LULU MILLER: Hey, it's Lulu. This is Radiolab, and I am about to hit play on what I think is an all-time favorite Radiolab. It is certainly one we've heard about from listeners over and over again. It was originally aired in 2011, and I'm not gonna say much more except that we're gonna launch you into the story and then we have two pretty wild updates. So think of this as a trilogy—the Emilie trilogy. Here we go with Part One: In the Wall.

[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. Today, sort of a love story. Here's the guy.

ALAN LUNDGARD: My name is Alan Lundgard. Do you want to ...

JAD: Do you want me to say anything more than that?

ALAN LUNDGARD: I don't know. Is this—is this for like a credit?

ROBERT: No. Often on our show, we let people introduce themselves.

ALAN LUNDGARD: Oh. I don't know. I don't have a title.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: All right.

JAD: So that's Alan. The girl, Emilie, we'll meet her a bit later, for reasons that will become clear. The story begins on a fall day in Brooklyn.

ALAN LUNDGARD: And so the day in question I guess was the morning of October 8.

JAD: They're both living in this one-room loft in Brooklyn.

ALAN LUNDGARD: And we woke up and, you know ...

JAD: Both 21.

ALAN LUNDGARD: ... went about our daily routine and prepared to go.

JAD: He was in art school. She was taking some time off from art school to work for a local artist.

ALAN LUNDGARD: So she would take the bike and I would take the train.

JAD: What was the morning like?

ALAN LUNDGARD: It was a beautiful day. It was, you know—the sun was low in the sky, so there were long shadows. I strapped on her helmet and adjusted it, took her bike out for her. We kissed each other goodbye and said, "I love you." And I watched her ride down the street in this early morning, and then, you know, on I went down into the subway.

JAD: Six hours later, he's working in the studio doing some sculpture, and he gets a call from a cop.

ALAN LUNDGARD: And he just said, "Emilie Gossiaux, she had an accident. She's at Bellevue. This is the address." And I said, "Oh. I mean, do you have any more information?" And he just told me that it was bad. I was carrying a bunch of stuff, and I just dropped everything and started running.

JAD: Now Alan and Emilie had only been together nine months, but when it started, says Alan ...

ALAN LUNDGARD: It was just so immediate.

JAD: The night they got together, they both just kind of knew.

ALAN LUNDGARD: It was sort of like a weird prophetic kind of thing where I think it was the first day that the schools had a snow day. It was snowed out. It was kind of like this past blizzard, you know, sort of like the city shuts down magical kind of thing.

JAD: He'd gone out with some friends just as the snow was coming down.

ALAN LUNDGARD: And we were trapped at this party.

JAD: And that's where he bumped into Emilie.

ALAN LUNDGARD: Pint-sized, these big, like, iridescent eyes, and a very kind of—I have trouble describing her voice. It's almost as if—and I know you guys are audio people, but it's like stereo, almost.

JAD: Truth is, they'd known each other for a while, but that night, says Alan ...

ALAN LUNDGARD: Fireworks all of a sudden. And it felt right.

JAD: So you had a—you had a feeling this wasn't just a thing. This was a thing!

ALAN LUNDGARD: Right. Or the thing.

JAD: The thing.

ALAN LUNDGARD: Right.

JAD: The thing?

ALAN LUNDGARD: The thing.

JAD: The soul thing?

ALAN LUNDGARD: Yeah.

JAD: All right.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Well, Emilie, there have always been boys around Emilie.

ROBERT: That's Susan Gossiaux, Emilie's mom. She says at first when Emilie told her about Alan, she thought, "Okay, so that's another boy." Emilie seemed to have that effect on boys, perhaps because she didn't really seem to need them.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Here is someone who's been obsessed with art, and has given up everybody in her life for art.

ROBERT: At the age of six ...

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: She was creating her own comic books.

ROBERT: In junior high school, she took drawing classes every night. And then in high school ...

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: She left us, friends, boyfriends ...

ROBERT: To go to a high school of the arts in Florida.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: No one stands in the way of her art. It's all she sees. It's all she focuses on.

ROBERT: But then she visited Emilie in May, a few months before the accident, and she met Alan.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: I met Alan, and he was delightful. But there was a different look that I'd never seen in Emilie's eyes before when she looked at him, and I didn't like it.

JAD: Tell us about the accident from your perspective?

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: From my—from when I ...?

JAD: Yeah.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: I was at work.

ROBERT: You're in New Orleans?

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Metairie, which is a suburb of New Orleans. And I get a telephone call. And I looked and I saw it was Alan. Alan has never called me before. I answered the phone, I said, "Hello, Alan." And he said, "You have to come. Emilie was hit by a truck."

ALAN LUNDGARD: A 18-wheeler semi-truck.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: And I took a breath and I said, "Alan, is Emilie dead?" And he said, "No, but you need to get here as soon as possible."

JAD: Six hours later, her and her husband, Emilie's dad, were at Bellevue Hospital here in Manhattan.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: They brought us into the—her room in the surgical ICU.

ALAN LUNDGARD: We all went in, and she was just lying in bed.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: And there were tubes.

ALAN LUNDGARD: Tubes down her throat.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Coming in and out. And ...

ALAN LUNDGARD: Her face was so swollen.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Emilie ...

ALAN LUNDGARD: Covered in blood.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: ... weighed probably at the time of the accident about 100 pounds, and she then weighed 128. She had swollen 28 pounds.

JAD: Oh, wow!

ALAN LUNDGARD: She had multiple fractures in her leg and her pelvis and the left side of her face.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: They had opened her abdomen, and they had taken her intestines out and put them on top of her body so that she could breathe.

ALAN LUNDGARD: And she was just lying completely still, you know?

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: That first 48 hours, nothing moved. Not—nothing.

ALAN LUNDGARD: We took up shifts. You know, her mother would be there in the day and her father in the evening, and then I would be there with her at night.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Her eyes weren't even flickering.

ROBERT: And as she sat there watching Emilie not move, she says she kept thinking, "Why? I've got these four kids and everything bad seems to happen to Emilie."

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Starting at six months, ear infections, then sinus infections, then asthma.

ROBERT: By kindergarten, Emilie was losing her hearing for reasons no one could quite figure out. She had to get hearing aids.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: On both sides.

ROBERT: But somehow, her mom says, all this just made Emilie more fierce.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: If anyone can conquer this, it's Emilie.

ALAN LUNDGARD: I think on the second day, they started to take her off her medication, expecting to see some sort of reaction from her.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: And nothing. Nothing. There was a nurse, and the nurse said that Emilie was gone, and asked me about organ donations. And I said, "Yes." And so I worked up enough courage to go into what they call the track room, which is where the residents usually are. And there was one woman resident sitting at a computer, and I went and I said, "When are you gonna let Emilie go?" And she said, "We will have a family meeting tomorrow morning and we'll talk then." And so I said, "Okay," and I left. And I went back, and I'm sitting with Emilie, side of her bed, and I'm telling her—Emilie and I read the book, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, when she was a sophomore. And I remember the ending of the book. "There's a land of the living, there's a land of dead, and the bridge is love. And that love is the only thing that survives." And it's kind of the way it goes. And so I was sitting there with Emilie, and I was telling this—I was saying this and talking in her ear and saying this, and talking to her and telling her that I would love her eternally through all time, that our love would never end. And Emilie raised her left hand.

ROBERT: What was ...

JAD: Oh my God. What was ...

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: It was chaos! I was yelling for the nurse, "I saw it! I saw her move!"

ALAN LUNDGARD: That was really one of the really abrupt moments.

JAD: Now they knew.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Emilie was not dead. Emilie was alive.

JAD: But how alive? Over the next few days, says Alan ...

ALAN LUNDGARD: She slowly started moving more, not really in response to anything. She'd writhe in bed, scratch her leg where there was a wound.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: We would hold her hand down and she'd slap. She'd slap our hands away.

JAD: But when they'd tell this to the doctors, the doctors would say ...

ALAN LUNDGARD: That's not indicative of any kind of mental functioning.

JAD: It could just be a reflex, really. So the medical team began trying to determine just how damaged was she?

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: The ophthalmologist teams were coming in, and they were trying to get Emilie's eyes to—eye pupils to respond. And they weren't responsive, and so I knew what that meant.

ROBERT: What did that mean?

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: It meant she could be blind. So Emilie couldn't see, couldn't hear.

JAD: Because remember, she wore hearing aids.

JAD: And why didn't you just put those in?

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: We tried.

ALAN LUNDGARD: I mean, we tried many times to put it in, but she just wouldn't allow it.

JAD: What would she do exactly when you did it?

ALAN LUNDGARD: Flail her head, shake around.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Kick. And she would hit. Had a lot of bruises on my body where she'd kicked me and pinched me. So we stopped.

ALAN LUNDGARD: Right.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Every once in a while, we would go back to it, but there was the question, you know, maybe she couldn't hear anymore.

ROBERT: What do you do to a person who's—you don't know what's going on inside her and you can't get to her?

ALAN LUNDGARD: You send her to a nursing home and, you know, that's where she would have remained.

JAD: And after several weeks in the ICU, Emilie ...

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: She was stable.

JAD: That meant they had to make a decision.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Once you become stable, then you have to move off surgical ICU and out of the hospital to either a rehabilitation or to a nursing home.

JAD: So that became the new question: where would she go? Could she be repaired, so to speak, in which case she'd go to rehab? Or is this it for her, in which case, she'd go to a nursing home?

ROBERT: Now making that call medically ...

MICHAL EISENBERG: Is sometimes tricky.

ROBERT: That's Dr. Michal Eisenberg. She's a physician at NYU and it's her job to make that call. She says one of the key criteria for getting someone into rehab ...

MICHAL EISENBERG: To do rehab on somebody, you need to have them reacting to you. A person needs to be able to participate in a meaningful way for three hours of therapy a day.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: They have to be able to follow commands because that's how you rehabilitate someone. If the person can't hear, if the person can't see, then there's no way to communicate with her.

ALAN LUNDGARD: And so they made the assessment that she could not go to rehab.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: And that Emilie should go to a nursing home. So I sent my husband back to New Orleans to look for a nursing home.

ALAN LUNDGARD: That they could bring her back to. They just kept it all a secret from me that they were gonna take her away from me.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: I mean, how do you tell someone who loves your daughter that much that we're taking her away? But it was not just one life that we had in our hands, it was two lives. We felt that that would be the best thing for him, and Alan could hate us maybe as a way for him to bridge and let go of that grief.

JAD: But then as the doctors were prepping Emilie to move her to a nursing home, they had to remove her tracheotomy, which was helping her breathe.

ALAN LUNDGARD: And she all of a sudden started talking.

JAD: Really?

ROBERT: She spoke?

ALAN LUNDGARD: Yes.

JAD: What was she saying?

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: She would curse, "Don't touch me, you blankety-blank." You know?

ALAN LUNDGARD: She would say stop.

JAD: This is in response to someone touching her?

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: To touch. Touching her.

JAD: And if she wasn't cursing, says Alan ...

ALAN LUNDGARD: She would call everybody, Miss Dashwood.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Certain people that were touching her were Miss Dashwood.

JAD: What's ...

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Is it ...?

ALAN LUNDGARD: From Sense and Sensibility.

ROBERT: You're quoting Jane Austen?

ALAN LUNDGARD: Oh yeah, we had watched the movie, like, a couple months previous to this.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: So somehow she was locked in the movie.

ALAN LUNDGARD: And it was just the assumption of the doctors that she was just sort of mentally damaged.

JAD: But if she's calling people Miss Dashwood, doesn't that at least mean something?

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: No. It wasn't enough to say that Emilie could follow a command like "Sit up, raise your right hand."

JAD: So the plan was still the nursing home?

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Right.

ALAN LUNDGARD: I mean, no. Every possibility had not been exhausted.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: I can see him. He was sitting across the room, and his jaws were just clenched.

ALAN LUNDGARD: I just was not gonna give up.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: And he was saying, "You have to give her a chance. She—you have to give her the chance."

ROBERT: Did you have a plan?

ALAN LUNDGARD: No, I had no plan whatsoever.

ROBERT: No?

ALAN LUNDGARD: I was lost. This experience was just completely traumatic to me emotionally, but at the same time, I was going to help her in whatever way I could. The only trajectory I had was to help her.

JAD: And one night, just a few days before Emilie was gonna be discharged to a nursing home away from him.

ALAN LUNDGARD: I was there alone with her, and it was 3:00 am or something.

JAD: And she was calm.

ALAN LUNDGARD: Like, she wasn't trying to fight me away or anything. I had helped her fix a thing that was wrong with her mouth wiring. It was like a wire that was poking her, and I fixed it for her.

JAD: And he says at that moment something occurred to him.

ALAN LUNDGARD: It really just was like in the recesses of my mind.

JAD: He thought of the story of Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan. He'd read about it a few days earlier online, and he thought, "Hmm, what if I tried what Annie Sullivan did with Helen Keller on Emilie?"

ALAN LUNDGARD: I took her left hand with my left hand, and I leaned over, and using her wrist as the baseline for the words.

JAD: And his finger as the pen.

ALAN LUNDGARD: I just wrote, "I," waited a second, "L," waited a second, "O," waited a second, "V, E," waited a second, "YOU."

JAD: Then, according to Alan, she said to him ...

ALAN LUNDGARD: She said, "Oh, you love me? thank you."

JAD: She literally replied immediately to it?

ALAN LUNDGARD: Yes, she replied immediately.

ROBERT: Does she know who you are?

ALAN LUNDGARD: No, she has no idea who I am.

JAD: But now he had a way to get to her so he could figure out how much of her was actually there, and maybe even prove it to the doctors.

ALAN LUNDGARD: You know, I had to have something that was conclusive to present to them. The following evening, I took out my cell phone. And it has a record function on it, and I started recording question after question to determine her cognitive ability.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alan Lundgard: What is your name?]

ALAN LUNDGARD: What. W-H-A-T.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emilie Gossiaux: What ...]

ALAN LUNDGARD: Is. I-S.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emilie Gossiaux: Is ...]

JAD: You fingerspelled every letter?

ALAN LUNDGARD: Yes.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emilie Gossiaux: Car. What is your—what is your name? Emilie! Let me spell it for you.]

ALAN LUNDGARD: She's writing her name on the palm of my hand.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emilie Gossiaux: E-M-I-L-I-E. Emilie.]

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Alan called me at four o'clock in the morning. He said, "You have to come now. I have proof."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alan Lundgard: I'm now going to ask her what year it is. What ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emilie Gossiaux: What ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alan Lundgard: Now I'm gonna write, "year."]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emilie Gossiaux: ... year ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alan Lundgard: ... is ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emilie Gossiaux: ... is ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alan Lundgard: ... it?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emilie Gossiaux: ... it?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alan Lundgard: Question mark.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emilie Gossiaux: 2010.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alan Lundgard: Very good, Emilie. Very good. Very, very good. Do you know where you are?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emilie Gossiaux: I don't know. I don't know where I am.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alan Lundgard: Okay, right now I'm gonna write "hospital."]

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Got there about 4:45 in the morning. Alan is over there by the bed continuing to fingerspell and talk to her. And—and she calls him Alan. She knows that this person who is fingerspelling on her hand is named Alan, but Alan can't get her to understand who he really is, that it's her Alan.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alan Lundgard: I'm just gonna write my name again, "Alan."]

ALAN LUNDGARD: But she just couldn't make that mental jump to connect her past life with her present.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emilie Gossiaux: Alan, what ethnicity are you? Are you Asian?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alan Lundgard: Am I Asian? I tell her no.]

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: The next thing I hear her say is "Pull me out of the wall."

ALAN LUNDGARD: She kept saying ...

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: "Pull me out."

ALAN LUNDGARD: "Please pull me out of here."

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: "It's dark in here."

ALAN LUNDGARD: "Pull me out."

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: "Help me."

ALAN LUNDGARD: "I know you can do it."

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: "Pull me out of the wall."

ALAN LUNDGARD: I kept saying I can't. I would write on her hand, "I can't."

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Alan starts to sob and I'm crying too.

JAD: What are you thinking at this point?

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: It wasn't enough.

JAD: That wasn't enough.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: It wasn't enough. And I said, "Alan, ask her about her hearing aids."

ALAN LUNDGARD: And ...

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: So he fingerspells, "Hearing aid."

ALAN LUNDGARD: "Hearing aid." And she said, "Okay."

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: She agreed to put the hearing aid in for the first time.

ALAN LUNDGARD: So we put it in and switched it on.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: He said, "Emilie."

ALAN LUNDGARD: "Emilie, can you hear me? It's me, Alan." And immediately ...

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Everything came back to me. I was there. I remembered everything.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: The door opened and Emilie stepped out.

ALAN LUNDGARD: She was back.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Yeah, it was just by hearing his voice. I knew it was him, and then he said my mom was there.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: And I heard her say what I'd been waiting for her to say all those weeks.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: I screamed, "Mommy, mommy!"

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: She said, "Mama."

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: You know, I couldn't believe they were there the whole time.

JAD: We asked Emilie, before she came back, where was she?

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: I didn't know where I was, if I could see at all. I mean, all I knew is that I was sleeping and I was always dreaming.

JAD: She says people would come to her in her dreams and say ...

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: "Don't—don't touch that."

JAD: "Stop scratching your wounds."

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: My dreams, they blended with reality.

JAD: She said she knew somehow that there were people around her, but she couldn't get to them. And that she also knew she was in a dream ...

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Why am I still sleeping?

JAD: ... that she couldn't somehow wake up from.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: I felt helpless. I felt really helpless.

JAD: Were you waiting for someone like that? I mean, were—because ...

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: I was waiting for some communication, you know? And I was relieved. Alan, he's a miracle to me.

JAD: Emilie is now at the Rusk Institute, which is one of New York City's leading rehab centers. And on the day we visited her, she'd just had a breakthrough.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Today was the first day I could stand on both legs and walk, actually walk. I walked a hundred feet today.

JAD: After rehab, she'll be moving into an apartment in Lower Manhattan with Alan. She's blind, and the chances of her seeing again are slim, but Alan plans to spend his time helping her cope and helping her find a new way to make art.

JAD: Emilie, can you introduce yourself?

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Do you want me to say "My name is Emilie Gossiaux?"

JAD: Yeah, just so we have it all on tape.

ALAN LUNDGARD: They asked me if I would have a title and I couldn't think of one, but I thought of one.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: A title?

ALAN LUNDGARD: Yeah. I'll do mine. My name is Alan Lundgard. I'm "the boyfriend."

ROBERT: [laughs]

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: My name is Emilie Gossiaux. I'm the girlfriend. [laughs]

ALAN LUNDGARD: You're the star of the show!

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Oh, that is ...

LULU: When we come back, Emilie's story continues.

LULU: Lulu. Radiolab. We are following the story of Emilie Gossiaux. And a few years after her accident, from her emergence from the wall that her mind was trapped in, we followed up with her. And we'll call this part Part Two: Walking Fishes.

JAD: Of all the stories we've ever done, I think this one has gotten the most response. And when we left that story, Emilie had emerged from the coma and begun to recover, but she was blind.

JAD: Totally blind, right?

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Yeah.

JAD: And, like, no light, any—nothing coming in.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: No.

JAD: Okay.

JAD: Needless to say, it was a very big adjustment.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: I just know—I just had to develop my own ways to navigate throughout the world and trust myself, and ...

JAD: And being a visual artist, she had to develop new ways to draw.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: I had crayons. And if you draw with crayons hard enough, you can feel the wax on the paper. Yeah.

JAD: But then one day in the summer of 2012, she gets a call.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: From the Lighthouse School in New York City.

JAD: The Lighthouse School?

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Yeah, it's a school for the blind.

JAD: Her mom had found out that they were trying out this brand new technology.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: I think they were doing this study for the FDA.

JAD: Very experimental. And her mom signed her up. Long story short, Emilie shows up at the Lighthouse School one day and walks into this room, and a guy named Ed gives her this thing.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: He gives me the device.

JAD: Can you describe it? I mean, is it a big helmet or ...

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: No, it's not. It's just like a regular pair of sunglasses.

JAD: Though they were a little heavier than your normal sunglasses she says, because right on the front, like on the bridge of the nose, was a little camera pointing forward.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: And then attached to the sunglasses was a little wire ...

JAD: That ran out of the camera and down to this little square piece of metal.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: I think it's made out of titanium, and it's just like the size of a postage stamp, or a little bit thicker, though.

JAD: Ed explained to her that that little piece of titanium was filled with thousands of electrodes. And what was gonna happen is that the camera was gonna convert images into patterns of electricity on that little square. So he told her to take the little square ...

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Place it on your tongue ...

JAD: Put it right on the center of your tongue ...

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: ... and close your mouth. So I put it on, and they turned it on, and it was like it started to tickle. Imagine a lot of Coca-Cola. Like, a lot of bubbles on your tongue, and always, like, prickly, prickly feelings.

JAD: The idea behind this thing, according to science writer Sam Kean ...

SAM KEAN: Author of The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons.

JAD: ... is that we actually see with our brain, not our eyes. I mean, it might seem like our eyes are doing the seeing and our ears are doing the hearing and our fingers and the tongue are doing the tasting and the touching, but that's actually not how it works. Each of our senses sends signals into the brain as electricity.

SAM KEAN: As little blips on nerves.

JAD: And it is the brain that then converts those little blips into what you perceive as a sight or a sound or a smell. Now obviously, someone who is blind, their retina is not sending those signals anymore. But what if there is another way to get signals for light and dark and color into our brains?

SAM KEAN: In all of our brains there are lots and lots of pathways going from every part of the brain to every other part of the brain. And normally, your brain isn't using those pathways, even though they exist. It's like there's a road there but it's shut down and traffic can't be on it. But ...

JAD: What if you could open up some of those routes?

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: He just let me sit with it on for an hour or two hours.

JAD: Emilie says at first she had no idea what was happening. She would just swivel her head around and feel the patterns on her tongue change.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: And every time I looked around he'd say, "Oh, that's a chair. That's a door. That's me. That's your mom." [laughs]

JAD: And it went on like this for a while. Ed showed her a ball and a square ...

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: A plastic banana.

JAD: And nothing was really happening for her except for the prickly feelings on her tongue. But then there was this moment.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Ed had this really long styrofoam rod and he flashed it in front of me. He moved it up and down in front of my face. And I was like, "Oh my God, what was that?"

JAD: Suddenly, she says, she just saw it.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: I was like, "Oh my God!" [laughs] It just happened on its own.

JAD: What did it look like?

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: And so in my mind's eye, it looked like a long white skinny stick.

JAD: Could you see the texture of the stick? Or ...

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: No, I couldn't see texture. I couldn't see in three dimensions. It was very flat. It was kind of like that kid's toy Lite-Brite?

JAD: Yeah.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: So imagine, like, a black screen and little tiny white dots.

JAD: All arranged in a line. So Emilie was allowed to keep the brain port device for about a year-and-a-half, and during that time the Lite-Brite resolution of it did get better as her brain learned to speak tongue.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: It was awesome. When I saw the people moving ...

JAD: And one of the things that really struck me in our conversation was I asked her about this video that her mom had sent me showing her wearing the device and walking down the street. And she told me that usually, you know, now that she's blind, when she's walking down the streets of New York City ...

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Especially Uptown where the streets are a lot wider.

JAD: ... she says people see her and her white cane and walk a really wide circle around her.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: So I—yeah, I hardly ever notice other people walking around me. It feels like I'm just walking alone. I can always hear the traffic and the sounds of traffic, but not other people.

JAD: But she says when she put the device on and put that little sensor on her tongue, the sidewalk came alive!

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: I thought it was amazing. Like, I didn't know that this many people were on the street at the same time as me. And now they're all—they're all there again.

JAD: But she described them in a way that sounded almost like a painting.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Like really soft blotches. Everything was really soft. Like, soft blotches of ink that could move. They're walking, and I could see their legs moving and I could see them—their gait, but I couldn't see them clearly. Like, I couldn't see their features or whether they were wearing a shirt or shorts or a dress or pants. I just, like, see their shadows. And every now and then I see the light casted on them.

JAD: Really?

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Yeah.

JAD: I would imagine somehow like underwater creatures?

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Uh-huh?

JAD: Squishy, jellyfish-like?

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Yeah. Yeah, like lighting up. Yeah like that.

JAD: And that, for Emilie, is what it's like to translate the city with your tongue. New York City becomes this hazy sea of walking fish that make their way along in the sunshine.

LULU: It's been a full decade since that last update with Emilie, and she has been busy. She completed an MFA program at Yale, and the artworks she's been making have been shown in museums and galleries across the world, including an exhibit that just opened at the Queens Museum in New York City. We sent producer Sindhu Gnanasambandan to Emilie's home ...

SINDHU GNANASAMBANDAN: Hello!

LULU: ... in the Upper East Side.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Hi!

SINDHU: Emilie, hi!

LULU: Where she lives with ...

KIRBY THOMAS KERSELS: Kirby

LULU: ... her partner, Kirby.

KIRBY THOMAS KERSELS: Nice to meet you.

LULU: And London, her guide dog.

SINDHU: Well, let me take my shoes off.

LULU: To talk with Emilie about what's been on her mind, her tongue, her heart these days.

SINDHU: So, like, in the second episode, it was about that, like, sunglass, like, tongue device.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: I haven't used that in years, but it was fun to experiment with.

SINDHU: Was there a reason you stopped using it?

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: I just found that drawing with my hands, tactile drawings was a lot easier and more freeing than trying to, like, look at something through my tongue. [laughs]

SINDHU: [laughs]

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: You know? So—and sometimes it would give me headaches, too. It just was too slow for me, and yeah.

SINDHU: Is there any other tools that are helpful to you in your art-making process?

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: I have a rubber pad, a drawing board. So when I place my paper over the rubber padding and I draw into it using a ballpoint pen, the lines of my drawing will pop up. And so I'm tracing the line of my drawing with my left hand as I draw with my right hand. And so I can—I feel like I'm looking, I can see what I'm drawing as I'm feeling it.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: I color all my drawings using Crayola crayons, and I was able to organize them by putting each crayon into their own separate envelope that I put a Braille label on so that I can pick and choose which colors I want to use. But before that, I had created a colors journal with these Crayola crayons, and I asked Kirby to describe each color to me and then I associated that color to a memory. That way I'm able to clearly visualize the Crayola colors I'm using.

SINDHU: Do you have that with you?

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: I do. Do you know where it is, Kirby, my colors journal?

KIRBY THOMAS KERSELS: I'm gonna look to see if it's here.

SINDHU: I mean, that's just amazing. So it's just like memories connected to each color? Or each color has a memory and there's how many of them?

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: In my journal I have 90 records.

SINDHU: Oh my gosh, wow! Okay, here's the journal. It's like this little gray book.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Which one?

SINDHU: Okay, Denim is the Crayola name, and then it says "Milkmaid."

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Oh. Sorry, the Crayola crayon is named Denim, and the—my memory of Milkmaid, the Vermeer painting. And she's wearing this blue blouse over her dress, and it was just the most beautiful blue I can remember seeing.

SINDHU: Okay, I'll just do a couple more. Above I think it says, like, "Leeloo Dallas?" Is it Dallas?

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Oh my God! [laughs] One of my favorite movies was The Fifth Element.

SINDHU: Okay.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: And so Leeloo Dallas is the main character in this movie, and she has really awesome orange hair.

SINDHU: [laughs]

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: [laughs]

SINDHU: When you say that, do you see that mullet in your head?

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Yes. [laughs]

SINDHU: And I guess you see Sunset Orange orange?

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

SINDHU: This time I'm gonna read the memory and then you can tell me the color. "My hair, summer 2005."

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Oh, that's Midnight Blue. Yeah.

SINDHU: Does your experience of being in the wall ever show up in your work?

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Um, no. No, not at all.

SINDHU: So is that a period of time where you don't really make art about it?

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Oh no. No, I never make art about it. No.

SINDHU: Why?

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: It's just I feel like I really just want to leave it all behind. Yeah, right now my work is really centered around memories and dreams, and also the intersectionality of the experience of disabled people and animals. And it also focuses on love and intimacy and co-partnerships.

SINDHU: I'd love to talk about your exhibit at the Queens Museum.

LULU: All right. I'm gonna just cut in here for a second to describe Emilie's most recent exhibit, which is currently at the Queens Museum in New York City. You can go check it out. And so you walk into this room, and there are these three big white dogs standing on their hind legs. They're made out of papier-mâché, and each one of them is holding a leash up in their paw that's connected to this walking stick, this giant walking stick that they're all sort of dancing around, almost like a maypole.

LULU: And at their feet are all these papier-mâché flowers in red and magenta and pink. And around them are these giant papier-mâché trees. And the whole thing is called Other-Worlding.

SINDHU: What does this show mean for you?

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: The show to me is a celebration of my relationship with London. London and I have been working together for over a decade. The three sculptures of London are human-scale. We kind of took dimensions from my body and London's body and meshed them together. There's London.

SINDHU: There is London! Tell me more about London. Like ...

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Yeah. London is a blond English Labrador, and she is 13-and-a-half years old. She's my first guide dog and, you know, she changed my life in many ways. When we're together I feel like we become this superorganism. In some ways, she and I are going back and forth between, you know, a maternal and, like, a spousal relationship. It's a relationship built on interdependence.

SINDHU: I'm curious, like, what specific moments you can think of with London that really inspired this piece.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Mm-hmm. In the beginning of our relationship when we were just starting to bond together, which is a really important process of your relationship with your guide dog is the bonding. I would turn on music, London would prance around me, wagging her tail. And I'd hold my arms out to her and she'd jump up and put her paws in my hands, and we'd kind of like stomp around to the music together. [laughs]

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: So in a way I feel like what really carried me through all these years is these foundations of love that I've had from my partner of London and Kirby.

SINDHU: London and Kirby. Yeah.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Kirby and London, you know? [laughs] If you want to make it in alphabetical order.

KIRBY THOMAS KERSELS: London and Kirby, for sure.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: We're a team.

LULU: All right. That'll do it for today. Thank you so much for tuning in. We'll be back in two weeks with more. Bye!

[LISTENER: Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Sarah Qari, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton. Let's go! Yeah! I always wanted to do those.]

[LISTENER: Hi, I'm Erica in Yonkers. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]

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