Dec 17, 2012
Transcript
[RADIOLAB INTRO]
TIM HOWARD: Okay. Hello, hello?
ALEXANDER GAMME: Hello!
JAD ABUMRAD: Hello, hello!
ALEXANDER GAMME: Hooray! How are you? [laughs]
JAD: We are super, super excited to talk with you.
ALEXANDER GAMME: Oh, well same with me. I'm sorry about the delay. And so ...
JAD: Oh, it's fine. No, it's ...
ALEXANDER GAMME: Quite a busy day.
JAD: Life is crazy.
ALEXANDER GAMME: Life is crazy.
JAD: Yeah, I know.
ALEXANDER GAMME: But you were so enthusiastic. So I need to talk to these guys. They really mean it!
JAD: This is Alex.
ALEXANDER GAMME: Alexander Gamme.
JAD: Gamme?
ALEXANDER GAMME: Gamme.
JAD: Are you Norwegian all the way back?
ALEXANDER GAMME: Yeah, typical Norwegian.
JAD: You know, if "typical" includes things like ...
ALEXANDER GAMME: Biking in Sahara, and climbing Everest and things like that.
JAD: He's kind of a professional adventurer.
ROBERT KRULWICH: Hmm.
JAD: And we got him into the studio because he made a video last year on one of his trips ...
JAD: Gotta tell you, this video? It's maybe the most amazing internet video I have ever seen. [laughs]
TIM: I think so, too.
JAD: So let me just set the scene for you.
ROBERT: Okay.
JAD: What you see in the video is this guy, Alex, kind of moving along this—he's on skis—this snowy snowscape.
ROBERT: Hmm.
JAD: He's filming himself. He's got the camera in his right hand.
ROBERT: Where is he, exactly?
JAD: Antarctica.
ROBERT: Oh!
JAD: He's on a three-month trek to the South Pole and back by himself. And what he'd been doing is every couple of days on his trip, you know, every 200 kilometers or so, he would bury stuff in the snow.
ALEXANDER GAMME: Some—some fuel, and sometimes a little bit of gear that I didn't use.
JAD: Was that just to lighten your load?
ALEXANDER GAMME: Yeah.
JAD: You know, because every ounce of unneeded weight has to go.
ROBERT: Sure.
JAD: So in this video, it's day 86.
ALEXANDER GAMME: Almost three months since I left.
JAD: That's three months of walking 10 hours a day.
ALEXANDER GAMME: And I lost almost 25 kilos.
JAD: 55 pounds. He's exhausted.
[YOUTUBE CLIP, Alexander Gamme: Oh!]
JAD: He's come upon his last cache.
ALEXANDER GAMME: So on the last cache, where this video is captured ...
JAD: What you see is Alex kneel in the snow, start to dig.
ALEXANDER GAMME: I'm telling that I'm quite hungry.
JAD: Whatever's in this last cache in the snow, it's been three months since he buried it.
ALEXANDER GAMME: So I didn't really recall what was there.
[YOUTUBE CLIP, Alexander Gamme: [speaking Norwegian]]
JAD: He hopes it's something good. So he digs up this bag of stuff, starts rifling through it.
[YOUTUBE CLIP, Alexander Gamme: [speaking Norwegian]]
JAD: Some Vaseline, some zinc ointment.
ALEXANDER GAMME: It's just a mess.
JAD: Nothing.
ALEXANDER GAMME: It's pretty much old trash.
[YOUTUBE CLIP, Alexander Gamme: [speaking Norwegian]]
JAD: But then ...
[YOUTUBE CLIP, Alexander Gamme: Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!]
ROBERT: What is it?
JAD: He holds up a double bag of Cheez Doodles.
ROBERT: [laughs]
[YOUTUBE CLIP, Alexander Gamme: Yeah!]
JAD: And he throws it up in the air.
[YOUTUBE CLIP, Alexander Gamme: Yeah!]
JAD: And then this is—this is my favorite part. He just freezes, and he's staring off into the distance almost like, did that happen?
[YOUTUBE CLIP, Alexander Gamme: I mean ...]
ALEXANDER GAMME: Is it real?
JAD: So he starts to dig some more. And then ...
[YOUTUBE CLIP, Alexander Gamme: Oh, ha ha! Yeah! Oh!]
ROBERT: What's it this time?
ALEXANDER GAMME: A huge chocolate bar. It's milk chocolate. And then it's just like ...
JAD: He finds some Mentos.
[YOUTUBE CLIP, Alexander Gamme: Mentos!]
ALEXANDER GAMME: I find more and more and more.
ROBERT: [laughs]
[YOUTUBE CLIP, Alexander Gamme: [laughs]]
JAD: Have you ever been that happy in your life?
ALEXANDER GAMME: Well, I've been thinking about that. When did you shout last time you were so happy?
JAD: I think that's why we've been watching this video over and over again, because none of us can remember.
ALEXANDER GAMME: [laughs]
JAD: It's like, what stands between you and that feeling is a really interesting question.
ALEXANDER GAMME: Yeah, it's three months with hunger.
JAD: Actually, I think the reason I like this video so much is not just because he's happy, it's that he somehow stumbled into this moment of perfection.
ALEXANDER GAMME: It's just like a perfect situation.
JAD: By being so tired and so hungry, and finding such a stash of candy that he had forgotten that he left, he created a moment of just absolute complete bliss.
ROBERT: In this hour on Radiolab we're gonna be searching for moments like Alex had happen in Antarctica. We're gonna be searching for ...
ALEXANDER GAMME: Bliss. [laughs]
JAD: Bliss of all different sorts. Perfect moments.
ROBERT: Perfect worlds.
JAD: The kind of bliss that slips right through your fingers.
ROBERT: And the kind of bliss that just might last.
JAD: And last.
ROBERT: And last.
JAD: All right. We're gonna begin with a story that kind of inspired this show. We would've never done a show about the word "bliss" were it not for the following story, which is about a Bliss.
ROBERT: A? What do you mean a bliss?
JAD: That'll—that'll make sense in just a second. Story comes from our producer Tim Howard, and it begins with a box of tapes.
TIM: All right. So check it out. This is ...
JAD: All right. We're in my office, and you've got a rectangular package here. What is it?
TIM: It is a very old-looking box. Doesn't look like much. It's just about, like, 15 cassettes. "Tape number six: Singing and playing to friends in America."
[ARCHIVE CLIP, cassette tape: [singing]]
TIM: Okay, so this is Charles.
RICHARD URE: Charles Kasiel Bliss. An amazing character.
TIM: And that's Richard.
RICHARD URE: Richard Ure.
TIM: He's the fellow who gave me the cassettes. He was a friend of Charles.
RICHARD URE: Yeah.
JAD: So these were just, like, sitting in his attic or something?
TIM: Garage, I think.
RICHARD URE: He looked like, I suppose, a little gnome, a little leprechaun, almost.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, cassette tape: [singing]]
RICHARD URE: He was short, bald and laughter the whole time.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, cassette tape: [singing]]
RICHARD URE: He was a lovable character. Simple as that.
TIM: This is my favorite one.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, cassette tape: [singing]]
JAD: Wait a second. Just explain why we're talking about this guy.
TIM: Sure. Because these tapes tell an amazing story about a guy who really embodied his name. And he tried to save the world, but ultimately just tried too hard.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: The turning point in my life came in 1908.]
TIM: We can start the story here. This is from a lecture that he gave decades later. So the story goes, it's 1908, and he's a little kid living in what's now the Ukraine.
JAD: Okay.
TIM: And his name is Karl Blitz.
JAD: Not Charles Bliss?
TIM: Not Charles Bliss. Karl Blitz. B-L-I-T-Z. That's his original name. And little Karl ...
ARIKA OKRENT: ... was fascinated by tales of discovery and adventure. My name is Arika Okrent.
TIM: Arika wrote about Charles Bliss in this great book called ...
ARIKA OKRENT: In the Land of Invented Languages.
TIM: Getting back to the story. One day, she says, when Karl was 11 ...
ARIKA OKRENT: A lecture came through town about some ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: Polar expedition.]
ARIKA OKRENT: Polar expedition.
TIM: ... two explorers ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: Showing slides.]
TIM: ... talking about their trek across the North Pole. And he was so inspired by what he saw and heard at that lecture that even decades later, he couldn't talk about it ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: My father took me to this—excuse me ...]
TIM: ... without getting choked up.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: My father took me to this lecture, and there I saw men who left their warm homes, their secure existence, and went out into the Arctic into the icy snow in almost certain death. For what? For what? For in search of knowledge, for an idea.]
TIM: As he tells it on those tapes, that was the beginning of his big idea that was gonna change the world. Fast forward a few years ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: When I came to Vienna after the First World War ...]
ARIKA OKRENT: He did end up going to the Technical University of Vienna.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: I was suddenly discovered to be the best mandolin player in Austria, and one time I played with a full opera orchestra under the direction of the composer Franceca. Ah, those were the days.]
TIM: And then everything changed. In 1938 ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Adolf Hitler: [speaking German]]
[NEWS CLIP: German troops swarm across the Austrian border on the historic ...]
TIM: The Nazis came to town.
ARIKA OKRENT: Nazis came to town. He was sent to Dachau and then Buchenwald.
TIM: You know, the concentration camps.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: One—one feeling, one reassuring desire to end my life.]
TIM: All around him, people were being worked to death or outright exterminated. But his wife Claire was a German Catholic with connections.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: And Claire, my good wife, smuggled my mandolin and my guitar into the concentration camp. I became so famous as an artist. And for instance, our block fuhrer of would come into our barrack and said "Blitz, we must have the mandolin! I want twice a week!"]
TIM: And you could say that it was here in Buchenwald that Karl started to develop his ideas about language, about the ways that you can manipulate words. For instance, there was this one song that all the prisoners sang.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: The Buchenwald Kleid, one of the saddest songs I can ever meant.]
TIM: Had the saddest lyrics in the world. At a certain point, Karl started to play around with this song. You know, he'd swap out some of the sad lyrics for some jokes, sing it for his fellow prisoners.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: And they laughed and laughed and laughed, and forgot for a few minutes that they are in the darkest and the most terrible house on Earth.]
TIM: And on the flip side, every evening, the guards would march all the prisoners outside, force them to stand there in the cold in front of these loudspeakers. Make them listen to these speeches. Speeches of Hitler and Goebbels screaming Nazi slogans. Like ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Adolf Hitler: Deutschland über alles!]
TIM: Which means "Germany above all."
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Adolf Hitler: [speaking German]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: There are certain words which make you mad, which drive you mad.]
TIM: But after about a year ...
ARIKA OKRENT: His wife somehow wrangled a British visa for him, and he ...
TIM: ... gets out.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: Thank heavens those dreadful times are gone, and now I can play here for you an improvisation as it comes into my mind.]
ARIKA OKRENT: In 1939, he went to Britain ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: And got a job as a manager of a factory.]
TIM: But he arrived in England just as The Blitz begins. The Germans start to bomb every major city in England.
[NEWS CLIP: The noise that you hear at the moment is the sound of the air raid siren.]
TIM: And every time he'd introduce himself to somebody new, they'd shudder.
TIM: That can't be your name.
ARIKA OKRENT: Yeah.
TIM: Because of, like, "Blitzkrieg?" It had that association?
ARIKA OKRENT: Yes. [laughs]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: "You can't go around here in Great Britain with a name like 'Blitz!'" So I changed from the warlike "Blitz" to the peaceful "Bliss."]
TIM: That was how he became Charles Bliss.
ARIKA OKRENT: Bliss has all the right associations, so he went forward with the feeling of—that he was now Bliss and would bring happiness to the world.
TIM: And a year later, he and his wife end up in China, in Shanghai, where there was a big population of exiled Jews.
ARIKA OKRENT: Shanghai was the only place that would take them at that time.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: And there in China—and there in China, I got the opportunity of my lifetime.]
TIM: And now we come to his big idea.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: I realized what I did not know, that the Chinese have a different way of writing.]
ARIKA OKRENT: He became enraptured by the Chinese writing that he saw.
TIM: The Chinese use symbols, and each symbol is a word. And he writes about having this epiphany when he saw the Chinese symbol for "man."
ARIKA OKRENT: He saw that the Chinese written form of "man" sort of looks like a man.
TIM: It looks like a stick-figure man. And it means "man." He doesn't even know what the Chinese word for "man" is. He doesn't know how to say "man," but that doesn't matter. He is skipping the word and going directly into the meaning.
ARIKA OKRENT: So here was a way of getting beyond language. You could think the word in any language if you see it in the symbol.
TIM: And that was a revelation.
JAD: Why?
TIM: Well I mean, think back to the concentration camps. When they were outside in front of those loudspeakers listening to Hitler saying stuff like "Deutschland über alles." You know, "Germany above all." And that phrase?
JAD: Mm-hmm.?
TIM: Charles knew that it actually predated the Nazis.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: That was coined a hundred years earlier in 1848.]
TIM: And originally, it was meant as a rallying cry to bring together all of these separate principalities ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: The Kingdom of Bavaria and the Kingdom of Saxonia, the Kingdom of ...]
TIM: ... that spoke German, but these were not one country. So when they said "Deutschland Über Alles," it meant unification.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: A unified Germany.]
TIM: A nation above the states.
JAD: Oh, so it wasn't necessarily an aggressive thing.
TIM: No. But ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: But Hitler turned this around.]
TIM: Hitler changed the meaning. Instead of the nation above all states, he changed it to the nation ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: Everything, above all the countries of the world.]
TIM: ... above all other nations.
JAD: Oh!
TIM: So you see what happened. This phrase that started meaning one thing: unification ...
JAD: Yeah. Became the opposite.
TIM: Yeah. This is what the Nazis did.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: Those words? Lies.]
TIM: They would bend words to obscure the truth of what they were doing. Extermination? They would call it "solution." By doing that, as he saw it, they were able to convince good, sane people—his neighbors—to go along with the genocide.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: And I realized that something must be done to make language more truer to nature.]
ARIKA OKRENT: Words were the problem. Words made people do cruel things to each other.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: They tear our society apart.]
ARIKA OKRENT: Words were dangerous instruments.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: They cause violence, they cause wars.]
TIM: So when he saw the Chinese symbol for "man," he thought this might be the answer.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: And the idea came up to me that I should invent symbols.]
TIM: Like the Chinese symbols, but even clearer.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: Which are so simple and pictorial that even children can read them.]
ARIKA OKRENT: If he could sit down and work it out, you would look at the symbol and know what it meant instantly, regardless of what language you spoke.
TIM: You wouldn't even need words, which he felt ...
ARIKA OKRENT: Could be manipulated.
TIM: You could just have the symbol ...
ARIKA OKRENT: ... and get straight to the truth of the matter.
TIM: And the way he saw it, right off the bat you'd have all of these benefits.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: Frenchmen and Finns, Englishmen and Estonians.]
TIM: Language barriers would be out the window.
ARIKA OKRENT: Everything from traffic accidents to health problems ...
TIM: ... could be avoided, he thought ...
ARIKA OKRENT: ... if his symbol system would just be adopted.
RICHARD URE: He had this vision that high-level political and commercial negotiations would be done in symbols.
TIM: Did he say anything as grand as, like, "War wouldn't happen?"
ARIKA OKRENT: Constantly.
TIM: And even, of course ...
RICHARD URE: He reckoned Hitler wouldn't have happened, basically. That if the German people had understood these symbols, they wouldn't have copped Goebbels's propaganda. That's a pretty tall order, but it did seem to be what he thought.
ARIKA OKRENT: Everything could be cured by this system.
TIM: He's the biggest dreamer ever.
ARIKA OKRENT: Yeah.
TIM: How did he go about doing this?
ARIKA OKRENT: He started working out what the basic lines and shapes would be. He also wanted to make sure you could produce it with a typewriter, so it had to be a limited set of shapes out of which everything could be created.
TIM: Okay, so he works on it for seven years.
JAD: Seven years?
TIM: And he comes up with [book slams on table] that.
JAD: Wow! That is a big one.
TIM: This massive book called ...
ARIKA OKRENT: "Blissymbolics"
TIM: "Semantology: A Logical Writing for an Illogical World."
JAD: That says it all.
TIM: Where he explains the logic of his system. For example, here? Here's a symbol for "sword," which looks exactly like a sword. And then sword plus a forward arrow means "attack."
JAD: I buy it.
TIM: And then if you see a symbol for sword and another symbol for sword and they're crossed, that means "war."
JAD: So that's the idea, that you take these basic elemental symbols and combine them?
TIM: Exactly. All right, here's another one. This symbol here is like the top half of a circle.
JAD: Like a little rainbow, but just one line.
TIM: That means "mind."
JAD: "Mind."
TIM: It looks like the top of a skull.
JAD: Ah.
TIM: Now if I were to take that symbol for "mind," and I were to go like this, I were to put inside it a question mark, that means ...
JAD: I'm—I don't know? Or I ...
TIM: "Doubt."
JAD: "Doubt."
TIM: And there are also, you know, ways to indicate verbs and adjectives and first person, second person, the past, the future. But kind of the one thing that it did that no other language or symbol system or anything has attempted to do—at least as far as I know—is that it would make clear when something was what he called a "human evaluation." You know, basically an opinion.
JAD: Hmm.
TIM: And what you would do is you'd put this little—this little "V" symbol, and you'd put it above the symbol.
JAD: And why—why "V?"
TIM: Well, because, you know, a "V" is balanced on a point and it's unstable, it wobbles. To him, that represents opinions, human evaluations, anything that comes out of the mind.
JAD: Hmm.
TIM: Or take metaphors.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: If you say something which is in the 'taphor ...]
TIM: The "'taphor," as he says.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: You must put up the metaphor sign.]
TIM: To alert the reader: do not take this literally.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: Stop. Metaphor ahead.]
JAD: Not exactly bulletproof, but I can—I can see the thinking there.
TIM: I actually think it's pretty impressive. And ...
JAD: Okay. So what happens next?
TIM: Well, after he finishes this, and he and his wife are living in Australia at the time ...
ARIKA OKRENT: They spent all their savings on producing this book, and sent it out to ...
TIM: ... professors, government officials ...
ARIKA OKRENT: ... heads of state.
TIM: Something like 6,000 people.
ARIKA OKRENT: And they waited for the orders to start rolling in.
TIM: And no response from anybody.
ARIKA OKRENT: And then they had nothing.
JAD: Can't say I didn't see that coming.
TIM: Yeah.
ARIKA OKRENT: And with great disappointment, Charles went to work as a welder in a factory.
RICHARD URE: At General Motors Holland, he was working on the production line almost as a robot.
TIM: And a year later his wife died.
ARIKA OKRENT: You know, he had fought in World War I, he had been in a concentration camp, he had lived in exile, but he says this was the lowest point of his life.
TIM: Until one day, 1971.
ARIKA OKRENT: This—as he said, this letter floated onto his desk with this picture of this beautiful, dimpled child proudly using his symbols.
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: Yeah, it was a poster.
TIM: A poster.
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: A poster.
TIM: This is Shirley.
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: Shirley McNaughton.
TIM: And at the time, she was a nurse at a place called the OCCC.
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: The Ontario Crippled Children's Centre, a name that we were very happy to leave behind us.
TIM: They've since changed the name.
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: I started there in 1968.
TIM: And Shirley was part of this group of teachers and nurses who worked with these kids who suffered from cerebral palsy.
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: If you have cerebral palsy, it's the motor control from the brain that's been affected.
TIM: Which meant that they had trouble moving their arms or legs. And even in some cases ...
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: They couldn't speak.
TIM: They couldn't form words. And in a film that was made of this class, you see these young kids ...
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: Children from five to seven.
TIM: ... all sitting in wheelchairs, and they're watching the teacher. She talks to them, and you hear them try to talk to her. But they can't.
ARIKA OKRENT: These kids had no way to communicate.
TIM: Couldn't they learn how to read?
ARIKA OKRENT: They could, if you knew what they were understanding. And they have no way to communicate that to you.
TIM: The only thing all these kids had were pictures that they could point at.
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: They had a picture of a toilet, picture of food, picture of a drink, a picture of a bed. They were limited to that kind of communication. But I knew they were bright.
TIM: But if they couldn't move and they couldn't speak, how would you know?
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: My insight on that was the twinkle in their eyes.
TIM: But, she says, a lot of doctors and nurses at the time ...
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: Thought I was crazy.
TIM: Thought there really wasn't much going on inside these kids' heads.
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: You know, they thought I was projecting into the children.
TIM: What she needed, she said, was a way to get through to them.
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: And ...
TIM: So one day she was at the library with a colleague, and they come across this dusty old volume that had never been checked out called—you guessed it ...
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: Blissymbolics.
TIM: And what did you first think when you saw it?
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: Oh, boy! Can I get back to the group? How fast can I get back to the group with this?
TIM: Really?
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: This is exactly what we need.
TIM: So do you remember what the first symbols were?
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: I think it was "I" and "You."
TIM: "I" looks kind of like a standing person.
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: An upright line.
TIM: A small horizontal line at the base.
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: Yeah.
TIM: Next to it ...
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: The number one.
TIM: Which means "First person." "You" is the same symbol, but with the number two for "Second person."
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: And then they had to have a verb, and it was love.
TIM: Heart with an arrow through it.
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: So now they've got a sentence: I love you. One of our mothers says the happiest moment she's ever had with her child was when her child came home and said "I love you," you know? So ...
TIM: Shirley and her staff started to add more symbols.
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: [laughs] They caught on.
TIM: And pretty soon, they'd created this giant laminated chart.
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: It had "I" and "You." And "He," "She," "We" and "They." Then it had "Mother," "Father," "Grandma," "Grandpa," "Doctor," "Nurse," "Teacher," "Therapist," "Postman," "Fireman," "Librarian," "Dentist."
TIM: Eventually, they added adjectives.
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: "Happy," "Sad" and "Frustrated." All the verbs. You had "Love" and "Like" and "Hate." "Want" and "Need." "Understand."
TIM: Pretty soon ...
ARIKA OKRENT: The kids started to do amazing things with symbol combinations.
TIM: They started to improvise. Shirley remembers asking one kid ...
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: Terry Martin, what did he want to be for Halloween?
TIM: Terry pointed first at the symbol for "Creature."
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: A creature, not a person.
TIM: Then he pointed at the symbol for ...
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: "Drinks."
TIM: Then ...
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: "Blood."
TIM: And then ...
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: "Night."
JAD: A creature who drinks blood at night.
TIM: Right.
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: He wanted to be a vampire.
JAD: Ah.
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: He spelled a new word.
TIM: It sounds like an explosion with these kids.
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: It was. It was.
TIM: For the first time, she says, she could actually talk to them, like, know who they were.
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: Yeah, you got to know who the leaders were in the classroom, those who wanted to help others, those who copied others.
TIM: And it was around then that she and the other teachers decided to send Charles Bliss that letter.
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: We were sharing our excitement for this gift he'd given to the children. You know, he was in Australia. He was an elderly man. We had no thought that he would come and visit us. You know, it didn't enter our mind.
TIM: But Charles Bliss?
RICHARD URE: He was delighted!
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: [singing]]
RICHARD URE: He had battled for so long for recognition, and now he had it.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: [singing]]
ARIKA OKRENT: He mortgages his house and flies over.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: And I was so happy there, and I played my mandolin and told them jokes.]
ARIKA OKRENT: He dances around and kisses everybody effusively.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: And they laughed and laughed and laughed their heads off.]
TIM: He had long conversations with the kids ...
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: ... in symbols. He was very happy about the children.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: [singing] Joy, joy, joy!]
TIM: But somewhere along the way, he notices something. Shirley—Shirley and the teachers had begun to augment the system. They'd begun to add their own symbols, such as ...
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: The opposite-meaning symbol.
TIM: This allowed the kids to take one of Bliss's standard symbols and just invert the meaning.
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: Opposite of happy? Sad. Opposite of up? Down. Opposite of in? Out.
TIM: To her, this would effectively ...
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: Double the number of adjectives.
TIM: Which would be great for the kids.
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: And we developed rules ...
TIM: ... for how to combine symbols, for how to be more precise with the symbols.
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: Yeah.
TIM: She threw in some new pronouns that were missing.
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: The difference between "He" and "Him" and "His."
TIM: In short ...
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: I would make the adaptations I needed to make. From the very beginning, we were using it to meet the children's needs.
TIM: Their specific needs.
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: And of course, that is not what he had in his mind.
TIM: He wanted a system that was universal. Every change that she made created, like, a separate dialect.
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: He would get very emotional about it.
TIM: So when he got back to Australia, he started ...
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: Writing all these letters.
TIM: Basically taking issue with her changes, and her failure to understand how his system works. Meanwhile thanks to Shirley, word about Bliss's symbols had spread way beyond Canada, to Hungary, France, Sweden, Israel, Zimbabwe.
JAD: Zimbabwe?
TIM: Yeah. And then Argentina, Brazil, Finland, Iceland, Italy, Bermuda, Guam, Japan, Portugal, Spain, Netherlands, Hungary, Switzerland, Venezuela, Madagascar, Yugoslavia.
JAD: It spread to all these places?
TIM: Yeah. And in each place, the symbols would inevitably get tweaked to suit that country. For example, in Israel, because the writing goes from right to left ...
JAD: Yeah?
TIM: ... the Blissymbols went from right to left.
JAD: Ah.
TIM: But what really pained him the most, what really got him, was that these teachers were using his symbols ...
ARIKA OKRENT: As a step toward English.
TIM: Or French or German or Hebrew or whatever. It was just a way to get the kids to their native languages.
ARIKA OKRENT: The teachers always saw it ...
TIM: The way they saw it, you start the kids on Bliss ...
ARIKA OKRENT: ... and then you introduce reading and letters, and eventually they're fully literate.
TIM: At which point, you don't need the Blissymbols.
JAD: Oh!
TIM: This was the ultimate insult to him. They were using his system to bring these kids back to the very thing that he was trying to get everyone away from.
JAD: Evil words.
TIM: Yeah.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: I tried to explain it to them. They don't want to listen to me. They look through me. What should I do? What should I do? I don't know. I don't know.]
TIM: And it's right about at this point in the story that you start to hear a different Charles Bliss.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: This Shirley McNaughton has perverted my work, has perverted and perverted and perverted.]
JAD: Is he saying "Perverted?"
TIM: Yeah.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: She smiles, she beguiles and she lies.]
TIM: He kept sending Shirley and the other teachers letters, and the letters got angrier and angrier.
ARIKA OKRENT: "This was not what the language was for. This was a universal language that had nothing to do with spoken language. You are ruining my system. You are abusing it."
TIM: And eventually, he decided to take matters into his own hands and he traveled back to Canada.
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: And he started going to the various centers ...
TIM: ... where the kids were using his symbols.
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: And saying horrible things about me, and getting them very upset. That's when I got upset. I got upset when he got them upset.
TIM: Not long after, Shirley receives a summons.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: I have taken to court, the OCCC.]
JAD: Wait, he sued them?
TIM: Yeah.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: I added two more defendants. Mrs. Shirley McNaughton ...]
TIM: On the tapes he even suggests that he's gonna have Shirley put away.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: Her whole life.]
TIM: For life.
JAD: Wow! Why was he so upset with her in particular?
TIM: Well, because by this time, she'd started ...
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: The international organization BCI.
TIM: Blissymbol Communications International.
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: And ...
TIM: ... she felt like this was a totally unique and powerful tool which could and should transform lives around the world, and more teachers needed to adopt it.
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: Definitely.
TIM: What was he asking for? Did he ...
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: He wanted us to use the symbols in his way.
TIM: So in 1975, the BCI won a license agreement to use the symbols in the workbooks for the kids, but Charles Bliss ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: They should all be pulped!]
TIM: ... didn't give up.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: They should all be pulped!]
TIM: He published endless tirades and sent them out to anybody who would listen.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: Please unite in helping to eradicate all falsifications of the Blissymbol system.]
TIM: All in all, this went on for over a decade.
ARIKA OKRENT: And the administration of the program where Shirley was working was desperate to make him go away. He had basically destroyed the program.
TIM: And so in 1982, he and the BCI finally come to an agreement.
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: It was a financial settlement that satisfied him.
TIM: What was the financial settlement?
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: $160,000.
TIM: Wow.
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: You know, we were a little program in the basement of the Ontario Crippled Children's Centre. We were, you know, just a classroom.
JAD: Wow. So a guy who wanted to save the world ends up robbing a bunch of disabled kids? I mean, that's kind of putting it crudely, but that's how it feels.
TIM: Basically, that's the—yeah.
JAD: And did the symbols ever go anywhere?
ARIKA OKRENT: Well, there was a lot of excitement about it in the beginning, but it never spread very far. It's used now at a few schools in Canada and Sweden, a couple other places, but it never went very far because he was constantly taking it down at every turn.
TIM: But here's what I find most surprising: when I—when I talked to Shirley, she didn't have any bitterness toward him, not even in the worst moments.
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: When we were having the final legal action, we'd go through that in the morning, and as the lawyers were packing up their papers, Charles Bliss would reach across the table and he'd say, "Shirley, will you help me?" And ...
TIM: So she'd go to lunch with him, sit with him.
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: And then he asked me if I would come to his hotel that night and put the ear drops in his ears. And I did that every night he was involved with this thing. That's just the way it was.
TIM: And it wasn't just that she takes care of people for a living. You know, she felt—and still feels—that Charles Bliss had created something really new in the world. She even told me that when she uses Blissymbols, she actually thinks differently.
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: Yes. Definitely.
TIM: Really?
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: Definitely.
TIM: What's different?
SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: Oh, I just think so much more about what a word means. And it's like poetry in its purest form. I've been playing with stained glass down here in my retirement. And you can—you know, you can just take the symbols and put them into one composite, and they say things that only art can say. It's beautiful. They transmit a meaning that is beyond any words.
JAD: Thanks to producer Tim Howard and Arika Okrent, author of In the Land of Invented Languages. We'll be right back.
[LIVVIE: Bliss is having friends and family you can rely on. My name is Livvie Graham, and I am calling from the side of the road in Dallas, Texas, awaiting rescue.]
[GINGER: This is Ginger, a socially awkward introvert from Cabot, Arkansas. Bliss is one day in which I do not have to interact with another human being.]
[MAHMOUD: Bliss is political ignorance. This is Mahmoud from Montreal.]
[WOMAN: Bliss is your baby sleeping in your arms.]
[ARIKA OKRENT: Hi, this is Arika Okrent.]
[SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: Uh, just a minute here.]
[ARIKA OKRENT: Radiolab is supported in part ...]
[SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation ...]
[ARIKA OKRENT: ... and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world.]
[SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: More information about Sloan can be found at www.sloan ...]
[ARIKA OKRENT: ... .org. Radiolab is produced by ...]
[SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: ... by WNYC ...]
[ARIKA OKRENT: ... and distributed ...]
[SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: ... by NPR.]
[ARIKA OKRENT: Hope that works for you. Thanks.]
[ANSWERING MACHINE: End of message.]
JAD: Wait, wait. Don't. Shh! Let me just hit record. Okay, now what were you saying spontaneously a moment ago? [laughs]
JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.
ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.
JAD: This is Radiolab. And today?
ROBERT: Bliss.
JAD: And in our last segment, we met a guy who dreamt of a perfect world where words could never muck things up. Got a little carried away.
ROBERT: Yeah. And so let's forget about dreams.
JAD: Forget about them.
ROBERT: Now we're gonna look for perfection right here in the physical world.
LATIF NASSER: Okay. So—so this story ...
JAD: And we're gonna do it with the perfect person ...
ROBERT: Latif Nasser.
LATIF: It begins with a birthday present.
ROBERT: Hmm.
LATIF: It's February 9, 1880. Six miles outside the tiny town of Jericho, Vermont. And we're on a farm, a family farm—the Bentley family farm. And this scrawny 15-year-old kid named Wilson gets a microscope from his mother.
JAD: Mmm.
LATIF: So it's February and it's Vermont. And so naturally, the first thing this kid does is he grabs a handful of snow, picks out a single flake and he puts it under the microscope. And what he sees is the most beautiful thing he's ever seen. It's ethereal and perfect. He calls them "Masterpieces," as if they're these, you know, great works of art.
JAD: He calls them that in his 15-year-old diary?
LATIF: Well, looking back, he talked about that moment and what he was thinking when he sort of first saw it. But obviously, you know, within minutes or maybe even seconds, these masterpieces just disappeared without leaving any evidence that they ever existed. They just sort of evaporate.
JAD: Huh.
LATIF: And as he remembers it, he sort of decides then and there that he's gonna dedicate his whole life to documenting these masterpieces. Otherwise, no one will ever know they even existed.
JAD: He's gonna spend his whole life documenting snowflakes?
LATIF: Yeah. Yeah.
ROBERT: It's a good life, Jad. And it pays well.
LATIF: Right! That's exactly what his father said. His father thought he was—you know, he was just lazy and didn't want to do the farming chores.
ROBERT: [laughs] Oh, I see. His father says, "Milk the goats!" And he goes, "No, Dad! The beauty! The beauty!"
LATIF: Right. Right. And apparently he was a real—he was really good at digging potatoes, but he just sort of was so busy futzing around with his microscope that, you know ...
JAD: I don't like this kid. I don't like him.
ROBERT: He offends your work ethic.
JAD: It does so.
ROBERT: What happens next?
LATIF: So he takes his microscope, and he moves it to this unheated woodshed behind the house. And he starts sketching these snowflakes, right?
JAD: Hmm.
LATIF: And while he's sketching, he can't even breathe because he was worried that his breath would melt his specimen. So he's sort of holding his breath, and drawing these, you know, extremely complex crystals that can take you maybe—you know, maybe an hour to draw, but depending on the temperature, the humidity, the size of the crystal, he had—at most, he had five minutes, right?
ROBERT: Hmm.
LATIF: At the end of that, he looks at them all, and he's not satisfied. He just felt like he wasn't doing it justice, you know? What he calls these, like, miracles of beauty. So Bentley persuades his mother who persuades his father to buy him a camera.
JAD: Wait a sec. Wait, wait, wait, wait. 1880. We're in February, 1880. Have we entered into the era of picture taking?
LATIF: Just barely. And for a farming family this was, like, a lot of money, but they buy it for him and he gets it, and he sort of jerry-rigs it to the microscope. And at age 19, Wilson Bentley is the first person ever in history to photograph a snowflake.
ROBERT: Okay, I'm gonna cue the snowflake celebration music here.
LATIF: Right. From then on basically for the next 46 winters until he died, every snowfall, every blizzard, this guy Bentley would stand in the doorway of his little shack, holding out a wooden tray with thick mittens, because he would wear these, they're almost like oven mitts to make sure that none of his body heat would kind of leak out and inadvertently melt any of the snow. So he'd sort of stand there and sort of give it a once-over with his eye. If nothing was promising, he basically had a turkey feather, and he would sort of just wipe it clean with this turkey feather until he did find something he liked. And then he would take this tiny little wooden rod, and he would just sort of really delicately tap the center of the crystal and, like, really, really, really gently lift it off and then transfer it onto a glass slide so that he could put it under the microscope and he could photograph it.
LATIF: Over the course of his life, he basically photographed about 5,000 snow crystals. For his whole life he was just a farmer doing this kind of as a hobby, but he sold copies of these photos for five cents a pop to places like Harvard and the British Museum and the US Weather Bureau, research journals, magazines like Nature and National Geographic. And I mean, you've already seen the photos. Like, you've gotten them on a Christmas card, they're on your, like, ugly Christmas sweater in your closet somewhere.
JAD: [laughs] Robert's wearing a shirt with them on right now.
ROBERT: Yeah.
LATIF: [laughs] They're everywhere. They're beautiful, symmetrical, really clean and complex. A lot of the greatest scientists who ever lived, like Descartes and Kepler and Hooke, they all tried to sketch and draw and kind of capture the essence of snowflakes, but none of them could do it as well as this one obsessive loner from Jericho, Vermont, whose photos were perceived to be kind of more faithful to nature than anybody else's. But that was until this other guy came on the scene, this German guy.
ROBERT: Cue the other guy Germanic theme music.
LATIF: Yes. Yes. He was a German meteorologist named Gustav Hellmann.
ROBERT: Gustav Hellmann.
LATIF: Not of the mayonnaise fame, I don't believe.
ROBERT: [laughs] I hadn't even thought of that, actually.
JAD: [laughs] So Hellmann. Is this—is he a contemporary of Bentley?
LATIF: Yeah, he is. And he's working on his own book about weather, and so he hires a kind of a micro-photographer who's another German guy named Richard Neuhauss.
ROBERT: A micro—is that a very teeny photographer who he kept on his desk?
LATIF: Yeah, he's microscopic himself, and he just takes normal-sized photographs.
ROBERT: [laughs]
LATIF: Anyhow, he hires this guy and they take a bunch of photos using basically similar technology—a camera and a microscope, essentially. But what they find is totally different. They do not find the elegant, symmetrical ideal snow crystals that Bentley found. The crystals they found were, like, flawed, lopsided. Usually, like, broken.
ROBERT: Hmm.
LATIF: And the way I think of it, it was like a Martian who had only ever seen, like, glossy fashion magazines had just been given some, like, random family photo album, and it was like, "Oh, wow. This is—they're not so pretty. Like, these are kind of ugly."
JAD: [laughs] "These humans!"
LATIF: "These humans, they're not all symmetrical." But these Germans, they basically called him out. They basically thought Bentley was a fraud. There was a particular way that Bentley prepared his photographs. What he would do is he would use a penknife to scrape the negative around the snow crystal, which is what gave it that kind of nice black background, because he thought it would kind of put it in maybe starker relief. And the German guys said it's misleading, that it kind of mutilates the snowflakes.
JAD: Huh. But wait, so he's photographing these snowflakes and then significantly messing with the photograph?
LATIF: Exactly right. Exactly right. So here's a quote from the photographer who said, quote, "In many images, Bentley did not limit himself to improving the outlines. He let his knife play deep inside the heart of the crystals so that fully arbitrary figures emerged."
ROBERT: Oh.
JAD: Oh, so he's ...
ROBERT: Well, I don't know. That doesn't seem so—it's no longer a candid, is it?
LATIF: Well, that's the question. So they basically lob this, and this is kind of going in these journals, but Bentley basically launches a counter-attack, and what he says is that, in fact, those guys were wrong, that not correcting your photographs was—and he used this word, like, "perverse." To him, why wouldn't you remove specks of dust or other imperfections? Why photograph a broken snowflake when you could photograph a complete one? So this is a quote from Bentley. He said, "A true scientist wishes above all to have his photographs as true to nature as possible. And if retouching will help in this respect, then it is fully justified."
JAD: So he thought his retouched snowflakes were truer than the normal ones?
LATIF: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. The scientist is supposed to be kind of this very experienced, almost like a sage who has seen every different variation on a snowflake, but can sort of bring that all together in one drawing, one sketch, one photograph. And that's the true snowflake.
ROBERT: So if I brought him a slightly gloppy snowflake and said, "Look, this is what fell on my nose, and this is a true snowflake because it actually fell from the sky and it's—you know, it was unenhanced." He would say that ...
LATIF: He would say, "Robert, you're an amateur. Like, this is—this is not good work. You know, this is an aberration. This is an abnormality. Why would you choose to kind of highlight an abnormality as opposed to kind of this true ideal snowflake?" You know?
JAD: And does that one exist?
LATIF: [laughs]
JAD: I mean, that's the key question for me. Like, does the ideal snowflake exist in nature?
ROBERT: You think there are such things, exquisitely beautiful.
JAD: I would like to think that there are.
LATIF: No. So I think, if my facts are right, that the world snowflake expert is actually in Pasadena, California.
LATIF: All right. Check, check, check, check.
ROBERT: In sunny Southern California?
LATIF: Yeah.
LATIF: I'm wearing a t-shirt. I have sunscreen lathered, and I am going to talk to the world authority on snow.
KEN LIBBRECHT: How are you?
LATIF: His name is Ken Libbrecht. He's a professor of physics at Caltech. He is—in a way, he's like the modern-day Wilson Bentley because he takes a ton of snowflake pictures.
KEN LIBBRECHT: I've taken about 10,000 now. So ...
LATIF: And he actually makes snowflakes.
KEN LIBBRECHT: Oh, yeah.
LATIF: Artificially.
LATIF: Okay. Wow. So this is a giant tank. This is of nitrogen here?
KEN LIBBRECHT: Never mind that.
LATIF: Okay.
LATIF: And to get to your question about the ideal snowflake, a few things. So number one, there are a bajillion different kinds.
KEN LIBBRECHT: Dendritic, crystal stellar dendrites, needles and columns and hollow columns, and the sectored plates.
LATIF: So that's one thing. The second thing is that snowflakes are never static. They're never one thing. So at every single moment as it falls to the Earth, it's either growing or shrinking, depending on the kind of trajectory through the different pockets of weather as it's moving down. So there is no real platonic ideal form of a snowflake because it's so in flux.
KEN LIBBRECHT: I mean, there's no such thing as a perfect snowflake.
LATIF: But that doesn't stop Ken Libbrecht from looking.
KEN LIBBRECHT: You know, I tried up in Tahoe and Japan, Vermont, Michigan.
LATIF: He travels all over the world looking for Bentley's perfect flakes.
KEN LIBBRECHT: Alaska. Been to Alaska. Sweden. One of my favorite spots is Northern Ontario. A little town called Cochrane.
LATIF: Population 5,487.
LATIF: So where do you go in Cochrane? Do you—just anywhere? They're just falling all over the place?
KEN LIBBRECHT: Mostly it's the parking lot of my hotel. [laughs]
LATIF: Because there's a lot of waiting involved.
KEN LIBBRECHT: It only really snows well about once a week.
LATIF: Even then things have to be Goldilocks perfect.
KEN LIBBRECHT: If the clouds are too high, then they evaporate a little on the way down. They don't look very pretty.
LATIF: Or ...
KEN LIBBRECHT: If the clouds are too light or too heavy.
LATIF: That's bad too.
KEN LIBBRECHT: And a lot of times the temperature's wrong.
LATIF: If you want those Christmas card supermodel snowflakes, you need to have exactly ...
KEN LIBBRECHT: Minus 15. That's five degrees Fahrenheit.
LATIF: You need to have high humidity, not so much wind, so that they'll putter down slowly and have more time to grow.
KEN LIBBRECHT: But every once in a while, I mean, when the conditions are right, you go outside all, you know, hopeful and anticipating and you're just like, "Oh, crap. There's nothing but garbage out here." So you go back inside and read some more email, and you come back a half an hour later. Nope, still lousy. And then a half hour later. Nope, still lousy. And, you know, you do this for hours, and then all of a sudden they'll get really good. And then I'm just out there frantically trying to collect as many as I can. One of the things I like to think about is, you know, here I am with my little piece of cardboard in the middle of a continent where it's snowing all the time. And so I am catching some incredibly small number of these things for a brief period and getting some really cool pictures. And so you kind of wonder what else is out there? What are you missing? I mean, imagine just all the beautiful little works of art that are just falling down totally unnoticed, and then they just disappear. I mean, stuff that is far prettier than the pictures I have. Because they're out there. You know they're out there. Statistically they're out there. And so, you know, there's just an awful lot of really gorgeous things that just are, like you say, they're just totally ephemeral and you'll never see them. And they're falling constantly. So you sort of want to just stop the world and, you know, go look at them. [laughs]
JAD: Thanks to Latif Nasser, and to Ken Libbrecht, who wrote the book, The Secret Life of a Snowflake.
[MATT: This is Matt Neilly-Dawson from Asheville, North Carolina, and bliss is this sound.]
[baby laughing]
[MATT: That's the sound of my seven-month-old daughter reacting to my puppy dog licking her feet.]
[IGOR: Hi, my name is Igor, and I'm calling from Novi Sad, Serbia. Bliss is Indiana Jones, all three parts!]
[STEVE: Hi, Radiolab. This is Steve Strogatz. Bliss is the taste of hot pastrami at Katz's Deli on the Lower East Side of New York City. We live four or five hours away from New York and don't get there very often. And so I spend a lot of time in between visits thinking about that first taste of the hot pastrami. So for me, that's bliss. I get to think about some kind of almost unattainable perfection. Except that it is attainable—I just show up and there it is.]
[MARY: This is Mary Roach, and I'm in Oakland, California. And I have a list of bliss. My bliss list: number one, laughing uncontrollably, number two, zero gravity; number four, the first 10 seconds in a hot, hot bath; number nine, a raw oyster, very fresh, but no larger than an infant's ear.]
[LISTENER: This is Adrian Stein from New Brunswick, New Jersey. 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 we're talking about bliss.
JAD: And so far, I've gotta say we're not doing so great. I mean, we had a fleeting moment, a dream that crumbled, snowflakes that evaporate in your hand.
ROBERT: But in the next story, we're gonna shoot for bliss that lasts.
MIKE YOUNG: Hello, this is Mike Young.
ANDY MILLS: Mike.
MIKE YOUNG: Speak up, Andy.
JAD: Comes to us from our producer Andy Mills.
ANDY: Can you hear me?
MIKE YOUNG: I can hear you.
JAD: All right, so set this up. Who is this guy?
ANDY: His name's Mike Young.
JAD: All right.
ANDY: I called him up because of something that happened to him a little over 50 years ago.
MIKE YOUNG: Let's see, this was 1962.
ANDY: It was something that he still thinks about all these years later.
MIKE YOUNG: I was in my early 20s—22, something like that, 21.
ANDY: He was an undergraduate at a theological school in Boston, and one day he received a very different kind of religious education.
JAD: A very different kind.
ANDY: Uh-huh.
JAD: That's a good tease.
MIKE YOUNG: The event occurred on Good Friday.
ANDY: And it happened at ...
MIKE YOUNG: The Boston University Marsh Chapel.
ANDY: He was sitting not up in the main chapel, but down in the little basement chapel. And he was sitting with about 19 of his fellow classmates.
MIKE YOUNG: The meditation service was being piped down to us from the chapel above.
ANDY: They have speakers in the front of this little chapel in the basement.
MIKE YOUNG: It had organ music and an excellent choir, and ...
ANDY: The voice of the preacher. It was this kind of famous guy named Howard Thurman.
MIKE YOUNG: And we relaxed, and interesting ideas began going off in my head. Sometimes it was hard to pay attention to what was going on in the room. And we slid gently right into the psilocybin experience.
JAD: Wait, he said "psilocybin?"
ANDY: [laughs] Yes.
JAD: What?
ANDY: As in magic mushrooms.
JAD: Shrooms? You're gonna have to explain that one.
ANDY: This was actually something called the Marsh Chapel Experiments.
JAD: Marsh Chapel Experiments.
ANDY: And it was run by this guy ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Walter Pahnke: Let me ...]
ANDY: His name was Walter Pahnke.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Walter Pahnke: ... very briefly summarize the ...]
ANDY: And he was a graduate student at Harvard at this time. And he was studying religious experiences.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Walter Pahnke: ... peak experience. Now this has also been called the cosmic experience, the transcendental experience or the mystical experience.]
JAD: What exactly was he looking at?
ANDY: You know, like Christians, Muslims, Jews, Mystics, like, what kind of things do they all have in common? So he did a bunch of research and interviews and he came up with a basic catalog of the ingredients in a religious experience.
JAD: Hmm.
ANDY: And one day he's at Harvard and he bumps into ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Timothy Leary: Turn on, tune in and drop out.]
ANDY: ... that guy. Timothy Leary. He was actually a teacher at Harvard at the time, and he was famously giving psychedelic drugs to undergrads.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Timothy Leary: By teaching people how to use their heads. The point is that in order to use your head, you have to go out of your mind.]
ANDY: And when Pahnke got a chance to talk to these students who had tripped, he noticed pretty quick that they used really similar language to the people he'd been studying. And he started to wonder if you put people into the right situation and you give them this drug, could you induce—actually induce a religious experience? So on that day in 1962, Pahnke put 20 theological school students into this church basement, you know, during this Good Friday service.
JAD: Mm-hmm.
ANDY: 10 of them got a placebo and the 10 of them got a hefty dose of psilocybin.
MIKE YOUNG: Things in the room morphing.
ANDY: Which brings us back to Mike Young.
MIKE YOUNG: You would move your head and there'd be an after image from the lights. At one point, the visual effect was especially powerful.
ANDY: And he had this one moment that has just stuck with him ever since.
MIKE YOUNG: I was in the middle of a technicolor sea. There were bars of color, and I was floating through them and they were floating through me. And it was just glorious. And the bars of color then resolved into a wheel. I was at the center, and there was a different color going out from me in every possible direction. At first, this was quite nice, and then I realized that I had to swim out one of those color bars. I had to. And each of those different color bars would be a whole different life experience, and I could choose any one of those life experience color bars that I wanted, but I had to choose one. And I couldn't choose one. It was very painful. It felt like my insides were being ripped out of me. And I died. And at that moment that I died, I heard Howard Thurman say ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Howard Thurman: I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for death.]
MIKE YOUNG: And I stopped dying.
JAD: Wow!
ROBERT: [laughs]
JAD: Wow! What are we supposed to make of that?
ANDY: Right. It is—it is strange.
JAD: Yeah.
ANDY: And in fact, this is actually right around the time that there's this huge cultural backlash against this drug. By the end of 1962, you've got Harvard making the decision that these experiments are not gonna be done at their university anymore.
JAD: Yeah.
ANDY: '63 ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: That evil man ...]
ANDY: ... they fire Timothy Leary.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: Timothy Leary.]
ANDY: He's outta there. 1970, Congress outlaws psychedelics. 1971 ...
[NEWS CLIP: Nearly every country in the world, including the United States ...]
ANDY: ... bans them from research.
[NEWS CLIP: ... is a signatory to an international law banning the use, sale, cultivation and possession of dangerous drugs that have no useful place in medicine.]
JAD: I mean, on some level I get that because, like, what could you learn from a bunch of people tripping? Like, scientifically?
ANDY: I mean, I think that there actually is something that we can learn from this.
ROBERT: Hmm. What?
ANDY: Well, if you look at Mike Young, on the day that he walked into that chapel ...
MIKE YOUNG: I was still a theological school student.
ANDY: He was—you know, he was experiencing doubts.
MIKE YOUNG: Without any real confidence that ministry was something I was gonna stay in.
ANDY: But after this experiment at the chapel, he went home to his wife ...
MIKE YOUNG: And when I walked in, my wife was very much aware that something rather unusual had occurred to this guy she was married to.
ANDY: Did she just—you carry yourself differently? Did you ...?
MIKE YOUNG: She's never been that explicit about it. She just said she knew that—that I had had some kind of a major experience.
ANDY: At first, he just kind of wrote the whole thing off, but as time passed he couldn't stop thinking about the death and the rebirth experience. And to make a long story short, if you fast forward ...
MIKE YOUNG: I'm a Unitarian Universalist minister as a result of—partly a result of that drug experience.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Young: I want to share with you this morning a little exegesis of the New Testament.]
JAD: That's him?
ANDY: Yeah.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Young: The story of the good Samaritan.]
ANDY: He has been preaching for 45 years. Here—here's the thing that I think is really strange: all of the people who took the drug that day, those 10 who got the psilocybin and not the placebo, all but one became ministers.
JAD: Really?
ROBERT: Hmm.
JAD: So nine out of 10 went into the ministry?
ANDY: Nine out of 10.
JAD: What about the others?
ANDY: The placebo group?
JAD: Yeah.
ANDY: None.
JAD: None?
ANDY: According to Mike, absolutely none.
JAD: Wow, that is interesting!
ANDY: That was the first thing. I was like, "Wow, that's—that's crazy!" But at the same time, you know, it's a really small sample set.
JAD: Yeah.
ANDY: Who knows why anyone becomes a minister. I'm sure it wasn't just the drugs. You know, maybe they didn't even play that big of a role for everyone else. But this did make me, you know, like, more curious. Like, what exactly is happening to people when they take this drug?
JAD: Yeah.
ANDY: And I was surprised to find out that, like, right now, there are actually a few laboratories who are starting to experiment with these drugs again.
ROLAND GRIFFITHS: We thought well, why not?
ANDY: This is Roland.
ROLAND GRIFFITHS: Roland Griffiths, psychopharmacologist. I study the effects of drugs on behaviors.
ANDY: He's at Johns Hopkins.
ROLAND GRIFFITHS: Been at Hopkins for 40 years now.
ANDY: He's really well known for studying nicotine and Ritalin, but he told me that back in 2000, he was reading about the old psilocybin studies from the '60s. And this is right around the time when ...
ROLAND GRIFFITHS: The Drug Enforcement Administration and the FDA ...
ANDY: ... were starting to loosen their rules on experimenting with psychedelics. So he applies, and he gets approval.
ROLAND GRIFFITHS: A study of that sort had not been approved for 30 years. And I can tell you that I've never had a protocol that was as rigorously and carefully reviewed and scrutinized from every angle.
ANDY: Since no one had studied this drug for, like, three decades, he started with some really basic questions: how does this affect behavior? After people have taken this drug, like, do they feel confused or afraid? Is it habit-forming? And how he did this test was he has a—this lab room at Johns Hopkins.
JAD: Mm-hmm.
ANDY: That he's made really nice and cozy.
ROLAND GRIFFITHS: It's a—it's an aesthetic living room-like environment.
ANDY: There's a couch and a stereo system. And then one at a time, volunteer's brought in, given a hefty dose of psilocybin, blindfolded ...
ROLAND GRIFFITHS: And then they're asked to lay down and direct their attention inward. We were bringing people in two months after sessions and asking them so what—you know, what was the sessions like? And they filled out some questionnaires. And the thing that I really wasn't prepared for was how salient and important these experiences were said to be on follow-up. You know, they were saying "Well, it was really important," you know? And I would say, "Well, how important?" And they would say, "Oh, well it was the most important experience of my life." And I'd go, "What?" And they would say, "Yeah. You know, it's like—you know, like when my daughter was born. It changed my world forever. I recently lost my father, and—and I'll never forget that." And they'll say, "You know, it's kind of like that." And that's totally improbable. So we didn't—we didn't have any metric that could even assess that.
ANDY: And what made things even weirder for Roland is that when he gave these volunteers a questionnaire ...
ROLAND GRIFFITHS: About 75 percent of people are saying it's in the top five most personally meaningful and spiritually significant experiences of their life.
ANDY: A vast majority were talking about it like it's a spiritual experience.
ROBERT: Huh.
ANDY: So Roland, he went back to look at Pahnke's studies from the 1960s about the basic ingredients that make up a religious experience.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Walter Pahnke: Let me list the characteristics, a very summary list. First the characteristics of awe and wonder.]
ANDY: Everyone would report that they felt like they were in the presence of something great and enormous.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Walter Pahnke: The second characteristic is transcendence of time and space.]
ANDY: People described time slowing down or space getting weird.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Walter Pahnke: The third characteristic has to do with mood, very deeply self-positive mood.]
ANDY: Fourth—and I'm skipping over a few here ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Walter Pahnke: Unity. This is a sense of cosmic oneness.]
ANDY: This feeling of intense connection to everything around you.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Walter Pahnke: A part of everything that is, the whole universe and even every blade of grass and grain of sand and so forth. These are words that people used in describing it, anyway.]
ANDY: So based on this one guy's research, and keep in mind, you know, a lot of people have different opinions about this, Roland believes that you can actually take this little drug, and for a majority of people, you can induce a religious experience.
ROBERT: But—I don't—as soon as you call it that, then I'm starting to think, "Hmm, I don't know."
ANDY: Mm-hmm.
ROBERT: This is a real—a real—I mean, I don't know to you guys, but for someone who is—who takes this very seriously, to say that you can pop a pill and then in some shortcut fashion suddenly get this experience that hitherto had been very rare and had been assigned the value of grace, to say that is to say an enormous thing.
JAD: Well, it sounds like—it sounds like you're not—I'm guessing how you're taking it, Robert, is to say that it devalues the thing.
ROBERT: Yeah, it devalues it.
ANDY: It kind of does the opposite for me.
ROBERT: Really?
ANDY: I mean, when I hear the stories from—from, like, all the people in these studies, it reminds me, like, I've had these, like, very meaningful experiences that I didn't think would last.
ROBERT: On a pill did you have them, or ...
ANDY: No, not—not a pill. No drugs.
ROBERT: So what happened?
JAD: Yeah, what are you talking about?
ANDY: Well, it goes back to when, like, I was Christian. I used to be an evangelical Christian, and when I was about 15 I was at a church camp. And me and some of my best friends were all gathered around a campfire. It was hot, and the stars were all bright and shiny. I remember they were playing this song that I really liked, and you know that feeling that you get when—when you and a crowd of people are all singing, like, really loud some song that you all really love?
ROBERT: Yeah.
JAD: Sure.
ANDY: And as we're all singing this song, I remember my friend who wasn't raised in the faith like me, leaning over to me and saying that, like, he wanted to accept Jesus and be a Christian. And he asked, "What am I supposed to do?" And I remember that being like—great's not even the word for it. I—in this one moment, I got caught up in something that just felt so enormous. It's hard for me to explain how I felt. Like, it's hard to describe how I felt like we were all one, like there was something powerful that was —that was, like, both over us but also inside of us. And so much has changed since then that sometimes I look back and I think, "Did that happen? Like, did I hallucinate like some dude on drugs?"
JAD: Hmm.
ANDY: Because that friend who reached over to me? He's dead now. That faith that I was a part of? I left it. Like, all I have is this weird feeling that I can remember that's good.
JAD: And even though you're not a Christian anymore, you—you still have that feeling?
ANDY: Oh yeah.
JAD: But what is it about the idea that that feeling, that campfire feeling could be triggered by a pill and that maybe that's what was happening to those folks in Roland's study? What is it about that idea that helps you?
ANDY: For me, like, I see something concrete, you know? Like, I see—I see something that's harder to write off.
JAD: How so?
ANDY: Well, if I can go back into reporter mode, I will introduce you to one more guy, who I think is gonna help you understand what I'm talking about.
CHARLIE BESSANT: Hello!
ANDY: This is Charlie.
CHARLIE BESSANT: Charlie Bessant.
ANDY: He's a long-time smoker.
CHARLIE BESSANT: You know, I started at 17.
ANDY: Smoked for 40 years.
CHARLIE BESSANT: Pack a day. Breakfast, coffee, talking on the phone.
JAD: Wait, why are we talking about smoking?
ANDY: Well, Roland's new study he's doing right now, this pilot program that he's just started a few years ago?
JAD: Mm-hmm.
ANDY: Is trying to see if there's something in the transformation that you have in the psilocybin experience that can help smokers quit smoking.
ROBERT: What?
JAD: Really?
ANDY: Stick with me.
CHARLIE BESSANT: They gave me a pill, a blue capsule. And ...
ANDY: He closed his eyes, and like Mike, he says he had a hallucination that changed him.
CHARLIE BESSANT: The thing that I found so amazing, the one thing that was more amazing than anything else was when I was on this mountain.
JAD: This is a mountain in his head?
ANDY: Yes.
CHARLIE BESSANT: When I had traveled to the very top, I was looking out over this greatness.
ANDY: This vista of everything. He says he was just this microscopic thing. He was—he was so small and it was so big ...
CHARLIE BESSANT: But my experience at this one place was so exalted.
ANDY: Because he was struck by this feeling, this deep feeling that ...
CHARLIE BESSANT: We were the same thing. We were the same.
ANDY: This right here is another hallmark of these experiences. You're somehow confronted with this radical shift in scale, and things that formerly felt like too big for you to deal with, they suddenly—they suddenly looked different.
ROLAND GRIFFITHS: We had one person involved in our cigarette-smoking study who had had a dose of psilocybin. And in the course of that session, the idea of smoking came up to him. And he said, you know, it was like a fly had landed on his arm, and he just took his finger and he flicked it off. And he said he was done with it.
JAD: Done done?
ANDY: Mm-hmm. And that's exactly how it was for Charlie.
CHARLIE BESSANT: The morning afterwards ...
ANDY: He says he didn't want cigarettes anymore.
CHARLIE BESSANT: I just didn't. They just weren't an issue anymore.
ROBERT: Huh.
JAD: And how long has he been off of it?
ANDY: Three years.
JAD: Wow!
ANDY: Now this is just a tiny pilot program. I don't think that we should make too much out of it yet, but the insight I feel like is, like, because—because, like, Charlie has this real experience, like, it's not—it's not a question of, like, something invisible like faith, but it's like a tangible reality. For me, it's like the closest thing I can come to having some kind of real evidence that what happened to me was real.
JAD: With the campfire.
ANDY: Right.
ROBERT: To me, the mystery is you've done this occasional thing with an artificial stimulus, had a extraordinary but temporary feeling, and then mysteriously it isn't temporary.
JAD: Yeah.
ROBERT: It just goes on and on.
JAD: Yeah, do we have any idea why it persists?
ANDY: Well, Roland has a very educated hunch. I asked him about this, and he's looking right now at getting in there and doing research with some new FMRI machines. But his hunch is that the psilocybin drug experience, it somehow rewires the brain.
ROLAND GRIFFITHS: We're talking about rewiring a personality at a fundamental machine programming level.
ANDY: Like, he calls this experience a "rearranging experience."
JAD: Huh.
ANDY: You know, maybe—maybe one day science will figure out what's happening in the brain of a person that's experiencing something like this, but one of the things about this that troubles me, like as a reporter and then even, like, personally is that going back to Walter Pahnke, like, remember his list of ingredients from earlier?
JAD: Yep.
ANDY: His final characteristic ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Walter Pahnke: And the final characteristic that I'd like to mention here ...]
ANDY: ... final ingredient was ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Walter Pahnke: ... the characteristic of alleged ineffability, which means that the people who had such an experience claim that it can't be described in words, that it's non-verbal. Basically indescribable.]
ANDY: And that's one of the main things that I'm gonna take away from all this. I mean, talking to Roland and Mike and Charlie is just how hard it is to talk about the thing that I've just spent the last 20 minutes trying to talk about.
CHARLIE BESSANT: I understood something, some life, some eternal truth. [laughs] Words really don't match the thing. I was at the top, I was feeling divine source of—of self-awareness. [laughs] I'm sorry, it's a trick of words, I guess. It's—God, larger.
JAD: Thanks to producer Andy Mills. Thanks to you guys for listening.
[ANSWERING MACHINE: Start of message.]
[MIKE YOUNG: Hi, this is Reverend Mike Young, and here are the credits.]
[ROLAND GRIFFITHS: Radiolab is produced by Jad Adambrad?]
[MIKE YOUNG: Abumrad.]
[ROLAND GRIFFITHS: Our staff includes: Ellen Horne, Soren Wheeler, Pat Walters, Tim Howard ...]
[MIKE YOUNG: Brenna Farrell, Malissa O'Donnell, Dylan Keefe, Andy Mills, Lynn Levy and Sean Cole.]
[ROLAND GRIFFITHS: With help from Chris Berube and Kelly Benham.]
[MIKE YOUNG: Hope you got it!]
[ANSWERING MACHINE: End of message.]
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