[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: And today's show actually started with a conversation that we had working on another show.

JAD: Which was on words.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, child: Paper, eagle, clock, green, barrel, cats, hat, carnal, door.]

JAD: So yeah, we did an hour on the power of words, and we ended up talking with this guy.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Hello?

PAT WALTERS: Hello, is this Dr. Fernyhough?

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Hi, can you hear me now?

JAD: Named Charles Fernyhough.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: I'm a writer and developmental psychologist from Durham University.

JAD: And we were having this conversation with him about what happens to young kids when they learn words.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, child: Words, apple, DJ, thinking.]

JAD: Like that. You know, what happens to the way they see the world? And in the middle of the chat, he said something kind of radical, which was that: before they have words ...

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: I don't think very young children do think.

JAD: Like, think period? Was there a period at the end of that sentence? You don't think that they think, period?

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: I don't think they think in the way that I want to call thinking, all right? Which is a bit of a cheat, but let me say ...

JAD: What he meant is that thinking as he defines it is basically just words sounding silently in your head. And before you have those words in your head, you can't think. Now this is a controversial idea which we debated back and forth, but for the next few minutes we're not gonna debate it, we're gonna jump into it.

ROBERT: But before we do that, let's just announce the topic of the entire hour.

JAD: Okay. Tell them.

ROBERT: The voices in our heads! I don't know if it's plural or singular. Voices in our head. My head ...

JAD: No, heads. Heads works. Yeah.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: We're gonna dive into inner voices is the point—the voices that shape who we are.

ROBERT: That help us through tough times.

JAD: Maybe even do us harm.

ROBERT: As a starting point, we're gonna take very seriously what Charles Fernyhough just suggested: that before kids have language, they just don't think.

JAD: Because whether or not you think it's true, if you follow the idea all the way through as we're about to do, it does lead you to some interesting places.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: [clears throat]

JAD: So first of all, this whole idea, says Charles, goes back to this Russian guy.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Russian psychologist. Vygotsky.

JAD: Lev Vygotsky.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Vygotsky.

JAD: And is he a contemporary dude?

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: No, he died in the '30s.

JAD: Ah.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: He was—he was active ...

JAD: Anyhow, he came up with this idea, this really interesting notion of how kids learn to think. And it all begins, he said, on the outside.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Think about a small child who's sitting down solving a puzzle.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, mother: Does that look like it goes somewhere?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, child: It goes ... here!]

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: You're sitting down and you're working together on a puzzle. And all you've got to do is get these shapes into this board in the right kind of order. If you watch any kid with their parent anywhere in the world doing this kind of thing, you'll see them thinking together.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, child: Now that doesn't have an edge.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, mother: No.]

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: The child for example picks up a picture of a boat and says, you know, "Where am I gonna put this boat piece?"

[ARCHIVE CLIP, child: Where am I gonna put this boat piece?]

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: And then the mum says, "Well, have a look at the shape."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, mother: Well, have a look at the shape, fella.]

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: And then the kid looks at the shape and says, "Oh, it's got that pointy bit there."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, child: It's got that pointy bit right there.]

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: And the mum says, "Right. Well, can you see anywhere on the board that has a pointy bit?"

[ARCHIVE CLIP, child: Hmm.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, mother: Right there.]

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: And so on.

JAD: According to Vygotsky, this is the beginning of thinking, this kind of dialog. And at this point ...

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: It's completely external.

JAD: It's all happening in that space between the child and her mother.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, mother: Do you want to try putting that together? We don't know where it goes yet, but if you put it together ...]

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: And only over time, does it become internalized.

JAD: And how that happens, Vygotsky thought, is that as the child gets older, she'll start to take on the dialog herself. She'll start to talk to herself.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: This is the stage we call "Private speech."

JAD: We've all seen kids do this, right? Where they narrate every single thing they're doing? "Put the ball in the box. Take the ball out of the box."

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Now what then happens is a few years further down the line ...

JAD: These kids who are narrating everything they're doing then go to school, and the teachers tell them, "Shh! Don't talk out loud."

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: So they kind of get the message that they need to start doing this internally.

JAD: So they start to whisper to themselves out loud, and then eventually they whisper to themselves silently because the words are now in their head. And that ...

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: That, according to Vygotsky's theory, that is thinking.

JAD: Only then, he says, is the child having a thought. Now forgetting the particulars for a second, the main point here is that those thoughts that are humming along silently in your mind, those thoughts began as a duo with your mom, or a trio with your mom and your dad, or a quartet with your mom and your dad and your sister. In other words, those thoughts began as a crowd.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: The logic of it is that all our thinking is full of other people's voices.

JAD: Now most of us know that the voices in our head are just us, but what got us interested in this whole Vygotsky thing is that maybe this idea has something to say to people who actually do hear other voices in their head.

MOLLY MARTIN: Pat?

PAT: Yeah. Molly. Hi.

MOLLY MARTIN: Hi, nice to meet you.

PAT: You too. Thanks for coming up here.

JAD: As we were thinking about this, it just so happened that our producer Pat Walters had taken a trip to Denver and ended up tracking down this lady.

MOLLY MARTIN: And I'm Molly Martin, and I am a psychotherapist. And I run the Hearing Voices Network of Denver.

JAD: They met up at this hotel. Molly works with people who hear voices in their heads, and she runs a support group for people to share their experiences. The day Pat was there, she introduced him to a fellow named Marcus.

MARCUS MACIAS: Hi, I'm Marcus Macias. I'm a voice-hearer myself. I hear voices. So, you know, I first started hearing them 20 years ago, so I'm 40 now. So it was when I was 20 when I first started hearing them.

JAD: When it started for him, he says, the voices would kind of materialize out of background noise, like the hum of a refrigerator or the whir of a fan.

MARCUS MACIAS: When I first started hearing them, they were kind of guiding a little bit, you know? A guiding voice?

JAD: He says initially, the voices would help him out. Like if was in an argument and about to say something mean, the voices would warn him.

MARCUS MACIAS: "Be careful. Watch out." They say things like that, you know? Kind of like they were helpful. But then there was, like, other negative ones.

JAD: He's had periods in his life, he says, where the voices have even turned demonic.

MARCUS MACIAS: Things are a lot better now, though. You see, I'm learning how to manage, you know? Because I'm taking care of myself.

JAD: Okay, so why do we bring this up? Well, clearly for a lot of people like Marcus, hearing voices involves some psychiatric issues which sometimes for people can be serious. Really serious. But here's the weird thing: the experience of hearing somebody else's voice in your own head is actually way more common than you would think. Surveys have been done about this, and the number seems to be between and five and ten percent of normal healthy people have that experience or have had it at one time. Which brings us back to this Vygotsky situation. What might be happening in those cases, at least if you ask Charles, is a kind of misattribution of your own inner voice. Those voices in your head which are you, get mistaken to be from someone else.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: There's a nice, simple, elegant demonstration of this is that you take some people who are hearing voices, people with, in this case a diagnosis of schizophrenia who hear voices, and you sit them down at a microphone with some headphones on, and you show them some words on a screen, just flash up some words on a screen. And their task is to repeat the words, to read the words out loud.

JAD: Now if you can imagine, these subjects are seeing these words on a screen, they're repeating them into the mic. And they've got headphones on, so they're actually hearing their own voices as they're doing this. Trick is, the researchers have rigged it so that the voice in their headphones, their voice actually gets lowered just a little bit right before they hear it. What that means is that if I were to say, "Hello. My name is Jad," what I'd hear in my headphones is, [lowered] "Hello. My name is Jad."

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: And as you know, if you lower the pitch of the voice by a few semitones, it becomes much harder to recognize it.

JAD: [lowered] Because when I'm speaking in this lowered voice, you can still kind of recognize it's me, but it's a little bit harder.

JAD: Now what the experimenters found is that most people, most non-voice-hearing quote-unquote "healthy" people, when they were presented with the sound of their own voice lowered like this [lowered], and then asked "Is this you? Is it a stranger? Or are you not sure?" They did make mistakes. Some mistakes.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: The voice-hearers made considerably more mistakes.

JAD: Really?

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Yeah.

JAD: Not only that, when they heard their voices lowered, they would very, very often say, "That voice is coming from a stranger."

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: "That's not me. That's not myself. That didn't come from me." Now of course, that is potentially a frightening experience, that's potentially a very distressing experience.

JAD: But not always. Because let's just imagine that Vygotsky was right, that the internal voice of our thoughts is actually a blend of all of those external voices from our childhood. So in other words, our mom, our dad, our sisters, brothers, whatever. They're all in there in some way. And that can actually be a comfort.

JAD: Back at that hotel in Denver, Molly Martin had told Pat ...

MOLLY MARTIN: About a woman ...

JAD: ... who had seen her father murdered.

MOLLY MARTIN: He was shot in front of her. It was a robbery, and it was, I believe, at a convenience store.

JAD: And for years afterwards, she says, this woman would hear her dad's voice.

MOLLY MARTIN: Every morning, she would wake up. He would tell her to make her bed, and he would remind her throughout the day to do more positive things. If she was doing things for example—she wanted—she was a drug addict, and if she wanted to use drugs again, her father would say to her things like, you know, "Don't do it," you know, "It's bad for you." You know, more looking after her. I think she might've been 11 when he was killed, but it was a good relationship during that time.

PAT: Yeah. And then it just kind of like stuck with her.

MOLLY MARTIN: Yeah, I think so. I think so.

ROBERT: You know, that story is—because it's some foreign voice in our head, that's a little unusual. I mean, most of us are very familiar with an inner thought where it's yourself doing the talking, so you're listening to your own voice.

JAD: Right.

ROBERT: Lord knows I have that experience constantly.

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: Sometimes the voices are helpful, sometimes, as we're about to hear, they can be up to some kind of mischief.

JAD: Right. That's actually what our next story is all about. And this one goes back to a psychology professor named Claude Steele.

CLAUDE STEELE: I got a job offer—this is in the '80s—at the University of Michigan, and it was part psychology and part to administer a minority student program there. And in the process, I saw data that surprised me.

JAD: What he saw was a troubling trend: two kids would enter Michigan. One was Black, one was white. They'd come in at the exact same level.

CLAUDE STEELE: Same skills, same SAT scores.

JAD: So theoretically, they should do the same when they get to Michigan. But without fail, or almost without fail, after one semester ...

CLAUDE STEELE: The Black kid was winding up with lower grades.

JAD: How much lower?

CLAUDE STEELE: Pretty—pretty dramatic. At least two-thirds of a letter grade.

JAD: Meaning if the white kid got an A, the Black kid who should be getting an A too, is instead getting a B.

CLAUDE STEELE: That's right.

JAD: Or a B-plus.

JAD: That's significant.

CLAUDE STEELE: That's significant.

JAD: And he also, by the way, saw this performance gap between women and men when it came to math.

JAD: To the same degree?

CLAUDE STEELE: The same degree. In advanced math courses it was comparable. I learned this is a national phenomenon. If I was to walk into almost any college class in the United States, I'd have a very high probability of finding exactly that.

JAD: What could explain these differences?

CLAUDE STEELE: There was something there that people didn't understand and that we certainly didn't understand.

JAD: So he figured he would start with the women in math issue. He brought a bunch of women in and a bunch of men—sophomores.

CLAUDE STEELE: Brought them into the laboratory one at a time. Gave them a half an hour section of the graduate record exam you take if you're a math major—very, very difficult math.

JAD: Hmm.

CLAUDE STEELE: And sure enough, the women who had all the same credentials coming into that situation performed dramatically worse than the men.

JAD: Worse as in ...

CLAUDE STEELE: It would be a couple hundred points on an SAT test.

JAD: Big difference.

CLAUDE STEELE: It was a big effect.

JAD: So Claude Steele thought, "All right. Step one complete. I've got a lab situation that resembles the real world. Good. Now the next step is to tweak things a little bit, see if I can mess around with it." Now normally in these situations ...

CLAUDE STEELE: The test-giver's got a white labcoat on, and he brings in a big stack of cellophane-wrapped tests. And he puts a clock on the table. And it's all—you know, it's like, that's gonna intimidate almost anybody.

JAD: Maybe that's what's happening, he thought. What if I took away the clock, took away the coat, and most importantly, right before the test I had the test-giver, instead of saying the normal "I'm going to give you a test" pre-test thing, maybe instead say something like this ...

CLAUDE STEELE: Look, you may have heard that women don't do as well as men on difficult standardized math tests. You may have heard that. But that is not true for this particular test.

JAD: Oh!

CLAUDE STEELE: This particular test does not show gender differences, it never has, it never will.

JAD: He wondered if maybe saying that simple sentence before giving the test would have an effect.

CLAUDE STEELE: And sure enough, I wouldn't be here if their performance didn't go up and go up to match that of the equally-skilled men.

JAD: That performance gap totally vanished.

CLAUDE STEELE: Gee, look at this thing. So we raced and did it very quickly the same kind of an experiment with African Americans.

JAD: There, the pre-test disclaimer went like this:

CLAUDE STEELE: This is an instrument that we use to study problem solving, and it is not diagnostic of individuals' intellectual ability.

JAD: In other words, this is not a test of your intelligence. I repeat: not an IQ test.

CLAUDE STEELE: So just do the best you can.

JAD: And with that simple disclaimer at the start?

CLAUDE STEELE: Same kind of an effect.

JAD: The Black students and the white students were now equal.

CLAUDE STEELE: Just recently, Ryan Brown and Eric Day did an even cleverer treatment. There is an IQ test which is non-verbal.

RYAN BROWN: It's called the Advanced Progressive Matrices.

CLAUDE STEELE: It has figures.

ERIC DAY: Very abstract. They got lines crossing ...

CLAUDE STEELE: ... that you have to match and so on.

ERIC DAY: Checks, uh ...

RYAN BROWN: It's essentially pattern matching.

ERIC DAY: Diamonds with dots in them.

RYAN BROWN: Totally visual.

ERIC DAY: Yeah.

CLAUDE STEELE: And so they could represent that test as it is, as an IQ test. It's in fact seen as the gold standard of IQ tests because it's quote, "Culture-free."

ERIC DAY: There's no math, there's no reading.

CLAUDE STEELE: Because it doesn't involve language. Or you could represent the exact same test as a puzzle.

RYAN BROWN: Puzzle.

ERIC DAY: A puzzle.

JAD: Meaning you can give an IQ test to a bunch of kids and the Blacks will perform worse, but if you give that same test—lose the word "test," lose the word "IQ," and just call it a puzzle?

RYAN BROWN: The Black participants suddenly jump up in their performance.

ERIC DAY: Basically we got a reversal.

CLAUDE STEELE: When you represent it as a puzzle, Blacks perform as well as whites.

RYAN BROWN: They did, yeah.

JAD: That's all it takes. Just change a few words.

RYAN BROWN: In fact, there's even better research on this by a guy named Jeff Stone at University of Arizona who's shown this with golfing tasks, where he's had Black and white golfers just putt.

JAD: Putting? Are we talking about putting?

RYAN BROWN: Well, think about—think about what it takes to putt effectively. Are you a golfer?

JAD: No.

ERIC DAY: Ryan's not either, so he doesn't know what he's talking about.

RYAN BROWN: That's right. So I'm gonna make this up.

JAD: [laughs]

JEFF STONE: What we did was we got a miniature golf situation where each hole changed and people had to work around obstacles.

JAD: This is Jeff Stone. He runs the social psychology of sports lab at the University of Arizona. And here's what he did: he tested his Black and white putters in two scenarios. Scenario one: using the word "Intelligence."

JEFF STONE: When we told them it was a measure of sports intelligence, Black participants did about four strokes worse than white participants.

JAD: But when he changed it, took out the word "Intelligence," and framed it instead as a test of "Your natural athletic ability," there, the results totally flipped.

JEFF STONE: Flipped. And we had now whites performing significantly worse than Blacks by about four strokes. If you look at the recent US Open that was played in San Diego, Tiger Woods and Rocco Mediate went four days between holes. They went to an 18-hole playoff on Monday, and were still tied.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, golf commentator: Sudden death we go.]

JEFF STONE: And Tiger finally won it on the first playoff hole ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, golf commentator: Tiger Woods wins a third US Open championship.]

JEFF STONE: ... by one stroke. So when you talk about four strokes, that's a huge difference.

JAD: All right. So here's my question: Stereotypes are powerful, okay that makes sense. But in terms of understanding how this works, can you make this tactile for me? Like, if the stereotype that's having all these effects is like a thing, like a little gremlin that bites? Like, when in the test-taking process does it actually, like, do its damage?

ERIC DAY: That's gonna be way open to debate.

JAD: What does seem to be clear from the data, according to Eric Day and Ryan Brown and Claude Steele, is that gremlin only seems to appear when the test is sufficiently hard.

CLAUDE STEELE: If the test is easy, it's important to point out, these effects don't happen.

JAD: It's not that the gremlin is not there.

RYAN BROWN: Well, he walks in with you, but he doesn't speak necessarily until things get challenging.

CLAUDE STEELE: As soon as the test gets difficult ...

RYAN BROWN: That's where the voices kick in.

JAD: Which means that for most of the test, everybody's doing about the same. It's only at problem number 17, the one about cosines and factorials and whatever, where things start to go wrong. At least that's the theory. At that problem, the Black student starts to stiffen up a little bit.

CLAUDE STEELE: That's right.

JAD: And Claude Steele's measured this.

CLAUDE STEELE: Their blood pressure's elevated, their short-term memory is impaired.

JAD: It's that flicker of frustration through their body that wakes up the gremlin who starts to whisper in their ear.

RYAN BROWN: "I don't know if you can do this."

CLAUDE STEELE: "Is what they say about us true?"

RYAN BROWN: "They don't think you can do it."

JAD: All the usual stuff. And even if the student doesn't believe it—which is likely ...

RYAN BROWN: See, you don't have to believe it. That's the kind of insidious thing here.

JAD: Just the fact that he has now this extra bit of mental chatter ...

RYAN BROWN: That little guy whispering ...

JAD: ... well, it's a distraction.

CLAUDE STEELE: And that makes their performance go down.

JAD: Just a little bit.

RYAN BROWN: All this dialog is keeping you from being a hundred percent focused on the task at hand, which is solving these problems.

JAD: So the real subtle power of a stereotype isn't that it prevents you from doing the thing you want to do, it distracts you for just a beat from doing the thing you want to do. And that may be all the difference.

ROBERT: We'll be back in just a moment.

[LISTENER: Hi, I'm Nick and I'm from Minneapolis. 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.]

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JAD: Ready?

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Today on Radiolab, inner voices.

ROBERT: Inner voices.

JAD: Yes.

ROBERT: That was me on the inside. You were just hovering above. So far, I think we've had—the voices we've been listening to have been causing us trouble mostly.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: So I think let's just shift gears if we can.

JAD: Yeah, because now we got a story about a more helpful inner voice. Comes from our producer Sean Cole.

SEAN COLE: Hello!

JAD: Hey! So start us off.

SEAN: Story's about Mel Blanc, man of many—you know who that is.

JAD: No, I don't.

ROBERT: You don't know who Mel Blanc is?

JAD: Why? Should I know who he is?

SEAN: No, you do know who he is because of what he did.

JAD: What did he do?

SEAN: He was the voice of ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bugs Bunny: Eh, what's up, Doc?]

SEAN: ... Bugs Bunny.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: Oh!

SEAN: And ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Daffy Duck: You're despicable.]

SEAN: ... Daffy Duck. Porky Pig.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Porky Pig: Lucky me.]

SEAN: Yosemite Sam.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Yosemite Sam: So long, rabbit!]

SEAN: Pepé Le Pew.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Pepé Le Pew: You smelled me out, you little sandy witch!]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sylvester: Stand still!]

SEAN: Sylvester.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Tweety Bird: Okay, puddy-tat.]

SEAN: Tweety.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Foghorn Leghorn: I say, go away boy. You're botherin' me.]

SEAN: Foghorn Leghorn.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Egghead Jr.: Give me back my chicken!]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Foghorn Leghorn: Your chicken?]

JAD: That was all one guy?

SEAN: Yeah.

JAD: Okay, so what's—what's the story that ...?

SEAN: Dude, I'm nowhere near done with this. Woody Woodpecker.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Woody Woodpecker: Guess who?]

SEAN: Mel Blanc. Barney Rubble.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barney Rubble: Is it safe to come in?]

SEAN: Mel Blanc. Dino the Dinosaur.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dino the Dinosaur: [barks]]

SEAN: Mel Blanc. And on the other side of the anachronistic spectrum ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mr. Spacely: Oh, you guys won't believe this!]

SEAN: ... he was Mr. Spacely for The Jetsons.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mr. Spacely: Really?]

SEAN: Yes!

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mr. Spacely: Where's that Jetson?]

SEAN: Let's see ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Speed Buggy: Who put the antifreeze ...]

SEAN: Speed Buggy.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Speed Buggy: ... in my carburetor?]

SEAN: Secret Squirrel.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Secret Squirrel: Right, chief!]

SEAN: Captain Caveman.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Captain Caveman: Captain Caveman!]

SEAN: And Twiki from Buck Rogers, if you ever watched that.

JAD: Yeah!

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Twiki: What about the bomb?]

JAD: Holy [bleep]! This guy's like the voice of my childhood.

SEAN: Voices.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Twiki: Well, it sounds like a crowd.]

NOEL BLANC: Oh my gosh, my dad got so many requests to do so many voices.

SEAN: This is Noel Blanc, Mel's son—his only kid, actually.

NOEL BLANC: Kids would come to the door literally every single day, and he'd answer the door and talk to the kids. And then up at Big Bear where we are now, when the tour boats come just like they do now, we'd get on the megaphone, do the characters and say hi to all the tourists, you know, 12 times a day.

SEAN: Holy moly.

NOEL BLANC: That's how many tour boats we have.

SEAN: Now and you do voices too.

NOEL BLANC: [Bugs Bunny voice] That's right, Doc. I do a few of the voices [Porky Pig voice] that my daddy does and did. He did 1,500 voices.

SEAN: 1,500.

NOEL BLANC: Yeah. I copy a few of them.

SEAN: Mm-hmm.

NOEL BLANC: And there's a bunch of us that do different voices, and we've never been able to really sound like—exactly like him.

SEAN: So it took many of you to be one of him?

NOEL BLANC: Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, my gosh, yes. I do Bugs, Porky, Daffy, Tweety, Sylvester. But there's other people that do it, too. And all of them sound—you know, if he goes [Bugs Bunny voice] "What's up, Doc?" You know? It can sound real close to him, but then when you start to do sentences, it becomes very difficult for anybody to sound like him because everybody has their own voiceprint. And Mel had his own voiceprint.

SEAN: But this isn't really a story about voices. Or it is, but not in the way that you think. It's really about what it's like to breathe life into a character, and whether that character can breathe life back into you. See, back in 1961 ...

NOEL BLANC: Dad and I had ...

SEAN: ... Mel and Noel went into business together producing radio commercials.

NOEL BLANC: Funny commercials, because humorous commercials weren't really being done at that time. Very few. So we decided to start to do that. We sent out all the brochures, and that's the week, the same week, that Mel had a head-on collision at Dead Man's Curve at UCLA.

SEAN: And where was he—where was he headed?

NOEL BLANC: He had just finished a recording session in San Francisco. He had flown to San Francisco early in the morning, came back, ate dinner with my mom ...

SEAN: And then rushed back out to do another recording session.

NOEL BLANC: ... and a kid in a 98 Oldsmobile—gigantic car—lost control on Dead Man's Curve.

SEAN: Head-on collision.

NOEL BLANC: My dad was in an Aston Martin, which was an aluminum-bodied English car. And it folded right up. They had to cut him out of there. Luckily, he was only a block from the UCLA hospital.

SEAN: Is that like the jaws of life cut him out?

NOEL BLANC: Yeah. Yeah. They gave him a thousand-to-one chance of survival, and he broke virtually every bone in his body.

LOUIS CONWAY: Oh, I think that was more than a slight exaggeration, but from his point of view it probably felt just like that.

SEAN: This is Louis Conway.

LOUIS CONWAY: Louis W. Conway. I do very little these days. [laughs]

SEAN: He's a doctor.

LOUIS CONWAY: Before I retired, I was a neurosurgeon.

SEAN: And he was on the floor at UCLA Medical Center back then.

LOUIS CONWAY: I was a resident.

SEAN: He was like 29 at the time.

LOUIS CONWAY: I think I was the first one to see Mel Blanc in the emergency room, completely unrecognizable at the time. You know, blood and gore and so forth. So we cleaned him up, and then it became clear that he was gonna be a major celebrity in the place providing I kept him alive.

SEAN: When you show up at the hospital, what's the first—how are you greeted there?

NOEL BLANC: By a lot of flashing cameras. And that—all of a sudden, I knew something was really bad. I met my mom, we went inside. There were a lot of people there, the papers—because they thought he was gonna die. In fact, there was an obituary written in the Honolulu Herald that said, "Bugs Bunny's Dead."

SEAN: That was the headline?

NOEL BLANC: Headline. And ...

SEAN: You must have been really freaked out.

NOEL BLANC: Oh, yeah. Totally. So was my mom. We were just—we couldn't believe it. And he was ashen gray. He didn't look like he was gonna make it at all.

SEAN: The doctors did manage to get him stabilized, but he was unconscious.

NOEL BLANC: He was in a coma, so we just stayed there, ran home, take a shower, come back.

SEAN: For one day, and then the next, and then the next.

NOEL BLANC: We were at the hospital for about two weeks, and ...

SEAN: Trying to talk to him?

NOEL BLANC: Yeah. "Can you hear us?" It was always, "Can you hear me? Dad, can you hear me?"

LOUIS CONWAY: I mean, deeply unconscious. Not responding.

NOEL BLANC: I called him "Dad," "Pop," "Father." Whatever it is. "Mel." We tried to do anything.

LOUIS CONWAY: Not opening his eyes. There was really no response.

SEAN: And it became possible that he would never respond.

NOEL BLANC: But after about 14 days, a doctor came in. He was a resident.

SEAN: Dr. Conway.

LOUIS CONWAY: This is me, the resident.

NOEL BLANC: He was a resident. And he went over to Mel's bed ...

SEAN: And for whatever reason, maybe just to mix things up ...

LOUIS CONWAY: I said to him, without any real reason to suspect he would know what I was saying, I said to him ...

SEAN: "Bugs."

LOUIS CONWAY: "Bugs Bunny. How are you doing today?"

NOEL BLANC: And I'll be darned if Mel didn't go, [Bugs Bunny voice] "What's up, Doc?"

JAD: He responded as Bugs?

SEAN: Yeah.

LOUIS CONWAY: Quite clearly.

JAD: What?

NOEL BLANC: Then he went, "Porky, are you there?" Dad said, [Porky Pig voice] "Yeah, I can hear."

JAD: Oh, my God.

NOEL BLANC: "Tweety, are you here?" [Tweety Bird voice] "Ooh, I tot I taw a puddy-tat!"

SEAN: Foghorn Leghorn.

NOEL BLANC: [Foghorn Leghorn voice] "Pay attention, son. You see that house over there that says D-O-G? That spells chicken."

JAD: He said all that?

SEAN: Yeah.

NOEL BLANC: Bugs, Daffy, Porky, Tweety, Sylvester.

SEAN: All these characters.

NOEL BLANC: He went through about six characters.

SEAN: Are you standing there watching this?

NOEL BLANC: Yeah. Oh, yeah.

SEAN: And what's going through your mind at this?

NOEL BLANC: Well, I'm so excited that he's able to—that he came out of the coma. How else are you gonna feel when he hasn't done anything for 14 days, really hasn't been conscious? And then all of a sudden, he's conscious, doing these characters?

SEAN: And then according to Noel, after doing the characters for a few moments, he just came back.

NOEL BLANC: Where am I? What happened?

SEAN: As Mel.

NOEL BLANC: Oh, okay. You're at UCLA, you were in a traffic accident. Oh, was anybody else hurt? No. The boy had a scratched knee. I see.

ROBERT: So wait just a sec here. When he said, "What's up, Doc?"

SEAN: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: Was—was that Mel Blanc talking, or was that Bugs Bunny inside Mel Blanc?

SEAN: That's the question, and it's a question that actually came back again 23 years later.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, This Is Your Life: Mr. Mel Blanc? This is your life.]

SEAN: On TV. On this show This Is Your Life, which you've heard of. And they bring out a celebrity and then they talk to the celebrity's family and everybody they work with. And they say, like, "Hey, remember this and remember that?"

[ARCHIVE CLIP, This Is Your Life: Mel's funny voices used to drive our high school principal crazy!]

SEAN: And, you know, it's all very light and airy and fun, until ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, This Is Your Life: It's 8:29 p.m. January 24, 1961. It all comes to a crashing halt.]

SEAN: They start talking about the car accident, and they call the doctor out to the stage.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, This Is Your Life: Neurosurgeon Dr. Louis Conway.]

SEAN: Enter stage right, to tell the whole coma story. And the host says, Doc, like, what did you think when this all happened?"

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Louis Conway: I was astonished. Mel was dying, and it seemed as though Bugs Bunny was trying to save his life.]

SEAN: That. That is the idea that has survived more than any other part of this story, that's the thing that keeps coming back and back. And it's like, wait a second, like, what?

ROBERT: What does it mean?

SEAN: What does it mean? And it just presents all of these questions like, who is Mel, really? Who is Bugs Bunny, really? When you make somebody up, do they compete with you in some way?

JAD: Compete when?

SEAN: Right, exactly. Is that more deeply in Mel than Mel is? You know what I mean?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: Yeah, totally.

SEAN: I brought Dr. Conway back to that moment.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Louis Conway: It seemed as though Bugs Bunny was trying to save his life.]

LOUIS CONWAY: I don't remember saying that, but I may well have.

SEAN: Do you think there's anything to that?

LOUIS CONWAY: Well, I don't really know that Bugs Bunny was that skillful, but ...

ROBERT: [laughs]

LOUIS CONWAY: So I basically say not much to it, I don't think.

SEAN: So I asked Noel.

NOEL BLANC: It's an interesting headline: "Bugs Bunny saves Mel." He didn't save his life but he certainly got him out of the coma.

SEAN: Then he told me something that does feed into the idea that these characters had minds of their own.

NOEL BLANC: Well ...

SEAN: He says as a kid, he would watch his dad perform. And every time ...

NOEL BLANC: He became those characters. I could turn the sound off in a booth where you couldn't hear him, just turn the speaker's off, and watch him, and know exactly what character he was doing because his whole body would metamorphosize to that character. He looked like Bugs Bunny when he was doing Bugs. He looked just like Yosemite Sam when he was doing Yosemite Sam. He became really small and timid when he was doing Tweety.

JAD: So he was sort of like a method actor.

SEAN: Yeah, sort of. I mean, the way Noel described it, it was like these characters momentarily inhabited him.

NOEL BLANC: So I think they were part of him, basically.

JAD: But so what I don't get though is why would he respond to "What's up, Bugs?" rather than, like, "What's up, Mel?" Or "What's up, Dad?" Or "What's up, honey?" You know what I mean?

NOEL BLANC: That's—that's a difficult question. You know, I wish I could answer it.

SEAN: Noel didn't really want to go there.

NOEL BLANC: Anyway, what—what other questions do you have?

SEAN: [laughs]

NOEL BLANC: We're stuck on that one.

SEAN: I kind of am stuck on it, and I know that it's not a question anybody can ultimately answer, but I called up this guy.

ORRIN DEVINSKY: This is Orrin Devinsky at NYU Medical Center.

SEAN: A neurologist that we sometimes throw questions like this to. And I ran them through the whole scenario.

SEAN: This guy comes into the room and says, "Hi, Bugs Bunny. How are you doing today?" And he says, [Bugs Bunny voice] "What's up, Doc?"

ORRIN DEVINSKY: Interesting.

SEAN: So he batted it around in his head for a while, and then he said, "Well, you know, it might have something to do with cues. Like getting the cues mixed up."

ROBERT: What do you mean?

SEAN: Well, first of all ...

ORRIN DEVINSKY: Being in a coma for a few weeks speaks to a very significant brain injury.

SEAN: And what Orrin often sees with people who've had brain injuries like Mel's is that they lose the ability to read the cues that tell them who they're supposed to be when: dad at home, boss at the office, Bugs in the studio, whatever.

ORRIN DEVINSKY: Here's a man who no longer has his ability to differentiate social cues of right and wrong, of when to be Bugs Bunny and when not to be Bugs Bunny, where he is and where he isn't.

SEAN: You have to keep in mind that when he was working, this is a guy who was getting cued all the time.

NOEL BLANC: He was doing 18 radio shows a week at one time.

JAD: Whoa!

NOEL BLANC: So he'd just be running down the street from ABC to CBS to NBC, and they'd hand them a script and he'd run on stage and do it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mel Blanc: I'm a lieut—a cap—maj—a Private Sad Sack.]

NOEL BLANC: So he had those characters buried in himself that could come out and surface incredibly fast.

SEAN: On a dime.

NOEL BLANC: Yeah. "Here's the script. That's the character." Boom.

SEAN: So if he's got all these characters hanging around in his head ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Yosemite Sam: This town ain't big enough for the two of us.]

SEAN: ... just waiting for the right cue. And in his head, that part of the brain that interprets the cue is all messed up, maybe in a way when Dr. Conway said ...

LOUIS CONWAY: "Bugs Bunny, how are you doing today?"

SEAN: ... maybe the way Mel heard it was, "Hey Mel, you're on."

LOUIS CONWAY: In his mind, I might have been the director at the time, for all I know.

SEAN: Even the good doctor went along with this one.

LOUIS CONWAY: So he was given permission to talk now because it was his time to talk sort of thing.

SEAN: So on one level, it's obviously crazy to think that Bugs Bunny saved his life because, after all, he was just a cartoon character. But whether or not those characters saved him, I mean, in that moment, they were the most essential part of him, you could say. Because when the rest of Mel was adrift and sort of lost in the ether, Bugs was there. He was ready to go to work. Which makes perfect sense to Orrin Devinsky.

ORRIN DEVINSKY: I mean, that was a rehearsed thing that he did. Once you practice things long enough, they kind of become automatic in lower portions of the brain. And that's why, when the higher brain's injured, sometimes these lower brain functions can come out so—so beautifully because they have been kind of wired in over time. So the Bugs Bunny voice was perfectly preserved deep inside.

SEAN: Bugs Bunny is like crystallized and kept over here in a protective jar away from the rattling cage of the brain.

ORRIN DEVINSKY: Exactly.

SEAN: Hmm.

ORRIN DEVINSKY: It went down into the safe.

JAD: So what ended up happening to Mel?

SEAN: Well, he took a long time to recover.

NOEL BLANC: And was in a body cast for gosh, seven months. But he worked the entire time.

SEAN: I mean, he never stopped working.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barney Rubble: Right, let's go, Fred!]

SEAN: They're bringing the equipment to him?

NOEL BLANC: I brought the equipment in, dangled a mic over the bed. And he started to work there.

SEAN: In fact, the first 65 Flintstones—you would never know this—Barney in real life ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Fred Flintstone: What's on your mind, Barney? I'm kinda busy.]

SEAN: ... was flat on his back in a body cast.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barney Rubble: Just passing by on my way to see the doctor.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Fred Flintstone: The doctor? What's the matter with you, Barney boy?]

SEAN: And then in 1989, for the first time, Noel and Mel both were starring in this commercial for Oldsmobile. Mel's 81. And the shtick—they did a bunch of these. The shtick was, you know, "Not your father's Oldsmobile."

NOEL BLANC: We did the commercial—it took us all day to do it. And he had just gotten over the flu, so he wasn't feeling that great. And I said, "Dad, why don't you run over to the doctor?" So he goes over to the doctor, and I called the doctor, I said, "What's the story?" He says, "Well, he's fine. I can give him a shot and send him home, but I'd love to clear his lungs out. So why don't we just put him in the hospital overnight, clear his lungs out and then send him home?" So I talked to my dad and I said, "You want to do that?" He says, "Well, okay. What the heck." "I'll see you in the morning, Pop." "Oh, yeah."

NOEL BLANC: Got there the next morning about 7:30. I says, "How do you feel?" He says, "My leg hurts." I say, "Why?" The nurses at the hospital forgot to put up the bed rails on the side of the bed. Well, you know how high a hospital bed is. He had fallen out of the bed and broken his femur. Fat emboli got into the brain by that time, and within 48 hours, he was basically almost brain dead. Yeah.

NOEL BLANC: During the next couple of days, he'd come in and out of his coma, or in and out of his sleep. And I tried to rouse him with the characters like the doctor had 30 years earlier.

SEAN: You would?

NOEL BLANC: Yeah.

SEAN: "Bugs, are you in there?"

NOEL BLANC: Yeah. It was very difficult at that time because he's 30 years older now, he's 81 years old. And it was difficult to revive him after each time that he would fall back to sleep again.

SEAN: And just before his dad passed away, Noel says that Mel looked at him, and in the voice of ...

NOEL BLANC: Yosemite Sam.

SEAN: ... he said ...

NOEL BLANC: [Yosemite Sam voice] "Noel, I love you." And that was about it.

SEAN: Oh, my God!

NOEL BLANC: It was the last character he did. And the last character on film or recorded character ...

SEAN: Which was in that Oldsmobile ad I told you about.

NOEL BLANC: ... was Porky saying, "That's all folks!"

SEAN: And that's what his tombstone says, too, "That's all folks!"

JAD: Wow.

ROBERT: Thank you, Sean Cole.

JAD: Sean does some good voices himself.

ROBERT: He does, but we won't share them with you. Not in the company of Mr. Mel Blanc.

JAD: Very, very big thanks to Noel Blanc, Mel Blanc's son.

ROBERT: And to Dr. Louis Conway, the doctor.

JAD: And to Robert's boyfriend Orrin Devinsky.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: That's an inside joke.

ROBERT: I do like Orrin Devinsky.

JAD: Oh, and a huge thanks to Mel Blanc himself, wherever he may be, for all those voices that populated our youth.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Porky Pig: That's all, folks!]

JAD: Three, two, one. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Today on Radiolab ...

ROBERT: Well, we're talking about inner voices.

JAD: And for our last story of this hour, we're gonna switch things up a little bit because well, this is just one of the most amazing things I've ever heard.

ROBERT: Really?

JAD: Yeah. It doesn't have to do with voices, really. It's more like music, inner music.

JESSICA BENKO: Yeah.

JAD: That's Jessica Benko. She's a reporter.

JESSICA: Yep.

JAD: And she's the one who initially told me the story.

JESSICA: So a little while ago, I went up to visit this guy.

BOB MILNE: Well, hello.

JESSICA: Hi.

JESSICA: Bob Milne.

JESSICA: It's nice to see you.

BOB MILNE: Nice to see you.

JESSICA: Excuse my snowy feet here.

JESSICA: And he lives in a tiny town in Michigan with his wife Linda.

JESSICA: Hi, Linda. It's nice to see you again.

LINDA MILNE: Hi.

JAD: And who is he?

JESSICA: He's an amazing piano player. The Library of Congress actually called him a national treasure.

JAD: Really?

JESSICA: He's had this special relationship with music ever since he was a boy.

JESSICA: Did you grow up with any other instruments inside the house other than the piano? Or was that what you started out on?

BOB MILNE: Well, I am—my mother made me take piano lessons, and I hated it. I didn't like the sound of minor keys, and the piano teachers had me playing a recital in which there was a Schubert minor key piece in it. So on the recital, I played it in major, and everyone thought that was a travesty.

JESSICA: These days though, his main music isn't so much Schubert. It's actually ragtime.

BOB MILNE: Ragtime is one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four. I find the rhythms ...

JESSICA: So the thing about ragtime is that oftentimes the player is actually playing two different rhythms at the same time, one with the left hand, one with the right hand.

BOB MILNE: And then you put the rhythms of three in the right hand.

JESSICA: The thing about Bob is, he can do this like times a thousand.

JAD: Oh! What does that even mean?

JESSICA: Well, let me back up. I first heard about Bob from a neurologist named Kerstin Betterman.

KERSTIN BETTERMAN: Kerstin Betterman.

JESSICA: Who's now at Penn State.

KERSTIN BETTERMAN: Penn State University. First time I heard about Bob Mile was through friends.

JESSICA: Kerstin heard about Bob from a colleague who'd seen him play for an audience.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bob Milne: Well, I might just take a tune like ...]

JESSICA: He was actually playing multiple rhythms with his two different hands, and switching back and forth between different pieces of music and carrying on a conversation ...

KERSTIN BETTERMAN: A conversation.

JESSICA: ... at the same time. You can look up videos of Bob on YouTube, and you can see him performing and throwing out jokes. But at times you'll see him carry on a full conversation while playing. From the perspective of a neurologist, this is actually really hard because the part of your brain that should be engaged in playing a piece of music that complicated should also be engaged in having a conversation.

JAD: The talking part and the playing part are the same part?

JESSICA: They're the same part in most of us.

JESSICA: For most people, that sort of thing: playing a complex piece of music and having a conversation would—would interfere with one another?

KERSTIN BETTERMAN: Yes, that's what you usually would think. Unless you're highly skilled and you play maybe one piece of music at a time that you've done multiple times, but even then, it will be very difficult to this degree.

JESSICA: So Kerstin got in touch with Bob, and she started asking him some questions.

KERSTIN BETTERMAN: ... about the way you would perceive music ...

JESSICA: And in the course of chatting with him and talking about how he perceives music and all of this, he happened to say to her ...

BOB MILNE: That I could hear an entire symphony in my head. And I didn't think that was too big a deal because I always listen to two of them at once.

JESSICA: He told her ...

KERSTIN BETTERMAN: "I only have to focus on the one mentally that I want to hear at a given time, and then that's the piece a play. But I hear them all ongoing."

JAD: Did he just say he can hear two?

JESSICA: Two different symphonies.

JAD: In his head?

JESSICA: At the same time.

KERSTIN BETTERMAN: And we thought this was very unusual.

JAD: Yeah. But I mean, are we talking the full symphonies, or just the melody?

JESSICA: Every instrument.

JAD: Every instrument.

JESSICA: And he can focus in, and ...

BOB MILNE: Turn one of them up, one of them down. And they both run simultaneously.

JAD: Huh.

BOB MILNE: So then she pushed the envelope and asked me if I can hear three?

KERSTIN BETTERMAN: Three pieces of music.

BOB MILNE: I said, "Well, I don't know. Never tried."

JESSICA: But he was like, "Yeah, I think I could do three."

KERSTIN BETTERMAN: When we challenged him a little bit, actually, he said "I can do four if you ask me."

JAD: What?

BOB MILNE: But I wouldn't go any further than that.

JAD: No, that's total [bleep]. Four symphonies at the same time? That's just nothing but—but noise.

JESSICA: Absolute cacophony.

KERSTIN BETTERMAN: You know, the four pieces of music, that's just wow! I said, "Nobody can do this." You know, so I was really critical.

JAD: Yeah, because it's not true.

KERSTIN BETTERMAN: We had to think about how to test this.

JESSICA: Let me tell you about how the experiment worked, and then tell me if you think it's true.

JAD: All right.

KERSTIN BETTERMAN: We came up with the behavioral tests ...

JESSICA: So the first thing Kerstin had to do was find a control, someone to compare Bob to.

KERSTIN BETTERMAN: Right.

JESSICA: So she found a conductor.

KERSTIN BETTERMAN: Peter Perret, who's the former conductor of the Winston-Salem Symphony.

JESSICA: Who is himself an accomplished musician. Before the test, she sent him and Bob ...

KERSTIN BETTERMAN: Four pieces of music. We had Schubert's symphony. We had Brahms, we had Beethoven.

JESSICA: And finally, one from Mendelssohn. You have to keep in mind, these four symphonies are in different keys and different tempos.

KERSTIN BETTERMAN: Very different in themes and instrumentations. And the challenge for them was to learn these four pieces of music.

JESSICA: Completely memorize them.

BOB MILNE: Four different tunes, and they only gave me a couple days to listen to them.

KERSTIN BETTERMAN: And then play them in their minds, and we would then ask them where in a certain piece they would be after an arbitrary time.

JAD: I'm not really following. What—what did they do?

JESSICA: Okay, so here's what they did.

JAD: Mm-hmm.

JESSICA: They put these guys in the scanner, and they said to them, "I want you to play the music in your mind."

JAD: Play the music in your mind.

JESSICA: Close your eyes and imagine the music.

JAD: So no music is playing out loud?

JESSICA: No music playing. Just inside their head.

JAD: And are they imagining it however they want? Or like on the CD?

JESSICA: No, no. Exactly what they had heard on the CD.

JAD: So same instruments coming in and out?

JESSICA: Yep.

JAD: Same tempo?

JESSICA: Yep.

JAD: So if it was vivace on the CD, vivace in their head?

JESSICA: Exactly.

JAD: And why were they doing this again?

JESSICA: Well, they wanted to see if these guys could track via memory these really complicated pieces of music.

JAD: I see.

JESSICA: So they put the guys in the scanner. They're laying there.

JAD: Mm-hmm.

JESSICA: And on a screen in front of them, the word "Start" flashes. And at that moment, they start playing the first piece of music back in their head. In the control room, they're tracking the music themselves to follow the timing.

JAD: The researchers.

JESSICA: Yeah.

JAD: Oh, so while Bob and this dude are imagining it, they're actually keeping track of where the real CD is?

JESSICA: Exactly. They let it go for a while, and at an arbitrary moment they say "Stop." And then they say, "Sing to me exactly where you are in the music."

JAD: Like the note?

JESSICA: The exact phrase. They go back, they compare the timing.

JAD: To the CD.

JESSICA: Right. To find out if these guys can really recreate inside their heads exactly what they'd heard.

JAD: And?

KERSTIN BETTERMAN: So our conductor, our control was able to listen to one piece of music at a time and was really right on target with the right timing within a second.

JAD: Wow! So this conductor's imagined symphony was only a second off from the real one?

JESSICA: Yep. Same with Bob. So Bob's within a note or two.

JAD: Not bad.

JESSICA: Now round two.

KERSTIN BETTERMAN: The multi-song task, as we called it.

JESSICA: They told them both to start that first piece of music again, and then a little bit later, they said, "Start the second piece of music in your head."

JAD: Simultaneously?

JESSICA: Yep.

JAD: All right, I'm already like, come on. It's crazy. Like, this is—we've slipped into fantasy.

JESSICA: Well, and that's what happened for the conductor. He couldn't do it.

KERSTIN BETTERMAN: He couldn't do two simultaneously.

JAD: Yeah, of course he couldn't do it. It's impossible.

KERSTIN BETTERMAN: There was no chance. He said this is an overwhelming impossible task.

JESSICA: His brain just shut down.

JAD: Whoa, like he died or something?

JESSICA: He stopped even being able to track the first piece of music.

JAD: Ah.

JESSICA: He just got confused. Now we go to Bob.

BOB MILNE: They put me into the MRI and they asked me, "Start tune one in your head." So I did. Then roughly 10, 15 seconds later, I got a message on the screen. It says "Continue listening to One. Start Two." And then 15 seconds later, "Continue listening to tunes One and Two. Start Three." And then the same thing with Four. Then on the screen it said, Stop." And then Kerstin came on a little—I could hear her talking to me from somewhere. And she says, "Bob ..."

KERSTIN BETTERMAN: Tell us, where are you?

BOB MILNE: "Where are you in tune One?

KERSTIN BETTERMAN: Beethoven's symphony. Right now, what do you hear?

BOB MILNE: So I told her. And I described what the piece was playing at that point. And the same thing with tune Two, Three and Four. She announced that I was exactly right down to the note in each one of the symphonies.

JAD: Jess, you're telling me something that's just not ...

JESSICA: Kerstin's a really—she's got a lot of integrity.

JAD: No, I'm not—it's just my common sense right now is yelling like a three-year-old.

JESSICA: It really—it really is mind-boggling to think about. Makes my brain hurt.

KERSTIN BETTERMAN: But, you know, we proved he can do it.

JESSICA: When Kerstin gave you the different pieces of music to listen to ...

BOB MILNE: Uh-huh.

JESSICA: Did any of them clash?

BOB MILNE: No. No, they don't clash. They're all just playing different pieces. There's nothing chaotic about it.

JAD: All right. So assuming this is true, how does he do this? How does he explain to himself how he does this?

JESSICA: So I think there's two things going on here. The first has to do with emotion.

JAD: Emotion.

KERSTIN BETTERMAN: Bob is using different brain areas, I think. In his case, probably more emotional brain centers.

JESSICA: Emotion deepens the way that we experience things, makes stronger memories. And Bob has a really strong emotional relationship with music.

JAD: But don't we all?

JESSICA: Yeah, but it's a little bit beyond the whole "Minor keys make me feel sad." He has really specific emotions associated with individual keys on the scale.

JAD: Huh.

BOB MILNE: When I hear C major, it's a very bland key. It's like—I don't know how to describe. It's like eating water soup or something like that. But D major, the bright key that makes me want to dance even though I can't dance. And every key, every one of the keys of the piano had a different emotional attachment to me.

JESSICA: So for Bob, if just the keys are triggering different emotions?

JAD: Yeah.

JESSICA: Imagine what it must be like when you get to actual music.

JAD: So you think that something about how he experiences the emotions of the music makes it etch more deeply in his brain or something?

JESSICA: Yeah, I think he's—when he's got these four pieces of music going, he's not thinking hard about tracking each one of them. He's already in them. He feels them inside his body. And you can feel more than one feeling at a time.

JAD: Huh.

JESSICA: So that's one idea. The second idea has to do actually more with image and space, really. I asked him if he could try playing back two pieces of music right now. And I asked him: when you hear these two symphonies in your head, what are you seeing?

BOB MILNE: I can picture two symphony orchestras sitting side by side.

JAD: He actually sees the literal orchestras in his head?

BOB MILNE: Yeah. And I see them as silhouettes. There's no conductor in front of either one. There's a brownish hue out in front of them like it's the floor, but it's more the color of the deep brown of a violin. And in back of them, there's a semicircle that's bluish in color. Then when I listen to them, I'm gonna listen to Brahms' Second Symphony over in the left side, and over in the right side, I'll turn on the Emperor Concerto, third movement of Beethoven's. So I'm listening to that.

BOB MILNE: Now these are in two different keys. Emperor's in E flat, Brahms is in D. So now if I want to pay particular attention, oh, let's say I want to listen to the Emperor here, I'm gonna go into the E major. I just sped it up. See, I can speed the thing up to go to some other part in it. I can jump backwards. Let's see, just a minute. I can hear it in F. I can put it in any key I want to. But I'm going to roar forward in this third movement of the Emperor here, and listen to the E major variation on the piano, which is just like a—it's just rocking on this beautiful E-major chord, pivoting around to the E-flat note, and going up and down from there on the piano.

JAD: Wow! Wow! So his crazy talents may have something to do with this movie-making thing that he does in his head?

JESSICA: Yeah, but it's not just a movie. It's like a 3D movie. He can use it to find out where a specific instrument is.

JAD: How do you mean?

JESSICA: In his mind's eye, he can fly out over these orchestras and actually look down on the individual instrument he wants to see.

BOB MILNE: When I'm looking down and I see the piano out in front of them ...

JESSICA: He can zoom in and see them playing their instrument.

BOB MILNE: Okay, now I'm up there in the air listening to this thing, and over and my left side I can still hear this Brahms going along. Of Brahms, I can only see the silhouettes from the front, whereas the—the Emperor over here, I can see full color and every person's face in it plus hear the lines that they're playing.

JESSICA: And as he's flying out over these orchestras, the instruments actually get louder and softer depending on where he is. Like, if he goes behind orchestra number one ...

BOB MILNE: I can hear the bass much louder. And let's see, yeah. Then if I go over to the left side, I'm hearing the violins.

JESSICA: And he says he can float right above the players and actually see what they're doing.

BOB MILNE: I can see every wrinkle in the pleated shirts of their tuxedos. And I can see the deep brownish-orangish color of the violas. And I can hear the deep sound, the beautiful sound of that low viola. And I can hear every little rosin scratch across their bows.

JAD: God, listening to music for this guy must be like—like an acid trip!

JESSICA: [laughs]

JAD: The way that he's describing it?

JESSICA: I think it is. And when he listens to recorded music, it's so much diminished from what he feels when he's imagining it.

JAD: Huh. So he doesn't listen to CDs.

JESSICA: He cannot stand listening to CDs.

JAD: That—wow!

JESSICA: Yeah. He's a real example of the extremes of the human mind.

JAD: So what does he do with these crazy talents? I mean, is he like a billionaire?

JESSICA: [laughs] Nope. First of all, ragtime's not exactly the most popular form of music in the United States at this point, but it's what he likes to play. And he plays, you know, 250 shows a year, but a lot of them are at historical societies or churches.

BOB MILNE: Linda and I, we've got a small motorhome. It's an airport bus. One of those little 15-passenger buses. It's got a hot shower and a bathroom and a bed, of course.

JESSICA: So, you know, he travels around in his little motorhome with his wife when he can and without her when he can't, and sleeps in Walmart parking lots. He's working on an opera, which is mostly done. And he writes it in his head while he's driving, and then he sits down in a McDonald's and writes it out on paper. And, you know, that's pretty much what he does with his life.

JAD: Thanks to reporter Jess Benko for that great story, and also to producer Mark Phillips for making it sound so good. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Thanks for listening.

 

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