Jun 15, 2009
Transcript
[RADIOLAB INTRO]
LAURA BUXTON: Okay.
JAD ABUMRAD: I want to start the show today with a truly remarkable story, which at least initially involves this girl right here.
LAURA BUXTON: Hello. I'm Laura Buxton.
JAD: Laura Buxton is her name. Remember that name.
LAURA BUXTON: I should tie my hair back.
JAD: And Laura, let's do this like a movie, okay?
LAURA BUXTON: Like a movie. [laughs]
JAD: Yeah.
LAURA BUXTON: Okay.
JAD: Okay, it's June, 2001.
LAURA BUXTON: Yeah.
ROBERT KRULWICH: Where are we, exactly?
JAD: Oh, we're in a little town in northern England called ...
LAURA BUXTON: Stoke-on-Trent.
ROBERT: Stoke-on-Trent?
JAD: Yep. Imagine a little English house in this town. And the camera zooms in, and there standing in the front lawn is little Laura Buxton. She is 10 years old.
LAURA BUXTON: Yeah. Well, almost 10.
JAD: Whatever. She's a tall girl.
LAURA BUXTON: Pretty tall for my age.
JAD: Pigtails. And in her hand, she's holding a balloon. A red balloon. You with me so far?
ROBERT: Yeah.
JAD: Okay, so earlier that day, Laura had taken a little card and stuck it to the balloon. And on one side written ...
LAURA BUXTON: My name.
JAD: Plus a little message.
LAURA BUXTON: It just said, "Please return to Laura Buxton." And then on the other side, it had my address.
JAD: Okay? So cut back to the outdoor scene. There she is, standing on the lawn.
LAURA BUXTON: It's very windy.
JAD: She's got this red balloon with her name on it, and she holds it up to the sky, to the heavens.
LAURA BUXTON: And I just let it go.
JAD: Pew!
LAURA BUXTON: And the wind took it.
ROBERT: [laughs]
LAURA BUXTON: We were laughing and joking because we just thought it would get stuck in a tree a bit further down the road somewhere.
JAD: But that's not what happened. The balloon kept going.
JAD: All right. Now I'm looking at a map here of England. And Stoke-on-Trent is at the top.
LAURA BUXTON: Yeah.
JAD: So the balloon would have had to go south. Like, down, down, down. Past Stratford.
LAURA BUXTON: Yeah.
JAD: Past Walsall, past Wolverhampton. Then past Birmingham. Past Kidderminster. Past Worcester.
LAURA BUXTON: Yeah.
JAD: Past millions of people.
JAD: Past Cheltenham.
LAURA BUXTON: Yeah.
JAD: People with different lives, different names.
JAD: Past Glou-chester?
LAURA BUXTON: Gloucester.
JAD: Gloucester.
JAD: And all in all, the red balloon goes about 140 miles south.
LAURA BUXTON: Exactly. Against the prevailing wind.
JAD: Oh, really?
LAURA BUXTON: Which is a southwesterly.
JAD: Okay. So finally, when this balloon is all the way on the other side of the country, it begins to descend. Down, down, down. And of all the places it could have landed, you know, in a river, in a factory parking lot, in the sea, instead the balloon touches down in the yard of this girl.
GIRL: I live—I live in the countryside in a little village called Milton Lilbourne.
JAD: Just so you're not confused, this is a different girl than the first one. They do sound the same, but they live on opposite ends of the country.
GIRL: The balloon got stuck in our hedge, but our next door neighbor found it, and he thought it was just a bit of rubbish and he collected it up so the cows wouldn't eat it, because he didn't want the cows to, like, choke on the rubbish. And he was about to put it in the bin, like, literally. And then he saw the label saying, "Please send back to Laura Buxton," and he was like, "Oh my God!"
ROBERT: Why? Why would he say, "Oh my God?"
JAD: Okay, so check this out.
ROBERT: Uh-huh?
JAD: Remember how I told you that the first girl who sent the balloon was 10?
ROBERT: Yeah.
JAD: The second girl who received it?
GIRL: I'm 10 years old.
JAD: She's 10. Okay?
ROBERT: Okay.
JAD: Wait, wait, wait. There's more. There's more.
ROBERT: Better be.
JAD: Remember how I told you the first girl's name was Laura Buxton?
ROBERT: Yeah.
JAD: Well, girl number two, can you introduce yourself?
LAURA BUXTON 2: Okay. Hi, I'm Laura Buxton.
ROBERT: What? They're both Laura Buxtons?
JAD: Yeah.
ROBERT: No!
JAD: Yes!
ROBERT: Both named Laura Buxton.
JAD: Yes.
ROBERT: Get out!
JAD: You heard me right. A 10-year-old girl named Laura Buxton lets go of a balloon—pew! That balloon floats 140 miles and lands in the yard of a 10-year-old girl named Laura Buxton.
ROBERT: This is for real?
JAD: Yeah! I think it might be the strangest thing I've ever heard in my life.
LAURA BUXTON 1: It's pretty weird.
JAD: It's been about eight years since the balloon incident, and the Lauras see each other a lot. And we managed to get them both into a studio.
STUDIO ENGINEER: Hello, New York. This is London. Can you hear me?
LAURA BUXTON 1: So, like, we're gonna hear Americans through these?
LAURA BUXTON 2: Yeah.
JAD: Okay, back to the story.
LAURA BUXTON 2: Yeah, I got the balloon.
JAD: That's Laura number two.
JAD: What did you think at that point?
LAURA BUXTON 2: Well, I was quite young, so I didn't really know what to think. I was just like, I'd better write the letter because, you know, there's someone else out there called Laura Buxton. I must see them!
JAD: So Laura number two wrote a letter to Laura number one.
LAURA BUXTON 2: "Dear Laura," I think I put. "I'm 10 years old, and I live in Milton. I found your balloon, and the thing is that my name is Laura Buxton as well. So lots of love from Laura Buxton."
JAD: Laura number one.
LAURA BUXTON 1: Yeah?
JAD: You get the note.
LAURA BUXTON 1: Got it through the post.
JAD: Do you remember reading it?
LAURA BUXTON 1: I remember reading because I was so—I opened up whilst I was in the kitchen, and it was really quite confusing, actually, because it was like, "To Laura Buxton from Laura Buxton." I took it up to my mum, and we stood there arguing about it for quite awhile.
JAD: What did you argue about?
LAURA BUXTON 1: Well, she was trying to tell me that it had come to Laura Buxton and it wasn't from Laura Buxton. She just thought I was confused.
JAD: [laughs]
JAD: Okay, fast forward a short while later, the two Lauras meet. It was at one of England's most popular TV shows, Richard and Judy. They'd found out about the Laura-Laura coincidence, invited them on. And here, the story gets even stranger, because there's Laura number two, standing backstage.
LAURA BUXTON: And down the corridor I saw this girl who looked pretty similar to me.
JAD: First thing she notices is wow, we're the same height ...
LAURA BUXTON 2: Skinny and tall.
JAD: Got the same color hair.
LAURA BUXTON 2: Brown-ish hair.
JAD: We're even wearing the exact same clothes.
LAURA BUXTON 2: Pink jumpers and jeans.
LAURA BUXTON 1: Yeah.
JAD: So you both had on pink jumpers and jeans?
LAURA BUXTON 1 and LAURA BUXTON 2: Yeah. [laughs]
JAD: And as they started to talk, it just kept getting weirder.
LAURA BUXTON 1: Well, we both got a three-year-old black Labrador.
LAURA BUXTON 2: We've both got a gray rabbit. We've both got guinea pigs.
ROBERT: Really?
JAD: Yeah, yeah. And they both brought their guinea pigs with them that day.
LAURA BUXTON 1: I remember Laura took hers out of its cage and I had mine on my lap, and we were like, "Oh my God!"
LAURA BUXTON 2: They were identical.
JAD: [gasps]
LAURA BUXTON 1: They were both brown with a sort of beige-y orange patch on their bum. Like, completely the same.
LAURA BUXTON 2: I was just like, "Oh my gosh! How is this happening?"
JAD: Do you believe in miracles? Either of you?
LAURA BUXTON 1: I don't know. Would you call this a miracle?
LAURA BUXTON 2: I'm not sure. I mean, I guess it could be, but I think it's more of a case of fate.
LAURA BUXTON 1: Yeah, I'd say it's more fate than a miracle.
JAD: So you don't think the wind that blew the balloon was just wind?
LAURA BUXTON 2: Well, if it was just wind, it was a very, very lucky wind. The chance is just so unlikely, there must be some kind of reason.
JAD: What kind of reason?
LAURA BUXTON 2: Maybe we were meant to meet? I don't know.
JAD: But meant by who? Or what?
LAURA BUXTON 1: Who knows, really?
LAURA BUXTON 2: I mean, only time will tell. It could actually be, like, preparing us for something else later in life. Who knows?
LAURA BUXTON 1: Maybe when we're old grannies.
LAURA BUXTON 2: We'll find out. Now we're just young and we're just enjoying life.
ROBERT: Oh, Jad. I mean, look what you—you know what you are?
JAD: What?
ROBERT: You're a destiny bully.
JAD: What did you call me, a destiny's bully?
ROBERT: Yeah.
JAD: Sounds like a pop band or something.
ROBERT: No, it's what you're doing to those girls.
JAD: No, I wasn't trying to force God on them, if that's what you mean.
ROBERT: Yes. You're the one who says, "Oh, who's behind this?"
JAD: No, no, no. I was trying to get to the question of how should we think about that story.
ROBERT: Hmm.
JAD: Is our world full of magic and meaning and coolness? Or is it all just chance?
ROBERT: In fact, that's what we're gonna do with this whole hour on Radiolab. We're going to discuss the role that chance—chance plays in so many things.
JAD: In the lottery, in the flipping of coins and deepest of all ...
ROBERT: In us.
JAD: Yes.
ROBERT: On Radiolab.
JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.
ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.
JAD: We're about to get random, so stay with us.
ROBERT: So let's start with a very basic question.
JAD: Let's.
ROBERT: "Random" sounds like it means random. That is, anything can happen at the next turn of the wheel.
[cell phone rings]
JAD: Like your phone ringing, for example.
ROBERT: Oh, God.
JAD: Ran-dumb.
ROBERT: Sorry. Sorry, sorry.
JAD: Although it's happened so many times, that it's no longer random. It's completely predictable.
ROBERT: But it does have a very nice kind of lilt to it, don't you think? I'm going to sing with it now. [hums to cell phone melody]
JAD: [beatboxes]
ROBERT: [laughs]
JAD: [laughs]
ROBERT: And now back to our regularly-scheduled program. So let's say that something remarkable happens.
JAD: Like the Lauras.
ROBERT: Like the Lauras. Can you tell whether this is just the random act of an indifferent universe, or is there something truly miraculous and wonderful about it?
JAD: Excellent question.
ROBERT: Thank you very much.
SOREN WHEELER: Hey, we found you! So this is Jad.
JAD: Hey.
SOREN: And this is Robert.
ROBERT: Hi.
DEBORAH NOLAN: I'm Deborah Nolan. I'm a Professor of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley.
JAD: And the reason we'd come to see Deb Nolan at Berkeley is because we'd heard that she plays this game.
DEBORAH NOLAN: I like to incorporate lots of classroom activities and demos.
JAD: One in particular that has to do with randomness.
ROBERT: Yep.
JAD: It's a game that helps her students understand what real randomness actually looks like. And it doesn't look like what you would think. In any case, she takes us into her classroom. Us and a few students.
DEBORAH NOLAN: Yes.
ROBERT: And she sits us down. We all sit down.
ROBERT: Should we sit in a semicircle?
DEBORAH NOLAN: That sounds good.
JAD: And then she explains.
DEBORAH NOLAN: Okay, I'm gonna divide the group up into two, and I'm gonna divide it right here.
JAD: She splits us up so that group one is three of her students.
JOE CHANG: I'm Joe Chang.
RICHARD LIANG: Richard Liang.
MARGARET TAUBE: Margaret Taube.
JAD: And group two ...
JAD: Jad Abumrad.
ROBERT: And Robert Krulwich.
JAD: ... is us.
DEBORAH NOLAN: And the group here ...
ROBERT: She's pointing at us.
DEBORAH NOLAN: I'm gonna give you a penny, and I'm gonna ask you to flip the coin a hundred times. And the three of you ...
ROBERT: She points to her students.
DEBORAH NOLAN: Your job is to pretend to flip a coin.
JAD: Meaning they just have to flip the coin in their heads. Kind of guess.
DEBORAH NOLAN: How do you think that coin might land? Produce a hundred fake coin flips.
ROBERT: And then Deb leaves the room. So her students start whipping through their imaginary fake flips.
MARGARET TAUBE: Heads.
RICHARD LIANG: Tails.
MARGARET TAUBE: Tails.
RICHARD LIANG: Heads.
MARGARET TAUBE: Tails.
RICHARD LIANG: Heads.
MARGARET TAUBE: How many is that?
ROBERT: While we actually flipped the coin a hundred times.
JAD: Heads.
ROBERT: Heads.
JAD: Tails.
ROBERT: Tails.
JAD: Tails.
ROBERT: Tails.
JAD: Tails. Heads. Tails.
ROBERT: This is exhausting!
ROBERT: But eventually, we did finish, and both groups then put our strings of H and Ts up right there on the blackboard. And then Deb came back.
DEBORAH NOLAN: Hello. Here they are, huh? Let's have a look.
JAD: Okay. So on the board, you've got two sets of Hs and Ts which look pretty much the same—to us.
ROBERT: But she looked at their list.
JAD: The fakers.
ROBERT: And then she looked at our list. And right away she says, pointing at our list ...
DEBORAH NOLAN: This is the real one.
JAD: We were like, "Wow! How did she do that?" Well, amazingly, the way she knew had to do with one particular moment.
ROBERT: Right. Roll the tape back to a moment right at the beginning of our coin flip.
JAD: Tails. Tails. Tails. Three in a row. Another tails. I feel like we have way too many tails.
ROBERT: [laughs]
ROBERT: Seven tails in a row!
JAD: It was really spooky.
ROBERT: Completely.
JAD: Like, at any moment a unicorn was gonna come galloping in. That's how weird it was.
ROBERT: But as magical and un-random as it felt to us?
JAD: That's how she knew that we were the real flippers.
DEBORAH NOLAN: As soon as I saw the seven tails and then I looked over to the other board and there weren't any longer than four, I think.
JAD: That's how she knew. And when we asked one of the guys on the other team, "Why didn't you put more streaks in your flips?"
JOE CHANG: Um ...
JAD: Well, he said what I think we'd all say.
JOE CHANG: I was thinking if we did that too much maybe she would recognize that we were actually doing it on purpose.
JAD: In other words, those streaks just feel wrong. And that's the thing about randomness: real randomness when you see it, it just doesn't feel random enough.
ROBERT: But, says Deb, the truth is ...
DEBORAH NOLAN: Strange things do happen by chance.
ROBERT: But why is it so hard for us to emotionally accept this? Well, it finally made sense to us when we spoke to this guy.
JAY KOEHLER: Hi, Jad. Hi, Robert.
ROBERT: That's Jay Koehler.
JAY KOEHLER: And I'm a professor of finance and professor of law at Arizona State University.
JAD: So here's how the epiphany happened: we were explaining to Jay the unicorn experience in Deb's classroom.
ROBERT: We got one tail. Then we got a second, then we got a third.
JAY KOEHLER: Yeah.
ROBERT: And then we got a seventh.
JAD: And somewhere in the conversation, we started to do the math. Like, okay, what actually are the odds?
JAY KOEHLER: Let me see. Was it heads in a row or tails in a row?
ROBERT: Tails.
JAY KOEHLER: Seven tails in a row. That's one-half raised to the seventh power.
JAD: So we start to do the calculations, and at first it looked pretty good.
JAY KOEHLER: Point zero zero—a little more than one percent.
JAD: Just over one percent chance.
JAY KOEHLER: Yeah.
JAD: So it seemed at first that what had happened in Deb's class was super unlikely.
ROBERT: Right.
JAD: But then Soren ...
ROBERT: Yeah.
JAD: ... our producer.
ROBERT: Soren.
JAD: Had to go and say this.
SOREN: You know, to be fair, you should tell him that you actually flipped the coin a hundred times.
JAY KOEHLER: Oh, ho, ho! Now you—wait, wait. Did you—you were holding back on me.
ROBERT: Wait, wait. We're too stupid to know that. That's why we have Soren here.
JAY KOEHLER: Are you saying that somewhere in the hundred flips you got a run of seven?
ROBERT: That's what we're saying.
JAY KOEHLER: That's not a particularly good coincidence. I'm sorry to burst the bubble.
JAD: What do you mean?
JAD: And then Jay explained it to us: if you're just doing seven flips then yeah, getting seven in a row is really unlikely. But if you're doing multiple sets of seven ...
JAY KOEHLER: Fourteen of those sets of seven.
JAD: ... which we were, because we were doing a hundred. Then the probabilities start to add up. And we start small, like one percent. But then that one becomes two, which becomes four, which becomes eight until, when it's all said and done, the chances of getting seven tails in a row somewhere in a set of a hundred is—don't hold your breath.
JAY KOEHLER: About one in six chance.
JAD: One in six. That's it.
JAY KOEHLER: That you would've gotten a string of seven.
JAD: So what felt spooky and almost Twilight Zone-ish in the moment is actually ...
ROBERT: It's not that improbable.
JAD: Oh.
ROBERT: See, that's why you don't want to know it. It doesn't confirm your goosebumps.
JAD: No, I think the goosebumps are dead now.
JAY KOEHLER: Oh, I'm sorry to do that. I still enjoy life.
JAD: The problem, says Jay, is that we were so focused on those seven flips in a row that we'd forgotten about the other 93 that weren't seven in a row. We'd forgotten about what he calls the background. We were too zoomed in.
JAY KOEHLER: So you've gotta back the camera up and pan around and look at the complete sample space.
JAD: And when you do that, he says, what you will realize is that the thing that felt so special ...
JAY KOEHLER: Suddenly you see that it's not so odd in its real context.
JAD: And this sad lesson goes way beyond coins. He gave us this example.
JAY KOEHLER: In 1985 and 1986, Evelyn Adams of New Jersey wins the lottery twice.
JAD: Back-to-back years. Crazily improbable, right?
ROBERT: Right.
JAD: So if you zoom in, all the way in, there she is. Evelyn Adams, standing outside of a convenience store somewhere in New Jersey.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Evelyn Adams: I just won it again! I just won the lottery for a second time!]
JAD: She is completely blown away for good reason.
JAY KOEHLER: The odds that those two particular tickets would become winning lottery tickets are one in 17.3 trillion.
JAD: Wow!
ROBERT: [laughs]
JAD: But, Jay would say, if you pan the camera back away from Evelyn ...
ROBERT: Bye, Evelyn!
JAD: If you look at the whole world of people buying lottery tickets, at this vantage point you can begin to ask a different question.
JAY KOEHLER: What are the odds that somebody somewhere ...
JAD: Somebody somewhere.
JAY KOEHLER: ... would win the lottery twice? And in fact, the answer to that is it would be very surprising if it didn't happen repeatedly. And it has happened repeatedly.
JAD: Really?
ROBERT: For instance ...
JAY KOEHLER: In Connecticut, employees of a place called the Shuttle Meadow Country Club, they won twice. A man in Pennsylvania, he won twice a few years later. A California retiree won a Fantasy 5 and the Super Lotto in the same day. The odds of that were calculated at one in 23.5 trillion.
JAD: That's 'trillion' with a T.
JAY KOEHLER: One way I think to think about this whole thing, I think one example that sort of brings it all home—at least it did for me when I thought about the blade in the grass paradox. The golfer hits the ball down the fairway, and the ball lands on a particular blade of grass. If the blade of grass could talk, you know, the blade of grass would say, "Wow! Oh my God, what are the odds that that ball out of all the billions of blades of grass ..."
ROBERT: "Then it went to the right. On me. It lands on me."
JAY KOEHLER: "How did it come to be that it just landed on me?"
ROBERT: "I don't know. It's sort of like a miracle, really."
JAY KOEHLER: And it is sort of miraculous. But what we know is that it was gonna land on some blade of grass somewhere. So it's nearly a hundred percent chance that some blade of grass was gonna say, "Wow. What are the odds of that ball was gonna land on me?"
ROBERT: And if I were that blade of guess I'd feel so special and chosen.
SOREN: And crushed.
ROBERT: And crushed! [laughs]
JAD: Soren! The real lesson here, according to Jay Koehler and also Deb Nolan before him, is that if you don't see past yourself you fall prey to, you know, superstition.
DEBORAH NOLAN: Right. Or magical thinking. You have to be careful that you're not finding meaning here when it's just coincidence.
JAD: But there are some things, like the Lauras ...
ROBERT: Mmm.
JAD: ... that will never feel like just coincidence.
LAURA BUXTON 2: Well, if it was just wind, it was a very, very lucky wind. [laughs]
ROBERT: So we had to ask Jay.
ROBERT: I ask you sir, is this a miracle?
JAY KOEHLER: This is not a miracle. It's a good story. But, you know, there's lots of little things I could pick at in the story, you know?
JAD: Like what?
ROBERT: Oh, yeah. Pick—pick away.
JAY KOEHLER: Well, I mean, you know, Laura Buxton didn't find the balloon. Somebody else who knew a Laura Buxton found the balloon. And you selected out the features that match. And trust me, somebody checked to see if she was an identical twin and said, "No, no. That's not a good one. Skip the twin. Okay, how many brothers and sisters? Oh, not the same number? Skip that. Ah, they both have a rabbit. Let's put that one in the story."
JAD: To be totally honest, he—he's right.
ROBERT: What? What do you mean?
JAD: Well, when I was interviewing the Lauras, I asked them a bunch of questions kind of scouting for similarities.
JAD: What's your favorite color, both of you?
LAURA BUXTON 1: Blue.
LAURA BUXTON 2: Pink.
JAD: Scrap that.
JAD: And what do you guys study in school?
LAURA BUXTON 1: Biology, chemistry and geography.
LAURA BUXTON 2: Whereas I'm doing English and history and classical civilization.
JAD: Hmm. Scrap that.
JAY KOEHLER: What people do is they try to make the story better by showing more similarities.
JAD: So you're saying that somebody—I couldn't imagine who—doctored the story?
JAY KOEHLER: [laughs] By the way, I don't want to spoil anything, and this is a trivial comment, but I believe that one of the girls was actually nine.
LAURA BUXTON 1: Well, almost 10.
JAY KOEHLER: And the other one was 10.
ROBERT: [laughs] Oh well, that's the story then. Never mind.
JAY KOEHLER: I'm sorry to be your most depressing guest.
JAD: Nonetheless, I will continue to tell the Laura story every chance I get—on the air, at parties, wherever—because, you know, damn the statistics, it just makes me feel good.
ROBERT: I think Jay would agree with you.
JAY KOEHLER: Well, it—first of all, we love stories. It connects us. It makes—it gives us insight into our own lives. And I think it also gives us a feeling that life is magical.
JAD: And maybe we don't have to call it magic to enjoy the experience. In fact, I was talking to the Lauras and I asked them, "What if a statistician were to walk in the room right now and say to you, 'This was bound to happen. Statistically, this was gonna happen sometime to someone.'"
LAURA BUXTON 1: That's fair enough, really. Because it just happens to be us in those statistics. So ...
LAURA BUXTON 2: Yeah. I mean, if that's what the statistician thinks I mean, yeah. Fair game to him.
JAD: They don't really care. The way they see it, whatever was in that wind, whether it was fate or just wind, doesn't matter. It brought them together. And now they're friends.
ROBERT: Radiolab will continue in a moment.
[LAURA BUXTON 1: Hello, my name is Laura Buxton. Radiolab is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]
[JAY KOEHLER: Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Science Foundation.]
[LAURA BUXTON 1: Radiolab is produced by WNYC and distributed by National Public Radio. Thank you. Bye!]
JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.
ROBERT: And I'm Robert Krulwich. And we are talking on Radiolab about things stochastic.
JAD: Like coin flips and lottery tickets and ...
ROBERT: Well, let's just push this whole argument another step forward, if we may.
JAD: What do you mean?
ROBERT: Let's talk about human beings. Would it surprise you, Jad, if I told you that on the subject of predictability humans and coins are kind of similar?
JAD: It wouldn't surprise me because I wouldn't believe it.
ROBERT: [laughs] You would believe it if I made you an argument so powerful and so astonishing that you would be falling back on your butt in surprise and staring at me with a kind of simple admiration that you rarely have. Because here it is, I'm going to talk to you about basketball.
JAD: Basketball?
ROBERT: That is a sport where people ...
JAD: First of all, A) what do you know about basketball?
ROBERT: I mean ...
JAD: Basketball is a game of skill. Don't even try and pretend that there are, like, random forces like coin flips. No.
ROBERT: Well, let me ...
JAD: No. Nope. Zip. No.
ROBERT: Let me make you an argument. Let me make you an argument.
JAD: Hmm.
ROBERT: Let's just take, to make it really interesting, the most skilled basketball team ever.
JONAH LEHRER: For example, you could take a look at the '82 to '83 76ers.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, sportscaster: The Philadelphia 76ers' Maurice Cheeks ...]
ROBERT: That's Jonah Lehrer, regular on our show.
JONAH LEHRER: It's one of the best NBA teams of all time.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, sportscaster: Ramon to Cheeks, Cheeks to Dr, J, swooping it underneath, putting it up and in.]
JONAH LEHRER: So during the playoffs, the 76ers were all incredibly hot.
ROBERT: Take my man Andrew Toney. An outside shooter for the 76ers, during this run, he was ...
JONAH LEHRER: Sometimes Andrew Toney would make five shots in a row. He would be considered hot.
ROBERT: So that's the deal. Andrew hits his mark once, hits his mark twice, hits his mark three times. Now I'm gonna pass to him because he's obviously hot.
JONAH LEHRER: The basket looks to him that it's the size of a soccer goal.
ROBERT: He's golden. He's got the gods on his side.
JAD: And why are we talking about them?
ROBERT: Well because in this situation, you would have to agree that Andrew Toney was hot, right?
JAD: Yes.
ROBERT: That's the word. So let me ask, what exactly do you mean when you say "hot?"
JAD: Why are you asking me? Because he's making a bunch of shots in a row. And if you're on his team and you're coming down the court, you pass the ball to Andrew because he's on a roll.
JONAH LEHRER: What the fan assumes is that after five shots is that he's more likely to make a sixth shot.
JAD: That to me just seems like common sense. If he's making lots of buckets, of course you're gonna pass it to him. How could that be wrong?
ROBERT: And did the players assume this? Obviously, they're gonna pass, right?
JONAH LEHRER: Oh, the players all believed this.
ROBERT: The coaches believed this too?
JONAH LEHRER: The coaches believe it, so it actually dictates the plays they call. Everyone assumes it to be true that the hot hand is a real thing and dictates the flow of basketball games.
ROBERT: Thank you, Jonah. But ...
JONAH LEHRER: The hot hand doesn't exist.
JAD: What? You just went through this whole rigamarole about the Sixers being hot.
ROBERT: Yeah, well they were a great team, but a lot of scientists have looked at this question of hotness in sports, and in fact, there's a couple of scientists who actually looked at all of the made shots and the missed shots of this 76ers team, and when they looked directly at the numbers, emotions aside, just the data, here's what they found ...
JONAH LEHRER: At the very moment you think you're hottest you're actually freezing cold.
JAD: Wait. That can't be right.
JONAH LEHRER: Some of these percentages are pretty damning.
ROBERT: Take Andrew Toney. During the regular season Toney made 46 percent of his shots.
JONAH LEHRER: 46 percent.
ROBERT: After hitting three shots in a row, which means he's in the zone, he's totally there, his field goal percentage drops to 34 percent. That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm telling you, Jad Abumrad. I've got the numbers here.
JAD: [laughs]
JONAH LEHRER: And the reason seems to be is that Andrew knows he's hot, or he thinks he's hot, so he's taking less responsible shots. He's taking the three-point jumper from way beyond the arc, and he assumes his streak will somehow save him.
JAD: No, that cannot be. Because Jonah, you've been to basketball games. You see what happens. Someone hits ...
ROBERT: I've been to basketball games too, all right? [laughs]
JAD: You've been to games and you've seen that someone makes three shots in a row, the crowd gets up, suddenly there's an electricity in the air. Every time the guy gets the ball, everyone stands up in anticipation. You're telling me that's all a figment of our collective imagination?
JONAH LEHRER: It is a figment of our collective imaginations, and it's especially a figment of the way we kind of calculate streaks. The reason Andrew seems so hot is because he makes three, misses the fourth, makes the fifth, misses the sixth, makes the seventh and eighth. And so we rewrite that essentially random process, this mixture of makes and misses, we rewrite it in terms of, oh, it's a streak. Once we think he's hot, we tend to edit what actually happens to kind of preserve that sense of the streak.
JAD: Ugh!
ROBERT: Okay, don't believe Jonah. What about Jay Koehler, our statistician from Arizona State. Listen to him.
JAY KOEHLER: I have no reason to think, even if whether he missed seven in a row or made seven in a row or made three of his last four, I don't really care, I know that he's a machine. He's like a 52 percent shooting machine, or whatever his number is.
JAD: No, but he's a ...
JAY KOEHLER: And ...
JAD: He's not a machine though, he's a person with confidence that ebbs and flows. There's a difference. There's got to be a difference there.
JAY KOEHLER: I agree with you. You've just described the psychological theory that makes the hot hand belief so compelling, and so hard to get rid of with data. But it just doesn't matter whether the player made three or missed three, their probability of making that fourth shot, that next one, is pretty much the same.
JAD: This is very, very depressing, because essentially what you're saying is that basketball players are like ...
ROBERT: Coins.
JAD: ... coins.
JAY KOEHLER: Yes. Yeah.
ROBERT: The fact is, Jad, you are—and Kobe Bryant, even—is more like a coin than any of us had dared to imagine.
JAD: No!
ROBERT: Kobe has a pattern. In his case, it's what? 60/40?
JAD: Shh, stop it. Stop it!
ROBERT: On any given night with Kobe you think oh, this is—he's spectacular, but all he's doing is he's just having another night of his very 60/40 life. And that's just the way it plays out.
JAD: Even on a shot-by-shot basis you're saying?
ROBERT: Yeah.
JONAH LEHRER: Each shot seems to be kind of a random event.
ROBERT: Exactly. Are you willing to concede that statistically this is a ...
JAD: Not yet.
ROBERT: Come on!
JONAH LEHRER: It's so counterintuitive, I still as a basketball fan I was just watching a game the other night saying, "Pass it to Kobe, [bleep] because he's clearly hot." The only exception to this whole, whole literature of streakiness is ...
SOREN: Hockey.
JONAH LEHRER: No, is ...
ROBERT: [laughs]
JAD: The sport no one cares about.
JONAH LEHRER: Is it Joe DiMaggio's hitting streak where he hits for 42 games in a row? I've got it in the book somewhere.
JAD: Actually, Joe DiMaggio's hitting streak was 56 games. 56.
JONAH LEHRER: Yeah, so Joe DiMaggio is just about the only outlier you can find in professional sports.
SOREN: He's the only real hero.
JONAH LEHRER: Yep.
JAD: Well, at least I got Joe.
ROBERT: You know what, Jad? One reason you have trouble, I think ...
JAD: More than trouble. I still don't believe this.
ROBERT: Well, it's because you're not the only person who is a person of pattern and habit. We all are. Pattern rules the brain. Here's another story. This is, again, from Jonah Lehrer, but this one is about a woman. I believe her name is Ann.
ANN KLINESTIVER: I'm Ann Klinestiver. I live in a small country town where most people know other people.
JONAH LEHRER: Ann was a high school English teacher.
ANN KLINESTIVER: I taught for 31 years.
JONAH LEHRER: She now lives in West Virginia.
ANN KLINESTIVER: Can you wait just a minute? There's someone at my door. I'm sorry.
JONAH LEHRER: No, no. Of course. Of course.
JONAH LEHRER: Ann was an upstanding citizen, went to church every Sunday. Was just one of those people who ...
ROBERT: Makes the world go round.
JONAH LEHRER: ... makes the world go round.
ANN KLINESTIVER: I'm sorry.
JONAH LEHRER: Not at all!
ANN KLINESTIVER: Anyway, in 1991, I would go to the grocery store, and on the occasions I wrote a check for my groceries, the woman would say, "Gosh, you're shaky."
JONAH LEHRER: And she says she began to notice that her hands would start to tremble.
ANN KLINESTIVER: " Are you all right?" But I just thought maybe it was because of working hard and trying to get everything done.
JONAH LEHRER: And it got particularly bad when she said she was just walking in the mall doing some shopping.
ANN KLINESTIVER: And I was by myself walking, and it was like I stepped off a step that wasn't there.
JONAH LEHRER: It was the first full body tremor. She fell.
ANN KLINESTIVER: And then my husband was a doctor, and he sent me to a neurologist who diagnosed me with Parkinson's.
JAD: How old is she by the way?
JONAH LEHRER: She was, at that point, in her early 50s.
ROBERT: What is Parkinson's?
JONAH LEHRER: Parkinson's is the death of dopamine neurons in the back of your brain, in the part of your brain that controls bodily movement. And so when these neurons die, the end result is first the shaking hand and the loss of feeling and the loss of movement. And then, of course, the tremors get worse and worse.
ANN KLINESTIVER: But anyway ...
JONAH LEHRER: Well, the doctor diagnosed her with Parkinson's, and he gives her a drug called Requip.
ANN KLINESTIVER: Requip was a new medicine in 1992.
JONAH LEHRER: It's a pseudo-dopamine. It basically mimics dopamine in the synapse of the cells.
ANN KLINESTIVER: And it was like a miracle drug for me.
JONAH LEHRER: Her tremors disappear. Her symptoms disappear.
ROBERT: So she's cured? Or ...
JONAH LEHRER: If you looked at her on Requip years after she had Parkinson's, you wouldn't notice anything. She would seem symptom free. So about seven or eight years go by, all the while they're upping the dosage to compensate for the cell loss that's still taking place. And in the early years of 2000s something sort of unusual happened to Ann.
ANN KLINESTIVER: Some friends of mine had gone to Las Vegas every year for that basketball tournament, the Final Four type thing. And they asked would I like to go with them, and I said, "Yes, I would."
JONAH LEHRER: So she went to watch basketball, but as often happens in Vegas, one afternoon she and her friends found themselves in a casino.
JONAH LEHRER: Had you ever gambled before this trip to Las Vegas?
ANN KLINESTIVER: No, I was raised in a household that was fairly religious, and we considered gambling a sin.
JONAH LEHRER: But as she stood there in the casino in Vegas, she had this inexplicable urge to go to the slot machines.
ANN KLINESTIVER: They had frogs and princes and cars and cherries and lemons. Push a button, the wheels spin and see what the pictures did. I've never taken any drugs so I don't have anything to compare it to, but it was like a high. That was sort of the beginning of it.
JONAH LEHRER: And then when she comes back to West Virginia ...
ANN KLINESTIVER: I couldn't wait to get to a machine. I really wanted to play.
JONAH LEHRER: She discovers the dog-racing tracks about 15 miles away from her house.
ANN KLINESTIVER: I'd go there at 7:30, be there when they opened.
JONAH LEHRER: And that's where she would go. And they had a wide assortment of slot machines.
CASHIER: Hi, how are you?
ANN KLINESTIVER: If I had the money, I'd play all day.
JONAH LEHRER: From 7:00 to 3:30 in the morning.
JAD: Whoa!
JONAH LEHRER: And then she would go home and play slots ...
ANN KLINESTIVER: On the computer.
JONAH LEHRER: ... on her computer. Not even for money, just for the sheer visceral thrill.
ANN KLINESTIVER: I would play that the rest of the night. 7:30 the next morning I'd be back at the joint.
CASHIER: Hi, how are you?
JAD: Without any sleep at all?
JONAH LEHRER: No sleep. And she could keep that up for several days in a row.
ANN KLINESTIVER: At the beginning of my gambling, I'd wake up in the night and just scream out, "Oh, God! What am I doing? Help me, save me!" But eventually I became too hard-hearted, I guess, to even pay attention to that.
JONAH LEHRER: Her credit cards were all maxed out.
ANN KLINESTIVER: I sold my mother's silver. I sold my silverware. Things that should have been my son's heirlooms. Stole from the safety deposit box.
JONAH LEHRER: She steals quarters from her grandkids.
JAD: Steals quarters from her grandkids?
JONAH LEHRER: Yeah.
ANN KLINESTIVER: Anything I looked at around the house I thought I could get money out of.
JONAH LEHRER: Everyone who knows her is watching her life fall apart.
ANN KLINESTIVER: My house was filthy, dirty, a mess. I wouldn't take time to even wash dishes.
JONAH LEHRER: She lives on peanut butter.
ANN KLINESTIVER: Didn't have any crackers or bread or anything. I just had peanut butter.
JONAH LEHRER: Because that's all she can afford and still leave as much money as possible for the slots.
ANN KLINESTIVER: Even when I'd be at church I'd think well, there's so many more minutes, or so many more hours, then I can go gamble.
JONAH LEHRER: Her husband eventually leaves her.
ANN KLINESTIVER: I mean I loved my husband but ...
JONAH LEHRER: They got divorced.
ANN KLINESTIVER: ... there's just no decision. Everything is gambling. One of the neat things about gambling is you can do it by yourself.
JONAH LEHRER: How much money did you lose during those years, if you don't mind me asking?
ANN KLINESTIVER: I lost at least $300,000.
JAD: Wow.
ROBERT: $300,000.
JAD: Which to her is ...?
JONAH LEHRER: Is all her life's savings.
JAD: That's one quarter at a time.
JONAH LEHRER: Yeah, that's the surreal part.
ANN KLINESTIVER: I tried several things. I went to a rehab facility. My father—I told you I was raised in a really religious home, sometimes I would say my dad's watching me from heaven, and he wouldn't approve of this. He would be so disappointed in me, but seemingly I just couldn't stop.
ROBERT: Let me pause here for a second, Jad. I want to just take a moment to try to figure out what exactly is happening to Ann.
JAD: Yeah, why can't she stop?
ROBERT: Yeah. It turns out there may be an explanation if you look into her brain. Remember earlier, we talked about a little chemical called dopamine?
JAD: Yeah.
ROBERT: And how she didn't have enough dopamine in her brain, so that was giving her some kind of movement trouble, the Parkinson's.
JAD: Right.
ROBERT: It also turns out to be the case that any time you do something that makes you feel good, your brain spurts out dopamine.
JONAH LEHRER: For years that's how scientists saw dopamine, as the neurotransmitter of pleasure, the neurotransmitter of sex, drugs and rock and roll.
JAD: But you said earlier that dopamine has to do with movement.
JONAH LEHRER: Well, what is the ultimate purpose of movement from the perspective of evolution? It's to get you to food. It's to get you to sex. It's to get you to reward.
JAD: Huh!
JONAH LEHRER: So that's why the same circuits, the same chemical that controls motivation, that controls what you want, also controls movement.
ROBERT: But it turned out it was a little more complicated than that. In the mid-1970s ...
JONAH LEHRER: A guy named Wolfram Schultz ...
ROBERT: ... decided to take a much closer look. And his subject was a monkey.
JONAH LEHRER: He would put these very thin needles that can record the activity of individual dopamine neurons in the monkey brain.
ROBERT: And they'd put the monkey in a room, and then every day they would walk down the hall to the room where the monkey was, they'd open the door.
VOICEOVER ACTOR: Hello, monkey.
ROBERT: They'd flip on the light. They'd give the monkey some juice.
VOICEOVER ACTOR: Here you go, monkey.
ROBERT: And then when the monkey sipped the juice—dopamine!
JAD: Happy monkey.
ROBERT: Right. But then comes a surprise.
JONAH LEHRER: He soon discovered something very odd about these neurons.
ROBERT: As they juiced this monkey, day ...
VOICEOVER ACTOR: Hello, monkey.
ROBERT: ... after day ...
VOICEOVER ACTOR: Hello, monkey.
ROBERT: ... after day ...
VOICEOVER ACTOR: Hello, monkey.
ROBERT: ... after day ...
VOICEOVER ACTOR: Hello, monkey.
ROBERT: ... the squirt of dopamine, which they were always measuring in the monkey's brain seemed to move forward in time.
JAD: What do you mean?
ROBERT: Well, at first the dopamine hit when the monkey took the sip of juice.
VOICEOVER ACTOR: Hello, monkey.
ROBERT: But after a while, the monkey got the dopamine hit when they entered the room and switched on the light.
VOICEOVER ACTOR: Hello, monkey.
ROBERT: And then after a few more times, the dopamine hit when the researcher's feet could be heard walking down the hall. You see what's happening here?
VOICEOVER ACTOR: Hello, monkey.
JAD: Not really?
ROBERT: [laughs]
JAD: You're gonna have to bring it home for me.
ROBERT: Well, then I'll do it again then. What the monkey is trying to do is piece together the sequence of events that inevitably lead to juice.
JONAH LEHRER: Exactly. That's what these cells do: they try to predict rewards.
JAD: Oh, so this isn't just about movement or about feeling good, it's about finding the pattern of the thing that makes you feel good.
JONAH LEHRER: Yeah.
JAD: It's pattern finding.
JONAH LEHRER: Oh, this is pure pattern recognition. This is essentially how your brain makes sense of reality. In some very primitive sense, it parses reality in terms of rewards. This is how you get more food in the wild is you can see the reward before anyone else can.
JAD: So we're talking about, like, basic survival stuff here.
ROBERT: Mm-hmm.
JONAH LEHRER: There's one other wrinkle, though, about the dopamine system that makes casinos and slot machines so tantalizing, which is that these cells are also programmed to be very sensitive to surprising rewards. So this seems to be—most scientists speculate that this seems to be your brain's way of telling you: pay attention, you just got something for free. This must be good! Sit here in this nice, comfy, velvet chair and try to figure out this reward.
ROBERT: So now imagine Ann, sitting there at the slot machine. She pushes the button on the machine, the slot machine. And oh my God!
JONAH LEHRER: And sirens and bells go off, coins clang.
ROBERT: And inside her head, her dopamine neurons, they're saying, "Whoa, this is wonderful! But now how did this happen?"
JONAH LEHRER: Where did this big reward come from?
ROBERT: What did you do this time?
JONAH LEHRER: Why are you so happy all of the sudden?
ROBERT: And it starts searching for something.
ANN KLINESTIVER: They had frogs and princes and ...
ROBERT: Was it the number of ...
ANN KLINESTIVER: Cherries, and ...
ROBERT: ... cherries that she had just before? Was it that this machine had 13 hits and this was the 14th?
ANN KLINESTIVER: I thought I could tell ...
ROBERT: It has all kinds of pattern-like things. It has bells, it has lights. But the problem is ...
JONAH LEHRER: ... is that there is no pattern to find.
ROBERT: ... there is no pattern.
JONAH LEHRER: It's inherently random. It's inherently unpredictable.
ROBERT: And while the rest of us might just, you know, give up and walk away ...
JONAH LEHRER: God, I just wasted a hundred bucks on this stupid machine. I should go get lunch.
ROBERT: Ann can't go to lunch. Her dopamine system is ...
JONAH LEHRER: ... too powerful, too potent.
JAD: Oh, because of that drug she's taking?
ROBERT: Right. It keeps surging and surging, forcing her neurons to fight, fight hard to find a pattern. That's what's gripping her. Her brain is intoxicated at the possibility that it will learn how to succeed. That it will ...
JONAH LEHRER: ... crack an uncrackable code.
ANN KLINESTIVER: I thought I was good at solving the machines. In fact ...
JONAH LEHRER: She told me a story about she would go to buy milk, and then spend the next twelve hours with the milk rotting next to her as she puts quarter after quarter after quarter into this machine.
JONAH LEHRER: Were you surprised when you learned that the medication might be responsible for your gambling addiction?
ANN KLINESTIVER: I mean, if someone had said to me, "This medicine will cause compulsive gambling," I would have thought they were crazy.
JONAH LEHRER: It's just at that time where the first studies come out showing that this is actually a common side effect of Requip.
JAD: Really? So there were other Anns appearing in other places, same deal?
JONAH LEHRER: Absolutely.
ANN KLINESTIVER: Basically, after my neurologist took me off the Requip ...
JONAH LEHRER: Her compulsion disappeared instantaneously.
ANN KLINESTIVER: Almost immediately.
JAD: That fast?
ANN KLINESTIVER: Well, within a week I'd say.
JAD: Wow!
JONAH LEHRER: It was gone.
ANN KLINESTIVER: I haven't gambled for nearly three years.
ROBERT: Did her Parkinson's return?
JONAH LEHRER: Yeah.
ANN KLINESTIVER: I have tremors a lot worse. I've recently gotten a cane. I have trouble walking. I use a walker.
JONAH LEHRER: So the price of not being a gambling addict is living with debilitating Parkinsonian symptoms.
ANN KLINESTIVER: But my son, let me finish about my son. When I told him after I had quit gambling I said, "Son, I sold things that belonged to you that you should have," and he said, "Mom, those are just things. It's just really great to have you back."
JAD: Radiolab will continue in a moment.
[LISTENER: Hi, I'm Mattie Wiener, calling from Louisville, Kentucky. 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: Hello, I'm Jad Abumrad.
ROBERT: And I'm Robert Krulwich.
JAD: This is Radiolab, and our topic today is—you want to say the word?
ROBERT: Stochasticity.
JAD: Stochasticity.
ROBERT: S-T-O ...
JAD: Which is a wonderful and fancy word that essentially means randomness, chance.
ROBERT: Yep.
JAD: Like the kind that's built into flipping a coin, or playing the lottery, or to take things deeper, when you breathe. Krulwich, think about the air that's flowing around your head right now. It's full of atoms and molecules that are flying about and smashing into each other, and colliding and shooting off at different trajectories. It can't be predicted. It's totally chaotic, right?
ROBERT: Mm-hmm.
JAD: Until you breathe it all in.
ROBERT: [inhales]
JAD: When you do, things get predictable.
ROBERT: Can I release?
JAD: Nope, nope. Okay.
ROBERT: Whew, okay.
JAD: The point is when you breathe in, all of those chaotic flux-y molecules come in and become a part of the machinery that is you. They go into your blood, they go into your cells, which are themselves these little factories.
JONAH LEHRER: Factories full of even tinier factories like mitochondria.
JAD: What are mitochondria? I'm not really sure, but I do know that's Jonah Lehrer again, himself a factory of insight.
JONAH LEHRER: Factories full of these intricate things which work and can understand, you know, this gene makes this protein, which makes this organo, which does this thing for the cell.
JAD: This process, says Jonah, of taking in flux and giving it a shape, giving it order, that is what life does. In fact, you might say it is the definition of life.
JONAH LEHRER: The closer you get, the more you kind of stand in awe at the exquisite engineering. There is a sense that life can be the world's most elegant clock.
ROBERT: Nicely put.
JAD: Now if life is a machine, you would think that the most clocklike, most machine-y part of life would be all the way down at the bottom.
ROBERT: I would think so.
JAD: Which, for our purposes, is when a gene makes a protein—gene, protein, gene, protein—this is the basis of life. So you would think it's gotta be orderly, it's gotta be predictable.
ROBERT: Genes, proteins ...
JAD: Otherwise none of us would be alive.
ROBERT: [laughs] It is a very predictable, orderly system, so we all believe.
JAD: But then we spoke to this guy.
CARL ZIMMER: Yeah, am I talking? Have I been talking clearly?
SOREN: You're all right, yeah.
CARL ZIMMER: Okay.
JAD: And he mucked things up a bit.
CARL ZIMMER: I tend to be looking this way.
ROBERT: Well, what's your name?
CARL ZIMMER: My name is Carl Zimmer.
JAD: He's a science writer like Jonah.
CARL ZIMMER: I write a lot for the New York Times and Scientific American and Discover. I blog.
JAD: And he told us that this whole genes-making-proteins situation ...
SOREN: Here we are again.
JAD: ... as tick-tocky an affair as we've always assumed it to be, in fact, scientists have never actually seen it.
ROBERT: Well I mean, it's very small, but finally scientists have figured out a way to turn on a light when it happens, so they now can see a gene turning on a protein.
JAD: Literally see it with their own eyes.
ROBERT: Yeah.
JAD: And what they saw ...
CARL ZIMMER: Well ...
JAD: ... was astonishingly un-clocklike.
CARL ZIMMER: You know, at the fundamental level it's just sloppy. Sloppy. And that's the best word for it.
JAD: In fact, in our interview he used that word, like, 42 times.
CARL ZIMMER: Sloppy. Sloppy. Sloppiness. Sloppiness?
JAD: Sometimes he used this word ...
CARL ZIMMER: Random.
JAD: Or this.
CARL ZIMMER: Fluctuating.
JAD: And this one.
CARL ZIMMER: Noise. Chaos. Noise.
JAD: Definitely used that one a lot.
CARL ZIMMER: Jumble. Noise. Noisy. Accident. Noisy. Noise. Noise. Noise. Noise. Noise. Noisy. Sloppy. Chaotic noise. Sloppiness. Sloppy and fluctuating. Fluctuate. It's really crazy in there.
ROBERT: [laughs]
JAD: He started by telling us about this experiment that happened in California at Caltech, involving a little tiny bacteria called E. coli—which is Carl's favorite.
CARL ZIMMER: [laughs] Indeed. Yeah, so these are E. coli. These are harmless residents of our gut. And they're also ...
JAD: Would you call them creatures?
CARL ZIMMER: They're creatures, sure. They sense their world. They make decisions. They feed.
JAD: Okay.
CARL ZIMMER: They reproduce. They have genes like us. They've got 4,000 genes. I think they've earned the title "creature."
JAD: And these creatures are actually very similar to our own cells. Their genes make proteins just like ours. So what these scientists did was they took some E. coli that were exactly the same ...
CARL ZIMMER: Clones.
JAD: ... in every single way.
CARL ZIMMER: They're genetically identical.
JAD: And then they put the whole batch in a dish, and they said, "Okay everyone, we're gonna turn on your genes. Start making proteins now." And they watched, because like you said earlier, they had found this new way of getting the E. coli to ...
CARL ZIMMER: Glow.
JAD: Every time its genes made a protein.
CARL ZIMMER: It seemed like it ought to be like just flicking a switch.
JAD: Yeah, you turn on the genes, click—protein, protein, protein, protein, turn it off. Turn it on, protein, protein, protein, protein, protein, turn it off.
CARL ZIMMER: Couldn't get simpler.
ROBERT: This is like a basic function of biology.
CARL ZIMMER: Yeah, this is biology 101. And again, these are genetically identical E. coli.
JAD: Meaning they've got the same genes, they're making the same proteins, so they should glow the same.
CARL ZIMMER: Right, you just expect this steady glow in all of them.
JAD: Nice and steady.
CARL ZIMMER: And that's not what happened. You could start with, like, an individual E. coli and say, "Okay. Well, what happened with that one?" It didn't start to glow. It started to flicker. There'd be a little bit of light, then no light, a little bit more light, then maybe a sudden flash, then dark again. Then a little bit of light ...
JAD: Hmm. So they were expecting [steady buzz].
CARL ZIMMER: Yeah.
JAD: And what they got is buzz buzz buzz.
CARL ZIMMER: Right.
JAD: It was completely defective. Like a car with no muffler going putt, putt, putt. More troubling still, when they looked at E. coli number two, it too was defective—except in its own unique way. Two had his own thing going. Same with number three. He had his own thing going.
CARL ZIMMER: I mean they're genetically identical.
JAD: Same with number four.
CARL ZIMMER: This is essentially the same creature in many different copies.
JAD: And five. Six, too. And seven.
CARL ZIMMER: But each one was flickering in its own ...
JAD: Number eight.
CARL ZIMMER: ... pattern.
JAD: Nine.
CARL ZIMMER: Chaos.
JAD: 10.
CARL ZIMMER: Fluctuating.
JAD: 11.
CARL ZIMMER: Sloppiness. Noise. Chaos. Noise. Jumble. Chaos. Sloppy. Chaos. Sloppy. Jumble. Random sloppiness. Noise. Random noise. Chaos. Noise. Sloppiness. Noise. Noise. Noisy. Sloppiness. Noise. Random noise.
JAD: Now this noise would not be a problem if it's just bacteria we're talking about, but according to Carl ...
CARL ZIMMER: It's everywhere.
JAD: Everywhere in us. We are built, he says, on a foundation of chaos.
ROBERT: This is very puzzling to me because if, down at the deep level of our DNA, there's just this random ...
JAD: Mayhem.
ROBERT: ... mayhem.
JAD: Bedlam.
ROBERT: How do you go from bedlam up to the organization that I think I represent? I wake up in the morning, I go to sleep at night. I get hungry, I eat. I breathe in, I breathe out. Listen to my heart [heart beating]. I am very, very orderly. I don't know how you get from this [random noise] to this [heart beating].
CARL ZIMMER: That's right. I mean, so somehow, all of this sloppiness has got to be somehow tamed because we're alive. I mean, it's not total chaos in our bodies but …
ROBERT: But? This sentence never seems to quite finish. But we don't know how that happens, is that what ...?
CARL ZIMMER: We have some ideas of how it happens. As scientists start to understand how genes work with other genes, they can see ways in which you can filter out the noise and keep the good signal, keep the music.
JAD: Okay so do you want to sit or something or ...
LITTLE WING LEE: Sure. Where do you want me to sit?
JAD: Anywhere, really.
JAD: Now this I find really cool. The research on this stuff is really new, but Carl says one of the ways that the body may do this ...
JAD: Testing. Hello? Hello?
JAD: ... may go from, like, "ch ch ch ch ch" to [hums] is by doing something that I actually do on this show all of the time, which is use a noise filter. The body may have engineered some noise filters. I'll just give you an example from my world, and this is the honest to God's truth: I have a friend named Little Wing Lee.
JAD: Hey, Little Wing.
LITTLE WING LEE: Hello, Jad.
JAD: Tell me what you're holding in your hands there.
LITTLE WING LEE: In my hands, I have two audio tapes.
JAD: And Little Wing just recently called me up. She said, "I've got these two cassette tapes. They're really old."
LITTLE WING LEE: I think they were made in the '70s.
JAD: Her mom found them in her attic, and they're of their grandmother ...
LITTLE WING LEE: Ones labeled MeeMaw sings.
JAD: ... singing. Singing old slave songs and old hymns. Now Little Wing's grandmother died last year.
LITTLE WING LEE: She was 99 years old.
JAD: Wow!
JAD: And they were really close.
LITTLE WING LEE: Yeah, very close. They used to call me Little MeeMaw when I was a kid.
JAD: So she's got these tapes. She wants to hear them. The problem is, if you put it on for more than three minutes you get annoyed.
LITTLE WING LEE: There's that weird, like, hiss.
JAD: It's too noisy. And she wanted to know if I could do something about it.
LITTLE WING LEE: Yeah.
JAD: So real quick, here's what I did: I put it into a computer, launched an EQ program, found the bass noisiness, which was around 600 hertz and dialed that down like so. And then I found the high hiss frequencies, which are around 2,000 hertz, and dialed that down. Ah. Now as a final step, I just kind of located the voice around 1,000 hertz and dialed it up.
[MeeMaw singing]
JAD: Okay, so it's not a flawless process. I mean, now she sounds like she's coming out of a well, but for the first time you can hear her voice.
LITTLE WING LEE: I don't know. This is the first time I'm hearing this song, but it seems like she's describing the night that my grandfather passed away, talking about the doctors telling her that my grandfather has passed. And then she's describing putting a fern in his hand, and she said it should be a rose.
JAD: The thing that's applicable here is that we started with this ...
[tape hiss]
JAD: ... and then just by bringing certain frequencies down and others up, we ended up with this ...
[MeeMaw singing]
JAD: This might be how it is in the body. That you've got this noise all the way in the bottom, these genetic circuits which are spitting out messiness. But somehow just on top of that are other genetic circuits which are cleaning it all up, giving it a shape.
CARL ZIMMER: Uh ...
JAD: Wait, what? Is that not right?
CARL ZIMMER: Not quite.
JAD: Dammit! Science!
ROBERT: [laughs]
JAD: What's wrong with it?
CARL ZIMMER: Well, in our cells there's no grandma.
JAD: What do you mean there's no grandma?
CARL ZIMMER: You don't start off with some very clear signal that gets masked by noise. The noise is there from the start. It's noise, and then—whoop!—all of a sudden, you have this beautiful song.
JAD: Carl went on to explain—and it took, like, an hour for us to finally get this. There's nothing but noise down there at the bottom, and yet somehow this song emerges like a phantom. Because it seems like the noise is somehow filtering itself into music.
CARL ZIMMER: Mm-hmm.
ROBERT: So if we were to get the analogy right, Little Wing would hand Jad a tape with just fragmented sounds.
JAD: Little bits of MeeMaw.
ROBERT: Little bits of MeeMaw, in all kinds of random ways.
CARL ZIMMER: Maybe she gave you eight or nine tapes.
JAD: And somehow, he says, it all starts to kind of get into a network where this one filters that one, and that one filters the other one, and the other one filters that ninth one.
CARL ZIMMER: And out of all of that comes grandma, comes a song.
ROBERT: The song of a living, regular organism.
CARL ZIMMER: Mm-hmm.
ROBERT: A MeeMaw literally. I mean, grandmas are made from chaos.
CARL ZIMMER: [laughs] I love that.
ROBERT: Mm-hmm.
CARL ZIMMER: Mm-hmm.
ROBERT: You say "Mm-hmm" like it was almost like it seems like a miracle that one even stands up and walks.
CARL ZIMMER: But see the thing is you've hit—I mean, we are talking about something that scientists don't understand yet.
JAD: Yeah.
ROBERT: Hmm.
CARL ZIMMER: So I don't have—so there's not a—if you want to have a part of this show where you say, "And this, people, is how it all works ..."
JAD: Can't do that.
CARL ZIMMER: No.
JAD: But here's the thing: if you want to get fruity about this, you could say—and I put this to Carl—that if all the way down at the bottom of us there is this fuzz that cannot be predicted, then in some sense we're free to be whatever we want.
CARL ZIMMER: Hmm, well, you know ...
JAD: I mean, look, I can sit here and concentrate, and I can think any thought I want to right now.
CARL ZIMMER: Any thought?
JAD: Sure.
CARL ZIMMER: But you can't think about a poem from second century China.
JAD: True.
ROBERT: Do you think that—could you make an equivalence between loose mechanics and sense of freedom?
CARL ZIMMER: Well, you know, I mean, does the sloppiness and the floppiness of a protein clamping onto your DNA scale up to what you're gonna be when you grow up?
JAD: On Radiolab? Yes.
CARL ZIMMER: Okay. All right. Well, here we are then.
JAD: [laughs]
[CARL ZIMMER: Hello this is Carl Zimmer. Radiolab is produced by Soren Wheeler and Jad Abumrad. Our staff includes Ellen Horne, Lulu Miller and Dean Cappello.]
[LITTLE WING LEE: With help from Jennifer Madsen, Michael Raphael, Anne Heppermann, Jonathan Mitchell, Amanda Aronczyk, Charles Chilling, Emma Jacobs, Al Lipskin and Ike Sriskandarajah. The last one is—how do you pronounce this word?]
[CARL ZIMMER: The Stochasticity theme song was created by Josh Kurz and Shane Winter. Special thanks to Little Wing Lee and MeeMaw.]
[LITTLE WING LEE: Visit Radiolab online at Radiolab.org, where you can comment on this show, ask random questions and hear the entire Stochasticity theme song. Anyways, this is Little Wing. Thank you. Bye!]
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