Joe Rogan and Eric Weinstein on Head Transplants

I just learned something new, which is that cephalopods are under consideration to be the next great model organism for biology. So if you think about how weird it is that some branch of the phylogenetic tree is so far distant from us, that these mollusks have such advanced minds and, you know, their skin is the wonder of the world for sure. Nobody knows quite how all of that, not only do they have these chromatophores to get the camouflage right, but they also change the texture of their skin to mimic things like coral and all this stuff. Wouldn't it be cool if we made cephalopods the next great model organism and then we started doing comparative, like not only neuroanatomy, but connectomics, where we're trying to study how their brains are organized because they're so far away, they are probably the closest we will ever get to meeting aliens. I think I said that the last time I was here. And I'm really excited if that goes forward. Well, it really doesn't seem like anything else. Right. You know, whether it's a cuttlefish or whether it's an octopus, like you're like, oh, it's kind of like a squid. Like, yeah, a little bit. Like a person's like a monkey. Yeah. But like real different. Well, the nautilus is like the craziest, you know, maybe of not. The cuttlefish is the most interesting for sure. They're both. The octopus is like, you know, so intelligent. Right. And they regenerate. That's another part of it that's bizarre. Yeah. Well, it would be fun to do. I mean, I would imagine that Knuts and Salamanders in the tetrapod category would be the best for us to study for regeneration. I like how they regenerate up to a point. Like nature will say, yeah, you can grow an arm back. Can't grow a head back. Sorry, fuck face. That's a wrap. Yeah. You know, you lose your head. Nature's like, you gave up a big piece. You gave up the queen. It's over. Yeah. Game's over. So you think if you lose your tail, like, it's debatable. Do you grow your tail back? We could do that. I think lizards grow their tail back, you know, but they only grow like most of it. They don't grow the whole thing. But the Knuts and Salamanders seem to have this very high regeneration. You can just get an arm off over and over again. There it is. You can't cut their head off. Yeah. Why do you want to cut their head off? I don't. But I mean, just saying it's weird. Like you can't like chop them in half from the waist down. They don't seal up and grow a new waist. Like that's it. You can only get rid of the limbs. Yeah. But you can get rid of the limbs. Like nature has evolved a strategy for dealing with predation. Just give them the arm. Give them the arm. Take it. Pop. What do you make of the fact that we had this successful head transplant in monkeys in like the early seventies and then we walked away from it. Probably good move. Otherwise chicks at Beverly Hills would be getting new bodies, just getting their head screwed on to new bodies. Really? Yeah. Getting new heads. Yeah. People would figure out a way to transplant their brains every once in a lifetime forever. Imagine just having an 800 year old brain and 20 year old motorcycle victim. Yeah. That's what people are going to start doing. Well then I guess it's a good thing that we walked. I thought it was kind of a weird move that we would succeed at that and then say, okay, too much. Can't handle it. Do you think that's what they did? Yeah. Or was it probably hard to get funding? People thought you were playing God. The guy who did it I think was, maybe his name was Robert White and he was a devout Christian. It was really, it was good because there was a lot of this reverence for the human form and if a religious person is doing it, we feel better than if somebody is desecrating. Right, right. Some atheist asshole scientist. Yeah. That's Sam Harris. There is no God. I bet he's cutting heads off of dogs and reattaching them to monkeys. Yeah. That's what's also like we think of it as like, okay, it's one thing if you're trying out medicine on a monkey that might save babies, but it's another thing if you just say, hey, what happens if I cut this monkey's head off, stick it on another monkey? Well, there's all this crazy, I don't know if you've ever seen this, the Russians had this film introduced by JBS Haldane, great English biologist who was also a communist and therefore very pro-Soviet. And there's this experiment, it was experiments in continuation of the brain after death and they hook up the head to an artificial circulatory system and they sort of continue to have interactions where they swab the head and they get the eyelash movement and the tongue comes out to lick and eat things. It's quite interesting. I would recommend.