JAD ABUMRAD: Uh, okay. Ready?

ROBERT KRULWICH: Okay.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: Oh, okay.

JAD: You start then.

ROBERT: Okay. This is Radiolab.

JAD: Today, we're talking about loops.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad. This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: It's all about loops.

JAD: Yep. I'm Jad.

ROBERT: And I'm Robert. You're listening to Radiolab.

JAD: Today we're talking about loops.

ROBERT: I'm Robert.

JAD: I'm Jad.

ROBERT: And it's all about loops.

JAD: Yep. I'm Jad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert.

JAD: We're talking about loops.

ROBERT: And speaking of things that happen over and over and over again. On this show here ... [laughs]

JAD: Hello?

ROBERT: Here he is again.

STEVEN STROGATZ: Hi, Jad.

JAD: Hey, Steve.

ROBERT: Steven Strogatz.

JAD: How are you?

ROBERT: Mathematician, Cornell University.

JAD: How's it going?

STEVEN STROGATZ: I'm good.

JAD: And Steve told us a story about a mathematical loop.

ROBERT: That threw mathematicians all over the world ...

JAD: For a loop. The story starts way back with a guy named ...

STEVEN STROGATZ: Gottlob Frege.

ROBERT: Gottlob Frege? How do you spell Gottlob?

STEVEN STROGATZ: Yeah. It's not Gottleib. It seems to be L-O-B at the end, unless it's a typo in every book I've ever seen.

ROBERT: Now to set this up very quickly, Gottlob Frege was a mathematician back in the 1870s and '80s. And he had a dream that mathematics could unlock the secrets of the universe, that you could maybe even build a machine, feed it some basic mathematical rules, and it would just start churning out discoveries.

JAD: Wouldn't even need a human being.

ROBERT: That's how powerful he thought math could be.

JAD: But that led him to a question: If math is the most fundamental thing in the universe, what is the most fundamental part ...

ROBERT: ... of math?

STEVEN STROGATZ: What's at the foundation? Is it numbers? Is it, you know, one, two, three?

JAD: Well, that's what you would think.

ROBERT: But Gottlob ...

STEVEN STROGATZ: He said, "No, there's a deeper thing than numbers. The deepest thing of all is what today we call sets. The set of things.

JAD: The set.

STEVEN STROGATZ: Yeah. So, like, what's a set? You could ...

ROBERT: Steve explained it to us using, of all things, Sesame Street.

JAD: Really old episode.

STEVEN STROGATZ: As far as just to set it up here, it's two people working at the Furry Arms Hotel. There's Humphrey ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: All right, Ingrid.]

STEVEN STROGATZ: ... who's got a green nose and a pink face. And his girlfriend—or I don't actually know what she is. She might be his wife. Ingrid. And so they're hotel keepers. And Ernie is in the background. And so Ingrid and Humphrey are taking an order.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Hello. How may I help you?]

STEVEN STROGATZ: A room service order from a room full of penguins.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: We're hungry!]

STEVEN STROGATZ: You know, Humphrey says, "I'll take your order, Mr. Penguin, sir."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: What would you like?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Fish.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Fish.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: A fish.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Fish.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Fish.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Fish.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Fish.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Fish.]

STEVEN STROGATZ: Then Humphrey says, "Let me check if I got that right."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Fish, fish, fish, fish, fish, fish.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: You got it!]

STEVEN STROGATZ: And then he calls over to Ingrid who's gonna call it into the kitchen. So he tells Ingrid ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Fish, fish, fish, fish, fish, fish.]

STEVEN STROGATZ: And Ingrid says, "Fish, fish, fish, fish, fish."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Fish, fish, fish, fish, fish.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: No.]

STEVEN STROGATZ: And Humphrey goes, "No. That's not right." [laughs]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Fish, fish, fish, fish, fish, fish.]

STEVEN STROGATZ: Because she only says it five times. But then, Ernie explains ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Excuse me, Ingrid and Humphrey? I have a better way for you to do this.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: A better way?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Mm-hmm. Count the fish.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Fish?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: One.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Fish.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Two.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Fish.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Three, four, five, six fish.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Holy mackerel!]

STEVEN STROGATZ: They both realize, Ingrid and Humphrey, how powerful this is. And they say, "Does it work for ...?"

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Does it work on other stuff? Say cinnamon rolls?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Yep.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Spark plugs?]

STEVEN STROGATZ: Spark plugs.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Absolutely.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Wow!]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Wow!]

STEVEN STROGATZ: That's the point, that what cinnamon buns and spark plugs and fish, the sets have in common is that there are six in each. I mean, if you try to say what does six really mean, it's the thing that those sets have in common.

ROBERT: According to Steve, it's not so much the number six that's important here.

JAD: Yeah. That's just the label for this characteristic that all these piles seem to share.

ROBERT: It's the pile itself, the set.

JAD: That is the most basic thing.

ROBERT: So Frege said ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Holy mackerel!]

ROBERT: "Well, this is it." Sets are ...

STEVEN STROGATZ: The bedrock.

ROBERT: ... that I've been looking for.

STEVEN STROGATZ: Yeah. We can build the rest of math on top of this.

ROBERT: Yeah. Then I can make my math machine that will solve the universe.

STEVEN STROGATZ: And I think he published a book sort of showing how this might work, except that Russell ...

ROBERT: Bertrand Russell, the mathematician.

STEVEN STROGATZ: ... then found a devastating paradox that ended up, well, annihilating what Frege had tried to do.

JAD: Russell's paradox has now become known as ...

STEVEN STROGATZ: The barber paradox.

ROBERT: It's a little thought experiment. So in this case, the set is a town.

STEVEN STROGATZ: Yep.

ROBERT: A town with people.

STEVEN STROGATZ: Yep.

JAD: One barber.

ROBERT: With the following rules.

STEVEN STROGATZ: In this town, the barber shaves everyone who doesn't shave himself. Sounds reasonable, right?

ROBERT: The barber shaves everyone who doesn't shave himself.

JAD: So some people shave themselves, some people go to the barber.

STEVEN STROGATZ: That's the universe. We're in a town where everyone who doesn't shave himself is shaven by this barber. And now the question is: who shaves the barber?

JAD: Who shaves ...

STEVEN STROGATZ: Remember, the barber—the barber has the property that he shaves everyone who doesn't shave himself. So he can't shave himself.

JAD: Ah!

STEVEN STROGATZ: But on the other hand ...

JAD: Couldn't he ...

STEVEN STROGATZ: ... if he doesn't shave himself, then he's one of those people who doesn't shave himself, and is therefore shaven by the barber.

JAD: Well, maybe the barber—here's two solutions for you guys. The barber could not shave. Couldn't he just not shave? Or maybe he could ...

STEVEN STROGATZ: No. Everybody in town shaves.

JAD: Or maybe he could set up some sort of mechanical device that's sort of like one of those ...

ROBERT: No, no. You can't do that. You can't change the rules.

STEVEN STROGATZ: Yeah, you can't answer sensibly what happens to the barber.

ROBERT: And no one has.

STEVEN STROGATZ: There's nothing to say. He either does or doesn't shave himself by ordinary Aristotelian logic because the barber can't shave himself and he can't not shave himself.

ROBERT: [laughs]

STEVEN STROGATZ: So there's something ...

ROBERT: And that's what ruined—that's what ruined the machine that would solve the universe?

JAD: Wait, but this seems ...

ROBERT: I think it could ruin an afternoon, or maybe you have to wait for a couple of hours, like after lunch before you go swimming, But I can't see that overthrowing all a life's work.

STEVEN STROGATZ: It does. It does. It turns out to be very, very problematic for the foundations of math.

JAD: Because what this barber paradox, the reason it was so annoying to mathematicians was that math is supposed to be this logical thing, right? Logic is the lifeblood of math. And yet here you had this little bit of math that was illogical, a self-contradicting set.

STEVEN STROGATZ: A self-contradicting set.

ROBERT: But Bertrand Russell, the guy who came up with all this, he didn't lose faith. He felt well, this is just a problem with set theory.

STEVEN STROGATZ: So then he spent a long time trying to make a theory. I think he called it a theory of types instead of sets. And he had certain admission rules that he thought would prevent paradoxes from happening.

JAD: And for a while it was looking pretty good. Under Bertrand Russell's system ...

ROBERT: ... there was no logical problems, no paradoxes. Until ...

JAD: ... this scrawny little German guy comes along.

JAD: And you say his name Gödel?

STEVEN STROGATZ: I hear it—I hear it often pronounced—well, I don't speak German, but mathematicians often say it like the woman's piece of clothing, you know, from the old days.

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: [laughs]

STEVEN STROGATZ: Something like "girdle."

JAD: Girdle.

JANNA LEVIN: Gödel.

JAD: There's a kind of "ur" sound in the middle.

JANNA LEVIN: Yeah, umlaut.

JAD: This is Janna.

JANNA LEVIN: Janna Levin.

JAD: She has written a book about Gödel.

JANNA LEVIN: And I'm a professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College.

JAD: And she says the point at which Gödel enters our story, it's 1930s, Vienna, Austria.

JANNA LEVIN: He had just recently finished his what would be equivalent to, like, a doctoral degree, a PhD.

JAD: Smart dude.

JANNA LEVIN: Kind of a rising star. It was no question that people around him understood that.

JAD: He was also maybe a little bit off.

JANNA LEVIN: He had real breaks with, you know, reality. He was—in the biographies they'd call him a paranoid schizophrenic, but he seemed more of kind of obsessive, depressive. I don't know if my armchair psychology terms are accurate. But he was in and out of sanitoria, and he had real difficulties being sure what was real.

JAD: The only reality he really trusted was math.

JANNA LEVIN: Circles.

JAD: Shapes.

JANNA LEVIN: Prime numbers.

JAD: Formulas, axioms.

JANNA LEVIN: Right.

JAD: And at a certain point, he got into paradoxes. Perhaps it was the barber paradox that lured him in, we don't know. But he began to think about and actually experiment with some of these paradoxical loops.

JANNA LEVIN: So he took something like the paradox of the liar. The paradox of the liar says, "This statement is a lie."

JAD: This statement is a lie.

JANNA LEVIN: Right.

JAD: Huh.

JANNA LEVIN: If it's true, then it's false. And if it's false, then it's true.

JAD: This statement is a lie. If you think about that too much, you might explode.

JANNA LEVIN: [laughs] Right.

JAD: So Gödel was interested in that phrase, and for various reasons he took it, tweaked it a little bit to come up with ...

JANNA LEVIN: The following statement: "This statement is unprovable."

JAD: This statement is unprovable.

JANNA LEVIN: Which is very important to know is if it's provable, then it's unprovable.

JAD: Obviously, a little bit of a word game. But Gödel thought forget words. What would happen if I converted this statement into math? Because in math, things are either provable or unprovable. They cannot be both at the same time. It's either true or false. And if it's true? Well then, damn it ...

ROBERT: You should be able to prove it.

JAD: Yeah.

JANNA LEVIN: So he said, "I'm going to assign a special number, unique number to make that a purely mathematical statement by coding it in a very clever way into arithmetic."

ROBERT: To be honest, we don't completely get this part.

JANNA LEVIN: It's very, very clever.

ROBERT: But once he did his math-y stuff, he had a rigorous mathematical statement right there on the page. He looked at it, and he realized that what he just said in math ...

JAD: ... is that the following statement ...

JANNA LEVIN: This statement is unprovable.

JAD: ... is ...

JANNA LEVIN: It's true because it's actually unprovable.

JAD: Meaning in math, this statement actually is unprovable.

JANNA LEVIN: [laughs]

JAD: Because it is true, the logic of math will not let you prove that it is true. So it might be true, we'll just never know.

STEVEN STROGATZ: Nothing like that is supposed to happen in math. Things are supposed to be true or not true.

ROBERT: And you're supposed to be able to prove every true thing, says Steve. So if there's something true that you can't prove, that means that the math is strangely, woefully incomplete.

STEVEN STROGATZ: It's always called his incompleteness theorem. That's the phrase. The Gödel incompleteness theorem is that if you have a system of axioms that are consistent, meaning they don't contradict themselves, they're necessarily incomplete. That is, there are certain statements you can make within that system that you can't prove or disprove. And all of math has this character. This is the big shock. This is not just about word games, about logic puzzles with barbers. This is as devastating for even just counting. For one, two, three, four. In other words, math is shot through and through with these kind of statements that you can't either prove or disprove. Seriously, the deep thinkers at the time were amazed at this. It was recognized as one of the great ideas of the 20th century, for sure, maybe of all time. Maybe I should make it more concrete. There's a question that as far as I know is still not solved.

JAD: Steve gave us this example of a problem.

STEVEN STROGATZ: Something called Goldbach's conjecture.

JAD: That kind of gives you a sense of what incompleteness feels like.

STEVEN STROGATZ: So Goldbach's conjecture says that you can always write any even number as a sum of two prime numbers. So let me give you some examples of that. Like, say, 12.

JAD: Yeah.

STEVEN STROGATZ: Remember, first of all prime number means you can divide it by one and by itself. Like, 7 is a prime number—you could divide by 1 and 7 but nothing else.

JAD: Okay.

STEVEN STROGATZ: All right. So 12, which is an even number, is 7 plus 5.

JAD: Those are primes.

STEVEN STROGATZ: Those are both prime numbers. All right. Let's try another one. How about 24. That's 11 plus 13.

JAD: Right.

STEVEN STROGATZ: Okay. Or 36? 19 plus 17. Any even number. Now this has been checked out to—I don't know what, billions, trillions, maybe hundreds of trillions. So no one has ever found a counter-example to Goldbach's conjecture. And here's the thing: you might think that either it's true or it's false. It might be that this statement: every even number is a sum of two primes, it might be neither true nor false, but what we today call undecidable.

JAD: Hmm.

STEVEN STROGATZ: Undecidable is a term that comes from Gödel.

JAD: Undecidable.

STEVEN STROGATZ: Yeah. I mean, supposed in some ethereal or transcendental sense—like that is, suppose that there's God, and God knows that this is true.

ROBERT: [laughs]

STEVEN STROGATZ: Then, you know, what about us here among the world of human beings? All we can do is check each even number, and every time we check, it's true. That would never constitute a proof because we'd never run out of numbers.

ROBERT: If you then say that to understand everything, you either have to defer to God who does understand everything, if you believe in God. But if you don't believe in God, you then have to live with mystery and not knowing.

STEVEN STROGATZ: Mm-hmm. Yes.

ROBERT: That's all you can say?

STEVEN STROGATZ: I'm gonna say yes. I'm gonna say uh-huh. Well, I think you've encapsulated it perfectly. I think that Gödel himself was, I think, a believer in all kinds of mystical things. Like, for him, this was very freeing and liberating because it meant that there were—that we couldn't be mechanized. There was profound mystery forever.

ROBERT: Hmm.

JAD: Hold—hold on. I'm on your team here, but let me just point out something. Gödel, when he died, he was not exactly liberated. He was a paranoid—like, he thought people were trying to poison him. He starved himself to death. He wasn't exactly liberated in the end.

ROBERT: Well, but I choose to believe that somewhere in his tortured mind—and I guess his mind was pretty tortured—there was a little fellow humming a song, a song of liberation.

[choir singing]

ROBERT: Thanks to Steve Strogatz. He's currently working on a new book which he calls The Joy of X. Not "Sex," just X. We don't even know what he's experiencing the joy of.

JAD: [laughs] And JANNA Levin, her book about Gödel is called A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines.

[choir singing]

ROBERT: And finally our last loopy piece.

JAD: Yeah. And this one, like the last one, involves things feeding back on themselves.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: Kind of like your classic positive feedback loop.

ROBERT: Which is what, exactly?

JAD: Well, it's like what—you can do with audio. You take a speaker and a mic, you put the—you feed the sound from the speaker into the mic, and then back into the speaker and into the mic, it multiplies and multiplies, and then you get something like ...

[feedback squeal]

ROBERT: Painful is what that is. That's horrible!

JAD: Yeah. It can definitely be painful. But that kind of feedback loop, like in the case of our next story, can also take the pain away.

MELANIE THERNSTROM: Yes.

JAD: Comes to us from this lady.

MELANIE THERNSTROM: I'm Melanie Thernstrom.

JAD: She's a writer.

MELANIE THERNSTROM: The author of a book on pain called The Pain Chronicles.

JAD: Which is a book that began as a chronicling of her own pain, which she's been suffering from ...

MELANIE THERNSTROM: Every day.

JAD: ... for the last 15 years.

JAD: And what sort of pain?

MELANIE THERNSTROM: Oh, pain in my neck and right shoulder and right side of my head.

ROBERT: All at once?

MELANIE THERNSTROM: Yeah. It's all at once.

ROBERT: Oh my gosh.

JAD: Did it start with something? Did you hit it there? Or how did it start?

MELANIE THERNSTROM: It didn't start with an injury of any kind, but it did start at a discrete time.

JAD: Goes back to 1997. She was in upstate in New York at a country house on a date.

MELANIE THERNSTROM: It was our first date. And I wanted to impress him, so I swam across a pond, about a mile across.

JAD: Was this your idea or was this his idea?

MELANIE THERNSTROM: It was my idea.

JAD: Wow. That's a different kind of first date. And you made it all the way there and back?

MELANIE THERNSTROM: Yes. And nothing happened, but that night ...

JAD: When she got into bed ...

MELANIE THERNSTROM: ... I was kept awake by this strange burning sensation in my shoulder and neck. I didn't get the head pain for four more years. And that particular pain never went away and got worse over time.

ROBERT: Burning. So, it was like a nerve was being ...

MELANIE THERNSTROM: Yeah. I mean, eventually, I got an MRI a couple years later and there was nerve impingement in my spine. And so there was ...

ROBERT: Over the years, she says, she's tried everything. She's tried drugs and she's tried physical therapy. She's tried distraction.

MELANIE THERNSTROM: Like, I'll go to a matinee and if it's a scary movie, I just don't stay focused on the pain.

JAD: So distraction can work.

ROBERT: But then she says as soon as she gets out of the movie, it's back.

JAD: And it's angry for being ignored.

MELANIE THERNSTROM: Sometimes I'd have the sensation, like, that that right side of my head was dying. Like, the nerves were dying. Like a dead tree. And that image would kind of frighten me.

ROBERT: And that thought? She'd find that that thought would ...

MELANIE THERNSTROM: Make the pain worse. And making the pain worse will inspire further negative fantasies.

JAD: Which will make the pain worse.

MELANIE THERNSTROM: Which will make the pain worse.

JAD: Which will inspire more fantasies.

MELANIE THERNSTROM: Yes. So the loop goes.

JAD: Positive feedback loop.

MELANIE THERNSTROM: Yeah.

ROBERT: In a negative sort of way.

JAD: Right. And eventually, Melanie decided, "Okay, I'm gonna write a book about this. Let me do some research."

MELANIE THERNSTROM: So I was reading a lot about self-inflicted pain and religious rites. And I actually went to witness a Hindi festival, Thaipusam, in Kuala Lumpur.

JAD: And what she saw really changed her mind about things. And you can see video of this festival on YouTube.

ROBERT: What you see is a dense crowd of folks. And in the middle of the crowd, there are these monks doing insane acts of devotion.

MELANIE THERNSTROM: They literally, like, thread needles through their tongues, poke skewers through their cheeks. Weighted fish hooks dangle from their backs.

JAD: And yet, she says when she would look in their faces, they seemed relaxed.

MELANIE THERNSTROM: Like, their eyes don't tear up. They don't gasp for breath.

JAD: Like really relaxed. It wasn't just that they were tolerating the pain, it actually seemed like they weren't ...

MELANIE THERNSTROM: In pain.

JAD: At all.

MELANIE THERNSTROM: And I would think, "Okay, this person here has a skewer in his mouth. I'm in pain? This is pathetic." You know, and you can't become a religious Hindi in order to experience this analgesic benefit. Like, that's cheating. But I did feel like, "Okay, so one way to describe it is faith. But for every way that you can describe in religious terms, there's also a way you can describe things in scientific terms."

SEAN MACKEY: Yeah. The reality is all of our pain is in our head.

JAD: Which brings us to this guy. This is Sean Mackey.

SEAN MACKEY: Chief of the Stanford Pain Management Division.

JAD: And he will tell you that one of the most basic facts about pain is that it is not purely physical.

SEAN MACKEY: We've got signals coming up from the body that are sending us a message.

JAD: Like if you whack a toe, the signal shoots up some nerves in your leg into your spine.

SEAN MACKEY: And those signals converge in our brain.

JAD: And before you even feel a thing ...

SEAN MACKEY: There are a multitude of what I refer to as little amplifiers throughout our brain that turn up and turn down the overall pain experience.

JAD: And these amplifiers are things like your mood ...

SEAN MACKEY: Anxiety, depression.

JAD: ... attention ...

SEAN MACKEY: Expectations.

JAD: All of these things feed back onto that signal coming up from the body. And they can either boost it up, up, up, up, past a certain point where you get a sensation of pain, or they can deaden it down, down, down, down, down, down, down, to where you don't feel anything at all.

ROBERT: Huh.

JAD: Point is pain is a conversation between the brain and the body. And Sean thought, "What would happen if I actually let people see that conversation?" Could they, you know ...

SEAN MACKEY: Take control of it.

MELANIE THERNSTROM: Yes.

JAD: So he did a study, and Melanie signed up.

MELANIE THERNSTROM: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: So describe what happens in this experiment.

MELANIE THERNSTROM: So you're put in this MRI machine.

SEAN MACKEY: We put somebody into a scanner.

JAD: A brain scanner.

MELANIE THERNSTROM: And you have a screen in front of you.

JAD: And what you see on this screen is something that normally only the researchers would see. You see your own brain in real time.

SEAN MACKEY: Yeah.

ROBERT: Well, you're not seeing the whole thing. You're just seeing one piece.

SEAN MACKEY: Called the anterior cingulate cortex.

MELANIE THERNSTROM: There are many parts of the brain that respond to pain, but that's the one that ...

SEAN MACKEY: It's an area that has been shown to be involved with pain perception, turning pain up and down.

MELANIE THERNSTROM: It's thought to give pain its emotional valence, its negativity.

JAD: And do you actually see an image of this little piece of your brain, right there in front of you on the screen? Are you looking at your brain?

MELANIE THERNSTROM: No, no.

SEAN MACKEY: That's confusing to everybody. So instead, we give a visual metaphor.

MELANIE THERNSTROM: You see an image of ...

SEAN MACKEY: Fire.

MELANIE THERNSTROM: ... flames.

SEAN MACKEY: In an ice cave. And it is kind of a cartoon flame, but it looks realistic.

ROBERT: So are these flickering flames? Do they leap into the—do they leap?

MELANIE THERNSTROM: Yes. They leap, and the more activation there is in that region, the higher the flames go.

JAD: So Melanie is lying in a scanner, watching her own pain flames. And Sean gives her a set of instructions.

SEAN MACKEY: We say, "Okay. We want you to imagine that you're sitting in a nice, warm, soothing jacuzzi."

MELANIE THERNSTROM: You know, this burning is a warm bath, this burning is very relaxing. I'm relaxing into it.

JAD: Yeah. But pretty soon, it was like, "Hot. Hot! It's kind of hot. It's scalding me. I have to get out." And before she knew it, the flames were ...

MELANIE THERNSTROM: Growing.

ROBERT: So Sean says, "Okay. Okay. So how about you're lying on a beautiful beach?"

JAD: Yes!

MELANIE THERNSTROM: You know, this burning is a pleasant suntan.

SEAN MACKEY: And the sand is nice and warm and pleasant.

MELANIE THERNSTROM: I'm gonna look so good in my new bathing suit if I just keep getting burnt like this.

JAD: Yeah, sunburn. Hot. All right ...

MELANIE THERNSTROM: And then the flames would kind of go crazy.

JAD: Her thoughts keep slipping out of her control.

MELANIE THERNSTROM: You know, if ...

JAD: Every time she would see those flames rise, she would think, "Oh, no. The flames are rising," which would make them rise even more, and then more and more until she had this bonfire on the screen.

MELANIE THERNSTROM: You're immediately struck by—they look like the flames where you're gonna—the flames where you're burned at the stake. I'd been reading a lot of lives of saints at that point.

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: But then Melanie had an idea. She said, "Why don't I take this negative image and flip it?"

MELANIE THERNSTROM: And then I started trying to move into the idea of being a saint or a martyr, and that I, you know, believed that I would have no pain, and that I was protected by my faith.

ROBERT: Oh!

JAD: And as Melanie started thinking about this, she could see the flames ...

MELANIE THERNSTROM: Dying down.

JAD: Just a little bit.

JAD: Wow.

MELANIE THERNSTROM: Which is odd because this isn't—you don't know me, but this isn't actually, like, part of my fantasy life.

ROBERT: Yes.

JAD: But she thought, "Okay, I'll try this."

MELANIE THERNSTROM: Let me keep going in that kind of feeling. So I was trying to pick one of the few prayers I knew. I mean, I didn't—I'm half Jewish and half Christian, so I was sort of not settled in onto what kind of martyr I was.

ROBERT: [laughs]

MELANIE THERNSTROM: You know, I started thinking, "Should I really be a Jewish martyr since if you're half Jewish, your mother's Jewish. It's the right side. Really I'm Jewish more than Christian." And then I started thinking about Jewish martyrs and, like, what prayers did they say.

JAD: And as she added and revised details ...

MELANIE THERNSTROM: That continued to make the flames go down. Okay. I'm in the right brain state. Let me do more of that.

JAD: So Melanie finally decided, "Okay, I'm gonna be this one particular Jewish martyr. His name is Akiba ben Yosef." He was burned at the stake by the Romans for teaching the Torah. And there's a particular legend that just as the executioner is about to set fire to the logs right underneath his feet, Akiba stared the executioner in the eyes and smiled. And the executioner was like, "Why are you smiling? You're about to be burned alive." And Akiba said, "All my life, when I said those words, 'You shall love the Lord, your God with all your heart, with all your soul,' I was sad because I thought 'When shall I be able to fulfill that command?' And now that I'm giving my life and my resolution remains firm, why shouldn't I smile?"

ROBERT: And by the time Melanie had this fantasy built up in her mind, she looked over at the flames and she noticed they were almost gone.

MELANIE THERNSTROM: Like zero. You know, zero pain.

JAD: For the first time, she'd taken control of it.

MELANIE THERNSTROM: I felt like, "Wow! I am watching my brain thinking my thoughts, and I am changing my thoughts by thinking and watching myself do this."

JAD: So you were looking at yourself looking at yourself looking at yourself looking at yourself.

MELANIE THERNSTROM: Yes!

SEAN MACKEY: It's like peering inside and seeing the ghost in the machine.

MELANIE THERNSTROM: I felt, you know, like someone taking their first step on the moon. Like, I am watching my brain thinking my thoughts. And I am thinking my thoughts, changing my thoughts by thinking and watching my thoughts, watching my brain, changing my thoughts by thinking and watching myself do this.

ROBERT: Well, I need to establish this, that once you were—did your two sessions and you're in between exercises, without all these gizmos, could you address your pain better?

MELANIE THERNSTROM: No. Like, you'd think, "Well, okay. Can't you just get the feedback from your own body?" But somehow, this sensation isn't quite direct enough that I think that you could do it without the visual feedback.

JAD: But for that moment, in that machine?

MELANIE THERNSTROM: It was power.

JAD: Before we go, a very special thanks to our singers who joined us this hour from the New Music Ensemble at LaGuardia High School. They are ...

KELLY ETHEMEU: Kelly Ethemeu.

JULIAN SOTTO: Julian Sotto.

ELI GREENHOE: Eli Greenhoe.

JULIA EGAN: Julia Egan.

RUBY FRUME: Ruby Frume.

JAD: Those guys wrote and performed all the music between the pieces. You guys rock. And thanks to the guy who teaches them and who organized this, Mr. Robert Apostle.

ROBERT APOSTLE: Stop!

ROBERT: And let's begin.

[ANSWERING MACHINE: Message three.]

[SEAN MACKEY: This is Sean Mackey at Stanford University. So it looks like the credits.]

[JANNA LEVIN: This is Janna.]

[STEVEN STROGATZ: This is Steve Strogatz.]

[JANNA LEVIN: Radiolab is produced by Jad ...]

[KURT BRAUNOHLER: I call him "Dad" and Kristen calls him "Chad," but his real name is Jad Abumrad.]

[SEAN MACKEY: Our staff includes ...]

[JANNA LEVIN: Ellen Horne ...]

[KURT BRAUNOHLER: Ellen Horne!]

[SEAN MACKEY: Soren Wheeler.]

[KURT BRAUNOHLER: Soren Wheeler!]

[JANNA LEVIN: Sean Cole.]

[KURT BRAUNOHLER: Sean Cole!]

[SEAN MACKEY: Pat Walters.]

[KURT BRAUNOHLER: Pat Walters!]

[STEVEN STROGATZ: Tim Howard.]

[KURT BRAUNOHLER: Tim Howard!]

[JANNA LEVIN: Brenna Farrell.]

[KURT BRAUNOHLER: Brenna Farrell!]

[SEAN MACKEY: And Lynn Levy.]

[KURT BRAUNOHLER: And Lynn Levy.]

[SEAN MACKEY: Levy.]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: End of mailbox.]

-30-

 

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