[RADIOLAB INTRO]

[GPS: Please enter your address.]

JAD ABUMRAD: Denver, Colorado. 

[GPS: Calculating route.]

SHARON ROSEMAN: Okay, now I'm getting closer to him. Woo!

VOICE: I promise I won't bite you.

JAD: We begin our journey this hour ...

SHARON ROSEMAN: How old are you?

VOICE: I'm 42.

SHARON ROSEMAN: Oh, man I'm 63. This isn't gonna work. [laughs

ROBERT KRULWICH: I don't know!

JAD: With this woman, her name is Sharon Roseman.

SHARON ROSEMAN: Okay, enough of that.

ROBERT: Enough of that. All right. 

ROBERT: And we're going to talk about a little predicament she got herself into.

SHARON ROSEMAN: I was about five years old. I lived in a small suburb of Chicago called Maywood, Illinois. And I was outside playing on the street.

JAD: Her and a bunch of kids, they're playing this game.

SHARON ROSEMAN: Blind Man's Bluff.

JAD: And she was it.

SHARON ROSEMAN: The person who is it wears a blindfold, and all the other kids try and scatter around and they have to freeze. And then they can taunt you and you can only hear them.

JAD: And the objective is basically to feel around, follow the voices until you tag someone.

SHARON ROSEMAN: Then they become it.

JAD: And that's what she does.

SHARON ROSEMAN: Everybody laughs because the person that I tagged is kind of the loser, you know, because I found them first. So I'm playing the game and they took the blindfold off and suddenly I didn't know where I was. I—I didn't recognize anything. This horrible panic set in because nothing looked familiar to me. Absolutely nothing. I just—I—I ran blindly just running. Just to run because I was so scared. And I ran into the back yard of this house in front of me. And I saw my mother sitting in a lawn chair and I said, "Why are you here?" And she said, "What? What do you mean, why am I here?" I said, "Why are you in this backyard? Where are we?" She said, "What are you talking about? We're at home. I'm in the backyard." And I said, "But this isn't our house." And she said, "Yes, this is. What are you talking about?" And I couldn't explain it. And I just kept crying and just kept saying, "I don't know where I'm at." And ...

ROBERT: She—your mother must've been very worried at that moment.

SHARON ROSEMAN: Well, unfortunately, my mother said something to me that actually changed my life forever. She pointed her finger in my face, and she said, "Don't ever tell anybody because they'll say you're a witch and they'll burn you."

JAD: What? A witch? 

ROBERT: She said because?

SHARON ROSEMAN:  I don't know. I don't know. And from that moment on, it was my secret.

JAD: She realizes now that what happened to her in that moment when she was five and playing the game, was that her whole world had rotated.

SHARON ROSEMAN: A quarter turn.

ROBERT: A quarter turn.

SHARON ROSEMAN: Picture where you're sitting right now. You would still be sitting in that same room, but the wall that you're looking at right in front of you is now one wall over to the right.

ROBERT: Let me make it easier. If I were on the toilet, say, sitting there looking straight ahead is now the bathtub in a different place than it was before, the sink in a different place by about 90 degrees.

SHARON ROSEMAN: Yes. Everything. Everything in the entire universe.

JAD: But just horizontally. It doesn't tilt?

SHARON ROSEMAN: No, it doesn't tilt. East, west becomes north, south. Like in Colorado here, the—the mountains, the Rocky Mountains are on the west end of town. 

ROBERT: Right. 

SHARON ROSEMAN: When this happens to me, they move to the north end of town, but everything else moves with it.

ROBERT: So the first time that happened, did you—you say you didn't know where you were, yet you recognized things, but they just weren't where they were supposed to be? Or ...

SHARON ROSEMAN: No, I didn't even recognize them. That very first time I was so panicked I just didn't know what to do.

ROBERT:  Did it ever happen again?

SHARON ROSEMAN: Over and over and over.

JAD: I mean, I get lost all the time, as do you. But that's ...

ROBERT: This is different.

JAD: Yeah. Before we go any further, let's just orient real quick. I'm Jad Abumrad. 

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich. 

JAD: This is Radiolab. This hour ...

ROBERT:  ...we're calling it Lost and Found. So we're going to be experiencing the feelings like Sharon just had of being totally lost.

JAD: And then that relief that you feel, as Sharon will feel eventually, of being totally found.

ROBERT: Not totally. Let's go back to her story. 

ROBERT: Did it ever happen again?

SHARON ROSEMAN: Over and over and over.

JAD: She says this 90 degree rotation problem would come on in all kinds of situations. Sometimes even when she had her eyes closed.

SHARON ROSEMAN: But what saved me was that shortly after that first episode, I went to a little birthday party and we were playing pin the Tail on the donkey, and they put a blindfold on me and spun me in circles.

JAD: You must have been like, "Oh, man."

ROBERT: Bet you didn't want to do that.

SHARON ROSEMAN: It was—it was awful.

JAD: Because after that first turn, everything did shift.

SHARON ROSEMAN: But then, on the second turn ...

JAD:  ... when they spun her around again.

SHARON ROSEMAN: It fixed it.

JAD: Really?

SHARON ROSEMAN: Yeah.

JAD: How does—that's so weird.

SHARON ROSEMAN: If I played a third time, crazy again.

JAD: So it's binary. It's like on, off, on, off.

SHARON ROSEMAN: Exactly. Exactly. But I couldn't tell anybody that.

JAD: But now she had a fix or temporary fix. So from that moment on, anytime her world would shift.

SHARON ROSEMAN: I would go into the bathroom and I'd close the door so nobody could see me. And I would spin in circles until it fixed it.

ROBERT: You spin, and it reasserts itself correctly.

SHARON ROSEMAN: Yeah. And I still do that to this day.

JAD: And with her secret spinning, Sharon has managed to lead a relatively normal life. She got married, had three kids ...

SHARON ROSEMAN: ... but when—when my children were babies, if one of them would cry out—just cry out in their sleep ...

JAD: Invariably she'd wake up.

SHARON ROSEMAN: Bang into a wall.

JAD: Completely turned around.

SHARON ROSEMAN: And then I would have to follow their cries, the sound of their cries, until I could find their—their bedroom. There was no explanation for that. I had to just say I was clumsy.

JAD: So you never told them?

SHARON ROSEMAN: No. And my husband didn't know. And I'm not married to him anymore. But—and you can leave that in there. 

JAD: The point is, she kept it a secret. But one day, when Sharon was 29, she was on her way to her brother's house and she got turned around.

SHARON ROSEMAN: So I called him from a payphone and I said, "I can't find your house."

JAD: She read him the names of the street signs ...

SHARON ROSEMAN: And he said, "Sharon, you're like two blocks from my house." And I just started crying and I told him the story. He was just shocked.

JAD: And so he dragged her to the hospital and they saw some specialists.

SHARON ROSEMAN: And they kept me in—in the hospital for, like a week doing every kind of test you can imagine. And it showed nothing. They basically told me it was psychological.

JAD: Like it's all in your head?

SHARON ROSEMAN: Yes.

JAD: Wow. 

SHARON ROSEMAN: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: And that you were the only one in the whole universe who had this problem. 

SHARON ROSEMAN: Yeah. I thought, okay, I must be a witch.

JONAH LEHRER: Huh. I mean, that's—that's just. That's a crazy story.

JAD: Okay, just to pull out for a bit, after we talked with Sharon, we ended up speaking with—well, if you've heard Radiolab before, you probably know that voice.

JONAH LEHRER: Um, Jonah Lehrer? 

ROBERT: [laughs] No, don't ask it like a question!

JONAH LEHRER: Jonah Lehrer.

JAD: Yes. There you go. There you go.

JAD: Jonah is a science writer and an author.

JONAH LEHRER: My last book was How We Decide.

JAD: Knows a Lot about the Brain. And so we played him tape from the Sharon interview just to see what he thinks. And he had an interesting take.

JONAH LEHRER: Well, it—I mean it's just—it's just one of these great windows into this talent we completely take for granted. And—and you realize this is such sophisticated software. There are so many different algorithms that are running that allow us to not get lost on the way out of the bathroom.

JAD: One way to think about this story, he says, is not why does Sharon get lost all the time? But why don't the rest of us?

ROBERT: Exactly.

JONAH LEHRER: And a lot of this is brand new science. So we're talking the last three, four or five years.

ROBERT: But in that time, he says, scientists have just begun to figure out how brains make maps of our surroundings from moment to moment. 

JONAH LEHRER: They've identified at least four different types of cells that make these maps possible, everything from place cells to grid cells to border cells.

JAD: Wait, can we go through. Place cells?

JONAH LEHRER: Yeah, no, no. We'll—we'll slow down. But—but, but all these cells come together to give us these incredibly rich maps. 

ROBERT: This all began to make more sense to us when Jonah said, "Okay, let me do it this way. I just took a trip into this office, because I'm sitting in a radio station. Now, let me do the same thing as I did it in my brain. I got out of my car. I walked to the front of the building. .."

JONAH LEHRER: So I open up the door and somehow, some way, my brain begins to make sense of this space. 

ROBERT: First thing that happens, he says, his little cells in his head called grid cells come online. 

JONAH LEHRER: Grid cells are pretty weird, I got to be honest. 

ROBERT: Before he's even taken the step into the building, these grid cells, kind of like mappers or surveyors, they just lay on a grid ... 

JONAH LEHRER: ... this grid, this matrix ...

ROBERT: ... over the hallway right in front of him.

JONAH LEHRER: Unbeknownst to me, that grid is composed of equilateral triangles.

ROBERT: Triangles?

JONAH LEHRER: Triangles. Yeah, it's. It's pretty spooky as I'm walking down the hallway, I pass from one triangle to the next. My brain is keeping track of exactly which triangle I'm in. I pass by a wall, so some border cells go off.

GPS VOICE: Avoid the concrete wall.

JONAH LEHRER: Which just respond to borders, edges, physical limits. I look to my right and my head direction cells change, but then they change back ...

ROBERT: Wow, wow, wait, head direction cells?

JONAH LEHRER: So there's a head direction neuron firing all the time when I'm facing dead ahead, when I turn my head to the left, that neuron stops firing. We have a new head direction neuron firing. Now I'm back to the dead ahead. I turn to the right, new head direction neuron firing dead ahead.

ROBERT: These cells keep you oriented so you know where you are in the grid and now it's time to fill in the details. And this is where things get really cool.

[GPS VOICE: Proceed down the corridor.]

JONAH LEHRER: As I take a couple more steps. Now my place cells are probably beginning to get active. It's the I'm here cell.

ROBERT: It's like for every landmark in the space, each spot he passes by, the brain will drop a little pin. It's like an I'm here pin.

CELL VOICE: Here at the coffee table.

ROBERT: And then I'm here ...

CELL VOICE: At the potted plant ...

ROBERT: And I'm—I'm here.

CELL VOICE: At the door in the studio.

ROBERT: So now ...

JONAH LEHRER: ... as I imagine myself, walking from this little closet-like space back to my car as I pass by the coffee table with the magazines that place cell fires, now I'm by the front door, that place cell fires. Now I'm on the sidewalk. That place cell fires. Now I'm by my car. That place cell fires.

ROBERT: And when you put it all together, the place cells, the grid cells, the border cells, what you get, he says ...

JONAH LEHRER: It's a symphony of electricity, which somehow is translated for me into an idea of a space ...

ROBERT: ... and this whole neural symphony, it mostly takes place in a particular part of the brain ...

JONAH LEHRER: ... the hippocampus.

ROBERT: So if Jonah were to just hazard a guess about Sharon ...

JONAH LEHRER: ... she should get her hippocampus checked out is what is what she should do.

JAD: I mean, you know, that's just a guess. Now, getting back to that story.

SHARON ROSEMAN: Even though I was 29, I was an adult, I had children ...

JAD: The point at which we left off, Sharon had gone to the hospital, gotten a bunch of tests, and the doctors had told her ...

SHARON ROSEMAN: ... that I needed to go see a psychiatrist. I felt like a freak. But then one day, years after that, I was watching some TV show ...

[NEWS CLIP: Imagine scanning a crowd ...]

JAD: It was a newsy, 2020 type thing about face blindness.

[NEWS CLIP: Face blindness.]

JAD: People who can't recognize faces. And at the end of the show, the reporter mentions this website. Sharon goes, she was curious. And when she gets there, this little window pops up that asks her if she wants to take a survey.

SHARON ROSEMAN: So I thought, Well, I'll do it. And it was mostly questions about face recognition. But as I got deeper and deeper into the questionnaire, the questions started turning more to "Have you ever experienced being in a place that should look familiar to you but suddenly does not?" And I was like, "Oh, my gosh, that's me." And asked for explanations. So I was just typing away and typing away.

JAD: And eventually she meets the doctor who would finally de-witch her.

GIUSEPPE IARIA: My name is Giuseppe Iaria. I'm a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Calgary.

JAD: And do you have a strong sense of direction out of curiosity?

GIUSEPPE IARIA: I don't, actually. I am not a gifted directional, like, you know, guy.

JAD: But Giuseppe had this idea that maybe just like face blindness, there could be such a thing as location blindness. So he asked Sharon to go online and play this game.

GIUSEPPE IARIA: A sort of video game.

SHARON ROSEMAN: It's like virtual reality.

GIUSEPPE IARIA: Not like where you have to shoot people and fight people and blah blah blah.

SHARON ROSEMAN: The screen would be showing you these landmarks like a flower shop.

GIUSEPPE IARIA: Bar.

SHARON ROSEMAN: Bank.

GIUSEPPE IARIA: Bakery.

SHARON ROSEMAN: ... and then eventually I needed to be able to—to say ...

GIUSEPPE IARIA: Where things are with respect to one another.

SHARON ROSEMAN: Well, nothing, not even a guess for me. And it actually made me physically ill.

JAD: And then Giuseppe told her something, "Before you, I'd met this woman."

GIUSEPPE IARIA: This lady who was complaining about orientation.

JAD: And she also failed this test. So I brought her and had her play the game."

GIUSEPPE IARIA: In the scanner, in the MRI scanner.

JAD: In the brain scanner.

GIUSEPPE IARIA: And we were able to find activity all over the brain.

JAD: Except in one little place.

GIUSEPPE IARIA: We were not able to detect any increased activity within the hippocampus.

JAD: Which just so happens to be the home of Jonas little guys.

JONAH LEHRER: Place cells, border cells, grid cells.

SHARON ROSEMAN: That particular part of the brain, the hippocampus just never developed. And at that point that's when Giuseppe ...

JAD: For the first time told her this thing has a name.

SHARON ROSEMAN: DTD for developmental topographical disorientation.

JAD: And that's not trivial, because when something like this has a name, suddenly it's not your fault.

SHARON ROSEMAN: I—I felt like I was reborn. I keep telling him You are my hero. You'll always be my hero.

ROBERT: So have you ever met Sharon? I mean, face to face.

GIUSEPPE IARIA: I haven't and we are—we are supposed to meet now in this fall.

ROBERT: What if you like beta and fall in love with her and then she gets lost and you rescue her and the science is ruined, but you get married?

GIUSEPPE IARIA: I am already married, so ...

ROBERT: Oh, okay. Never mind.

JAD: But anyway, Giuseppe's there. He's got a couple of patients and he's wondering, "How many other folks like this are out there?" So he puts up a website.

GIUSEPPE IARIA: We said, okay, we are looking for people who have these specific symptoms. One year later, we were basically dealing with 700 people with the same—with the same issue.

JAD: What?

ROBERT: Wow.

JAD: 700 people?

GIUSEPPE IARIA: Yeah.

JAD: So he sets up an Internet forum where they can all talk to each other.

SHARON ROSEMAN: I'm the moderator ...

JAD: Now Sharon corresponds with the DTD sufferers from all over the place.

SHARON ROSEMAN: There are others out there who experience the 90-degree rotation.

JAD: Really?

ROBERT: Whoa. What about spinners, though? Do you—have you ever met a spinner?

SHARON ROSEMAN: No. No.

SHARON MACHEL: Actually, I should get some water because if ...

SHARON ROSEMAN: Oh, here. Well, there's one there.

DAVE FENDER: You can just use that one, that's fine.

JAD: But then a few months later, she did. Another woman named Sharon.

SHARON MACHEL: My name is Sharon Machel. The last name is M-A-C-H-E-L. Rhymes with Rachel.

JAD: When this Sharon heard about the first Sharon, she says she bolted straight up.

SHARON MACHEL: "There is a woman in Colorado who has what I have!" And I—it was such an emotional moment for me ...

JAD:  That she decided to fly to Colorado to meet Sharon Roseman, and they spent a day together.

DAVE FENDER: All right, so let's just start with the easy stuff and ...

JAD: They spoke with reporter Dave Fender.

DAVE FENDER: Describe yesterday. I mean, what was it like to get together yesterday, and ...

SHARON ROSEMAN: Yesterday was awesome. I got out of the car and we just gave each other a hug. And it was—it was—it was a bond that I've never experienced with anybody else in my life, ever.

SHARON MACHEL: We sat down right away in the hotel lobby and started to laugh. We couldn't stop laughing. Everything—we were telling our experiences right away and comparing notes, not even finishing our sentences.

JAD: Now we still don't know what's wrong with Sharon and Sharon and the others, and we certainly don't know how to fix it. But whereas before Sharon and Sharon were lost and alone, now they're lost and together. So in a way, it's like they're not really lost.

SHARON ROSEMAN: Like, we sat there probably for 15 minutes describing how we were going to navigate from this hotel to the shopping mall that we could see right out the window of the hotel.

SHARON MACHEL: And we had to come up with some contingency plans. What if ...

SHARON ROSEMAN: So we had—we had the GPS, if we needed it. Sharon had a map in her hands, if we needed it, we had street names. We were just hoping that at least one of us was there and instead of being messed up. And so we got there. There it is. There it is. There it is. We were both so excited, we were jumping up and down. It was really ridiculous. If anybody says and they had no clue why we were so excited that we found Nordstrom's.

JAD: Big thanks to Molly Webster for producing that piece with us. For more information on anything you just heard or will hear, go to Radiolab.org. And you can subscribe to our podcast there.

[SHARON ROSEMAN: Hi, this is Sharon Rosen. Radiolab is funded in part by the Alfred Sloan Foundation.]

[GIUSEPPE IARIA: Enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. This is Giuseppe Iaria from Calgary.]

[SHARON ROSEMAN: More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

[DAVE FENDER: Hi, sorry I'm so late. I've been on the road. I'm calling from my cell phone. Radiolab is produced by WNYC and distributed by NPR.]

JAD: Hello, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: And I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. Today, our program is ...

ROBERT: Lost and found.

[GPS VOICE: Approaching zone without GPS.]

TIM HOWARD: All right. Well, you know, I think we're getting real close.

ROBERT: And here, driving into our next adventure is our producer, Tim Howard. 

TIM: Yeah, it seems this is it.

TIM: So Soren and I took a trip.

VOICE: I need your picture ID.

TIM: Yup.

TIM: To Fort Monmouth, New Jersey.

JAD: Fort what?

TIM: Fort Monmouth.

JAD: Is that a military base?

TIM: Yep. We were going to this museum they have on the base ... 

TIM: I'm Tim Howard.

MINDY ROSEWITZ: Hi, nice to meet you.

SOREN WHEELER: Soren.

TIM: To meet this woman, Mindy.

MINDY ROSEWITZ: Mindy Rosewitz, I'm a museum curator at US Army Communications.

TIM: She agreed to show us around ...

JAD:  To see what? 

TIM:  Patience, Jad.

MINDY ROSEWITZ: Do you want to hear some stories?

TIM: Absolutely.

MINDY ROSEWITZ: Okay. Here on display, we have the war heroes.

TIM: So she pointed to this one glass case, sort of like a memorial.

MINDY ROSEWITZ: Well, he was born in 1918, died here at Fort Monmouth in 1937. So he lived about 20 years, served with the Army Expeditionary Forces. He was wounded and blinded in one eye. Carrying a very important message.

TIM: What's all this on his—on his face there? Looks like putty, like. 

MINDY ROSEWITZ: [laughs] Like what's all this stuff on his nose? It's called crop. And it's a natural growth. I think it's a calcium growth. And some pigeons just get that.

JAD: Did she just say pigeons? 

TIM: You got it.

MINDY ROSEWITZ: A lot of them get it. Here's another one. Marker. 

TIM: This is a beautiful pigeon here.

MINDY ROSEWITZ: Yeah, but he has one eye.

TIM: Oh, wow.

MINDY ROSEWITZ: His eye was shot out in the war.

JAD: Wait a second, Tim. 

TIM: Mm-hmm? 

JAD: What's the story? Why pigeons? 

TIM: Why pigeons? 

JAD: Yeah.

TIM: Well, A) pigeons are awesome. And B) there's a big question here.

JAD: Which is?

TIM: But let me—let me just start you off training wheels with a simple little story.

MINDY ROSEWITZ: This is GI Joe. He's our hero pigeon.

TIM: But there's one pigeon named GI Joe.

MINDY ROSEWITZ: GI Joe is pretty cool.

TIM: Well, he looks like a totally ordinary pigeon. I wouldn't know that I'm standing a foot away from a—a war hero.

MINDY ROSEWITZ: I think he's cute. He's got yellow legs. Remember I told you about the legs? The feet?

TIM: Oh yeah.

JAD: All right, so what's the story?

MINDY ROSEWITZ: Okay.

TIM: So it's 1943.

MINDY ROSEWITZ: There was a town.

TIM: The British have just taken this little Italian town ...

MINDY ROSEWITZ: Collevecchio. 

TIM: Collevecchio, from the Germans.

MINDY ROSEWITZ: The bad guys.

TIM: The problem is, they took it really fast and their American allies are about to ...

MINDY ROSEWITZ:  Bomb the town.

TIM: In 20 minutes. Their radios are down. They can't get anybody back to the base in time to tell them to call it off.

JAD: How nearby is this base?

TIM: 20 miles away. And so they only really have one option.

JAD: Let me guess.

TIM: Now, wait. Just so you really get this.

JAD: Yeah. Bring it home.

TIM: This bird is in a place that he's never been before.

JAD: Mm-hmm.

TIM: Whole way there for hours he's been in a dark box. He should be completely confused. JAD: Should be.

TIM: And yet when they take him out and throw them in the air like a cosmic zip cord, he's pulled over mountains, lakes, forests, none of which he's ever seen before. Right back to the army base where he lives.

MINDY ROSEWITZ: Just in the nick of time.

TIM: Just as the bombers are about to take off.

MINDY ROSEWITZ: He's credited with saving over a thousand British lives.

[NEWS CLIP: American-hatched GI Joe carried the message through an artillery bombardment in Italy and saved units of the 56th London Division.]

TIM: How the hell did he do that? How did he know exactly where to go?

MINDY ROSEWITZ: Some of them returned with the message capsule hanging from their leg and their breastbone shot open and all that kind of stuff. But they would always fly back home.

JAD: How?

TIM: That's your question?

JAD: Yeah.

TIM: Hello.

CHARLIE WOLCOTT: Hello there.

TIM: So I called this guy.

CHARLIE WOLCOTT: This is Charlie Wolcott.

TIM: He's a heavy hitter in the pigeon world.

CHARLIE WOLCOTT: Former director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

TIM: My question is, if GI Joe had never been to that town, how did he know how to get back home?

CHARLIE WOLCOTT: Well, the first thing that GI Joe needs to know is where ...

JAD: Wait, wait, Tim. I'm sorry. I feel bad for saying this because it's your first piece for the show. But I mean, don't we know the answer to this?

TIM: What's the answer, Jad?

JAD: Well, birds have a compass in their head. That's how they migrate.

TIM: Jad, you dummy. You're just not getting the degree of difficulty.

CHARLIE WOLCOTT: Think about it this way. If I take you in a little boat and put you out in the middle of a large body of water, all you can see is water in every direction. Which way do you paddle to find New York City?

JAD: Are you asking me?

TIM: Yeah.

JAD: Can I have a compass in this scenario?

TIM: Sure. But that's not going to help you.

JAD: Sure it will.

CHARLIE WOLCOTT: No, no.

JAD: What do you mean, no?

TIM: Just think about it. Which way are you going to paddle first?

JAD: Hmm? I don't know enough to say.

CHARLIE WOLCOTT: Exactly. It depends a little bit on whether I've dumped you in the Atlantic Ocean. The Pacific Ocean, the Indian Ocean, or whatever.

TIM: You—you can't swim home if you don't know which direction home is.

JAD: And you're saying this is what a pigeon does? You can throw it anywhere and it knows. TIM:That's my whole point. I would—if you were a pigeon, I wouldn't need to tell you anything.

CHARLIE WOLCOTT: How did GI Joe figure out where he is with relation to home? That's the great question.

JAD: That is—okay, I'm with you now, and I'm sorry for interrupting you earlier.

TIM: That's all right.

JAD: So how do they do it?

TIM: Well, if you have a one sentence answer for it, then that's a short interview.

CHARLIE WOLCOTT: It is a very, very easy answer: we don't know.

TIM: But they have been doing a lot of crazy experiments on pigeons over the years, like six years now to try and figure all this out.

JAD: Like what?

CHARLIE WOLCOTT: [laughs] Let us count the ways. We have tried flying pigeons with frosted contact lenses.

TIM: They've put coils on their heads ...

CHARLIE WOLCOTT: Heads that the pigeons had, like a hat. 

TIM: They've glued ... 

CHARLIE WOLCOTT: Little brass weights ...

TIM:  To their backs. They put radio transmitters on them.

CHARLIE WOLCOTT: Yes, indeed.

TIM: They followed pigeons in airplanes.

CHARLIE WOLCOTT: The—the point is that it's a—it's a complex issue.

TIM: And they have definitely not arrived at any consensus for how pigeons do this.

JAD: They have theories?

TIM: Plenty of theories.

CHARLIE WOLCOTT: Oh, yeah.

TIM: For example ...

CHARLIE WOLCOTT: The Italians, Floriano Papi and his colleagues, believed that when you take the pigeons out to the release point, they sample the odors on the way to the release point.

TIM: All the smells of the places that they pass?

CHARLIE WOLCOTT: Right. Essentially a series of olfactory landmarks. You know, you go past the chocolate factory and the olive groves, or the garlic plantation or whatever.

TIM: Sounds like a beautiful place. [laughs]

CHARLIE WOLCOTT: And so when a pigeon is released, what it does is it sniffs the breeze and says, "A-ha!"

[GPS VOICE: Continue past garlic, take a left at chocolate.]

CHARLIE WOLCOTT: This is the odor that came to me on the north wind and therefore I need to fly south in order to get home. But ...

TIM: Charlie's actually put this idea to the test ...

CHARLIE WOLCOTT: We anesthetized the pigeons, put them in a box, artificial air ...

TIM: So they can't smell anything.

CHARLIE WOLCOTT:  ...and a rotating turntable and transported them about a hundred miles away. And when they got over being kind of carsick, they flew home just fine.

JAD: So something else is going on here?

TIM: Yeah. And here's where we get to my personal favorite theory. All right. Forget about smell. There are some researchers who think that the key to pigeon navigation ...

JAD:  Is ...

TIM: Are you ready for this?

JAD: Yeah. What is it?

TIM: Metal. Which is to say if you go all the way down into the center of the Earth, there's all this iron down there churning. And as it's churning, it's throwing off this magnetism.

CHARLIE WOLCOTT: Yes. Lines of magnetic force.

TIM: Up through the earth, out into space. So imagine up there in the atmosphere above the planet, there are all these lines that are wiggling. And as GI Joe is flying through the air, he's moving through these lines.

JAD: Do you think he sees the lines?

TIM: Well, I can tell you that he might feel them because there are these little particles in his beak.

CHARLIE WOLCOTT: Magnetite, magnetic iron particles.

TIM: They're twitching, in some spots they twitch more, in—in some spots less.

CHARLIE WOLCOTT: And if you can measure various aspects of the magnetic field, like its strength and its angle, you can tell whereabouts you are.

TIM: Do you think that's what's actually happening?

CHARLIE WOLCOTT: I think it may be partly what's happening.

TIM: I mean, Charlie—Charlie says there's probably a lot of things going down. And any time you think you've figured it out, the pigeon goes and messes you up. For example, he told me about this one place.

CHARLIE WOLCOTT: There is a place ...

TIM: In New York ...

CHARLIE WOLCOTT: ... about 90 miles west of here called Jersey Hill Fire Tower. If we take Cornell pigeons to Jersey Hill and let them go, they go random. And so they are essentially lost. And it is a Bermuda Triangle for Cornell pigeons.

SOREN: Why would that be?

JAD: That's Soren.

CHARLIE WOLCOTT: I had—if we knew, I would tell you.

SOREN: Is it a magnetic thing?

CHARLIE WOLCOTT: No, no. There's nothing magnetically disturbed about it.

SOREN: Is it a sewage treatment capital?

CHARLIE WOLCOTT: No.

SOREN: Hyperactive radio frequencies?

CHARLIE WOLCOTT: No. It's a—it's a hill surrounded by pine trees. It's just a hill.

SOREN: Does it make you wonder if there's a whole other system going on in a pigeon that we haven't even started to think about?

CHARLIE WOLCOTT: Yes, of course. And then you—you say, well, what could it possibly be? And after a long day of—of being out there with the pigeons and releasing them and waiting for them to make up their mind and fly home and get the vanishing bearings, you come back and you open the loft, and there they are, you know, all sitting on their little perches, going coo, coo you just long to grab one by the scruff of the neck and say, "How do you do it?" But so far, obviously, they haven't told us.

TIM: One more thing.

MINDY ROSEWITZ: I didn't tell you about how they were monogamous.

TIM: Oh.

TIM: The pigeon mind might be unknowable, but the pigeon heart is an open book.

MINDY ROSEWITZ: Yeah.

TIM:  Well, Mindy said that with a lot of other birds ...

MINDY ROSEWITZ:  ...roosters and chickens.

TIM: If you get them all together ...

MINDY ROSEWITZ: They all go wild and party.

TIM: One thing leads to another.

MINDY ROSEWITZ: They all party.

MINDY ROSEWITZ: They're in the jacuzzi, right?

MINDY ROSEWITZ: Well, maybe they go in the jacuzzi after. Maybe they—I don't know what they're doing.

TIM: I'm not judging.

TIM: But pigeons ...

MINDY ROSEWITZ: They would mate and they would stay mated until death do they part.

TIM: So one thing you can do to make the pigeon fly home faster is you take the male out of his cage. You put another male in there with his girl, and of course he's going to get pissed off.

MINDY ROSEWITZ: Feathers are fluffing. And, "Who is the stray male in my cage?" And all this kind of stuff.

TIM: Drive him away.

MINDY ROSEWITZ: And he flies back so fast to clean house.

CHARLIE WOLCOTT: Yes, this is called the widowhood method. And yes, it is a powerful motivator.

MINDY ROSEWITZ: Yeah, they miss the Mrs.

JAD: So, wow. So, who knows how he did it. But what may have propelled GI Joe through those darkened war torn skies was jealous rage.

CHARLIE WOLCOTT: Could have been. Could have been.

TIM: You go, GI Joe, you go get that young buck.

JAD: Yeah. You go GI Joe. 

TIM: And if you have to save a thousand lives in the meantime ...

JAD: Okay.

TIM: Just do it.

ROBERT: Pretty good. Pretty good. Those pigeons. But I think we can go one more round for the human being and our natural ability to navigate. I—I met a—a woman named Lera Boroditsky. She's in the psychology department at Stanford University. She studies languages and she's found that some languages have a curiously, I don't know how to put this, a curiously pigeon-like power.

LERA BORODITSKY: [laughs]

ROBERT: No, seriously.

LERA BORODITSKY: There are languages that don't rely heavily on words like 'left' and 'right,' and some languages actually don't have those words at all in the culture I got to spend some time in, they rely on north, south, east, west.

JAD: Oh, you mean like sort of taking a left at the biscuit factory, I'm going to hang an East.

LERA BORODITSKY: More so than that, you would say things like, "There's an ant on your southwest leg." Or, "Move your cup to the north northwest a little bit."

JAD: Where are we talking about, by the way?

ROBERT: Yeah, you should back up. This story is too good. You should start at the beginning.

JAD: Yeah, where are we in the world right now?

LERA BORODITSKY: This is a community called Pormpuraaw, on Cape York in Australia.

ROBERT: Pormpuraaw.

JAD: When was this?

LERA BORODITSKY: This was a few years ago, I guess 2006. There, the way you say hello in Pormpuraaw is you say, "Which way are you going?" So in English you say, "How are you?" "Fine." In Pormpuraaw you say "Which way are you going?" And the answer must be something like, "North northeast in the middle distance, how about you?"

JAD: What?

LERA BORODITSKY: So imagine as you're walking around your studio, each person that says hi to you, you have to report your heading direction to them. So you literally can't get past hello in this language without knowing which way you're facing.

JAD: And you said north-northwest in the middle direction. Is it really that—that precise?

LERA BORODITSKY: It's actually more precise than that. There are 80 some different choices.

JAD: Wow.

LERA BORODITSKY: Yeah, it was socially very awkward. People thought I was quite dim because I wasn't oriented and I didn't know exactly which way was which all the time. You can ask a five year old there. Can you point northeast and they can point without hesitation. If you ask a Stanford professor or a Harvard professor to do the same thing, they have no idea.

JAD: But isn't this ...

LERA BORODITSKY: But, you know, I—hmm?

ROBERT: What if you were indoors? Like, what—what if you were in a—in a shelter? Could they still do it?

LERA BORODITSKY: Yep. They keep track of directions even when they're indoors ...

JAD: How?

LERA BORODITSKY: Without windows—you pay attention, you just have to pay attention. And I think what's really striking about the discovery of languages like this and folks like this is they have an ability that we call dead reckoning. And it's an ability to, you know, after any kind of circuitous path to turn around and head straight back home. That ability, we thought, was beyond human capacity. We had observed it in ants and we had observed it in birds. But there was always some other explanation, like birds have magnets in their beaks and ants are counting steps. You know, there's some kind of extra thing that they were doing. Now, there's 7,000 languages in the world. About a third of the world's languages have this property.

ROBERT: Wow.

LERA BORODITSKY: Not a third of the world speakers, but a third of the world's languages.

JAD Wow.

LERA BORODITSKY: And these are not folks that have magnets or special ant superpowers. They—they're using this—the same cognitive system that we're using. They're just using it differently. They're paying attention to something that we normally don't pay attention to.

ROBERT: But interestingly, Lera says, there was a moment, a very particular moment when she sort of slipped into attention.

LERA BORODITSKY: Yeah. So I had this interesting experience when I was there. So after about a week of being there, I was—people were constantly pointing to locations and I was constantly trying to stay oriented and after about a week I was walking along, I was kind of trudging through the sand. It was hot and I was thinking about whether I was wasting my time there or not. I wasn't sure if the study was going to work out and all of a sudden I noticed that in my head there is this extra little—it seemed almost like a win—like an extra window, like in a video game. There was like a little console, and in that console was a bird's eye view of the landscape that I was walking on and I was a little red dot that was traversing that landscape.

JAD: No kidding.

ROBERT: And you just become a Pillowpalauo, or whatever they're called.

LERA BORODITSKY: [laughs] And I thought, Wow, that's really cool. That makes it so much easier if you have that little extra module.

ROBERT: And all of a sudden is the correct word? Is that—it happened all of a sudden?

LERA BORODITSKY: I just saw it. It was—it was just there. And then I kind of shyly shared this with someone. I said, you know, this weird thing happened. I was walking along and I got this—had this view in my mind. And they looked at me kind of strangely and said, "Well, of course, how else would you do it? That's—that's exactly—of course, you have a bird's eye view and you keep track of your location from a bird's eye view."

ROBERT: Of course you do. I have that all the time.

JAD: No you don't.

ROBERT: No I don't.

JAD: I don't either.

[GPS VOICE: Proceed to break.]

JAD: And by the way, that voice right there, that's been joining us from time to time, we should explain that is Karen Jacobsen.

KAREN JACOBSEN: And I'm also known as The GPS Girl.

JAD: She was nice enough to agree to read some things that we could use in our stories. So that's what you've been hearing.

KAREN JACOBSEN: Okay. Well, shall we start with the script that I have in front of me?

ROBERT: Yeah. Yeah, let's do that. Okay.

KAREN JACOBSEN: Please enter your address.

JAD: Wow, that's amazing. It sounds like you've actually gone into the machine somehow.

KAREN JACOBSEN: Got to work out how to bottle that. Oh, I did.

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. 

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. Today on this program, we are calling it ...

ROBERT:  Lost and Found.

JAD: That's right. We have stories of getting lost.

ROBERT: And of course, getting found. Now, I think we're going to—we're going to make a little adjustment here.

KAREN JACOBSEN: Recalculating.

ROBERT: Shift gears.

KAREN JACOBSEN: Approaching emotional left turn.

ALAN LUNDGARD: Thank God.

ROBERT: It doesn't. I don't know how to turn left.

JAD: Give it to me.

JAD: This next story is a very different kind of lost and found, sort of a love story. 

JAD: If you can tell us your name?

ALAN LUNDGARD: Oh.

JAD: Here's the guy.

ALAN LUNDGARD: My name is Alan Lundgard. Do you want to ...

JAD: Do you want me to say anything more than that?

ALAN LUNDGARD: I don't know. Is this—is this for like a credit?

ROBERT: No. Often on our show, we let people introduce themselves.

ALAN LUNDGARD: Oh. I don't know. I don't have a title.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: All right.

JAD: So that's Alan. The girl, Emilie, we'll meet her a bit later, for reasons that will become clear. The story begins on a fall day in Brooklyn.

ALAN LUNDGARD: And so the day in question I guess was the morning of October 8.

JAD: They're both living in this one-room loft in Brooklyn.

ALAN LUNDGARD: And we woke up and, you know ...

JAD: Both 21.

ALAN LUNDGARD: ... went about our daily routine and prepared to go.

JAD: He was in art school. She was taking some time off from art school to work for a local artist.

ALAN LUNDGARD: So she would take the bike and I would take the train.

JAD: What was the morning like?

ALAN LUNDGARD: It was a beautiful day. It was, you know—the sun was low in the sky, so there were long shadows. I strapped on her helmet and adjusted it, took her bike out for her. We kissed each other goodbye and said, "I love you." And I watched her ride down the street in this early morning, and then, you know, on I went down into the subway.

JAD: Six hours later, he's working in the studio doing some sculpture, and he gets a call from a cop.

ALAN LUNDGARD: And he just said, "Emilie Gossiaux, she had an accident. She's at Bellevue. This is the address." And I said, "Oh. I mean, do you have any more information?" And he just told me that it was bad. I was carrying a bunch of stuff, and I just dropped everything and started running.

JAD: Now Alan and Emilie had only been together nine months, but when it started, says Alan ...

ALAN LUNDGARD: It was just so immediate.

JAD: The night they got together, they both just kind of knew.

ALAN LUNDGARD: It was sort of like a weird prophetic kind of thing where I think it was the first day that the schools had a snow day. It was snowed out. It was kind of like this past blizzard, you know, sort of like the city shuts down magical kind of thing.

JAD: He'd gone out with some friends just as the snow was coming down.

ALAN LUNDGARD: And we were trapped at this party.

JAD: And that's where he bumped into Emilie.

ALAN LUNDGARD: Pint-sized, these big, like, iridescent eyes, and a very kind of—I have trouble describing her voice. It's almost as if—and I know you guys are audio people, but it's like stereo, almost.

JAD: Truth is, they'd known each other for a while, but that night, says Alan ...

ALAN LUNDGARD: Fireworks all of a sudden. And it felt right.

JAD: So you had a—you had a feeling this wasn't just a thing. This was a thing!

ALAN LUNDGARD: Right. Or the thing.

JAD: The thing.

ALAN LUNDGARD: Right.

JAD: The thing?

ALAN LUNDGARD: The thing.

JAD: The soul thing?

ALAN LUNDGARD: Yeah.

JAD: All right.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Well, Emilie, there have always been boys around Emilie.

ROBERT: That's Susan Gossiaux, Emilie's mom. She says at first when Emilie told her about Alan, she thought, "Okay, so that's another boy." Emilie seemed to have that effect on boys, perhaps because she didn't really seem to need them.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Here is someone who's been obsessed with art, and has given up everybody in her life for art.

ROBERT: At the age of six ...

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: She was creating her own comic books.

ROBERT: In junior high school, she took drawing classes every night. And then in high school ...

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: She left us, friends, boyfriends ...

ROBERT: To go to a high school of the arts in Florida.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: No one stands in the way of her art. It's all she sees. It's all she focuses on.

ROBERT: But then she visited Emilie in May, a few months before the accident, and she met Alan.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: I met Alan, and he was delightful. But there was a different look that I'd never seen in Emilie's eyes before when she looked at him, and I didn't like it.

JAD: Tell us about the accident from your perspective?

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: From my—from when I ...?

JAD: Yeah.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: I was at work.

ROBERT: You're in New Orleans?

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Metairie, which is a suburb of New Orleans. And I get a telephone call. And I looked and I saw it was Alan. Alan has never called me before. I answered the phone, I said, "Hello, Alan." And he said, "You have to come. Emilie was hit by a truck."

ALAN LUNDGARD: A 18-wheeler semi-truck.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: And I took a breath and I said, "Alan, is Emilie dead?" And he said, "No, but you need to get here as soon as possible."

JAD: Six hours later, her and her husband, Emilie's dad, were at Bellevue Hospital here in Manhattan.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: They brought us into the—her room in the surgical ICU.

ALAN LUNDGARD: We all went in, and she was just lying in bed.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: And there were tubes.

ALAN LUNDGARD: Tubes down her throat.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Coming in and out. And ...

ALAN LUNDGARD: Her face was so swollen.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Emilie ...

ALAN LUNDGARD: Covered in blood.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: ... weighed probably at the time of the accident about 100 pounds, and she then weighed 128. She had swollen 28 pounds.

JAD: Oh, wow!

ALAN LUNDGARD: She had multiple fractures in her leg and her pelvis and the left side of her face.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: They had opened her abdomen, and they had taken her intestines out and put them on top of her body so that she could breathe.

ALAN LUNDGARD: And she was just lying completely still, you know?

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: That first 48 hours, nothing moved. Not—nothing.

ALAN LUNDGARD: We took up shifts. You know, her mother would be there in the day and her father in the evening, and then I would be there with her at night.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Her eyes weren't even flickering.

ROBERT: And as she sat there watching Emilie not move, she says she kept thinking, "Why? I've got these four kids and everything bad seems to happen to Emilie."

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Starting at six months, ear infections, then sinus infections, then asthma.

ROBERT: By kindergarten, Emilie was losing her hearing for reasons no one could quite figure out. She had to get hearing aids.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: On both sides.

ROBERT: But somehow, her mom says, all this just made Emilie more fierce.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: If anyone can conquer this, it's Emilie.

ALAN LUNDGARD: I think on the second day, they started to take her off her medication, expecting to see some sort of reaction from her.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: And nothing. Nothing. There was a nurse, and the nurse said that Emilie was gone, and asked me about organ donations. And I said, "Yes." And so I worked up enough courage to go into what they call the track room, which is where the residents usually are. And there was one woman resident sitting at a computer, and I went and I said, "When are you gonna let Emilie go?" And she said, "We will have a family meeting tomorrow morning and we'll talk then." And so I said, "Okay," and I left. And I went back, and I'm sitting with Emilie, side of her bed, and I'm telling her—Emilie and I read the book, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, when she was a sophomore. And I remember the ending of the book. "There's a land of the living, there's a land of dead, and the bridge is love. And that love is the only thing that survives." And it's kind of the way it goes. And so I was sitting there with Emilie, and I was telling this—I was saying this and talking in her ear and saying this, and talking to her and telling her that I would love her eternally through all time, that our love would never end. And Emilie raised her left hand.

ROBERT: What was ...

JAD: Oh my God. What was ...

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: It was chaos! I was yelling for the nurse, "I saw it! I saw her move!"

ALAN LUNDGARD: That was really one of the really abrupt moments.

JAD: Now they knew.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Emilie was not dead. Emilie was alive.

JAD: But how alive? Over the next few days, says Alan ...

ALAN LUNDGARD: She slowly started moving more, not really in response to anything. She'd writhe in bed, scratch her leg where there was a wound.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: We would hold her hand down and she'd slap. She'd slap our hands away.

JAD: But when they'd tell this to the doctors, the doctors would say ...

ALAN LUNDGARD: That's not indicative of any kind of mental functioning.

JAD: It could just be a reflex, really. So the medical team began trying to determine just how damaged was she?

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: The ophthalmologist teams were coming in, and they were trying to get Emilie's eyes to—eye pupils to respond. And they weren't responsive, and so I knew what that meant.

ROBERT: What did that mean?

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: It meant she could be blind. So Emilie couldn't see, couldn't hear.

JAD: Because remember, she wore hearing aids.

JAD: And why didn't you just put those in?

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: We tried.

ALAN LUNDGARD: I mean, we tried many times to put it in, but she just wouldn't allow it.

JAD: What would she do exactly when you did it?

ALAN LUNDGARD: Flail her head, shake around.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Kick. And she would hit. Had a lot of bruises on my body where she'd kicked me and pinched me. So we stopped.

ALAN LUNDGARD: Right.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Every once in a while, we would go back to it, but there was the question, you know, maybe she couldn't hear anymore.

ROBERT: What do you do to a person who's—you don't know what's going on inside her and you can't get to her?

ALAN LUNDGARD: You send her to a nursing home and, you know, that's where she would have remained.

JAD: And after several weeks in the ICU, Emilie ...

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: She was stable.

JAD: That meant they had to make a decision.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Once you become stable, then you have to move off surgical ICU and out of the hospital to either a rehabilitation or to a nursing home.

JAD: So that became the new question: where would she go? Could she be repaired, so to speak, in which case she'd go to rehab? Or is this it for her, in which case, she'd go to a nursing home?

ROBERT: Now making that call medically ...

MICHAL EISENBERG: Is sometimes tricky.

ROBERT: That's Dr. Michal Eisenberg. She's a physician at NYU and it's her job to make that call. She says one of the key criteria for getting someone into rehab ...

MICHAL EISENBERG: To do rehab on somebody, you need to have them reacting to you. A person needs to be able to participate in a meaningful way for three hours of therapy a day.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: They have to be able to follow commands because that's how you rehabilitate someone. If the person can't hear, if the person can't see, then there's no way to communicate with her.

ALAN LUNDGARD: And so they made the assessment that she could not go to rehab.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: And that Emilie should go to a nursing home. So I sent my husband back to New Orleans to look for a nursing home.

ALAN LUNDGARD: That they could bring her back to. They just kept it all a secret from me that they were gonna take her away from me.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: I mean, how do you tell someone who loves your daughter that much that we're taking her away? But it was not just one life that we had in our hands, it was two lives. We felt that that would be the best thing for him, and Alan could hate us maybe as a way for him to bridge and let go of that grief.

JAD: But then as the doctors were prepping Emilie to move her to a nursing home, they had to remove her tracheotomy, which was helping her breathe.

ALAN LUNDGARD: And she all of a sudden started talking.

JAD: Really?

ROBERT: She spoke?

ALAN LUNDGARD: Yes.

JAD: What was she saying?

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: She would curse, "Don't touch me, you blankety-blank." You know?

ALAN LUNDGARD: She would say stop.

JAD: This is in response to someone touching her?

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: To touch. Touching her.

JAD: And if she wasn't cursing, says Alan ...

ALAN LUNDGARD: She would call everybody Miss Dashwood.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Certain people that were touching her were Miss Dashwood.

JAD: What's ...

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Is it ...?

ALAN LUNDGARD: From Sense and Sensibility.

ROBERT: You're quoting Jane Austen?

ALAN LUNDGARD: Oh yeah, we had watched the movie, like, a couple months previous to this.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: So somehow she was locked in the movie.

ALAN LUNDGARD: And it was just the assumption of the doctors that she was just sort of mentally damaged.

JAD: But if she's calling people Miss Dashwood, doesn't that at least mean something?

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: No. It wasn't enough to say that Emilie could follow a command like "Sit up, raise your right hand."

JAD: So the plan was still the nursing home?

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Right.

ALAN LUNDGARD: I mean, no. Every possibility had not been exhausted.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: I can see him. He was sitting across the room, and his jaws were just clenched.

ALAN LUNDGARD: I just was not gonna give up.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: And he was saying, "You have to give her a chance. She—you have to give her the chance."

ROBERT: Did you have a plan?

ALAN LUNDGARD: No, I had no plan whatsoever.

ROBERT: No?

ALAN LUNDGARD: I was lost. This experience was just completely traumatic to me emotionally, but at the same time, I was going to help her in whatever way I could. The only trajectory I had was to help her.

JAD: And one night, just a few days before Emilie was gonna be discharged to a nursing home away from him.

ALAN LUNDGARD: I was there alone with her, and it was 3:00 am or something.

JAD: And she was calm.

ALAN LUNDGARD: Like, she wasn't trying to fight me away or anything. I had helped her fix a thing that was wrong with her mouth wiring. It was like a wire that was poking her, and I fixed it for her.

JAD: And he says at that moment something occurred to him.

ALAN LUNDGARD: It really just was like in the recesses of my mind.

JAD: He thought of the story of Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan. He'd read about it a few days earlier online, and he thought, "Hmm, what if I tried what Annie Sullivan did with Helen Keller on Emilie?"

ALAN LUNDGARD: I took her left hand with my left hand, and I leaned over, and using her wrist as the baseline for the words.

JAD: And his finger as the pen.

ALAN LUNDGARD: I just wrote, "I," waited a second, "L," waited a second, "O," waited a second, "V, E," waited a second, "YOU."

JAD: Then, according to Alan, she said to him ...

ALAN LUNDGARD: She said, "Oh, you love me? Thank you."

JAD: She literally replied immediately to it?

ALAN LUNDGARD: Yes, she replied immediately.

ROBERT: Does she know who you are?

ALAN LUNDGARD: No, she has no idea who I am.

JAD: But now he had a way to get to her so he could figure out how much of her was actually there, and maybe even prove it to the doctors.

ALAN LUNDGARD: You know, I had to have something that was conclusive to present to them. The following evening, I took out my cell phone. And it has a record function on it, and I started recording question after question to determine her cognitive ability.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alan Lundgard: What is your name?]

ALAN LUNDGARD: What. W-H-A-T.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emilie Gossiaux: What ...]

ALAN LUNDGARD: Is. I-S.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emilie Gossiaux: Is ...]

JAD: You fingerspelled every letter?

ALAN LUNDGARD: Yes.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emilie Gossiaux: Car. What is your—what is your name? Emilie! Let me spell it for you.]

ALAN LUNDGARD: She's writing her name on the palm of my hand.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emilie Gossiaux: E-M-I-L-I-E. Emilie.]

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Alan called me at four o'clock in the morning. He said, "You have to come now. I have proof."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alan Lundgard: I'm now going to ask her what year it is. What ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emilie Gossiaux: What ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alan Lundgard: Now I'm gonna write, "year."]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emilie Gossiaux: ... year ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alan Lundgard: ... is ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emilie Gossiaux: ... is ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alan Lundgard: ... it?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emilie Gossiaux: ... it?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alan Lundgard: Question mark.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emilie Gossiaux: 2010.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alan Lundgard: Very good, Emilie. Very good. Very, very good. Do you know where you are?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emilie Gossiaux: I don't know. I don't know where I am.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alan Lundgard: Okay, right now I'm gonna write "hospital."]

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Got there about 4:45 in the morning. Alan is over there by the bed continuing to fingerspell and talk to her. And—and she calls him Alan. She knows that this person who is fingerspelling on her hand is named Alan, but Alan can't get her to understand who he really is, that it's her Alan.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alan Lundgard: I'm just gonna write my name again, "Alan."]

ALAN LUNDGARD: But she just couldn't make that mental jump to connect her past life with her present.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emilie Gossiaux: Alan, what ethnicity are you? Are you Asian?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alan Lundgard: Am I Asian? I tell her no.]

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: The next thing I hear her say is "Pull me out of the wall."

ALAN LUNDGARD: She kept saying ...

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: "Pull me out."

ALAN LUNDGARD: "Please pull me out of here."

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: "It's dark in here."

ALAN LUNDGARD: "Pull me out."

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: "Help me."

ALAN LUNDGARD: "I know you can do it."

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: "Pull me out of the wall."

ALAN LUNDGARD: I kept saying I can't. I would write on her hand, "I can't."

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Alan starts to sob and I'm crying too.

JAD: What are you thinking at this point?

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: It wasn't enough.

JAD: That wasn't enough.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: It wasn't enough. And I said, "Alan, ask her about her hearing aids."

ALAN LUNDGARD: And ...

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: So he fingerspells, "Hearing aid."

ALAN LUNDGARD: "Hearing aid." And she said, "Okay."

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: She agreed to put the hearing aid in for the first time.

ALAN LUNDGARD: So we put it in and switched it on.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: He said, "Emilie."

ALAN LUNDGARD: "Emilie, can you hear me? It's me, Alan." And immediately ...

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Everything came back to me. I was there. I remembered everything.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: The door opened and Emilie stepped out.

ALAN LUNDGARD: She was back.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Yeah, it was just by hearing his voice. I knew it was him, and then he said my mom was there.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: And I heard her say what I'd been waiting for her to say all those weeks.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: I screamed, "Mommy, mommy!"

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: She said, "Mama."

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: You know, I couldn't believe they were there the whole time.

JAD: We asked Emilie, before she came back, where was she?

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: I didn't know where I was, if I could see at all. I mean, all I knew is that I was sleeping and I was always dreaming.

JAD: She says people would come to her in her dreams and say ...

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: "Don't—don't touch that."

JAD: "Stop scratching your wounds."

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: My dreams, they blended with reality.

JAD: She said she knew somehow that there were people around her, but she couldn't get to them. And that she also knew she was in a dream ...

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Why am I still sleeping?

JAD: ... that she couldn't somehow wake up from.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: I felt helpless. I felt really helpless.

JAD: Were you waiting for someone like that? I mean, were—because ...

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: I was waiting for some communication, you know? And I was relieved. Alan, he's a miracle to me.

JAD: Emilie is now at the Rusk Institute, which is one of New York City's leading rehab centers. And on the day we visited her, she'd just had a breakthrough.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Today was the first day I could stand on both legs and walk, actually walk. I walked a hundred feet today.

JAD: After rehab, she'll be moving into an apartment in Lower Manhattan with Alan. She's blind, and the chances of her seeing again are slim, but Alan plans to spend his time helping her cope and helping her find a new way to make art.

JAD: Emilie, can you introduce yourself?

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Do you want me to say "My name is Emilie Gossiaux?"

JAD: Yeah, just so we have it all on tape.

ALAN LUNDGARD: They asked me if I would have a title and I couldn't think of one, but I thought of one.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: A title?

ALAN LUNDGARD: Yeah. I'll do mine. My name is Alan Lundgard. I'm "the boyfriend."

ROBERT: [laughs]

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: My name is Emilie Gossiaux. I'm the girlfriend. [laughs]

ALAN LUNDGARD: You're the star of the show!

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Oh, that is …

JAD: If you want to know more about Alan and Emilie, go to our website, Radiolab.org.

ROBERT: I guess ...

JAD: We should go.

ROBERT: Yeah. Thanks for listening.

[AUTOMATED VOICE: You have reached your destination.]

JAD: Oh, and thanks to Karen Jacobson.

[ALAN LUNDGARD: Oh, this is Alan Lundgard. Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad and Tim Howard. Our staff includes Soren Wheeler, Ellen Horne, Pat Walters, Brenna Farrell and Lynn Levy. With help from Douglas Smith and Jessica Gross. Special thanks to Alice Gaby, Dave Pewter, Molly Webster, Mark Coyne, Jordan Bowen, Susan and Erick Gossiaux, George Martin, Craig Anderson and Garret Cook. Thank you. Bye-bye.]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: End of mailbox.]

 

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