[RADIOLAB INTRO]

ROBERT KRULWICH: Let me ask you something, Jad.

JAD ABUMRAD: Yeah?

ROBERT: Have you ever had the experience where you really, really get to know somebody, and you notice that as you keep spending time together that you just keep anticipating and knowing and feeling, and it just gets better and better and better. And there in the froth and the joy of a true sense of intimacy, suddenly there's a little teeny knock on the door of your mind. Some corner of you says to yourself, "Do I really know her?" I mean ...

JAD: Yes, totally! Like, you're with the person and, like, a little bit of doubt creeps in and it grows and grows, and suddenly you're like, "Wait, who are you? Like, who are you really?"

ROBERT: [laughs] That's gonna be our subject this hour. We are going to take a trip.

JAD: A "Who are you" trip.

ROBERT: And we're going to ask, "What do you know when you think you know everything about someone?"

JAD: Yes.

ROBERT: So if you stay with us we are going to get real interested and get real close—almost.

JAD: Almost. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD:  This is Radiolab. Today, a series of stories of people—beings—trying and often failing to read the mind of another. And to get things started, we're gonna go back to the beginning where the "Who are you" question is super mysterious. Well, at least to me. This begins with a, well ...

ROBERT: With a precious event in Jad's life.

JAD: Right.

ROBERT: Jad—Jad produced a son, and the first question that he—this is his first baby—and so he—he naturally had a question.

JAD: I like the way you say that. "It's his first baby." It's so dismissive.

ROBERT:  [laughs] Yeah, but like all parents new or old, you know what he wants to talk about.

JAD:  I want to talk about my kid. His name is Amil. This is him right here. And by the way, I do plan to make this interesting to people who don't have kids because I was just one of those people two months ago, so bear with me. But okay, Amil, he's 2 months old, he's still in the munchkin phase, and he's just starting to tune in the world. And so there are these moments, like yesterday for example, where he gets real quiet and he just stares at me. And it's—it's kind of amazing, actually. But it also—it also kind of presents an interesting question which I want to explore right here, in fact you can't avoid it, you're just staring at this thing and you're like, "What is this little creature experiencing?" Like, here is a little human being that is brand new in the world. What does the world look like to a tiny baby? What does it smell like? What does it sound like? And I happened to find somebody who could help me at least begin to answer these questions.

JAD: Hello?

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Hi, Jad.

JAD: Hi, is this Charles?

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Yes, that's right.

JAD: Woo-hoo!

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Good to talk to you.

JAD: Charles, before we get started, can I just have you introduce yourself so I can get your name right?

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Okay. Hi, my name is Charles Fernyhough. I'm a writer and developmental psychologist from Durham University.

JAD: And back when Charles had his first child, Athena, he decided to tackle that question.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: You know, what is it like? What's going on for this little person? As a dad, you know, as an awestruck new dad.

JAD: But also as a scientist. So he wrote a book.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Called A Thousand Days of Wonder: A Scientist's Chronicle of His Daughter's Developing Mind.

JAD: It's an amazing book where he basically goes through what we do and don't know about what's happening in the minds of little babies when they're brand new. So I put the scenario to him.

JAD: Okay, Amil's brand new. When I'm sitting there holding him and we're staring at each other, what exactly is he seeing?

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: One difference that does relate to their visual system is that their— the lens of their eye is absolutely crystal clear, whereas your lens, my lens, because they are of a certain age they have become slightly yellowed, so they filter out some of the blue frequencies of the light that we see.

JAD: So wait, what—paint the picture, what would that be like for them?

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: I mean this is my stab at imagining what this would be like, but if you can imagine being in a Greek village in the summer at noon.

JAD: The sun is directly overhead. And it's one of those villages where ...

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Everything is white. You know, the houses are all painted white. You're wearing sunglasses, and then you suddenly take off the sunglasses.

JAD: It's that bright?

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Yeah. I think light is a big—it's probably the biggest shock to newborn babies.

JAD: It's interesting to consider that that blinding haze of whiteness might actually be how the world really is. We just don't see it.

ROBERT: But then you—you haven't yet mentioned sound, because I would imagine that what's true about the eyes might also be true about the ears.

JAD: Yeah, well I asked—I asked Charles, like, do babies hear things differently than the rest of us, and he said, "Yeah, we think so. We think they hear echoes."

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: The echoes are actually there, but our brains filter them out.

ROBERT: Really?

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: But it takes some time for them to learn to do that. I mean, the science behind it is quite complicated, and I don't think I could explain it now, but it's to do with the relative times of arrival that the—that the sound makes on the—the two ears. That the brain basically has to—has to learn to make this adjustment, it can't do it straight away. And so a newborn baby's hearing, we guess, we don't know for sure again, because we can't know what it's like, but we guess that babies hear things in a very echoey way.

JAD: But it gets even stranger.

JAD: Tell me about the experiment with the babies and the brain cap.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Yeah, I described a study that was done with babies where they were taking EEG measurements. And these are the kind of measurements that you get when you put a—a net of 16 or so electrodes over the scalp, and these electrodes pick up the very small electrical changes that go on as your brain works. And it's a perfectly safe, harmless procedure which you can do with very young babies. Well, usually when you do these studies you can see the way—see the way in which particular parts of the brain respond to different kinds of stimulus.

JAD: In an adult brain, he says, if you show someone a picture you will see a little—bzzt!—bit of electricity towards the back of their brain.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: If, on the other hand, you heard a sound, then the bit of your brain sort of slightly further forward from that, the auditory cortex, would fire, and you wouldn't see any in the visual cortex.

JAD: Because different parts of the brain have different jobs. But what happened with these babies is that things got very strange. Like, the researchers would show them a bunch of pictures, like boop! Here's a circle. Boop! Here's a cross. And often, things would work as they were supposed to. They would see, like, a little spark in the back of the baby's brain where vision is processed. Sometimes they wouldn't. Sometimes when they showed them let's say a cross, the vision part would be silent but they'd see a spark ...

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: In the auditory cortex. The hearing part of the brain.

JAD: So the picture would trigger a sound in their head?

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: We don't know what it triggered in their head for them subjectively, but we do know that a part of the brain that shouldn't have fired did fire.

JAD: They were—I mean, what—what you're saying but not quite allowing to pass through your lips is that they were hearing the picture.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: But we don't—we don't know what they heard, but it's a good basis for saying that when a newborn's brain is developing, these different wirings that lead information into different parts of the brain are still taking shape.

JAD: It might be, he says, that inside Amil's brain right now at two months, all of his senses are in a big synesthetic knot, so that when he hears my voice maybe he sees flashes of color, or maybe when he looks at the wall he hears tones. Or maybe when light comes in through the window he tastes it, like salt or something, I don't know. I mean, that's the thing.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: We can't know. I mean, there is really strong philosophical grounds for being skeptical there. I mean, naturally I can't know that anybody is conscious.

JAD: Wait, what does that mean?

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: I can't know that you're conscious.

JAD: But I—I'm talking to you.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Sure. You are. But, you know, you could be a really smart zombie. You could be a robot. You know, I can't see you, you're 5,000 miles away. I mean, maybe I'm the only person in the universe who is conscious.

JAD: Huh.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: We tend to—you know, the vast majority of us tend to say, "Well, he looks like me, and he talks like me, and he thinks like me, and he perceives like me, so he's gonna be like me.” But it is a leap of faith.

ROBERT: Huh. I guess it is, kind of.

JAD: Yeah, but then I told him about the—the stare.

ROBERT: The what?

JAD: The thing that I started this little segment with. How, you know, just in the last little bit Amil has started to really stare at us. And we stare back, and it's—that's not a leap of faith, that's for real. And he—he told me something really depressing.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: In those first couple of months, the visual system is controlled by the subcortical regions, and they're kind of the old bits of the brain. The cortex is the relatively new—evolutionarily speaking, the relatively new part of the brain that surrounds the whole thing. And there's a switch between one kind of control system, the subcortical system and the cortical systems, but as the handover happens—and this is happening at about two months, it's probably— it would be interesting to know if he's doing this now. As the handover happens, there's a kind of struggle for power. And the subcortical regions which were controlling vision, kind of don't immediately want to cede power to the cortical regions.

JAD: Huh.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: So the baby loses—temporarily loses control of where he or she is looking because of this struggle for power.

JAD: Really?

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Scientists call this sticky fixation. And it's where a baby will just keep staring at you. It's as if the baby can't take its eyes off you.

JAD: Yes, this is what is happening now. You're telling me this is a brain glitch?

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH:  Yeah, and it's quite a well-documented phenomenon. And it's bad news for the parents who think that their babies are gazing—gazing at them adoringly, because actually they're just kind of—they don't know where to look, they can't control where they're looking. They don't know how to look away, basically.

JAD: Oh, depressing!

JAD: This might actually be one of those cases where ignorance really is bliss, because the truth is you have to project, and you have to make that leap of faith. Or at least you have to believe whatever it is you have to believe so that when he looks at you and you look back at him, you smile. Because eventually that will teach this little dude how the world works, that humans operate on relationships which are these feedback loops. Which okay, at this moment in time for him are not real, but they will be soon. Charles Fernyhough is the author of the amazing book, A Thousand Days of Wonder.

ROBERT: A Father's Prayer from Jad Abumrad.

JAD: Shut up. [laughs]

ROBERT: But you believe that he eventually will—will know you and his mom and his sister if there is gonna be one—or brother—and his cousins, and then the world and then his friends and then—and then there'll be a ...

JAD: Yeah, it's like a whole ...

ROBERT: He'll be a player.

JAD: It's like an onion of leaps of faiths that you just have to kind of—that doesn't make any sense at all but you know what I'm saying.

ROBERT: [laughs] Yeah, I do.

JAD: It's like one leap of faith on another, on another, on another, until you die.

ROBERT: But there is—not to worry you, this is a very rare circumstance we're about to introduce, but there are people who make the necessary connections growing up and learn to deal, love and behave well with the rest of the world, and then something odd happens: this very ordinary and important necessary ability just turns off.

JAD: Yeah. And with that we're gonna meet a few folks.

ROBERT: Could you introduce yourself?

V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: I am V.S. Ramachandran of the University of California, San Diego. I direct the Center for Brain and Cognition there.

CAROL BERMAN: Okay. My name is Dr. Carol Berman. I'm at NYU Medical Center. I'm a psychiatrist. Also in private practice.

JAD: They're gonna tell you two different stories.

ROBERT: But really, it's the same story, just two different versions of it in a way.

JAD: That's right. That's right. And we're gonna start with Carol.

CAROL BERMAN: So my patient, who is this 37-year-old patient, comes back to her house and sits next to this man who's wearing a red plaid shirt and trucking boots. The—I think the jeans she recognized and the boots. And she takes a look at him and says, "Who are you?" And he says to her, "Well, who are you? Come over here and give me a kiss."

JAD: So she leans in nervously and gives him a kiss.

CAROL BERMAN: She gave him a kiss.

JAD: But it feels wrong. I mean, everything about this situation to her feels wrong.

CAROL BERMAN: She was thinking this is some strange man who's sitting here in, you know, her husband's clothing. This did not look like her husband to her. And she was wondering what he was doing in her apartment.

ROBERT: Okay. So that is one story. And now we want you to hear a second story, slightly different, but—well, you'll see. This one comes from Dr. V.S. Ramachandran.

V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: I saw a patient not long ago, was in coma two weeks, came out of the coma. A student on our campus, intelligent, quite articulate, a little bit slowed down, but overall quite intact. But here's the problem. When he looks at his mother, he says, "Doctor, who is this woman? This woman looks exactly like my mother, but she's an imposter."

ROBERT: An imposter?

V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: "She's an imposter. She is some other woman pretending to be my mother."

ROBERT: Now is this person coming into his room his actual mother?

V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: It is his mother. And of course, this is very alarming to the parents. Sometimes it spill—spills over to the father, okay? It's usually somebody very close to you. And he has nothing else wrong with him.

ROBERT: He just doesn't think that his mother is really his mother. 

V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: Yeah.

CAROL BERMAN: This person looked like her husband, but there was something off.

JAD: Like what?

CAROL BERMAN: There was something about him. Some essence.

JAD: Like the feeling you with—have towards someone when you see them?

CAROL BERMAN: Right. The feeling or the essence of the person, the soul of the person isn't in there.

JAD: These two patients, turns out, are both suffering from the same rare delusional disorder, which is called Capgras.

CAROL BERMAN: Pronounced like "Cahp-grah."

V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: Capgras delusion. Capgras.

ROBERT: How do you spell it? C-A-P ...

V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: G-R-A-S. 

ROBERT: Capgras. Okay.

V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: Named after a French neuropsychiatrist, almost a hundred years ago.

JAD: Story is in 1923, a French woman was taken in for treatment. She came in to her doctor totally convinced that her husband had been replaced, her kids had been replaced, her clothes had been replaced, even her house had all been replaced with imposters. And that doctor who first described this terrifying condition was named Joseph Capgras. Still today, no one is quite sure why this delusion happens. So I asked Carol Berman how she might explain this delusion.

CAROL BERMAN: We explain it psychologically. There might be some negative aspects of the person that you don't want to recognize. Like, maybe my patient, you know, saw some negative things in her husband that she didn't want to recognize. So when the negative aspects came in, he had to be a completely different person for her to—because she couldn't—you know what I mean?

JAD: So—so, on some level, you're not—you think it might be because she's not—was not acknowledging certain facets of her husband?

CAROL BERMAN: Right.

JAD: I think what she's saying, Robert, is that, like, you're a complicated person, and there are parts about you that I like and there are parts about you I don't like. Like when you yell at me, for example, but I integrate ...

ROBERT: You make me into—you make me into a real screamer here.

JAD: But, no, the point is, I take all of these different facets of you, and I integrate them into the whole of Robert Krulwich. But what she's saying is if—like, what if there is some intense aspect of denial where I couldn't acknowledge the negative parts, so the only way that I could deal with that was to say, "Oh, well, this person is being—is yelling at me. So that's not the Robert I know." So the only way to do it is to ...

ROBERT: Therefore it isn't Robert at all.

JAD: Therefore it isn't Robert at all. Right.

CAROL BERMAN: But this is a psychotic excuse and very far out to go all the way over there and to think, well, these clothes are being replaced or my husband's being replaced, that is a huge leap out of reality into psychosis.

JAD: If you think that there might be some psychological explanation for this, wouldn't you try and address that central psychological thing?

CAROL BERMAN: We do, but we don't get too far. [laughs] We tried this stuff, but when a person starts breaking from reality and becomes psychotic, you can't just talk them out of it. You could take fingerprints. You could show them everything about the person and you can't get anyplace.

ROBERT: Okay, so that's the psychiatrist's explanation for this condition. Now here is how the neuroscientist explains it.

V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: I think what's happening is something quite specific. You can explain this in terms of the known circuitry in the brain. The visual centers of the brain funnel in information to the fusiform gyrus where you recognize your mother or a dog or a table or a chair. Is this a stranger? Is it Joe? Is it my mom? Is it a dog? Is it Fifi? Then the message goes to the amygdala, which gauges the emotional significance, emotional relevance of what you're looking at.

ROBERT:  So wait, so, so to cap—to make that into normal English, Mom is a face I recognize as Mom and a set of feelings that I associate with Mom.

V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: Correct. Absolutely. Now what happens is, in this patient, because of the head injury, that wire is cut.

ROBERT: So then, no mommy feelings.

V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: No mommy feelings. So you say, "My—my God, if this is my mom? She looks like my mom but why am I—I have no feelings? There's something really weird here. She must be an imposter." Now that's a very far-fetched delusion. Why doesn't she just say, "She doesn't feel like Mom? But of course, she's my mom."

ROBERT: Yeah. Why doesn't he do that?

V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: To be sure, sometimes that happens, but most often he says, "This is not my mom." Because our thought processes are much more dependent on our gut level emotional feelings than we realize.

ROBERT: So absent a feeling, a familiar feeling of Mom, some part of my brain says, "That's your mother." And some part of it says, "No, it can't be." And the deal that the brain works out is a deal that creates this fiction called "It's an imposter."

V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: Yes.

ROBERT: Because that solves the problem.

V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: Yeah. And—and the equation that says it can't be is from your emotions, wins.

ROBERT: But now here's the twist.

V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: Now if she goes to the next room, speaks to him on the phone, he says, "Mom, where are you? How are you? It's wonderful to talk to you!" All the emotions come flooding back and he is not delusional, right? Why would that be? An hour later, she comes to the room. He says, "Who are you? You look just like my mother, but you're not my mother."

ROBERT: Ah. So seeing the face seems to set off this problem.

V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: The reason is there's a separate wire going from the auditory regions in the brain to the amygdala, the emotion centers. That wire was not cut.

ROBERT: So what you hear can be very familiar, but if you see it, then you got a problem.

V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: Now people ask me, how come—what if she just—what if she comes and talks to him, right? What—why doesn't the hearing kick in and say, "Look, she is your mother." There's a hierarchy of—of priorities. We're highly visual creatures. We pay much more attention to vision, give much more weight to vision than to hearing and to voice.

ROBERT: Huh.

V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: So you say "This is an imposter. She sounds a little bit like my mother, I don't know why, but she's obviously an imposter." Rather than, "She doesn't look like my mother but has my mother's voice."

JAD: So I mean, can their delusions start to creep into, you know, other relationships?

CAROL BERMAN: They do. And a couple of them misidentified me. They gave me some funny looks like this patient gave me a really funny look. Like "Uh-uh."

JAD: Like you're an imposter too?

CAROL BERMAN: Yeah. She thought I was an imposter, too.

JAD: So in that case, what do you do?

CAROL BERMAN: Well, that's a problem, you see? Does she trust me anymore? Because I'm really not the person she thought I was. I'm somebody else. I'm a duplicate.

JAD: And I understand, and—and tell me if you're not comfortable talking about this. I understand that you have personal experience with this disorder?

CAROL BERMAN: Yeah. Actually, my husband, he started not recognizing other people first, and then at some points he didn't even think I was his wife.

JAD: Yeah.

CAROL BERMAN: I'm very stressed out with this whole situation because my husband was a charming, intelligent, wonderful person in all ways, and his dementia has been getting worse and worse.

JAD: Yeah. You're a psychiatrist, so does—does your understanding of how that might work in the brain change your—how—how that—I'm—I'm just curious.

CAROL BERMAN: Well, no, it can't really change your feeling because, you know, when I get home and I'd like to—I get home, I kiss my husband and say, "Hi, how are you today?" And I hope he's recognizing me. And if he doesn't, you know, I feel terrible. After a hard day's work, I want to be able to hug him and kiss him and, you know, have a nice, friendly environment when I get back. But you never know what you're gonna get when you get back home.

JAD: Carol Berman is the author of a recent book called Personality Disorders.

ROBERT: And V.S. Ramachandran is the author also of a new book, The Man with the Phantom Twin: Adventures in the Neuroscience of the Human Brain.

JAD: Before we go to break, I just want to remind you that we—we have a website, Radiolab.org. You can go there and hear anything that you hear in this hour again. You can also subscribe to our podcast. That's Radiolab.org.

ROBERT: Radiolab will be right back after these telephonically funded in phone messages—telephonically phoned in fund messages. Telephonically ...

JAD: That's a lot of F-F-F sounds.

ROBERT: Yeah.

[ANSWERING MACHINE: You have two new messages. Message one.]

[CAROL BERMAN: Hi, this is Dr. Carol Berman reading the credits for you. Radiolab is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the National Science Foundation. Radiolab is ...]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: Two.]

[CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Hi, this is Charles Fernyhough. Radiolab is produced by WNYC and distributed by NPR. Okay, cheers. Bye.]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: End of message.]

JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. Our topic today is ...

ROBERT: Who are you? Is what we're asking.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: We're asking it in—in as fundamental way as we can. Who are you?

JAD: You might call it "knowing the other."

ROBERT: Pretty good. Very nice. Very nice. It could be a scholar journal thing.

JAD: I know, but it sounded so anthropological or something.

ROBERT: All right. Let's make it less anthropological because we're gonna throw away the anthro part.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: So instead of asking it of another person, which we did in the previous section, let's ask it just to make things more interesting, let's ask it of—of an individual from another species.

JAD: Yes. That's where this whole knowing another being's mind question gets way trickier, especially with primates. This next story comes from a reporter, Ben Calhoun, and grew out of a conversation that he had with a—well, just listen.

JERRY STONES: Okay. You can start any time you want.

BEN CALHOUN: All right. Thank you very much, sir.

JERRY STONES: You ready to go, are you?

BEN CALHOUN: Yeah, absolutely. Jerry, you ready?

JERRY STONES: Yes, sir. Whenever you are.

BEN CALHOUN: Let's just start with having you introduce yourself.

JERRY STONES: Well, I'm Jerry Stones. I'm the facilities director at the Gladys Porter Zoo.

BEN CALHOUN: That's where Jerry is now. But he told me this story. He was working at the Henry Doorly Zoo in Nebraska, and he was working with this orangutan named Fu Manchu.

JERRY STONES: I call him Fu. Everybody that loved that old boy referred to him as Fu or Phooey.

ROBERT: Wait, let me just set the scene. So we're in the Nebraska zoo. Where in Nebraska is this?

BEN CALHOUN: In Omaha.

ROBERT: Oh, in Omaha. Okay.

BEN CALHOUN: So in the Omaha Zoo. It's fall.

JERRY STONES: 1967, late '66 or '67.

BEN CALHOUN: Kind of cold. The leaves have fallen off the trees. Jerry Stones is just going about his daily business.

ROBERT: What is his daily business?

BEN CALHOUN: Being in charge of the zookeepers. So he's kind of the top dog among the crew of zookeepers there. And he's up at the office.

JERRY STONES: And all of a sudden, here come a couple of the keepers running up over this hill. They say, "Jerry. Jerry, Jerry. The orangutans are in the trees by the elephant building." The line went dead for a minute because I couldn't figure out what the blazes they were talking about. And I said, "What?" And they said, "The 'rangs are in the trees by the elephant building."

ROBERT: So the orangutans are no longer in their assigned area?

BEN CALHOUN: Yes.

JERRY STONES: So I took off with them and we ran down there. And sure enough, there was this grove of elm trees on this hill overlooking the elephant building, and there up in the top of these trees were all the orangutans.

ROBERT: Oh, God.

BEN CALHOUN: Yeah.

JERRY STONES: And there was Fu Manchu and his female Tondelayo, and an old female named Sophia, a big heavy set girl, and Toba, a young female, and Dennis, a young male.

And they were all up in the trees.

BEN CALHOUN: Five of them.

JERRY STONES: Five of them up there, you know? Looked like these huge red clumps of grapes.

ROBERT: [laughs]

BEN CALHOUN: At this point, Jerry's a young guy, so he went Tarzan on them.

JERRY STONES: Back in those days, I didn't think anything about going to the top of a tree and grabbing an 'orang by the hand and leading them back out of the trees, even though a couple of them had already bit me.

BEN CALHOUN: So he gets them all back in the exhibit and they didn't know how the orangutans had gotten out.

JERRY STONES: No. I'm questioning everybody and not listening. I have a tendency to do that, you know? Anyway, I can get them down to the building. We put them away in the cage, and we go out to see what was going on. And in the exhibit itself, there's moats on each side of this exhibit.

BEN CALHOUN: You know, like a zoo moat? You've got the exhibit and then you've got where people look from. And in between there's a moat.

ROBERT: Right.

BEN CALHOUN: Well, down at the bottom of this moat, there was a door to a furnace room.

JERRY STONES: Big metal door that had just a regular lock and everything on it.

BEN CALHOUN: It was always shut.

JERRY STONES: Kept locked all the time.

BEN CALHOUN: That door was open.

JERRY STONES: What had happened is the 'orangs had climbed down in the moat, went into the furnace room, which was in the basement, up a ladder to the janitor's closet on the first floor.

BEN CALHOUN: One, two, three, four, five. They all emerge from this janitor's closet.

JERRY STONES: And then just pushed the big glass doors open and went out into the park. I figured somebody had not locked the door shut.

ROBERT: Oh, right. Okay.

BEN CALHOUN: So Jerry Stones gathers his zookeepers around and he says ...

JERRY STONES: Basically, we needed to be more careful. Somebody evidently went out in that moat to do something, and when they came back in they did not lock the door. A mistake, and it should not happen again. And everybody vowed that this would not happen again. And it didn't. It didn't happen again for about a week.

BEN CALHOUN: Few days go by.

JERRY STONES: I can't remember where I was at.

BEN CALHOUN:  And again.

JERRY STONES: "The orangutans, they're in the trees by elephant building. And Jerry, we—we—the door was locked, Jerry. We didn't do it. We didn't do it," you know, on and on and on.

BEN CALHOUN: So they take them all back into the building.

JERRY STONES: Same thing. I get there, go down to the moat.

BEN CALHOUN: That furnace room door is open again.

JERRY STONES: I was convinced that these people were not smart enough to tie their shoes, you know? And—and—and they said, "But Jerry, we don't go down there." Well, somebody screwed up. So I'm discussing with these keepers what's gonna happen to them in their short lives. Now I swore to God, I said, "Dude, look, next time this happens, somebody's being fired." A few days later ...

BEN CALHOUN: Somebody runs up to him.

JERRY STONES: "Jerry, come."

BEN CALHOUN: "You've gotta come see this."

JERRY STONES: I go, "No, not now."

BEN CALHOUN: They ran out into the zoo, and they went to this hill that's near the exhibit. Peeked over the top of it, commando style. Down at the bottom of the moat, Fu Manchu was messing with that furnace room door.

JAD: What was he doing?

BEN CALHOUN: They couldn't exactly see what he was doing because of how far away they were, but he was fiddling with the lock. And he's fiddling and he's fiddling. And then ...

JERRY STONES: All of a sudden the door opened.

BEN CALHOUN: ... bam!

JERRY STONES: It just popped open and we went bowling down the hill and we caught him before he could do any damage.

ROBERT: You mean the orangutan seemed to be opening the door?

BEN CALHOUN: Yes.

JERRY STONES: You know, I had realized now it wasn't their fault. And, you know, I ate the crow that I had to eat. And we still didn't know exactly how he did it. And we went out there and we looked around and there was a few little sticks and stuff laying around. We thought, "Well, he must be using this stuff to pry the door open or do something," you know?

BEN CALHOUN: So Jerry figured, easy solution: clean the exhibit every day.

JERRY STONES: I said, "Look, from now on, we need to go out in this yard every day before we put the 'rangs out and search that place over and again. You know, make sure there's no sticks or anything out there, because I don't know how he did it, but he did it." You know, we knew what the problem was and we knew how to deal with it. Went along like that for a week or two, and then here come the keepers. "Jerry, the orangutans are in—in the trees by the elephant building. And we checked it, Jerry. We did everything we were supposed to." You know, they're—they're bound and determined they didn't do anything wrong. So we went out.

BEN CALHOUN: So—so they had been searching this exhibit every day to make sure that he didn't have anything.

JERRY STONES: Yes. There was no—we walked that exhibit. We cleaned them all. We did everything. There was no sticks, no anything we could find that he used to pry the darn door open.

BEN CALHOUN: No tools?

JERRY STONES: No tools, no nothing.

ROBERT: Wait, aren't we now like, how can this be? How can this be?

BEN CALHOUN: How can this be? So he's ushering Fu Manchu through the building. They've got all the orangutans, they're moving them. And all of a sudden he sees in the corner of Fu Manchu's mouth.

JERRY STONES: I saw this little blink of light.

BEN CALHOUN: Just a little glimmer of light.

ROBERT: Like a silver filling or something?

BEN CALHOUN: Yeah.

JERRY STONES: A little shiny thing at the corner of his mouth.

BEN CALHOUN: He walks over, pulls down Fu Manchu's lip. And in there ...

JERRY STONES: Lo and behold, there was a piece of wire about four inches long that he had bent into a horseshoe to fit inside his lower lip and around his gum.

BEN CALHOUN: And he's had it there for so long ...

JERRY STONES: That it was just polished, shiny.

ROBERT: Suggesting what? That this animal has been secreting his actual key all this time?

BEN CALHOUN: Yeah.

JERRY STONES: All this stuff that we're picking up and hauling away to keep him from opening the door was of no use because he was carrying his own key with him all the time.

BEN CALHOUN: What he had done was stick the wire into the space between the door jam and the door, wrap it around the latch and pull it back. It's like the credit card trick, you know?

ROBERT: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

JERRY STONES: Nobody taught him this. Nobody ever did anything like that around him. Not only did he make the tool, but he put it in a place where I couldn't find it. He was smart enough to know that if I found it, I'd take it away from him. The Locksmith Union of the United States gave him an honorary membership, and the zoo in Omaha had that hanging on their wall for years. I don't know if they still have it or not.

ROBERT: Well, this has been very interesting. It is a really great story.

BEN CALHOUN: Oh, thanks. [laughs]

ROBERT: Very nice. But—but I don't quite understand, like what—what exactly was—why are you telling it to me? What is the reason for this?

BEN CALHOUN: Well, you know, there's a lot of stories of orangutans using tools right?

ROBERT: Yeah.

BEN CALHOUN: But even though this is a funny story, there's actually a really serious question at the heart of it about deception.

ROBERT: Why? What's so important about it?

BEN CALHOUN: Well, deception is special. It requires that the deceiver get into the mind of the person who they're deceiving. And nobody has been able to prove that animals can actually do this, know a human being's thoughts intimately enough, get inside their heads and, you know, consciously deceive them. So I took the Fu Manchu story to a scientist, a primatologist named Rob Shumaker.

ROB SHUMAKER: Hello, Rob Shumaker.

BEN CALHOUN: Hey, Rob, it's Ben. Am I catching you at a good time?

BEN CALHOUN: He's at the Great Ape Trust in Iowa.

ROB SHUMAKER: And I study the behavior and cognition of orangutans.

BEN CALHOUN: And he says the Fu Manchu story doesn't prove that animals are capable of doing this.

ROB SHUMAKER: Well, in—in this particular case, I can't prove it one way or another. There's always a question of whether or not it was really happening.

BEN CALHOUN: But, when I really pushed him ...

BEN CALHOUN: I'm just wondering, like, personally, do you believe in his case that it was?

BEN CALHOUN: He said ...

ROB SHUMAKER: You know, if I had to just give an opinion about this ...

BEN CALHOUN: ... that deep down ...

ROB SHUMAKER: ... I have no doubt at all. I 100 percent believe it was deception. Keeping a tool concealed over a whole number of days and timing his escapes so that no one was around to see him, I think the evidence is just absolutely compelling to suggest that Fu Manchu was able to deceive and was deceiving. And if someone really has that much trouble believing it, I think then maybe they ought to question, "Is it because I don't believe what I'm hearing or I don't want to believe it because it's an orangutan?" If they don't want to believe it because it's an orangutan, that's no excuse.

JERRY STONES: It was like who taught him? I just—I couldn't figure out—I mean, when you think you're so smart that all the other animals are way below you, and all of a sudden you find this animal that does these sort of things and you know people that couldn't open the door with a key, right there, you—you know, you have to be in awe. I've been around a lot of other orangutans in my almost 45 years in this business, and the next time you go to a zoo and you're around one, you just look at their face and you look at their eyes and you can see in there there's this—these wheels turning, trying to figure you out.

JAD: Thanks to reporter Ben Calhoun. Okay, to keep things moving, you could say that the last story we heard, you know, that—that was sort of a formal relationship because you had a orangutan and a—and a zookeeper and they were separated by bars.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: But how about this? For this next segment, let's remove the bars, collapse the space and make it more of a family thing. More intimate.

ROBERT: Yeah. So this time, the human will be our producer, Lulu Miller. And this is a tale which leaves Lulu wondering. Something happened to her dog, and the question for her is: can she ever know what happened in her dog's mind? And more important in this case, does she want to know?

LULU MILLER: On most of his birthdays, Maureen would give Charlie a sweater. Maureen was my dad's coworker, Charlie was my dog. He was a little white terrier, a very active little guy, always snuffling around at something, barking, growling if you took his spot on the couch. But when we'd zip him into that year's sweater, he'd go completely still. Every time, almost like it was an instinct.

LULU: He'd get that same stillness when my sisters and I would sit in a circle around him, coloring on his white fur with magic markers. I used to think he was still like that because he was happy, content to be our little dog. But now I don't know. Wildness glimmered up in him, though, from time to time. We'd be sitting in the living room, Charlie and I, all quiet, late afternoon. I'd be reading a calculus book or staring at it, kind of, and he'd be gazing out the window, fixed. When suddenly without warning, he'd tear off to the front hallway barking, and literally slam his body against the door, not even bothering to scratch.

LULU: And this urgency was so refreshing, so reassuring that I'd let him out. And into the street he'd fly into our neighbor's yard chasing after a squirrel. He'd make it to the base of a far off tree in five seconds flat, though he never caught a squirrel or a chipmunk or anything. Not once. In those moments, though, you could see the wolf inside him springing to life, this ghost of what he once was. It's just that he was generations out of practice.

LULU: And his wildness would get misdirected at non wild things, too. He'd chase after vacuum cleaners, growl at bongo drums and suspiciously eye the dishwasher. He was part of our family, though, and if I make him sound growly and awful, he wasn't. He was quiet, mostly. Stoic. A good listener. My dad's only friend through long stretches. My dad's a guy prone to the nostalgic and swoops of sadness, and I'd stumble in on him on early mornings in tender conversation with Charlie testing ideas out on him. "What do you think, big guy?" he'd say. "What do you think?" I imagined he was very lonely—Charlie, that is. Lost in a purgatory where he didn't belong.

LULU: Okay, congratulations. You've made it this far in someone else's pet story. I promise things are about to change, because it's shortly after his 13th birthday—Maureen, I think, got him a little blue jean jacket with a sheepskin inside, and Levi buttons—that Charlie got eaten by a pack of wild coyotes. Let me back up just a step or two. This all happened on Cape Cod, the easternmost tail of Massachusetts, where you can find beachgoers in the summer, Kennedys, I think, if you know where to look and very few predators—a couple hawks, the occasional fox. But other than that, as the local fauna goes, it's pretty much Snow White land: chipmunks, bunnies, skunks.

LULU: Until the coyotes came. I was about 15 when we first started hearing about them, and for us East Coasters, it made no sense. Coyotes were symbols of the West, somewhere far, far away from Massachusetts, somewhere where the land was orange and wide and open. At that point, the only coyotes I'd ever seen were the ones on ladies' vests in the stores my mom liked. So I looked into it, and it turns out that for a long time it was that way. Coyotes, like big states and cheerful personalities, was a strictly Western thing. But in the 1920s, people started spotting coyotes in New York, and by the late '50s they'd made it up to Massachusetts—only they couldn't quite get out to Cape Cod. See, Cape Cod is literally cut off from the rest of Massachusetts by a canal that's almost two football fields wide.

LULU: So for decades, the coyotes were kept on the mainland until one night, sometime in the late '70s, according to naturalists, a pack of coyotes decided to do what the rest of us do: they gathered up their kids together for a road trip and crossed the bridge. Or possibly, some speculate, swam across the canal. But I think it's a far better image to picture them as silhouettes walking in single file across the bridge with a big white moon behind them. [howls]

LULU: So suddenly, they were there, and they started multiplying. More and more sightings of them in backyards and on runners' routes. The local press started running articles, "Keep Your Pets in After Dark." A cave was found, local lore has it, with hundreds of collars. In 1998, a three-year-old boy was bitten, and then my sister found a goose completely slaughtered down on a dock by the pond. It was surrounded by a splatter painting of feces strewn so wide she deemed it the [bleep] of terror.

LULU: Now it turns out my family came to Cape Cod right around the same time as the coyotes. In the late '70s, my parents bought a cabin in the woods that overlooked a purple marsh. The cabin had a deck, and that's where we spent most of our time. We'd sit out there late into the night watching birds and stars. And that's where Charlie was the happiest, on the deck. He'd pace around occasionally, nails scraping the wood, but mostly he just flopped down with a sigh, a literal human sigh, and gaze out along with us.

LULU: We never needed a fence because he simply never left. When the coyotes first showed up, I used to like hearing them. You'd hear it as you lay awake in bed, the howl sometimes far off, sometimes right up close. It felt thrilling to know that things were happening, life cycles and grisly nature predators prey right outside the walls. It used to make me feel like part of the Earth.

LULU: So here's how it happened from my perspective. It's late August, sun is setting. We pull into the driveway, but we don't see Charlie on the deck. Immediately I knew something was wrong. My dad said, "No way, everything's fine." But then we heard a whimper off in the woods. My mom and sisters and I jumped into action. We called for him, shone flashlights, "Charlie!"

But the woods had gone quiet.

LULU: And I remember this part very clearly. We were all standing out on the deck, craning our necks, listening for something. And just as my dad was forming the words, "Look, there's nothing to worry about. He'll turn up in the morning," we heard the yelp. So Charlie, that same noise he'd make when you stepped on his tail, followed immediately by the howls. I ran into a closet to hide from the sound.

LULU: The next morning, there was nothing. Not a shred, not a collar, not a bone, not a piece of hair. They say one way the coyotes do it, especially with other dogs, is that a lone coyote comes up to the dog and starts playing with it. Eventually they go off together, and after just a few paces, the pack descends. Or a slight variation: a coyote pretends to be hurt. It whimpers and cries and calls out for help. I can only imagine Charlie in that moment. There he is, standing face to face with his past self. At long last, one of his own has come over to him. I imagine his head looked up a bit, his chest swelled, his ears perked up and he stepped off the deck.

LULU: It's right around then that we would have come home. He would have heard us roll into the driveway, seen our flashlights, heard our calls, and for once ignored us. He was off to help his brother. I wonder how fast it happened. I wonder if he even knew. I imagine he did. I imagine he saw the eyes suddenly, all at once, realizing he was surrounded and thought, "I've been had. Well played, my brothers. Well played." And I like to imagine a nod of respect on their part

before they descended.

LULU: The morning after it happened, we were empty. My dad couldn't look up. He kept rearranging chairs around the kitchen table as if some new arrangement would obscure the empty spot on the floor. And for so long, that's how we experienced it. It was about us, the family member we lacked. And then one day years later, it dawned on my sister that for all the sadness we felt, that last moment for Charlie was probably glory. For that one moment,

he was wild. He went out like a wild dog. We were all standing out on the deck when she said it. My mom smiled and said, "Yeah, that's a nice thought." But then she turned to us, "You know, who's to say they got him? Who's to say he didn't off and join the pack?"

JAD: Producer Lulu Miller.

ROBERT: And we'll be right back.

JAD: Wait, before we do, before we—before we jet, you know, be sure to check out Radiolab.org. You can sign up for our podcast there and read all kinds of stuff, as well as see a ridiculously cute picture of Charlie. Little Charlie the white dog. He's on our website, Radiolab.org.

[LISTENER: That's my kitty cat, Max. And this is Ritchie. Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. Our topic is—today is the very simple question, the very fundamental question: who are you?

ROBERT: Who are you? Yeah.

JAD: Like, who are you, really?

ROBERT: And what do you know?

JAD: And what do you know? Can I get inside that head? Probably not.

ROBERT: So this is the—this is the ultimate get-inside-that-head question. All of us know that one time or another, you know, that we're going to die.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: And one of the big questions for everyone is, you know, what happens then? Nothing? Something?

JAD: Yeah. Like when you get right up to it, like, what's out there?

ROBERT: Well, there's a hunch that people who are right on the edge may know a little more than those of us who are still deeply and richly in our lives, that maybe at the threshold there'd be something that you could tell, something that you could say.

JAD: For—for example ...

ROBERT: There is a moment in Shakespeare, it is a very, very famous moment when Shakespeare allows his actors to step right up to the edge of death, almost into death itself. It's from Hamlet.

RON ROSENBAUM: Yeah, it sounds good.

ROBERT: Okay, so we'll—we'll start. So what's going on in the play at the very end?

RON ROSENBAUM: Well, at the very end, there's a pile of bodies.

ROBERT: This is Ron Rosenbaum. He's the author of a book called The Shakespeare Wars.

RON ROSENBAUM: Hamlet and Laertes have fought a duel, and the queen has drunk a draft of poison.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gertrude: The drink! Oh my dear Hamlet.]

RON ROSENBAUM: People are dying all over the place.

ROBERT: And Hamlet, too. He's been cut and fatally poisoned. He falls into the arms of his—of his very best friend.

RON ROSENBAUM: Of his very best friend.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Laurence Olivier: Oh, I die, Horatio.]

ROBERT: This is Sir Laurence Olivier.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Laurence Olivier: The potent poison quite o'ercrows my spirit.]

RON ROSENBAUM: And then finally he says ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Laurence Olivier: The rest is silence.]

ROBERT: And then Hamlet dies.

RON ROSENBAUM: So that's the end of Hamlet. "The rest is silence." Those are his last words.

ROBERT: Which may be Shakespeare's way of just saying so that, you know, when you die, that's what happens next. It's just nothing. It's just silence.

RON ROSENBAUM: However, seven years after Shakespeare's death, his collaborators reprinted collected works of Shakespeare. This is called The Folio Version.

ROBERT: In that version, says Ron ...

RON ROSENBAUM: After "The rest is silence" Hamlet is not silent. What is printed beneath "The rest is silence” is literally O, O, O, O.

ROBERT: Four Os.

RON ROSENBAUM: Four Os.

ROBERT: Yes. We have an appointment with Mark Rylance. We are from National Public Radio and ...

ROBERT: We wondered: what are these Os? They're just tacked like big dangling donuts onto one of the most lyrical deaths in the English language, so what are they doing there? Well, most of the actors who perform Hamlet pay no attention to the folio. They don't do the Os, and they do "The rest is silence," they die and it's done.

STAGEHAND: The green room is down to the left there.

ROBERT: But we met a guy who does do the groans.

ROBERT: You are he?

MARK RYLANCE: I'm Mark, hi.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich. Hi. This is Jad Abumrad.

JAD: Hi.

ROBERT: His name is Mark Rylance.

MARK RYLANCE: Yeah. Should we go up to my—my dressing room?

ROBERT: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

ROBERT: We met him backstage at the Longacre Theater in New York City. He was starring in a—in a non-Shakespeare Broadway show, but he took us up to ...

JAD: Wow, we're in a Broadway dressing room. This is pretty cool.

ROBERT: ... a teeny dressing room. And it was there that he began to talk about the groans.

MARK RYLANCE: So the "O, O, O, O," was added by very careful editors to the folio in 1623.

ROBERT: Mark said he didn't think that Shakespeare actually wrote those Os. He thinks probably an actor did it.

ROBERT: So—so when you and your director sat down and you're looking at these four Os on the page, why didn't you think to yourself, "Shut up?"

MARK RYLANCE: Because I guess—I guess I'd done it 300 times shutting up, so I was into—into the change, into the difference.

ROBERT: Particularly when he began to just consider the character of Hamlet himself.

MARK RYLANCE: Of all the characters who die in plays, I think we're most intrigued about what Hamlet will make of it.

ROBERT: Because, Rylance says, remember, not only is Hamlet, you know, unusually obsessed by death, he went to a school that championed reason over mystery.

MARK RYLANCE: He's a student at Wittenberg University. He's part of that whole Protestant movement to the accurate study of nature. He—he's moving away from superstition and then he encounters a ghost.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Hamlet: What?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Hamlet's Father: I am thy father's spirit.]

MARK RYLANCE: A ghost that not only appears as his father, but sounds like his father.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Hamlet's Father: If thou didst ever thy dear father love ... ]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Hamlet: Oh, God.]

MARK RYLANCE: This is—this is for—for the scientists I imagine listening to your program, you have to put yourself in that position. It's one of you. It's not a new age wanderer or some regular visitor to a psychic who has this experience. So his—his gaze has been—for the whole play, his gaze has been on what—what is on the other side of our consciousness.

ROBERT: And when, in the end, Hamlet finally steps to the edge of the answer, and he utters ...

MARK RYLANCE: The rest is silence.

ROBERT: ... here's the choice that actors and directors, when they do Hamlet, must make: Hamlet's next step is either into silence where there is nothing, where there's a nothingness forever and ever, or is there a something waiting on the other side? And does he see that something in a vision—maybe four visions?

MARK RYLANCE: "O, O, O, O."

RON ROSENBAUM: They could represent a kind of dying aria.

MARK RYLANCE: O.

RON ROSENBAUM: A long sigh. "I see it coming."

MARK RYLANCE: O.

RON ROSENBAUM: "Oh, my God. It's here."

MARK RYLANCE: O.

RON ROSENBAUM: "It's about to happen."

MARK RYLANCE: O.

RON ROSENBAUM: "That's it."

ROBERT: So this is—this is an idea you had to inhabit night after night.

MARK RYLANCE: I did, yeah.

ROBERT: So what did you think you were doing?

MARK RYLANCE: I felt that—I felt I was encountering—I felt I was en—encountering another reality than was immediately apparent to those around me. And so I felt with Hamlet that—that he'd moved and was seeing things, was encountering things, but his ability to put words to what he's witnessing dies before his ability to witness.

ROBERT: The ability to say what he saw? That died, even though he still had mind enough to see. So some nights Mark would deliver the oaths silently.

MARK RYLANCE: Just looking, four times in four different places, maybe.

ROBERT: Or he might change tempo.

MARK RYLANCE: O, O, O, O.

ROBERT: And some nights he died better deaths.

MARK RYLANCE: The best deaths would just be when the audience and I were together, and we were all—we were all kind of together wanting, I suppose, Hamlet to say—say something, what can you say? What's happening to him? Something is happening, but we don't know what it is. Then he's gone. He's gone.

ROBERT: And the rest is silence.

JAD: Shh. No. Shh. No. Silence. And now!

ROBERT: I think—yeah, you can't just do that on the radio. People think that they like—you know, something's gone wrong with the electronics.

JAD: It's true. If you go for over 12 seconds, I think there is an alarm that goes off and people are running from over the building. In any case, I think this means that we're almost done right?

ROBERT: It does. But we have something we'd like to share with the people who heard this program.

JAD: Yes.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Johnny Cash: [singing] In your mind ...]

JAD: We actually have a website, Radiolab.org. And if you go there ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Johnny Cash: [singing] In your mind ...]

JAD: No, actually really go there, you can subscribe to our podcast. And if you subscribe to our  podcast ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Johnny Cash: [singing] In your mind ...]

JAD: No, actually subscribe, you'll find that we often release stuff on the podcast first ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Johnny Cash: [singing] In your mind ...]

JAD: ... before we release stuff on the broadcasts, which is what you're hearing now.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Johnny Cash: One foot on Jacob's ladder and one foot in the fire, and it all goes down in your mind. In your mind.]

JAD: Radiolab.org is the address and if you want to email us with any thoughts, radiolab (@) wnyc.org is our email address. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Thanks for listening.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Johnny Cash: [singing] In your mind. In your mind.]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: You have two new messages. Message one.]

[RON ROSENBAUM: Hi, this is Ron Rosenbaum reading the credits. Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad. Our staff includes Ellen Horne, Michael Raphael, Soren Wheeler, Lulu Miller, Tim Howard and Pat Walters.]

CAROL BERMAN: Message two With help from Sharon Shattuck and Raymond Tankakar. Special thanks ...]

[RON ROSENBAUM: ... to Brett Lefferts and Karen Havlik. Hope this is helpful. Thanks.]

[V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: Okay, cheers. Bye.]

[CAROL BERMAN: Okay. Thank you. Bye bye.]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: End of mailbox.]

 

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