Why Do We Put Holes In Our Head?

The $15,000 A.I. from 1983: Scraping, grinding, or drilling a hole through the thick, hard skull that evolution developed to protect our most sensitive contents might be one of humanity’s worst ideas -- and also one of our best. We have no idea how it started, or why the first trepanner thought it would fix anything. We just know that nearly every civilization worldwide has been drilling holes in heads for at least 7,000 years. Sometimes it actually worked. Sometimes it… didn’t. Unraveling the impossibly-complex story of trepanning exposes a deep conceptual understanding of the relationship between the brain and behavior. It reveals our desire to take drastic measures to preserve the lives of people who are important to us, whether their value is practical or emotional. And the development of trepanning from Neolithic peoples to the Greeks and Incas and modern trauma surgeons takes a winding road through horrors and genius. Trepanning evolved alo