[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: We're back from our break.

JAD: Yes, we are.

ROBERT: What do we do during our breaks? What would you say we do during breaks?

JAD: We don't do anything, we don't exist.

ROBERT: Really?

JAD: And we're going to continue with our show here to how many meditations? Eleven.

ROBERT: Eleven.

JAD: Eleven meditations on things relating to death and what happens after.

ROBERT: But we're not up to eleven.

JAD: No.

ROBERT: This is...

JAD: Five.

ROBERT: Five.

JAD: It's called?

ROBERT: Four Seconds Down.

JAD: From producer Soren Wheeler.

KEN BALDWIN: Wake up. Everything's pretty black, same as it has been the last couple of weeks.

SOREN WHEELER: This is Ken Baldwin, the day he's talking about is August 20, 1985.

KEN BALDWIN: Say goodbye to my wife, and I just say, "I'll be home late, do some overtime."

SOREN: At the time he's living a couple hours east of San Francisco.

KEN BALDWIN: Say goodbye, say I love her. And I know right now that I won't survive the day. She has no idea how I feel. Everything is dark, everything is black. So I get in my car. [I'm just not a very good person.] Drive to work because I think maybe I can do it one more day. The closer I get to work the more I realize I've got to disappear, to start over and get rid of whatever it is I've got. [It's gotta end.] I drive right past work. And then I'm on the freeway, kind of relaxed. And I finally see the bridge and it's huge. It's gigantic.

SOREN: He parks his car at the bridge, puts money in the meter.

KEN BALDWIN: And I start walking. And I'm walking on the bridge just like any other tourist. It's a beautiful day. It's a gorgeous Wednesday. I see everything around me, and it's just gorgeous. And I find a place. It's an outcropping. You can see straight down into the water. And I say, "This is time to do it. You really got to do this." I really believed that everybody would be better off without me, that everybody would just get on with their lives feeling better about me being gone than me being here. I put my hands on the railing, count to ten. [Go.] And I vaulted over. And the last things I saw leave the bridge were my hands, and that moment, that very moment I said, "Oh my God, this is a mistake." And nothing I can do about it except fall.

SOREN: The fall from the bridge to the water takes about four seconds.

KEN BALDWIN: And it was almost like quick flickers of what I was trying to think of. [Oh, my family!] My daughter, three years old, I'll never see her grow up. The things she's gonna see that I don't get to see. Man, the misery that I caused. This is bad. I'm sorry guys that I did this to you. [Wow.] I do want to live. [This how it's gonna end.] Then I just blacked out. And I woke up, and I was swimming for my life. And I was saying, "Oh my God, somebody please save me, somebody save me."

SOREN: He hit the water in a cannonball. He bruised his feet, his backside, but no serious injuries. Some workers saw him jump and called the Coast Guard.

KEN BALDWIN: And then the next thing I remember I was on the Coast Guard cutter.

SOREN: Only 26 people have made it onto that boat out of the thousand or so that have jumped. And nearly all of them say that in the middle of the fall, when they're facing their death something inside them changed, and they didn't want to die. For Ken, that change happened the very moment he saw his hands leave the bridge.

KEN BALDWIN: I can see that perfectly. I can see my hands leave the bridge. I don't know if it was a mechanical switch, or some kind of switch in the brain function but it—for some reason, it became a switch to another life.

JAD: Number six.

ROBERT: Am I dead?

JAD: Ooh, I hear some seagulls.

PAUL BROKS: You hear the seagulls, yeah.

JAD: Where are they coming from?

PAUL BROKS: We're just on the edge of the English Channel in the Atlantic.

JAD: Really, so they've got you in a little box floating in the ocean?

PAUL BROKS: Actually we're not that far away from the sea, so we get lots of seagulls here.

JAD: This is Paul Broks. He's not really floating in a box in the ocean, he's just in a box near the ocean. And the reason we've connected our box in New York to his in England is because of a question he was once asked.

PAUL BROKS: If you work in the sort of line that I've worked in over the years, you get the most bizarre statements and questions.

JAD: Which is because Paul's a neuropsychologist, which means he diagnosis patients with various mental disorders. And he describes this one case about eight years ago involving a woman named Jeannie.

PAUL BROKS: Just an ordinary, pleasant, middle-aged woman from the north of England.

JAD: Early 50s.

PAUL BROKS: Well loved by her family.

JAD: She comes into his office, he runs her through some basic tests.

PAUL BROKS: I just did a basic assessment of—as I would in that sort of case of general intellectual level.

JAD: And at first she seemed pretty with it. She answered all his questions, she seemed pretty alert. But then...

PAUL BROKS: We then got into a conversation about whether things seemed real.

JAD: What does that mean?

PAUL BROKS: Well, it's difficult to pin that one down. She just felt that things weren't real. She would point to objects in the room and say "Well, that cup there doesn't seem real, does it? Or the chair doesn't seem real. It just doesn't feel real. So I can see it and I can describe it to you, but it just doesn't feel real." And the thing that really made me sit up was when she said—I forget the exact phrase, but it's in the book.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Paul Broks: Eventually Jeannie said, "Am I dead?"]

JAD: Am I dead?

PAUL BROKS: Yes, do you think I'm dead? Do you think I've died?

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Paul Broks: I didn't respond immediately. I let the silence flow. Jeannie smiled. Her face was lit with a benign perplexity. There was a smear of toothpaste around the corner of her mouth. She didn't seem to notice the droplets of tea spilling onto her dressing gown. But there was a glint in her eye. "In the middle of the night I was convinced," she said, "I thought they would come to take me away. I can't say for sure that I'm dead", she continued. "But things are not the same. I don't feel real. It seems to me I might be dead. How would I know if I was dead?"]

PAUL BROKS: It immediately made me think this may be an example of Cotard's Syndrome.

JAD: No one really knows what causes Cotard's Syndrome.

PAUL BROKS: It's very rare. I mean, I've come across three cases.

JAD: But one of the symptoms, he says, is often this sense, deep sense that you're somehow not completely here.

PAUL BROKS: One idea about this syndrome is that somehow there's a decoupling of thoughts and feelings.

ROBERT: Which means what, exactly?

JAD: Here's how he explained it to me. The brain has two jobs it's doing at all times. The first is to keep track of what's happening outside your body. Like the sites that are coming at you, smell, touch. Your sensual experience of the world.

PAUL BROKS: Your sort of immediate consciousness of the body and the world, and the body being in the world.

JAD: All the while the brain also is maintaining this inner life, where you think thoughts, and you have memories, personality.

PAUL BROKS: What you normally think of when you think about yourself.

JAD: You, right?

JAD: What do you think happens in this condition? Is it that outer you...

PAUL BROKS: The sort of sensual self.

JAD: ...somehow gets cut, cut off from that inner mental you and it just drifts off to sea, leaving you with just thoughts.

PAUL BROKS: But it's the feelings that give us our in-the-moment sense of self. So if you don't have feelings attached to thoughts and perceptions...

JAD: Then you're like a vapor. You're there but you have no weight.

JAD: Isn't what you're describing basically one version of the afterlife? Like, my body is gone, but something remains?

PAUL BROKS: Yeah, I haven't thought of that. That's a very interesting way to think about it. But is that any different than the story persisting in someone else's head?

ROBERT: Seven.

DAVID EAGLEMAN: Do you guys know this group, TheEdge.org? It's John Brockman's group.

ROBERT: Yeah, we do.

JAD: That's David Eagleman again. And for number seven, a brief excerpt from a conversation we had with him, "If I only had a brain."

DAVID EAGLEMAN: So I just wrote an essay on there. Yesterday it came out.

ROBERT: Is this "Big ideas that will change the world"? That one?

DAVID EAGLEMAN: Yeah, exactly. What's the thing that'll change everything? And my answer was—and I think this is something I'll actually see in my lifetime. The idea is silicon immortality. In other words, downloading your consciousness into a computer, and we'll really have reached a new point where there'll be immortality.

ROBERT: Oh!

JAD: How would you figure this would work?

DAVID EAGLEMAN: So imagine you make an exact copy of the three dimensional structure of the brain, all the neurons, all the connections between the neurons, the proteins inside, the phosphorylation states of the proteins, you make a copy of this whole thing. What matters is the algorithms that are running on top of the brain. It's not the wet, gushy stuff that matters, it's what that wet gushy stuff is implementing. And the idea is that if you could recreate the brain out of, let's say, beer cans and tennis balls, and you get all the structure the same, and it runs the same algorithms, then that would be you. It would have your consciousness, your memories, your thoughts and so on. Now right now it's science fiction because it's so much data our current computers couldn't handle it.

JAD: Is that the only limitation, just the hard drive size?

ROBERT: No, there's other limitations.

DAVID EAGLEMAN: There are two limitations right now. One is our imaging technology, and the other is the amount of storage capacity.

ROBERT: And error. I mean, you get one atom or two wrong, and all of a sudden instead of your cat named Coco, it's now named Boko and then you're not the same person.

JAD: [laughs]

DAVID EAGLEMAN: No, that's not true, in fact. Because every time you hit your head on a cabinet, you're actually killing lots of neurons. But that doesn't change who you are. You don't misremember your cat's name. I mean, imagine that you changed one word in the novel, Moby Dick, it would still be Moby Dick.

ROBERT: Well, almost Moby Dick.

DAVID EAGLEMAN: It would be almost Moby Dick, but you are almost the same person day to day. And you're never exactly the same person that you were yesterday because of small changes in your brain.

JAD: But let's imagine that you're right, despite Robert's objections.

ROBERT: I'm not even imagining it.

JAD: Let's just say you are.

ROBERT: I'm just listening to the hubris of this.

JAD: [laughs] What would you actually do with a Xerox brain?

ROBERT: He wants to be immortal. Don't you have...

JAD: No, but I mean like...

ROBERT: He's doing this in his own life-time?

JAD: No but how would you interface with a Xerox brain?

DAVID EAGLEMAN: So the idea is if we can recreate a brain in zeros and ones on a computer, then you could actually live inside of a virtual world, and you could enjoy living in this world indefinitely.

ROBERT: Or like the Scarecrow.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, The Wizard of Oz: [singing] If I only had a brain.]

ROBERT: He didn't have a real brain, he had straw and a certificate.

DAVID EAGLEMAN: Well you don't actually know that you have a real brain either, right?

ROBERT: What?

DAVID EAGLEMAN: There are modern philosophers who deal with this in a very—in a real way. They ask how would we know if we are a simulation?

JAD: But why would we die if we were a simulation?

ROBERT: He's not gonna die, that's the whole point.

DAVID EAGLEMAN: Well, so this is the point of my book Some, is to illustrate that there are lots of possibilities out there, right?

ROBERT: Here it comes!

DAVID EAGLEMAN: Yeah, when you...

ROBERT: Go ahead, go ahead I don't want to interrupt you because you're about to become immortal.

DAVID EAGLEMAN: So there are many different stories written here. In some of them God is actually a married couple that got separated and then reunited or that God is the size of a microbe, and he's...

JAD: Eight? Did we say eight, or is it nine?

ROBERT: I think it was nine.

JAD: No, I think we're eight. Ineffable.

ROBERT: Another story by David Eagleman.

JAD: From his book some read for us again by actor Jeffrey Tambor.

JEFFREY TAMBOR: When soldiers part ways at wars' end, the breakup of the platoon triggers the same emotion as the—well, the death of a person. It's the final bloodless death of the war. The same mood haunts the actress on the drop of the final curtain after months of working together, something greater than themselves has just died. After a store closes its doors on its final evening, or Congress wraps its final session, the participants amble away feeling that they were just part of something larger than themselves, something they intuit had a life, even though they can't quite put a finger on it. In this way, death is not only for humans but for everything that existed. And it turns out that anything that enjoys life enjoys an afterlife—platoons and plays and stores and Congresses. They don't end, they just move on to a different dimension.

JEFFREY TAMBOR: Although it's difficult for us to imagine how these beings interact, they enjoy this delicious afterlife together. They exchange stories of their adventures. They laugh about good times, and often—well, just like us, just like humans, they lament how short this thing is, how brief it is. It may seem mysterious to you that these organizations can live on without the people who composed them, but the underlying principle is simple: the afterlife is made of spirits. I mean, after all, you don't bring your kidney, your liver or your heart to the afterlife with you. Instead, you gain independence from the pieces that make you up. Now a consequence of this cosmic scheme is going to surprise you. When you die you are grieved by all the atoms of which you were composed. Yeah. I mean they hung them together for years, whether in sheets of skin or communities of spleen, but with your death, they don't die.

JEFFREY TAMBOR: Instead, they part ways moving off in their separate directions, mourning the loss of a special time they shared together. Actually haunted by the feeling that they were once playing parts in something larger than themselves. Something that had its own life. Something—well, they can hardly put a finger on.

[LISTENER: Support for NPR comes from NPR stations and Kaufmann, the foundation for entrepreneurship, committed to growing economies and expanding human welfare. On the web at Kauffman.org.]

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

[LISTENER: And William T. Grant Foundation, supporting research to improve the lives of young people. Online at WTGrantFoundation.org. This is NPR, National Public Radio.]

 

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