[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Recently, we interviewed a guy named Steven Johnson, who wrote a book. And he tells this story of how the book came about.

STEVEN JOHNSON: There was one specific event actually that really kind of triggered it, which is that I tried a—a biofeedback experiment.

JAD: He had found a place where he could get hooked up to a bunch of sensors and probes, and then see what was happening inside his body in real time.

STEVEN JOHNSON: So I went in, having been kind of curious about this, and tried it out. And it's kind of a therapeutic environment where there's a kind of a doctor who sits there and talks to you. It's a bit like going to a shrink. And we started this session, and there was a little screen, and you see this little line kind of scrolling along. And initially, it's very even, a kind of flat line. And after about a minute or two of talking, the doctor actually said, "You know, your adrenaline system seems very well-regulated."

JAD: [laughs] Oh, my God!

STEVEN JOHNSON: And I said, "Thank you very much. Thank you. I've always suspected that it was." And then for some reason, about a minute or two after that I decided—as I sometimes do—that I would make a joke. And so I tossed out some stupid little joke about something. And instantly a huge spike appeared on the screen. There was this giant kind of surge of adrenaline that had been released in my body. And we both kind of turned and looked at the monitor and said, "Whoa! What was that?" And then at the end of this session, he—we talked for about 30 minutes, and he gave me this printout of the whole session. And it was effectively a chart of my attempts at humor.

JAD: [laughs]

STEVEN JOHNSON: It was this flat line interrupted by six spikes of jokes, you know, successful or otherwise that I had tried to make. And I looked at that, and I thought of all the times over the years that I had found myself, you know, making borderline inappropriate jokes at situations where a joke was probably not the appropriate thing to do. When I teach, you know, compulsively making jokes to get laughs from the students. And I thought, somehow years ago I set up this little circuit in my head that guaranteed me this little jolt of adrenaline every time I made a joke. And I felt kind of like a drug addict more than a funny guy.

JAD: A glimpse of himself he was not prepared for. And it got him thinking ...

STEVEN JOHNSON: How many other routines like that are going on in my head at any given time? And what would happen if I went out and tried to track them down?

JAD: What would happen is he'd write a book. A book about the brain, which in turn got us interested in the brain. And what better time? In the thousands of years that human beings have been curious about what's going on in our heads, we can actually find out now. Get inside a charged, buzzing brain remotely while the owner of that brain is still alive and doing normal things like wiggling a finger or drinking a Pepsi. Using giant magnets, researchers can watch blood flow in the brain and guess at what part of the brain commands to finger to wiggle. What part likes Pepsi, what part likes Coke. Which part leans Democrat, which Republican. Seriously, these are tests researchers have actually done. They've put brain-imaging helmets on nuns as they meditate, sleepers as they dream. It is a new world.

JAD: Not unlike 17th-century Venice, when craftspeople figured out a deep mystery: how to take a piece of glass, line it with tin, and make a mirror. A mirror that's cheap, and more importantly, straight. All of a sudden, Europeans could see their own reflection as they actually are, not wobbly or distorted. Or imagine even earlier, when Narcissus accidentally catches his own reflection in a pond, and is amazed at that mysterious person looking back at him from the cloudy depths.

STEVEN JOHNSON: I remember being seven or eight, and I would—I would, you know, kind of look into the mirror and have those moments of like, "That's me. That's me in the mirror."

JAD: Hmm.

STEVEN JOHNSON: "That's weird that—what does it mean that I'm me?" And what—you know, and have those kind of slightly surreal moments when I was seven. And to some extent, I can't get those moments anymore. Like, I could even kind of get the weirdness of kind of looking at yourself and thinking, "What does it mean that I'm—I'm me?"

JAD: What Steven Johnson just described, standing in front of a mirror and freaking out, is a little like repeating a word over and over. The meaning of the word gets dissociated from the sound, just like the image of you becomes disconnected from the real you, the inner you. The little guy sitting at the controls behind your eyes, of the self, the soul, whatever you want to call it, that thing is something scientists are looking for right now. And it's what we'll be looking for this hour. Where is it?

ROBERT KRULWICH: Where—you mean where's—where is the inner real me?

JAD: Yeah. Yourself.

ROBERT: Oh. That's such a big quest—well, introduce yourself and then we can begin talking about this.

JAD: Okay. This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad. And you?

ROBERT: Robert Krulwich. We know that our bodies change, our cells change, moods change, dreams change. Everything about a normal, healthy person is flux, is change. Yet somehow, there is a oneness, a throughline. A continuous sense of self. You wonder, like, how the heck does that happen? Where is this self thing?

JAD: And that's how we're gonna start. We're gonna hear from somebody who thinks he's found it. Thinks he can point to it inside us. Later in the program, we'll hear a story of a woman who has certainly lost it. Woke up one day as a completely different person.

ROBERT: And I will introduce you to a scientist who says he can explain, or at least he has a good theory about why human brains differ from all the brains of all the other creatures.

JAD: All that is coming up. Okay, let's get things started.

ROBERT: When you ask the basic question: where is the self? The ancients had an answer. Always the same answer: right there. That's where the center of rational thought, speech, everything is.

JAD: Didn't they actually try and cut it open and see if it was living in there?

ROBERT: Yeah, and then they found out it was a pump, so they were really disappointed. So they began to gaze upward a bit. And here's the modern prejudice. V.S. Ramachandran is one of the world's great neurologists. If you ask him where the self lies, he'll tell you without any question, it lies where you'd hear this.

[whirring sound]

JAD: And that is what?

ROBERT: That is the sound of a neuron firing.

V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: It's astonishing that we got 100 billion little wisps of jelly in your head called neurons. And it's the activities of these neurons, a flux of ions across them, the passage of current, that is life.

ROBERT: Huh.

V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: You know, what we call our mental life, our thoughts, our ideas, our ambitions, our passions, our fear of death, our love life, everything—even what you think of as your own intimate self—you—is the activity of these little specks of jelly. This is the greatest realization in the last hundred years. In a sense it's obvious when stated in that—in that manner.

JAD: But not all brains can do what he just described.

ROBERT: What makes you think that?

JAD: Well, let me introduce you to Julian Keenan. He works at Montclair State University. I talked to him recently. He told me this story of many years ago, his mentor Gordon Gallup did an experiment. He took a bunch of chimpanzees, put them in a room with a mirror where they could see their own reflection. When he did, this is what happened.

JULIAN KEENAN: At first, they would attack the mirror. They'd started beating their chests, and started threatening it as if the animal in the mirror was another chimpanzee. But then slowly, over the course of tens of minutes, the chimp began to say, "Wait a minute. This guy's doing exactly what I'm doing."

JAD: Wasn't there something about them sticking their butts on the mirror, too?

JULIAN KEENAN: Yeah, there was a lot of that going on. And they would show you all the signs that they knew that that was them in the mirror.

ROBERT: Wait. How did they—how does a chimp know that the image in the mirror is the chimp? Couldn't, like, he be thinking, "Oh, let's just bash butts with that other chimp?"

JAD: Yes, you're right. This is anecdotal. How do you prove it? And that, says Julian, is where a clever little technique called the Mark Test comes in.

JULIAN KEENAN: My mentor Gordon Gallup, one day he was shaving. And as he turned away from the mirror, I think there was a spot of shaving cream left on its face. And as he was wiping it off he wondered, would a chimp do the same thing?

JAD: In other words, would the chimp look at the mirror and think, "Hmm. That guy, he sure does look like me. Moves like me. Maybe that creature is me. And if that guy has a spot on his face, maybe I have a spot on my face."

ROBERT: Hmm.

JAD: To test this, to see if chimps can recognize themselves, they did an experiment.

JULIAN KEENAN: So you knock him out. You give him some anesthesia—a half hour. You knock him out. And while they're unconscious, you just paint a red mark on top of their forehead.

JAD: Wait for them to wake up.

JULIAN KEENAN: And then you put them in front of a mirror again.

JAD: And there is the test. The chimp wakes up with a spot on its head, sees the spot on the monkey in the mirror, stares and then touches the spot on its own head.

JULIAN KEENAN: I mean, the typical thing that it will do is it will wipe the mark and then smell. What is that? Is that food? Is that tree sap? And that was clear evidence that these chimpanzees recognize themselves.

ROBERT: Oh my God, that's pretty interesting.

JAD: Isn't it?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: Especially if you think about what the chimp is doing. It's creating a representation of itself that floats free of its body. That over there is the same thing as me over here.

ROBERT: Well, it's very intellectual, you know? Because you can't feel that other guy. You don't know that it's you from touch. You just see it over there, and you know somehow that that's you.

JAD: Exactly.

ROBERT: That's—that's your brain going there. That's your brain.

JAD: And this thing with the chimps opened up a Pandora's Box.

JULIAN KEENAN: This was a major discovery, because it revealed that the chimpanzee has some sense of self-awareness. Now what that sort of means is that well, the chimpanzee might have a soul or a self a lot like humans have. And it immediately brought up a lot of ethical considerations. You know, should they be in zoos? I mean, should we charge them for murder, you know? Do they have equal rights? And there's some people today who are even fighting for equal rights for chimpanzees.

ROBERT: [laughs] Well, these are unusually passionate people, you know? But the question that lingers in my mind is, where did this idea of a self—recognizing a self—where does it come from?

JAD: Where do our mirror powers come from?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: Bill Clinton.

ROBERT: From who?

JAD: Bill Clinton.

ROBERT: President Bill Clinton?

JAD: Yes.

ROBERT: Why?

JAD: I mean, it's not really Bill Clinton. But he does figure largely into an experiment that Julian Keenan did recently that tries to answer that question.

JULIAN KEENAN: Well, the sort of idea was, can we get a sort of more elegant way of testing self-recognition? We know that humans recognize their own faces, so what we came up with was this morph design. And I was at CompUSA and saw this bargain bin $9.99 morph software which we still use today.

JAD: And with this software, Julian Keenan does the following: he takes a photo of himself ...

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: And a photo of Bill Clinton he has lying around.

ROBERT: Which we all have. I mean, I have a pile of them.

JAD: He's a big Bill Clinton fan. And he digitally smooshes the two photos together, makes a morph. 50 percent Julian, 50 percent Bill.

ROBERT: So right on top of each other.

JAD: Yes, like in that Michael Jackson video.

ROBERT: Oh, yeah. I know that one.

JAD: The first thing he realizes when he takes a glance at this photo, is that he finds it very easy to see himself in the morph.

JULIAN KEENAN: I would always say, "Oh, that looks like me."

JAD: Whereas when other people see the morph, the first thing they see is Bill Clinton.

JULIAN KEENAN: Anyone else looking at that picture would say, "You're out of your mind," right? That looks like Bill Clinton.

JAD: Julian sees Julian. Everyone else sees Bill.

JULIAN KEENAN: And we termed that was the self-effect. There's this real affinity to see yourself in these morphs.

JAD: And that's where things get interesting. He tries it out on his patients, takes a photo of Bill Clinton.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Clinton: I did not have sexual relations with that woman.]

JAD: And a photo of a test subject, which let's pretend for the moment is you.

ROBERT: I did not have sexual relations with that woman.

JAD: Good. And with the computer, he morphs the two together.

ROBERT and BILL CLINTON: I did not have sexual relations with that woman.

JAD: So he shows you the picture. Same thing. You see more of you in the morph, everyone else sees more of Bill in the morph. You see more of you, they see less of you. Now the twist. Julian injects you with a special anesthesia that puts half your brain to sleep.

JULIAN KEENAN: You can anesthetize, safely anesthetize each hemisphere one at a time. So you can knock out the left hemisphere for about five minutes, and/or knock out the right hemisphere for about five minutes. Now, what we did was we showed them these morphs, so a 50-50 picture. And what we found was that without the right hemisphere, they wouldn't see themselves. But when they did have the right hemisphere, they always saw themselves.

JAD: In other words Robert, when you're looking at this morph of you and Bill Clinton and the right side of your brain is turned off, you will see mostly Bill.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Clinton: I did not have ...]

JAD: But when the right side of you is turned back on, suddenly you will see mostly you again.

ROBERT: ... sexual relations with that woman.

JAD: Yes!

ROBERT: So what you're saying then, is my ability to recognize myself is somehow lodged in the right side of my head.

JAD: That's what he thinks.

JAD: This seems to be a real victory for the right hemisphere. I mean, we always talk about the left hemisphere as being the smart one that does language, can solve problems, does math. But here you're saying without the right hemisphere we wouldn't really know who we are.

JULIAN KEENAN: Right. You know, sometimes it feels like when you're crusading for right hemisphere rights, you know, we're gonna—we're gonna march on Washington or something. The right hemisphere has been called the minor hemisphere throughout the whole of last century, because it doesn't have language. And I think that this is really the main reason we have a right hemisphere is it gives us self-awareness.

ROBERT: Huh. So the idea of a self, while in our brains, it turns out it's from a neighborhood in our brains if you believe this guy.

JAD: Yeah, it's kind of lopsided. Over to the right.

ROBERT: Over to the right which, you know, I thought myself was kind of everywhere.

JAD: But, you know, pinning it down might not be as easy as Julian thinks. Especially when you hear stories like this next one about how the soul or the self can just sometimes take a walk. Producer Hannah Palin tells this story of her mother.

HANNAH PALIN: 15 years ago, my mother had a brain aneurysm when she was only 46 years old. I've come to refer to it as "The day my mother's head exploded."

HANNAH'S MOTHER: It was Friday the 20th of August, and I woke up with a bad headache. And in the past, I'd go to an aerobics class and then my headache would go away. It was just like magic. It was—it was great. And I went to the aerobics class, and I worked out a little bit. And the headache just kept getting worse and worse. Somebody took it upon themselves to call 911. And I was laying on the couch, and all these little men came in with a stretcher and whisked me off to St. Francis Hospital in Beacon.

[ambulance siren]

HANNAH'S MOTHER: And that's the last thing I remember for four months.

HANNAH PALIN: When I finally arrived by my mother's bedside, my stepfather led me into the tiny room where my mother lay hooked up to every conceivable wire and monitor. I took her hand just to let her know that I was finally there, and she responded with a surprisingly tight squeeze. She knew her only child was there and her spirit wanted to let me know how happy she was, but her fragile body just couldn't handle it. Every monitor in the room went crazy. Alarm bells went off. The room became this living thing, hissing and beeping, consuming my mother's lifeblood. Nurses and doctors filled the room. My mother tightened her grip on my hand. And then I fainted.

HANNAH PALIN: The mother I grew up with died that day, and was replaced by an entirely different person who just happens to have the same memories and body and family and address as my dead mother. She spent the next three months unconscious in intensive care. After an operation to repair her aneurysm, my mother spent two more months in a regular hospital room. She was able to sit up and talk a little bit and was conscious, although not exactly coherent.

HANNAH PALIN: One day, I couldn't help but ask where she thought her spirit had gone while the rest of her lay unconscious at the Westchester Medical Center. She told me she'd been in Vietnam.

HANNAH'S MOTHER: Well, I remember that I was a little old man in Vietnam, and I grew vegetables. It has something to do with reincarnation, I think. I don't know if that was a previous life, or that's the life I'm going to, or what. But it was so far away from anything I know now. I know nothing about vegetables, and I know nothing about Vietnam, and I know nothing about being a little old man. But that's what it was.

HANNAH PALIN: When Christmas came around, my mother was moved to a rehab facility, but she was still just the shell of a person. She could barely talk. She was using a walker. She needed help going to the bathroom. She still had a feeding tube coming out of her stomach.

HANNAH'S MOTHER: I had to learn to walk again. I had to learn to climb stairs. It was a real weird sensation, being 46 years old and having to learn to walk again.

HANNAH PALIN: After seven months, my mother was released from the hospital and I returned to Chicago to pick up my life where I left off. When I returned home, I found myself grieving, and feeling really guilty about it. I mean, my mother was still alive. I was supposed to be happy, but I just kept feeling like she was gone forever. So I ordered myself to have patience, to wait it out. I was her daughter. She needed me. And then slowly, very slowly, this other person began to emerge.

HANNAH'S MOTHER: Oh, I know what we can do. Let's sing, Hannah! Goodbye my Coney Island baby. Hello, my own true love.

HANNAH PALIN: That's my mother and I singing together. My mother never used to sing. Now she'll erupt into song at the mere hint of an attentive audience. And then she got a tattoo above her left knee, a little red heart on a green stem. She's addicted to Wendy's hamburgers, and even sings a little song about how much she loves going there.

HANNAH'S MOTHER: Wendy's, Wendy's, Wendy's. I love Wendy's. Come with me to Wendy's.

HANNAH PALIN: I tell myself my mother wasn't always like this. My mother used to be very proper, very meticulous, very aware of social conventions. The ones that usually discourage people from wearing Groucho Marx glasses while singing "Hey Good Lookin'" in the middle of an airport.

HANNAH'S MOTHER: I used to be very perfectionist-oriented. Now if things are perfect, that's nice. If they're not so perfect, it's okay.

HANNAH PALIN: It's all just okay.

HANNAH'S MOTHER: Yeah. Yeah, everything is okay. I love sex now. I didn't—wasn't too crazy about it before. I don't know what the difference is, but I'm just more open to that kind of thing, you know? [laughs]

HANNAH PALIN: You also like to sing now.

HANNAH'S MOTHER: Oh, yes, I love to sing.

HANNAH PALIN: I don't remember you singing before.

HANNAH'S MOTHER: No. There's something about that experience that was very freeing.

HANNAH PALIN: My mother's illness, like a death or an accident, was one of those moments when time stops. When normal disappears. When you marvel that everyone else in the world can still laugh and go to the movies and complain about the weather. That's an explosion. In those moments, you can see life happen. It has clarity and meaning and purpose in the midst of its horror and pain.

HANNAH PALIN: But then those moments pass, and you're consumed by the trivia of daily life once again. Sometimes when I'm overwhelmed by the task of making my way through the world, I try to focus on the fact that the electric bill does not matter. The idiot driver glued to their cell phone does not matter. The mind-numbing day job truly does not matter. But welcoming the strange and the different? Being open and available for my husband, my friends, my family? Experiencing love and laughter as often as possible? That's what matters. Because it can all be taken away in one brilliant flash.

HANNAH PALIN: Do you feel different than other people?

HANNAH'S MOTHER: I don't know. I don't know how other people feel. But I do know that I don't worry about death at all. Not at all. Because I've kind of seen it, and I've been there, you know? And that's very liberating.

HANNAH PALIN: Did you have any memory of near-death experience?

HANNAH'S MOTHER: No. A lot of people have asked me that, but I didn't ...

HANNAH PALIN: Didn't see the white light, or ...

HANNAH'S MOTHER: No.

HANNAH PALIN: ... glow on the other side, or anything.

HANNAH'S MOTHER: Well, not unless being a farmer, a vegetable farmer in Vietnam is the other side. You know, that could be what heaven is all about: being a vegetable farmer in Vietnam. And maybe that's the whole thing.

JAD: That's producer Hannah Palin with a story she calls The Day My Mother's Head Exploded. Thanks to Jack Straw Productions for helping her tell that story.

ROBERT: I've never heard a version of heaven quite like that.

JAD: Isn't it amazing?

ROBERT: I'm trying to think, like—where my heaven—I don't know. Like, last night in my dreams actually, I was in a cafeteria with a lot of writers. All of them wearing wire-rimmed glasses.

JAD: Did it feel like heaven to you?

ROBERT: It felt good!

JAD: [laughs] Before we go to break, I played the story you just heard for a neuropsychologist in the UK. His name is Paul Broks. Wrote an incredible book called Into The Silent Land. And he said an interesting thing to me. We are all just a car crash or a slip away from being a different person.

PAUL BROKS: That's right. And that's precisely how I felt the very first time I went into one of these neurological rehabilitation centers. I suddenly felt very fragile. That in an instant we can be completely transformed. And of course, it's not just the person who's affected, the person who's injured who's affected. It's also the people around them. And there's an interesting little anecdote of this is I was with someone who had a severe head injury. And I went to see him at home. I did some work with him at home, and he got very angry at one point. Got very tired of doing my tests, and threw all the test materials on the floor. And his wife came in, and eventually he calmed down. And I just said to her later on, "How do you cope with this when that happens?" And she said "Well,"—she said something that really interested me. And she said, "Well, when it happens, I think it's not really him. It's not really Jeff."

JAD: Wow!

PAUL BROKS: "It's not really him." But paradoxically, what—what kept her with him, and kept her supporting him was that—was the belief that at some level it really was him. So I think we kind of—people in that situation have this kind of paradoxical survival strategy that, well yes, they have to accept it's not the person, it's not really them. But on another level, why are they still with them?

JAD: Is there something in that belief though, that could possibly be true? I mean, is there something that doesn't change? I don't know. I mean, some people might call it a soul, right? Do you believe in something like that? Or is everything purely as fragile as you say?

PAUL BROKS: I personally don't believe in an immaterial soul. And I think in a case like his—let's call him Jeff—you'd have to ask, "Well, what's happened to Jeff's soul? What's happened to Jeff's soul in this situation? Has the soul also been mutilated along with the brain? I think I would suggest that this—the notion that there is a sort of immaterial soul, which some people might believe departs the body at death, and—and some people might believe takes on another body in a future life, that's an illusion, I think. Other people take a different line on this. And other people do believe there is self stuff or soul stuff somewhere. But the question I would put to them is where? Where is it?

JAD: In the brain? I mean, is it possible we just haven't dug deep enough and found it?

PAUL BROKS: But how would you know when you found it? What would you be looking for?

JAD: I don't have ...

PAUL BROKS: I have no—I have no idea what you'd expect—what you'd expect to find. And what is it you would expect to see? How would you ever know when you saw a soul?

JAD: But what makes you, Paul Broks, you, your personality? What makes you consistent from one day to the next? Like, what makes your personality?

PAUL BROKS: Yeah. Well, what makes me consistent is that I looked—I have the same body more or less from day to day. I look in the mirror and it's me, usually. Well, in fact it's always me. It's never anybody else. But essentially, what I tell you—and if you'd like to ask me about myself is I'll tell you a story.

JAD: If I'm understanding you correctly, our selves are simply a narrative, a sort of narrative center?

PAUL BROKS: The extended self, which is what we normally think of when we think about ourselves, is really a story. It's the story of what's happened to that body over time.

JAD: Paul Broks is a neuropsychologist and author of the book Into The Silent Land. This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad. Robert Krulwich and I will continue in a moment.

 

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