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PODCAST

pplpod

pplpod is a podcast about people, places and lots of other stuff. Each episode takes a deep dive into the lives, choices, and legacies of fascinating figures from history, culture, music, and beyond. From icons who shaped entire generations to hidden stories that deserve the spotlight, pplpod brings you closer to the people behind the headlines and the legends.Thoughtful, engaging, and story-driven, pplpod explores what makes these lives extraordinary—and what we can learn from them today.

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All Episodes

23:29

Fatal Familial Insomnia: Silvano's Brain, Codon 178...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

In late 1983 an Italian man known as Silvano arrived at a sleep institute at the University of Bologna, unable to sleep and aware that two of his sisters had died the same way. Under neurologist Ignazio Roiter he let doctors record his decline and arranged to donate his brain. Roiter, sleep expert Elio Lugaresi, and neuropathologist Pierluigi Gambetti found none of the spongy damage of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, but the family kept tracing its history, and a 1986 paper named fatal familial insomnia

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24:23

Prosopagnosia: Face Blindness, the Fusiform Gyrus and...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

Prosopagnosia, or face blindness, leaves eyesight, intelligence, and memory intact but strips away the ability to know who a face belongs to. John Hughlings Jackson noted cases in the 19th century, and in 1947 German neurologist Joachim Bodamer named it after treating a 24 year old with a bullet wound to the head who could recognize family only by voice, gait, or touch. This episode explains the right fusiform gyrus as the brain's fast lane for faces and the difference between acquired cases, caused

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23:35

Cotard Syndrome: The Walking Corpse Delusion and...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

In 1880 French neurologist Jules Cotard described the delusion of negation, now called Cotard syndrome or walking corpse syndrome, in which a person becomes convinced they are dead, rotting, bloodless, or missing organs. His case of Mademoiselle X denied parts of her body and any need to eat, believed she was eternally damned and therefore could not die a natural death, and died of starvation. This episode explains why, in one cohort of 100 patients, 45 percent denied their own existence while 55

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26:11

Phrenology: Gall's 27 Brain Organs, Fowler Busts and...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

Phrenology began with two ideas that neuroscience still accepts: the brain is the organ of the mind, and different areas do different jobs. The leap came next. This episode follows the idea from Johann Caspar Lavater's physiognomy to German physician Franz Josef Gall, who in 1796 claimed 27 mental organs, including one for murder and one for loving children, that grew like muscles and pushed out the skull. Johann Spurzheim coined the word phrenology and lectured across Britain and the United States,

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24:13

Four Humors: Settling Blood, Black Bile and...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

Calling someone sanguine, melancholy, or in a bad humor borrows from a medical theory that ruled for over two thousand years. This episode explains humorism, with roots in Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Ayurvedic medicine, systemized by Alcmaeon, Hippocrates, and Galen around four fluids: blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. Each was tied to one of Empedocles' elements, a season, and a temperament, from sanguine spring to phlegmatic winter, and phlegm covered sweat, saliva, mucus, and even brain

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21:47

Hippocratic Oath: Apollo, a Bladder Stone Ban and...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

First, do no harm does not appear in the Hippocratic Oath. This episode examines what the oath actually says and where it came from: part of the Hippocratic Corpus written between the fifth and third centuries BC, likely not by Hippocrates, surviving in third century AD papyrus fragments and a complete 10th or 11th century manuscript in the Vatican Library. It opens with an oath to Apollo, Asclepius, Hygieia, and Panacea and binds the new physician to treat a teacher like a parent, share money with

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23:04

The Hawthorne Effect Myth: Moonlit Workbenches, Relay...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

The Hawthorne effect says people change their behavior when they know they are being watched, and it is taught as gospel in management and psychology classes. This episode returns to the Western Electric Hawthorne Works in Cicero, Illinois, where illumination experiments from 1924 to 1927 found output rising in both the brighter test room and the unchanged control room, and still rising as lights were dimmed, until the workers could no longer see. From 1927, Elton Mayo's Relay Assembly Test Room

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21:47

Neanderthals Reconsidered: Boule's Arthritic...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

The Neander Valley was named after hymn writer Joachim Neander, whose family had changed its name from Neumann, meaning new man. In 1856 quarry workers there found bones they took for a cave bear's, and schoolteacher Johann Carl Fuhlrott recognized them as an ancient human, three years before Darwin's On the Origin of Species. This episode traces how the caveman stereotype took hold: Rudolf Virchow blamed the bones on rickets and blows to the head, William King said the species was incapable of

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23:19

Altitude Sickness: Acosta's Andes, HAPE, the Gamow...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

Around 30 BCE a Chinese text warned Silk Road travelers about the Big Headache Mountains of the Karakoram, and in the late 1500s the Spanish Jesuit José de Acosta, crossing the Pariacaca pass in the Andes, blamed his nausea and blinding headache on air too thin for human needs. This episode explains why: the air stays about 21 percent oxygen at any height, but falling barometric pressure spreads the molecules out, and water vapor in the lungs takes a growing share of the space. It covers why an

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19:44

Bandura's Bobo Doll Experiments: Mallets, 'Sock Him'...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

In 1961, at the Stanford University Nursery School, psychologist Albert Bandura tested whether children learn aggression simply by watching. Seventy two children aged roughly three to five and a half were split into groups that saw an adult attack an inflatable Bobo doll, saw an adult play quietly with Tinker toys, or saw no model at all. The aggressive adults punched the doll, sat on it, hit it with a wooden mallet, and shouted scripted lines like sock him and pow. Each child was then frustrated by

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26:34

Brain Freeze Explained: Trigeminal Nerve Mix-Ups,...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

The cold stimulus headache, better known as ice cream headache or brain freeze, starts on the roof of the mouth. This episode explains how freezing food on the richly vascular palate makes blood vessels constrict and then rapidly swell again, a rebound vasodilation that sets off dense pain receptors. The signal travels along the trigeminal nerve, which also serves the forehead, and the brain refers the pain to the wrong place, the same mechanism that sends heart attack pain to the arm. An

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25:58

Lucid Dreaming: Alan Worsley's Eye Signals and...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

Dutch psychiatrist Frederik van Eeden coined the term lucid dream in 1913, borrowing from the psychiatric idea of a lucid interval: the moment a patient regains insight. This episode traces the experience from Aristotle, Galen, and Tibetan Buddhist dream yoga to Samuel Pepys, who wrote in 1665 that he knew a dream about Lady Castlemaine was a dream before he woke. It separates awareness from control using Stephen LaBerge's work, walks through Kristen LaMarca's four skill levels from beginner to

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22:26

Henry Gray's Anatomy: 18 Months in the Mortuary and...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

Henry Gray, born in 1827, was already lecturing on anatomy at St. George's Hospital Medical School in London by 1853, after award winning research on the endocrine glands and the spleen. In 1855 he asked illustrator Henry Vandyke Carter to help him make an anatomy textbook that students could afford and surgeons could use. For 18 months the two dissected unclaimed bodies from workhouses and hospital mortuaries, Gray isolating nerves and vessels while Carter drew them, work made possible by the

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23:58

William T.G. Morton: Ether Dome Triumph, the Letheon...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

Before October 16, 1846, surgery meant being strapped to a table fully awake. This episode follows William T.G. Morton, born in Charlton, Massachusetts in 1819, a former clerk and salesman who left the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery without a degree and built a business soldering false teeth to gold plates. To win over the prominent Whitman family of Farmington, Connecticut, he promised to become a physician and enrolled at Harvard, where chemist Charles T. Jackson introduced him to sulfuric

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20:18

Shoe-Fitting Fluoroscopes: Glowing Toe Bones and...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

From the 1920s into the 1970s, shoe stores invited children to step onto a polished wooden cabinet, slide their feet into a slot, and watch their own toe bones wiggle in glowing green through one of three viewing portholes, one each for the child, the parent, and the salesperson. This episode tells the story of the shoe fitting fluoroscope, also sold as the pedoscope, and the patent squabble behind it: Boston physician Jacob Lowe sold his rights to the Adrian Company of Milwaukee for $15,000, the

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23:35

Buried Alive: Essie Dunbar's Coffin, Felt-Lined...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

Taphophobia, the fear of being buried alive, was never just Victorian paranoia. This episode explains what actually kills someone trapped in a coffin: carbon dioxide builds up as panic speeds the breathing, and hypercapnia sets in before the oxygen runs out, though a trickle of air through loose soil can stretch survival terrifyingly long. It weighs the legend of the fifth century Emperor Zeno, said to have screamed for three days inside his sarcophagus while Empress Ariadne refused to open it,

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19:35

Randy Gardner's 264 Hours Awake: Pinball, Paranoia...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

In December 1963 and January 1964 in San Diego, 17 year old Point Loma High student Randy Gardner set out to beat the 260 hour sleeplessness record of Tom Rounds of Honolulu, starting with classmates Bruce McAllister and Joe Marciano Jr. keeping him awake. Stanford sleep researcher William Dement flew in, and Lieutenant Commander John J. Ross of the U.S. Navy Medical Neuropsychiatric Research Unit monitored his health. Their accounts split: Dement reported few ill effects and lost to Gardner at

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24:01

Albert Sabin's Sugar Cube Polio Vaccine and His Cold...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

Albert Sabin was born Abram Saperstein in 1906 in Bialystok, came to the United States in 1921, and quit dentistry at NYU for medical research, earning his medical degree in 1931. In World War II he served as a major on the Neurotropic Virus Commission, studying dengue and sandfly fever and winning the Legion of Merit. His autopsies had shown that poliovirus enters through the mouth and multiplies in the intestines before reaching the nervous system. So when Jonas Salk's injected, killed virus

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18:53

Martin Couney's Incubator Babies: Coney Island's...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

For about 40 years, one of America's most advanced neonatal clinics sat on carnival midways. Incubators began when French obstetrician Stéphane Tarnier saw poultry incubators at the Paris Zoo and had a human version built, but the medical establishment dismissed the idea. Martin Couney, born Michael Cohen in Prussia in 1869, claimed medical degrees from Leipzig and Berlin and training under Pierre Constant Budin, though no record of a medical license exists. Shut out by hospitals, he exhibited

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23:53

Human Genome Project: Celera's Race and a Buffalo...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

Launched in 1990 by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health with partners in the UK, Japan, France, Germany and China, the Human Genome Project set out over an expected 15 years to read 3.1 billion base pairs of the gene rich human genome. Its hierarchical shotgun method mapped the genome in ordered chunks of about 150,000 base pairs, copied inside bacterial artificial chromosomes. In 1998 former NIH scientist Craig Venter launched Celera Genomics, promising whole genome

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13,829 results

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