A Ridiculous History of Brain Science, with Jorge Cham

Summary

Ridiculous History: A Ridiculous History of Brain Science, with Jorge Cham

Episode Release Date: June 26, 2025
Host: Ben Bowlin & Noel Brown
Guest: Dr. Jorge Cham

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Introduction

In this episode of Ridiculous History, hosts Ben Bowlin and Noel Brown delve into the ridiculous and fascinating journey of brain science, joined by special guest Dr. Jorge Cham, a renowned expert in the field. This installment builds upon their previous discussion, exploring how humanity's understanding of the brain has evolved over millennia, often through bizarre and ethically questionable methods.

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Early Understanding of the Brain

Dr. Jorge Cham opens the discussion by challenging the simplistic view of the brain as just another organ. He remarks, “It's the most complex organization of matter that we know about in the whole universe, and it's also the biggest everything zone.” (06:59)

Historically, many cultures attributed consciousness and the soul to organs other than the brain. Aristotle, for instance, believed that the heart was the center of human intelligence and emotion, considering the brain merely a cooling system. As Dr. Cham explains, Aristotle thought, “the brain was really just like a radiator... to cool, keep you warm... like coils in a radiator.” (10:37)

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Trepanation and Early Neuroscience

The practice of trepanation, or drilling holes into the skull, provided some of the earliest insights into brain function, albeit through gruesome means. Dr. Cham notes, “People started to figure out, oh, the brain has parts. It's not just like one giant computer chip. It's got a little processor for this over here and a little processor for that over there.” (13:49) These early experiments, though ethically dubious, laid the groundwork for understanding the brain's modular structure.

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Phrenology: Science or Quackery?

Moving into the 19th century, the discussion turns to phrenology, a now-discredited field that attempted to map personality traits to specific regions of the skull. Dr. Cham describes it as, “people would just guess... like, the part of back part of your brain, that's where your love is located and the front part is where your egoism is located.” (15:03) While considered pseudoscience today, phrenology played a role in popularizing the idea that different brain regions have distinct functions.

Noel Brown draws parallels between phrenology and other historical medical practices like bloodletting and chakra theories, highlighting how confirmation bias and limited scientific understanding led to widespread acceptance of questionable theories: “It's not too far off from things like chakras and meridian lines… some Eastern medicine that some people think is quackery and some people swear by.” (16:10)

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The Case of Patient HM: Unlocking Memory’s Secrets

One of the most pivotal moments in neuroscience, the story of Henry Molaison (Patient HM), is thoroughly explored. After suffering severe seizures, Dr. William Scoville performed a lobotomy, removing parts of HM's hippocampus, which successfully halted his seizures but left him unable to form new long-term memories. Dr. Cham poignantly summarizes, “He could remember his childhood, his early adulthood... but after that, he couldn't remember more than 30 minutes at a time.” (24:12)

This case revolutionized our understanding of memory, demonstrating that different types of memory (e.g., procedural vs. declarative) are stored in distinct brain regions. Noel Brown humorously reflects on HM's condition: “I hope he has a lived perception that he is a virtuoso... he just woke up every day and every 30 minutes, the world was brand new to him.” (28:11)

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Phineas Gage: Personality and the Frontal Lobe

Another cornerstone case discussed is that of Phineas Gage, a railroad worker who survived a catastrophic brain injury when an iron rod pierced his skull, significantly damaging his prefrontal cortex. Initially hailed as a miracle survivor, it was later observed that Gage's personality had dramatically changed—he became irritable and impulsive.

Dr. Cham explains, “His personality had shifted from being a nice guy to being very ill-tempered... because the front part of your brain, that's kind of where your personality is and where your ability to focus is.” (34:07) This case underscored the role of the frontal lobe in governing personality and executive functions.

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Neuroplasticity and Modern Insights

The conversation shifts to neuroplasticity, the brain's ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections. Dr. Cham ties this concept to both human learning and artificial intelligence: “Your brain is not static at all. Your brain is constantly kind of rewiring itself... That's how AIs learn.” (45:33)

Noel Brown shares contemporary studies, such as the enlargement of the hippocampus in London taxi drivers, reinforcing the idea that experience shapes brain structure: “They found that part of your brain that stores, like, locations and spatial memory, that's actually bigger, like, it grows.” (36:59)

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Future Directions: AI and Consciousness

Looking forward, Dr. Cham speculates on the future intersection of neuroscience and artificial intelligence, suggesting the possibility of conscious AI within the next few decades: “It's quite possible that within, I don't know, 20 years, there'll be a conscious AI who is smarter than us.” (49:39)

The discussion touches upon the singularity, a point where AI surpasses human intelligence, drawing an analogy to the Big Bang singularity: “The term that gets thrown around a lot is singularity... like an 'it moment where a big thing happens.'” (49:58)

Ben Bowlin eloquently ties this to human consciousness and identity: “We're talking about Homo sapiens exceptionalism. Right. The idea that... you could observe maybe the way an octopus dreams, or the functions of certain higher order mammals.” (54:43)

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Consciousness, Intuition, and Shared Minds

The episode explores complex topics such as metacognition and collective consciousness, referencing cases like conjoined twins who share parts of their brain, leading to shared consciousness experiences: “They sort of share their consciousness almost in a way... one of them can sense when the other person… sort of control different parts of the other person's body.” (55:11)

Noel Brown reflects on the mystical aspects of human connectivity: “It's fascinating the way twins can kind of know what each other are thinking and feeling.” (57:12) The conversation extends to the Internet as a form of collective consciousness, bridging individual minds into a larger network.

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Near-Death Experiences and Consciousness

Dr. Cham briefly touches upon near-death experiences (NDEs), discussing whether such phenomena can be explained by brain activity or hint at something beyond: “All of these phenomena, near death, feeling outside of your body, having weird visions, talking to people who are already dead... there are brain processes that you can say, okay, I think that's what's going on there.” (60:01)

He emphasizes the limitations of scientific inquiry in understanding NDEs fully: “Scientists can't answer that because we can't test someone while they're having a near death experience.” (60:01)

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Conclusion: The Ever-Evolving Understanding of the Brain

As the episode concludes, Dr. Cham shares his optimism and caution regarding the future of neuroscience and AI: “We're going to be understanding the universe a lot more… who knows what's going to happen with AIs.” (49:00) The hosts reflect on humanity's rapid advancement in brain science, from rudimentary understandings to the brink of creating conscious machines.

Noel Brown encapsulates the essence of the discussion: “We're talking about metacognition here... sometimes I'm jealous of the guy that can't remember anything for more than 30 minutes because it can be a waking nightmare... what we do to ourselves in terms of thinking about thinking and all of the possibilities.” (55:11)

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Notable Quotes

• Dr. Jorge Cham: “It's the most complex organization of matter that we know about in the whole universe, and it's also the biggest everything zone.” (06:59)

• Dr. Jorge Cham: “Your brain is not static at all. Your brain is constantly kind of rewiring itself... That's how AIs learn.” (45:33)

• Noel Brown: “We're talking about Homo sapiens exceptionalism. Right. The idea that... you could observe maybe the way an octopus dreams, or the functions of certain higher order mammals.” (54:43)

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Further Exploration

For those intrigued by the intricate dance between neuroscience and artificial intelligence, and the ridiculous yet enlightening milestones that have shaped our understanding of the brain, this episode offers a compelling narrative filled with humor, insight, and thoughtful speculation.

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Disclaimer: The historical practices discussed, such as trepanation and lobotomies, are presented for educational purposes. These practices are now considered unethical and are not endorsed.

Transcript

[Ben Bullen]

Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to the show. Thank you as always so much ridiculous historians for joining. Joining us. Let's hear it for the man, the myth, our super producer, Mr. Max Williams.

[Noel Brown]

Hi, Max.

[Ben Bullen]

All right. Yeah, we're getting some snapping fingers. This is part two of a continuing exploration. The guy who just said Hi, Max, is Mr. Noel Brown. None other than.

[Noel Brown]

Oh, thanks, buddy.

[Ben Bullen]

You're welcome, buckaroo. They call me Ben Bullen in this part of the world. And Noel, if we could do a Previously on Ridiculous History.

[Noel Brown]

The smoke monster was bull. Wasn't anything.

[Ben Bullen]

Well, it was a thing. It was the man in black. It was, you know, that's the show lost.

[Noel Brown]

Which date dated references. But that's what we're here for. No, it's true. We did previously on Ridiculous History. Talk with the brilliant and lovely Dr. Jorge Cham, who helped us navigate the universe a little bit. From the big ban to the singularities to AI and the way that artificial intelligence may well be close to, if not already, at a place where it resembles the human brain.

[Ben Bullen]

Yes, that is true. And Noel, as you know, I'm really proud of you and Max and myself for being quite transparent and forthright with the fact that we are ourselves not experts. Folks, we know everybody enjoyed the first part of our conversations with Dr. Jorge Cham. And believe it or not, we were able to get Jorge back for another episode. Jorge, welcome. Thank you for joining us.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Hey, super fun to be here. Thanks for having me back.

[Noel Brown]

Of course, of course. You're helping us out as well. We love a good two parter, especially one that we decide on in advance.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Yeah. And this will be the Empire Strikes Back of podcast science.

[Ben Bullen]

Oh, my gosh.

[Noel Brown]

That's a film.

[Ben Bullen]

It's a universe.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

This is an iHeart podcast.

[Ben Bullen]

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[Ben Bullen]

Hello.

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[Ben Bullen]

We're talking about the history of what we call the big bang in our previous exploration which led us to, as you were saying, Noel, an exploration of so called artificial intelligence, the nature of reality, the observable universe. And we teased just a bit. Episode 2 this is our exploration of the ridiculous history of a thing that studies itself. The science of the human brain. So real quick, if we could open it up this way. Jorge, just small talk. What is the human brain?

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

What's this little about 6 to 8 pound organ that you have in your head? And it's just another organ in your head, you know, it's a lump of fleshy stuff that basically makes who you are happen. Like your conscious experience all your memories, how you feel, that's all happening in that little gelatinous blob inside your skull.

[Noel Brown]

I have always felt calling the brain an organ was selling it short just a little bit. When I think of an organ, I guess I think of just, like, guts, you know, which. It's important. But the brain is a very peculiar and powerful and incredible organ.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

It is, it is. People say it's the most complex organization of matter that we know about in.

[Noel Brown]

The whole universe, and it's also the biggest erogenous zone in the human body.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

There we go. It's the biggest everything zone, basically. Hunger, hate, love, it's all happening in your head.

[Ben Bullen]

Now, this is fascinating, and I love that phrase, because we also have to acknowledge an inherent dilemma. We're asking a thing to research and explain itself, to measure itself. Could you tell us a little bit about the philosophical quandaries involved with that? Because ordinarily, if you asked a duck its opinion about ducks, you would get a weird, you know, not completely objective.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Right, right, right. And everyone knows they're just a bunch of quacks. No, it's a super interesting philosophical conversation. Right, because. Right. There's 86 billion neurons in your head. And so the idea that 86 billion neurons could ever really, really understand what's happening in 86 billion neurons, even somebody else's 86 billion years, it's sort of impossible. Right. It's sort of like a car understanding a car or a switch understanding a switch. So it's probably not possible for the human brain to really understand everything that's going on in your brain down to the T. But we have science, and so we can make kind of generalizations. We can make certain rules. We can understand the general structure and organization of the brain. But totally understanding the brain and predicting what it's going to do, it's probably impossible for our brains. But you can imagine, like, maybe aliens who have 400 billion neurons. You know, to them, we might be like, oh, look at these cats, you know, running around. We can totally understand what's going on in their heads.

[Ben Bullen]

So this leads us to the ridiculous history of neuroscience or brain science. Could you tell us a little bit about the first. I guess there was a moment in human civilization, or a series of moments, more accurately, wherein people realized this gelatinous blob in their head was doing something. We're under the impression that for a lot of human history, various cultures believed that the soul or the consciousness maybe resided in other organs like the heart or the. I'll say it Sorry, substitute teachers. The genitalia was there.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Let's face it. A lot of it. A lot of our actions do come from.

[Ben Bullen]

Oh, my God.

[Noel Brown]

It's like a second brain.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah. So was there any sort of inflection point or crossroads in history of humans where they started to look at the brain as a seat of consciousness?

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Yeah, yeah, no, yeah. It's a pretty interesting history because as you mentioned, probably for most of human history, we had no idea what was going on inside of our bodies, how our bodies work, much less how our brains worked or what it did. Aristotle, back in the ancient Greek era, basically agreed with what you just said, which is he thought that everything that makes us who we are is in our hearts, like in our chest. And he thought that the brain was really just like a radiator, like a brain just there to, like, cool, keep you warm. Yeah. Because, you know, this has all these, like, lumps and wriggles. Like, that would make sense, right? Kind of a little bit.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah, sure. Maybe dissipate the heat, like coils.

[Noel Brown]

Like coils in a radiator.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Yeah, yeah. Like increasing the surface area. And if you think about it, it kind of makes sense. Right. Like, if you are designing a human being, like, why would you put the most important part on this little appendage sitting at the top, you know, exposed to air Just out there.

[Noel Brown]

Yeah, out there it's exposed. Yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Wouldn't you put it, like, in the chest? Right. Protected by ribs and organs. Like, that would make a little bit more sense. But no, it's like it's sticking up in our hands.

[Ben Bullen]

It's a little peninsula on the body.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Yeah.

[Ben Bullen]

Oh, weird.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Yeah. So easy to knock or chop off. So he didn't quite have it. Right. But people think that maybe the Egyptians knew a little bit more about the brain. So there's this famous papyrus. Papyrus squirrel.

[Noel Brown]

Squirrel.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Yeah. That they found, made by the ancient Egyptians, where they kind of like documented medical cases. It's called the Edwin Smith Papyrus. Yeah, Squirrel papyrus.

[Noel Brown]

Like the font, a favorite font.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Oh, that's another brain game right there it is. So they. They. We know, like the adjudgments catalog all these medical things. Like, oh, if you break an arm, this is what happens. If you sever your spinal, this is what happened. And there's like an entry number 20 in this squirrel that says, you know, if you get hit in the head too hard, we know that sometimes you can lose the ability to talk. Oh, so like, in their heads, they're thinking, oh, your brain is good for things like Talking. So that's kind of like the earliest, we think, kind of a record of people, humans, kind of understanding what the brain is doing.

[Ben Bullen]

Oh, wow. And this also reminds us clearly of a similar practice indicative of recognizing the importance of the brain as an organ, which is the. The practice of trepanation. Right. Trepanation being letting out the demons. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Noel Brown]

Venting relieving pleasure.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah. Drilling a physical hole somewhere in the cranium. I think for a lot of us lay folk, the primary amazing thing about the practice of trepanation is that people survived somehow. Yeah, right.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Yeah. It's wild. Basically, there's not much activity going on understanding the brain up until about the 1800s. And that's when people really started to record things like, hey, if you open up your skull and you dig a hole through here, this can happen. Or if you open up this part of the brain and you kind of, like, mess around with it or apply electricity, your arm will move. And so. Yeah, and so that's one of the things that people did in the 1800s, which open up your brain and pook it. And it's sort of ethically dubious to us now.

[Noel Brown]

Yes. I was about to say probably a.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Little bit.

[Noel Brown]

Gave us that information, but. Which is often the case with early discovery. It's like, you gotta break a few eggs to make a science omelet.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

We're gonna be a little bit of a mad scientist. Yeah. But it taught us a lot. It started to kind of piece everything together. People started to figure out, oh, the brain has parts. It's not just like one giant computer chip. It's got a little processor for this over here and a little processor for that over there. And so that's kind of how it started, really. Kind of ramping up the history of brain science.

[Ben Bullen]

Now we're talking the 1800s at this point, which means, from what Noel and I understand, this means this happens. This great scientific inquiry occurs in the same sort of historical milieu as a lot of quack science. Right. I guess we should talk about phrenology a little bit.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's a bit of a sketchy thing to delineate between quack science and real science.

[Ben Bullen]

Right.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

You know what I mean? Back then, it's like accusing a caveman of not being good scientists. They just didn't know. And so they were just trying out all these different theories. They had all these ideas. They were going on vibes, basically.

[Ben Bullen]

Vibes?

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Yeah. As a. Phrenology was a huge deal in the 1800s. People thought that you know, there was this idea that the brain is mapped. Like there's areas that do different things, but so people would just guess, like, oh, the part of back part of your brain, that's where your love is located and the front part is where your egoism is located. And so they just, if you look it up, phrenology, there's all these maps. I think most people have probably seen them just like a human head with areas kind of like a meat diagram on a cow.

[Noel Brown]

Little regions or the tenderloin is.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Ben Bullen]

And that was informed, unfortunately, by a lot of confirmation bias. We could argue from Western Europe at the time wherein people would say, oh, we've made this rough butcher's diagram or topography of a cranium. And based on this bump, this guy is going to be good at. What's a silly thing to be good.

[Noel Brown]

At in the unicycling?

[Ben Bullen]

This guy's great at unicycling.

[Noel Brown]

Juggling chainsaws, perhaps?

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah, look at the other bump, you know, right there by the temple. This is our unicyclist juggler. Phrenology, Jorge. Was it widely accepted in its day?

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

I think it was as accepted as somebody selling tonics, going from town to town in the Old west selling tonics to rejuvenate your vigor or something like that. It was something that people weren't quite sure it was true or not. And some people claimed that they were certain of it. And people rolled the dice.

[Noel Brown]

Not a far jump from things like the humors, you know, the idea of leeching and bloodletting in order to balance out these supposed, you know, materials within the body. And then, honestly, I'm not trying to poo poo anybody's beliefs here, but not too, too far off from things like chakras and meridian lines and some Eastern medicine that some people think is quackery and some people swear by. So, I mean, it's just interesting the way some of that stuff is still around believed in or not believed in, depending.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

No, no, that stuff is quackery. No.

[Noel Brown]

Okay.

[Ben Bullen]

Ooh, the professor came out on that one.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

No offense to the Crystal fans.

[Ben Bullen]

Yes, yes, yes.

[Noel Brown]

I'm just being diplomatic.

[Ben Bullen]

We are being diplomatic and we share the same pursuits, which is always going to be, hopefully, the collective, objective interrogation of the world around us and within us.

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[Ben Bullen]

One thing we were talking about a little bit off air. It pertained to some just phenomenal and again, as you said, Jorge, ethically dubious learnings. And that came you mentioned the earlier realization from humanity that certain parts of the brain function in certain ways and excel in certain things. And at the end of our first conversation we introduced a patient who for a long time was simply known as hm. And hm, as we find, is pivotal to neuroscience, perhaps because of well, gosh. Can we tell the story, Jorge?

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Yeah, super fascinating story. This was a little bit later. This was in the 1930s that this man came about. His name was Henry Malaysian. But for a long time, people didn't know his name because when you become a medical subject, they kind of make you anonymous. So for a long time, for many years, he was just known as Patient Hm. And so this was a guy who had a lot of seizures as a kid. Some people think it maybe happened after he had a bike accident and he knocked his head. Some people think he was just kind of. He just had these seizures for no reason. So it's not quite clear how or why he got these seizures, but they were, like, super intense, like he couldn't really function. It would really kind of make him not able to have a job or go to school or things like that.

[Danielle Fishel]

And.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

And at the time, as you said, doctors were like, oh, I know how to cure this. I'll just poke a hole in your head and mess around with it. And so a common procedure back then was basically a lobotomy. Like, they would just kind of stick this long needle kind of through your eye socket. They just move your eye a little bit out of the way, and then you stick it in there and then kind of mess around. And what they did for him specifically was they destroyed most of his hippocampus. So deep inside your brain, you have these little lumps called the hippocampus. And his seizures were so severe that this doctor called William Scoville thought that he needed to take out both his hippocampus. And so he did. And the amazing thing is it sort of worked. His seizure stopped. But unfortunately, it had a bad side effect, which is that Henry Molaison was not able to make new memories. So he remembered his whole life, his childhood, his early adulthood, right up until the day he had his surgery. But after that, he couldn't remember more than 30 minutes at a time.

[Ben Bullen]

He couldn't encode new information.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Right. If you met him and you said, hey, and he could tell you where he grew up, who his mother was and everything, but 30 minutes later, he would totally forget he met you. Or 30 minutes later, he couldn't tell you how he got to where he was, what he had for breakfast. He couldn't tell you anything beyond 30 minutes ago.

[Ben Bullen]

Okay, well, we've all met executive producers.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

In Hollywood before we see lobotomized. Oh, boy.

[Ben Bullen]

So this is a moment of tremendous significance to the history of neuroscience. And first off, HM's existence at this Point is cursed. You mentioned earlier that this was a primary source for the film Memento. Is that correct?

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Yeah, yeah. The Christopher Nolan film. The one he kind of got famous for. Initially, Memento, it was this guy who basically lived this life, but in our modern world right now. And so he couldn't Remember more than 30 minutes ago. And so. And so that movie's kind of told backwards in time. It's like he's. You're sort of living the movie like he is living it. It's like, oh, I'm here. Why am I here? I don't know why I'm here. And then you flash back to, like, 30 minutes ago to figure out how he got there. And then you Keep flashing back 30 minutes at a time. That's the movie, and this guy actually lived it. He just woke up every day and every 30 minutes, the world was brand new to him.

[Ben Bullen]

That's a gift.

[Noel Brown]

Yeah. I don't know if that's terrifying or kind of awesome, but. No, I think it's terrifying.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

I don't think it would be a.

[Noel Brown]

Good way to experience the world.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Well, it wouldn't make you useful for pretty much anything except being a medical test subject.

[Noel Brown]

There's something to be said about if we could just wipe our memories or do a little reset, but, no, I'm sorry, I'm not making light. This is a very, very serious condition, but one that shed a lot of light on some things that didn't require people to go necessarily digging around in people's brains.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Right, right, right. Yeah. In particular, it shed a lot of light on how memory works in our brain. So, like, before this patient, mostly people thought that memory was something that was spread across your brain. Like, people thought your brain was just a giant kind of a computer ship, and you had just, like. You know, you store memories in a little bit here, a little bit there, a little bit everywhere. It's just kind of like, evenly spread out. But what was fascinating about patient HM is that he could remember his childhood, his early adulthood. He couldn't make new memories, but you could teach him motor skills. Like, he could. Yeah. Like, you could teach him how to play tennis, and the first day, he would be terrible at it. But if he kept practicing, he would get better at it, but he wouldn't remember having practiced.

[Ben Bullen]

Wow. So every time this guy, for example, plays tennis, he's just a little bit better.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Right. But he doesn't know why.

[Ben Bullen]

He's just really good at it.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Yeah. Like, you know, by session 30, I imagine. Right. This is a hypothetical Because I don't think they really asked him to play tennis. But like by session 30, he'd be like, you know, hitting aces and returning lobs and he'd be like, oh my God, I had no idea I could play tennis. That was basically his experience.

[Ben Bullen]

I hope he has a, I hope he has a lived perception that he is a virtuoso, you know what I mean? Because it's always the first 30 minutes that he's played tennis. Yeah, right.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

But then in the next session, if he, if he doesn't play tennis, he has no idea he's good at playing tennis also.

[Ben Bullen]

True. Pure victory.

[Noel Brown]

Yeah, it's a real conundrum. So what did this teach us though, about the brain? That there were certain things that could not be recalled, but yet certain things had a bit more of a sense memory, perhaps?

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Yeah, Mainly what it taught people is that there are different kinds of memory. I think most people who are listening know about short term memory, long term memory. So those are two separate things in your brain. But for a long time we didn't know that and we didn't know there was such a thing as motor memory. Like when you like your signature, you can do your, write your signature without thinking about it. It's just in your muscle memory. Or some people can play the piano with just your muscle memory. So that's in a different part of your brain than the long term, the short term, even your verbal and language, all of that is just in separate areas. It's still in areas, but it's a little bit more spread out in the brain. And so that's kind of what it unlocked for scientists is like, oh, wait, memory is not just this like one hard drive. It's like a whole bunch of little hard drive and a whole bunch of different ways that memories get stored.

[Ben Bullen]

So that teaches us as well about that reminds us of things like, what is it called? Broca's aphasia or something. So patient HM was capable of retaining and speaking the language he had learned in his childhood. What we're talking about, when we talk about Broca's aphasia is of course the breakdown of, as you said, Jorge, a different version of the hard drive, right? The one that controls linguistic aptitude. Did he? I don't know the answer I'm asking honestly, did sense memory impact anything? Could he. The same way he was hypothetically taught to be good at tennis, could he be taught to. And we're breaking tons of ethical experimentation laws on this, but could you possibly teach this patient to be avoidant of or attracted to, say, a certain stimuli like a smell, and then wait for that reset in the brain function. Is it possible to make a world where this guy is waking up experiencing lucidity every 30 minutes and now he just hates the Noel. What's a good smell to hate?

[Noel Brown]

Oh my gosh, the smell of coffee.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Like coffee.

[Ben Bullen]

Coffee. Coffee is a great one. Would it be possible to teach sense memory in an olfactory way? Or what does that teach us about the brain?

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

I think the idea is that he couldn't make long term memories and I'm not sure that our associations with certain smells, I'm not quite sure where that is in the brain. So some of it might be in our long term memory, in which case he couldn't, you couldn't train that in him, but some of it might be automatic, in which case you probably could. Yeah.

[Ben Bullen]

That is fascinating. And it occurs in step with. We wanted to ask you about this with another pivotal moment in neuroscience understanding. And folks, by the way, I feel like we've been very clear about this. Do not try this at home. No matter how mad you are at your sibling, do not try this at home. Right. There is another case that occurred in the 1800s. So a little bit prior to HM. The infamous Phineas Gage.

[Noel Brown]

Yes. Railroad tie.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Yeah. Yeah. So Finnish Gage was a railroad worker. He's just a regular dude in mid-1800s up there in Vermont. And by all accounts, he was a nice guy, lived his life, worked hard. One day he was installing these long metal rods on a rock to make way for a railroad. And what they do is they pack some dynamite in there, they stick the rod and then they light the fuse and then that blows up the rock. What could go wrong? Right, right. So the thing exploded on him and this meter long iron rod basically went through his head. So it kind of went in through his left cheek, kind of up and above, kind of behind his eyeballs, through the front part of his brain and then it came out the top.

[Ben Bullen]

Gnarly smarts.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Yeah, yeah. But he didn't die. He didn't die. He survived. That is the fascinating thing. And so he got better and everyone's like, oh, oh my God, this is amazing. He's a miracle. I guess the brain is not that important for.

[Noel Brown]

No. Wrong takeaway. Wrong takeaway.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

For a long time he was basically used as an example of like, oh, the brain is like, you know, just one big immersive, most mass and if you lose a little bit, it's like, you know, you lose a Little bit, but whatever. Your brain has the rest of itself to like make you who you are. And so he survived. People thought he was fine, but little by little, people sort of realized there was something a little off about him. Like he wasn't quite himself. Like reportedly he just had like a. He kind of basically became an A hole. I don't know if I can say that.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah, he had a marked change in his temperance. Right. He was now seen as. Yeah, like you said, a hole. And thank you for keeping it a family show.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Not a nice guy. Not a nice guy.

[Noel Brown]

Well, by all accounts before that though, he was a perfectly nice fellow, a hard worker, like you said, and fine to be around, jovial. And then after this, people started noticing that something in his personality had shifted.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Yeah, his personality had shifted from being a nice guy to being very ill tempered, just grumpy all the time. But. And then beyond his personality, he also kind of had a little bit of ADHD now. Like he could. He found it hard to focus. He couldn't really concentrate. And so he's just kind of like a frustrated person all of the time. And, you know, people who knew me were like, this is not the same person. And so only later would the people realize like, oh, this is perfectly explained. Because the front part of your brain, that's kind of where your personality is and where your ability to focus is. So that was another big part of kind of like mapping the brain and figuring out that there are parts to it that do different things and which parts do different things.

[Noel Brown]

I gotta say, there's a really great episode of our sister podcast, Stuff youf Missed in History Class. All about Phineas Gage, back in the archives. I remember back when I produced that show, that was the first time I'd heard of him and I thought it was super fascinating. So do check that one out for a deep dive on this fascinating character.

[Ben Bullen]

Also fascinating to borrow that word there. It's also fascinating that his treating physician was a guy named J.M. harlow. And J.M. harlow, like many Western physicians of his day, held an abiding interest in phrenology. So maybe if you are a boffin or doctor of the day, maybe it's not the fact that this meter long rod went through the front part of this human brain, it's that it altered the shape of the cranium. So now he doesn't have good guy bumps.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Well, what's interesting is that this idea sounds crazy, right? You could judge how a brain works by how well a brain is good at something by its shape. But that's actually something they found kind of in the 90s, early 2000s, was that they looked at brain scans of taxi drivers in London.

[Ben Bullen]

The knowledge.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Yeah. Have you heard the knowledge? Have you heard of this?

[Noel Brown]

The way it sort of changed the pathways? Right.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Yeah, yeah. So they studied the brains of taxi drivers in London and they talk about the knowledge. Right. Like, you know, if you're brand new at driving a taxi in London, you're clueless. You have no idea where anything is. If you've ever been there. There's, like, alleys everywhere with all these. It's impossible to navigate. But once you've done it for a while, you know the whole lay of the land, you can take anyone anywhere. They studied the brains of these people, and they found that people who've been doing it for a long time, that part of your brain that stores, like, locations and spatial memory, that's actually bigger, like, it grows.

[Noel Brown]

Mine is shriveled, y' all. I am so bad at directions. I have no sense of geography. It's really bad because it's.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Yeah, because he.

[Noel Brown]

Maybe it's been bad even since before. You know what? That's funny, though. I will say this. I have recently been trying to actively not use maps, and I have found that it improves my sense of direction overall. So I think it can be almost relearned or improved upon.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Yeah. Yeah. My wife just talked to a coworker who said he's taking his son out for walks just to teach him how to go on walks.

[Noel Brown]

Yeah. Navigate spatially. It's not always inherent, you know.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Yeah. Because he's going off to college and kids today basically maybe don't have that ability to walk around.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah. I haven't had to be lost in the woods. Right. Like our forebears. Yeah. It's funny you say that, because we. We've talked in the past about these arguments regarding the advent of offloading some sort of process from the human machine to an external machine. And I love that you're bringing up the knowledge because that was a revolutionary study in neuroscience. It reminds me as well of a study, I want to say it was NYU in 2008. Admittedly, small sample size, but they studied people who meditate, Buddhist monks in particular, and they found something similar to how the use of the part of the brain that is occupied with spatial positioning, proprioception, you could argue, similar to how their continued practice of knowing where they are and where they're going literally became mind over matter and increased the. I believe the argument is not just the increase in size but the increase in density of synaptic connections. The but the study in 08 with Buddhist monks found, and I'm going to sound so pop sci here, and I apologize, it found that the part of the brain positioned toward or associated with things like empathy and compassion was actually denser and larger and exhibited more activity in those Buddhist monks versus a sample size of, you know, jerks like us.

[Max Williams]

Malcolm Gladwell here. I recently recorded the first episode of Smart Talks with IBM where I learned how AI agents are joining AI assistance as a major productivity tool. Let's start with AI agents. AI agents can reason, plan and collaborate with other AI tools to autonomously perform tasks for a user. Brian Bitzel, an expert from IBM, gave me an example of how a college freshman might use an AI agent As.

[Brian Bitzel]

A new student, you may not know how do I deal with my health and wellness issue. How many credits am I going to get for this given class? You could talk to someone and find out some of that, but maybe it's a little bit sensitive and you don't.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Want to do that.

[Max Williams]

Bissell told me you could build an AI agent, a resource for new students that helps them navigate a new campus, register for classes, access the services they need, and even schedule appointments on their behalf, which in turn buys them more time to focus on their actual schoolwork.

[Brian Bitzel]

We can see patterns of how agents and assistants can help employees and customers and end users be more productive, automate workflows so they're not doing certain types of repetitive work over and over again, and streamlining their lives and making data more accessible to them 24 hours a day.

[Max Williams]

To learn more about IBM's AI agents and how they can help your business, visit IBM.comagents.

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[Walton Goggins]

I feel like I have to give you something in return for karma.

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I don't really have much in my purse. Oh, let's see. Hand sanitizer. It's lavender.

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[Ben Bullen]

Seriously.

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Let me check this pocket. Oh, mints.

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Oh, I have raisins.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

I'm a mom.

[Walton Goggins]

Wait, wait one sec. I've Got cupcakes in the car.

[Ben Bullen]

It's our best iPhone offer ever. Switch to T Mobile get a new iPhone 16 Pro with Apple Intelligence on us. No trade in needed.

[Noel Brown]

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[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Pay out via virtual prepaid card a.

[Ben Bullen]

Little 15 days credits and imbalances do.

[Noel Brown]

If you pay off early or cancel.

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[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Non Buddhist monks.

[Ben Bullen]

Non. There we go. Not.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Not. Enlightened.

[Ben Bullen]

Not. Yes, non. Enlightened. Perfect diplomacy. So this brings us to, I think the general umbrella term for this concept is neuroplasticity. Is that what we're kind of talking about? What is neuroplasticity?

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Yeah, it's kind of this idea that your brain is not static at all. Your brain is constantly kind of rewiring itself, kind of constantly attuning itself. And it's not like you're necessarily growing new neurons, but these neurons are making new connections between themselves. And also kind of more importantly is that the connections that they have, they're constantly kind of recalibrating themselves. And actually that's kind of what's happening. That's how AIs learn. If you look at these neural net models, basically what their changing when they're learning stuff is the weighing of the synaptic connections. So, like, how strong?

[Noel Brown]

Priority wise or.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Yeah, kind of priority wise. Yeah, like, like each neuron is connected to like, let's say a hundred other neurons. And like it's getting all this input. So which ones do you ignore? Which ones do you listen to? And so that happens at what are called synapses, which is kind of where, like, you know, the little branches of two neurons kind of meet and firing.

[Noel Brown]

Right? Firing synapses.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Firing, yeah, firing synapses. Where that gets transmitted from one to the other. So that's, that's where that's happening. Yeah.

[Noel Brown]

And when you look at a brain scan or an mri. Mri, if I'm not mistaken, you can literally see these, this activity. Right. Lighting up in different regions of the brain.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Kind of these, these are like almost like molecule size. They're like super, super tiny. So you can't see them in like an mri, but you can see kind of like when you look at an mri, what you're looking at is the oxygen consumption of your neurons. You can tell like, oh, these neurons are being active because they're drinking up a lot.

[Noel Brown]

That makes a lot of sense. So it's an indicator. Got it.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Ben Bullen]

That's fascinating. So now we have learned that given that the universe, observable according to Big Bang theory, is about 14 billion years old, humans are a real up and coming fad overall. Right. Great hustle.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

We're the latest IT beings, basically.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah, we are. We sure Are not for long. Well, that's how fads work. And we also learned in that very brief span of time that we call humanity, people went from totally thinking the soul was in the most protected part of the body, the torso, to figuring out, oh, that fatty thing in your head does something. Right after we figured out how to stop eating each other's brains, just going to throw that in there. And then from there we see this vast series of at times problematic innovations, sometimes based in accident, sometimes based in confirmation bias, or as you said, quack science of phrenology. Jorge, where does the exploration of consciousness and neuroscience go in the future, by the way? Just going to put this out there for posterity. Jorge, Noel, Max and I are recording this on Monday, June 23, 2025. So no pressure. Jorge, next thousand years, where are we at?

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Was no said, assuming we survived the next, I don't know, month of existence here. I think these things are like Pandora's box. Once you open them, you can't go back. And so I think we're going to be understanding the universe a lot more. We're going to be understanding things at the quantum level a lot more. And who knows what's going to happen with AIs. It's to going quite, I think, possible that within, I don't know, 20 years, there'll be a conscious AI who is smarter than us, I think.

[Noel Brown]

Can I just ask. The term that gets thrown around a lot is singularity in terms of AI. But then we also, when talking about the Big bang, that's referred to as a singularity event. And maybe the terms are sort of used loosely. But can you kind of talk about that term and how it applies to both of those different things? Is it really just kind of like a. An it moment where, where a big thing happens?

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Yeah. So consciousness is one of the most debated things in like neuroscience psychology. Like, if you ask any scientist, like, what is even consciousness? You'll get 100 different answers. Some people think it's like totally kind of biologically based. Like it's, you know, a dog can have some kind of consciousness, an ant can have a little bit of a consciousness. You know, machine can have a consciousness.

[Ben Bullen]

The materialist, materialist philosophy.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And some people think there's something kind of special and almost supernatural about it. You know, even scientists sometimes think that when it happens, it's like this kind of indescribable thing that happens.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah, Promethean lightning in a bottle.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ben Bullen]

And this is, this is where we get to the Vast precipice, some would say, or the vast horizon. Depends upon your interpretations of, as you said, Noel, singularity, or transhumanism and futurism. Noel and I were talking off air, Jorge, at length about the concept of AI, artificial intelligence, large language models. We touched on it, naturally, a little bit in part one, but perhaps we close out chapter two of our conversation on the history of brain science by exploring the nature of AI just a bit further. Now you have, through your work, explored human computer interaction in depth. Right. And so where do you see the future of human interaction with AI going? You already said there is a horizon where this kind of thing exists. What will that tell us about the human brain?

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Oh, my goodness, all small talk. Well, it kind of depends on where you land, about how special the human brain is. I personally am an engineer by training, and to me brains are really just like meat machines. It's mechanical, there's chemicals involved. Some people think quantum physics and quantum uncertainty plays a role in those little tiny synapses that we have, in which case there is maybe some magic to how the human brain works.

[Noel Brown]

I think we're all made of star stuff, Jorge.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

That's what I say.

[Ben Bullen]

Well, if the Big Bang is true, then technically that's. That's also true. Right?

[Noel Brown]

Well, yeah, we arose from something like that. Right. We had to have.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Yeah, yeah. Well, most of our. The atoms in our bodies were made inside of a star. Yeah. Because the universe at the beginning was just all hydrogen, and so anything other than hydrogen was basically made by star. And usually stars dying.

[Ben Bullen]

So, yeah, this podcast brought to you by hydrogen.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

So.

[Ben Bullen]

So, so we're saying then that the nature of consciousness is still something that the world's smartest people, past, present and possibly future, have debated. The materialist view of this one thing, in this one case, these physical processes, these mechanics and these chemical interactions. And then there's the larger question. Is there something bigger? Right. Is an individual consciousness only a node for a larger system, which gets little. A lot of my old professors hate that idea.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Yeah, it's this idea like humans are the way that the universe understands itself, kind of. Is that what you're talking about? A little bit, yeah.

[Ben Bullen]

Because we're talking about now what we would call Homo sapiens exceptionalism. Right. The idea that although one can observe perhaps emotions in a pet, or what seems to be emotions in a pet, even on the strength of various cognitive diagnostics, you could observe maybe the way an octopus dreams, or the functions of certain higher order mammals.

[Noel Brown]

We're talking about metacognition here. Right. Like the fact that humans are uniquely built to think about thinking, to analyze themselves sometimes into oblivion. Which is why maybe sometimes I'm jealous of the guy that can't remember anything for more than 30 minutes because it can be a waking nightmare at times what we do to our ourselves in terms of thinking about thinking and all of the possibilities. And it can be really exhausting. Right?

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Yeah. Yeah. And there are fascinating cases in the history of brain science, too, that kind of speak to consciousness. So one fascinating case that is pretty recent were our conjoined twins. So there's a pair of famous twins called the Hogan twins. And these are two girls who were born conjoined. They basically share a brain or they share parts of the brain. And specifically they share this part called the thalamus, which is kind of a hub inside of your brain that kind of relays information. And so it's definitely two people. You can talk to one of them, you can talk to the other of them, but they sort of share their consciousness almost in a way. Like one of them can sense when the other person. Sometimes one of them can sort of sense what the other person is thinking. And they can sort of each control different parts of the other person's body. Kind of like one of them controls the left leg or the other one. The other one controls the right arm of the other one. I forget the exact details, but it's kind of like you said, kind of like we sometimes think being conscious, the only way to be conscious is to be conscious like humans are right now. But there are other ways that we can be conscious.

[Noel Brown]

Well, I mean, even other non conjoined twin studies yield some pretty interesting results. Like in terms of potentially some kind of link where there's at the very least a. What's the word I'm looking for, a kind of intuition in terms of like, that would surpass normal intuition, maybe between regular siblings. I've met and known in my life multiple sets of identical twins. And there's something to it. It's very fascinating. I would say that is a different kind of conscious in some ways where you are. Maybe it's a product of sharing the same space so much and, you know, spending so much time around each other. But I have seen something, some things that I have a hard time explaining in terms of the way twins can kind of know what each other are thinking and feeling.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Yeah, I mean, there's definitely a role for intuition there. And, you know, it doesn't have to be physical consciousness. Like, you know, I kind of Personally think that we all kind of share as a human species some sort of consciousness, you know, through the Internet.

[Noel Brown]

Unconscious.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah, Like Jungian super consciousness.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Right, right. Like if you're all.

[Noel Brown]

It just adds to that. You're right. I'm sorry, I didn't interrupt, but that's a really good point. The Internet is in and of itself a super scaled version of that that just contributes to what we're talking about.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Yeah, it just really all depends on how you define this word consciousness. Like, if it means, like, you know, being able to write poetry and understand Shakespeare, that's one you, you might not get very far there. But, you know, I've talked to scientists who basically just define it as our sense, as one of our senses that keeps track of our internal state. So you have a visual sense that tells you, oh, I'm in the room, there's a door over there, that's an apple over there. You have kind of an inner looking sense that just tells you, like, oh, I'm feeling this way. I'm thinking about this. I'm having this memory of the apple I ate this morning. It's just kind of like something that tells your body, oh, this is what's going on inside your brain.

[Noel Brown]

Well, the key word there also is I, you know, and this idea of identity and this idea of consciousness revolving around who we are and who we are being ultimately a collection of experiences that are in many ways influenced by the society we live in. You know, and if you want to take it further than that, and people trying to achieve enlightenment, the idea is sort of disconnect from all of those aspects. Aspects and truly experience the spiritual part of what it is to have a soul or to what it means to be part of the universe, rather than this identity, this construct that we sort of force upon ourselves or is forced upon us. Oftentimes it's fascinating. Obviously, I'm super into this stuff.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Well, we just did an episode about this on Science Stuff, the podcast I'm on, and about near death experiences.

[Ben Bullen]

Oh, yes.

[Noel Brown]

We just talked to an incredible podcast creator and friend of the show, Dan Bush, on Stuff They Don't Want yout to Know about, his incredible podcast Alive Again, that is all about interviews with folks who have experienced near death experiences.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah, I'm gonna connect you with those folks, Jorge, you guys should hang out. Can you tell us just a bit of a tease as we wrap up what you found in your explorations on NDE or near death experiences in Science Stuff.

[Danielle Fishel]

Stuff.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Yeah, well, it kind of goes back to this idea of what consciousness is, because, you know, a big part of near death experiences is this out of body experience. People feel like they're outside their body. And what we found was that.

[Noel Brown]

It.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Can all be explained by science, by how your brain works. But whether that's actually what's going on, like, you know, scientists can't answer that because, you know, we can't test someone while they're having a near death experience. But basically all of these phenomena, near death, you know, feeling outside of your body, having weird visions, talking to people who are already dead, There are brain processes that you can say, okay, I think that's what's going on there and that we can replicate that in the lab. If I give you a hallucinogen in a control environment, you're also going to have these experiences. If I take a machine that disrupts this part of your brain, I can make you feel like you're stepping outside.

[Ben Bullen]

Your body or experiencing divinity. Like the famous God helmet experiments. And also very well done, Dr. Cham to note that we cannot ethically pursue some direct experiments that would lead to breakthroughs there because it would require doing kind of evil things to innocent people, even if they signed up. We've all seen Flatliners. Yeah.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Classic Julia Roberts movie. Yeah.

[Ben Bullen]

Oh, yeah, that was Julia.

[Noel Brown]

Is it Kiefer? Kiefer's in that one too.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Yeah.

[Ben Bullen]

Young Sutherland. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I've gotta be honest, it's a super up to date pop culture reference, I'm sure. But I remember seeing flatliners and being convinced that this is why people join med school.

[Noel Brown]

So they can do the flat. So they can do flatliners.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah. Luckily, my uncle, very nice, very learned man, assured a young Ben Bullen that it would still be illegal to quote, unquote, flatline people to quote, unquote, see what happens.

[Noel Brown]

Well, and speaking of other cinematic masterpieces, we were talking a little earlier about the idea of Vibes. And I have to take this opportunity to recommend the movie Vibes.

[Ben Bullen]

Oh, my gosh.

[Noel Brown]

I know it's one of your favorites, Ben. I actually recommended it to a friend the other day. Seminal Ghostbusters, Indiana Jones mashup slash ripoff that everyone should see, starring Jeff Goldblum and Cyndi Laupert.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

No way. What?

[Noel Brown]

It's true. You don't know Vibes. Well, get yichu a cinema, Jorge. Hopefully they're doing a revival screening of Vibes somewhere in your neck of the woods.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

I think I missed that seminal moment in neuroscience.

[Noel Brown]

It's okay. Yeah, it explains a lot.

[Ben Bullen]

It's a real breakthrough. It's sort of like the Police Academy 4 of its time.

[Noel Brown]

It's probably contemporary with Police Academy 4.

[Ben Bullen]

It probably is.

[Noel Brown]

Actually may have come out the same year with that.

[Ben Bullen]

Thank you so much, Jorge, for spending time with us and making this Jorge and Science Stuff Week. Where can people learn more about your explorations?

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Yeah. So right now, my big project is Science Stuff. It's a new iHeart podcast. You can find it anywhere. You get your podcast. Search for Science Stuff. One word and look for the purple icon. That's us. And we answer awesome questions like, do animals understand death? Or do they like to get drunk? Or what's inside of a black hole? Or, oh, can you really freeze them?

[Ben Bullen]

Can we grow a limb?

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Yeah, that's one that was super fascinating recently. Why can't we regrow limbs? There are animals who, like you cut off their arm, they'll just grow a brand new one. Why can't we do it? And we found out the answer is maybe we can.

[Ben Bullen]

And while you are on the Internet, please do check out one of our favorite aspects of Dr. Champ, Jorge. In addition to being one of, if not the smartest people on the history of this show, definitely in this episode, you are not just a mechanical engineer. Stanford graduated. You did not just attend Georgia Tech, one of the most difficult schools of its caliber. You are also the creator of a comic strip called PhD Comics. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Yeah. PhD Comics. You can find [e-mail] It's a comic strip I started when I was in grad school. And it's all about what it's like to do science, what it's like to be an academic. It's kind of. People describe it as the Dilbert of academia.

[Noel Brown]

I don't know this, guys. I'll have to check it out. I'm looking forward to it. I need a comic strip in my life.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Yeah. Yeah. And so I was super lucky to be able to do that for many, many years on the Internet. Huge amount of support from people out there. And then that translated to me doing movies and then a TV show recently. You can find that one on PBS Kids. It's called Eleanor Wonders why. And I've also gone to write and draw a lot of books. So probably most famous one I've worked on is called we have no Idea, which is a guide to everything we don't know about the universe. And now the most popular one is something called Oliver's Great Big Universe, which is for kids. If you have a Kid who's really curious and likes science, but also likes fart jokes and really fun, fun middle school, middle grade stories. Please check that out.

[Noel Brown]

A polymath and Renaissance man indeed. Dr. Jorge Cham. Thanks again for joining us on Ridiculous History for Jorge Cham Week.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Oh, thank you.

[Ben Bullen]

And well, well, well, bully for us. Congratulations and tally ho.

[Noel Brown]

We watched Chim Chimcherie, Pip Pip, Chip Chip Cherry.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

Yes.

[Ben Bullen]

No, we once again, my friend, we managed to speak with a world class expert in science and I think we posed some interesting questions.

[Noel Brown]

I think so. I think we held our own with Dr. Cham, Jorge to his friends. I'd like to think that we walked away from these recordings as friends. He said like, he said he wanted to come back on again and that we made him laugh and smile. That made us feel really good.

[Ben Bullen]

That's true. Our neurons were firing.

[Noel Brown]

Boy, were they.

[Ben Bullen]

Whichever, whichever part is associated with learning and with.

[Noel Brown]

And joy.

[Ben Bullen]

And joy. That's the word we were looking for. We. I don't know. No. This guy is so close to getting a cool, ridiculous history street name, a nickname, an operator name, you know.

[Noel Brown]

Well, he's. It's Dr. Jorge, Riverside champ.

[Ben Bullen]

Oh, that's true.

[Dr. Jorge Cham]

He made his own.

[Ben Bullen]

There we go.

[Noel Brown]

No, no, we can do better. We'll workshop that one. But for now, huge thanks to you, Ben. That was a fun exploration of all things heady and universal.

[Ben Bullen]

Huge thanks to you, Noel. Huge thanks to our super producer, Mr. Max Frictionless Williams. Got a nice haircut there. Also, big, big thanks to AJ Bahamas Jacobs, Jonathan Strickland AKA Aid the Qur. Okay, Yep, big things to him.

[Noel Brown]

Oh yeah, of course, sure. The, the, the rude dudes. Over at Ridiculous Crime, we've got Christopher Odis and Eve Jeffcoats here in spirit. You know what? I think we'll see you next time, folks. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

[Walton Goggins]

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[Dr. Jorge Cham]

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[Ben Bullen]

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[Malcolm Gladwell]

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[Ben Bullen]

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[Malcolm Gladwell]

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[Dr. Jorge Cham]

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[Malcolm Gladwell]

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[Dr. Jorge Cham]

This is an iHeart podcast.