JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, this is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich. The topic is totally tumor, of course.

JAD: That's my line, by the way.

ROBERT: Oh!

JAD: No, no. So yeah, we've been talking about tumors this hour, famous tumors. And thus far they've been really bad.

ROBERT: Terrible tumors.

JAD: Really bad.

ROBERT: Scary, horrible tumors.

JAD: But ...

ROBERT: Because we are fair minded about everything.

JAD: Even tumors.

ROBERT: Let us consider the possibility that sometimes tumors can be rich, beautiful, and desirable.

JAD: For example,

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Phenomenon trailer: George Malley is an ordinary man who is about to become extraordinary.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Phenomenon trailer: Name as many mammals as you can in 60 seconds.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Phenomenon trailer: How about alphabetical? Aroc, bat moon, caribou dolphin. Are you getting this? What is going on, George? ]

JAD: In this 1996 movie, John Travolta plays a guy who gets a brain tumor. And the tumor ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Phenomenon trailer: Oscar-worthy performance…]

JAD: ... makes him into a genius.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Phenomenon trailer: John Travolta, in Portuguese]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Phenomenon trailer: You learn the Portuguese language in 20 minutes?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Phenomenon trailer, John Travolta: Not all of it!]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Phenomenon trailer: Phenomenon!]

ROBERT: He didn't learn the accent though. [laughs]

JAD: [laughs] The tumor doesn't give accents.

ROBERT: But it—But it does—it does raise a real question, which is like, can it—is it possible for a tumor to create ...

JAD: Something good?

ROBERT: Yeah.

ORRIN DEVINKSY: Hello Jad. Nice to meet you.

JAD: Nice to meet you.

JAD: So we paid a visit to a guy, a doctor named Orrin Devinsky.

ORRIN DEVINKSY: I'm a neurologist at NYU Langone School of Medicine.

ROBERT: And Dr. Devinsky has had a lifelong interest in the beneficial effects of certain kinds of brain conditions.

ORRIN DEVINKSY: Right. I'll just tell you, I think one of the most fascinating cases in neurology very quickly ...

JAD: And this one we were not prepared for.

ORRIN DEVINKSY: A gentleman was described, who ever since he was a child, would look at safety pins and have an orgasm.

ROBERT: At safety pins.

ORRIN DEVINKSY: At safety pins. The more shiny and the more numerous the safety pin, the stronger the sexual experience.

ROBERT: And this happened from his pubescent period. He just—safety pins turned him on?

ORRIN DEVINKSY: Sometime at puberty, he made this association. When he looked at a safety pin, he had an orgasm. So ...

ROBERT: He got to have been embarrassed by this. This is worse than being ...

ORRIN DEVINKSY: So, yeah. So he would go into private—He realized this is not something most people do. He never talked about it. And he did it in private. And then he got married after the war. He was honorably discharged and got married and then started having less sex with his wife because the safety pin was much—safety pins were much more enjoyable. Sometimes he just had to think about his safety pin, not even hold it up.

ROBERT: So we—are we seriously making the case that this guy is getting a benefit from his ...

JAD: Not seriously.

ROBERT: ... pin obsession?

JAD: But I think actually you could say that the experiences that this guy was having with those safety pins gave him a kind of pleasure that maybe is unavailable to the rest of us.

ROBERT: From an odd, odd source. But you know, pleasure’s pleasure.

JAD: Until, says Devinsky, this fellow began to have seizures.

ORRIN DEVINKSY: Got admitted to a psychiatric hospital in London, the Maudsley, one of the big psychiatric units. They actually got an EEG, and to make a long story short, there was a benign tumor.

ROBERT: Right in the part that's called the temporal lobe, sort of in the middle of your head, right behind your eyes.

ORRIN DEVINKSY: But they took it out.

ROBERT: They took it out.

ORRIN DEVINKSY: They took it out. And they cured him of his wonderful experience. So he—he never was able to—He could look at safety pins all day long, but he would never again, enjoy them the way he had for his whole life.

JAD: How did he feel about that?

ORRIN DEVINKSY: I think it was a mixed blessing, as you would imagine.

MARK SALZMAN: Well, I've got blue jeans on and sneakers ...

ROBERT: And this idea that from a tumor you can get something not so good, but also something good, this is an idea that has—Well, there's been a—a novel written on this theme.

MARK SALZMAN: The title of the book is Lying Awake.

ROBERT: By a friend of mine.

MARK SALZMAN: My name is Mark Salzman.

ROBERT: Mark is a writer who lives out in California and he thought, "I'm gonna imagine a nun."

MARK SALZMAN: Our main character is Sister John of the Cross.

ROBERT: Now this is a woman who had joined a nunnery because she felt just lonely for a relationship with God.

MARK SALZMAN: Yes. It's just not enough for her to tell herself, "Yes, God is there." What she longs for is a tangible sense of God's presence. A—a sense that she can really feel God's presence in her life. And she—she begins having what she thinks are migraine headaches. The—the regular doctor that the sisters see tells her that she seems to be having migraine headaches. They're coming more and more frequently. And there comes a point when one of these headaches changes dramatically, and then everything is different.

ROBERT: Everything is different. What's different? Well, what happens?

MARK SALZMAN: Shall I read?

ROBERT: Yeah, go ahead.

MARK SALZMAN: You—you kind of have to imagine this scene taking place in an environment of profound silence. She's in the cloister. She and one other sister, they're working on a sewing project. They're sewing an altar cloth. "One of the pins slipped out of her hand, ringing like a miniature triangle as it bounced off the floor. She looked down to the floor and saw that it looked impossibly distant. When she reached down for the pin, her hand looked strangest of all, as if it belonged to someone else. The silence in the room came alive, like the words left out of a poem. Something buried so deep inside her that she'd forgotten it was there rose to the surface. 'Sister, are you not feeling well?' God was present in Sister Ann's voice. He was present in her face. Nothing was changed yet everything was changed. 'God is here,' she answered. 'You were here all along.'"

ROBERT: Well, this is a field goal, isn't it? For someone who is seeking a spiritual connection. She has one.

MARK SALZMAN: That's right. She—this is the moment she's been waiting for all her life.

ROBERT: But there is a problem because when these feelings come ...

JAD: I'm sorry. She has a tumor. Let's just get the non surprise out of the way.

ROBERT: The show is called "Totally Tumor!"

JAD: All right! I'm just saying!

ROBERT: She has, like, a call...

JAD: First of all, it's "Famous Tumors," okay? You keep calling it "Totally Tumor" ...

MARK SALZMAN: Yes. She has a meningioma, a benign tumor, small, about the size of a raisin in the temporal lobe area of her brain.

ROBERT: Right in the same spot where the safety pin fellow had his tumor.

MARK SALZMAN: So the problem for her is, should I have the tumor removed, give up the most satisfying and fulfilling experience of my whole life? Or should I sacrifice my health in order to share with others the experiences that I'm having?

JAD: So we thought well, Orrin Devinsky, the doctor we spoke with first ...

ORRIN DEVINKSY: Yeah. So I think every case is unique in individuals.

JAD: ... he does see patients like this.

ROBERT: This is what he does for them.

JAD: So we took the case to him.

ROBERT: Now here's the question: if a person comes and says, "I'm having what I want," and you are suspicious that what she also is having is a disease, what do you do about the patient?

ORRIN DEVINKSY: If I knew for sure that the tumor, let's say, was benign and would never grow, and the only thing that person experienced was this religious feeling that they found extremely enjoyable, I would say let's do nothing but do serial scans to make sure nothing grows and that you're safe.

ROBERT: But in the book, as it happens, the nun got a little worse. She had a few more headaches, they're more severe. And they took the tumor out.

MARK SALZMAN: "The seizure activity stops. These experiences stop coming, and she does feel afterwards a sense of blah. She feels as if she sort of tumbled out of a Himalaya mountain into a muddy village." This is common apparently in patients after they've been treated.

ROBERT: Right. So my last question then is really about the—it seems to me the deepest question of all in this case, is that if someone has a very important and meaningful experience, and you have a sense it may be a abnormality, a physical abnormality that is triggering that, do you regard them as delusional? Like, there's just the possibility here that maybe these people are having an actual conversation.

ORRIN DEVINKSY: So yeah, there's no question ...

ROBERT: Or there are just—you do not even consider that?

ORRIN DEVINKSY: No, I mean, so sci—I think the question you ask, and I think you're getting at, is could it truly be that this is God's avenue to speak to us? And people in the late 1800s thought it was through the right hemisphere, and that's often where these cases occur, in the right hemisphere. So it may be that, that's right. It's the more emotional hemisphere. And when things are in a perturbed state, you may be more receptive to experiencing spiritual things. And I think there probably is some physiologic basis that allows you to tune into a broader world. And maybe some states of neurologic dysfunction allow you to harmonize or tune in or receive those messages, so to speak.

ROBERT: In which case then, your tumor or your epilepsy would be the ...

ORRIN DEVINKSY: The window or the conduit, right.

JAD: I—I do feel like I need to place an asterisk right here. Like, we are talking about a tumor in the end.

ROBERT: Well, but maybe understand that every feeling, every thought you have comes from cells in your brain.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: If any of those cells can produce a glorious experience, then the experience stands on its own. And sometimes in very well-documented cases, these are extraordinarily profound, desirable things.

ORRIN DEVINKSY: They're often hard to put into words.

ROBERT: Have you tried? I mean, when you ...

ORRIN DEVINKSY: Yeah. I mean, people—you know, Dostoevsky's probably the most articulate person with epilepsy who's had a religious experience and who wrote down what he experienced. I don't have the quote in front of me, but it's, you know, "this Felicity. This—this feeling I get ..."

ROBERT: "For several moments," he was quoted to say ...

ORRIN DEVINKSY: "Precious."

ROBERT: "I would experience such joy as would be inconceivable in ordinary life. I would feel the most complete harmony in myself and in the whole world, and this feeling was so strong and sweet that for a few seconds of such bliss, I would give 10 or more years of my life, even my whole life, perhaps."

[ORRIN DEVINSKY: This is Orrin Devinsky. Support for NPR comes from NPR stations, and the Wallace Foundation, a source for ideas for expanding learning opportunities beyond the school day. At WallaceFoundation.org.]

[MARK SALZMAN: The Ford Foundation, a resource for innovative people and institutions worldwide. On the web at FordFoundation.org.]

[LISTENER: And Cosman, the foundation of entrepreneurship, committed to growing economies and expanding human welfare. On the web at Cosman.org.]

[MARK SALZMAN: This is NPR.]

 

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