Ep 24 · Wilder Penfield

[00:00:00]A surgeon cut open a man's skull while he was wide awake, touched a single spot on his brain with a thin electric wire, and the man suddenly heard music.

[00:00:08]Not imagined it, heard it.

[00:00:11]A song from his childhood playing again, note for note, while he lay there on the table describing it.

[00:00:17]His name was Wilder Penfield, and in the 1930s he was hunting for the source of his patient's seizures.

[00:00:24]The brain feels no pain, so he could keep them awake through the whole operation, numbing only the scalp.

[00:00:29]Then he'd brush different spots with a weak current and ask one question.

[00:00:34]What do you feel?

[00:00:36]Most spots gave a twitch, a tingle, a flash of light.

[00:00:40]But when he touched a place on the side of the brain, something impossible happened.

[00:00:44]People didn't remember the past, they relived it.

[00:00:47]One heard her mother calling her from years [music] before. One heard a full orchestra and swore the radio was on in the room.

[00:00:54]Touch the same spot again and the same moment played again from the start.

[00:00:59]They knew they were lying on an operating table, and they were somewhere else entirely.

[00:01:04]Penfield came to believe the brain records [music] everything, that every face, every sound, every forgotten afternoon is still in there, perfectly preserved, just waiting for the right spot to be touched.

[00:01:15]It became one of the most famous ideas in the history of the mind.

[00:01:19]But it wasn't true. Out of more than a thousand patients, only about 40 ever relived anything.

[00:01:25]And when scientists [music] looked closer, those memories weren't recordings at all.

[00:01:30]They were dreams, stitched-together fragments the brain was inventing on the spot, impossible to trace to anything that ever really happened.

[00:01:38]Because that is what a memory is.

[00:01:40]>> [music] >> Not a recording you play back, but a story your brain builds again from nothing every single time, and quietly rewrites a little with each telling.

[00:01:49]The afternoon you remember most clearly may be [music] one that never happened the way you see it.

[00:01:55]And you would never know.