JAD ABUMRAD: Hello, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: 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:  Well, 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: About this 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 gonna 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.

JAD: What?

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: Top of the pigeon's head, 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 here in the US 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 only about 10 percent of them ever find their way home. And so they are essentially lost. And it is a Bermuda Triangle for Cornell pigeons.

SOREN WHEELER: 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 gonna 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 gonna 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: Whoa!

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. It was especially noticeable when I was surrounded by small children who, unlike me, knew which direction they were facing.

JAD: Always?

LERA BORODITSKY: Yep. 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: Whoa!

LERA BORODITSKY: Not a third of the world's 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 gonna 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]

[CHARLES WOLCOTT: This is Charles Wolcott.]

[MINDY ROSEWITZ: Hi, this is Mindy Rosewitz.]

[CHARLES WOLCOTT: Support for NPR comes from NPR stations, and ...]

[MINDY ROSEWITZ: The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, helping NPR advance journalistic excellence in the digital age.]

[CHARLES WOLCOTT: The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant and peaceful world. More information at MacFound.org.]

[MINDY ROSEWITZ: And the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, supporting the performing arts, environmental conservation, medical research and the prevention of child abuse.]

[CHARLES WOLCOTT: This is NPR.]

 

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