[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 two 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 those 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.]

 

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