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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

19:15

The Pineal Gland: Descartes' Seat of the Soul,...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

Deep in the center of your brain sits a rice-sized, pine cone shaped organ that once looked up at the prehistoric sky. This episode follows the pineal gland from ancient medicine to modern chronobiology. Herophilus imagined it as a valve controlling the flow of vital spirits, or pneuma, through the brain's ventricles. Galen, who called it konarion, argued it could not move and so was just a support for blood vessels. In the 17th century René Descartes noticed it was the brain's only unpaired

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23:49

The Gut Microbiome: 100 Times Our Genes, Butyrate and...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

The human genome has roughly 20,000 to 25,000 genes, but the gut microbiome carries about 100 times more, making you genetically about 1 percent human. This episode tours the 10 to 100 trillion microbes inside you, which make up as much as 55 percent of the dry mass of stool. The stomach is nearly sterile acid, though Helicobacter pylori survives by wrapping itself in ammonia. The colon holds the densest microbial community ever studied, with 300 to 1,000 species, yet about 99 percent of gut

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26:01

The Blue Fugates of Troublesome Creek and the...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

Around 1800, French orphan Martin Fugate settled along Troublesome Creek near Hazard, Kentucky, and married Elizabeth Smith. Both unknowingly carried a rare recessive gene for methemoglobinemia, and four of their seven children were born with vivid blue skin. In a valley cut off from roads and railroads, descendants married into the local Combs, Ritchie and Smith families, and the trait resurfaced for generations. Yet many of the blue Fugates farmed, raised families and lived into their 80s and 90s,

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26:09

Colorblindness: John Dalton's Preserved Eye and...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

Chemist John Dalton believed blue fluid in his eyes filtered out red and green, and asked that his eyes be preserved after his death. In 1995, scientists analyzed DNA from the eye, kept since 1844, and found a genetic variation instead. This episode explains color vision deficiency, which affects about 8 percent of men and 0.5 percent of women with red-green types. True grayscale vision, monochromacy, is very rare. Most cases involve the L, M and S cones, either with one missing, called dichromacy,

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17:27

The Dress Explained: Cecilia Bleasdale's Photo,...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

In February 2015 Cecilia Bleasdale photographed a lace dress at the Cheshire Oaks Designer Outlet in England and sent it to her daughter Grace, who was getting married on the Scottish island of Colonsay. Grace saw white and gold. Cecilia, who had just seen the dress in person, saw blue and black, which it was. After the wedding, singer Caitlin McNeill posted the photo on Tumblr, a BuzzFeed poll took off, and the page hit 14,000 views a second and a record 673,000 concurrent visitors, with 4.4

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24:53

Optical Illusions as Prediction: Changizi's Neural...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

The room around you feels like raw reality, but this episode argues it is an edited, slightly delayed guess. Using illusions as a diagnostic tool, it follows Richard Gregory's three tiers. Physical illusions bend light before it reaches the eye, like the stick in water Ptolemy noted around 150 AD, or mountains that look close on a haze-free day. Physiological illusions come from tired hardware, like afterimages. Even textbooks slipped here: the Hermann grid's gray dots were blamed on lateral

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26:56

Why We Dream: Gudea's Temple Order, Calvin Hall's...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

The average person spends about two hours a night dreaming, adding up to five or six years of life. This episode starts with the word itself: in Old English, dream meant noise, joy or music, and only took on its sleep meaning in the 13th century under Old Norse influence. In Bronze Age Mesopotamia, Egypt and Greece people did not have dreams, they saw them, as visits from gods or ancestors. Around 2100 BCE, Gudea, king of Lagash, rebuilt the temple of Ningirsu because a dream figure told him to,

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18:03

Hypnic Jerks: The Falling Sensation, Tree-Sleeping...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

Just as you drift off, your whole body jolts and you feel yourself fall. Sleep medicine calls this a hypnic jerk, or sleep start: a form of myoclonus, a brief involuntary muscle contraction that happens only at sleep onset as you cross into non-REM sleep. It can be a full body flex or a single kicking leg, often with a racing heart, quick breathing and sweat. Researcher Ian Oswald documented how the brain, in the hypnagogic state, invents a quick story, like tripping on a curb, to explain the

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22:44

Everest's Death Zone: Thin Air, Fetal Hemoglobin and...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

At the summit of Mount Everest, 29,032 feet up, the air holds the same 20.9 percent oxygen as at sea level, yet breathing it can kill. This episode explains the death zone, which begins at 8,000 meters, about 26,246 feet, and covers only 14 peaks in the Himalaya and Karakoram. Swiss doctor Edouard Wyss-Dunant first called it the lethal zone in 1953. The problem is pressure: it falls from about 1,013 millibars at sea level to under 356, too little to push oxygen across the lungs into hemoglobin. The

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24:19

Yanny or Laurel: How a 2007 Dictionary Recording...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

In May 2018 a one second audio clip divided the internet: in a Twitter poll of more than 500,000 people, 53 percent heard Laurel and 47 percent heard Yanny, and each side found the other impossible to understand. The recording began in 2007, when opera singer Jay Aubrey Jones recorded about 200,000 reference pronunciations for Vocabulary.com in a makeshift New York apartment studio. Eleven years later Katie Hetzel, a 15 year old freshman at Flowery Branch High School in Georgia, looked up laurel,

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22:56

Yawning Science: Gallup's Cold Pack Test,...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

Bored office workers yawn, and so do paratroopers seconds before they jump. This episode explores chasmology, the study of yawning, starting with the reflex itself: a slow inhalation, a peak of involuntary muscle stretching called the acme, then a fast exhalation, a sequence seen in fetuses on 4D ultrasound at 30 weeks. The airway dilates to three or four times its size, and the rumble in your head is the tensor tympani muscle in the middle ear. The old idea that yawning pulls in oxygen fails the

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19:52

Tip of the Tongue States: Brown and McNeill's 1966...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

That maddening moment when a word you know refuses to come out has a clinical name, lethologica, and a long research history. William James described its mild anguish in his 1890 book The Principles of Psychology, and Sigmund Freud blamed repressed thoughts. The empirical breakthrough came in 1966, when Harvard researchers Roger Brown and David McNeill read people definitions of obscure words like sampan, apocrypha and nepotism. Participants stuck on the tip of the tongue could guess the first

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23:33

Wisdom Teeth: A 13,000-Year-Old Impaction, Shrinking...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

The oldest known impacted wisdom tooth belongs to a Magdalenian woman who lived in Ice Age Europe between 13,000 and 11,000 BCE. Third molars were grinding tools for raw roots, nuts and uncooked meat, and the heavy chewing load stimulated osteoblasts to build longer, bigger jaws. Agriculture about 10,000 years ago, cooking and then the Industrial Revolution softened diets, jaws grew shorter and wider while tooth size stayed the same, and impaction became ten times more common after

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23:44

Why Tickling Makes Us Laugh: Knismesis, Gargalesis...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

Tickling is two different things. In 1897 psychologists G. Stanley Hall and Arthur Allen separated knismesis, a light moving itch that annoys without laughter and is shared with animals like scratching dogs and twitching horses, from gargalesis, the harder pressure that brings helpless laughter and is found mostly in humans and other primates, though rats emit ultrasonic chirps when tickled. In 1939 Yngve Zotterman at the Karolinska Institute showed in cats that tickle depends on the same nerves

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22:34

Incorruptible Saints: Bernadette's Wax Mask and...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

In Catholic and Eastern Orthodox tradition, incorruptibility is the belief that divine intervention lets the bodies of some saints and beatified people avoid normal decay through autolysis and putrefaction. The Catholic Church verifies claims under canon law: bishop authorized inspections, sometimes a pontifical commission, a written medical report, and resealing with ribbons and wax. Witnesses often report a sweet odor of sanctity, and embalming or organ removal disqualifies a body. When Pope John

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24:14

Tetrachromacy: Subject cDa29, Mosaic Retinas and the...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

Most people see color through three cone types tuned to short, medium and long wavelengths, but the common ancestor of all vertebrates had four. During the nocturnal bottleneck, when early mammals hid from dinosaurs, rods mattered more than cones and mammals lost two cone types, and primates later re-evolved a third, mainly to spot ripe fruit. Birds kept the fourth cone and see into the 300 to 400 nanometer ultraviolet range, so zebra finches that look alike to us carry distinct UV plumage patterns,

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23:40

Sleep Paralysis Demons: Newfoundland's Old Hag Board...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

Up to half of all people will wake at least once unable to move, with crushing pressure on the chest and a dark figure in the room. This episode explains sleep paralysis as an overlap of REM sleep and waking: serotonin, the wake signal, and acetylcholine, which drives REM, fire at the same time, so the mind is alert while REM atonia keeps the body locked. Dream activity bleeds into perception as static, buzzing, whispers, roars and electric tingles. The midbrain's threat vigilance system reacts to

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22:37

REM Sleep Atonia: Aserinsky's 1953 Eye Study and the...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

In 1953 Nathaniel Kleitman and Eugene Aserinsky noticed sleepers' eyes darting beneath closed lids and found that people woken in those windows reported vivid dreams. EEG later showed REM sleep looks like wakefulness: fast, desynchronized signals, theta rhythms in the hippocampus and gamma waves of 40 to 60 hertz. Acetylcholine floods the brain while histamine, serotonin and norepinephrine drop to zero, and Hobson and McCarley described brainstem REM-on and REM-off neurons switching the state. To

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25:07

Paris Syndrome: Hiroaki Ota's Patients, Rousseau's...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

Paris syndrome is a rare, acute form of culture shock documented mainly among Japanese visitors to the French capital. Its psychiatric symptoms include delusional states, depersonalization, derealization and a conviction of being persecuted by locals, and its physical ones include dizziness, sweating, vomiting and a racing heart. A 2004 paper by Viala and colleagues in the French journal Nervure named four causes: the language barrier, friction between harmony focused Japanese etiquette and informal

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26:00

Phantom Limbs: Ramachandran's Cotton Swab, the Mirror...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

A cat whose left foreleg was amputated months earlier still tries to scoop litter with the missing paw, and between 50 and 80 percent of human amputees likewise feel a limb that is gone. This episode separates phantom limb syndrome, the often painless sense of presence, from phantom limb pain, and describes kinetic, kinesthetic and exteroceptive sensations, including phantom itches and telescoping, where the limb seems to shrink toward the stump. Phantoms also follow tooth extractions, eye removal,

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13,829 results

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