, the opera singer Teresa Gossman, hid the skull in her straw mattress and lay down on the bed. And then to to finish up the story, the guy ringers right. Quote. The prince now tried bribery, and his emissary promised Rosenbaum a large sum if he would deliver the skull, whereupon the skull of an old man was handed to the

prince and buried with Hyden's body. Uh not unnaturally, Prince Princess Okay, so fake skull handed off for a bribe. Not unnaturally, Prince esther Hazy did not keep his promise of a reward, But neither had the wary ex secretary acted honestly since he had not delivered the right skull. So it's a double double cross. But I wonder if they both leave happy with that. You know, it's like, all right, I've got a skull can literally somebody's skull.

It might not have the right kind of musical genius bump, but uh, yeah, somebody's skull is in there. And but the guy did not get his money. Uh. And then finally they say on his deathbed, Rosenbaum gave Hyden Skull to his collaborator, to Peter and quote made him promise to leave it in his will to the Museum of guessel Shoft dear music Freund in Vienna, the owner of

a great number of valuable Hyden relics. So Hyden Skull stayed there from until nineteen fifty four, and then eventually there was a there was a mausoleum built in berg Church all that that church in uh in Nissenstock where the body was supposed to be. Eventually it was in nineteen fifty four that the skull was finally reunited with

the rest of the body. But I think at least for a while, maybe maybe permanently after that, but at least for a while there were two skulls in the grave because they also had the original fake decoy skull that had been interred with the body and the wig. He had a friendly roommate, right exactly, thank you, thank you. But this brings me back to to the pseudoscience underlying uh this, this head theft mission here. Why did Rosenbaum

and Peter steel the head again? They were enthusiastic amateur phrenologists they were students of the German anatomist friends Joseph Gall, who again he's credited with pioneering the now discredited field

of phrenology. Now, Gall apparently made some legitimate contributions to the development of neuroscience and neuro anatomy, but I think whatever these legitimate contributions where they are now overshadowed in his legacy by the association with phrenology, which is just one of the most awful and rightfully infamous pseudosciences in

human history. And we can explain more about phrenology across this couple of episodes, but the short version is that phrenologists incorrectly believed that you could make accurate inferences about human mental traits like uh like personality traits, moral characteristics, and intellectual aptitudes by measuring the shape and the contours

of people's skulls, particularly bumps on the skull. So if there's a bump in a certain place right near the top of your head, that might show that you have a special propensity for veneration, maybe you'd be a good candidate for the clergy. But if there's a pronounced ridge over the top of your ear, that is a swelling of the organ of destructiveness, and you will surely become a violent criminal, etcetera. And I think you can pair

phrenology along with what's known as physiognomy. More broadly, physiognomy is the belief that you can accurately assess a person's mental characteristics by looking at their outward appearance. Often, physiogo to me, would focus on the face. You'd see these charts of like, oh, somebody has a face like this, it means that they're they're very sanguine and uh and and they're you know, prone to laughter and to gluttony. And somebody has a face like this, and there, you know,

without a doubt a murderer. Uh. And So phrenology and that kind of thing they led to all kinds of horribly misguided applications and pseudo scientific criminology supposed scientific justifications for racism and ethnic prejudice, for gender prejudice and so forth. And it's weird because phrenology, like if you explain it today, it's one of those things that sounds so stupid on its face. It's hard to see how people ever believed it.

But phrenology was hugely influential, especially in the first half of the eighteen hundreds. Uh, though it was, it should be said, it was not like everybody believed it at the time. It was subjected to fierce scientific criticism even during its heyday, But that doesn't mean it did not

find very popular applauding audiences. Yeah, like you said, so much of the time it ends up being this way of saying those horrible things you think when you look at certain people's skulls and faces, those feelings are backed up by scientific principles, and here they are, and and and that. You know, you can see why that would be enough to hook people who wanted to believe these things.

Oh yeah, it's great to tell people like that. You know, you can have a scientific justification for whatever you gut feeling you get when you look at somebody like, oh, this guy he has the you know, the the pointy top of the head of a genius, or you know this late Yeah, my wife won't do what I tell her because there's something wrong with the shape of her skull, and science proves it. Now, the tragedy of phrenology is

started with some premises that are basically true. Like it started with the idea that the personality and mental traits are in large part determined by processes in the brain. Of course, that's true, we know that today and uh and with the premise that some brain function and are especially dependent on localized regions in the brain, so we also know that's basically true. Like you know, visual processing depends especially on the visual cortex in the back of

the head. Speech is especially dependent on the area now known as Broca's area, which is on the left side of the brain, near the front of the head. Uh. And these were real discoveries of early neuroscience that there were regions of the brain that correlated with certain types of mental activity, though not always as strictly as some

people think. Um. But from these real discoveries was extrapolated this flawed chain of reasoning that led to chronology, and according to people like Franz Joseph Gall it would go something like this. So you'd say the mind is a product of the brain. You know, apparently true or at least mostly true. The brain is not a homogeneous mass, but they're you know, there are different parts of it

that do different things. That's generally true. But then the next leap is to the size of a localized part of the brain will be correlated to how powerful it associated mental faculty is, which is not necessarily true. And then from there you get to well, you get bumps on the outside of the skull that will indicate the size and therefore the strength of the underlying regions of

the brain, which that's pretty much not true. And then therefore you can make a generalized map of the skull to find which shapes and bumps and protuberances create which personality characteristics and aptitudes, which at this point is just completely wrong. You can just imagine the branch on the tree here just going growing gradually more crooked for the

further you go. Right, yeah, um, But for a few decades at least, phrenology again proved extremely popular again, as it was especially during like the first half of the nineteenth century. Uh. And there's an interesting section in Lawson's book where she attributes at least some of the appeal of phrenology to Franz Joseph Skull's skills at public speaking

and the allure of his lectures. She writes that he always gave his public addresses with props surrounded by his personal collections of heads, which he would pick up and use for demonstration to enraptured audiences. You know, here's the skull of a man who was consumed in life by vanity. You can see the bulge corresponding to his organ of conceit. Or here's the skull of a genius composer observed the

swelling above his organ of music, etcetera. And then Larson writes quote, when fresh specimens were available, his assistant would dissect an animal brain or occasionally a human brain in front of the audience. Galls talks became famous in Vienna and later throughout Northern Europe, and they were attended by a wide cross section of the public, from tourists and tradesmen to ambassadors and academics. The combination of medical terminology visual aids few members of the public can have seen

a dissection before, and talented oratory was intoxicating. After a lecture, people queued up to have their own heads read by Gall. This was science endowed with psychic powers, the scientists who knew you better than you knew yourself, and all thanks to the secrets inscribed in the shape of your head. But but I mean the horrible part being, of course that it was all just completely wrong. Phrenology had no empirically verifiable basis, its founding premises were incorrect, and it

could not make accurate predictions about future findings. But it was popular nonetheless. And it seems like, at least to some extent, it's popularity had more to do with the personal flair and charisma of its founding popularizer than with its empirical merits. And this is something I think about a lot. I think this is always something to be really conscious of. It is so so easy to mistake

good public speaking for truth. Uh, you know, the the allure of a weekly supported claim delivered by a charismatic voice is always present and something to you know, be conscious of, to like ask yourself if that's happening in your brain, if you are thinking something is true because

somebody is good at talking and they're saying it. And I think about digital versions of this today, the digital versions of the Viennese lecture halls like YouTube, where you know, I get a feeling that there is a huge undercurrent of ideological shaping that often takes place on a similar basis here viewers of things like YouTube and even podcasts. So we could say, listen to somebody mainly because they're

a compelling speaker. They're captivating to listen to. They you know, they they're good with words, there's something nice about their voice, whatever that is, and over time can end up adopting their beliefs or claims, regardless of whether there's a good reason for the claims themselves. Yeah, you know what I mean. It makes me think back to uh, you know Carl Sagan I mentioned earlier. I mean, Sagan was an individual

who every everything tended to line up for him. You know, a great scientific mind, an excellent speaker and science communicator. But you don't have to have every line up with a person, and many times it does not. You have plenty of great scientists who are not natural public speakers, and you have plenty of natural public speakers who do not have a mind for science or an appreciation for science, and maybe not interested in in impressing the science like that.

They may use the science in some cases when it suits them, but that is not their their primary go Well, I would say one thing that really works against us here is the tragic disjunction of the fact that one of the most compelling qualities in a speaker, one of the things that makes people most fun to listen to

as a speaker is confidence. And yet being a good communicator of science often requires you to be extremely circumspect and to repeatedly in tone, you know, communicate doubt and to repeatedly communicate you know, we're not sure about this, that you know that these are reasons for thinking so, but there are reasons against it and all that which goes exactly against some of the things that makes but the most fun to just like watch lectures from right right.

And this is true at at various levels in different ways. It's certainly true at our level because we are we are not experts in the topics that we discuss, and therefore we always have to admit this could this could be wrong, and or this is changing, this could change, because then we get into the level of just that's what science is. So you'll encounter, you know, experts in their field who are also voicing the same level of uncertainty.

And there are times where that is not as convincing as someone who, uh, you know, who's very sure of themselves, like the the the yeah. And you know, you can easily think of various examples of this um you know, you can see why they You can be drawn into the siren song of someone who's absolutely seems absolutely certain about what they're talking about, versus someone who says, well, we're still figuring it out. All right, Well, you know,

we're almost out of time here. But I want to share another story of brain theft, and this one comes to us from two thousand sixteen. I don't know if you ran across this one, Joe, uh, but the basic premise here is summed up well in the headline, this headline from the Daily Mail. My nemesis, are you're gonna make me click on a Daily Mail article? Uh? Well? I also I also provided you with or maybe I didn't. Yeah, I did provide you with another uh report as well

from CBS Pittsburgh your choice. Okay, thirty thousand caveats to whatever this story is, but I do want to hear it. Okay. So the Daily Mail headline was burglar stole human brain,

nicknamed it Freddie and used the embombing fluid to get high. Um. And there were various versions of this this headline that were that were traded about in So what happened here is Okay, this is Pennsylvania where Allegedly, a twenty six year old uh individual was in jail on burglary charges when his grandma discovered a human brain underneath the porch in a Walmart path. Okay, allegedly the stolen brain, named Freddie by the year old individual. Okay, he named it,

He named it. Freddie was being used for its embalming fluid, which the accused and and a friend used to soak their marijuana in prior to smoking said marijuana. Oh no, if that's true, that no, no, no so um. According First of all, according to CBS Pittsburgh reporting on the incident, the brain was most likely a stolen teaching specimen. So basically, go back to the original Frankenstein. That's scene where was

his named. Fritz goes in to steal a brain, and there are the two brains, there's the normal brain and the criminal brain, and he accidentally smashes one of the jars and steals the other one. Basically that scenario um, except in this case, Uh, I guess Fritz had other ideas in mind. So to two tips I want to share for everybody here. First of all, and obviously, do not steal a human brain. I mean it's it's illegal in the United States to possess a human brain like this.

It's illegal to own or possess the remains of a human being other than ashes. Uh. You know, with certain caveats obviously, if you're like a teaching institution, etcetera. But for the just a random individual, No, you can't have a brain. You can't have a skull. Um. So that means no head, no brain, no skull, none of that. Second smoking formalde hide laced anything is just a terrible idea. Do not do it, um. It can result in a host of issues including brain damage to your brain, not Freddy,

your brain, lung damage, and body tissue destruction. So just a some bad choices were made here regarding Freddy. Never smoked Freddy. Yeah, so uh with that, I think we're gonna close out part one here, but I'm excited to come back in part two because we're gonna we're gonna get into other cases of head and brain theft. We're gonna get into some ancient traditions. We're gonna talk a little bit about mythology and folklore. Uh, it should be

a really fun time. I can't wait. And then at the end of the week, are are weird how cinema selection is also going to concern brains. We have a really brainloaded week here. I'm so excited, as chop Top would say, my brain is burning. All right. Well, if your brain is burning and you would like to listen to more Stuff to Blow your Mind, check out the

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