ROBERT KRULWICH: Hi, I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD ABUMRAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: This is Radiolab.

JAD: And in this hour, a show about brains.

ROBERT: Yes.

JAD: When we think about our brains, if we ever think about our brains ...

ROBERT: Which we don't very often.

JAD: No.

ROBERT: You can blink, your heart can beat. You don't think these things.

JAD: Yeah. You don't even think about it even when you're thinking.

ROBERT: Right. So—so you and your brain have a kind of quiet agreement to just get along.

JAD: Yeah, but every so often, you and your brain fall out of agreement here. And then where are you?

ROBERT: We have four stories about just that. Starting with this one.

JAD: A short time ago, we got an email from a listener in San Francisco.

ROBERT: Something odd had happened to her and she wanted to share it with us.

JAD: I missed—I didn't hit the record button fast enough. Could you just tell me your name again? And ...

LIZA SHOENFELD: My name is Liza Shoenfeld, and I'm a research technician at the Gladstone Institute at the University of California, San Francisco.

JAD: Now, Liza is just getting started with her scientific career.

LIZA SHOENFELD: I finished my undergraduate degree about a year and a half ago.

JAD: And this story takes place as she was about to take that next step after college and apply to grad school.

ROBERT: And the star of our story, other than, of course, Liza herself, is a little mischievous part of her brain. Well, everyone's brain ...

LIZA SHOENFELD: Part of your brain called the basal ganglia.

JAD: Basal ganglia, which at the time she'd been studying.

LIZA SHOENFELD: The basal ganglia is a fairly large part of your brain.

JAD: It's actually this big hunk deep in the center.

LIZA SHOENFELD: And it's responsible for controlling and coordinating movement.

ROBERT: When I move my neck back and forth, am I using my basal ganglia?

LIZA SHOENFELD: Yeah.

ROBERT: When I make an expression in my face and I'm using my basal ganglia?

LIZA SHOENFELD: Definitely.

JAD: What about if I'm reading The New Yorker?

LIZA SHOENFELD: I don't think so.

ROBERT: Apologies to The New Yorker and its employees.

JAD: Point is, this part of your brain is really basic.

ROBERT: And at the lab where she was working, they had figured out this particular basal ganglia trick.

LIZA SHOENFELD: Using this really cool technology called optogenetics.

JAD: What they'd done is they found a way to take a mouse, thread a little fiber optic cable through its skull, deep into its brain, into its basal ganglia.

LIZA SHOENFELD: So that when you shine a blue laser, literally, we just shine lasers into mouse brains.

JAD: They could actually turn its basal ganglia or parts of it on or off.

ROBERT: And this is in a live mouse?

LIZA SHOENFELD: This is in a live mouse. So we have these really cool videos showing a mouse running around, having a great mouse time. You turn the light on, we can get him to freeze ...

ROBERT: In mid-stride?

LIZA SHOENFELD: Yeah.

ROBERT: So you hit the laser and—boom!—the mouse stops.

LIZA SHOENFELD: Mouse is like this.

JAD: So you use light to, like, puppetize the mouse?

LIZA SHOENFELD: Yes.

JAD: If you're this mouse, no matter how hard you try ...

ROBERT: Move feet, move!

JAD: ... as long as that light is on ...

ROBERT: Come on, move.

JAD: ... you can't do it. Liza is holding the strings.

ROBERT: Not exactly. It turns out she doesn't get to play with the laser that much.

LIZA SHOENFELD: I'm kind of like I'm the bottom of the totem pole, so I do a lot of pipetting.

JAD: It's like where you squirt liquid from one tube to another.

LIZA SHOENFELD: I'm working on my pipetting skills these days.

JAD: Grunt work. Get the thumb muscles up.

LIZA SHOENFELD: Oh, I could beat anyone in the thumb-wrestling competition right now.

JAD: So at a certain point, she was like, "Enough of this. Time for me to apply to grad school."

LIZA SHOENFELD: Yeah, I applied to five. University of California-San Diego, University of Washington in Seattle, UCSF, Rockefeller University and Harvard.

JAD: Okay. So you're going big.

LIZA SHOENFELD: Yeah. Go big or go home.

JAD: Right. Exactly.

ROBERT: So she heads off to her first interview.

LIZA SHOENFELD: University of Washington went great. I loved it. Went down to UCSD in San Diego. It's a beautiful place, great scientists. It's actually the largest neuroscience community in the world.

JAD: So far, so good.

ROBERT: Did you ever go back to San Francisco where we are now?

JAD: This is where things get strange.

LIZA SHOENFELD: Yes. So my last interview. My very last interview, it was at UCSF.

JAD: And she says about a week before that interview ...

LIZA SHOENFELD: I got really sick, pretty severe nausea. I wasn't really able to eat or do anything and ...

JAD: Throwing up?

LIZA SHOENFELD: Yeah, all sorts—I don't know. I had some bad dim sum the weekend before. That could have been it.

ROBERT: Yeah, that's it. So she goes to the doctor, he gives her some pills to fight the nausea.

LIZA SHOENFELD: And then the next day was my interview. Friday was my interview. So I went, you know, there's the nice introduction and they give you breakfast.

JAD: At this point, she's pretty familiar with the whole routine.

LIZA SHOENFELD: Generally, the way these interviews are structured is that we talk a little bit about my research in dopamine and the basal ganglia and these mice.

JAD: They tell her about their work.

LIZA SHOENFELD: I have to think of a couple witty questions. I ask my questions.

JAD: Anyhow, she's raring to go and she heads in to meet her first basal gangliatician of the day.

LIZA SHOENFELD: And he studies—one of the things he studies is dopamine.

JAD: In the basal ganglia.

LIZA SHOENFELD: He studies stuff that's a little bit more molecular than what I—than what I know. But we had a good conversation about dopamine. And at this point in the day, I was feeling okay ...

ROBERT: No nausea.

LIZA SHOENFELD: Then I went to my second interview, which is this woman that I was so excited to talk to. Her name is Allison Doupe, and she's pretty well known.

ROBERT: Her name is Allison Doupe?

LIZA SHOENFELD: Allison Doupe.

ROBERT: Wow. And she studies dopamine?

LIZA SHOENFELD: [laughs] She studies songbirds.

ROBERT: Songbirds.

JAD: Which is what Liza really wanted to study.

LIZA SHOENFELD: So birds have basal ganglias, too.

JAD: So she's pretty fired up.

LIZA SHOENFELD: And kind of the beginning of that interview, my—my face started to feel a little bit strange. And I was wearing glasses that day, so what I thought was happening was that my glasses were—you know, your glasses get loose and they kind of start to slip down your nose and you have to kind of tighten the muscles around your ears to try and keep your glasses on. So we were talking and I just kept on feeling like, "God, why can't I stop tightening that?" It was—kind of got to the point where it started to distract me, but I felt okay. Then we went to lunch, and this was a lunch with all the current students and a lot of the current faculty and all the prospective students. And at lunch, I remember on the walk to lunch my head just started spontaneously turning to the right like ...

JAD: Like ...

LIZA SHOENFELD: Like I—like I would be trying to sit here and face you and I would just turn over here and face Robert.

JAD: That's—that's such a funny thing.

LIZA SHOENFELD: It's strange.

JAD: Was your neck moving and you're like, "No neck. Don't do that."

LIZA SHOENFELD: Yes, exactly what was happening. I was trying to send signals to my neck being like, "All right, sitting here having lunch with an important professor, why don't you just face him, talk to him," and instead I'm just turning over here, turning over here, turning over here.

ROBERT: Oh, you're turning a fairly wide arc.

LIZA SHOENFELD: Yeah.

ROBERT: You are turning away from the professor.

LIZA SHOENFELD: Oh, yeah, so I remember—I remember at one point in lunch turning my chair like this.

ROBERT: You're trying to rotate? [laughs]

LIZA SHOENFELD: So I could talk to him.

ROBERT: A permanent sidelong glance.

LIZA SHOENFELD: Yeah.

JAD: But she figured, must just be a cramp or something.

LIZA SHOENFELD: I'm kind of thinking. "Oh, okay. So I slept funny last night. I must have slept in a weird angle on my pillow. Now I'm having a neck cramp. My glasses are loose. I just got to tighten the glasses."

JAD: Yeah. Everything under control.

LIZA SHOENFELD: So—so then I, after lunch was going to go to my third interview. It was with Allison Doupe's husband, who also studies songbirds. So he's familiar with the basal ganglia, too.

JAD: They meet up to walk over to his office together.

LIZA SHOENFELD: And so I explained to him on the walk over, "I think I'm having neck cramps. Would it be possible maybe to try and get a hot pad?"

ROBERT: He says, "Sure, let me track one down."

LIZA SHOENFELD: But on the walk, not only now does my neck start turning to the right, but it's snapping itself back.

ROBERT: Involuntarily.

LIZA SHOENFELD: Yeah, my head snapping back.

JAD: So suddenly your eyes are pointing up at the sky.

LIZA SHOENFELD: And then as I'm talking to him, I'm realizing that I can't control my eyebrows from raising pretty tightly. So I look like ...

JAD: Like you're doing right now?

LIZA SHOENFELD: Like I'm doing right now.

ROBERT: So you're in a state of—of deep surprise, to read your face. High eyebrow.

LIZA SHOENFELD: Constant deep surprise, I can't stop it. I look surprised at everything I'm saying and I can't stop it. So after the eyebrows start and I can't pull them back down, then—then the mouth, then all this area starts to go.

ROBERT: Your lower face.

LIZA SHOENFELD: Yes.

JAD: What is it doing?

LIZA SHOENFELD: It turns into this really twisted, painful, grimacing smile.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: Would you mind demonstrating?

LIZA SHOENFELD: I'll demo it. I'll demo it. Okay so I've got the neck, it looks like this.

JAD: Crane back.

LIZA SHOENFELD: The eyebrows are like this.

JAD: Total surprise.

LIZA SHOENFELD: My face is a lot like this.

JAD: Crazy Frankenstein face.

ROBERT: [laughs] This is not the obviously the best demeanor for a graduate interview.

LIZA SHOENFELD: No. Yeah, it's not—it's not going well at this point. And I'm—and I'm very ...

ROBERT: Now is Michael now noticing that something is ...

LIZA SHOENFELD: Yeah, I think at that point he thought I was just really excited to be talking about neuroscience and I'm just trying to think, okay, mouth like try—try and just calm down a little bit. And it was pretty painful too. I mean, it was like, imagine like a charley horse in your face.

JAD: Oh!

LIZA SHOENFELD: Yeah.

ROBERT: But she gets through the interview.

LIZA SHOENFELD: I actually do okay. You know, he asks me tough questions about science and I can answer him, I think. And I leave the interview. And then I'm met by the woman who's the head of the admissions weekend.

JAD: And she took one look at Liza ...

LIZA SHOENFELD: And she said, "You know, I don't know if you should do the rest of the interviews." And with her is my student host.

JAD: And Liza decides, all right, let me just call my dad.

LIZA SHOENFELD: Just to say, "Hey, Dad. I'm in the middle of my interview and something kind of funny is happening with my face. I can't control it." And while I'm talking to him, I lose control of my mouth and my tongue. So I can't—I can kind of talk, but it's pretty bad, really. It's pretty bad.

ROBERT: And is your dad a doctor?

LIZA SHOENFELD: No. Imagine your kid calling you being like, "I'm losing control of my face." And as they're telling you that, I started to think something's really wrong. And then my student host comes rushing back in running and he looks at me and he tries to put on a calm face, and he says, "So now we need to go to the emergency room."

JAD: So they throw her into a taxi.

LIZA SHOENFELD: And in the taxi it went from, "I can't control my mouth" to a—I mean, a complete ...

ROBERT: All palsied in a torque.

LIZA SHOENFELD: I did not look good. And as we're pulling up to the emergency room was when my throat started tightening up.

JAD: They rush her inside.

LIZA SHOENFELD: And they have me in a gurney in a room in the back of the ER, surrounded by six people within two minutes.

ROBERT: Doctors swarming all around her.

LIZA SHOENFELD: An oxygen mask. EKG leads all over my chest. They do an IV.

ROBERT: And as she's lying there on the table and she's thinking, like, "What's wrong with me? Why can't I control my throat? Why can't I control my body?"

LIZA SHOENFELD: And I just—I couldn't—I remember frantically sending messages like, "You gotta cut this out now."

JAD: But she wasn't in control. And it turned out that while she was going from interview to interview to interview, talking about how her lab had taken these little mices and seized control of their basal ganglia ...

LIZA SHOENFELD: The Compazine that I took ...

ROBERT: ... that nausea drug.

LIZA SHOENFELD: ... was actually affecting dopamine systems in my basal ganglia.

JAD: In other words, that drug had been doing to her ...

ROBERT: Pretty much what [laughs] what she'd been ...

JAD: ... doing to those mice.

LIZA SHOENFELD: One to two percent of people who take Compazine, they can have what's called an acute dystonia, which is what happened to me.

JAD: During all those interviews.

LIZA SHOENFELD: And the crazy thing is, the guy that I talked to first in the morning was the molecular dopamine guy. You know, how does dopamine get packed into vesicles? How does it get released? And it wasn't until I started talking with the more systems-level people who studied the behavioral output of the basal ganglia that I started to have behavioral deficits in my basal ganglia.

ROBERT: So your basal ganglia are testing the San Francisco docs and they are failing and ...

LIZA SHOENFELD: [laughs] Yeah.

ROBERT: Did you get into San Francisco State?

LIZA SHOENFELD: UCSF?

ROBERT: UCSF.

LIZA SHOENFELD: No.

JAD: Damn it, basal ganglia!

LIZA SHOENFELD: [laughs]

JAD: We should probably tell everybody that Liza's obviously doing okay. Back in the ER, when the doctors finally figured out what was going on, they just gave her some Benadryl, of all things.

LIZA SHOENFELD: And—and actually, within 20 minutes, I was feeling a lot better.

JAD: She could breathe, her face had unclenched. And when we asked her, "How has this little adventure changed you?" She said, "Well, I'm still working with those mice," because when we talked to her, grad school hadn't started yet. "And now when I go into that room with a little laser ..."

LIZA SHOENFELD: I go in now and I just really I empathize with them.

ROBERT: [laughs] Come on, little Casper. This will just be for a couple of minutes.

JAD: You can do it!

LIZA SHOENFELD: Yeah, I'm thinking a lot about that.

ROBERT: Liza Schoenfeld is now a proud PhD candidate at the University of Washington.

JAD: And thanks to Brenna Farrell for production help on that story.

ROBERT: Okay, so Liza's disagreement with her brain didn't last very long. It was over within, really less than a day.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: But there are people who get into fusses with their heads that last longer. So here's a bigger, badder and broader story.

JAD: Also a true story. Comes from an essay written many years ago by a guy named Berton Roueché, who's this great—I don't know. How would you describe him?

ROBERT: Berton Roueché, he was a great essayist, journalism essayist.

JAD: Yeah. And this essay was published in 1958 in The New Yorker, and it's kind of an interesting essay because it's essentially one long quote from this woman that Berton interviewed, Rosemary Morton. It reads like a novel, even though it's non-fiction. So we asked an actress who's been in some movies, Hope Davis, to read excerpts from Rosemary's story. And the story begins on a normal night. Rosemary's at home with her husband Frank. And everything's fine—for the moment.
ROSEMARY MORTON: I'd been home about an hour. Dinner was ready and waiting in the oven, and I was sitting at the piano not really playing, just amusing myself. That's something I often do at the end of the day. It helps me relax. My husband was in the kitchen making us a cocktail, which is another Morton custom. We usually have a drink or two before dinner. So everything was quite ordinary and normal until Frank came in with the drinks.

ROSEMARY MORTON: I got up to join him on the sofa, and as I did, as I started across the room, I felt the floor sort of shake.

ROBERT: Is that because there's an earthquake going on?

JAD: Well, in the essay she looks at Frank and she's like ...

ROSEMARY MORTON: "Good heavens," I said. "What was that?" Frank just looked at me, his face was a perfect blank. He made some remark about old buildings stretching and settling, and handed me my drink.

JAD: So she doesn't really think too much of this because it was very momentary.

ROBERT: Okay.
JAD: But a week later she's at work. She's actually in the library because she's a librarian. She's at her desk.

ROSEMARY MORTON: I worked at my desk for about an hour, and it was heaven. So quiet, so peaceful. Then I got up to get a book from the stacks or a drink of water or something, and it happened—the floor gave a shake and sank. It went down and up, just one lurch. Maybe a little more pronounced than the first time. And then everything was back to normal except for my state of mind. I didn't know what to think. The best I could do was tell myself that this was an old building too. It was built around 1900.
JAD: So that was her sense at first: just old buildings.

ROSEMARY MORTON: It never occurred to me that there might be any other explanation.

JAD: But then over the next few days, very odd things begin to happen.

ROSEMARY MORTON: I don't know how to describe it, but I had the feeling that my sense of touch was getting more and more acute, especially in the soles of my feet. I could feel little tremors that other people couldn't. I didn't tell Frank until the middle of the following week, on Wednesday night to be exact. By then, I had to. I couldn't keep it to myself any longer. There was something wrong with me. There just wasn't any word for the awful sensations I'd been having. The floor-shaking feeling was only one of them. I don't know how many times that happened over the weekend, seven or eight at least. But even that began to have a different feeling.

ROSEMARY MORTON: At first, the floor had moved or sagged as a whole. It still did, only now I could feel another movement too, a kind of counterpoint. Sometimes it was as if I were sinking into the floor. The room would tilt, and I'd take a step and the floor was like snow. It would give under my foot and I would sink. And other times it was just the reverse: the floor would rise up to meet me. By then it wasn't simply the floor that moved—when the floor tilted, the walls of the room tilted with it. And the ceiling. I mean, the shape of the room never changed, only its position in space.

JAD: So Rosemary went to see her doctor, and her doctor sent her to some specialists and they ran some tests. And then a short while later, she went back to her doctor to get the results.

ROSEMARY MORTON: He read me their conclusions and they were all the same. They even used the same phrase: "Impression, essentially normal." I'll never forget that phrase: normal. Essentially normal. It sounds so reassuring, so comforting. But it isn't. At least it wasn't to me. It was terrifying.

JAD: After this diagnosis—or non-diagnosis—things really take a turn. Fast forward a few months ...

ROSEMARY MORTON: There were times in March and early April when I was absolutely certain I was going to die. But my reaction to death was peculiar. I don't remember feeling afraid. All I remember is an overwhelming sense of urgency. So little time, so little done, so much I wanted to do.

ROSEMARY MORTON: I dragged Frank to the theater more than once, and I never thought of refusing when he suggested the Philharmonic or the Metropolitan. My response to music had never been so complete. I spent hours listening to records. I'd play some old favorite like Beecham conducting Haydn's London Symphony, and it was amazing. It seemed to me that I could hear the inner structure more clearly than ever before. So the idea of a dinner and a concert wasn't at all unusual. My only mistake was to take that dreadful underground passage.
ROSEMARY MORTON: It was raining and I was in a hurry, but even so I should have realized. When I did, it was too late. The passage was jammed with commuters shoving and pushing and surging toward me, but I didn't dare turn back. The floor was beginning to wobble, and I knew if I tried to swing around it would tip me head over heels. All I could do was go on. The traffic was still all against me. People kept looming up, towering up. They came charging at me like giants. And then I felt something right out of a nightmare.
ROSEMARY MORTON: I was almost at the end of the passage when I felt the movement change. It was as if someone had pulled a lever. There was a little jolt, and the floor was moving very slowly backward down the passage. I was walking on a treadmill. Only for a minute, though. Then I reached the stairs. I drove myself up to the lobby and collapsed in a chair. I was jelly.
ROSEMARY MORTON: From early April, I began to move in a different world. I was conscious of a new dimension, a new plane. I had a new relationship to space. My legs, my arms, my face, my whole body felt different. It had no permanent shape, it changed by the minute. I seemed to be completely at the mercy of some outside force, some atmospheric pressure. I was amorphous. My left leg would seem to lengthen, or my right arm or my neck, or one whole side of me would double or treble in size. And yet that doesn't fully describe it.
ROSEMARY MORTON: There were times when the force seemed to be the rotation of the Earth. I would have the feeling that I was vertically aligned with the Earth's axis. I could feel a sort of winding movement start up inside me. Then one of my legs would begin to shorten as if it were an anchor being drawn slowly up by a winch. The other leg would dangle. After a minute, the winch would shift, it would engage the dangling leg, and just as slowly bring it up to match the other.

ROBERT: This feels like some kind of a nightmare cartoon of some kind.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: So what is—what is wrong with her?

JAD: Well, after months of this, at the end of the essay she does finally learn that this condition she has has a name.

ROSEMARY MORTON: My trouble was a disturbance of the internal ear called labyrinthitis.

ROBERT: Labyrinthitis.

ROSEMARY MORTON: The suffix "-itis" meant inflammation.

JAD: Swelling.

ROSEMARY MORTON: So the meaning of labyrinthitis as a word was simply an inflammation of the aural labyrinth.

ROBERT: You know, I think people in science and medicine love to give big fat names to "I don't know."
JAD: Well actually, this condition you should know. It goes by another name.
ROBERT: What?
JAD: Vertigo.
ROBERT: Oh!
JAD: That's why I like the story because, like, I didn't know. I mean, like, I always thought of vertigo like from the movie.
ROBERT: Yeah.
JAD: Like, you're on the stairs and you're like, "Whoa! Whoa!" Like, it's just a thing with heights, you know? Like, that's what it was in the Hitchcock film. But what Rosemary Morton goes through in this story, it's like—seems way deeper. And at some point in the essay, she actually refers to her situation as a "case of gravitational anarchy."

ROBERT: That's an interesting phrase.

JAD: A phrase I kind of—I kind of like.

ROBERT: Yeah. Well, does she get better?

JAD: Yep.

ROSEMARY MORTON: It's impossible to say exactly when it all ended, but I think it was Frank who really sensed it first. It was after dinner one night in late August, and he suddenly smiled and remarked that I must be feeling much better. I asked him what he meant. "You never look scared anymore," he said.

JAD: It's very mysterious, but her vertigo just went away—poof!

ROBERT: Without explanation for the coming and no explanation for the going?

JAD: Some things just don't have explanations, Robert, but they have wonderful sound design.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: And that's Radiolab: no explanations, pretty sounds. [laughs]
ROBERT: I'd buy a ticket to that, Mr. Jensen! I'm crazy for sound design!
JAD: [laughs]

JAD: [laughs] I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I am Robert Krulwich.

JAD: We'll be back.

[LIZA SHOENFELD: Hey, Radiolab, this is Liza Shoenfeld calling in with the credits. Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Radiolab is produced by WNYC and distributed by NPR.]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: End of message.]

ROBERT: Hey, I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: This is Radiolab.

JAD: Today, When Brains Attack.

ROBERT: Now in this story, the next one up, we're gonna meet somebody whose brain is, well, it's kind of keeping a secret from him. The brain knows something, but the brain isn't telling.

JAD: Well really, first, it's a story of a friendship between two guys and the guy who told us the story is ...

ANDY: Andy Mills. And I am a freelance radio producer.

JAD: And the other guy? You'll meet him in a minute.

ROBERT: So maybe we should start, like, how did you meet? Like, what was the—where did you lay eyes on each other?

ANDY: Well, it was my sophomore year of college, and it was the time that the freshmen are all moving into the dorms. And I was meeting new people, welcoming the freshmen.

ROBERT: Oh, you're an RA or you're some sort of ...?

ANDY: No, no. Just one of those chatty people in the dorm.

JAD: You're like, "What's your name?"

ANDY: Exactly. And as I was talking actually to a group of freshmen in my room, I hear this, like, strange noise from the room next door. It was this kind of low drone. So I kind of peeked over and saw, you know, an 18- to 19-year-old kid in a wheelchair. Dark, curly hair. And this noise I'd been hearing was his voice. Not even a week later, I run into him in the hallway and I introduce myself. I say, "Hi, I'm Andy. What's your name?" And he said ...

KOHN ASHMORE: My name is Kohn Ashmore. K-O-H-N.

JAD: Kohn ...?

ANDY: Ashmore.

JAD: Kohn Ashmore.

ANDY: Yeah. I was on the way to eat lunch, and I invited him to join me. We sit down in the corner and I notice, like, he brings the fork to his mouth, like, really slowly. Everything about him is slowed down. But I also noticed, like, he's witty, observant. And so at a certain point in the conversation I asked him, "What's wrong? Like, why do you move and talk so slowly?"

JAD: You just asked him flat out?

ANDY: Yeah.

JAD: Was he offended?

KOHN ASHMORE: No.

ANDY: No! I think he was—he was relieved to find somebody who was willing to admit that it's a little bit weird.

JAD: Yeah.

KOHN ASHMORE: Well ...

ANDY: And then he tells me this story.

KOHN ASHMORE: The date was ...

ANDY: He started at the beginning.

KOHN ASHMORE: November 15.

ANDY: He said, "I was eight years old."

KOHN ASHMORE: I was out in the backyard.

ANDY: "I had this dog. The dog had run off."

KOHN ASHMORE: Broke loose of his chain.

ANDY: "I ran out into the street."

KOHN ASHMORE: And ...

ANDY: "The next thing I knew I was waking up from a coma."

KOHN ASHMORE: Yeah. Five months ...

ANDY: Five months later.

JAD: He got hit by a car?

ANDY: Yeah.

ANDY: And when you woke up, what had happened to you? What were the injuries you suffered?

KOHN ASHMORE: Well, I couldn't talk, couldn't move.

ANDY: And then he comes out of it slowly and slowly, but thing is he stays ...

KOHN ASHMORE: Slower.

ANDY: Slow.

KOHN ASHMORE: Very slow.

JAD: So this is a man who has slowed down, globally?

ANDY: Right. Except for, of course, his mind.

ROBERT: Hmm.

JAD: Really?

ANDY: Oh, yeah. He does well in school. He's smart. He has a great sense of humor. And we connected. You know, I was his neighbor in the dorm and we had a lot in common. We liked a lot of the same music. We used to stay up late. I'd play my acoustic guitar and he would sing Matchbox 20 songs from the '90s, you know?

JAD: You—you must slow down your playing? Is that what happens?

ANDY: My playing is not exactly rock star material or anything.

ANDY: I love that song.

ANDY: It wasn't long before we ended up having these really deep conversations into the middle of the night.

JAD: About what?

ANDY: Well, the fact that both of our parents are divorced, and how we both grew up in households that were fighting all the time and having to sleep at Grandma's is, like, a regular part of both of our lives. We talked a lot about how, like, that impacted our life growing up, and we just became really close.

ANDY: It's a level situation. Tell me what you had for breakfast today?

ANDY: You know, I've known Kohn for almost a decade, but it wasn't until last summer that I decided to interview Kohn on tape. And it was in the middle of this interview that Kohn tells me this story that completely changed the way that I think about Kohn and his slowness.

KOHN ASHMORE: So I really ...

ANDY: The story starts off with him in junior high. First big crush.

KOHN ASHMORE: Julie.

ANDY: Her name was Julie. And he's trying to think of something romantic to do to catch her attention. And he really loves music. He was listening to his Walkman one night, and he realized that that's—that's what he wants to do. He would make her ...

KOHN ASHMORE: A mix tape.

ANDY: A romantic mix tape. And that would be the thing. So he makes this tape, and then he decided that ...

KOHN ASHMORE: I should try singing.

ANDY: ... to actually sing ...

KOHN ASHMORE: A love song.

ANDY: ... a love song to Julie. So he writes this song, records it, puts the tape back in the stereo.

KOHN ASHMORE: And when I played it back [Kohn singing], I remember being horrified. [Kohn singing]

ANDY: He felt embarrassed. He felt confused.

KOHN ASHMORE: Screaming, crying.

JAD: Wait. Why?

ANDY: Well, it turns out that was the first time that he had ever heard his voice the way that you and I hear his voice, and so ...

JAD: Wait—first time. What does that even mean?

ROBERT: He'd never heard a recording of himself? Or ...

ANDY: Oh, no. He had—not only had he never heard a recording of himself, but when he talks ...

KOHN ASHMORE: I hear myself like I hear you.

ANDY: What do you mean by that?

KOHN ASHMORE: Like, I mean ...

ANDY: He tells me that he actually didn't know that his voice was slow. He hears me talk normal, and then he hears himself talk normal as well. Like ...

ROBERT: You think he's slow and speeding up? Or do you think he just thinks he's regular?

ANDY: It's not like he speeds both of us up.

JAD: Does he mean, like, your—your voice just—or his voice just feels normal? Or does he mean it actually sounds normal?

ANDY: It sounds exactly the same is what I'm saying. Like ...

ROBERT: He thinks he sounds the same.

ANDY: He could be sitting here right now, he would hear you talk, he would hear me talk, and then he would say something and in his head it's all the same speed.

JAD: But that doesn't make sense because it's, like, variable speed, you know?

ROBERT: I don't think it's—no, I think he thinks he's just normal. I'm normal inside.

JAD: So we went back and forth and back and forth on this until finally ...

ROBERT: We need a specialist at this point.

ORRIN DEVINSKY: Guess we'll take our positions. Are you ready?

JAD: We ended up calling this guy who we've had on the show before.

ROBERT: All right. So Andy? Orrin's here.

ORRIN DEVINSKY: Orrin Devinsky, neurologist. NYU Medical Center.

ROBERT: He's the doctor.

ORRIN DEVINSKY: Hi Andy.

ANDY: Hi Orrin.

JAD: Anyhow, Andy ran him through the whole story.

ANDY: Yeah. Well, he was eight years old, and he was I believe ...

JAD: Everything you've just heard. And here was Orrin's reaction.

ORRIN DEVINSKY: It's a fascinating case, and my first clinical question would be did he know he moved slowly? But ...

ANDY: Absolutely, yeah.

ORRIN DEVINSKY: But it was only for his own voice that he was unaware that he was different than everybody else.

ANDY: Right.

ORRIN DEVINSKY: So he does have feedback on himself. The one area he's not getting feedback on is his voice production, which—which interestingly happens in post-encephalitic Parkinson's patients. They're slow in all their movements, they're slow getting up out of a chair, they're slow walking. But as with Kohn, there are some cases where they just get little focal areas that they don't see their slowness.

JAD: Hmm.

ORRIN DEVINSKY: So Oliver Sacks, when he took care of his Awakenings patients at Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx, would sometimes record their voices and play it back and they'd say, "That's not me! You're fiddling with the tape machine. That's not my voice."

JAD: Because the voice to them would sound ...

ORRIN DEVINSKY: Too slow.

JAD: Too slow.

ORRIN DEVINSKY: Too slow.

ANDY: Yeah, that's exactly Kohn.

ORRIN DEVINSKY: Do you think his inner voice, his inner mental speed is truly as fast? Or is that also slow?

ANDY: Oh, it's absolutely normal.

ORRIN DEVINSKY: Okay.

ANDY: There was never a point where I was having to, like, wait for Kohn to make some, you know, mental exercise before he'd respond.

ORRIN DEVINSKY: What I don't understand fully is why he hears you, Andy, speaking at three times his pace and feel you're normal, but something about his own voice feeding back to his own brain, he never perceived that at a different speed than your voice and everyone else's.

JAD: Do you trust it?

ROBERT: Do you then wonder it?

JAD: Do you wonder about the ...

ROBERT: Maybe would you suspect that if you met him you'd learn something different than you ...

ORRIN DEVINSKY: Yeah. No, in medicine, you should always trust the patient's report but keep in the back of your head a drop of skepticism. But my gut as a clinician is more than 95 percent it's real.

JAD: Now keep in mind, that was not a true clinical diagnosis, that was just Orrin Devinsky giving us his gut opinion.

ANDY: Well, I have a theory. I have a theory, unscientific though it may be. And that is ...

JAD: Well, that's what we specialize in. [laughs]

ROBERT: [laughs] Welcome to the club.

ANDY: I think that it has something to do with familiarity. Like, when I first met Kohn and I heard his voice, it was so foreign and so strange and I could hardly make out what he was saying, but now I'm surprised when people say, "What did he just say?" And I think "Well, he just said he was horrified," You know, I—I've grown so familiar to his voice that it ...

ROBERT: Is it sort of like going into a Shakespeare play and in Act One, Scene One you don't know what's going on, but somehow in the second act it begins to click?

ANDY: Exactly. It's that familiarity. And if I have it, I mean, imagine what he must have.

KOHN ASHMORE: Yeah, I've grown accustomed to hearing something different.

JAD: But what I don't get is, like, I mean, this went on for years. So how—how could no—how come no one told him?

ROBERT: His parents and his siblings and his friends have never turned to him and said, "Hey, you know, come on. Speed it up." They've never ever said that?

ANDY: Well, no. His parents being deaf, you know, cross them out. They couldn't have told him.

JAD: His parents are deaf?

ANDY: Both of them.

JAD: Both of them. Whoa.

ANDY: And Kohn thinks that everyone else just assumed that he knew what his own voice sounded like.

JAD: Really? Like, when you talk to his friends?

HALEY: Hello?

ANDY: Hey, Haley.

HALEY: Hey.

DAVE: Hello?

ANDY: Hey, Dave. What's up?

DAVE: Oh, not much. What's up, Andy?

JAD: I mean, and you told them the whole thing. What was their reaction?

ANDY: Honestly, most of them didn't believe me.

HALEY: You're kidding.

ANDY: Did you know this at all?

HALEY: No, I had no idea. I didn't know that. And so his—when he speaks, he just thinks that it sounds just like anyone else?

ANDY: Yeah, that's what I'm telling you.

HALEY: Oh, that's so sad!

ANDY: Yeah.

JAD: So after he found out about his voice, which I guess was the one thing he thought was normal, what did he do?

KOHN ASHMORE: Well ...

ANDY: He said ...

KOHN ASHMORE: I'm never gonna talk again.

JAD: Did he—did he talk again? Obviously he did, right?

ROBERT: [laughs]

ANDY: Well, that's the same question I asked him.

ANDY: After you heard that you were different ...

ANDY: How long did you go before talking again? And he told me ...

KOHN ASHMORE: I do remember going back to school.

ANDY: And he doesn't recall, like, the first conversation exactly that he had, but he thinks it went something like ...

KOHN ASHMORE: Shut up and leave me the hell alone.

ANDY: He didn't want to talk, but gradually he realized that he kind of had to.

JAD: And what about singing? You said he liked to sing.

ANDY: Well eventually, he got comfortable again with the idea of having his voice recorded, his singing voice recorded. And so after the interview was over, he mentioned this song that he actually had been singing a lot. And so I turned the recorder back on and asked if he would sing it for me.

ANDY: So tell me the name of the song and then just sing away.

KOHN ASHMORE: This is "Grey Room" by Damien Rice. [singing]

ANDY: And it was actually pretty emotional for us both. And as I'm sitting there hearing him sing this song, I'm just wondering, like, what does this sound like in his head? So after I got the tape recorded I brought it back to my friends in Chicago in a band called Hudson Branch. And all of them know Kohn. And I asked them, "Like, do you think that we could maybe play some music to this?" So the music could kind of give us a peek into the way that Kohn hears it and the way that Kohn feels it, and maybe we could feel it too.

KOHN ASHMORE: [singing with music]

JAD: Huh!

ROBERT: What did Kohn say when he heard it, by the way? Did it remind him of anything like what he feels?

ANDY: Yeah. I mean, when he heard it, he said "Hell, [bleep][00:40:41.12] yes!"

ROBERT: [laughs]

ANDY: That was a quote from him. Yeah. No, he loves it. He loves it.

JAD: Thanks to producer Andy Mills who just received a—an award at the Third Coast Festival for a shorter version of that piece. And thanks also of course to Kohn Ashmore.

ROBERT: And the band, and they call themselves Hudson Branch.

JAD: You can find out more about them at radiolab.org, and they have a new album out, just out called World Kid.

ROBERT: And we will be right back.

[LISTENER: This is Mike from El Dorado Hills, California. Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: And this hour ...

JAD: Four stories of when brains attack. Times when you and your brain have a falling out, so to speak.

ROBERT: And our final story, it's—it's really a doozy. It comes from reporter Mark Phillips.

MARK PHILLIPS: Yes.

JAD: Okay. So, Mark, what are we hearing?

MARK PHILLIPS: Well, I went to visit this incredible woman named Diane Van Deren.

DIANE VAN DEREN: You found us! Come on in, man. Nice to meet you.

MARK PHILLIPS: Yeah.

MARK PHILLIPS: She lives just south of Denver in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.

MARK PHILLIPS: That's a cool view of—makes Denver look tiny ...

DIANE VAN DEREN: Doesn't it?

JAD: So who is she? Why is she a person of note?

MARK PHILLIPS: Well, she's one of the best ultra runners in the world.

DIANE VAN DEREN: Very active lifestyle.

JAD: What's an ultra runner?

MARK PHILLIPS: The definition is just anything longer than a marathon. The majority of them that she runs are 100 miles.

ROBERT: A hundred, this is continuous miles?

MARK PHILLIPS: Continuous.

DIANE VAN DEREN: No sleep, 28 hours straight. You know, I can tell you what pain is. I can tell you what pain is. And I was fortunate. I got runner up to Lance Armstrong for Outdoor Person of the Year years ago. And I kind of think Lance and I have stories that are very parallel.

JAD: How so?

MARK PHILLIPS: Well, I'm it's interesting. She was always an athlete. She actually played professional tennis for a while. She came to running later in life. And oddly enough, her running career started with a seizure.

DIANE VAN DEREN: My first seizure. Gosh, I do remember it.

MARK PHILLIPS: It was 1988. Diane was 28 years old.

DIANE VAN DEREN: I had two children, married. I was three weeks into my third pregnancy.

MARK PHILLIPS: And one day ...

DIANE VAN DEREN: I was with my mom. We were in the car. And as we were driving around, I remember reaching for, like, the glove compartment box. And I remember as I was reaching for that—that's I had this funny sensation. It was quick and it was brief. And then, boom! That's the last thing I remember.

MARK PHILLIPS: And next thing she knows, she's waking up in the hospital.

DIANE VAN DEREN: I was confused. I didn't know where I was, what I was doing, what happened. And eventually, I ended up getting with a doctor, Dr. Spitz.

MARK PHILLIPS: And after some tests ...

DIANE VAN DEREN: They sent me off for an MRI.

MARK PHILLIPS: ... he told her.

DIANE VAN DEREN: What you have is epilepsy. That was the first time I heard that word.

JAD: The seizure was just out of the blue?

MARK PHILLIPS: Well, what the doctors eventually figured out is that when she was a baby, she had a fever.

DIANE VAN DEREN: And I ended up throwing a grand mal seizure, which lasted almost an hour.

JAD: That's the ...

MARK PHILLIPS: ... that's the big one. Yeah. And they kind of put together that she probably damaged a part of her brain from that seizure.

DIANE VAN DEREN: And 24 years later, basically, boom! Seizures reoccurred.

JAD: And you said earlier that this somehow led to her running?

MARK PHILLIPS: Yeah. Okay, so after the seizure, the first seizure in the car, they started to happen more and more. But before the seizures would come on, she would have this warning sign.

DIANE VAN DEREN: I would get really tingly all over my body. I'd feel kind of floaty. The premonition that something's about to happen.

MARK PHILLIPS: She was in the shower. She would have to get out.

DIANE VAN DEREN: Okay, where do I need to be, what I need to do and then—pow!—it would happen. I tried every medication that was available, diet, nutrition. I mean, I tried it all.

MARK PHILLIPS: Basically, nothing was working.

DIANE VAN DEREN: Nothing worked.

MARK PHILLIPS: Until ...

DIANE VAN DEREN: I found the only way I could break the cycle of a seizure for me. Whenever I had that premonition a seizure was coming on I'd have my running shoes by the front door.

MARK PHILLIPS: She'd be eating dinner. She would feel a premonition and just drop her—her fork and knife ...

DIANE VAN DEREN: Throw those running shoes on. And I just showed you these mountains here by my house. I'd run to the Pikes National Forest.

MARK PHILLIPS: Let's just run in silence for a second. So we get some sound of that.

DIANE VAN DEREN: Yeah.

MARK PHILLIPS: Her house is literally, you know, on the foothills of these mountains.

DIANE VAN DEREN: Seen a herd of elk out here, Seen a mountain lion out here. A lot of deer. Whenever I had a seizure coming on, I'd go run. Well of course, my family, my mom, everybody was panicking because they were thinking oh, my gosh, Diane's gonna be off running in the middle of nowhere, have a seizure, and we're not gonna know where she is, how to find her, what we're gonna do.

MARK PHILLIPS: But ...

DIANE VAN DEREN: I found that—that it worked.

MARK PHILLIPS: She wasn't having seizures.

JAD: So when she would run, she would have a premonition. But no actual seizure at the end?

MARK PHILLIPS: Yeah.

DIANE VAN DEREN: When I ran from the seizures and I'd run to the forest, I would just feel me just getting more relaxed. My heart wouldn't be pounding, calmness set in. And that is where my love for running began.

MARK PHILLIPS: Literally outrunning the seizures. And at first would just be an hour or so, but then she was going for longer and longer—two hours, five hours, six hours. And it sort of worked for a while. But eventually ...

DIANE VAN DEREN: The seizures basically just started overcoming.

MARK PHILLIPS: ... they caught up with her.

DIANE VAN DEREN: I was having three to five seizures a week. I wasn't getting those premonitions like I did in the beginning.

MARK PHILLIPS: It got to the point where she didn't have enough time to get her running shoes on.

DIANE VAN DEREN: I didn't have that long of a premonition. It was like, boom! Seizure. So I could tell that part of my brain was actually getting weaker. And I knew at that point in time I really was at more of a risk of dying from a seizure.

MARK PHILLIPS: You could die from a—a seizure?

DIANE VAN DEREN: Happens all the time. People die of seizures all the time. For example, a friend of mine, his wife, she went up to go take a bath, had a seizure, went up later, and he found her dead in the tub. You know, my kids, I always had to tell them, "Hey, Mom's taking a bath. Come check on me." I, as a parent, as a wife, as a mom of three small children, I was running out of options.

MARK PHILLIPS: And, you know, she talked with her doctors and they said, well, there's a chance you can have a surgery that would fix this. If the seizures are coming from just one discrete part of the brain, they can cut that part of the brain out. But first they have to figure out if it's that type of seizure and where it's coming from.

DIANE VAN DEREN: To see if it was operable.

MARK PHILLIPS: Which meant she had to go to the hospital and actually have a seizure in front of them.

DIANE VAN DEREN: I had to have 64 electrodes basically glued on—onto my scalp.

MARK PHILLIPS: She was hooked up to an EEG machine and ...

DIANE VAN DEREN: I had a camera on me 24/7 and ...

MARK PHILLIPS: There's footage of this. She showed it to me.

DIANE VAN DEREN: I remember laying there in the bed saying, "I can't run. I need to let it happen."

MARK PHILLIPS: What you see on the screen is she starts to jerk. She's clenched, she's shaking. You hear the bed sort of rattling, and she bites her tongue so hard that, you know, there's just this pool of blood below her face, she's choking on her blood. It's just it's—it's horrifying.

DIANE VAN DEREN: And then as I came out of it, honest to God, I felt like I'd been run over by a truck. I was gurgling, still had some blood that was in my throat. And I had a massive headache.

MARK PHILLIPS: But the doctors are standing right next to her, cheering.

DIANE VAN DEREN: All right! All right, we got it! We got it!

MARK PHILLIPS: Because they actually found that the seizures were coming from one spot in the brain.

DIANE VAN DEREN: Then when they said, "Well, what do you think? We found the spot, you could be a surgery candidate."

MARK PHILLIPS: I mean, you know, it's a big risk. It's not like just taking a pill. I mean, you're cutting out a chunk of your brain.

MARK PHILLIPS: Was it a tough decision or was it just sort of a no brainer? No pun intended.

DIANE VAN DEREN: Let's see here. Well, in all honesty, it was hands down. I was like, "Let's go." So they sawed the side of my right head open. They just literally just sawed it open. And so there was my brain exposed while I was on the table.

MARK PHILLIPS: So the doctors huddle around and they look in and they can actually see this gray, discolored spot from all the seizure activity. It's on the back, right side. It's a part of the brain called the temporal lobe, which is the part of the brain that seems to be involved in memory, spatial reasoning and temporal reasoning, time.

DIANE VAN DEREN: And they had to, you know, decide okay, well, how much of her brain are we gonna take out? And they go back and forth. I mean, obviously, the more brain that they take out, the more consequence, the more side effects. Well, they ended up cutting out probably the size of a kiwi out of my right temporal lobe.

JAD: That's big.

MARK PHILLIPS: Yeah, it's not insignificant.

JAD: Wow.

DIANE VAN DEREN: When I came home, I just had horrific headaches and this extreme pain. I mean, I just remember just holding my head, just trying to hold my head together. It just hurt so bad. And seizure wise, they didn't know. So everybody was kind of on pins and needles. Did it work? Did it not work?

MARK PHILLIPS: And as the days went on, they waited and waited and waited.

DIANE VAN DEREN: And I wasn't having seizures.

JAD: None at all?

MARK PHILLIPS: No, she's not had a seizure since the night before the surgery.

MARK PHILLIPS: So you didn't really get into the competitive ultra running until after the surgery. How did that come about? I mean ...

DIANE VAN DEREN: How did I get into this? It was interesting. I did a 50-mile race. I won that.

JAD: Like, what?

MARK PHILLIPS: Here's where things kind of get interesting. After a year or so of no seizures, Diane decided to enter this race, a 50-miler, on a whim.

DIANE VAN DEREN: I just read about it in a magazine. You know, I loved to run and I thought, "Oh man, I have this new outlook on life. I'm not having seizures. Okay, I'm gonna run a 50." I won that. And then I signed up for my first 100-mile race. Of course, everybody was like, "Oh my gosh!" A race in the Big Horn Mountains of all places. Did well. I ended up placing.

MARK PHILLIPS: At the same time, back home ...

MARK PHILLIPS: When did you start to notice, you know, that—that things were different, working differently in your brain?

DIANE VAN DEREN: Mm-hmm. I didn't. My family started noticing things. Mom's forgetting, you know, what time my appointments were, we're late to school. My mom's not here to pick me up.

JAD: So she was having short-term memory loss.

MARK PHILLIPS: Yeah, a lot.

DIANE VAN DEREN: Meeting somebody in the morning. Later on that afternoon, maybe I see them again and I have no idea who they were. They'll have to say, "Hey, remember I saw you?" Those kind of things. But yeah, let's see, what was I saying?

MARK PHILLIPS: Meanwhile, first overall in the Alfred Packer 50-miler, second overall in the Beyer 100-miler, first overall in the Tahoe Rim 100-miler. I can keep going.

JAD: Yeah, go!

MARK PHILLIPS: First overall in the 24 hours in Frisco trial run, first for women's in the Dances With the Dirt 50-miler in Hell, Michigan.

JAD: Dances With the Dirt in Hell Michigan.

MARK PHILLIPS: First in women's in the Canadian Death Race 78-miler in Edmonton, Canada.

JAD: The Canadian Death Race?

MARK PHILLIPS: Yeah.

DIANE VAN DEREN: The Yukon Arctic Ultra 300-miler. It was -48 degrees when we began the event. The shoes literally froze on my feet, and only two of us finished. I ran the first hundred miles with no water. Did 430 miles in the Yukon, pulling a sled.

MARK PHILLIPS: During which time she'd sleep only about an hour a night.

DIANE VAN DEREN: For 10 days.

JAD: Wow.

ROBERT: Really?

MARK PHILLIPS: The crazy thing is that through all of this, she can't read a map.

JAD: What? What do you mean?

MARK PHILLIPS: Well, one of the main functions of that kiwi-sized part of her brain that the doctors took out, as I said, was spatial reasoning. And so after the surgery, maps just look weird to her.

DIANE VAN DEREN: It's like just a bunch of information on a piece of paper. All those lines, all those squigglies.

MARK PHILLIPS: It's just noise.

JAD: So then how does she navigate through a race?

DIANE VAN DEREN: Well, I take a pink ribbon with me. So when I'm out there in the middle of nowhere and I have three ways to hit a trail, and I'm not quite sure which way to go ...

MARK PHILLIPS: Is it left? Is it right?

DIANE VAN DEREN: I'll pick a way. I'll drop a ribbon.

MARK PHILLIPS: And then after a couple of hours, if she feels like she's not on a trail anymore, she just goes back until she gets to the pink ribbon and then she picks the other way.

DIANE VAN DEREN: On the Yukon, there was a time where gosh, I was lost for two hours. I was out in the middle of nowhere, all alone. Huge, heavy winds just ripping across the Yukon River.

MARK PHILLIPS: Did you win that year that you were lost for two hours?

DIANE VAN DEREN: Yeah.

MARK PHILLIPS: Mostly Diane finds these sort of workarounds for what she lost in the surgery. But the fact is she only became this amazing runner after the surgery. So while we were talking, I just couldn't help but wonder ...

MARK PHILLIPS: Well I mean, I wonder, like, do you think—did having part of your brain removed make you an ultra runner? Do you—do you understand the question?

DIANE VAN DEREN: I do.

MARK PHILLIPS: And she says, no.

DIANE VAN DEREN: I think having a brain injury puts me at a disadvantage. But I think for me that the one advantage—if I had to say I have an advantage—would be time. I can really get lost in time.

MARK PHILLIPS: When the doctors removed that part of her brain they took out a basic awareness of—of time passing.

DIANE VAN DEREN: Time's hard. So when I'm on the Yukon, I'm going for 10 days. I kind of forget how many days I've been out there. You know, some of the racers are saying, "Oh, I've been out here six days. I'm exhausted." For me ...

MARK PHILLIPS: "I can't look back. I can't think, you know, how long I've been running because I—I don't know."

DIANE VAN DEREN: I stay in the moment.

MARK PHILLIPS: Because of that she doesn't—she doesn't know how tired she should feel.

JAD: Huh.

MARK PHILLIPS: Think about it. If you don't know where you are in time, you don't know how much further you have to go, how far you've been. You're just running, you're just hearing your footsteps and that's it.

DIANE VAN DEREN: I get a rhythm in my mind, that's what I want to hear in my feet. I go by rhythm. I know the sound that my feet, about what an eight-minute pace would be, how my feet would sound.

MARK PHILLIPS: So count out the beat for me.

DIANE VAN DEREN: One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. You're a drummer. You hear it?

MARK PHILLIPS: Yeah.

DIANE VAN DEREN: One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. And even with my breath. In two, out two. [breath, breath] Two breaths in, two breaths out. Match my feet. See the rhythm?

MARK PHILLIPS: Yeah.

DIANE VAN DEREN: If that's all I have to hear for 28 hours that's what I want. It's music. That's my music. Nothing else in my mind but my feet and my breathing. That's the music to an athlete's ear. That's the flow.

JAD: Thanks, Mark.

MARK PHILLIPS: Yeah, no problem.

JAD: Reporter Mark Phillips. For more information on Diane Van Deren, you can go to our website, Radiolab.org, we've got some links there. And I guess that's it. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: And I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Thanks for listening.

[DIANE VAN DEREN: Hi, this is Diane.]

[MARK PHILLIPS: Hey, guys. It's Mark Phillips.]

[DIANE VAN DEREN: Here we go. Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad.]

[MARK PHILLIPS: Jad Abumrad. Our staff includes Ellen Horne.]

[ANDY: Soren Wheeler, Pat Walters.]

[DIANE VAN DEREN: Tim Howard. Brenna Farrell.]

[MARK PHILLIPS: Malissa O'Donnell.]

[ANDY: Dylan Casey. Cassi?]

[MARK PHILLIPS: Dylan Keefe.]

[DIANE VAN DEREN: Lynn Levy and Sean Cole.]

[MARK PHILLIPS: With help from Douglas Hughes-Smith, Daisy Rosario.]

[ANDY: Nadia Wilson, Brendan McMullen and Raphaela Dennin—D-E-N-N-I-N, Dennin? Yeah, yeah. That's it. Okay, that's—that's the credits. All right, Radiolab, talk to you later.]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: End of message.]

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