 Good afternoon everyone. We're going to go ahead and get started here. My name is Brian Hendrickson I'm an assistant professor in the Department of Writing Studies rhetoric and composition here at Roger Williams University And it's my honor today to introduce to you this year's Gagliardi family distinguished seminar speaker Sam Keane Sam begins his official bio by telling us he quote Spent years collecting mercury from broken thermometers as a kid and now he's a writer in Washington, DC quote I'm not sure if we should interpret that as a cautionary tale a superhero origin story or a commentary on the sorts of folks who tend to populate our nation's capital But either way I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that since then Sam's found safer ways to get his creative juices flowing and Flow they have and true superhero fashion Sam has published stories in the best American science and nature writing the New Yorker the Atlantic the New York Times magazine Slate and Psychology today among other places and his works been featured on NPR's radio labs science Friday and all things considered Among other shows his most recent book Caesar's last breath was named the Guardian Science Book of the Year in 2017 while the disappearing spoon was a runner-up for the Royal Society book of the year Both the violinist thumb and the dueling neurosurgeons two other books of Sam's were nominated for Penn's literary science writing award in my advanced writing in the sciences class My students and I had the pleasure of reading Caesar's last breath as a model for communicating science to the general public Afterwards we remarked on Sam's ability to transform mundane phenomena into compelling interwoven narratives comprised of the most moving accounts of inert matter You're ever likely to read anywhere and we noted that this must be one of the central aims of science writing To render the marvel the mystery and the magic of science palpable accessible and inviting for all Whenever I read Sam's work or listen to one of his radio appearances I'm taken back to my childhood fascination with the natural world my dreams of becoming an astronaut and Yes, that freshman biology class where in a dark lecture hall alongside 900 other freshmen. I decided I'm just not cut out for science Sam's science writing almost compels me to wonder, but what if Now as a writing studies researcher I'm fascinated by the role that writing plays in how students engage with scientific inquiry throughout their college careers Part of what I love about my research is that I get to observe the complicated frustrating and vigorating and ultimately transformative process of discovery that students undergo as they form their passions and identities as scientists Reading Sam Keane gives me a very similar sort of pleasure His stories remind us of the inexplicable number of happenstances that make us who we are as individuals and that also Make up our common human experience. I'm sure Sam's talk today entitled Spoons and thumbs funny spooky poignant and completely true science stories will leave you feeling equally Inspired and now please join me in giving a warm welcome to our gogliardi family distinguished seminar speaker Sam Keane Well, hello everyone is the microphone on Okay, well, hello everyone. Thank you all for joining me this afternoon. I appreciate it So I had a bad go In about third grade or so. I came down with strep throat something like a dozen times that year and Every time I did I got to stay home from school So it wasn't all bad as far as I was concerned, but you know, I was feeling kind of achy kind of fluey Not in the best mood and my mother of course was kind of fussing over me And she'd always try to take my temperature with one of those old-fashioned Mercury thermometers like you can see in the picture here. Don't make them nowadays But back when I was a kid, it's all we had with the old-fashioned mercury ones And I admit, you know, I was kind of clumsy when I was a kid I was also very prone to talking to myself still nowadays. I do it some but back then I talked to myself a lot and So, you know, my mom would try to take my temperature put thermometer under my tongue she would leave the room I would start chatting with myself singing whatever and not infrequently This would happen the thermometer would fall on our hardwood floor and it would shatter But I admit I was always kind of secretly excited when that happened because I loved the mercury that would go Spilling out of the thermometer. It was like these little liquid ball bearings were all over our floor And my mother was actually very cool about the whole thing, you know She never panicked. She never made us evacuate the house or anything like that She would actually get down on her hands and knees with a toothpick And she would start to brush the little bits of mercury toward each other And my favorite part was when she had two little spheres right next to each other And she would give them one final nudge and then they would jump together into this slightly larger sphere That was perfectly seamless and I was just thought it was the most gorgeous amazing substance I'd ever seen I mean, it's a metal. It's heavy like a metal, but it's liquid it flows. It's very shiny very Futuristic science-fiction II was just hooked on this stuff mercury and I you know, I managed to accidentally break enough thermometers over the years where we got quite a nice collection of mercury my mother kept it in a Little jar and a knick-knack shelf in our house. We'd been good that day. She would get it down Let us play with it. I had a lot of good memories associated with this metal with mercury so eventually When we got introduced to the periodic table sometime during elementary school first thing I did was look all over the periodic table to try to find mercury looked it up and down and I couldn't find it. I just could not see mercury on there And of course mercury is on the periodic table, but as I found out the symbol for mercury is actually h g Neither of those letters are actually in the word mercury and I thought well boy, that's pretty stupid Why would that be the symbol if those letters aren't actually in the word? But you know, I got some help looked it up a little bit and found that oh, you know, okay These come from some Greek and Latin words and I thought wow You know, I didn't know they knew about this this metal mercury thousands of years ago That's pretty interesting and the more I looked into it the more I realized that they didn't just know about this metal It was associated with other things in their culture There was a God that they associated with this metal the God Mercury also a planet that they associated with it And the more I looked into it the more I realized that wow mercury really has this rich and interesting history not just the Greeks and the Romans, but Alchemists were obsessed with mercury. They were always using in different sorts of experiments Gold and silver mining when they were colonizing the new world They would send whole galleon ships full of mercury to help out with the gold and silver mine Just story after story about where mercury appeared in different places in history and I really got excited about those different stories and I even found kind of an unusual connection to a story from American history exploration of the United States So I'm from the Midwest. I'm from South Dakota and So we always had a very long Lewis and Clark section in our local history classes But there was one story about Lewis and Clark and Mercury that they did not teach us in school that I only found out About later that I think was really illustrated of illustrative of what mercury is like So this story gets started with this man right here Dr. Benjamin Rush one of the founding fathers of the United States signed the Declaration of Independence that whole thing But he was a physician. That's what he was best known for during his lifetime especially there was a yellow fever outbreak in Philadelphia in the 1790s and pretty much every other doctor just fled the city abandoned their patients But he very bravely stayed behind and treated a lot of people who would not have gotten treatment otherwise So very brave of him to do that Unfortunately his pet treatment for pretty much any ailment was this mercury chloride Compound that he would kind of force feed them Often until their hair started falling out their teeth would get loose and fall out They'd start grueling from the side of their mouths. It was a kind of a bad news medicine They had different ideas about medicine at the time one idea was that you know, you kind of wanted to fight fire with fire So if you had an ugly disease you had to give something to provoke an ugly reaction and you know Mercury sure provoked a reaction in people its poisonous Your body does not want it inside you and people were assured then that they were getting the right treatment because its mercury was Really having an effect on them. We don't think about medicine nowadays But anyway, dr. Rush thought that this treatment was really great. So he started to mass produce it He called them dr. Rush's billuist pills He got a patent on them and each of these pills was about four times the size of an aspirin So very very large pills and he packed six hundred of these pills With Lewis and Clark when they went wandering through the wilderness and there's really no delicate way to put it But these pills were extremely powerful laxatives. They called them thunder clappers and The idea was that you know if Lewis and Clark ate something they shouldn't have you know They drank some questionable water or something like that They could take one of these pills and it would basically flush them out again mercury is a poison your body And does not want it inside you it will go through you very very quickly And we know that these pills worked and in fact we know Lewis and Clark used these pills Because it's had a bit of a side benefit for historians and archaeologists of today In that they can actually still pinpoint and follow where Lewis and Clark must have gone Because the level of mercury in the soil is just too high for it to have been natural as they moved around from place to place So from this one element then from just mercury I learned About history some unusual history, but I also learned about etymology about word origins I learned about alchemy mythology poison forensics even a little bit of chemistry and That's really what got me excited about science I think when I look back on it for the first time is learning all these stories about different things like different elements Different compounds things like that and how they would relate to us in unusual ways And so when I was in high school, I was convinced I was going to be a scientist took all the science classes I could you know physics biology Anatomy chemistry everything I could then I got to college University of Minnesota again very focused on science ended up Being a physics major there and was about three years into my program I was loving it for a while until something kind of suddenly swerved on me that third year I started working in some research labs doing some different things some more intensive things some more real life Scientific things and a few things kind of changed for me One thing is not infrequently something like this would happen. So, you know, I drop something it would shatter on the floor Maybe the thermometer incidents should have been a little bit of foreshadowing for me But you know, I hadn't been in a lab before I was a little bit clumsy with things experiments didn't turn out the way I was hoping all the time But even more than that. I realized that just temperamentally I didn't enjoy being in the lab the way that a lot of other people did There's a lot of tinkering involved a lot of you know frustration and unknowns some people dealt with that very well They worked through it. They loved the problem-solving aspect of it. I just felt frustrated the whole time And realize suddenly, you know, maybe I don't want to be a scientist I've been so focused on it for so long, but suddenly maybe I don't want to do it with my life And it was kind of a scary moment for me You know, I felt like I almost didn't know who I was anymore if I wasn't going to be a scientist It was almost how I had to find myself and then suddenly I'm not that person anymore And at the time this felt like kind of a world historical crisis to me I know now that it's very common for a lot of students. They go through this they get into something and think you know I thought I was gonna like that, but maybe not maybe I want to do something a little different But at the time I didn't know exactly what to do So I kept going with my physics major kept going with that but I also decided to run to the other side of the campus and Start getting an English major at the same time So it's kind of working on parallel tracks there the physics side and the English side And I liked my physics or my English classes are reading writing papers things like that But I realized eventually that it was I missed the science and I still wanted to be involved in science in some way and Teach science get science out there But I didn't want to be in the lab and I started wondering about ways that I could do that And the way I ended up doing it after a few different temps at it was to write some different books Including my first book the disappearing spoon which kind of got inspiration from that mercury story that I mentioned before So the premise of this book is to find a spooky or unusual or funny story about every single element on the periodic table and I did manage to cram every one of the 118 elements in there some just make cameos, but I did manage to get them all in there and My real motivation for writing this book there were there were a couple of things actually that I was trying to do with this book One I don't remember or I don't know what your experience with the periodic table was in your chemistry classes But for me there was a bit of frustration in that there were just huge Swabs of the periodic table that we never ever talked about in class Just row after row some whole columns that just never came up and I wanted to know, you know What are the stories behind these elements? I wanted to give all of these other elements a Personality as well like some of the more familiar ones that we all know about what are their stories of those elements But I had another motivation too in that I knew that there were some really great stories out there About elements that everyone thinks they know really well, but that actually have kind of a hidden unusual back story to them And probably the best example of that of an element with a hidden unusual back story is the element aluminum So we all know aluminum today You know it's in popcans and literally baseball bats aluminum foil all that kind of stuff in a way It's kind of a throwaway element. We don't think about it too much But believe it or not for a long time during the 1800s Aluminum was actually the most precious metal on earth It was worth far more than silver was worth far more even than gold was And the reason why is that even though aluminum is very common. It's the most common metal in the earth's crust It's always very tightly bonded to other elements in nature usually to oxygen So you never find like a pure mother load of aluminum It's always a mineral of some sort and it's very hard to get that aluminum off there So when scientists in the very early 1800s started to get the first pure samples of aluminum It was considered kind of a miraculous metal. I mean it was very light But also very strong very attractive It basically had everything you would want in a metal wrapped into one package And because it was so hard to get and so expensive to make Having aluminum became something of a status symbol for kings and emperors So right here you're looking at an aluminum centerpiece that was created for one of the emperors of France And that is aluminum on the top and then that's gold beneath it because aluminum was the more impressive metal You would obviously want that to be on the top another French emperor Actually had a prized set of aluminum cutlery that he reserved for his most favorite guests at the banquets and The lesser nobility were actually reduced to eating with gold knives and forks And it was considered very embarrassing to be eating with the gold knives and forks when there was aluminum silverware available And even the United States got into this game a little bit Where I live right now in Washington DC, you might be familiar with the Washington Monument there It's as obelisk down in the National Mall Well when they were putting that up in the 1880s the US government decided we are going to put a Six inch pyramid as you can see in the picture here a six inch pyramid of aluminum at the very tippity top of the Washington Monument and it's still up there today, and they did this for a few reasons One if you've ever seen a picture been down in the National Mall The Washington Monument is standing there all by itself, and there's basically nothing else around So they knew lightning was going to strike it at some point They needed a lightning rod they needed a metal up there to conduct the lightning to the ground safely But the reason they chose aluminum out of all the other metals they could have chosen Was that the US government was kind of bragging a little bit they were saying you know We are such an up-and-coming industrial power that we can put aluminum on our public monuments Isn't that impressive and the rest of the world was very impressed For a while Because not long after that the aluminum market pretty much crashed completely What happened was a few chemists a few European chemists and one American chemist Figured out how to mass produce aluminum so produce it on an industrial scale For the first time and the American chemist very famous scientist named Charles Hall He had been working on it his entire undergraduate career was basically his career project as an undergraduate And he figured it out a year or two after graduation So not much older than most of the people in here when he figured this out They called him the aluminum boy wonder when he did this and probably no one ever made more money More quickly on the periodic table than Charles Hall did When he opened his first company aluminum company of America now known as Alcoa when he opened Alcoa He was shipping out about 50 pounds or so of aluminum every day, and that was plenty to meet demand 20 years later. He was shipping out almost 90,000 pounds of aluminum every single day and he could barely keep up with the orders He died a very very wealthy man because of his knowledge of the periodic table And I like this story because it again It shows how the how our perspective on the elements has changed over time There are certain elements like aluminum that everyone thought was the greatest thing in the world back then and then nowadays We don't really pay attention to and it's kind of an open question of whether aluminum was better off back Then is one of the world's most precious metals But one that very few people used or today when it's one of the more productive metals in the world But one nobody really pays attention to and it also makes you wonder what elements on the table that we value A lot now people won't care about in the future or are there elements out there that no one cares about now That are going to be worth a lot of money in the future. It just depends on what happens with our society So that was my first book the disappearing spoon and a few years after that I wrote a second book called the violinist thought so this book again was very focused on Stories really a lot of story times what I try to do with all of my science is the storytelling aspect of it And this book as you can maybe see the double helix there on the the violin is about genetics about human DNA specifically, but kind of about DNA and genetics in general and To me One of the reasons I was so fascinated always with DNA is that it's kind of a unifying theme of all of biology In that it's every known form of life uses genetics and DNA in the same basic way Whether you're talking about tulips guinea pigs bacteria Toes Toadstools slime molds dung beetles members of Congress whatever Jeans and DNA work the same way in all of these bizarre creatures And I just thought wow, you know, that's really fascinating that everything has this one thing that if we know nothing else about a living creature We know about something about its genes and DNA it unifies all of life But as soon as I started writing this book, I realized pretty quickly But there was one thing that was different about the genes of animals most animals and the genes of human beings and that thing that's different is the genes of the genes that you see scientists talk about I don't know if you've ever looked in a scientific paper or read an article or something about genetics But if there's a human gene name involved usually it's this terrible long jargoni word There are numbers or like random Greek letters in the middle I mean, you don't even know what what they're even getting at with the name here But things are a little different with the names with the gene names of animals in that You know scientists can relax a little bit they can have a little bit more fun and they can be a little bit more creative when it comes to naming genes that they discover inside different animals and In particular, there's just a little double helix there But in particular I am thinking about the genes of these guys right here the fruit flies Now they probably don't look at they might not look particularly witty But fruit flies have inspired more strange and unusual gene names and probably any other Creatures out there. There are different fruit fly genes named groucho It's one called smurf lost in space fear of intimacy It's one called tribal after that famous episode of Star Trek where the Tribble start multiplying There's the faint sausage gene. I have no idea what the faint sausage gene does, but it's kind of a great name There is the tin man gene and if the tin man gene gets mutated fruit flies cannot develop a heart So that kind of makes sense There's a gene that leaves fruit flies exceptionally tipsy after a tiny tiny sip of alcohol It's called the cheap date gene which kind of makes sense Probably my favorite gene name though was not originally discovered in a fruit fly It was discovered in a mouse for the first time and that gene name is the POK erythroid myeloid ontogenic gene Now at a glance that is a perfect example of a Terrible terrible gene name where you can barely understand even what those words mean But if you look a little bit closer, the first three letters are POK And there's an e in the beginning of the next words an am it kind of spells out Pokemon and in fact the scientists who discovered this gene they named it the Pokemon gene They published a paper about the Pokemon gene it became the official name of this gene And everyone kind of had a good laugh about this silly gene name Except you can see right after the word Pokemon there There's a little R with a circle around it and that means copyright restricted and It turns out that the lawyers at Pokemon Inc. Were not very amused about this whole thing Because the Pokemon gene actually contributes to the spread of cancer in mice And they didn't want their cute little pocket monsters confused with tumors kind of understandable So they actually threatened to sue the heck out of these scientists They were really going to take him to the cleaners over this and finally the scientists back down and you know They gave it some other terrible gene, but for one shining moment. There was actually a Pokemon gene So one question people often have about My books is they want to know where the titles came from like why did you call this book the violinist thought? It doesn't seem like an obvious title for a book about genetics So I thought I would explain a little bit about where the title of this book comes from Obviously, there is a violinist involved with it This man right here a violinist named Niccolo Paganini Usually considered the greatest violinist who ever lived active in Europe in the very early 1800s and every king every queen every emperor Wanted Paganini to come play for them because he was the absolute best in fact there were stories going around If you've ever heard those stories about musicians usually blues musicians nowadays Who sold their soul to Satan in order to get their talent? Well, a lot of those stories actually started with Paganini people actually thought he had struck a deal with the devil Trading his soul in to get his musical talent. That's how good he was. It had to be a supernatural explanation well turns out that wasn't actually true and one of the Nonfiction one of the real-life reasons Paganini was such a good violinist Was he had these amazing? Even sort of freakishly flexible hands So one thing he could do with his hands. He could take his pinky like this and He could bend his pinky into a right angle with the rest of his hand just by stretching it out like that And it actually gets worse because he could also put his hand down flat on a table like this And he could raise his pinky and his thumb behind his hand kind of like this And he could touch his pinky and his thumb behind his hand while keeping it flat on the table So he could do things with his hands. You should not be able to do with your hands But they gave him a big advantage when he was playing the violin because he could bend his hands in unusual ways He could stretch them incredibly wide. He could do fingerings and things that other musicians simply could not Which meant he could play music that no one else at the time could so obviously that gave him a big advantage as a violinist And from a modern perspective, it's almost certain that Paganini had a genetic disorder of some sort Because it wasn't just his hands that were very flexible all his joints could move different ways He could bend his elbows backwards his knees bent the wrong way He was basically like a circus rubber man and that he could twist himself into all sorts of different shapes He just happened to choose being a violinist as his career And I like this as the title story for the book for a couple of reasons First of all in our heads we kind of usually think about something like music the arts being on one side of a spectrum and Something like genetics of science being on a different side of the spectrum and there's no really Connections between them But in this case if you know a little bit about the arts the music know a little bit about the science the genetics You can actually see there is a really interesting and good connection between them And that's something I try to do in all of my books is to show connections between things like science and the arts Science and politics science and all other areas of human life And this is a really nice example of that because once you know both the science and the music You can see that there is this great connection and it actually improves the story knowing some of the science behind it But I also chose his story for another reason one specifically related to genetics in that in addition to having these kind of amazing hands Paganini was also a very hard worker and he loved playing and practicing music So it wasn't just like he got these magical hands and all of a sudden he was the best musician in the world He had to work very very hard for it And he happened to be alive in an environment that rewarded things like playing music Violinists were basically the rock stars of their day. So it wasn't just his genetics that made him who he was It was his genes his environment his temperament all of those things working together And if you talk to geneticists nowadays, that's really where the field is headed and that there They're not so concerned nowadays about looking at one tiny gene and just figuring out this one specific gene They're looking at systems of genes gene environment interactions are looking at a lot of different things besides an isolated gene And if you look at the story of Paganini's life, I think that knowing the genetics helps the story But it's not all of it You need to know more about Paganini in order to appreciate the true story of his life and what really made him who he was And that goes for all of us in this room today. Our genes are important They're definitely an influence on who we are, but they're just an influence. They don't define us Completely as to who we are and that's really where the science is going nowadays And to think that you could get that out of the life of a violinist of all people. I think is pretty neat pretty interesting So that was my second book and I'm gonna Actually wrap up by talking a little bit about my third book the dueling neurosurgeons Which from the title you can probably tell is a book about neuroscience psychology things like that So another question people often have is they want to know You know, why did you write this book like you could have written about a thousand different scientific topics? Why did you choose this topic to write about and I can say with this book? What really inspired me to write about it? was doubt or Skepticism NIST trust whatever you want to call because a few years ago I was reading a story about a man who got injured in one part of his brain and his behavior changed in this very Unusual way after this injury and I was reading this and I said to myself that sounds like Balone I didn't say baloney, but I said that sounds like baloney to me Like I just don't believe that this story is true. I think the author may hit a mistake in Translating this story, but I kind of forgot about it for a little bit until a few days later Coincidentally, I was reading something else totally different book Again, it was a woman this time got injured in one part of her brain and her behavior shifted in this very unusual way And I just thought this is the same thing. I don't believe this I think this author made a mistake as well And so I sort of set out to try to disprove these authors to show that they were wrong Which was a good way of course of making myself look stupid because it turned out they were totally right and I was totally wrong But the more I thought about it the more these stories really fascinated me and I wanted to know a little bit more about them So what kind of stories are we talking about here? Well, I think we can all generally recognize the types of animals in this picture here You know, we might not know genus and species, but we can tell basically there's some monkeys a bird a turtle Etc. But it turns out that there's one spot in your brain in the temporal lobe Which is on the side of your brain near your temple There's a spot in your temporal lobe that if it gets damaged All knowledge of animals can disappear from your head So these people can still tell plants apart They can tell human faces apart human-made objects. They can tell apart no problem But dogs elephants fish raccoons all of them look exactly the same to them They cannot tell these different creatures apart and it turns out there are other people They get nicked in a slightly different spot in their brain. They can tell animals apart no problem But plants suddenly they cannot tell the part at all trees or corn or grass It just all looks the same to them and when I looked into it a little more I realized actually there's a good evolutionary reason that something like this might happen You think about our ancestors long ago. They're sort of wandering around in the the wilderness or the jungle or whatever somewhere Whatever you picture There are some people back them who are very good about Classifying and recognizing different types of animals. They knew that okay. Those are dangerous stay away from them These are friendly. They're good companions. These are good to eat a lot of different categories Same with plants people would say this is good medicine. These are poisonous These are good to eat and the people who are very good about Classifying recognizing different types of plants and animals ended up having an advantage over the long term They had an evolutionary advantage over the long term this Ability got sort of hard wired into our brain where all of us today you can see it with little children They love talking about different types of animals and why this is one type of animal. This is another type It's hardwired into our brains But the downside of having it hardwired into our brains is that if that part of the brain happens to get injured then poof That knowledge will disappear and that's what seems to be happening with these people And I just thought that was a really interesting insight into the evolution of the brain based on this one sort of narrow medical case and the second case about the woman that I mentioned I thought was even more unusual and strange So it turns out there are parts of our brain that help produce language And I've highlighted one of them there called the Broca's area kind of a famous part of the brain that helps produce language and Unfortunately, it's fairly common where people will get damaged in the Broca's area often from a stroke or something and Because it's a language area of the brain. They have trouble speaking afterward They just can't get words out to very very frustrating to watch even more frustrating for them and kind of sad So that's what happened if the Broca's area gets damaged, but in some people something slightly different happens So if you think about it the Broca's area is in the brain But the part of you that's speaking is the teeth the tongue and the lips So that information up in your brain has to get down to your mouth The way it does this is through basically what are biological wires through neurons and nerve cells that send the information Just like wires send information in electronic devices And in some people the Broca's area turns out to be fine. There's no damage there, but the wires get broken So the information it's okay there, but it just can't get down to the teeth the tongue and the lips So these people struggle to produce language because the wires connecting the two areas are broken But one thing you learn about the brain fairly quickly when you start studying it Is that there are a lot of alternative pathways in the brain? There's lots of different detours back routes other ways for information to get sent around inside the brain And it turns out that there is a connection between the Broca's area the language area the emotional centers in your brain And then the emotional centers by taking a detour can actually get in touch with your teeth your tongue and your lips So again in these people the direct connection is broken, but there's this back alley through the emotional center So if you try to have a normal everyday Conversation with these people they because the wires are broken with the direct connection They just can't get the words out they struggle with it But if you provoke them you get them riled up you get them angry you insult them Turns out they can swear at you no problem at all. They'll say you beepity beep beep and then Sort of jump back because in a lot of cases they didn't even realize they could produce these words They just bubble up out of the emotional centers of the brain and it turns out something similar can happen with the musical centers of the brain There are connections between the language producing parts the musical centers and those can connect to the teeth the tongue and the lips and With these people they can't speak they can't have an everyday conversation But they can sing song lyrics no problem at all and if you remember a few years ago now There was a congresswoman from Arizona named Gabrielle Giffords She was giving a talk and someone in the crowd pulled a gun out and shot her in the head unfortunately She survived it ended up going to rehab and she happened to be one of these people Who could not speak anymore, but she could sing song lyrics And there's videos of her in rehab singing songs like girls just want to have fun And I don't know why Cindy Lauper, you know out of all things was one of the songs that stuck with her But by practicing singing by doing that over and over she eventually regained some ability to speak So this has a therapeutic value knowing these stories about how the brain works And the more I thought about it the more I thought you know This is a really cool way to learn about the brain to learn about different injuries different ways The brain can go down or go offline and suddenly we get an insight into how the brain works Based on how people's behaviors change, and I thought you know that would be a really cool In a really cool book I think to march around the brain from part to part and show you what happens when each part goes offline when it gets injured and that's kind of the premise of this book is to Basically teach about how the brain works through these stories of everyday people and their struggles to recover From different injuries different maladies things like that So that's kind of the premise of that book But I wanted to wrap up briefly by talking a little bit about another story in the book Because throughout most of the book I'm talking about kind of everyday Normal things that we all deal with things like visual perception other sensory information Memories language kind of the basic everyday things that the brain does But there's another aspect of the brain too and that the brain is very intimately tied up with who we are as human beings There's a lot of like philosophy a lot of big questions about us as human beings Tied up with the function of our brain and this last story gets at one of those big questions Those big meaty philosophical questions about the brain how it helps produce our sense of self So this story gets started in Canada in about 2005 Few miles outside of Vancouver there was a woman there God-pregnant found out she was having twins or she was kind of excited Except at one of the late sonograms the technician said I'm sorry. We have some bad news But the twins are actually conjoined. We used to be called Siamese twins. So basically they were fused together But she decided to have the children she brought them to term and as you can see in the picture here They turned out to have a Siamese brain. So their brain was actually connected And I should emphasize that the girls are Krista and Tatiana. They're both alive today. They're happy They're healthy. They're in school. So things turned out pretty well for the two girls overall It could have been a dangerous situation, but things turned out okay But because they share a brain in this way, they do show some very unusual behaviors So specifically the part of their brain that's connected is a part called the thalamus We all the thalamus in our brain. It's deep deep inside the center of our brain And what the thalamus does is it basically acts as a relay center for most sensory information So we see something we taste something we hear something that information gets sent immediately to the thalamus And the thalamus figures out okay, what am I going to do with this information? I'm going to send this information this way this goes this way It's a hub takes the information from your sensory organs sends them different places Now these girls Krista Tatiana they share a Thalamus so they share a sensory hub in their brain Which means they share a lot of sensory information well, okay, so what does that mean? How does that work on a practical level? Well, it turns out that if one of the girls say takes a sip on a cup of juice The other girl can taste the juice in her mouth You tickle one of them the other one starts to laugh you give one of them a shot at the doctor's office The other one grabs her arm in pain. They fall asleep together They may be even dream together and again scientists have never seen anything like this and it does open up kind of these big questions about the sense of self because It's sort of something you have to ask, you know, they're sharing sensory information. They're sharing consciousness on some level They're sharing thoughts. Are they actually to individual people or are they more like one person sort of split up in between two bodies and It's an open question and maybe it's an ambiguous question Maybe we'll never get a clear-cut answer, but a lot of the evidence I think points to them being individual people So one thing that the girls often do is they'll often go up to somebody and they'll say something like I Am just me and both of them will say this right after one another And that's kind of a weird thing to say if you think about it like none of us would probably walk up to somebody and say I am just me But it apparently the girls have this kind of instinct to define themselves as individual people They feel to themselves like they are individual people which definitely counts for something And I think the the next anecdote even supports this idea of them being individuals even more Because it turns out that one of the girls Likes ketchup, you know, she loves ketchup on her hot dogs and her fries whatever it is Unfortunately, her sister hates ketchup and is always like scraping her tongue because she can taste it when her sister eats it Kind of the perfect way to torment your sibling, I guess But there is kind of a lesson in there in that the girls are getting very similar if not identical sensory information But they're reacting to it in very different ways. So identical inputs different outputs They are acting like individual people here and so I think most of the evidence does point to them being individual people and You see a lot of cases like this people with severe language disorders memory disorders In this case having an unusual brain structure is allowing neuroscientists to get at some of these questions These big meaty questions about free will consciousness sense of self for the very first time These are things philosophers have debated endlessly for thousands of years Maybe neuroscience won't get any sort of answer, but at least we're making some sort of progress We're looking at it from a different angle kind of an unusual way That's one of the things I'm really trying to do with this book was get at some of these questions through the lens of neuroscience So I'm not going to go into too much about my fourth book Caesar's last breath so I want to make sure there's time for questions If you want to know about it, I can answer questions about it during the Q&A session but Those are my books at the end of this talk though. I really want to sort of confess something And that I've been subtly tricking you this entire time in that I've been telling these stories about you know, bunny hopefully unusual strange things about science But I hope and I suspect that you've actually learned something a little bit as well I've sort of tricked you into learning some science by engaging you with these stories by telling you interesting strange unusual things about this and It turns out that telling science as a story is a very good very effective way to communicate Science the human brain is very very good when you give it a story. There's a narrative structure. There are characters in there There's conflict and drama and a resolution We are very very good about remembering and absorbing that information and even scientific information You talk to scientists you ask them about their research. They start to tell you a story They were fascinated by this thing and this is how we learned it And these were the heartaches we had and this is what how we came overcame those things Even scientists when they're doing their work tell themselves stories We are storytelling creatures and you can get a lot more out or you can get a lot more science out of things by telling stories Then you might think so I hope you can walk away from this talk this afternoon with a new appreciation Not only for science not only for stories, but for the stories that make science again Thank you all for coming. I appreciate it and I think we have time So I'm happy to answer any questions you might have about the books about writing about pretty much anything you're curious about They were born in 2005, so they'd be 12 or 13 depending on when exactly so scientists did do a little bit of a few studies with them But obviously because they're not 18 they haven't done much with them And it could be they could get to 18 and say, you know, we don't want to do this anymore and Stop participating or maybe they will keep going and continue. So but yeah, they're they're pretty young still Yep There's a lot of different things I do I read very widely a lot of fiction a lot of nonfiction and outside of science too Just anything I think might be even sort of interesting I pick up and try to read and I'm always it's something you train your brain to do is to look for stories things that I could Write about or is there a scientific angle to this? so what I first try to do is find the story and make sure there's a good story there and Once I'm confident that there's a good compelling story Then I try to think about the scientific angle and what to do with it and after that it's it's not a Exciting answer. It's just putting in a lot of hours reading things Searching databases going to archives talking to people just trying to figure out trying to get every scrap of information That I can in order to piece it together Piece together the story and I was telling some people earlier today that it can be a little frustrating sometimes I mean you might end up with a big stack of papers you go through and that might be one chapter or something So you go through a lot of material sometimes to distill it down to one thing But if it's a really good chapter, you know, it's gonna feel worthwhile you forget about the pain very easily until you have to write the next but Yeah, a lot of it is just kind of wading through and putting in time in libraries archives things like that getting the information Oh, I will be soon So my editor actually changed at my publishing house So I had the same publishing house and I will have them for the new book my main editor change You've left for a different house. So I have a new editor and we're kind of bouncing ideas around We haven't quite nailed it down yet, but I'll probably get started on one pretty soon Was there yeah, yeah, um, I Would say that instance stood out because that was one time where I just flat out did not believe it And that's kind of rare. There are other cases. You know, I've read things and I knew it was wrong But that's because I had done some, you know, I knew about the subject ahead of time But in this case, I really thought it was wrong without any basis for it. So kind of hubris took up But there are other times I Know that like I had a professor in college I remember vividly telling us these stories about this is from my my chemistry book about a bubble chamber and all these Stories about it was a very fun interesting story and I wanted to include it in the book So I started looking it up and it turned out it was complete legend and no basis for it whatsoever But that was a good lesson in that, you know, you can't always believe everything that someone tells you even No, he was a good top-notch scientist But he had heard this story and probably distorted it a little bit after that So it was a game of telephone basically so that was a good lesson in teaching and me to actually go do my own research and After that it's kind of a mix of you know primary sources You know actually looking at letters archives things like that sometimes going back and reading historians documents or finding transcripts of oral interviews or There's all sorts of different sources out there You just kind of cast your net widely and are willing to go out and do some work Yeah, there's a few favorite books. I have that I would recommend as you know sort of great examples of science writing So one of my absolute favorite science books is the making of the atomic bomb, which is it's an investment It's about 800 pages, but it's it's an incredible book. It's really a good book David Kwamans a fantastic science writer. I like his stuff Deborah Bloom is a great science writer Amy Stewart's a great science writer Those are all non-fiction writers and there's a I don't read much science fiction But there's a few who do a very good job with the science that I enjoy Neil Stevenson as someone who comes to mind Who also writes big doorstop books, but there's some good science in them as well So those are things I I kind of gravitate toward as far as authors. Yeah It's actually it's kind of related to that So there's an element on the table I don't think I have one in this slide, but it's called gallium and it actually sits right below Aluminum on the periodic table So they look almost identical if you had like a chunk of each one in front of you It would be very very hard to tell them apart Except that gallium has one unusual property in that it melts at about 85 86 degrees So it's kind of weird for a metal, you know a hot day You could hold it in your hand and this metal will start to melt like run down your fingers because it has such a low melting point So the title the disappearing spoon comes in because it's sort of a I mean I guess a classic nerd science per hank to make a spoon out of gallium metal Then you serve it to somebody with hot coffee or tea or something and they just think it's an aluminum spoon So they start stirring it and then all of a sudden it disappears on there So that's where the title well, I can tell you briefly about my fourth book actually If you want to know a little bit about that and you know, I'm probably do one question after that if anyone has one So the fourth book is about the atmosphere Caesar's last breath and just sort of a quick anecdote About that one of the things I do talk about in that book is I talk about the fact that the Atmosphere of our earth the air around us has actually evolved over time And we don't have the same air that we had a long time ago, and I'm not talking about just you know Like very tiny small things. I'm talking about huge massive changes very early in our planet's history We had a basically volcano exhaust for an atmosphere. So things like Ammonia hydrogen sulfide just really nasty reactive gross gases for our atmosphere Eventually that gave way to a nitrogen rich atmosphere one that was dominated by nitrogen nitrogen still the dominant gas today But a lot of people don't realize it I don't think that oxygen was a quite a latecomer in Earth's Atmospheric history and that free oxygen O2 was very rare in our planet's history until a few hundred million years ago So there's about four and a half billion years old We've only had an appreciable amount of oxygen for a very small sliver of that time And in fact life arose on earth far before there was ever any oxygen and for the first creatures that arose on earth Oxygen was actually poisonous to them. Oxygen would have killed them or destroyed them to them It was a pollutant it was like chlorine gas or something where they didn't want oxygen around them because it was going to kill them These were microbes mostly not Multistell creatures mostly microbes in fact all microbes back then eventually microbes evolved the ability to use oxygen and To harness it and they gave rise to things like multistellular plants animals things like that and That actually gave us a big opportunity because we wouldn't be the creatures We are today things who can run and jump and think without this ability to utilize the oxygen in the air and Oxygen is actually kind of varied a lot It's percentage and Earth's history over the past few hundred million years And that sometimes it goes way up and sometimes it goes way down and just briefly one of the interesting things about it going up And down is that it's had some unusual effects on the evolution of certain animals especially insects So if you look at insects and the way they breathe They don't breathe like the rest of us do in that they don't have lungs the way So mammals and birds and reptiles we all inhale gases goes into our lungs dissolves into our blood our blood delivers oxygen to ourselves Insects aren't like they need oxygen, but they don't have lungs to suck it in what they have instead of these little pores all over their skin and oxygen to sort of passively diffuses into them and This is fine for them. It works. Okay But the problem is it's a passive process. They can't get a lot in there So insects actually can't get too large because They have they struggle to get the oxygen to their innermost cells And it's actually why insects are usually very tiny, you know, we don't you don't have big birds and mammals But you don't see gigantic insects because of this inefficient breathing process among other reasons But that's one of the big ones But it turns out that if oxygen levels are much higher as they have been in Earth's past Much higher percentages. Well, all of a sudden you can get gigantic insects In fact, you look in the fossil record, you can see millipedes that are a yard long You can see dragonflies the size of seagulls. There are spiders the size of car tires There are gigantic insects out there in our past history Simply because of oxygen levels rising and falling. So we have about 21% oxygen today It was 35% when you had the dog-sized creepy crawlies running around. So we should be thankful I think it's at 21%. It's a good percentage for us. Yeah, we can do one more question. Yeah Okay, so if you didn't hear in the back, he asked, you know, if you were inspired by this You want to be a science writer like what should you do as a practical thing? the absolute most important thing is to start doing it and You know, I wrote a lot just in notebooks that I had I would fill pages of notebooks with You know, it was fiction or whatever it was. They were terrible stories. They never got published They did not deserve you to publish. They were awful, but it was good practice I was putting words in the right order putting sentences in the right order putting paragraphs in the right order looking for those effects and things it's just like playing an instrument or A sport you need to practice writing. You don't wait around until inspiration strikes. You go out you practice you do it Another thing that I was very glad I did I took some writing classes in college But even more than that I started writing for my campus newspaper. We had a daily newspaper University Missed it was kind of a big journalism place So they were putting out a lot of stuff, but there was basically no one on staff who wrote about science So I joined the staff and every time a science story came they basically were like Handed it to me because they didn't want to deal with it And I think that's fairly common if you have a good science background You'll get opportunities to write about things because a lot of people don't want to touch it They don't want to actually dive into it So working at a campus newspaper working for a local newspaper that might want a science story Maybe starting something online just getting practice doing it doing an internship somewhere and doing as much As possible so you start to get feedback early getting feedback from editors from readers things like that early I think is an important stuff. So those are the things One more okay Well, I'm gonna be around signing books happy to personalize them for you Where as a gift or if you had a question and we're too shy and I'm gonna be down there too again Thank you all for coming