10 Scientists Who Were Their Own Guinea Pigs

I've changed the jan Michael Vincent finally. All right, you've been talking about that forever, Chuck. I'm glad you finally did it. And you showed me your driver's license and it's official. Pretty neat. And what's cool is, um you did your hair for the photo. It looks kind of like the air Wolf Airwolf era, Jane Michael Vincent. Is there any other era the Mechanic? That's true? That those are his two eras Hooper. Was he in that? Yeah?

He was the young buck stuntman to Burt Reynolds's aged veteran. Really he played that role a couple of times. Then I guess, huh, okay, Well, that's enough for the Jim Michael Vincent shout outs. Is he around still? Uh? I mean I haven't seen him in a decade and he was in pretty bad shape a decade ago. Was he really Yeah? From the from what I think drugs, I might be wrong though, or maybe he was not. He was injured or something. Do you just told everybody Jim

Michael Vincent likes drugs. He's self experimented. Great one, Thank you very much for that. Um. This is a special episode because we are good good friends of the Science Channel and they have a very very cool show that an ad played for at the beginning of this episode, Dark Matters. It comes on. It premiered last Wednesday. It comes on tomorrow Wednesdays at ten pm. Have you have you looked at the episodes? Have you seen any of

the video? It's pretty awesome. It is UM and I was going through the episode guide of the stuff they have coming up. It's like, um, really like a dark version of Unsolved Mysteries? Remember that? Yeah? Yeah? So UM. The A couple of the episodes have stuff that we've covered, like Einstein's brain, c I A lsd UM, and then they have a bunch of stuff we have. I didn't get that impression, but it's it's possible. They can do

anything they want. But imitation is the greatest form of flighters, right, And that's actually we get asked to do stuff sometimes and you'll know if we really want to do it because we do it. And we did this one. Like this is literally being recorded today. Yeah, Like that's crazy. That is definitely different. Yeah, Jerry's turning this one around like hours later. Yeah, or earlier. We recorded this. It is as fresh as it gets. It still has the

peach fuzz on it. Depeche Mode. By the way, de pech Mode is in no way related to a rare the founding He was a founding member of the h Mode and later went on to Founderation. Really Vincent Clark really, yes, wow, I knew there was some tie. I had no idea we're talking about this because we were having rarely do we let you in on our pre record conversation. But Josh went saw Ratio this weekend and I knew it was awesome and it was great, and there was some

tie to another band. I couldn't remember it, and it was depeche Mode. Well, it was either depeche Mode or the pet Boys, probably, but I had cheez Did I just say that that? He said the pet Boys, which is an auto part score. They're really good on the keyboards and they had these gigant or heads and bodies. All right, So Chuck, you're ready ready. We're talking about scientists who self experiment and we've talked about UM crazy

experiments before. So this UM episode actually forms a trifecta with two other previously released episodes that if you haven't heard, you should go listen to. What's the third UM? There is the human Experimentation sure episode, and then five Crazy Government exp Oh yeah, all those are pretty pretty well mixed together. So if you listen to that the if you listen to those two and self Experimentation, you're gonna have a very robust understanding of just how nuts some

scientists are. You know what they call that around here? What a bucket? Yeah, they do a bucket of content. Heck, that's almost channel. That's right. Ah, this is good man. You threw this together like lickety split last week and found some really cool things. I think. Yeah, there's there's UM you could do way more than ten Yeah, sure, UM, like the guy who cracked his own knuckles for thirty years, just in his left hand. I believe he found nothing right.

It does not cause arthritis. Um. We've talked before about Albert Hoffman, the Swiss chemist who um took the world's first acid trip that's on purpose, Um, on a bike. But can you imagine like never having known anything about it, Like I think generally when people do that kind of thing these days, you've heard of it and you know what's coming. But for it to be this brand new thing, he was probably like I bet there was along bike crack. Yeah, like kids, kids grew up on the Great Space Coaster,

so they know it's coming, you know. Um, But yeah he said that. Um. He he laid down at home and UM, these these bizarre but not altogether unpleasant visions started coming to him and yeah, he was whacked out for many hours. Um. But we've talked about him before. UM. A guy who we haven't talked about who I find just fascinating. His name Santorio Santorio. It's the the researchers so nice. They named him twice, Sordio Sthordio. Yes, yes, take a check. Well, he was a self experimenter and

one of the earlier self experimenters. Um, we're talking sixteenth century style. And uh, what he did is he wanted to find out about and I guess they didn't call it metabolism at the time, did they, No, he he later ending the study. Okay, yeah, back then they had no I But basically that's what he was doing, was kind of learning about the human metabolism. And he did so by h being very meticulous about recording what he eat eated, what he ate and what he drank, and uh,

weighing his stools and his urine. And I guess he formed some equation what comes in what goes out? Well, he found that it doesn't equal. And you you can't take into account the weight you put on. There's still some um difference. And he wanted to figure out where that went. And he came up with the idea of insensible perspiration, which I thought was going to be all about sweat. So I was a little disappointed. Well it is, yeah, but really, I mean it's just like constant, little sweat

weight like that. But the cool thing about Santorio Squared is that, um, he lived for thirty years chuck essentially every every day, every every single day for thirty years, and he basically lived on this machine. It was like a huge beam scae and he constructed like a little chair and like a work table and all that. And he weighed all the food and drink that came on, and he weighed all the poop and urine that went off.

But he lived on this thing. Well. And what's sad is that he did all this and it really wasn't super useful, no, but it opened the doors though for things like that. It definitely did. And um, one of one of the other things that did was, um, he had the idea of insensible perspiration before he did this, so he was one of the first people to say, you know what, I'm not just gonna say something. I'm gonna subject this to scientific rigor. I'm gonna put my

money where my mouth is. I'm gonna scale and weigh my pooop. Yeah, he's like a stockbroker in the eighties looking for brand, you know. So that's number one. Uh, number two, we come to eighteen o three is a little bit of a jump there to Frederick Wilhelm Adam Certnir and Um, what he ended up doing was actually pretty useful for everyone even today, because he did he discover morphine he isolated did it isolated it from opium? Yeah,

and through two steps got a few friends together. Well, at first he tested it on animals until they started dying, sleeping and dying, right, and then he was like, well, maybe I should try to some people and see what happened. Because he said, um that animals do not give exact results. I guess that's true, right, So he and his seventeen year old friends give exact results. Also, dying is a

pretty exact result. Yeah, So he ouedied a bunch of animals and he got three uh you pointed out seventeen year olds plus himself, and I think he was like twenty at the time he was, so that's like right in the wheelhouse. Still today, I think he's a middle age back then though, yeah. Uh. And so he dosed himself and his friends on a low dose at first, about a half a grain of morphine, which is thirty mgs. It's a comparatively low dose to what he took, right,

and that produced a little flushing. He was like, hey, this is kind of neat, but I'm I'm looking for more than flushing, so let me take a little more more. After about fifteen minutes, took a similar dose, started feeling a little queasy and faint and sleepy, of course, and to the point where I guess he thought it might be getting a little dangerous, so he threw up, made all his friends throw up to get it out of

their system. Well, yeah, he started to get a little worried that they were all gonna die because they've taken ninety milligrams of morphine in less than an hour, which today we realized is ten times recommended us. So yeah, he he um, he gave everybody like eight ounces of vinegar to drink and made him throw up and save

their lives. Yeah, imagine they probably huh. Yeah. And then he did another experiment later because he had a toothache, and he found that if he just took opium for it, the toothache wasn't cured, but if he took some morphine it was cured. Oh, I thought he discovered that by accident, Like he was like, wait a minute, my toothache. You know, he kept going, this is the only experiment, Like he

had like many many brushes with death. As far as self experiment any scientists go, he was probably one of them, one of the toughest ones, or at least or the most as the one most addicted to morphine. That's right, Yeah, but that was a pretty big contribution to humanity. I mean, that's still like the go to um pain killer today, I imagine or not imagine, I know this to be true.

Uh up next, Josh, we have Henry Head, Sir Henry Head, and he got together with his buddy w HR Rivers and um they this one's a little crazy to meet. They knew at the time that nerve damage can repair itself, but what they didn't have was uh documentation, right, because people couldn't describe it. Good night. They'd be like yeah, I guess that kind of hurts, yeah, and like yeah, so what they needed at the time there was no documentation.

So they were like, well, let me cut out a sliver of my nerve on my arm and sew it back together. Unless since I can talk about this stuff intelligently, just I'll do it myself and not just any nerve. This is a radial that his the radial nerve in

his left arm. Right, he was right handed, which is why he did this to his left arm because he's no, he's no dumb right, Um and he had it surgically removed and the radial nerve, dude goes to the spinal calm and then all the way down branches all the way down to the hand, so it's like a major nerve. And he had a section cut out and then tied back together with silk and then said, Okay, I'm just gonna spend the next five years paying attention to how

the um sensation uh semantaception comes back. That's right, and not only that, chuck. So, dude, I got a root canal the other day, as you know, he said, it wasn't too bad. Huh, No, it wasn't. But I was thinking about Henry Head because while it was going on, I kind of went off to my happy place. I just like left my body as much as possible in case any pain did come along, it would be kind of muted. What Henry Head did that work? Was it did? Yeah?

You know, like you're not looking for the pain, You're trying to avoid it mentally. Yeah, and it definitely makes it worse if you're attention, yes, he But what Henry Head did was create this kind of trance like state called negative attitude of attention, where he focused his attention inward on pain, looking for it, so he could, you know, I guess, experience it more fully and pay attention to the type of pain it was. This guy went on this journey of pain, excruciating pain at times. Yeah. What

was his quote to his wife? He said, I shall know a great deal about pain by the time this experiment is over. And he was right, yeah, whatever, But he was a bad dude. She's like, what's this bringing

in this eternal pain? But he, uh, you know that documentation was important because they've never been able to describe for they probably didn't follow patients up like they do now, you know, like five years later, right, Well, and this was over the course of five years, so like they they basically documented how sensation returns after a major nerve damage. And he also contributed a lot to experimental psychology with

the negative attitude of attention. UM. Basically, there's this whole thing of reverie where you're just basically zoned out, like Ralphie in um a Christmas story like that that was never documented before. And basically what Henry Head did was say, oh, here's a way to explore that. I don't get the Ralphie. Remember where they're like Ralphie and he like comes to remember his his little daydream about getting the A plus plus plus plus plus. That's Reverie. Yeah, that's good. Family

comedy is number four in our list. Josh, I could like to call the dude who loved drugs Alexandra Shulgin. We talked about him before, and he was a chemist for doll in the sixties. We talked about in the can Psychedelics treatmental Illness, that's the one he showed up in. Right. He was basically um toying with with mescaline and and compounds that later became ecstasy M D M A M D M A. I have a hard time saying that.

And he and his wife took a lot of these psychoactive drugs, had parties and the Martini as the usual method of the sixties, put a little drugs in there, and uh, you know, that's basically his story. He he liked the drugs, and I guess he documented all this stuff, right, Yeah, he went just partying, was he? I don't know if partying is the right word, But I don't know that he was always documenting. I don't know if it was

always scientifically rigorous how many did he take here? So there's like an estimated three hundred psychoactive compounds in the world, and he estimated that he sampled between two hundred and two and fifty of them. So he liked the psychedelics a lot. He put into the dead Simothy Learry to shame, didn't he They were probably buddies? Was he American? Yeah? Okay, So let's go back a little bit from the drug

adult sixties to nineteenth century. Yeah, eighteen nineteen, Right, there's a Czechoslovakian monk who um at age thirty two, became a doctor because, um, he didn't think that the whole recommended dosage thing that was being doled out at the time was he called it nothing but mysticism. He thought it was way too low and basically, um was homeopathy.

I think he had a problem with homeopathy. His name is yam Per Kenny, and he uh, he basically said, Okay, I'm gonna become a doctor so I can learn more about this, and then I'm gonna take as many drugs as I can get my hands on, and um overdose and then pay attention to what happens to me, because I want to figure out what the recommended dosage should be. Yeah.

The coolest part about this guy's story, I think is that after he started doing this, like taking things like fox glove to blur his vision and then writing about that night shade Ah, the word got out and people. I got the sense that other doctors were like, Hey, there's this dude that you'll let you do anything. Do it right, He'll take anything, So they started doing that. Yeah. One of his teachers, UM at med school, said Hey, I've got these three different extracts of epocac, and I

need to find out which one's best. So what do you think which one? Is there anything that that does besides make you vomit? Nope, Okay, that's it's sole purpose as far as I know, that's it. Have you ever ever heard of it used for anything else? No? I

haven't either. No, I don't ever want to have it, but um, I want to try it this, so yeah, PERKINI UM conducted a three week trial of these three extracts of ipecac, and by the end of the trial, he'd conditioned like a vomiting response whenever he saw like a brown powder that looked like iocac. Again, this life's like you want some cinnamon TOAs well. You know, it's interest seeing his wife died and he became um in charge of raising his three boys, and he said, okay,

I'm not a self experimenting anymore. I gotta I have to stick around and take care of these these jokers. Yeah, it was pretty cool. He said he was leaving it to the younger generation. But he's been doing it for twenty years already. And um, not just ipecac and uh fox glove, but also um nightshade. We now use atropine, which is the active ingredient night shade to dilate pupils thanks to him, because he overdosed on night shade to find out what would happen. And he would also make

himself very dizzy to study vertigo on carousels. Yeah, there's the type of vertigo named after him. Yeah, because he he studied it and figured it out. So he would just like get on the carousel until it and then stand up and yeah. But rather than this is a common thread in in self experimentation, like with my root canal or if you're dizzy on a carouself, you go inward. You you you shy away from it. You don't want

to pay attention to any details. You just want everything to end right with self experimenting researchers do is throw themselves into the experience and pay attention and gain all that knowledge from it that you know, any one of us could do if if we were good at describing things scientifically, but we don't because we want to avoid pain and discomfort. Guys did it for us, they did, thankfully. Yeah, well that's why we're doing this one too. It's like,

hats off to him. If you haven't gotten that impression yet, thank you, hats off. What if I just did that and I had like a reversal and I like, you couldn't say anything about it, all right? George Stratton is next, and he uh did something a little crazy. You know. He wore reversing lenses in the nineties. So he learned that our visual information comes in in an inverted manner.

We all know this, right, well, he knew that, but there were theories that said this, that's how it has to be, and he wanted to find out if that was true, Like, does visual information have to be inverted for us to see upright? Because you know that it flips over in the brain exactly right. So can you imagine what he did to his brain by doing this? Yeah, it's pretty crazy. He wore these reversing lenses, which basically presented the visual information right side up, um, and were

them for eight days straight. So it provided it right side up to the brain. But if we wore that, everything would look upside down. And he did. He like you said, eight days straight, unbelievable. He said. The thing that got him the most was like he would put his hand out moving right. Well, he had to just sit there for like the first four days. He couldn't move at all. Yeah, but um, he would put his he would stretch his hand out and it would come in from the top rather than the bottom. He said,

everything was just like a dream. Um, I'd like to try that out for like a second, you know, I'd just like to put some on and be like, oh right, that's weird. Let me take them right back off exact, not leave them on for eight days. Apparently, by the fifth day, everything started to um show up as upright again. Yeah, and then if you really concentrated on it, it would go back to being upside down. But so did he

rewire his brain? Yeah, he proved that the visual information doesn't have to be inverted to be seen upright, um, and that the brain is really capable of adapting in a fairly short time to basically the most radical changes in in the stations it is presented. So I guess that's sort of helped. I mean, it's not like that led to any huge breakthrough that I think it probably gave. Yeah, I would think that it probably formed the basis of

like neural plasticity surely, all right. Yeah. Plus also, I mean, anybody who does that, that's mind bending. You know, he gets a he gets a pat on the back for that, no matter what. Well. And he also found too that after taking them off that it took a little while to get back to normal, which the process something too about your brain unlearned and his brain was. Yeah. He said that he had like glasses at first, and he said it was just too much. He couldn't do it.

So he blindfold of one eye for eight days and had like basically a monocle like a little yeah, just single lens and that's the one he wore for eight days. He said it was just too much to have two lenses. So you want to do Carl lon Steiner. Uh yeah, he he actually did do a lot of good work. He was Viennese and he was a physician, and he basically came up with the blood typing system, the A B O blood typing system, because he noticed that red blood cells and some people clump in the presence of

the fluid component, which is serum, but not everybody. So we thought it's almost as if their blood is a different type from one another. Well, at the time, like they knew that that would happen because you give people blood transfusions and then they die and um they because BO was clumped. Yeah, but at the time everybody thought it was because those people had some unknown disease. And lon Steiner was like, I think that people just have

different types of blood. So he used his own blood in some of his colleagues, we should do one on blood type. I think we should. Is that true? Like your body cannot literally cannot accept another blood type. It depends I think, oh is the universal type, so you can um except but if you have like A can you can't have B at all because the red blood cells clump and your blood doesn't flow and you die. So it's like putting diesel in a very much in

a regular very much. So yeah, um so what like you said, what Lon Steiner did was a huge contribution because he showed, you know, there's different anigens in different types of blood, and that creates this different blood type a bo or a b um. And when you when you if you tell if you test people first and say oh, they're a type and we've got some a type blood over here, a blood transfusion will work, and so will oregan donation and all the other huge. Yeah,

it was enormous. I bet doctors were like, oh, well that's good to know in these people. Um. So yeah he won the Nobel Prize in ninety that rightly, so yeah, he should win it every year. But what's crazy is you know he he just he experimented on himself. It's kind of cool. Um. But what's nuts is that he also uses colleagues blood. And it just so happened that out of like five people, they all had different blood types,

like types were present. It could have gone the exact opposite way and just everybody had a type and then he said no, they're the same, yeah exactly. So I thought that was pretty cool and it was almost providence well and he he led that led to Dr Jack Goldstein UM in the nineteen eighties to do He was a biochemist that did more experimenting and this one confused not confused me. But he found out that an enzyme and coffee, when injected into BE blood removes anigin and

basically makes it the universal blood type. How did he figure that out? I don't know. The coffee, I don't know, but he figured it out. But I just injected coffee one day to see what that would do and in my blood. Right, So he he had O type blood, so that that this enzyme changes B type blood O type blood. UM, and he had O type blood. So to prove that this worked, he got a blood transfusion of this treated B blood that was ostensibly now OH blood.

So he got a blood transfusion, a small one, but he did it himself, UM to see if you know, his arm would fall off or something like that, or if his blood would clump. And it worked. And it's still being worked out. But apparently, UM, you know that opens up like the donation pool. If you can just take all this B type blood and you need OH,

which is the universal type. Just injected with this enzyme, and I wonder how much blood you have to have transfused before it, Like how much diesel can you put in there? I don't know, Like if you if they just did like a vial with that, like what would that do to your body? I don't know, because Goldstein did like eleven billion, eleven and a half billion red blood cells, and I don't know if that's just a few drops or if that's like half a pine or a pine or what. Yeah, well we'll have to find

that out in the blood typing episode. Okay, well I have I've been wanting to do the blood one for a while, but it's just like, let's do it right now. It's tough. I'm gonna need a little while on that one. Okay, Okay, do we have a blood typing article? Well, we have an article on blood that's like really dense. Oh yes, we started to do that when we're like, yeah, we're not doing this right now. It was I thought I think it was written by an M. D. Wasn't it.

It read like it. Yeah, So look for the revised version coming in the future. All right. I like number nine Erman is it Herman or Erman Ebbing? House. I don't think he's Portuguese. He was a German. Would Airman Portuguese? Yeah, Erman, I don't know he's Herman. Then let's just call him Herman.

He was German. And uh he was the first guy to really study memory and a really maybe at all, but in a really scientific way, which was which was unusual at the time to apply scientific research principles to psychological matters. Right that it was like basically taking the way the hard science is doing and applying it to the soft science of psychologists. But he formed the methodology

that's still in use today and proved that it can work. Like, yes, you can study you know, cognitive faculties like memory in a science way, in a science way, science e way. Um, so what he did was pretty cool. He created Uh, the first thing he did was he created these non syllable nonsense syllable of them with two consonants with a vowel in the middle, like nog this is one example

you used. And he had to make them nonsense because there had to be like no so ciation with like previous words that he had learned that had to be brand new things in his brain because I mean, if you if you have a previous association with a syllable, right like SKay. Okay, and you have a great memory of ice skating as a child, and SKay brings that to mind. Of course you can remember SKay. I'm surprised

he came up with I would that'd be tough for me. Uh. So what he did was he basically, over the course of a year, uh learned these words and then to the point where he could recall them perfectly, and then recorded how long it took for him basically to forget them and then relearn them again. And that taught us all sorts of cool things about memory. Yeah. He he figured out that um and a lot of this stuff you know is so commonplace. We we know it, we

take it very much for granted. But this guy is the one who figured out that UM, meaningless stuff is harder to learn than meaning full stuff. Um. He gave us the idea of the learning curve. The more stuff you have to learn, the longer it's going to take to learn it. Yeah. I think he was the first person actually name it to the learning curve. I think so it's possible. I believe so Okay, um and uh forgetting happens most rapidly right after learning and then kind

of evens off and slows down. Um. And he taught us that cramming doesn't work, that learning is best when it's done over a longer time than you know, a single Yeah, because boy, I used to cram pretty well. Did you stunk at it? I was good at it? I was not. I just I would just be too stressed out. Well, and I short changed myself though, because I would do well in the test and then forget it, which was I mean, I wasn't doing myself any favors

as far as gaining knowledge. You know, I took Italian um in college, and it was the only language that's ever clicked for me, Like I got a town in on a fundamental level. Yeah, and just aced the class until the final, and I studied for the final. I don't think I crammed it, just you know, I didn't take it for granted that I was gonna ace the final.

But I for some reason I got there and forgot everything when I sat down, and well then I panicked, Yeah, but it wasn't panic until I realized that I had forgotten everything. And I still did this day. Don't understand what happened, and I don't remember. It's not like it came back after the test. It just went away right before the final. You know what happened? What Centorio Sordio,

That's what happened. I started, I started weighing my feces, and it chased away all my understanding of battalion, and I stopped after one trial. Did you? I'm just saying, I've waited my feces once, and I know you gotta do it more than once. He also created the ebbing House illusion. Have you ever heard that? That's that thing? Right there? Is that the same size that is not the same size, It is not the same side. It's a very famous illusion where there are two same sized circles,

they're not the same size. And then the one on the left has these very large circles around it and the one on the right has very small circles around it, and it gives the appearance that they're different sizes, but they are not so. Eving House is a pioneer in experimental psychology, which is pretty cool, absolutely, and in experimental psychology still today. Self experimentation is um fairly commonly used UM because it's not nearly as dangerous as it is

in say medicine. For that reason, science today is basically like you can't self experiment. That's so nineteenth century. Well, and beyond the dangers of it, there's something called double blinds and placebos that you know, if you know, if you're self experimenting, then there that's going to affect the outcome of the experiment almost time with the double blind is like a hallmark of science, the inquiry, and you

it's impossible with when you're experimenting on yourself. So, uh, if you're looking for grant funding and you're saying, well, I'm just gonna try this drug on myself and see what happens, You're not gonna get that funding, but probably won't get published either, right, Well, it depends. There's this guy named Seth Roberts who published a paper about his twelve years of self experimentation. And he's a psychologist, um, but the paper that he published was about the self

experimenting he did in his spare time. So if you're not an experimental psychologist, um, probably if you're into self experimentation, you're either um some sort of pro scientist doing it in your spare time, or you're an amateur. There's a there's a been a movement called an equals one, which is you know, in his scientific notation for the study sample size or population size, didn't called quantified self though. That's a movement. Well, that's the um, that's the website.

There's like a group where it's kind of like this hub of like, hey, I want to figure out why I had migraine. So I started tracking like my food and they were wired editors. I think, yeah, yeah, I did not know that. Yeah, yeah, So there's a quantified self. Dot com is basically this awesome place where you can go see how other people are carrying out their own self experiments and gets a little wacky. Yeah, there's just one lady that drinks her first yurine of the day

each day she records all that. Are you sure you saw that? I read it. I didn't see her do that. Well, but he didn't click on the YouTube. Know, there's all sorts. There was a big Forbes. Forbes had a big article on this movement, which is some people call it naval gazing at its finest. Other people think it's valid. Well that's the point that Seth Roberts made. He was saying like, I don't need funding for this because I'm just doing it my spare time. It costs like basically no money.

Get off my back. I just pay attention. But he also said that, um, he was motivated. He had the motivation of a person looking to solve a problem, like he wanted to control his weight or mood or make himself a happier person, um, get better sleep. So he just carried out all these self experiments and he could conduct more than one at a time. So yeah, he

was like, get off my back. I think it's kind of cool though, Like I have lactose issues and I could see myself getting into um eating to tracking that and and isolating exactly which foods. I mean, that's basically all it is. That's it's kind of cool. And drinking your own urine type will draw the line there. So, UM, we should probably say thanks to some of the sources that helped us with this podcast Clark Oscillatory Thoughts Blog. Um, let's see Tiffany Watt Smith wrote Henry Head in the

theater of Reverie. Scientific American had a cool article self experiment and step up for science. Alan Neringer had a paper from one called self experimentation a call for change. Lawrence kay Altman literally wrote the book on this. Um who goes First? The Story of Self Experimentation in Medicine? Yeah, exactly. Um A. Cohen wrote an article in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology about UM Sara Turner's experiments. He in his good Time Buddies. Um Salvatore Kurri did he rideout sad?

He wrote about George Stratton. Uh, the University of Indiana has a cool human intelligence department quantified self dot com. If you want to get into self experimentation and don't feel like suing us for mentioning it, it's interesting to look at at the very least. Yeah, I agreed, and then Seth roberts the unreasonable effectiveness of my self experimentation is the name of the paper. So those are all the ones, and then pretty soon there'll be a list

top ten list on the site. It's not published yet, it's practically done. I would assume, and Chuck, if you forgot the name of the show that we were promoting on sign channel, why don't we do a little ad for it? That's true? Yeah, um chuck. A couple more shout outs are good, good friend Wyatt Senak. Yes, his stand up special Wyatt Sanak Comedy Person is out on DVD, very funny stuff and if you've only seen why it on the Daily Show he is. Uh, he's great on

the Daily Show. But his stand up is hysterical and different than you would think it would be. It is. He's much more like lively and animated and he's awesome. He's a good guy too. Um. And we have a happiness audio book out, that's right, the Grammy nominated nominated Happiness Audio book, The super Stuff Guide to Happiness. That's right. Um, it's up on iTunes for three nine nine. You're gonna end up selling out more if you're in Australia. We're sorry.

Um let's see what else. Oh, it's got all sorts of great sound design interviews. It's just cool. We've got some experts on the horn. Ye, my niece, yes, starts it out. Um and uh, yeah, it's up on iTunes. Just search for super Stuff Guide to Happiness and that will also bring up, um, the super Stuff Guide to the Economy, which is still evergreen and good. Are we gonna do any more of those? I think we should just I mean I would feel like I just we should okay, we would it feel like a quitter if

we just had to. Yeah, we need at least three. I would like four at least okay, okay, and then one more administrative detail. We have a cool little thing. If you text um s y s K to eight zero five six five, it texts you back a link to listen to the podcast on your iPhone without going through iTunes if you're not in the mood. Is that what it did? Yeah, it's cool. It brings up our r S speed and you can just listen to it. I think it's quick time, so it'll work on your

iPhone or your droid or whatever. That's our latest marketing invention. Yeah, it's pretty cool. So UM just text s y s K two eight oh five six five. If you ever are having a stuff, you should know Jones. It's right. Friedrich's turners not around. Yeah. By the way, we're we're working on there's been some issues with the apps, I think refreshing the podcast less lately, and we are working Our tech department is working on that. So keep your pants on, as they say, so this will be up eventually.

You can look for UM ten ten scientists who were their own guinea pigs love it. In the search bar at how stuff works dot com, you can also type in human experimentation and five crazy government experiments and they'll bring up those articles. Um, and I said, handy search bar finally somewhere in there, which means it's time. We're a listener, man, Josh, I'm gonna call this, uh well, first of all, quickly, if you're from Berkeley, California and you went to UC Berkeley, we had a slight slip

of the tongue. Seriously, we said, U C l A Berkeley. We know it's UC Berkeley, we know you see l A is in Los Angeles. Yes, it was just a little slip of the dog. That's it. We're not dummies. And sometimes if you live in or have been to Netterling, Colorado, and are a fan of the Frozen Dead Guy Days and are mad we didn't bring it up in our Cryonics episode, go listen to ten odd town Festivals. It's in there. It's in there, all right. So back to the listener mail. This is from Stephen H. And this

was just cool information. I'm a huge fan of the show. Guys, loved the depth and breadth of the presentations. I'm not sure how far I uh I am from this week. He's pretty far, but I just listened to the Black Death episode. I thought you might be interested to know. While the plague was a horrible affair with millions of deaths and an interesting effect on our language today, many scholars of the history of the English language, myself included, hold that the plague in England is a major reason

why we write in English today. You see, after the Normans, which were French vikings, took England at the Battle of Hastings in ten sixty six, Anglo Norman, French and Latin became the two major languages of administration and literature because all the important rich folks were chum. However, for reasons unknown, the plague seems to have hit the mid range nobility harder than other groups, resulting in a desperate need for administrators. The only people left to fill the jobs were regular

joe's who only spoke English. So the theory goes, because of the plague, the nobility was forced to learn English to communicate with their administrators, resulting in the re emergence of English as the language of law, administration, and literature from Stephen h pretty neto. Yeah, I love supplemental information. That's those are my favorite ones. So thanks a lot, Stephen h um and since chucks such a big fan of supplemental information. UM, if you have any supplemental information

about experimentation, specifically self experimentation, we want to hear it. Yeah, if you've done this yourself, I'd like to hear about it. Yeah, but don't do it yourself just to tell us about it, No, because we don't want even get hurt. That seems like in the gray area that I'm not comfortable with it. If you've done like your own lactose study on yourself, something like that, sure, something harmless, Yeah, like you didn't inject lactose. Um. You can tweet to us at s

y s K podcast UM. You can go onto Facebook dot com slash stuff you should know that's our page, UM, or you can send us a plain old fashioned email to stuff Podcasts at how stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow, brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera, it's ready. Are you