M⁴: Medicine, Mystery, Mayhem... and Sometimes Murder

In 1848, a railroad foreman in Vermont leaned over a blasting hole, turned his head for one second, and sent a 13-pound iron rod straight through his skull. Minutes later, he was sitting up and cracking jokes with the doctor. Phineas Gage is the most famous patient in neuroscience, the man who was “no longer Gage.” He’s in nearly every psychology textbook ever printed. And much of what those textbooks say about him is wrong. This week, Crystal walks Andrea through the accident, the country doc

In 1927, the United States Supreme Court ruled that a young Virginia woman could be sterilized against her will, and the justice who wrote the opinion summed it up in one infamous line: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Her name was Carrie Buck. She was 17, poor, pregnant, and suddenly labeled “feebleminded” by the people who wanted her out of sight. What followed was a test case built to fail her, with a defense attorney who barely defended, expert witnesses who never met her, and d

A private jet crosses the Midwest at 46,000 feet, perfectly on autopilot, while fighter pilots pull alongside and see frosted windows and no movement inside. Nobody aboard will ever answer the radio. This week, Andrea and Crystal look at some of the most famous plane crashes in history: Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper, Patsy Cline, Jim Croce, Lynyrd Skynyrd, John Denver, Payne Stewart, Aaliyah, and JFK Jr. But we’re not telling these stories in order. We’re sorting them by what a

On the night of August 21, 1986, the villages around Lake Nyos in northwestern Cameroon went quiet. There was no fire, no flood, and no sign of a struggle. By morning, more than 1,700 people and thousands of animals were dead, some of them miles from the water. The few who woke up found that their neighbors, their families, and even the insects were gone. This week, Andrea takes us to a remote crater lake that had been keeping a deadly secret for centuries. What rolled through those valleys in

A podcast climbed to the top of Spotify's charts with a claim that stopped us cold: that some non-speaking autistic children can read minds — and that dozens of them gather on a shared, non-physical plane they call "the Hill." As two RNs, we wanted to believe it. So we pulled the research. What we found traces straight back to a technique with a body count of false accusations, broken families, and at least one criminal conviction — and a well-documented psychological effect that explains why l

People who've survived a near-death experience often describe the same things: a tunnel, a bright light, a sense of peace, even a "life review." But what if some of these experiences aren't happening at the edge of death at all, and instead are happening in the brain during a seizure? This week Andrea dives into the eerie overlap between post-ictal states and near-death experiences, tracing the neuroscience of what happens in the brain right after a seizure and asking a genuinely unsettling que