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Announcer: Listener-supported WNYC Studios.

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, no. That is okay. We'll 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.

Narrator: George Malley is an ordinary man who is about to become extraordinary.

Dr. Bob Niedorf: Name as many mammals as you can in 60 seconds.

George Malley: How about alphabetical? Aardvark, baboon, caribou, dolphin, eohippus, fox--You're not getting this.

Lace Pennamin: What is going on, George?

Jad: In this 1996 movie, John Travolta plays a guy who gets a brain tumor and the tumor makes him into a genius.

George: [foreign language]

Bonnie: You learned the Portuguese language in 20 minutes?

George: Not all of it.

Narrator: Phenomenon.

Robert: He didn't learn the accent though.

[laughter]

Jad: The tumor doesn't give accents?

Robert: But it does raise a real question, which is, is it possible for a tumor to create-

Jad: Something good?

Robert: Yes?

Jad: Hello.

Dr. Devinsky: Jad, nice to meet you.

Jad: Nice to meet you. We paid a visit to a guy, a doctor, named Orrin Devinsky.

Dr. Devinsky: I'm a neurologist at NYU Langone School of Medicine.

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

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

Jad: This one we were not prepared for it.

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

Robert: At safety pins?

Dr. Devinsky: At safety pins. The more shiny and the more numerous the safety pins, the stronger the sexual experience.

Robert: This happened from his pubescent period? Safety pins turned him on right at the beginning?

Dr. Devinsky: Sometime in puberty he made this association when he looked at a safety pin, he had an orgasm.

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

Dr. Devinsky: Yes. 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. Then he got

married. After the war, he was honorably discharged and got married and then started having less sex with his wife because safety pins were much more enjoyable. Sometimes he just had to think about a safety pin, not even hold it up.

Robert: Wait, are we seriously making the case that this guy is getting a benefit from-

Jad: Not seriously.

Robert: -this pin obsession?

Jad: 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 source, but pleasure is pleasure.

Jad: "Until," says Devinsky, "This fellow began to have seizures."

Dr. Devinsky: He got admitted to a psychiatric hospital in London, the Maudsley one, 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, in the middle of your head, right behind your eyes.

Dr. Devinsky: But they took it out.

Robert: They took it out?

Dr. Devinsky: They took it out and they cured him of his wonderful experience. 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?

Dr. Devinsky: I think it was a mixed blessing, as you would imagine.

[background music]

Jad: Blue jeans on, the sneakers up.

Robert: 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 has been 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 going to imagine a nun."

Mark: Our main character sister, John of the Cross.

Robert: This is a woman who had joined a nunnery because she felt just lonely for a relationship with God.

Mark: 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 sense that she can really feel God's presence in

her life. She begins having what she thinks are migraine headaches that the regular doctor that the sisters see tells her that she seems to be having migraine headaches. They're coming more and more frequently. 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: Shall I read?

Robert: Yes, go ahead.

Mark: You 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 looks 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."

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"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 and Sster Ann's voice, it 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 was seeking a spiritual connection. She has one.

Mark: That's right. This is the moment she's been waiting for all her life.

Robert: But there is a problem because when these things come-- [crosstalk]

Jad: I'm sorry. Just, can we-- She has a tumor, let's just get the non-surprise out of the way.

Robert: The show is called Totally Tumor [crosstalk]

Jad: All right. It has like a call. First of all it's famous tumors. Okay.

Mark: 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: 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: We thought-- Well, Orrin Devinsky the doctor we spoke with first.

Dr. Devinsky: Every case is unique and individuals--

Jad: He does see patients like this.

Robert: This is what he does for them.

Jad: We took the case to him.

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

Dr. Devinsky: 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've 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: In the book, as it happens, the nun got a little worse. She had a few more headaches, they are more severe and they took the tumor out.

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

Robert: 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 an abnormality or physical abnormality that is triggering them. Do you regard them as delusional? There's just the possibility here that maybe these people are having an actual conversation.

Dr. Devinsky: Yes. There's no question.

Robert: Or just you not even consider that?

Dr. Devinsky: No. I think the question you asked and I think you're getting at is could it truly be that this is God's avenue to speak to us. People in late 1800s thought it was through the right hemisphere and that's often where these cases occur in the right hemisphere. 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.

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--

Dr. Devinsky: The window or the conduit.

Jad: I do feel like I need to place an asterisk right here. We are talking about a tumor in the end.

Robert: Well, understand that every feeling, every thought you have comes from cells in your brain. Any of those cells can produce a glorious experience and the experience stands on its own. Sometimes, in very well-documented cases, these are extraordinarily profound, desirable things.

Dr. Devinsky: They're often hard to put into words.

Robert: Have you tried? I mean, when you had--

Dr. Devinsky: Yes. I mean, people-- Dostoevsky is probably the most articulate person with epilepsy who's had a religious experience and who wrote down what he experienced. I don't have a quote in front of me, but it's, "This felicity, this feeling I get--"

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

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Annie McEwen: Hi, my name is Annie McEwen, I'm a producer at Radiolab. I wanted to talk about this thing we do at Radiolab because I like it. We have this thing, it's a newsletter. Big surprise, every show has a newsletter, but ours, I think, is pretty fun.

Matt Kielty: Oh, it's so fun.

Annie: Matt Kielty.

Matt: Hello.

Annie: Fellow producer at Radiolab. What is your favorite part of the newsletter?

Matt: My favorite part of the newsletter is-- First it's getting it and seeing it in my inbox, and then second, it's opening it, and then third, is just hitting Page Down on my keyboard till I get to the very bottom of the e-mail-

Annie: Oh, That's good.

Matt: -because you know what's at the bottom of the e-mail?

Annie: What?

Matt: You know.

Annie: Staff Picks.

Matt: Staff Picks is at the bottom of the e-mail. How great is that?

Annie: It's great.

Matt: Just stuff that we like. Stuff we're into.

Annie: What are your favorites?

Matt: Some of my favorite staff picks-- There was the one video where it was like 17 babies on a hamster wheel.

Annie: Really?

Matt: Oh, the article about the guy who ate 17 burritos.

Annie: Matt, you're not saying real ones.

Matt: Okay. What's your favorite staff pick?

Annie: My favorite one ever?

Matt: Yes.

Annie: It's hard to say. One of my favorite ones ever was Robert talking in delightful detail aboutThe Great Sausage Duel of 1865.

Matt: Classic pick.

Annie: Classic. Molly's bedbug pajamas.

Matt: Oh, yes, that was a scary time.

Annie: Tracie's pasta recipe, which I did not make because I don't really cook, but I'm just proud of her.

Matt: Actually, it's really simple.

Tracie Hunte: This is online. There's a 28-ounce can of tomatoes, five tablespoons of butter, a pinch of salt, an onion, and you cook it in a pan for 45 minutes. All right?

[applause]

Matt: Thank you, Tracie. I'm telling you, everybody is loving this pasta dish.

Reviewer 1: Oh, I do, definitely.

[applause]

Matt: That woman, this guy.

Reviewer 2: Sure.

Reviewer 3: I think it's wonderful.

Reviewer 4: Very tasty.

Reviewer 5: Pasta every day.

Annie: Matt, you're not helping. Anyway, a newsletter has cool stuff in it like staff picks and also tells you when an episode is dropping.

Matt: It's free.

Annie: It's free.

Matt: We're just going to hit it, just say like, "You should sign up."

Annie: Sign up. You can sign up in about three seconds at radiolab.org/newsletter or text "RLNews", as in Radiolab News to 70101. That's "RLNews" to 70101. Thank you.

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