[RADIOLAB INTRO]

PRODUCER: Could you—could you introduce yourself?

ROBERT KRULWICH: Yeah. Say who you are.

PAUL AUSTER: Oh, my name is Paul Auster.

PRODUCER: And what do you do?

PAUL AUSTER: What do I do? I sit here and talk to people like you.

ROBERT: No, he doesn't. And he's a—he's—Paul Auster is one of the most prolific writers we have.

PAUL AUSTER: I do the best I can.

ROBERT: But I went to see him because anytime you open a Paul Auster book, you notice that he is noticing that in the world there are lots of strange repeats. He calls them rhymes.

PAUL AUSTER: Rhyming events.

ROBERT: What is a rhyming event?

PAUL AUSTER: Well, a rhyming event would be something, for example, the girlfriend I had when I was very young—college freshman, sophomore, had a piano in her apartment, and the F above middle C was broken. It was the only note that didn't work on the piano. That summer, we got together and we went out to Maine. Way, way out in the wilds of Maine, near Eastport. And we were walking through a pretty much abandoned town. And we walked into what looked like an old Elk's lodge or Moose lodge. And we walked up to the piano that was sitting in the room and my girlfriend could play very well. And she tested out the piano. One key was broken! F above middle C. So that to me is a rhyming event.

JAD ABUMRAD: Rhyming. Pfft. The F's always break.

ROBERT: But ... [laughs]

JAD: I don't know.

ROBERT: If that doesn't impress you. And I—you know, I'm gonna give you another one. This is a—this is a true story, by the way, the one you're about to hear, and it—it's a whopper.

ROBERT: This is too weird.

PAUL AUSTER: Well, it is. The room, just five pages in. "During the war M's father had hidden out from the Nazis for several months in a Paris 'chambre de bonne.' Eventually he managed to escape ..."

ROBERT: What's a 'chambre de bonne?'

PAUL AUSTER: A maid's room. It's a small room on the top floor of a Paris apartment building. Chambre de bonne. "Eventually, he managed to escape, made his way to America and began a new life. Years passed, more than 20 years. M had been born, had grown up and was now going off to study in Paris. Once there, he spent several difficult weeks looking for a place to live. Just when he was about to give up and despair he found a small 'chambre de bonne.' Immediately upon moving in, he wrote a letter to his father to tell him the good news a week or so later he received the reply. 'Your address,' wrote M's father, 'that is the same building I hid out in during the war.' He then went on to describe the details of the room. It turned out to be the same room his son had rented."

JAD: Wait a second.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: So the father flees the Nazis, stays in this room in Paris. Leaves. 20 years go by. The son happens to be in Paris, needs a room.

ROBERT: He finds a little ...

JAD: Finds the—so you're saying the same ...

ROBERT: It turns out ...

JAD: ... the same room?

ROBERT: The same exact ...

JAD: Exact same room?

ROBERT: Yes. Where his dad ...

JAD: And this really happened? You're not just ...

ROBERT: This really hap—it didn't happen to Paul. It happened to a friend of Paul's. Yes.

JAD: Wow! That is weird!

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: And what do you make of that?

ROBERT: Well, I–I'm not sure what to make of it, except that it gives you a funny sense that sometimes in your life, when something happens and then weirdly it happens again, that maybe that's intentional, or maybe ...

JAD: Like the script has already been written somehow.

ROBERT: Whatever it is—there's—is the question is, is—is there such a thing as fate?

JAD: Scientifically speaking?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: Well, that's our question for the hour.

ROBERT: Is there fate? If there is ...

JAD: Can you know it? 

ROBERT: Yep. And more importantly ...

JAD: Can you control it?

ROBERT: Once you get a hint to what it might be?

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad. This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: And let's get on with it.

JAD: Yeah. Okay. So to get things started since fate is our topic, let's just mend the word. Shall we?

ROBERT: What do you mean?

JAD: 'Cause fate is not a word a scientist would ever use.

ROBERT: No, they don't.

JAD: They'd get laughed out of their peer reviewed parties.

ROBERT: [laughs] 

JAD: They use words like "genetic predispositions," "genes-based" ...

ROBERT: Although there'd be another scientist in the room who would say, "Well, it isn't really the gene. It's the environment."

JAD: "The environment." Another guy would walk in and be like, "No it's nature."

ROBERT: "Nurture ..."

JAD: "... nurture, nature." Really this argument, on some level, when it's a very old argument is about choice versus fate.

ROBERT: Hmm.

JAD: And that tension gets really fascinating when you talk about something like willpower ...

ROBERT: Hmm.

JAD: ... in candy. Let me introduce you to a guy. His name's Walter.

WALTER MISCHEL: Walter Mischel.

JAD: He's a psychologist.

WALTER MISCHEL: At Columbia University in the psychology department.

PRODUCER: So what's gonna happen is ...

JAD: He has done a remarkable study.

JAD: So are we ready to go?

PRODUCER: Yeah. I think we're good.

JAD: And the marshmallow study.

WALTER MISCHEL: Ah, the marshmallow study.

JAD: At the start of the study, how did you come up with the idea?

WALTER MISCHEL: Well, I had three little girls who, at that time ...

JAD: We're talking now, late '60s.

WALTER MISCHEL: ... were going from being these sweet sometimes and happy often, you know, little creatures.

JAD: How old were they at that point?

WALTER MISCHEL: Well, they—they ranged an age from two to five. And what I was—what any parent immediately knows is that when kids start going into the fourth year of life, a lot happens to them.

JAD: Like he noticed that one of his daughters who had just hit four, suddenly she could delay gratification.

WALTER MISCHEL: Yeah.

JAD: Almost all of a sudden. If he—if he told her, "Look, I know you want that," I don't know, "pack of bubblegum. But don't whine, don't complain. When we get home, I'll give you something better." Suddenly she could wait.

WALTER MISCHEL: This was in the late 1960s, and there was almost no work on quote "willpower," "self control," "self-regulation." It just wasn't a topic.

JAD: So he thought he would jump in. Here's what he did: to test this hypothesis "something happens to kids around the age of four," he went to a nursery school ...

WALTER MISCHEL: A big nursery school at Stanford University.

JAD: ... gathered up a bunch of kids at different ages. And one by one, he put them in a room ...

WALTER MISCHEL: Small room, off the playroom.

JAD: He'd bring the kids in, sit them in a chair, and then he would give them a choice which had to do with marshmallows.

WALTER MISCHEL: Yummy.

JAD: What kid doesn't love marshmallows? And he would say to them, "Here's your choice. You can either have one ..."

WALTER MISCHEL: One marshmallow.

JAD: ... now. Or if you wait, you can have two ...

WALTER MISCHEL: Two marshmallows later.

JAD: ... later.

WALTER MISCHEL: Now that creates a lot of dilemmas.

JAD: Yeah, it does. Especially because, you know, the researchers leave the room to give the kids a chance to think. And right there on the table, in front of the child, were the marshmallows. Calling them!

WALTER MISCHEL: There are no distractions in the room. There are no pictures. There are no toys.

JAD: [laughs] The child is left to stare at the marshmallows.

WALTER MISCHEL: So it's basically an isolation chamber.

JAD: Pure agony.

WALTER MISCHEL: I can show you a video of what they're doing and you can see it.

JAD: Can we watch?

WALTER MISCHEL: Sure. Let's turn it on. And ...

JAD: He walked over to a TV and pulled up a video of the marshmallow experiment. And I must tell you, it is some of the greatest video ever shot, particularly because the round he showed us, the researchers had replaced the marshmallows with something even more enticing.

WALTER MISCHEL: Oreo cookies.

ROBERT: Mmm, Oreos.

WALTER MISCHEL: So what you're seeing over here is a tortured looking adorable little girl, wearing a blue sweatshirt.

JAD: About five years old. Pigtails.

WALTER MISCHEL: Kind of sniffing at it.

JAD: She puts her face right up to the cookie.

JAD: She's weighing. "Do I want this badly enough?"

WALTER MISCHEL: That's exactly what she's doing.

JAD: She picks up the cookie, puts it down.

WALTER MISCHEL: Weighing and re-evaluating her choice.

JAD: She knows she can have this one now, but if she waits, she can have more. But ...

WALTER MISCHEL: "I've had—had it."

JAD: She gives in after just a few minutes.

JAD: Okay. Now we have a—a sort of a doughy-face boy in a yellow t-shirt who's kicking 'cause he's so antsy.

JAD: This kid's strategy is not to confront the cookie directly, but to kick the table that holds the cookie. Kick it, kick it, kick it!

WALTER MISCHEL: And it's a very male response. I mean ...

JAD: But remarkably, he holds out way longer than the first girl. And of course, there were the cheaters.

WALTER MISCHEL: Here we see a guy looking at the two cookies.

JAD: [laughs] He picked one up!

WALTER MISCHEL: He's taken one—which is against the rules. He's licking the inside. He's licking out the cream, replacing the licked cookie and putting it back on the tray.

JAD: Anyhow, we watch kid after kid after kid being tortured by the gravitational pull of Oreo cookies. Some, to avoid the pull, went under the table, some turned their backs and started singing a song. All in all, Mischel and his team tested 500 kids in that initial study. And they found that yes, four year olds are dramatically better than younger kids at resisting temptations. So something does happen at around four years old, but within that—and here's where the plot thickens—there was a huge range. Some kids gave up after a minute, others could last 20 minutes. And most fell somewhere in the middle where they could resist the cookie for about ...

WALTER MISCHEL: Seven minutes, eight minutes.

JAD: That's the average.

WALTER MISCHEL: All depending on age and what the goodies are and so on.

JAD: Now in and of itself, there's nothing too surprising here. He basically confirmed his hypothesis, but what is amazing, truly amazing is what happens next.

WALTER MISCHEL: I just was sitting around the kitchen table with my kids about five, six years after the studies began.

JAD: He was talking with his kids and he knew that they still went to school—this is now five or six years later—with some of those kids from the initial study. So he is asking them ...

WALTER MISCHEL: You know, "How is Jenny doing? And how's, you know, "How's Cecily doing?" This was just totally informal.

JAD: And his kids told him, "Well, Cecily's doing fine. Jenny, not so good." And he began to realize a weird pattern: the kids like Cecily, who he remembered had been good at waiting for the marshmallow back in the study. Well, they ...

WALTER MISCHEL: Seemed to be the ones who were doing better.

JAD: ... they were doing better at school.

WALTER MISCHEL: And suddenly on a very small end, you know, very small sample, it looked like there were differences here. Could there be a relationship between the number of seconds these kids waited when they were four, and how they're doing when they're—when they're 10 and 11 and 12? So what we did beginning when these kids were 15 years old, 14 to 17 years old, was the first follow-up wave.

JAD: So he tracked down as many of those original kids as he could find. And just for starters, he looked at their SAT scores. Now keep in mind, this is 10 years later, and some stupid little test that a kid takes when they are four that has to do with resisting a marshmallow and how many seconds they can resist should not, I repeat, not have anything to do with how they do on their SAT scores, which is one of the most important tests they're ever gonna take. But ...

WALTER MISCHEL: We found remarkable correlations between the actual SAT scores and seconds of delayed time.

JAD: In other words, the kids who waited the longest when they were four, staring at the Oreos, did better on the SATs ...

WALTER MISCHEL: Yes.

JAD: ... than the kids who just gave up immediately?

WALTER MISCHEL: Yes.

JAD: How much better?

WALTER MISCHEL: Significantly.

JONAH LEHRER: The differences are so big.

JAD: That's Jonah Lehrer, science writer, often a guest on this show, who's also reporting about these follow-up studies.

JONAH LEHRER: You know, the difference between a kid who can wait one minute for the marshmallow and a kid who can wait 20 minutes, the difference from the SAT scores is 210 points.

JAD: No way!

JONAH LEHRER: Yeah. This isn't, you know, fiddling at the margins. This is a profound difference.

WALTER MISCHEL: Well above what one would expect by chance.

JAD: And as they dug into the data, it turned out it went way beyond SATs. The kids who waited back when they were four now in their late teens ...

JONAH LEHRER: Parents reported they were better behaved.

JAD: And on the flip side, the kids who hadn't been able to wait back in that initial study, they were more likely now to be suspended from school, to be classified as "problem kids," to be, you know, the kind of kids who ...

WALTER MISCHEL: Were most likely to wind up as the bullies.

JAD: The results were so odd and strong that Mischel and this team decided to keep following those kids up through their teens, into their 20s and 30s and beyond.

WALTER MISCHEL: So this is now roughly 40 years, because they're about 44—45 at this point. We're still in touch with over 250.

JAD: And they've expanded the kind of data that they're keeping track of. Everything from ...

WALTER MISCHEL: How well they're able to stick to goals at work. How far they go in school.

JAD: Even their health.

WALTER MISCHEL: For example, body mass index.

JONAH LEHRER: A huge amount of data. They really wanna, like, amass a—an FBI file, so to speak.

JAD: And the more data they collect, the worse it gets. The kids who could wait back when they were four, now in their 40s have better jobs, they've gone farther in their education, they're even skinnier ...

WALTER MISCHEL: Yeah, yeah.

JAD: ... than the kids who couldn't wait. Now think about this: how much willpower you exhibit as a four year old in something so insignificant as trying to resist the pull of a marshmallow could predict this frightening amount about your life?

WALTER MISCHEL: There's no question that there was something predictive about it and that it wasn't a fluke.

JAD: Here's what I'm wondering.

JONAH LEHRER: Yeah.

JAD: If I have a four year old, and I informally give them this test and they fail ...

JONAH LEHRER: Yeah.

JAD: ... should I be worried? Do you know what I mean?

JONAH LEHRER: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, me, I've got such a bias against these kinds of rigid predictive variables when it comes to the brain.

JAD: Yeah.

JONAH LEHRER: But I think these experiments have to give you pause.

JAD: Because one interpretation of Mischel's work, and it's one we unfortunately cannot rule out, is that maybe self-control is hardwired. You either have it by the age of four or you don't. And if you don't have it, statistically you're screwed. But there's another way to interpret this—thankfully. If willpower gets its start when you're four, which is a big if, but let's just assume for the moment it does, then you gotta ask, what exactly happens at age four that separates the willful from the rest of us?

WALTER MISCHEL: So what you're seeing over here is a tortured looking, adorable little girl.

JAD: Walter Mischel would say go back to those videos and really look at them. If you do, much of what you'll see has very little to do with nature.

WALTER MISCHEL: She's looking at it. She's withdrawing from it and she's holding her breath.

JAD: The first thing you notice, he says, is that every kid is in agony. Even the good kids, they are not models of strength. They are suffering too. 'Cause Oreo cookies, man. They're good! Second, the very simple difference between the good kids and the bad kids seems to be that the good kids just found ways to distract themselves. They had strategies.

WALTER MISCHEL: And she's holding her breath.

JAD: Like this girl ...

WALTER MISCHEL: She's saying "Shhhhh" to herself and stopping herself.

JAD: ... shushing. That seemed to work. Or ...

WALTER MISCHEL: Kicking.

JAD: ... kicking the table. That's actually a good strategy, he says. Or making up a tune.

WALTER MISCHEL: You know, kids composing new songs.

JAD: Or just turning around in the chair.

JAD: Okay. We're back to girl number one now. She has her back completely turned to the cookies.

JONAH LEHRER: Some kids actually pretended the marshmallow was a cloud.

WALTER MISCHEL: I mean, the kinds of things one sees are extraordinary.

JONAH LEHRER: Or the cookie was a UFO. They turned this hot stimulus into, as Mischel puts it, a cold stimulus.

JAD: And that might be all that separated the kids who could wait from the kids who caved.

JONAH LEHRER: The best kids simply had a better bag of tricks.

JAD: And if that's all we're talking about, tricks, well, you can teach a trick.

JONAH LEHRER: You know, I think one of my favorite twists on his experiment that he did was he found that you could take kids who had trouble delaying gratification, so kids who had really had a tough time waiting for the marshmallow, and you simply say to them, "Put a picture frame around the marshmallow, pretend it's a picture and not a delicious piece of candy." All of a sudden, you gave kids this little trick and you could turn low delayers into much higher delayers.

JAD: Oh, so he could help these kids.

JONAH LEHRER: Absolutely. You can teach—just—just, so that simple suggestion "Why don't you just pretend it's the picture frame?" So he's got these bar graphs and it's dramatic. All of a sudden, the low delayers are performing just like the high delayers.

JAD: Really? And is there any evidence that if you teach these kids, these low delayers, and you give them these tools, that you can send their life in the right direction in some way?

JONAH LEHRER: There—there's—there's no evidence of that yet. You know, he hasn't shown that simply teaching kids how to draw a picture frame around a marshmallow leads to a balloon in SAT scores. And that's where I think even Mischel admits that it's—it remains unclear how valuable these tricks are. Because you can teach obviously, a kid a trick to deal with a marshmallow in a lab setting, but that doesn't mean they'll necessarily be able to go home and—and, you know, you can't go around drawing picture frames all day long.

JAD: But that's kind of the crux of it, no? I mean, you kind of have to know that these tricks are useful.

JONAH LEHRER: Yeah.

JAD: Otherwise you're just picking your interpretation. You could say, oh, it's learned tricks, or it's hardwired.

JONAH LEHRER: Yeah. So—so I think the answer to that remains completely unknown. If they're just beginning to fly all these subjects out, you know, do—it's a couple days' worth of brain scans. I mean, this is a big, big project. No one quite knows what they'll find.

WALTER MISCHEL: I mean, I think it's—it's highly likely to be like most things in life are turning out to be.

JAD: Mm-hmm.

WALTER MISCHEL: Which is yes, the wiring makes a difference and yes, the experience makes a difference and the wiring and the experience are interacting and changing each other.

ROBERT: So Jad?

JAD: Mm-hmm?

ROBERT:  I, who have never been able to withhold my fierce desire to eat all the chicken. When seven pieces of chicken are served to three people, I will eat four pieces of the chicken.

JAD: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: And yet somehow I have gone through most of my life holding a job.

JAD: Doing quite well.

ROBERT: So, you know, I think before people take Mr. Mischel's views too close to heart, remember there are outliers. There are people who have grabbed the marshmallow early and yet who have somehow thrived.

JAD: [laughs] We'll be right back.

[PAUL AUSTER: Hi, this is Paul Auster. Radiolab is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. This is Walter Mischel, Radiolab is produced by WNYC and distributed by NPR.]

JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: Subject is ...

JAD: Fate. And ...

ROBERT: So after the marshmallow story, I was thinking, you know how people, when they hear a thing like that—that your child will be successful through life if it ...

JAD: You could know it at age four.

ROBERT: Right. This is actually how people behave. They try to figure out in their children, well, where are the deficits? Where are the advantages? How can we ...

JAD: As early as possible!

ROBERT: And yes, and they project out from the four year old straight to college.

JAD: Yep.

ROBERT: And there are some people in this world who find this obnoxious. And—and one of them is Malcolm Gladwell who grew up in Toronto.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Okay. Just pull it to your mouth there.

ROBERT: It's Canada. So they don't do any of this sort of thing. He's the author of Outliers. And at the 92nd Street Y, he told me how much he hates gifted and talented programs.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Yeah. It's ridiculous. Why do you decide? So a gifted program says that we identify a—a child, and call that child gifted because of their performance at the age of whatever, nine or 10 or 11 years old. Why do we care particularly how well a child performs at nine or 10 or 11 years old? They're nine or 10 or 11. They're a good 25 years from making any kind of substantial contribution to the world. Why don't we wait? What's the hurry? And also, how do you know? So, like, my—you know, so one child learns to read at four, one child learns to read at two and a half, right? So what? Why does it matter? Are the things that are being read between two and a half and four of such incalculable ...

ROBERT: No, no, no. It's—it—the normal parents' response to, "Oh, if he's reading it at two and a half, think of the things he'll do!" And it's just an extrapolation. It's the parent's way ...

MALCOLM GLADWELL: No but, like, reading is reading. Once you can read, we're done. I mean, it's not like there's an—there's an infinite scale and that so and so reads better and better and better. And I can say, we can say, today of Gladwell that he reads so much better than Krulwich, and that this is like what separates the two of us. It's reading. I mean, like ...

ROBERT: Well, but now the effect, for example, on, like—you used the phrase, "The Matthew Effect." What is that?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: "Matthew Effect" is a phrase coined by Robert K. Merton, the great genius sociologist of Columbia. He's a guy who says in the verse in Matthew, which says that,  "To him who has much more will be given,"  and he uses this to describe the Matthew effect, which is this notion that a small initial advantage—difference in—a small, initial difference in the performance of any two people will inevitably grow because the person who's a little bit ahead will get so many more advantages that they will end up being far ahead. So a good example—there's all kinds of great Matthew effects. So if you're born—if you're a young boy born in October, November or December who has designs on being a professional soccer or hockey player, the deck is stacked against you. There's not much you can do. You—you should probably give up.

[laughter]

JAD: Wait, why exactly?

ROBERT: Well, it's really an accident of birth thing. The month you were born in, Malcolm thinks, might make a huge, huge difference in your life. Here—here's his way of describing this. I'm gonna read here a passage from his book, Outliers.

ROBERT: On page 23 of your book, you do a play-by-play.

ROBERT: Kind of a clever way to do this.

ROBERT: We're at the Memorial Cup hockey championship. Oh, I want to read what you wrote. "March 11th starts around one side of the Tigers' net leaving the puck for his teammate January 4th. He passes it to January 22nd, flips it back to March 12th, who shoots point blank at the Tiger's goalie, April 27th. April 27th blocks the shot rebounded by Vancouver's March 6th. He shoots! Medicine Hat defensemen February 9th and February 14th dive to block the puck. January 10th looks on helplessly. March 6th scores!" Question is: why did you choose this peculiar kind of nomenclature?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Because I wanted to make this point that all—an extraordinary number of hockey players, and are born in the first three or four months of the year.

ROBERT: 17 of the 25 players on—on the Medicine Hat team were born in those first three months?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Yeah.

ROBERT: Why?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Because the eligibility cutoff date for—for age class hockey in Canada, and the world, is January 1st. And we start recruiting All Star squads in hockey in Canada when peop—kids are nine and 10 years old. But of course, when you're nine years old, the best one is the oldest one, right? So all you do is you choose the kids who are born closest to the cutoff date, and then you give them special coaching and put them on All Star squads until nine—and extra games and extra practice until eight and nine years later, they really are the best. And by the way, we see exactly the same effects in school systems, right? The kid—the relatively youngest kids in the class underperform the relatively oldest kids, and that underperformance lasts into the college years. The kid born—the young kid born the last, you know, three months of—the youngest three months of their age cohort in school are something like—I forget the exact number—nine or ten percent less likely to go to college than those born in the—in the three oldest months.

ROBERT: But you know, Jad, I—I agree that, you know, when you're born matters, of course.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: But I kept saying to him, well, what about, what about natural talent? What about if you really were a great hockey player?

JAD: Just popped out with it.

ROBERT: Just popped out with it. And then he said, "Well, it's really practice, you know, ability plus practice. Emphasis on practice." I said, "No, no, no. What about the idea of just being a genius? He has this problem.

ROBERT: You were being accused of being a genius denier.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Yes.

ROBERT: Are you a genius denier or are you simply a genius disliker?

[laughter]

MALCOLM GLADWELL:  Well, so there's clearly this thing called talent, right?

ROBERT: Right.

MALCOLM GLADWELL:  And it's this—it's the magic dust, right, that gets sprinkled onto persistence. It turns a lot of hard work into something great. And the question is, how large of a role does it play? And what does it consist of? I mean, is a—you know—a piece I wrote years ago for the New Yorker, I remember writing about Wayne Gretzky and reading a—a biography of Wayne Gretzky. And he's a—he's a kid.

ROBERT: He's a great hockey player.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Great hockey player. Greatest hockey player of all time. And as a kid, when he is two years old, his parents would sit him in front of the television. He would watch hockey games on—on Saturday nights. And when the game ended, he would burst into tears, right? And it was this little glimpse into his future greatness, because here he was at two, and he loved this thing. He was, he couldn't even play hockey. He's two. I mean, he can barely walk, but he already has understood he loves this thing so much, that, for it to end, is an unconscionable burden, right? And it just—it's like the world is ending and he's disconsolate. So what is Wayne Gretzky's talent? Well, part of it is his extraordinary, you know, vision, his coordination, his whatever it is. But a lot of it is this guy loves this game so much that he would do nothing but do it and think about it and engage it, and do all those things. Now, is if—is this magic dust called talent, is that all it is? Maybe. Why are people so hostile to the notion that what genius is, is an extraordinary love for a particular thing? Why is the love—so we're—you know, we hear the ability definition of genius, the "rare ability" definition, and we think, oh, that's so plausible. Totally. That's what it is. But then we hear the—the "extraordinary love" definition of genius. And we say, "he's a genius denier." Why? Why is—why are we so hostile to the notion that what separates the genius and the rest of us, is the genius loves what he or she does more than we do? But we have no problem at all that what separates the genius is that they have some, you know, some ...

ROBERT: Well, because it misses the point! I mean, there are people like Paul McCartney ...

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Are you hostile to the notion of love, Robert? Is that what that is? ROBERT: [laughs]

[laughter]

ROBERT: No, I just wanna make an obvious point here that, you know, Harry Smith—no, that's a real person. Harry X could "love" writing songs, but Paul McCartney ...

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Even the way you say "love" though, is so—really, have you—have you thought about this?

ROBERT: Okay, come on. I'll do it different. Your Harry X could "love" ...

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Uh huh.

ROBERT: ... "Love"... 

MALCOLM GLADWELL: That's better!

ROBERT: ... writing songs.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Uh-huh.

ROBERT: He loves writing songs so much that he can't stop, but for lunch and dinner, and 

sometimes not even those. But next door is Richard Rogers, little Richard, Ricky Rogers.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: He loves writing songs too, but for some reason, Harry writes and loves writing, Ricky writes and loves writing. And Harry writes a unmemorable song called the "The babbling brook goes to and fro," and Richard writes "Some enchanted evening."

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Well, no, so, you're ...

ROBERT: But there's a difference there.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: No. Well, but hold on, hold on.

ROBERT: The "love" doesn't get you.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: No, no, no, the love—but the love does. So think about this: love is not the complete explanation. Love is the way in. Because Wayne Gretzky loves hockey so much, he thinks about it all the time. And does more than that, he engages the sport in a way that no one else has ever engaged it. So there's this wonderful—that remember in, when I was writing about Gretzky, there's this thing that he famously did once where he scored a goal from behind the net. And he flips the puck over the net, like, and it kind of does a little thing and goes in. And the reason no one had ever done that before was not just that no one could do it. Lots of them could do it. It had never occurred to anyone else before, right? No one had engaged the sport on that level. So why is Gretzky engaging it in that way? Why is he thinking about it that deeply and creatively? Because he can't get hockey out of his head, right? Whenever I encounter someone like that, I cannot get past that sense they give off that they have—they have found their calling. That they are in—actively in love, in almost in a romantic way, with this thing that they do.

ROBERT: No, you're right.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Right? Absent that you can't be a genius. I'm sorry. You can't.

[applause]

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Are you convinced yet?

ROBERT: I—I ...

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Are you still holding out for some chilly, abstract, you know, Nietzschean notion of ...

ROBERT: No, I'm gonna pull back for a minute here and try another tackle altogether.

JAD: Well, let me just ...

ROBERT: I got a little shy there at the moment.

JAD: Yeah. But—but to give you credit, my Nietzschean co-host ...

ROBERT: Thank you.

JAD: You know, there are people who—who try, try, try, try, try, love what they're trying to do deeply and yet fail over and over.

ROBERT: But that—that's because they—they don't have the talent. That's what I was arguing. Doesn't have the talent to do it.

JAD: No, but I'm—I'm thinking of a whole 'nother category of being who just seemed doomed.

ROBERT: To failure?

JAD: Endless failure.

ROBERT: Like?

JAD: Well ...

JAD: Walters, you wanted to just play this from the beginning?

PAT WALTERS: Yeah. Just one second here.

JAD: This is our producer, Pat Walters.

PAT: You—you live in Arkansas, is that right?

MIKE BARRIER: That's correct. Yeah. Yeah.

PAT: I don't think you have road runners down there, do you?

MIKE BARRIER: No, the road runner—I think—I don't—I think they've—maybe gotten into the far western part of the state.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Road Runner: "Meep Meep."]

PAT: You know what that is, Jad?

JAD: I hate that freaking bird.

PAT: Yeah, exactly!

JAD: It's the Road Runner. And who is this—this dude?

PAT: This is Mike Barrier.

MIKE BARRIER: I'm the author of a book called Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation and its Golden Age.

PAT: He's basically the guy you call if you have, like, a big profound question about Looney Tunes.

JAD: [laughs] Looney Tunes.

PAT: Yeah. A few months ago, Lulu and I started wondering like ...

JAD: Lulu Miller, our former producer.

LULU MILLER: Why is the Road Runner so good? Because I am at least in the camp ...

ROBERT: That's her question?

PAT: Yeah, but before we get to the answer, I just wanna give you a little background on the cartoon.

JAD: All right. Go for it.

PAT: It's 1949, and you're at the movies with your wife. You go in and you take a seat. And when the movie starts, one of the very first things you see is a cartoon. And in the '40s and '50s, most of these cartoons were ...

MIKE BARRIER: Chase cartoons. Tom and Jerry being the prime example.

PAT: Problem was, this chase thing was a formula. It was rigid. And it got a lot of cartoonists kind of bored.

JAD: Yeah.

PAT: So one day this kind of famous cartoonist named Chuck Jones was sitting around with his buddy, Mike Maltese.

MIKE BARRIER: Just talking about what oddball combinations of characters that could be chasing each other. I think Maltese thought about having an aardvark chasing a gnu or something like that.

PAT: What's like a gnu? I don't even know what a gnu is. But just cut to the chase. Eventually they decided, "Let's make a cartoon about ..."

MIKE BARRIER: Coyote chasing a road runner.

PAT: And when this cartoon came out, it was huge. It was a hit.

JAD: What does it mean for a cartoon to be a hit?

PAT: Like, in those days, cartoons usually only ran one time.

JAD: Huh.

PAT: But this one was different.

MIKE BARRIER: Six months after it came out, they started making another one.

PAT: Which was almost completely unheard of. Which brings us back to Lulu's question.

LULU: Why is road runner so good? Because I am at least in the camp that it's way better than Tom and Jerry.

PAT: And Mike says it's actually all about ...

MIKE BARRIER: The coyote. He's an extraordinarily human animal.

PAT: And not just like in the facial expressions that he made and the ways that he looks at the camera a lot.

JAD: Yeah.

PAT: But actually it kind of was about the predicaments that he found himself in.

JAD: Meaning?

PAT: Take, for example, this one really famous cartoon. Like always, Coyote has got a plan. He has made a painting of the road.

MIKE BARRIER: Showing the road, continuing over a chasm.

PAT: Like, he's put this painting right at the edge of the cliff.

MIKE BARRIER: Had you thinking the Road Runner would run through the painting, gravity would take hold of him, and he would plunge into the chasm.

PAT: Road Runner comes flying down the highway and he gets to the painting ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Road Runner: "Meep Meep"]

PAT: ... but he doesn't fall.

MIKE BARRIER: Instead, the Road Runner runs into the painting as if it were—the road were actually continuing. But then when the coyote tries to follow the Road Runner into the painting, he runs through the painting and falls.

LULU: [laughs]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: long whistle and then a loud "bang" when Coyote lands.]

PAT: And he looked up at the camera and he shrugged, and he’s like, "Why did the bird get to run into the painting and not me?"

MIKE BARRIER: Gravity isn't this uniform indifferent force.

LULU: Mmm.

MIKE BARRIER: It's a malignant force that actually—that comes in and outta play, according to how inconvenient it can be for the coyote.

LULU: But that's interesting. The—the Road Runner isn't his real opponent at all. It's—it's the universe.

MIKE BARRIER: Right. Oh, yeah. No, he—he's chasing the roadrunner, but the universe is his opponent. Absolutely.

PAT: And that's kinda what makes the Coyote seem so human. He's in that situation that all of us feel like we're in sometimes: like the very laws of physics are against us.

MIKE BARRIER: Yeah. Yeah. It's almost—almost a primitive way of thinking, but you—but I think all of us lapse into this, you know, how can this happen?

LULU: Right. The universe is out to get me, like ...

MIKE BARRIER: Yeah, yeah. You can't be human and not feel that way.

PAT: On the other hand, even though the universe is screwing you, at least it's noticing you.

MIKE BARRIER: It's kind of flattering in a way. [laughs]

PAT: It's totally flattering, yeah.

PAT: And this, Mike says, is why the cartoon works. Like, on the one hand, it confirms our paranoias, and on the other, it kind of plays to our vanity.

JAD: Flattering. Is that really—I mean, when you said flattering a second ago, is that—is that really what it is?

PAT: You don't see it that way?

JAD: I don't know. I've never liked this cartoon because he never wins. It's like, what's more flattering to live in a world that actively screws you at every turn or one that just doesn't care about you? Like a Nietzschean void.

PAT: I don't really know. That's kind of tough.

JAD: I go with the void.

ROBERT: No!

JAD: What do you mean "No?"

ROBERT: Totally ignored by the universe?

JAD: Yes!

ROBERT: That's the worst!

JAD: As opposed to being actively, actively screwed by the universe? Yeah, sure. Ignore me.

ROBERT: You don't know—what you don't know—let me tell you a story.

JAD: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: I went to ABC News and I did a story. It went very well. And then the next week I did a story which went very badly. And the head of the place, Roone Arledge called me into his office. And this was Roone Arledge, a legend in broadcasting. And then he put his face right in front of my face. His nose almost touching my nose, and said to me, "I hated this! I hated that! What's wrong with you?" And instead of being sad and upset, inside my head, like Wile E. Coyote himself, I thought, "Wow, he knows my name!"

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: "He watched my story!"

JAD: But if Roone Arledge had said that to you every single day.

ROBERT: He didn't do it every single day.

JAD: I know, but in cartoon form, that's essentially what's happening here.

ROBERT: Yes. But, but ...

JAD: The universe ...

ROBERT: ... cartoons ...

JAD: ... is yelling at you.

ROBERT: But the reason I like Wile E. Coyote ...

JAD: No. No. No.

ROBERT: ... is because I—I admire the guy. He has no evidence at all that anything good will ever happen to him, and yet he wakes up every day with hope.

JAD: Hmm.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Roadrunner: "Meep Meep."]

JAD: Hope schmope. He's just a masochist.

ROBERT: Thank you, thank you, Pat and Lulu. Thank you to Pat and Lulu!

LULU: See ya!

JAD: [laughs] we'll be right back.

[LISTENER: This is Casey calling from Fort Myers Beach, Florida. Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. Today ...

ROBERT: Subject is ...

JAD: Fate.

ROBERT: So if you think there is such a thing as fate ...

JAD: Fate.

ROBERT: And—and you want some hint of what is the plan for you, what's in store for you or for someone you love.

JAD: What is predestined, right?

ROBERT: Yes. Then, well, as we know, our—our professor at Columbia, Walter Mischel, he would simply offer you a marshmallow.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: Malcolm would ask you what your birthday is.

JAD: You know, but there's another way to do this.

ROBERT: What?

JAD: Just look at what a person writes—their emails, their essays, whatever. What if you were to take that text ...

IAN LANCASHIRE: Hello.

JAD: Give it to this guy. He puts it into a computer and you turn it into ...

IAN LANCASHIRE: Data.

ROBERT: What do you mean? Who—who is that?

JAD: This is ...

IAN LANCASHIRE: My name is Ian Lancashire. I'm a professor of English at the University of Toronto.

JAD: Now Ian, as he said, is an English professor, but he's also a computer guy.

IAN LANCASHIRE: Right. Founded a computing center with the help of IBM Canada.

JAD: And the reason he combines those two, is because he's interested in the secrets behind the author's words.

ROBERT: Hmm.

JAD: And that desire, he says, to take a text, spin it into data as a way to get into that author's head? Well, that goes back a long way.

IAN LANCASHIRE: It goes back to the fathers of the Christian Church.

JAD: To the Bible.

IAN LANCASHIRE: In the early Middle Ages.

JAD: So monks decided to make what's called a concordance of the Bible. And what that means is they were gonna take every single word in the Bible, and there are 960,243 of them, at least in the King James version, and they were gonna list them all alphabetically, notate each time every single word was used and the context.

ROBERT: Ay yi yi.

IAN LANCASHIRE: Yes. Imagine it. You begin with the first verse.

JAD: "In the beginning ..."

IAN LANCASHIRE: [laughs] You create a heading for the first word.

JAD: "In." All right.

IAN LANCASHIRE: And then for the second word.

JAD: "The."

IAN LANCASHIRE: And then for the third.

JAD: "Beginning."

IAN LANCASHIRE: Every time you come across those words, you have to write a context.

JAD: "In Genesis one, verse one, occurrence one. "In the beginning", Genesis one, verse six, occurrence two. "And God said, 'Let there be a firmament in the midst ...'"

IAN LANCASHIRE: It's all handwritten. And at the end, you end—well, you end up with a lot of pieces of paper.

JAD: So many that it took those first monks, you know, who decided to do this, an entire lifetime to complete it. Nowadays, you know, with computers you can be done in.

IAN LANCASHIRE: In under 15 seconds.

JAD: Bam! So that all just basically sets the stage for the story that I'm about to tell you. It's the 1980s, Ian is an English professor at Toronto. He's got a lab full of computers and he's using them to analyze his favorite authors.

IAN LANCASHIRE: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, TS Elliot, James Joyce, Cadman, Chaucer, Shakespeare.

JAD: And he's turning up some interesting stuff, sort of.

IAN LANCASHIRE: For example, in his poetry, Milton, didn't use the word "because." Who knows why?

JAD: Yeah. But at a certain point, Ian decided to look at more modern authors.

IAN LANCASHIRE: And so I turned to Agatha Christie.

JAD: At the time he was doing this—we're now in the '90s—Agatha Christie happened to be the most published author ever.

IAN LANCASHIRE: She sold a billion books.

JAD: A billion? Like "B" billion?

IAN LANCASHIRE: She was number one.

JAD: Behind God.

IAN LANCASHIRE: After—after the Bible, I think. [laughs] So what I did is I collected two of her earliest novels written in the early '20s.

JAD: He fed those two into the computer.

IAN LANCASHIRE: Then I did the third.

JAD: Eventually, he would add in 14 additional books that cover 50 years of Agatha Christie's writing.

JAD: What is the computer doing exactly?

IAN LANCASHIRE: Measuring the individual concordance, word frequency, vocabulary of the works.

JAD: And all the while it's spitting out these reports.

IAN LANCASHIRE: And I saw the totals at the bottom. So all this ...

JAD: Now first of all, the woman wrote 80 detective novels, which is just amazing in and of itself. The computer found that her use of language was relatively consistent and normal for the first 72 of those books. But something happened on book number 73, something drastic.

ROBERT: What?

JAD: Suddenly her use of words like ...

IAN LANCASHIRE: Words like "thing," "anything," "something," "nothing."

JAD: ... what Ian calls indefinite words ...

IAN LANCASHIRE: These—these words increased six times.

JAD: But also, when the computer added up the vocabulary size of that book ...

IAN LANCASHIRE: That is how many different words are there in the first 50,000 words of a text.

JAD: ... it found in this book, there were 20 percent fewer different words.

IAN LANCASHIRE: That is astounding. That's one fifth of her vocabulary lost.

JAD: It gradually dawned on him that what he might be seeing was the very beginning stages of an author losing herself.

IAN LANCASHIRE: She had developed Alzheimer's. I delayed publishing my results for two years. I had to have the results analyzed by a computational linguist and a statistician.

JAD: And in her lifetime, was she ever actually diagnosed?

IAN LANCASHIRE: Absolutely not. There was no diagnosis.

JAD: He said that some of her biographers suspected that something was up in her later years.

IAN LANCASHIRE: One point apparently she cut off all her hair. She was not doing very well in interviews.

JAD: But as far as we know, she was never taken to a doctor, never got diagnosed.

IAN LANCASHIRE: I think her family closed around her and protected her. I realized that I was seeing something about the human mind. I was seeing the author in the text in a way that people hadn't seen the author in the text before.

JAD: Which raised a question for me—and I think this can apply to anyone. I mean, we all write a bazillion emails a day. I've got a decade's worth on my computer. Does that stuff hold clues about what will be? Like early warning signs?

IAN LANCASHIRE: I think it's possible it does. Yes. And it's well worth doing research about how a loss of vocabulary can be determined, let’s say, in one's email over five or six years.

JAD: Indications are, he says, that those clues are there. Not only that, they may actually be there practically from the beginning.

KELVIN LIM: Oh, yep. Yep.

IAN LANCASHIRE: Very famous example is the so-called nuns study.

KELVIN LIM: Okay. The—the nuns study actually began in 1990.

JAD: This is Dr. Kelvin Lim. He works at the University of Minnesota, and is the current director of the so-called nuns study. And this study, more than any other that we know, really makes the point about the predictive power of the words we choose. Study began with a guy named David Snowden who wanted to look at aging over time. So he chose nuns because he wanted a group that was healthy.

KELVIN LIM: For example, they don't smoke. They don't drink.

JAD: They all have similar lifestyles.

KELVIN LIM: They obviously haven't had children.

JAD: So he approached this one particular order in Connecticut.

KELVIN LIM: Called the School Sisters of Notre Dame.

JAD: And he signed up just short of 700 nuns. And the only stipulation being ...

KELVIN LIM: You had to be at least 75 years of age. And so we're now 20 years in the study, so that means the youngest of the sisters is about 95.

SISTER ALBERTA SHERIDAN: Yeah, I think I am. I am the youngest.

JAD: And you are 94 years old.

SISTER ALBERTA SHERIDAN: Yes, sir.

JAD: Not 95.

SISTER ALBERTA SHERIDAN: Not 95. [laughs]

JAD: This is Sister Alberta Sheridan.

SISTER ALBERTA SHERIDAN: I like the way you said that.

JAD: Do you happen to know who the oldest remaining sister in the study is?

SISTER ALBERTA SHERIDAN: Wait a minute. Now the one who was buried today, Jad, was 101. I think she was the oldest one in the study.

JAD: Wow!

SISTER ALBERTA SHERIDAN: In our province, yes.

JAD: The study began innocently enough, she says. The researchers would show up to the convent every year, give the nuns a bunch of tests.

SISTER ALBERTA SHERIDAN: But, like, mostly from memory. Just questioning back and forth.

JAD: And then over the years, as the nuns passed away, which many of them have at this point ...

SISTER ALBERTA SHERIDAN: They've all gone, Jad.

JAD: Of the original 678 sisters ...

KELVIN LIM: At this point, we have approximately 40 sisters still alive and participating in the study.

SISTER ALBERTA SHERIDAN: And I'm the only one left here in the Wilton province.

JAD: And as the nuns would pass away, the researchers had arranged it so that they would get a small piece of their brains.

SISTER ALBERTA SHERIDAN: Yes.

JAD: Which they could examine for plaques and tangles.

SISTER ALBERTA SHERIDAN: Now this morning, we buried a sister here, I told you. But the funeral was delayed a bit because she had to be taken to the hospital to have a portion of her brain removed to further the study.

JAD: Wow.

SISTER ALBERTA SHERIDAN: Mm-hmm.

JAD: Okay, so here's why I bring this study up, because of an accident that happened pretty early on, that changed everything in the study. David Snowden, the main dude was in the convent archives, and he was talking to the archivist. The archivist says to him, "Hey, you know all these nuns that you're studying, who right now are over the age of 75? I actually have the essays that they wrote right when they got here."

KELVIN LIM: And they did this roughly at about age 18.

JAD: Like 60 years before?

SISTER ALBERTA SHERIDAN: Oh, yes. Oh, yeah.

KELVIN LIM: Right.

SISTER ALBERTA SHERIDAN: I have a copy of it at home. [laughs] Oh, that's great. Come on in, Naomi.

NAOMI STAROBIN: Thank you so much.

JAD: We actually asked a reporter, Naomi Starobin, to visit Sister Alberta at her home in Connecticut.

SISTER ALBERTA SHERIDAN: Are you late today?

JAD: And have her read her essay that is now 76 years old.

NAOMI STAROBIN: Yeah, go ahead.

SISTER ALBERTA SHERIDAN: "Two days after the birth of the Christ child, I was brought as a belated Christmas gift to a Mr. and Mrs. Albert Joseph Sheridan of Providence, Rhode Island. A week later, the sparkling waters of baptism were poured over me." I'm not gonna read all this silly stuff that—when I first entered.

NAOMI STAROBIN: Why not?

SISTER ALBERTA SHERIDAN: It sounds kinda saccharine. I was only a teenager when I wrote ...

JAD: But here's the thing: when the researchers found the essays, like the one you just heard, it was a gold mine.

SERGUEI PAKHOMOV: It was a major, major find.

JAD: So they analyzed the essays, looking primarily at ...

SERGUEI PAKHOMOV: Two specific features of the language that was contained in these narratives.

JAD: That's Serguei Pakhomov. He does the analysis for the current nun study.

SERGUEI PAKHOMOV: In particular, they looked at the notion of grammatical complexity and idea density.

JAD: What is idea density? What does that mean?

SERGUEI PAKHOMOV: Idea density is a measure that looks at how many basic units of meaning are contained in any given utterance, divided by the total number of words in that utterance.

JAD: In other words ...

SISTER ALBERTA SHERIDAN: "The date of my birth is December 27th."

JAD: ... like, if you were to listen to sister Alberta's autobiography ...

SISTER ALBERTA SHERIDAN: "When I was 11 years of age, my dear mother was called to God."

JAD: ... it's the number of little discreet ideas she's able to cram into one sentence.

SISTER ALBERTA SHERIDAN: "This was to be a turning point in my life, as I had always had the odd desire to become a sister."

JAD: Here's a classic example of the difference between low and high idea density. Here's low.

SERGUEI PAKHOMOV: From Sister Helen. "I was born in Eau Claire, Wisconsin on May 24, 1913, and was baptized in Saint James Church."

JAD: Okay, that's low. Now here's high.

SERGUEI PAKHOMOV: From Sister Emma. "It was about a half hour before midnight between February 28 and 29 of the leap year 1912 when I began to live and to die as the third child of my mother, whose maiden name is Hilda Hoffman, and my father Otto Schmidt."

JAD: I gotta say, I'm liking the first one.

KELVIN LIM: Jad, probably you as a journalist, seeing the first one as straight to the point.

JAD: Yeah, it's good writing.

KELVIN LIM: And the second one seems kind of embellished.

JAD: A little bit. Yeah.

JAD: But here's the punchline of all this. Turns out that the people who, when they were 18 wrote in that journalistically, very precise, low idea density sort of way, those people, 60 years later were vastly, vastly more likely to develop dementia. In fact, based on those essays alone, the researchers could predict with about 85 percent accuracy, what the nun's brains would look like when they died and were able to look at the brains. I mean, would the brains have plaques and tangles that you associate with Alzheimer's or would they not?

ROBERT: [sighs]

JAD: What?

ROBERT: I mean? That's just crazy.

JAD: Wait, why?

ROBERT: It's backwards reasoning. Well, we'll see. We'll see. I'm just—suddenly, I'm suspicious.

JAD: Why?

ROBERT: Here's a man who, from what you just said, has found the ones who got sick and working backwards, found certain incidences of this, that or the other, and says, "Ah, this is a cause that produces this effect."

JAD: No, no, no, no. There's no cause and effect here.

KELVIN LIM: These studies are—are demonstrating associations, right? They're not demonstrating causality.

JAD: Right.

KELVIN LIM: There's a very important distinction.

JAD: This is just a correlation. Okay?

ROBERT: But, you know, that may be one of 190 correlations that produce people who get Alzheimer's in the end.

JAD: Yeah. I mean, yeah. I mean, but let me argue your case actually from a different angle. Like, would this kind of linguistic analysis actually be relevant in the age of Twitter where everything is short and clipped?

ROBERT: But people who Twitter, don't only Twitter. They might also write, small, short, dense essays for their... 

JAD: Yeah. But well, you know, I mean, I guess you're right. It's like, it's mostly about the thoughts in your head, not so much what you write.

ROBERT: Well, so what about Agatha Christie? Was there a conclusion about Agatha?

JAD: Yeah, there was.

IAN LANCASHIRE: Agatha Christie writing "Elephants Can Remember."

JAD: This brings us back to Ian Lancashire and that 73rd book of Agatha Christie’s that he analyzed, and found that her vocabulary dipped. Well, before he did the analysis, he picked up that book and gave it a read and like most people who read it, didn't like it.

IAN LANCASHIRE: Initially, I thought it was very poorly written, badly plotted, full of errors of time, of dating. Terrible read. Then I realized when I looked at the title, "Elephants Can Remember ..."

JAD: He realized that maybe Agatha Christie sensed what was happening to her.

IAN LANCASHIRE: She was responding to that truism that elephants never forget. The—the chief character is an aging female novelist named Ariadne, who is a foil for Agatha herself. And she, Ariadne, is suffering from memory loss.

JAD: In the story, she tries to help a detective solve this crime, but she has trouble because she keeps forgetting.

IAN LANCASHIRE: And the last—the last sentence in that novel in fact is Agatha saying, "Well, maybe it's okay not to remember."

JAD: Wow!

IAN LANCASHIRE: She was trying to defend herself, defend her sense that she was forgetting, she was losing her vocabulary, she was losing her language. I began to see that Christie was heroic, still writing despite this handicap.

JAD: Yeah.

IAN LANCASHIRE: And her willingness to do that at an age of 81, 82, struck me as—as heroic in a way.

ROBERT: Well, I understand that. That's—the muse wouldn't quit, but the—the tools all left the room.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: So thinking about Agatha Christie and the nuns, and then earlier in the marshmallows, and basically to pull this show home to a nice, happy knot, there are two ways to think about destiny. First, you can think, "Well, I have one."

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: There's some kind of pattern in my life. Some sort of ...

JAD: All you have to do is look at the clues and I can maybe know what it is.

ROBERT: Or the other view is: who knows? Que sera, sera. What will be, will be. Like, stuff happens.

PAUL AUSTER: Anything can happen at any time.

ROBERT: That's Paul Auster. Remember him from the beginning of the show?

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: And he's—curiously, in this show, he's the guy who says there's no pattern, no way, no how.

PAUL AUSTER: You're on your way to your wedding and you die in a car crash. I mean, these things happen. So listen, talking about the true stories that I've written, I mean, the—the really crucial one is the thing that happened to me when I was 14 years old, when I was out hiking with a bunch of camp kids in the summer of 1961, and we got caught in a lightning storm. And we were going into a clearing, but in order to get to the clearing, we had to crawl under a barbed wire fence. The lightning and thunder are crashing all around us, and the boy right next to me was struck by lightning and killed. And he was as far away from me as you are from me right now.

ROBERT: Really.

PAUL AUSTER: We were right next to each other. Let me just—I might as well. Okay. "I don't remember saying anything. I don't remember crying. Another boy and I kept ourselves busy trying to take care of Ralph—the name of the boy. He was still unconscious. We rubbed his hands and arms. We held down his tongue, so he wouldn't swallow it. We told him to hang in there. After a while his skin began to take on a bluish tinge. His body seemed colder to my touch, but in spite of the mounting evidence, it never once occurred to me that he wasn't going to come around. I was only 14 years old after all. And what did I know? I'd never seen a dead person before.

PAUL AUSTER: "Later on when they told me he was dead, I learned that there was an eight inch burn across his back. I remember trying to absorb this news and telling myself that life would never feel the same to me again. Strangely enough, I didn't think about how I had been right next to him when it happened. I didn't think, 'One or two seconds later. And it would've been me.' What I thought about was holding his tongue and looking down at his teeth. His mouth had been set in a slight grimace. And with his lips partly open, I had spent an hour looking down at the tips of his teeth. 34 years later, I still remember them. His half closed, half open eyes. I remember those too."

PAUL AUSTER: And I can't tell you how this jolted me. It absolutely formed, I think, my whole view of life. The thing that I said before, anything can happen at any moment. When you think about how many people there are in the world, how many things there are, how many, cars in motion, how many buses moving, planes flying, well sure, things are gonna intersect in different ways. And we can't predict how.

ROBERT: So that's what we're examining. And I thought, well, maybe you would agree that there is some kind of string through the world, which if you know how to push it will tell ...

PAUL AUSTER: You, see, I really believe firmly that stories can only be told backward. You can't—you can't predict.

ROBERT: So the notion which we are—we are suggesting in the other stories is that you begin your life, you walk into the world, you write down an essay, you don't or do eat a cupcake. And these people in the white coats look at your essay and look at your cupcake reaction and they go, "Hmm ..."

PAUL AUSTER: Well ...

ROBERT: And they say things about you going forward, way forward in time.

PAUL AUSTER: I don't know. These seem like random variables to me. There are about 10,000 other things that probably factor in. So too many ...

ROBERT: You'd make a terrible social scientist.

PAUL AUSTER: Yeah, I know. Well, I remember Charles Olson, the great American poet, he called sociology a withered grape. And I—I think I tend to agree with it. [laughs]

ROBERT: [laughs]

ROBERT: I guess he got us right. "Radiolab, making wine out of withered grapes." [laughs]

JAD: [laughs] that should be our tagline.

ROBERT: Paul Auster's most recent book is called ...

JAD: Invisible.

ROBERT: Yeah, that's right. It's very hard to find. And the story we just heard comes from his book "The Invention of Solitude."

JAD: That's right. And we gotta go, but there—we're always online at Radiolab.org. Subscribe to our podcast there.

ROBERT: Thank you for listening.

JAD: Yes! I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Bye.

[LISTENER: Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad and Soren Wheeler. Our staff includes Ellen Horne, Pat Walters, Tim Howard, Lynn Levy, Lulu Miller and Brenna Farrell. With help from Raymond Tendulkar, Sam Roudman and Nicole Corey. Special thanks to Katie Sol. Talk to you later. Bye.]

 

-30-

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

 

 New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of programming is the audio record.