SGU Episode 330

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You're listening to The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

S: Hello and welcome to The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, November 9, 2011, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

B: Hey, everybody.

S: Rebecca Watson.

R: Hello, everyone.

S: Jay Novella.

J: Hey, guys.

S: And Evan Bernstein.

E: Hello-o, everybody.

This Day in Skepticism

S: So, Evan, what have you got for today?

E: All right. November 12, 1935. The first modern surgery on the frontal lobes for treatment of mental disorders was performed by Egas Moniz at Santa Maria Hospital in Libson, Portugal.

S: Santa Marta.

E: What'd I say?

S: Santa Maria.

E: Did I say Santa Maria?

S: I know that rolls off the tongue...

E: Isn't that weird? It's like deeply programmed.

S: Yeah. The Nina, the Pinta, the Santa Maria.

E: Because I am reading it and it says "Marta" and I was, sure enough. At Santa Marta Hospital in Libson, Portugal.

S: Lisbon.

(laughter)

E: Good evening, everyone. Moniz is sometimes referred to as the founder of modern psycho-surgery, and a developer of leucotomy, more commonly called, the lobotomy.

S: The pre-frontal lobotomy, yeah.

E: Moniz injected absolute alcohol into the frontal lobes of a mental patient through two holes drilled in his skull. Moniz later used a technique that severed neurons and led to the pre-frontal lobotomy techniques of the 1940s. And he was later awarded a Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine in 1949 for, having, done these, horrible things.

(laughter)

E: And these sorts of radical surgeries kind of fell out of favor once psycho-active medication became available in the preceding decades.

S: Yeah, I mean it's easy to be judgmental, you know, looking back from our current perspective about things like frontal lobotomy, but it definitely was a different time. This was pretty much in the there was any effective medication for psychiatric disorders and many people had extremely severe conditions so, you know, and also the attitude at that time was very different that it is now. And again, I'm not defending or justifying that, but it was, the views towards mental illness and psychiatric patients at that time was, definitely, almost barbaric by comparison to our modern views. You know, if you were mentally ill, you weren't really treated with the autonomy and informed consent and all the things that we take for granted today. Since then there's been a slew of, you know, ethical reformations in psychiatry. You know, really transforming how we approach and think of those patients. So, more than half a century ago, we've gotta be careful not to ..

B: Judge them too harshly?

S: Yeah, judge people from the perspective of our own time as opposed to their own time.

E: Definitely. You have to take it in context.

B: I always think in a few, two or three generations, what are they gonna look back upon, like, this decade or this generation and be aghast. Like, oh, my god, can you imagine they did that or they believed that?

E: Other sorts of therapy that were going on right before the lobotomy included insulin shock therapy, Cardiazol shock therapy, and electroconvulsive therapy, which were all, well, by comparison the lobotomy was considered a relief, in a way, in a sense, instead of a patient having to go through all these other ...

S: They would also do these, like, cold wraps. They would suddenly wrap somebody in a cold, wet blanket, and they would calm them down. Because it would just so physiologically shock them. Yeah, those were considered reasonable therapies. Electroconvulsive therapy has ...

B: That was fairly effective, wasn't it?

S: It still is. I mean, that is, it was effective but, but extreme, and it's evolved over the years. You know, it went through various stages. I think we've talked this before, where, instead of inducing a seizure in both hemispheres, you do one hemisphere, then you only do one part of it, and now they're using magnetic induction instead of electrical stimulation. But it is a fairly effective treatment for severe refractory major depression. And you know you can do it now without, you know, having people actually have a generalized seizure. So, it's much more humane and the side effects are much less than they used to be.

E: I mean, you still don't want it if, you know.

S: It's, you know, it's like for people who can't get out of bed. I mean their life is basically at zero quality of life. They're completely debilitated with depression and they're not responding to medication. That's who gets that kind of procedure.

E: By the 1950s there were almost 20,000 people who had lobotomies in the United States and 40,000 in Great Britain. But, those days are gone.

S: Yes. Thankfully.

News Items

Stroke Turns Man Gay (4:58)

S: You actually sent me the first news item tonight. Now give us the quick story on the rugby player, who, well, I don't know how to summarize it without telling the whole thing, so why don't you tell me.

E: The title of the article kind of sums it up and it's what obviously caught my attention as a headline is supposed to do.

Burly rugby player has a stroke after freak gym accident, wakes up gay and becomes a hairdresser. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2058921/Chris-Birch-stroke-Rugby-player-wakes-gay-freak-gym-accident.html

S; (laughing) Yeah.

E: So there's your headline. That'll stop you from clicking around and going to other places because you can't help but click on that to see, okay, what the heck is going on here.

B: That's funny, 'cause when I read that title I thought it was "Stroke turns man gray. I'm like, oh, wow, a stroke gave somebody gray hair, that's kind of weird.

(laughter)

B: I'm like, no, I think I misread that.

J: So, Steve, what do you think? What happened to him?

S: Well, you know, when I first saw that, I thought, okay, you know, that's unusual. I've never heard of that before, but it's not crazy. I mean, you know, the brain's a complex thing, and certainly people can have bizarre changes, you know, to their personality, et cetera, from focal lesions in the brain. So I actually did a quite extensive literature search, looking for other cases. And there actually are a number of case reports that are relevant to this case. In one report, the only other recent published case I could find was from 2008, and that one was actually of a man who was gay, and had a stroke, and became heterosexual. It was the opposite.

B: Oh boy. That's unfortunate. That's unfortunate.

S: And he was, you know, he was…

B: Only in the terms of people who think they can reprogram people and make them straight.

R: Oh, yeah.

B: If they get their hands on that technique…

S: Yeah, (laughing), right, I see what you're saying.

R: Soon they're gonna be (inaudible)

B: That's what I mean, and let me underscore that.

E: We can cure you know.

R: They'll be doing frontal lobotomies in church basements now.

S: Yeah, except. Well, I'll get back to that notion in a minute. Then I found older reports. One, one gold mine. It was an article that essentially was a summary of cases in which patients had significant changes in their sexual orientation after a focal lesion like a stroke or a tumor or something like that. Most of these cases, however, involved people who became disinhibited. And that's the first thing that I thought of, too, because that's common. You know, when you damage a part of the brain and that changes behavior, obviously you're taking something away. Right? You're not adding something when you cause a lesion.

R: So is it more that they're becoming pan-sexual?

S: Well, that's possible. And in some cases it appears to be the case. So there are parts of the brain that have inhibitory or decreasing effect on other parts of the brain, and if you remove the inhibition then you disinhibit or increase the activity of those other parts of the brain. So there are definitely cases where people have become sexually disinhibited after some kind of trauma or disease or tumor or lesion or whatever. And some of the cases they described were essentially describing that, a sexual disinhibition. But then they went over a few cases where patients actually, their sexual behavior changed in character, not just becoming increased. Two cases were described of men becoming pedophiles after having a lesion: a tumor or a stroke. In one case the man was found to have a tumor, and when it was removed he reverted back to his baseline personality, which was a normal, monogamous, heterosexual relationship with his wife. And then the tumor grew back, and they figured that out because he started to become obsessed with young children again. And then they removed it and he once again reverted, so there was a pretty good correlation there.

B: To hell.

S: There is a reported case of a woman becoming disinhibited and then preferring other women as opposed to her, you know, basically losing interest in her husband and becoming interested in other women. But again, that was combined with other bizarre disinhibitory behaviors like eating a lot and gaining weight, and eating non-food items. Specifically toilet paper and feces were mentioned.

(Multiple expressions of disgust from the Rogues.)

R: Like in those shows on TLC.

E: Oh, yeah, Taboo?

R: "My Weird Obsession" or…

E: Yeah.

S: Yeah. But here …

E: Where people eat couches and stuff.

S: it's a dramatic change in behavior with damage to the brain.

R: Isn't it also called pica?

S: Yeah, that's, pica is the syndrome where you eat dirt and clay or whatever.

E: So, Steve, is what you're saying shifting in sexual preferences or orientation is one of the symptoms of this stroke, or this kind of stroke; it's just one of the things that occurs?

S: Well, it's, there isn't one syndrome here. That's one thing that also emerged out of all these cases is that there's no one clear anatomical syndrome where you could say, if you damage this piece of the brain, it will have this very predictable change in your sexual orientation or behavior. And that's getting back to what Bob was saying. I don't think this is going to lead to any kind of, you know, church-basement surgery for gayness because we wouldn't know what to do. It's too complicated. There's too many pieces here, you know, interacting with each other. There does appear to be, like the temporal lobes are often involved, and the hypothalamus is often involved and the mesial structures are often involved. So, yeah, these are the parts of the brain that we know are involved in sexual behavior, so it makes sense that they would be involved. But there isn't, again, this really predictable, like, one-to-one correlation between any specific anatomical structure and a specific change in sexual orientation. So, you know, it just reinforces the, what I think we already knew, that sexual orientation is a complex affair. There's a lot of moving parts. The net effect, you know, it's hard to predict, and, these are rare cases, too. I mean, you can count on one hand, over the last 50 years, the number of reported cases like this. This is not something that happens frequently.

J: You know, what's weird about it is, the guy sustained an injury…

S: Yeah.

J: and then, you know, he had a dramatic change in, you know, a feature about him, in this case it was his sexuality. And then I'm sitting here and I'm like, you know, do I feel bad for this guy? You know, like, he was engaged.

S: He seems perfectly happy now.

(Bob and Jay talking at once; cannot distinguish what they say)

J: You know it's not, he's really not the same person, though, anymore.

S: Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, I know, it's interesting to think about how you should feel about that.

R: Yeah, and it's interesting to think about how easy it is to change our entire conception of what our personality is.

S: Yeah.

R: You know, the things that you feel are the most integral to you as, as Jay Novella, you know, could be easily switched up in one…

J: Yep.

B: One stroke! One fell stroke.

R: If you will.

J: Yeah, just another example of "we are the meat in our head." And that's it.

S: Yeah, exactly.

J: His soul isn't fighting back to be, to be straight.

S: Right. Right. Yeah, the meat changed and he changed. You're right, absolutely.

E: Steve, is it possible that it's purely psychological and the physical effects of the stroke itself did not, possibly did not have an effect on his, on what occurred prior and afterwards?

B: That's kind of like my initial take, my very initial take was that, well he was using this as an excuse. He was always gay, he always hid it, and this was his excuse, his out.

S: Yeah.

B: So to speak. To say, oh, boy, I'll use this to say, hey! It did something to my brain, I'm gay now. I'm sorry. Not so much that he's sorry, but use it as a means to come out of the closet and, but now from what Steve's saying, that doesn't look like it's the case. It looks like it's one, you know, it's like a one-in-a-million type stroke that can have this type of an effect.

S: Yeah, unless you knew him personally, it's hard to say. But just basing,

B: Yeah.

S: Taking the media reports at face value, it doesn't seem like he was an effeminate guy who was in the closet and then decided to come out after he had the stroke, or maybe he was less inhibited about coming out after the stroke. It really seems like there were a suite of changes to his personality, and he really did have a change. So, and again, the other case reports that I found, the literature makes it plausible. But again, it's second-hand information so it's hard to really say. But interesting. You know, again, it's one of those things where you might think "oh, this is crazy," but it actually, you know, there's support for it in the literature.

E: It definitely got me to stop and kind of take a look…

S: Yeah, can that happen? Yeah.

E: Read a little more into it.

Asteroid YU55 (14:05)

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/11/08/asteroid-close-call-with-earth-have-no-idea/

S: All right, well, Bob, tell us about how the Earth is about to be destroyed yet again, by another asteroid.

B: Yeah, we had, it looks like the Earth had another close call. This past Tuesday, November 8, an asteroid had a close approach to the Earth. So close, in fact, that it was in the orbit of the moon, which are my favorite kinds of close calls. The moon is about, eh, 249,000 miles away. This new asteroid is about 202,000 miles away at its closest approach. So it got within the orbit. And just some stats on this asteroid: it was called 2005 YU55, discovered about five or six years ago. It's not big at all. It was 1,200 feet, or 400 meters long.

J: They said it was the size of an aircraft carrier.

B: Lots of these websites love to put the size in terms of, in ways that are more relatable, like, "oh, it's four football fields" or "an aircraft carrier."

J: Well that helps.

B: Yeah, it does, it does. But it seemed like people were just overdoing it a bit. Just say it's 1,200 feet long, 400 meters.

S: Also, Bob, I just want to mention, you mentioned that the asteroid came within the orbit of the moon. It's worth pointing out that many people grossly underestimate how far away the moon is. If you ask them, like with a representative, like to scale, shapes, like that they represented the Earth and the moon, to show how far away the moon would be, they hold it at something like arm's distance away. But in fact, you know, if the moon were the size of a tennis ball, let's say, and the Earth was a basketball, you'd have to be, like 30 feet away in order to represent the distance. So, it's not that close.

E: It's a quarter million miles.

S: But if you see it visually it's actually much more, it puts it into better perspective than the number. If you just go to like, lunar distance on Wikipedia, you could see a to-scale indication and you realize how far away the moon really is.

B: Yeah, actually I found a website that put it into perspective, the distances and the relative sizes. They described it as, if you envision the Earth as a medium-sized house, then the moon would be a large car, at that scale, nine football fields away. Here's football fields, again. And this, the asteroid itself, this asteroid that approached us recently, was a pencil-point dot seven football fields away. Really, really crazy tiny. You can't help but think that the dinosaur-killer asteroid from 65 million years ago, that one, well, that one was a lot bigger, but how much bigger was it? At this scale of the house-car thing, it would be as big as your thumbnail. So it's still, you can really appreciate that this, relative to the Earth, that this thing is crazy tiny, and the Earth itself really wasn't in any, in any danger. The one from 65 million years ago was 25 times bigger in diameter and 15,000 times the volume. Now, but, that doesn't mean that this thing, if it hit us, it wouldn't pack a wallop. If you dropped an aircraft carrier on the Earth, say you just dropped it on the Earth from a mile up. You know, it would be, that'd be a helluva noise, right? It would pretty much knock down anything. But, this thing was travelling at 29,000 miles per hour, relative to the Earth's surface anyway, and so, when, if this thing did hit us, I mean we're talking some wicked kinetic energy. If it hit the Earth it would have produced a four-gigaton explosion. At 4,000 megatons, four billion tons of TNT. So that would have been a helluva hit. The biggest H-bomb that's ever been tested was, I think Russia had a hydrogen bomb called Czar that was just a measly 50 megatons, right? 50 megatons, oh, that sounds tiny compared to four gigatons. This thing actually, it would have left a crater, a four-mile wide crater that's 1,700 feet deep. Can you imagine what that thing would have looked like? It would have also, as a side effect, it would have, there would have been a magnitude 7 earthquake, or more. It could have been an 8. And, of course, chances are it would have hit the ocean. And that would have produced a 70-foot high tsunami. That would have killed a lot, a lot of people. But, of course, you know, that's a worst-case scenario, so there's no real need to really fear these types of things. According to David Rabinowitz, he's a planetary scientist at Yale; Steve, do you know him?

S: No.

B: Probably not, he sits at the cool table in the cafeteria at work, right?

E: He's a real mensch.

B: Yeah, anyway. He estimates that YU55 asteroids come this close to Earth only about like once in a hundred years. And then it's only like once in a hundred thousand years that we actually get hit. So, this is exceedingly rare. But, and so, as close as this thing was, though, a lot of people were saying, hey, can, can, you know, could we actually see this thing with our naked eye? But, there was no way. There was like, it was like a hundred times dimmer than the limit of human vision. So, it was clearly not naked-eye visible, unless you're a super-hero. But if you had a six- to eight-inch telescope, though, you would have been able to see it. Hey, if anybody out there actually saw it with their telescopes, send us an e-mail and tell us about it. So, yeah, this thing, I think they projected this out for like a century and this, it's not gonna be any problem for quite some time. But hopefully it drives home a bit, the need to really, to really scope out all of these asteroids that could potentially be really hazardous, so that we could at least have as much lead time as we can. 'Cause the more lead time you have the easier it will be to actually change its trajectory in a significant way.