Latest / The Mind of a Man / The Most Unexplainable Humans in History

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The Most Unexplainable Humans in History · The Mind of a Man

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  Speaker 1: Phineas Gage. Phineas Gage was a 25-year-old railway foreman in Vermont,
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  Speaker 1: and in 1848, he became the most important patient in
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  Speaker 1: the history of neuroscience by having a metal rod fired
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  Speaker 1: through his brain and then standing up and asking for
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  Speaker 1: a ride home. His job was clearing rock to lay track.
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  Speaker 1: which meant packing explosive powder into drilled holes using a
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  Speaker 1: tamping iron, a sharpened rod over three feet long and
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  Speaker 1: weighing 13 pounds. On the 13th of September, the powder
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  Speaker 1: went off early. The rod launched upward, entered under his
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  Speaker 1: left cheekbone, passed behind his eye, tore through the left
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  Speaker 1: front of his brain, and exited through the top of
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  Speaker 1: his skull, landing 25 yards away, streaked with blood. Here
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  Speaker 1: is the part nobody can quite believe. He did not die.
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  Speaker 1: He did not even lose consciousness. He was thrown onto
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  Speaker 1: his back, twitched a few times, and then started talking.
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  Speaker 1: Within minutes, he was sitting upright in a cart, riding
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  Speaker 1: back into town. When the doctor arrived, Gage was waiting
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  Speaker 1: on the porch of his hotel and greeted him with
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  Speaker 1: a line that has echoed through medicine ever since. Doctor?
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  Speaker 1: Here is business enough for you. The doctor could see
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  Speaker 1: his brain pulsing through the hole in his skull. Gage
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  Speaker 1: lived for another 12 years, but he was not the same.
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  Speaker 1: The men who knew him said the accident had changed
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  Speaker 1: who he was. The reliable, capable foreman became, by some accounts, impulsive, difficult, unrecognizable.
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  Speaker 1: His friends said he was no longer Gage. And that
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  Speaker 1: was the discovery, the thing his shattered skull taught the world.
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  Speaker 1: The idea that specific parts of the brain govern specific
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  Speaker 1: parts of who you are, that your personality has a
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  Speaker 1: physical address inside your head, and that a rod through
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  Speaker 1: the wrong three inches can change the person without killing
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  Speaker 1: the body. Every neuroscience textbook on Earth still has a
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  Speaker 1: section on him. And the honest truth is that even now,
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  Speaker 1: with all our scanners and models, the full story of
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  Speaker 1: how a man takes an iron bar through the brain
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  Speaker 1: and walks away is something medicine describes far better than
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  Speaker 1: it explains. Joy Milne. Joy Milne smelled her husband's death coming,
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  Speaker 1: 17 years before any doctor could. She is a retired
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  Speaker 1: nurse from Scotland, and she has an ability that should
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  Speaker 1: not be possible. She can smell disease. Not infection... Not
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  Speaker 1: a wound. She can smell illnesses that give off no
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  Speaker 1: odor anyone else on Earth has ever detected. It started
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  Speaker 1: with her husband, Les. When he was around 28, Joy
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  Speaker 1: noticed his smell had changed. A new scent. Musky. Greasy. Faint,
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  Speaker 1: but constant. She told him he was not washing properly.
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  Speaker 1: He was. The smell stayed, unexplained, for years. And eventually,
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  Speaker 1: she simply stopped mentioning it. Seventeen years later, Les was
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  Speaker 1: diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. And a while after that, Joy
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  Speaker 1: went with him to a support group full of other
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  Speaker 1: Parkinson's patients. And the moment she walked into the room,
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  Speaker 1: she understood. Every person there smelled exactly like her husband.
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  Speaker 1: The same musky odor she had been smelling on Les
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  Speaker 1: since before there was a single visible symptom. She had
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  Speaker 1: been smelling the disease itself. 17 years early. When she
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  Speaker 1: mentioned this to a scientist almost by accident, he dismissed it.
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  Speaker 1: Why would Parkinson's have a smell? It made no sense,
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  Speaker 1: but he came back to it and they tested her.
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  Speaker 1: They had six people with Parkinson's and six without wear t-shirts,
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  Speaker 1: then bagged the shirts and handed them to Joy to
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  Speaker 1: sort by smell alone. She got 11 out of 12 right.
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  Speaker 1: The one she got wrong, the healthy man she insisted
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  Speaker 1: smelled of Parkinson's, was diagnosed with the disease eight months later.
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  Speaker 1: She had not been wrong. She had been early. Joy
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  Speaker 1: Milne turned out to have a genetic hypersensitivity of smell,
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  Speaker 1: and her nose has since become the basis of an
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  Speaker 1: actual diagnostic test, one that may let doctors catch Parkinson's
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  Speaker 1: years before the shaking ever starts. She says she can
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  Speaker 1: smell other diseases too. Cancer, diabetes, tuberculosis, which she describes
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  Speaker 1: as an oily biscuit smell. Science is still trying to
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  Speaker 1: catch up to a grandmother from Perth who could smell
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  Speaker 1: death coming two decades before the doctors could. The people
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  Speaker 1: who feel no pain. When Ashlyn Blocker was two years old,
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  Speaker 1: she pressed her bare hand flat against the running motor
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  Speaker 1: of a pressure washer and held it there, calmly, while
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  Speaker 1: it burned the palm and fingertips off her skin. She
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  Speaker 1: did not cry. She did not even flinch. She simply
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  Speaker 1: looked at her hand and then at her mother. And
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  Speaker 1: when her mother burst into tears, it was little Ashlyn
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  Speaker 1: who comforted her, saying it was going to be okay.
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  Speaker 1: Ashlyn was born unable to feel pain, not dulled, gone.
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  Speaker 1: The condition is called congenital insensitivity to pain, and Ashlyn,
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  Speaker 1: a girl from Patterson, Georgia, is one of only a
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  Speaker 1: few dozen documented cases on Earth. She feels pressure, she
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  Speaker 1: feels warmth and cold, and someone's touch. What she cannot
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  Speaker 1: feel is pain, the alarm the rest of us can
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  Speaker 1: never switch off. As a baby, she never cried, not
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  Speaker 1: when she was hungry, not when she was teething. The
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  Speaker 1: only time in her early childhood she ever cried from
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  Speaker 1: pain was when her eardrum ruptured, and she felt the
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  Speaker 1: pressure of it once. That sounds, at first, like it
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  Speaker 1: might be a gift. It is the opposite, and it
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  Speaker 1: is one of the most dangerous things a person can
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  Speaker 1: be born with. Children like Ashlyn destroy themselves without knowing.
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  Speaker 1: They chew through their own tongues and fingertips. They break
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  Speaker 1: bones and keep walking. They scald and scratch and burn
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  Speaker 1: themselves because nothing inside them ever says stop. Her parents
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  Speaker 1: learned to put ice in her food so she would
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  Speaker 1: not gulp down something scalding and to check her body
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  Speaker 1: constantly for injuries she could not report, like checking a
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  Speaker 1: house for fires that give off no smoke. And the
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  Speaker 1: science still has gaps. Researchers traced Ashland's condition to a
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  Speaker 1: mutation in a gene called SCN9A, the switch that lets
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  Speaker 1: pain signals reach the brain. But the story is bigger
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  Speaker 1: than one gene. In Scotland, a woman named Jo Cameron
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  Speaker 1: reached her 60s before doctors realized she had never in
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  Speaker 1: her entire life felt significant pain or anxiety or fear,
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  Speaker 1: tracing it to a mutation in a gene so obscure
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  Speaker 1: it had been dismissed as junk. There are cases with
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  Speaker 1: no identifiable cause at all. We understand pain well enough
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  Speaker 1: to know it is keeping you alive right now. We
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  Speaker 1: still cannot fully explain the people born without it. Henrietta
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  Speaker 1: Lacks died of cancer in 1951 at 31 years old.
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  Speaker 1: She is also, in a real and literal sense, still
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  Speaker 1: alive right now in laboratories on every continent more than
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  Speaker 1: 70 years later. Part of her never stopped living and
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  Speaker 1: she never agreed to any of it. In 1951, she
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  Speaker 1: walked into a hospital in Baltimore with cancer. During her treatment,
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  Speaker 1: doctors took a sample of her tumor without her knowledge
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  Speaker 1: or permission, which was common and legal at the time.
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  Speaker 1: Every other human cell sample they had ever tried to
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  Speaker 1: keep alive had died within days. Hers did not. Her
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  Speaker 1: cells doubled, then doubled again. They kept dividing, tirelessly, endlessly,
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  Speaker 1: in a way no human cells ever had before. They were,
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  Speaker 1: for all practical purposes, immortal. They named the line HeLa
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  Speaker 1: from the first letters of her name, and it became
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  Speaker 1: the single most important tool in modern medicine. HeLa cells
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  Speaker 1: were used to develop the polio vaccine. They went up
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  Speaker 1: in the first space missions to see what happened to
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  Speaker 1: human tissue in zero gravity. They have been used in
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  Speaker 1: research on cancer, on AIDS, on the effects of radiation,
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  Speaker 1: in nearly 70,000 scientific studies. If you have been vaccinated
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  Speaker 1: for almost anything, her cells are part of the reason
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  Speaker 1: it exists. The scientific mystery is real. To this day,
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  Speaker 1: researchers cannot fully explain why her particular cells were so aggressively,
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  Speaker 1: perfectly immortal when everyone else's died. But the deeper story
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  Speaker 1: is a human one. Her family did not even know
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  Speaker 1: the cells existed until more than 20 years after her death.
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  Speaker 1: A woman was quietly turned into the foundation of modern biology,
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  Speaker 1: and for decades, nobody thought to tell the people who
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  Speaker 1: loved her. The family that cannot sleep. There is an
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  Speaker 1: illness so rare and so cruel that it exists in
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  Speaker 1: only a few dozen families on Earth. and it kills
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  Speaker 1: them in a way that sounds impossible. The people who
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  Speaker 1: have it lose the ability to sleep, not for a night, forever,
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  Speaker 1: and then they die from it. It is called fatal
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  Speaker 1: familial insomnia, and it is genetic, passed down through bloodlines
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  Speaker 1: like an inheritance nobody wants. It usually strikes in middle age,
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  Speaker 1: and it begins quietly. The person starts sleeping badly, Then worse.
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  Speaker 1: Then they find they cannot fall asleep at all, no
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  Speaker 1: matter how exhausted they are, no matter what any doctor
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  Speaker 1: gives them. Sleeping pills do nothing. The brain has lost
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  Speaker 1: the switch. What follows is a slow unraveling. Without sleep,
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  Speaker 1: the body cannot repair itself and the mind cannot rest.
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  Speaker 1: And over months, the person deteriorates, physically and mentally, trapped
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  Speaker 1: in a state of total exhaustion they can never escape.
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  Speaker 1: There is no cure. There is no treatment that stops it.
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  Speaker 1: Once it begins, it runs its course, and the families
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  Speaker 1: who carry it have spent generations watching it take their
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  Speaker 1: parents and knowing it may be waiting for them, too.
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  Speaker 1: The reason it belongs here is what it reveals. We
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  Speaker 1: treat sleep as ordinary, something we all do every night
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  Speaker 1: without thinking. This condition shows that sleep is not optional
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  Speaker 1: at all. It is a biological necessity so fundamental that
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  Speaker 1: losing it entirely is fatal. And medicine still cannot fully
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  Speaker 1: explain why the body cannot survive without it, only that
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  Speaker 1: it cannot. The people who remember everything. Ask most people
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  Speaker 1: what they were doing on a random Tuesday 11 years ago,
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  Speaker 1: and they will laugh at you. There's a tiny number
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  Speaker 1: of people alive who can answer instantly and correctly and
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  Speaker 1: who can do it for almost every single day of
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  Speaker 1: their lives. The condition is called hyperthymesia, and it is
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  Speaker 1: not the memorized party trick that memory champions perform. Those
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  Speaker 1: people train for years using techniques. The people with hyperthymesia
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  Speaker 1: do nothing at all. They simply cannot forget. Give them
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  Speaker 1: a date, any date within their lifetime. and they can
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  Speaker 1: tell you what day of the week it fell on,
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  Speaker 1: what they did, what the weather was like, what was
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  Speaker 1: in the news. Their autobiographical memory runs like an unbroken
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  Speaker 1: tape with no gaps. It sounds like a superpower, and
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  Speaker 1: in some ways it is, but the people who live
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  Speaker 1: with it describe something heavier. Because they cannot forget the
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  Speaker 1: good days, and they also cannot forget the worst ones,
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  Speaker 1: every grief Every embarrassment, every loss stays as sharp and
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  Speaker 1: complete as the day it happened, available for instant replay
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  Speaker 1: whether they want it or not. Most of us heal
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  Speaker 1: partly because memory fades. For them, it does not. And
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  Speaker 1: the science is genuinely unsettled. Brain scans have found some
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  Speaker 1: small structural differences in people with hyperthymesia, but nothing that
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  Speaker 1: adds up to a full explanation. Nobody can say exactly
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  Speaker 1: how a human brain, with the same basic equipment as
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  Speaker 1: everyone else's, records an entire life in that kind of perfect,
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  Speaker 1: permanent detail. They remember everything, and we cannot explain how.
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  Speaker 1: The woman who could not feel fear. There is a
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  Speaker 1: woman who is physically incapable of feeling fear. Not brave,
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  Speaker 1: not calm under pressure, fearless in the literal sense that
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  Speaker 1: the part of her brain that makes fear no longer
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  Speaker 1: works and nothing on earth can frighten her. Scientists studied
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  Speaker 1: her for years, identifying her only as SM to protect her.
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  Speaker 1: And they gave her a nickname that sounds like a
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  Speaker 1: comic book. the woman with no fear. A rare genetic
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  Speaker 1: condition had damaged a specific structure deep in her brain
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  Speaker 1: on both sides called the amygdala, which is the part
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  Speaker 1: that generates fear. And with it gone, she was, quite simply, fearless.
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  Speaker 1: Not by choice or courage, but because the machinery that
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  Speaker 1: produces fear had been switched off. Researchers tried everything. They
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  Speaker 1: took her to exotic pet stores, and she wanted to
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  Speaker 1: touch the venomous snakes and spiders, reaching for them again
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  Speaker 1: and again while being warned to stop. they took her
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  Speaker 1: through one of the most famously terrifying haunted attractions in
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  Speaker 1: the country and where everyone else screamed she led the
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  Speaker 1: group laughing and at one point startled a costumed monster
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  Speaker 1: rather than the other way around they showed her horror
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  Speaker 1: films nothing in her real life she had been through
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  Speaker 1: genuinely dangerous threatening situations and reported feeling no fear during
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  Speaker 1: any of them which had put her in real danger
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  Speaker 1: more than once fear it turns out keeps us alive
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  Speaker 1: It is not a weakness. It is a guardian. And
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  Speaker 1: she was living without her guardian. Her case taught scientists
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  Speaker 1: an enormous amount about where fear lives in the brain
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  Speaker 1: and what it is for. But it also left them
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  Speaker 1: with an uneasy question they still turn over. If fear
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  Speaker 1: can be erased this cleanly by damaging one small structure,
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  Speaker 1: then how much of what we feel and who we
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  Speaker 1: are is just biology waiting to be switched off? The
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: people who see colors that do not exist. There are
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  Speaker 1: people walking past you who can see around 100 million colors.
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  Speaker 1: You see about 1 million. The shades they perceive are
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  Speaker 1: not a metaphor and not an exaggeration. They are real
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  Speaker 1: colors that your eyes physically cannot detect. And most of
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  Speaker 1: these people have no idea the rest of us are
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  Speaker 1: missing them. Almost every human sees the world through three
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: kinds of color detector in the eye. Three channels that
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  Speaker 1: mix to produce roughly a million shades. These people, almost
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  Speaker 1: all of them women, have a fourth. They are called
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  Speaker 1: tetrachromats and the extra channel is not a small upgrade.
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  Speaker 1: In theory, a true tetrachromat can distinguish around 100 million
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  Speaker 1: colors a hundred times more than everyone around them. Shades
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  Speaker 1: that look identical to us, two socks, two greens, a
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  Speaker 1: wall that seems a single flat color, can be visibly,
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  Speaker 1: obviously different to them. They spend their lives seeing a
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  Speaker 1: richer world and mostly not realizing that everyone else is
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  Speaker 1: missing it, because how would they know? You cannot describe
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  Speaker 1: a color to someone who has no way to see it.
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  Speaker 1: For a long time, it was purely theoretical. Scientists knew
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  Speaker 1: the genetics made it possible, but could not confirm anyone
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  Speaker 1: who actually had the working fourth channel, until testing eventually
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  Speaker 1: identified genuine tetrachromats, including an artist whose paintings were quietly
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  Speaker 1: full of colors most viewers could not fully perceive. And
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  Speaker 1: the mystery is not just the eye, it is the brain.
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  Speaker 1: Having a fourth channel is one thing, learning to use
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  Speaker 1: it to actually process and separate all those extra colors
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  Speaker 1: instead of ignoring them is another. and science still does
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  Speaker 1: not fully understand why some tetrachromats seem to use their
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  Speaker 1: gift while others carry it without ever knowing. There are
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  Speaker 1: people walking past you who see colors you will never
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  Speaker 1: see and cannot even imagine. The boy in the bubble.
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  Speaker 1: A boy named David spent every second of his life
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  Speaker 1: from the moment he was born to the age of 12,
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  Speaker 1: sealed inside a plastic bubble. The first time his mother
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  Speaker 1: ever touched him with her bare hands, he was already dying.
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  Speaker 1: He had never once been touched without a wall of
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  Speaker 1: plastic between them. His was less a mystery of biology
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  Speaker 1: than a mystery of what we are willing to do
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  Speaker 1: to keep someone alive. David was born in 1971 with
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  Speaker 1: a condition that meant he had almost no immune system
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  Speaker 1: at all. An ordinary cold, a germ that you would
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: never notice, could kill him. And so, to keep him alive,
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: doctors placed him, from the moment of his birth, inside
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  Speaker 1: a sterile plastic bubble. He lived there. He grew up there. Food, water,
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  Speaker 1: everything that reached him was decontaminated first. He was touched
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: by human hands only through thick plastic gloves built into
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  Speaker 1: the walls. He became famous as the boy in the bubble,
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  Speaker 1: and his life was a genuine attempt by medicine to
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: buy time, to keep a child alive in a sealed world,
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: while science tried to find a way to fix his
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: immune system. NASA even built him a special suit so
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: he could, briefly, step outside the bubble. And photographs of
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  Speaker 1: that small figure in the spacesuit went around the world.
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: But the bubble was not a cure. It was a
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: waiting room. And the deepest tragedy is how it ended.
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  Speaker 1: A bone marrow transplant from his sister was meant to
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: save him, to finally let him leave. Instead, the donated
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  Speaker 1: tissue carried a hidden virus, dormant and undetected, and inside
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  Speaker 1: David's defenseless body, it did what nothing in his sealed
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  Speaker 1: world ever could. He died in 1984 at 12 years old,
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  Speaker 1: shortly after being able, for the first and only time
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  Speaker 1: in his life, to be touched by his mother without
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  Speaker 1: a barrier between them. his case pushed the science of
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: immune disorders forward enormously and children born with his condition
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  Speaker 1: today have real treatments that did not exist for him
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: he spent his entire life inside a bubble so that
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: others would not have to and that is the thread
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  Speaker 1: running through all of these every one of these people
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  Speaker 1: the man with the rod through his brain the woman
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  Speaker 1: who smelled death The boy in the plastic room taught
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  Speaker 1: medicine something it could not have learned any other way.
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  Speaker 1: They were not miracles, and they were not freaks. They
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  Speaker 1: were human beings whose bodies did something we could not explain,
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  Speaker 1: and who, in living through it, quietly handed the rest
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  Speaker 1: of us the answers.