The spinal soul of a frog

Or: Don't drop amphibians into boiling water, ever.

No frogs were injured in the creation of this illustration. I feel compelled to say that.

Bear with me. I have a point.

A few weeks ago, I deleted my Xwitter account. Things had gotten even uglier there (and I’m on record as calling that particular social media platform a sewer years ago, and who has the time for that)?

Cutting ties to what had become a hated obligation (MUST counter lies) freed me to start casting about for other harshes to my mellow. So I deleted my Instagram account, which was constantly being hacked by people who thought I had rich friends and kept reaching out to them for money.

I mean, c’mon. what kind of weird amount is $900? And who has that laying around?

And then I started noticing that every time I called up my Gmail, I have scads of notices from companies and organizations with whom I’d had scant congress (an Irish goods store from whom I once bought a gift for my aunt back in the teens, an Ohio hospice I’d donated to in the name of a friend who died there). There would be 100 emails some days, and maybe three of those were from people with whom I actually wanted to correspond.

I’d duly scroll down until — more recently than I’d care to admit — I realized the same way I was tightening up my social media, I could clean out my inbox.

And so I started unsubscribing. This is mostly a simple task that involves no more than clicking on “unsubscribe.” A few of those clicks took me to websites that asked me why I was unsubscribing. I wanted to check “Because I want to” but that was never an option. So I just checked “other.”

I’d been thinking about that story of the frog in boiling water, how if you drop a frog in water and turn up the heat, the frog will keep trying to acclimate until it boils to death.

Funny thing is, the opposite is true. That story’s a lie. A frog dropped in boiling water will die, as would any living thing. A frog placed in water that is steadily heated will seek to escape. Back in the 19th century, a German physiologist named Friedrich Gotz was testing to find the “spinal soul” of frogs, and he put two frogs — one of whom he’d removed the brain, ewww — and found that the brainless frog would stay in water, regardless.

That makes a sad kind of sense.

But ugh, that poor de-brained frog. Subsequent experiments showed the opposite of what we’ve come to think of as science, but somehow the result got twisted.

And now, before we go searching for a different metaphor to describe metaphorically cleaning house, let’s pause a moment to mourn the life and death of that brainless frog.