Heartbeat in the Brain, Hole in the Skull

your forehead? Indeed, Yeah, So we are going to rerun this episode because we have a special uh hole in our hearts, hole in our brains for this um for this episode, and we hope you enjoy. And also wanted to mention that if you don't know about the stud it's called the NIB dot com. Uh. Emmy Dennis, a cartoonist, has a great little bit on trepi Nation here is. She even recreates one of these trepre Nations posts that

we talk about. Well, I'll make sure to include a link to that on the landing page of this episode, as well as a link to a new Forbes article that came out. It has to do with three a trepan skulls from the Copacabana Peninsula. And the Kitty Kaka Basin of Olivia and these days back somewhere between BC and A thousand, uh see, so it's pretty interesting stuff.

Will also include a link to the video we did because there's a there's some particular footage that we mentioned in the episode and you might be thinking, oh, I'd really love to see that. You might think you would love to see that, and if you would, then check

out the video. I'll include the link on the landing page. Indeed, this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind does in fact deal with the brain, the physical aspect of the mind, and some rather radical things that have and can be done to it, like drilling a hole in it, yes, or particularly drilling a hole in the skull to create a pathway to the brain. Yes, that kind of a

cranial release point. Yeah. I mean, we are talking about trepid nation, which is something that has been performed since prehistoric times, and we'll get more into that, but it's pretty much mostly associated with which doctors. But we're going to talk about it today in a medical sense, historical sense, and what it may or may not have to do with Alzheimer's. Yes, um, I do want to just go ahead and get this out of the way right now,

and we'll probably touch on this some more. But no matter what you hear in this episode, do not drill a hole in your skull or the skulls of anyone you know. Um, it's a bad idea best left to professionals that you know. We we have caution you guys a lot before. We've talked about like you get stung by uh jelly fish, do not pee on yourself for others, because it's not gonna work. It might actually make things worse. But we are super serious when we talk about trepen nation. Um,

and we're kind of laughing about it right now. But as we will go into later, people have performed self trepennations before and we'll talk about the reasons for that. But again, this is something that is uh, it's just not something that you do. I mean, it's brain surgery, right exactly. And uh, in a sense, the the oldest form of brain surgery now when we're talking about about trepid nation. Essentially, this is the surgical removal of bone segments,

often circular, but sometimes it will be a square. It varies, but but you see a lot of circles from the skull in order to treat the symptoms of real or imagine brain maladies. It was practiced by the ancient Egyptians, Chinese, Indians, Romans, Greeks, and the early Mesoamerican civilizations. The earliest example that has been found of a skull with trepen nation marks goes back to the beginning of the Neolithic period some ten thousand years ago, and the procedure is still performed today,

both for medical and non medical reasons. Yeah, today doctors tend to call it a craniotomy instead of trepidation, just because trepination is kind of a for many good reasons, kind of a stigmatized term, because it does just bring to mind drilling a hole through the skull and uh, as as we'll discussed, there's a lot of baggage that comes with that. A lot of that baggage it does

not deserve, but some of it it does. Yeah, and when doctors do it today, it's because there's been some sort of head trauma and uh, some sort of injury that now only a sort of trepination would help to reduce swelling in the build up of blood and other fluids which can kill brain cells. Yeah, we're talking about epidural or subdural hematomas here. Uh. And and also portions of the skull will be reviewed, will be removed in

order to access parts of the brain. And in those cases, of course we're taking this brain flap off in your replacing it with a titanium plate, uh, screwing it on, or using some of the forum to to fix it back in position. Yeah, And then again these are our

medical reasons for undergoing this procedure. Non medical, there there are quite a few reasons, it turns out, through history, and one could be a kind of symbolic trepanning, in which you know, there's not there is a little bit of a hole made in the head, that it's more of a symbolic thing, a sort of third eye that mystics might say that you know, would help to expand

your consciousness. Um, I do know that. Archaeologist Bob Arnott says, and this isn't a new scientist article the skull doctors that some holes were made after death as part of a burial right or to allow removal of the brain before mommification. And he says that in some societies people actually wore bone ambulance little discs that were cut out from the skull of a leader or a great warrior. So it's kind of like the the whole symbolic transaction that happens there. If you have a little bit of

warrior or leader, perhaps you possess some of their power. Yeah, and undoubted, undoubtedly trepid nation was used to treat various headaches, epilepsy,

mental disorders. There's even in the most basic forms of trepid nation, with like the least medical ideas, there's still this notion that there is an essential link between what's going on inside the skull and the human condition and your experience of reality, and that you can somehow adjustice, tap into it, treat it by breaking down the barrier

between the world and the brain. Um and in this you do see some of these ideas there in many cases misapplied, but undoubtedly there have been holes drilled in heads to release spirits, demons, etcetera. Yeah, the spirit and demons things is something that that seems as though the Western world has applied to what they might have deemed

as a primitive culture. Yeah, I think it's it's from what I've read, is definitely overstated, but it's difficult for anyone to say, no one ever drilled a hole in the head to release the spirit or demon. But but it is, it is over applied, and we'll get into the details on that. It kind of gets, you know, treprenation, gets into that weird territory that cannibalism gets into, where there's so much myth and it's freighted with with so much morality that it's sometimes hard to suess out the

truth from fiction. Over a historical amount of time, Yeah, because certainly, especially really you know, Western European culture in the over the last a few centuries, really into the ideas of primitive, primitive people's or people who were deemed

as primitive eating each other and eating foreigners. Uh, certainly into the idea of of some sort of a primitive witch doctor just uh, you know, treating some sort of malady by saying, oh, must free ghost from skull with hammered you know, because it's just it's it's a demeaning ideas. It limits those individuals to most primitive modes of human behavior. Yeah. But then we have seen this in in Westerners for a long time, this idea that you know, a Western

must be much more sophisticated. So therefore it must be that they felt as though they were possessed by demon and they had to let it out. But according to Dr John Verano, who looked at something like ten years of schools that we're in museums and private collections in the U s and prow and he came to the conclusion that there's plenty of evidence for advanced surgical skills among the prehistoric people of the Andies. So that's for

one um. And if you start to look at this a little bit more, then you you will stumble across someone called Ephraim George Squire, who back in eighteen sixty three already knew this. He already suspected this um, but he actually had a different hypothesis of why this was, and it didn't have anything to do with demons um. He was an American diplomat and he was journeying across Peru when he met Senora Zanito, who had in her possession a skull with a perfectly square uh cut in it.

And what he notices that it had healing scar marks and it had new bone growth, which would indicate the person whoever inhabited that school before survived the trepid nation. Yeah, they were healing, They were going on with their lives despite and maybe even because of this hole. That's right. This if you want to look more into this to this specific example, it is from the mental fALS article headcase, and it goes into detailing trepid nation in various ways.

And Squire, who is a rather interesting individual on his own, I mean, a self taught archaeologist that was sent by Abraham Lincoln to South America to deal with the guano, the guana guano business, the guano problem, and then he ends up immersed in this issue of of these skulls in ancient neurosurgery. And and and at the time, you know, we were talking about Western ideals and not what primitives,

primitive so called primitive societies did and do. Um. This was a time where certainly that western white Westerners we were like to view themselves as this superior species, almost certainly a superior race, and everybody uh else was just kind of piddling about. So the idea that ancient ancient Meso Americans had advanced neurosurgery was kind of was a radical idea, and in some sense it's a dangerous idea to those who wanted to hold onto these these notions

of Western superiority. That's right, because we'll talk more about this in a little bit. But you know, nineteenth century, they're not having a lot of success with the procedure itself, and it had been largely abandoned by this time. So to think that a civilization, um, you know, five thousand years ago, seven thousand years ago, could have carried this out successfully seemed to fly in the face of logic. And what Squire did is he presented, um, this this skult.

Paul Broca, who was a French or was a French neurosurgeon and also the person for whom Broca's area in the brain is named for, and he corroborated Squire's discovery and said, yes, this is intentional. This looks like neurosurgery. Um. But Broca thought it was done for primitive reasons, again releasing the demons the ghost of the mind. And Squire said, no, I don't think so. And he was the first, I believe at that time, to come out and say I

think that it has more to do with perhaps combat. Yes. Um. I should also point out that Broke also thought that it was done almost exclusively on children. Yeah, this is which he collaborated by saying, they look, I used a glass instrument to to to gouge holes in the corpses of children and adult dead adults, and I found that it was far the far faster procedure with the child. And therefore he concluded that it was used exclusively on children,

which was his experience with his instruments. Right. So it's not a great way to sort of test out that hypothesis, but that's what he came to. Um. In the meantime, you have things like inc and pots that are showing up depicting trepen nation, further evidence that this was happening. Um, you have a survey of ancient inc and skulls showing that more males than females had trepennation holes, probably because

most warriors were men. And in addition, the majority of man made holes in the skull would occur on the left side of the school. And the idea is that right handed assailants, of which we know there are more of, Um, those the blows of those assailants would land on the left side of the school. We're talking about from a club sword, a slingshot, Um, so that's sort of more evidence that in this case, in the Incan's case, this

kind of trepidation was more of an e er procedure. Really, right, you have individuals who sustained massive damage to the head. They've essentially sustained brain trauma, and so the surgical procedure of the day was to try to relieve that pressure. Yes, so let's let's give it a look, see and try to imagine what this might be. You're an Incan warrior. Yeah, I'm just stumbled in from the battlefield. I took a club blow to the head. I'm in pain, I'm bleeding.

What can you do for me? Doc? Ah, Well, I see that you might have some shards of your own skull in your brain. We've got to pick this out. Let's clamp your head between minknees, pour some coconut juice on your scalp, and then we've got some freshly cut leaves that we can just put on this wound to dull the pain. Oh, okay, that would be coca leaves. Coco leaves exactly. And maybe you want to even have a little bit of our homemade alcohol because things are

going to get I might need that crazy. Maybe some tobacco as well, even yes, some tobacco. I'm going to take the sharp object. It could be perhaps a tooth

from the animal. Good. Good, sounds good. Okay, I'm gonna cut into your skull and I'm gonna groove it around and around this fracture you have deeper into your skull and uh, you have a little bit more of those cocoa leaves, by the way, and then you're going to feel this kind of sucking feeling when this plug of bone comes off of your brain, so rather your skull, because it's kind of like my brain is sealed in a in a tupperware, right, and you have just drilled

through that type of ware with your animal tooth. Yes, but it's not over yet because I have these Greek forceps that I've fashioned out of bamboo, and now I'm just gonna kind of pick around the wound, wash it out with a little bit more coconut milk, and take out any other sort of splinters because you know you don't want that. And I'm gonna dress it with leaves, a plaster of pepper, lime and beetlenut. Excellent. Now, is there any way you could you could sew things up

there as well. Oh yeah, that's a good point. That's we should really sew you up with some bat bones and banana fibers. Good, good before putting that dressing on. Thanks for reminding me, because that could have been really bad. Yeah, I would have had to come back and you know, and then that's two visits and I don't know how

my incot insurance covers those, uh, those postop visits. Also count yourself lucky because if this were happening in the future, in like the nineteenth century, you might be toast because you know that coconut juice super good for keeping bacteria out, and it turns out that that's a real killer. Yeah, this is this touches on the really one of the really interesting parts about it, especially when you're looking at it from Squire's point of view in his time, because again,

Western society had pretty much abandoned trepid nation. Because despite improving tools, you know, moving from more primitive instruments to two instruments of metal and devices and clamps and whatnot to put on top of the head like you see

in the woodcuts. Um, despite all these advancements, there was still pretty high mortality rate for individuals sustaining any kind of nursery on up into to uh the eighteen seventies when a survey found that it's many as seventy of neurosurgical patients died now mostly from infect mostly from infection because there's one thing to to dig around in there, but then everything has to heal and and it's very

susceptible to infection. Now you compare this to New Guinea tribes and uh, you see just thirty percent of those patients died. So obviously there's something here to keeping the

wound infection free. And you think about this too, even like with childbirth fatalities, once things were sterilized and a good practice was put into place that really got people over the hump of of the actual procedure itself and you know, help them to heal and And here's a great example of Wow, I um survived this Trepi nation, but now I might pass away from an infected wound. Yeah. So it's kind of a champion of the little man in a sense, because the squire ended up end up

being the victor in this uh in this argument was indicated. Yeah, this self taught archaeologist won over the esteemed French neurologists broke up. So kind of like that, and it's a champion for these the so called primitive societies that were looked down on. H Suddenly people had to realize, Hey, the ancient Incans, they knew what they were doing indeed, and they were doing it in a way that was more successful than they're more modern counterparts. All Right, we're

gonna take a quick break. Uh So when we get back, we're going to talk about Amanda Fielding, who is best known for performing her own trep nation. Alright, we're back, and you know, it's easy to think at this point in the podcast, well, all right, we've discussed some of the ideas about wine. People would drill a hole in the head wine tref nation was practiced wine wine is still practiced today, and you might think, well, case club,

we've sort of we've sort of figured it out. There are a few cases in which we need to apply this procedure in order to deal with some sort of injury to the to the skull in some sort of brain trauma or some sort of neurosurgery that requires access to the brain. There couldn't be any wacky or pseudo scientific or controversial reason to drill a hole in your head. Well, miss, you decided to drill a hole in your head. Maybe you're trying to widen your consciousness. Yes, is that the

wacky reason? I think so? Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, the idea of performing trepination generally on yourself because it's hard to find somebody to do it for you if your whole goal is to expand human consciousness. Yeah, if it's not an emergency medical situation, most likely the person the surgeon is not going to perform, right. That person agreeing to do it is probably not an actual doctor, and you're probably not in a hospital. Yeah, you should check

references and look around. But yeah, I mean we are talking about Amanda fil Fielding, who documented her own trepid nation and this is a nineteen seventy film called Heartbeat in the Brain. She is now seventy one years old and is the director of the Beckley Foundation, a trust that for over a decade has been carrying out research into consciousness, including the use of LSD and other psychoactive substances.

She also ran for British Parliament twice on the platform of trepid nation and these great posters but she has that shows her with a bird on her shoulder looking out in the distance, and then it says trepa nation for the national health. You know, that's an interesting way to sell trepid nation, just with sort of an abstract bird like because I can easily imagine, and not to poke fun at or anything, but I can imagine her

bringing up this. This is being her number one focus point for the campaign, and in her campaign people saying, well, we need to present that in a way that's a little maybe a little less on the nose. Uh, maybe no images of anyone actually drilling into their head if we're saying more just a bird staring off in the distance. I feel like she took both tacks though, because I think there's another one around him, which it's the sort of iconic image from the documentary which her head is

wrapped up and looking in the mirror. She look in the mirror and there's some blood going down her face. Um, so maybe she was testing out, you know, a b situations there that she was advocating trepidation. She was saying, we would be better off if we if we all did this. Before we go into the wise of why she did it, let's talk about how she did it, because again she's filming herself. She's in the mirror. She said in an interview with Vice magazine. I was obviously

very cautious and prepared myself very carefully. I used an electric drill with a flat bottom and a foot pedal and tested the drill head on the membranes of my hands to see if it would damage the skin. The old thing was carefully prepared. But more than anything, I prepared myself psychologically. It's the last thing you want to do. After I'd performed the procedure, I wrapped up my head with a scarf, had a stake to replace iron from the lost blood. I think almost a point by the way,

and and went to a party. It doesn't set you back at all. It doesn't incapacity incapacitate you. It is just a half hour operation. But in no way am I advocating the idea of self trepnation. It should always be carried out by members of a medical profession. So, and that's key here again. If anyone reads this and here's this and thinks I want to that sounds interesting, I'd like to give that a go. The the world's foremost trepennation advocate says, do not do this at home,

and only that. She says that, yes, she had a change in dream pattern. She says her dreams became less anxious, But she says, could all of that be described as a placebo? There is, of course that possibility, and I am very conscious of that. So she acknowledges, Yeah, I drolled a hole in my head. I felt better for it. But you know what, I'm aware of the placebo effect and this could perhaps be just a psychological state for me.

So let's talk about why she did this to herself. Well, for starters, she was the pupil of Bart Hugos, a Dutchman who in the nineteen sixty five carried out his own self trepi nation in order to expand his consciousness and uh and was a huge advocate of it himself, claiming that it was a way to essentially be high all the time. Yeah, and it's side note too, he named his daughter Maria Juana marijuana. Well I read that that's he was actually kicked out of medical school because

he was a huge marijuana advocate. Yes, yeah, so I just thought there's an interesting side note since we just did an episode on names and how they have these sort of self fulfilling prophecies sometimes. Anyway, I digress, Yeah, a very interesting character. He came up with a concept called brain blood volume, and this is this idea that

trepanning allows the full heart beat to express itself. And Fielding says, hey, when a baby is born, the top of the skull is really soft and flexible, and you have a fontanelle closing and then the skull bones closed. And she says this inhibits the full pulsation of the heartbeat, so it's denied its full expression of the brain, so to speak. That loss of pulse pressure results in a change of ratio between the two fluids and the brain blood and cerebral spinal fluid, which is important and won't

get to that in a moment. She says, it is blood that feeds the brain cells with what they need, such as glucose and oxygen. That's cerebral spinal fluid removes some of the toxic molecules. So she's saying that trepre nation essentially works by restoring the full pulse pressure of the heartbeat. And she has been doing some research lately

about this as it relates to Alzheimer's. But before we get into that, I thought it would be helpful for us to kind of give a call back to a past episode called The Night Janitor, in which we talk talked about the glymphatic system. Yeah, we're talking about the glymphatic system or the glymphatic clearance pathway. It's a functional waste clearance pathway in the mammalian central nervous system. And this discovery really lands the feat of Danish biologists making

nater guard um. She was leading research into sleep function at the University of Rochester's Medical school, and uh, she didn't think everything was really stacking up and making sense that I figured that the brain is too busy to recycle all this energy, that there's essentially a waste disposal problem with the human brain. Yeah, because she was looking at the lymphatic system. So muscles um create toxic by products, right, and those build up and then they're ushered out by

the lymphatic system. So she was thinking, I don't think the brain can't be doing that. The brain is so active during the day. Maybe we can look at this at night and see what's going on in terms of waste removal. Yeah, she suspected that the brain shared a similar system that the muscles had, and the in o lymphatic system offered um but instead of it's predicated on cerebro spinal fluid in what she called the glymphatic system with a nod to the brains glial cells, which maintain

homeostasis and protect neurons. So what she did she and her team injected anesthetized mice with fluorescent tracers into their

cerebro spinal fluids. So this allowed them to track where the fluid was traveling in their bodies, in their brains, and during the mice's waking hours, that fluid barely made it into the brain, but once sleep was induced, the brain cells of the mice actually shrunk, and that made way for a flood of the cerebro spinal fluid, essentially hosing down the brain of waste with the proteins and that the toxic byproducts and ushering them out. And here's

the weird thing. Are not weird, but very very interesting, and humans with dementia in Alzheimer's, there's an excess of the rains toxic byproduct beta amyloid. So that is giving researchers a really big reason to look into cerebro spinal fluid and see how it takes away these these byproducts. Because the idea is that if there is a build up well that can cause disease, it's kind of like plaque,

It's like brain plaque. So now you have Russian neuro physiologist Uri muson Nico who believes that tref nation could act as a kind of release valve and allow better circulation of the cerebro spinal fluid. And he says that as we age the proteins in the brain hard in preventing this system from working as it should, and as a result, the flow of both blood and cerebro spinal fluid is reduced and impairs the delivery of oxygen and

nutrients as well as a removal of waste. Now, if I'm understanding this, right Fielding is actually working with that Russian researcher and has the same beliefs about this. And you know, almost didn't want to even point these two things together with the night janitor that we discussed in the cerebrospinal fluid being attached to um the build up of proteins and disease. But it's so interesting that this

trepin nation aspect of it would come into play. Yeah, we were talking about this earlier, you know, hesitant to draw any lines between um, such an extreme activity as a self trepination or even advocating self trefination and an actual grounded science. But the way I like to look at it is, this is an extreme view, and it's kind of like taking the train to the end of

the line. Not everybody takes the train to the end of the line of the tracks maybe uh maybe you know, completely ironed out with with real science, but you can follow the tracks. It's too far, you can go a little too far down the line. And even someone in an extreme position, that extreme position is going to be in paying old with with some truths a lot of the time. And so who knows where this exactly pans

out in the end? Yes, well, of course research is needed, right and then the problem is hiding research funding for trefination, and um, you know, I know that they have looked at Alzheimer's patients before, and people who have had head traumas and then had trepronation, and they have seen that when they are trepinated, that the that that blood flow increases, and then when they replace that bone fragment or they

seal it up that it reduces. So, yes, that's true, but there's not enough research here to say, ah, yes, this is the thing that will cure Alzheimer's or dementia. And in fact, I think the real star of this story is crebro spinal fluid, the fact that this is the stuff that hosts down the works in your brain

and takes out the toxic byproducts. And then the second real story is that happens when you sleep, So you have to have enough sleep in order for you to get enough of that in your brain to take away these toxic byproducts. Now, where this where my brain goes in all of this is is not so much imagining a future where everybody goes to the doctor and has

a whole drilled in their head. But but where this might lead as we understand more about the subrospinal fluid, do we reach a point where there is some other kind of trans human fix in place to sort of tweak our evolved form for operable performance, Like maybe it ends up being something that's achieved with nanotechnology. That's true, that's the possibility, right, Or is there a way to induce sell shrinkage in your brain without any adverse side effects. Um,

that would allow an easier path for the fluid. I don't know. These are all really interesting questions, UM, but I thought what was most interesting, UM in terms of Amanda Fielding, is that she's not entirely on board word with the trepidation. Like she's definitely interested in pursuing it as a path to understanding consciousness and disease, but she says, in response to the question by advice, would you be doing the research even if you weren't trepanned? She says, yes,

I think so. But I suppose that my personal experience of getting trepanned, which I of course would not put total faith in, gave me the feeling that it's worthy of research. So again here she is sort of she's saying, yeah, it's giving me a perspective that I want to pursue, but I'm not sure that it's the way to go. M Do I think is helpful? Yeah? Yeah, she seems for a person that that did undergo self trepination, you know, she's she's seemed to be a very self conscious and

very grounded individual. So there you have trepidation, which, in a very loose sense is is kind of like loosening the belt on your brains pants. Yeah, eating a big meal, You've been thinking a lot of thoughts that meal, and then pop, Yeah, a little bit more room, I suppose, a little bit more room to expand. Yeah, that's the idea at least. Um again, it's it's kind of a gruesome topic and sort of it was hard to look at the footage. If anybody's curious, it's definitely out there.

That documentary is on YouTube and little um smatterings, not in its entirety, but it's very interesting stuff, all right, so they you have it trepidation in all it's uh grizzly details and up potentially um you know, mind altering details. Yes, we hope that we haven't caused any trepidation about trepidation for you. If you'd like to check out more episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, be sure to go to the mothership Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

That's where you'll find all the episodes, uh been podcast form, you'll find the videos, you'll find a blog post, links out to social media accounts you name it. And if you have any thoughts on treport Nation or these sort of feats of enlightenment. Let us know. You can email us at below the Mind at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it How stuff works dot com.