Feb 21, 2019
Transcript
[RADIOLAB INTRO]
ROBERT KRULWICH: So the—I guess our first question is, like, what—what conceivable set of circumstances led to you doing what you did?
KURT BRAUNOHLER: I just thought it would be a weird thing to do.
KRISTEN SCHAAL: Yeah.
KURT BRAUNOHLER: Yeah. It's like, well, that would be weird. We don't know if it's funny, but we try it out. So ...
KRISTEN SCHAAL: Yeah. Is it going to be weird? We'll do it.
KURT BRAUNOHLER: Yeah. Is it going to alienate half the audience? Yeah.
KURT BRAUNOHLER: Let's do it.
KRISTEN SCHAAL: Let's do it!
[ARCHIVE CLIP: audience cheers]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Kristen Schall: Thank you so much.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Kurt Braunohler: You are so ...]
JAD ABUMRAD: Okay. Wait, just to send things up.
ROBERT: I think you'd better.
JAD: Those two people that you just heard.
KRISTEN SCHAAL: Kristen Schaal.
KURT BRAUNOHLER: And Kurt Braunohler.
JAD: They are comedians.
KRISTEN SCHAAL: He’s good.
KURT BRAUNOHLER: That's it.
JAD: And we first heard about the bit you're about to hear from Jesse Thorn.
JESSE THORN: Yes.
JAD: The host of The Sound of Young America.
JESSE THORN: Yes.
JAD: Great show.
JAD: Are you rolling over there, Jesse?
JESSE THORN: No, let me record you. Okay.
JESSE THORN: Checking my phone. Okay. Yeah, I'm rolling.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Kristen Schaal: Thank you so much.]
ROBERT: So you set it up. When Kurt and Kristen walk on stage, what happened?
JESSE THORN: Well, there's a couple of jokes up top. You know, they joke about this TV show that they hosted in the '70s.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Kristen Schaal: It was called Uncle Ben's Farmyard Courthouse.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Kurt Braunohler: And it explained the American judicial system using a courthouse made completely of animals.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Kristen Schaal: Yeah, it was canceled immediately.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Kurt Braunohler: Yeah, I think that was ...]
JESSE THORN: And so the audience is kind of laughing at the jokes, thinking like, "Oh, this is going to be a regular comedy sketch."
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Kristen Schaal: So, we're going to do a sketch from it tonight.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Kurt Braunohler: All right.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Kristen Schaal: Okay?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Kurt Braunohler: Okay.]
JESSE THORN: And then they go into this song ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Kurt Braunohler: Oh, Kristen Schaal is a horse. Kristen Schaal is a horse. Look at her dance, like a—look at her go like a—look at her dance like a horse. Oh, Kristen Schaal is a horse. Kristen Schaal is a horse. Look at her dance, like a—look at her go like a, look at her dance like a horse. Oh, Kristen Schaal is a horse ...]
JESSE THORN: Kurt does this maniacal singing and clapping and Kristen is doing this horsey dance. [laughs]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Kurt Braunohler: Look at her dance like a horse. Oh, Kristen Schaal is a horse. Kristen Schaal is a horse. Look at her dance, like a—look at her go like a—look at her dance like a horse. Oh ...]
JAD: He just keeps going.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Kurt Braunohler: Kristen Schaal is a horse. Kristen Schaal is a horse. Look at her dance, like a—look at her go like a—look at her dance like a horse. Kristen Schaal is a horse. Kristen Schaal is a horse. Look at her dance, like a—look at her go like a—look at her dance like a horse. Kristen Schaal is a horse. Kristen Schaal is a horse. Look at her dance, like a—look at her go like a—look at her dance like a horse. Kristen Schaal is a horse. Kristen Schaal is a horse. Look at her dance, like a—look at her go like a—look at her dance like a horse.]
ROBERT: How much longer can you do that for?
JAD: And, like, why?
KRISTEN SCHAAL: Repetition, Jad.
KURT BRAUNOHLER: I mean, like, when we do it, we, it's like, after the third repetition,
people are laughing. They get it like, oh, they're just gonna do that.
KRISTEN SCHAAL: Over and over.
KURT BRAUNOHLER: And then somewhere around like, for, around the fourth time.
KRISTEN SCHAAL: Then it's not, it's really not funny.
KURT BRAUNOHLER: It's really not funny.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Kurt Braunohler: Look at her dance like, look at her go like ...]
KRISTEN SCHAAL: The audience is quiet. They're like, I'm done with this.
KURT BRAUNOHLER: I'm done, I don't wanna watch this anymore.
JESSE THORN: Why are they still doing it? And then ...
KURT BRAUNOHLER: And then that changes to actual hatred. And they're like, you stupid people. You two stupid people. But somewhere between like, nine and eleven, then they—then they're like, "I like these stupid people!"
KRISTEN SCHAAL: They're so stupid. And then they're like, "Ah."
JESSE THORN: Then you get this next level, which is, they can't continue doing this. And then they do continue doing it ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Kurt Braunohler: Look at her go like a—look at her dance like a horse. Oh, Kristen Schaal is a horse. Kristen Schaal is a horse. Look at her dance, like a—look at her go like a—look at her dance like a ...]
JESSE THORN: Like, they really—their eyes are starting to cross.
KURT BRAUNOHLER: By that point, I'm dripping sweat. Kristen's angry that I've gone that long.
KRISTEN SCHAAL: I'm just like [singing] looking at you, looking at you.
JESSE THORN: I mean, you can hear Kurt in that thing, like, losing track of the song
because he's going into some kind of fugue state.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Kurt Braunohler: Look at her dance, like a—look at her go like a—look at her dance like a horse!]
KURT BRAUNOHLER: I've had her on stage whisper, "Stop it!"
KRISTEN SCHAAL: Yeah. I'm up here working my ass off!
JESSE THORN: [laughing] This is maybe my favorite thing in the history of the world. What I love about it is that your brain is trying to make it into what you want it to be, which is a joke, but there is no joke happening. And so what these two people are doing is creating the expectation
that the expectation is going to be broken, but then breaking that expectation that the expectation is going to be broken by just delivering the thing that they've been delivering over and over for the past 10 minutes.
JAD: What's the longest you've taken it?
KRISTEN SCHAAL: 10 minutes in Australia, because you were drunk.
KURT BRAUNOHLER: Yeah, it seemed like—it seemed like 10 minutes. We can't be sure if it was 10 minutes. It seems like there's no way it's 10 minutes.
KRISTEN SCHAAL: I will tell you what, it was 10 minutes. And the audience went crazy.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Laguardia Arts High School singers: Kristen Schaal is a horse. Kristen Schaal is a horse. Look at her dance. Look at her go. Look at her dance like a horse.]
JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.
ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.
JAD: This is Radiolab, and today ...
ROBERT: Today it's all about ...
JAD: Loops.
ROBERT: Things that happen over ...
JAD: ... and over ...
ROBERT: ... and over ...
JAD: ... and over ...
ROBERT: ... and over ...
JAD: ... and over ...
ROBERT: ... and over ...
JAD: ... and over. Coming up. Loops that hurt you ...
ROBERT: Strange ...
JAD: ... loops that heal you ...
ROBERT: Dangerous loops ...
JAD: Loops that scare you ...
ROBERT: Loops.
JAD: ... and loops that eat you.
ROBERT: And loops that incomplete you.
JAD: What?
ROBERT: Shh.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Laguardia Arts High School singers: Kristen Schaal is a horse.]
ROBERT: So where—where are you guys? What—what ...
CHRISTINE CAMPBELL: We're in San Francisco.
ROBERT: You're in San Francisco, so you're not in Texas.
MARY SUE CAMPBELL: No, just sounds like we're in Texas.
CHRISTINE CAMPBELL: Yeah, she's from Texas, so ...
ROBERT: Oh.
JAD: Can you guys actually just, if you don't mind, introduce yourselves so we know—just, we have your name and all that.
MARY SUE CAMPBELL: Sure, I'm Mary Sue Campbell. I live in Novato, California. And my daughter, Christine, is ...
CHRISTINE CAMPBELL: 30 years old, I live in San Francisco, and I was raised in Novato in the house that said this would happen, so ...
ROBERT: Shall we begin?
MARY SUE CAMPBELL: Okay.
ROBERT: Tell me the beginning, how this story starts.
CHRISTINE CAMPBELL: From the beginning.
MARY SUE CAMPBELL: I think I—I—it was odd, Christine actually called me Tuesday morning, about ten o'clock, and just said, "Oh, what are you doing, Mom?" And I said, "Oh, I'm just gonna go out in the yard and do some yard work and run some errands." And she said, "Well, you oughta do the yard work early because it's gonna be hot today."
JAD: So we're in the—we’re in the summertime.
MARY SUE CAMPBELL: It was summertime, yeah. It was August. August 24, and apparently, what, 10 minutes later?
CHRISTINE CAMPBELL: About half an hour later.
MARY SUE CAMPBELL: Half hour later, she said I called her.
CHRISTINE CAMPBELL: She had left me a voicemail, something like, "Hey, Christine, it's Mom, something is—something's not right, something's wrong, I need you to call me back." So I gave her a call back, and she said, "Something about the house isn't right, there's—things look weird in here." Well, what's weird, what are you talking about? And then she said, "Well, I'm looking at the calendar, and it says August 2010," and I'm like, "Uh-huh?" And she's like, "Well, that's not right." And I said, "Well, yes, it is. It's August 24, 2010." And as soon as I said that out loud, I grabbed my purse to leave. "Oh my God, she's had a stroke." That was my—my—my first reaction, and, oh, that makes me feel emotional. And so ...
ROBERT: Christine says she walked out of her house to the car, keeping her mom on the phone.
CHRISTINE CAMPBELL: "What else do you see?" I'm just trying to keep her talking to me.
ROBERT: All the while, her mom's telling her one thing after another just doesn't look right.
CHRISTINE CAMPBELL: She says there's a strange black truck on the driveway, which is the truck that belongs to her boyfriend that has been parked there for 10 years.
ROBERT: Whoa.
CHRISTINE CAMPBELL: So I'm, of course, increasingly—I mean, I'm just freaking out at this point.
ROBERT: So she hangs up with her mom and then calls the paramedics, and a half hour later, Christine arrives at the hospital.
CHRISTINE CAMPBELL: By the time I walked in, she had been there for five or ten minutes at the most, and as soon as I walked in, the doctor greeted me and said ...
JONATHAN VLAHOS: I said ...
ROBERT: This is her doctor, Jonathan Vlahos.
JONATHAN VLAHOS: Christine, it's immediately evident it's not a stroke, not an infection.
CHRISTINE CAMPBELL: That's—that's a huge relief.
JONATHAN VLAHOS: But I said ...
CHRISTINE CAMPBELL: Your mother has transient global amnesia.
JONATHAN VLAHOS: Transient global.
ROBERT: Transient global ...
JAD: How did those words hit you?
CHRISTINE CAMPBELL: I'll be honest with you, I had no idea what that meant. I think the word I heard the most was 'amnesia.'
JONATHAN VLAHOS: Your mother has lost her ability to form new memories.
CHRISTINE CAMPBELL: Means she can't remember.
JONATHAN VLAHOS: But ...
CHRISTINE CAMPBELL: He said it's not going to last forever. It usually lasts between one and 24 hours, and we're not sure what causes it.
JAD: And it's at this point where the story goes from something kind of frightening to something a little more surreal.
CHRISTINE CAMPBELL: Yeah, so when I came in.
JAD: Her mother is sitting up in bed.
CHRISTINE CAMPBELL: She's a smiler. And she immediately started asking questions.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mary Sue Campbell: Okay, so what's the date?]
CHRISTINE CAMPBELL: And I said, "Well, it's ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Christine Campbell: Tuesday, August 24.]
CHRISTINE CAMPBELL: And of course, we have a video on YouTube of this.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mary Sue Campbell: My birthday's already passed?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Christine Campbell: Yep.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mary Sue Campbell: I don’t even remember if I remember that? I'm trying to remember the last date I remember. I don't remember my birthday.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Christine Campbell: Yeah. We hung out. You came over to my house,
and we watched a video that I made for you when I was in Texas. And all of your sisters and some of your brothers said happy birthday to you on the video. Yeah, but we still have the video so you can watch it again. But you're gonna remember eventually. They say it's just temporary.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mary Sue Campbell: Where was I? Was it at home?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Christine Campbell: You were at home, yep. You were at home doing some gardening, and you called me and you were feeling confused. So you called the paramedics, had them come and get you, and then we came here and did a bunch of tests on you.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mary Sue Campbell: Okay, so what's the date?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Christine Campbell: August 24. It's Tuesday.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mary Sue Campbell: I'm trying to remember the last date I remember. I mean, I don't remember my birthday just recently.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Christine Campbell: You don't remember your birthday, yeah.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mary Sue Campbell: Yeah, that must've just been recently.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Christine Campbell: Yeah, a couple weeks ago.]
JAD: Now, you might've missed it, but this conversation they're having just started over.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mary Sue Campbell: Since August?]
JAD: Because every 90 seconds, Mary Sue's memory resets.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Christine Campbell: August 24.]
JAD: But what's strange is the repetition. Like, we started that last clip you heard with her saying this.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mary Sue Campbell: I'm trying to remember the last date I remember.]
JAD: 90 seconds later, after her memory resets, she says.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mary Sue Campbell: I'm trying to remember the last date I remember.]
JAD: "90 seconds later."
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mary Sue Campbell: I'm trying to remember the last date I remember.]
JAD: And as you watch this video for a few minutes, you realize what's happening here is that Mary Sue ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Christine Campbell: You remember what day of the week it is?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mary Sue Campbell: No.]
JAD: Is in a loop. And it goes like this. First, the date.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mary Sue Campbell: Okay, so what's the date?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Christine Campbell: August 24.]
JONATHAN VLAHOS:She then responds in almost the same way every time.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mary Sue Campbell: My birthday has already passed?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Christine Campbell: Yep.]
JONATHAN VLAHOS:She's missed her birthday.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mary Sue Campbell: It's already after my birthday.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Christine Campbell: Yep.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mary Sue Campbell: Darn.]
JAD: And every time she says that, "Darn," in exactly the same way. If you fast forward ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mary Sue Campbell: It's already past my birthday, though?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Christine Campbell: Yep.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mary Sue Campbell: Oh, darn.]
JONATHAN VLAHOS: She must enjoy her birthday quite a bit.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Christine Campbell: You're gonna remember it eventually.]
JAD: Then she laughs.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mary Sue Campbell: What happened?]
JAD: Then they recap.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Christine Campbell: You were working in the garden, and you gave me a call.]
JAD: Christine explains the whole thing, and it's usually when she says the word paramedics ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Christine Campbell: So we called the paramedics.]
JAD: ... right there ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Christine Campbell: And had them come and pick you up.]
JAD: ... that Mary Sue's eyes get really wide in this look of sheer utter disbelief.
MARY SUE CAMPBELL: Yes.
CHRISTINE CAMPBELL: Yeah.
MARY SUE CAMPBELL: Isn't that creepy? I mean, every single time I watch this.
JAD: And you say that over and over.
CHRISTINE CAMPBELL: Yeah, I was just gonna say.
JAD: You say, "Isn't that creepy?"
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mary Sue Campbell: This is creepy!]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Christine Campbell: I know.]
JAD: 90 seconds later.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mary Sue Campbell: It's so creepy.]
JAD: 90 seconds later.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mary Sue Campbell: It's so creepy.]
JAD: And it's often at this point, right after "creepy", that she resets.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mary Sue Campbell: Okay, so I don't know what day of the week it is.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Christine Campbell: It's Tuesday.]
MARY SUE CAMPBELL: Like somebody put it on rewind.
JONATHAN VLAHOS: Over and over and over again.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mary Sue Campbell: Is it after my birthday?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Christine Campbell: Yes.]
MARY SUE CAMPBELL: I'd repeated the birthday so much that the nurse apparently was behind me mouthing the words.
CHRISTINE CAMPBELL: Yeah.
MARY SUE CAMPBELL: Oh, did I miss my birthday?
CHRISTINE CAMPBELL: Yeah.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Christine Campbell: Girl, it's like Groundhog's Day in here.]
MARY SUE CAMPBELL: Yep, Groundhog's Day.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Christine Campbell: This is like every two minutes. We're doing a loop.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mary Sue Campbell: We ask the same thing again?
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Christine Campbell: Yes, we do. We have had the same conversation over and over again every two minutes for the last two and a half hours.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mary Sue Campbell: Oh my gosh. Two and a half hours? Get out of here.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Christine Campbell: Yes, I know.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mary Sue Campbell: Same thing?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Christine Campbell: Same thing.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mary Sue Campbell: Two and a half hours?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Christine Campbell: Yeah, we can't seem to talk about anything else. That is what we're talking about today.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mary Sue Campbell: What day of the week is it?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Christine Campbell: Tuesday, August 24. You didn't miss it. You were there.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mary Sue Campbell: Oh.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Christine Campbell: Yeah.]
MARY SUE CAMPBELL: Watching it, I wanted to slap me, you know? I wanted to reach out and slap me and say, "Damn it, I just told you that."
CHRISTINE CAMPBELL: For the record, I would never slap my mother.
MARY SUE CAMPBELL: No, she would not. No, she would not.
ROBERT: Okay, so our big question here is, clearly this is a person who's lost her memory,
but why would her behavior from one cycle to the next be so precisely and consistently the same? I mean, sometimes exactly the same.
JAD: Yeah, why?
MARY SUE CAMPBELL: I—I think what it is is one of the things the nurses said is that when you have something like this, your true self comes out.
ROBERT: Huh.
JAD: "Your true—" the word true is interesting.
CHRISTINE CAMPBELL: Yeah. Yeah.
JAD: So is that what we're seeing on the video, is that—your true person—your true self?
CHRISTINE CAMPBELL: Oh yeah, I mean, that's my mom through and through right there. I mean, she's ...
JAD: What Christine means is not the repetition, but that her mom keeps asking so many questions.
CHRISTINE CAMPBELL: She's inquisitive, she just wants to know what's going on with all—you know, across the board.
MARY SUE CAMPBELL: I love problems, I love puzzles.
JAD: Are you like a Sudoku fiend?
MARY SUE CAMPBELL: You know, I am—I am—I hate to admit this.
CHRISTINE CAMPBELL: Oh God.
MARY SUE CAMPBELL: I play escape room games on the internet.
JAD: Escape room, what are those?
MARY SUE CAMPBELL: They're stupid little games where they have little hidden pixels that you find—you're stuck in a room and you have to get out. You've got to find the key to the door and there's all these little hidden places.
ROBERT: Oh, this is the perfect metaphor then.
MARY SUE CAMPBELL: Oh yeah.
CHRISTINE CAMPBELL: Yeah. I was my own escape room.
MARY SUE CAMPBELL: [laughs] Exactly.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mary Sue Campbell: Do you remember what day of the week it is?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Christine Campbell: No.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mary Sue Campbell: It’s Tuesday.]
JAD: But there's a different way of seeing this. First of all, Jonathan Vlahos, that ER doctor
who's seen a bunch of these cases, he said, well, that puzzler instinct, that's not just Mary Sue.
JONATHAN VLAHOS: What everybody does is struggle over and over again with where am I and when am I?
JAD: It's just a brain in survival mode. And another thing that everybody does, and he's seen about six of these patients so far, is that everybody, not just Mary Sue, but everybody becomes ...
JONATHAN VLAHOS: A broken record right down to the—the phrasing of the sentences.
JAD: Which creeps him out a little bit.
JONATHAN VLAHOS: It—it—you know, it makes the brain seem a little bit more like a machine. You know, you give the machine the exact same set of inputs.
JAD: Every 90 seconds, give it the same doctor, the same hospital room, same beeping machines.
JONATHAN VLAHOS: And see if the output ever varies. And ...
JAD: It doesn't.
JONATHAN VLAHOS: It almost seems like the patient has no free will.
JAD: And so sometimes, in the back of his head, he thinks, God, if I had that condition and someone videotaped me ...
JONATHAN VLAHOS: I would love to see—see my own tape.
ROBERT: Why?
JONATHAN VLAHOS: You know, I think I wanna see could I somehow escape the loop? Or would I—would I end up with the rest of us?
JAD: Now, thankfully, according to Jonathan, what normally happens in this condition is that as time goes on ...
JONATHAN VLAHOS: ... that 90 second loop ...
JAD: ... starts to slowly expand.
JONATHAN VLAHOS: It's actually more like two minutes or three minutes.
JAD: Eventually, four minutes.
JONATHAN VLAHOS: Now it's five minutes.
JAD: And for Mary Sue, after a few hours, as her loop got longer and longer, her old memories start to creep back in.
CHRISTINE CAMPBELL: By that evening, she was remembering up until, like, that Sunday.
JAD: A few hours later, her memory began to extend into Monday morning.
CHRISTINE CAMPBELL: And by the time we left the hospital, she remembered Monday night.
JAD: And then, finally ...
ROBERT: Shall we begin?
MARY SUE CAMPBELL: Okay.
ROBERT: Tell me the begin—how the story starts.
CHRISTINE CAMPBELL: From the beginning.
MARY SUE CAMPBELL: Well, I think—it was odd, Christine actually called me Tuesday morning about ten o'clock and just said, "Oh, what are you doing, Mom?" And apparently, what, 10 minutes later, about half an hour later, she said I could, she said I could ...
ROBERT: I'm Robert Kruwich.
JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.
ROBERT: And we'll be right back.
[ANSWERING MACHINE: Message one.]
[KURT BRAUNOHLER: This is Kurt Braunohler. And these are the words you've told me to read. Radiolab is funded in part by Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world.]
[CHRISTINE CAMPBELL: Hi, my name is Christine Campbell.]
[MARY SUE CAMPBELL: This is Mary Sue Campbell.]
[CHRISTINE CAMPBELL: Here we go.]
[MARY SUE CAMPBELL: More information about Sloan at www ...]
[KURT BRAUNOHLER: Sloan.org.]
[CHRISTINE CAMPBELL: Thanks.]
[KURT BRAUNOHLER: Hope that was dumb enough for you.]
[ANSWERING MACHINE: End of message.]
JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.
ROBERT: And I'm Robert Krulwich.
JAD: This is Radiolab and this hour we're talking about ...
ROBERT: Loops.
JAD: Loops.
ROBERT: Loops.
JAD: Loops.
ALEX BELLOS: Okay.
JAD: Loops.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Laguardia Arts High School singers: Something in nothing, nothing in something. Something in nothing, nothing in something.]
ROBERT: Here's one for you.
ALEX BELLOS: I mean, zero is the obvious loop and its loop shape is part of why zero is zero.
JAD: Who's this?
ROBERT: This is Alex Bellos.
ALEX BELLOS: And I'm the author of Here's Looking at Euclid. When I was a kid, I used to think, oh zero, it's just like a hole with nothing in it. But actually zero was chosen by the Indians as kind of reflecting the eternal cycles of the faces of heaven.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Laguardia Arts High School singers: Something in nothing ...]
ALEX BELLOS: The Romans and the Greeks and the—and the Jews, we didn't have a zero. We just had, you know, start, everything started at one. And one reason why we didn't is that we were kind of afraid of the void.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Laguardia Arts High School singers: The void ...]
JAD: Afraid of the void? What, like the ...
ROBERT: Well, I mean, how would you describe something ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Laguardia Arts High School singers: Something.]
ROBERT: ... that isn't there?
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Laguardia Arts High School singers: Nothing.]
ROBERT: There's nothing to say.
JAD: And that's scary somehow?
ROBERT: Yeah, it's an emptiness and a nothingness and it means you're so alone, you don't even know where you are.
ALEX BELLOS: And so this sort of was a psychological barrier to us grasping this zero. But in India, everything and nothing was the same thing. They had this very sort of fluidity and they grasped this idea that nothingness was something.
ROBERT: And oddly enough, the way they decided to represent the nothing was they—they took a little piece of nothing and they drew a circle around it, which turns the nothing into a something.
ALEX BELLOS: And it's a loop.
ROBERT: And it's a loop.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Laguardia Arts High School singers: Something in nothing, nothing in something, something in nothing.]
ALEX BELLOS: So this idea of eternity and continuity and infinity is actually contained with the—our numeral for zero.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Laguardia Arts High School singers: God.]
ALEX BELLOS: I mean, I kind of love the idea that actually here is kind of the most mystical,
kind of magical, spiritual digit of them all. You know, and it's—we use it every day.
WILLIAM BASINSKI: See. You rolling?
MARK PHILLIPS: Yeah.
WILLIAM BASINSKI: So here's two of the workhorses. These are like my old ...
JAD: Next up, a story from reporter Mark Phillips.
MARK PHILLIPS: All right.
WILLIAM BASINSKI: As you can see here, there's all these containers of tape loops.
JAD: Okay, so set this up. Who is this guy?
MARK PHILLIPS: His name's William Basinski. He's a musician who makes this
really hard to describe music. He's been doing it for about 30 years. And basically what he does is he takes a little bit of classical music or muzak, records it onto tape, analog tape ...
WILLIAM BASINSKI: This might be terrible.
MARK PHILLIPS: ... and he loops it.
WILLIAM BASINSKI: See if I can find something from the ...
MARK PHILLIPS: He cuts the beginning, the end, tapes it together into a circle, threads it through a tape machine, messes with the speeds. And you get something that sounds like this. This little phrase that just repeats ...
WILLIAM BASINSKI: ... over and over and over again.
MARK PHILLIPS: And never changes.
WILLIAM BASINSKI: You know, loops are everywhere. They're cycles. They're in nature. They're just universal. And if you can find a loop that can repeat without becoming redundant, then you can sort of fall into a different space and time even. Sort of like a bubble of eternity or something. I don't know.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, William Basinski: So that's what that sounds like.]
WILLIAM BASINSKI: Well, in the summer of 2001, I was archiving all these old tape loops, transferring them to digital. And something kind of weird happened.
MARK PHILLIPS: He grabbed this one piece of tape ...
WILLIAM BASINSKI: ... put it on. And it was this wonderful, grave, very stately loop I'd totally forgotten about. And I set it up and turned on the CD burner and left the control room, went to the kitchen, got some coffee, and came back and I started realizing something was changing. I looked and I could see that the tape was shredding.
MARK PHILLIPS: The thing to understand about tape is that when you record music onto analog tape, onto a bit of it, that music ...
WILLIAM BASINSKI: What it is is it's iron oxide powder glued to just a piece of plastic.
JAD: So the iron powder is actually the music.
MARK PHILLIPS: Yeah.
WILLIAM BASINSKI: But after 20, 30 years ...
MARK PHILLIPS: The glue loses its strength ...
WILLIAM BASINSKI: ... and the dust falls off ...
MARK PHILLIPS: ... onto the floor.
JAD: His music was actually falling on the floor?
MARK PHILLIPS: Yeah.
WILLIAM BASINSKI: And I thought, oh my God, what's going to happen? And what happened was, in the course of about an hour ...
MARK PHILLIPS: ... the music disintegrated. And you put more loops on and it kept happening. But the really interesting thing was, while some disintegrated quickly, some slowly, they all sort of had the same pattern.
JAD: What do you mean?
MARK PHILLIPS: Just listen to this one. So this is one of his loops at the beginning.
JAD: Okay.
MARK PHILLIPS: And after it went around and around for 20 minutes or so, the dust started to fall off, and then it sounded like this. All the—all the notes are still there, but the tails ...
JAD: ... they're getting shorter.
WILLIAM BASINSKI:
MARK PHILLIPS: And that's what would always happen.
WILLIAM BASINSKI: The sustains and decays of the notes seem to fall away, like from the back, moving backwards. Backwards.
MARK PHILLIPS: It gets shorter and shorter. Instead of being held for four seconds, it's held for three seconds. Two seconds. And finally, you just really hear ...
WILLIAM BASINSKI: ... like the attacks and the accents.
MARK PHILLIPS: Just the beginnings of the notes. Only the beginning.
WILLIAM BASINSKI: Those seemed to hold on ...
MARK PHILLIPS: ... at least for a little while.
WILLIAM BASINSKI: I was thinking, wow, this is like, I'm recording the life and death of a melody. It just made me think of human beings, you know, and how we die.
MARK PHILLIPS: You can really hear the disintegration on this particular loop. I think this was number five. It starts sounding like the rest, like this. But after just 15 minutes, it's basically completely gone. And the tape on this one, you know, tape is normally brown. Right now it's clear, like scotch tape.
JAD: The dust is gone.
MARK PHILLIPS: And there's a little bit of brown here. But now it's just clear.
JAD: Oh, it's almost all gone.
ROBERT: This next loop is—is a sly one, and you're gonna have to wait a bit for its loopiness to kick in.
JAD: Ready?
LYNN LEVY: Born ready.
MARK PHILLIPS: Producer Lynn Levy.
CRAIG SMITH: The smell of a dead whale is, you have to experience to know—to know what it's like. It's like nothing I've ever smelled.
LYNN: This is Craig Smith, professor of oceanography.
CRAIG SMITH: It really is. It's really putrid.
LYNN: Back when Craig was a graduate student ...
CRAIG SMITH: This is in 1982.
LYNN: ... he heard there was a dead whale floating off the coast of San Diego.
CRAIG SMITH: About a third out of the water with seabirds on it pecking at it.
JAD: How big?
CRAIG SMITH: Around 25 to 30 feet long.
LYNN: So what is that, like a train car?
CRAIG SMITH: More like the size of a small yacht, I guess.
JAD: Whoa!
LYNN: Big freaking whale.
JAD: Yeah.
LYNN: Craig wanted to sink that whale.
CRAIG SMITH: No one had ever studied what happens when a whale sinks to the seafloor. People just speculated about it.
JAD: So no one had ever followed it down to the bottom?
LYNN: No one had followed the whale down to the bottom.
JAD: Huh.
LYNN: Right?
CRAIG SMITH: So we—we towed the carcass out to sea.
LYNN: And they had all these little scraps of steel that they tied to the whale's tail one at a time.
CRAIG SMITH: About 2,000 pounds. And ...
LYNN: Nothing.
CRAIG SMITH: It wasn't enough to sink the whale.
LYNN: Whale kept floating there like a big smelly balloon. Its belly was all full of ...
CRAIG SMITH: Decompositional gasses.
LYNN: And the captain of the ship goes, "Well ..."
CRAIG SMITH: "I have a big rifle. Let's bring that out." So he got out his rifle. And all the other guys on the boat take out their guns.
JAD: Shooting the whale.
CRAIG SMITH: Yeah. Yeah.
LYNN: This also doesn't work.
JAD: It doesn't work?
CRAIG SMITH: It didn't really do anything.
LYNN: But Craig tried again and again. And eventually, not with that whale, but with others, he got to see something so cool.
CRAIG SMITH: So a whale dies and sinks down into the dark, and ...
LYNN: And then this incredible cycle begins.
CRAIG SMITH: Within minutes, scavengers will be at the carcass.
LYNN: Lots of them.
JAD: How do these little creatures see the whale if it's so dark?
LYNN: They smell it.
JAD: They smell the whale?
LYNN: Mm-hmm.
CRAIG SMITH: Within hours, it may well have hundreds of hagfish on it.
LYNN: They're terrifying.
CRAIG SMITH: These eel-like animals, they have grinding plates instead of teeth. And they burrow into the—the carcass.
LYNN: Hundreds, like a hagfish convention.
CRAIG SMITH: This writhing mass of eels.
LYNN: What does that look like?
CRAIG SMITH: Well, it looks like a giant Medusa head.
LYNN: Over the next few days, a bunch of other scavengers show up.
CRAIG SMITH: Including stone crabs, shrimp, sea scuds, sharks, crustaceans.
LYNN: Huge feeding frenzy. Flesh flying everywhere. Sometimes the hagfish get ticked off, and they try to defend their territory.
CRAIG SMITH: Hagfish have a very interesting ability to produce mucus. You can put a couple of hagfish into a bucket of water and kick it, and they can produce enough mucus to essentially turn the bucket of water into something like gelatin.
JAD: Wow! So it's like a Medusa head in a cloud of mucus.
LYNN: And all that is just the first stage.
CRAIG SMITH: The mobile scavenger stage.
JAD: Okay. So what happens after that?
CRAIG SMITH: Well, after the mobile scavenger stage is the enrichment opportunist stage.
LYNN: At that point ...
CRAIG SMITH: The whale is beginning to look pretty dilapidated. Little bits of whale soft tissue get implanted in the seafloor.
LYNN: And so the ground around the whale becomes sort of its own little ecosystem.
And a bunch of new animals show up.
CRAIG SMITH: They're worms. They're wriggly little worms.
LYNN: Just, like, tons of them.
CRAIG SMITH: We can—we can get 30,000 or 40,000 of them per square meter. Sometimes the sediment around a whale fall looks like a lawn of grass, where these worms are just wriggling, sticking up out of the sediment and waving back and forth.
JAD: What—what color are these worms? Do you know?
LYNN: I think they're white.
JAD: So a field of white worms.
LYNN: Yeah.
JAD: White grass.
LYNN: It's kind of ghostly.
JAD: Yeah.
LYNN: And finally, the last stage.
CRAIG SMITH: Something we call the sulfur-loving stage. At this point, the whale looks like a skeleton just covered with this actually beautiful mat of white bacteria. And it's fluffy and just looks like a polar bear's fur.
JAD: Covering the bones of the whale?
LYNN: Yeah.
CRAIG SMITH: Think about a whale skeleton draped in a polar bear fur coat.
JAD: Huh!
LYNN: Sulfur's coming out of the bones, and the bacteria are just clustering around, sucking it up for years. When you step back and look at it, these dead whales, they become like planets. And you find creatures living on them that you don't find anywhere else.
CRAIG SMITH: There are now about 55 species that haven't been found in any other habitat. Species of animals that only live on whale falls.
JAD: Does that mean that these creatures, like, the whale is their entire world? They don't know anything else?
LYNN: For some of them, yeah.
JAD: What do they do the rest of the time? I mean, this can't happen that often.
CRAIG SMITH: Well, that's a good question. It may be that they are living as—as fugitive species.
LYNN: In other words, they just drift around, sort of waiting. Can I say hoping? For—and when that happens?
CRAIG SMITH: They grow quickly, produce hundreds, thousands, maybe even millions of larvae that they then broadcast out into the water column.
LYNN: Then their babies drift around in the darkness, waiting. Until ...
CRAIG SMITH: A few of them find another such habitat, tens or maybe even hundreds of kilometers away.
LYNN: And repeat.
LYNN: So altogether, how long can a whale fall last?
CRAIG SMITH: Well, a whale fall can last, a large whale skeleton, that of a large blue whale or a fin whale, can support a community for 50 to 75 years.
LYNN: Wow!
CRAIG SMITH: Which really astounded us.
LYNN: And how does that compare to the lifespan of the whale?
CRAIG SMITH: Well, it's probably pretty comparable, actually. Whales live on the order of 50 to 70 years.
LYNN: There's something kind of poetic about that, the idea that, you know, for the same amount of time that the whale lived, it's gonna support this life.
CRAIG SMITH: Yeah, it is very appealing.
JAD: Okay, ready?
ROBERT: Okay.
JAD: This is Radiolab.
ROBERT: Oh, Okay.
JAD: Yeah, you start.
ROBERT: Okay. This is Radiolab.
JAD: Today, we're talking about loops.
ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.
JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad. This is Radiolab.
ROBERT: It's all about loops.
JAD: Yep, I'm Jad.
ROBERT: And I'm Robert. And you're listening to Radiolab.
JAD: Today, we're talking about loops.
ROBERT: I'm Robert.
JAD: I'm Jad.
ROBERT: And it's all about loops.
JAD: Yep, I'm Jad.
ROBERT: I'm Robert.
JAD: We're talking about loops.
ROBERT: And speaking of things that happen over and over and over again, here on this show here.
JAD: Hello?
ROBERT: Here he is again.
STEVEN STROGATZ: Hi, Jad.
JAD: Hey, Steve.
ROBERT: Steven Strogatz.
STEVEN STROGATZ: How are you?
JAD: Mathematician.
ROBERT: Cornell University.
JAD: How's it going?
STEVEN STROGATZ: I'm good.
JAD: And Steve told us a story about a mathematical loop.
ROBERT: That threw mathematicians all over the world.
JAD: For a loop. Story starts way back with a guy named ...
STEVEN STROGATZ: Gottlob Frege.
ROBERT: Gotlob Frege? How do you spell Gottlob?
STEVEN STROGATZ: It's not Gottlieb. It seems to be L-O-B at the end, unless it's a typo in every book I've ever seen.
ROBERT: Now to set this up very quickly, Gottlob Frege was a mathematician back in the 1870s and '80s. And he had a dream that mathematics could unlock the secrets of the universe. That you could maybe even build a machine, feed it some basic mathematical rules, and it would just start churning out discoveries.
JAD: Wouldn't even need a human being.
ROBERT: That's how powerful he thought math could be.
JAD: But that led him to a question: if math is the most fundamental thing in the universe, what is the most fundamental part ...
ROBERT: Of math?
STEVEN STROGATZ: What's at the foundation? Is it numbers? Is it, you know, one, two, three?
JAD: Well, that's what you would think.
ROBERT: But Gottlob ...
STEVEN STROGATZ: He said, "No, there's a deeper thing than numbers." The deepest thing of all is what today we call sets. The set of things, you know?
JAD: The set.
STEVEN STROGATZ: Yeah. So, like, what's a set? You could ...
ROBERT: Steve explained it to us using, of all things, Sesame Street.
JAD: Really old episode.
STEVEN STROGATZ: As far as just to set it up here, it's two people working at the Furry Arms Hotel. There's Humphrey ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: All right, Ingrid.]
STEVEN STROGATZ: ... who's got a green nose and a pink face. And his girlfriend—or I don't actually know what she is. She might be his wife. Ingrid. And so they're hotel keepers. And Ernie is in the background. And so Ingrid and Humphrey are taking an order.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Hello. How may I help you?]
STEVEN STROGATZ: A room service order from a room full of penguins.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: We're hungry!]
STEVEN STROGATZ: You know, Humphrey says, "I'll take your order, Mr. Penguin, sir."
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: What would you like?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Fish.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Fish.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: A fish.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Fish.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Fish.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Fish.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Fish.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Fish.]
STEVEN STROGATZ: Then Humphrey says, "Let me check if I got that right."
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Fish, fish, fish, fish, fish, fish.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: You got it!]
STEVEN STROGATZ: And then he calls over to Ingrid who's gonna call it into the kitchen. So he tells Ingrid ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Fish, fish, fish, fish, fish, fish.]
STEVEN STROGATZ: And Ingrid says, "Fish, fish, fish, fish, fish."
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Fish, fish, fish, fish, fish.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: No.]
STEVEN STROGATZ: And Humphrey goes, "No. That's not right." [laughs]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Fish, fish, fish, fish, fish, fish.]
STEVEN STROGATZ: Because she only says it five times. But then, Ernie explains ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Excuse me, Ingrid and Humphrey? I have a better way for you to do this.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: A better way?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Mm-hmm. Count the fish.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Fish?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: One.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Fish.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Two.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Fish.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Three, four, five, six fish.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Holy mackerel!]
STEVEN STROGATZ: They both realize, Ingrid and Humphrey, how powerful this is. And they say, "Does it work for ...?"
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Does it work on other stuff? Say cinnamon rolls?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Yep.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Spark plugs?]
STEVEN STROGATZ: Spark plugs.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Absolutely.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Wow!]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Wow!]
STEVEN STROGATZ: That's the point: that what cinnamon buns and spark plugs and fish, the sets have in common is that there are six in each. I mean, if you try to say what does six really mean, it's the thing that those sets have in common.
ROBERT: According to Steve, it's not so much the number six that's important here.
JAD: Yeah. That's just the label for this characteristic that all these piles seem to share.
ROBERT: It's the pile itself, the set.
JAD: That is the most basic thing.
ROBERT: So Frege said ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sesame Street: Holy mackerel!]
ROBERT: "Well, this is it." Sets are ...
STEVEN STROGATZ: The bedrock.
ROBERT: ... that I've been looking for.
STEVEN STROGATZ: Yeah. We can build the rest of math on top of this.
ROBERT: Yeah. Then I can make my math machine that will solve the universe.
STEVEN STROGATZ: And I think he published a book sort of showing how this might work, except that Russell ...
ROBERT: Bertrand Russell, the mathematician.
STEVEN STROGATZ: ... then found a devastating paradox that ended up, well, annihilating what Frege had tried to do.
JAD: Russell's paradox has now become known as ...
STEVEN STROGATZ: The barber paradox.
ROBERT: It's a little thought experiment. So in this case, the set is a town.
STEVEN STROGATZ: Yep.
ROBERT: A town with people.
STEVEN STROGATZ: Yep.
JAD: One barber.
ROBERT: With the following rules.
STEVEN STROGATZ: In this town, the barber shaves everyone who doesn't shave himself. Sounds reasonable, right?
ROBERT: The barber shaves everyone who doesn't shave himself.
JAD: So some people shave themselves, some people go to the barber.
STEVEN STROGATZ: That's the universe. We're in a town where everyone who doesn't shave himself is shaven by this barber. And now the question is: who shaves the barber?
JAD: Who shaves ...
STEVEN STROGATZ: Remember, the barber—the barber has the property that he shaves everyone who doesn't shave himself. So he can't shave himself.
JAD: Ah!
STEVEN STROGATZ: But on the other hand ...
JAD: Couldn't he ...
STEVEN STROGATZ: ... if he doesn't shave himself, then he's one of those people who doesn't shave himself, and is therefore shaven by the barber.
JAD: Well, maybe the barber—here's two solutions for you guys. The barber could not shave. Couldn't he just not shave? Or maybe he could ...
STEVEN STROGATZ: No. Everybody in town shaves.
JAD: Or maybe he could set up some sort of mechanical device that's sort of like one of those ...
ROBERT: No, no. You can't do that. You can't change the rules.
STEVEN STROGATZ: Yeah, you can't answer sensibly what happens to the barber.
ROBERT: And no one has.
STEVEN STROGATZ: There's nothing to say. He either does or doesn't shave himself by ordinary Aristotelian logic because the barber can't shave himself and he can't not shave himself.
ROBERT: [laughs]
STEVEN STROGATZ: So there's something ...
ROBERT: And that's what ruined—that's what ruined the machine that would solve the universe?
JAD: Wait, but this seems ...
ROBERT: I think it could ruin an afternoon, or maybe you have to wait for a couple of hours, like after lunch before you go swimming, But I can't see that overthrowing all a life's work.
STEVEN STROGATZ: It does. It does. It turns out to be very, very problematic for the foundations of math.
JAD: Because what this barber paradox, the reason it was so annoying to mathematicians was that math is supposed to be this logical thing, right? Logic is the lifeblood of math. And yet here you had this little bit of math that was illogical, a self-contradicting set.
STEVEN STROGATZ: A self-contradicting set.
ROBERT: But Bertrand Russell, the guy who came up with all this, he didn't lose faith. He felt well, this is just a problem with set theory.
STEVEN STROGATZ: So then he spent a long time trying to make a theory. I think he called it a theory of types instead of sets. And he had certain admission rules that he thought would prevent paradoxes from happening.
JAD: And for a while it was looking pretty good. Under Bertrand Russell's system ...
ROBERT: ... there was no logical problems, no paradoxes. Until ...
JAD: ... this scrawny little German guy comes along.
JAD: And you say his name Gödel?
STEVEN STROGATZ: I hear it—I hear it often pronounced—well, I don't speak German, but mathematicians often say it like the woman's piece of clothing, you know, from the old days.
JAD: [laughs]
ROBERT: [laughs]
STEVEN STROGATZ: Something like "girdle."
JAD: Girdle.
JANNA LEVIN: Gödel.
JAD: There's a kind of "ur" sound in the middle.
JANNA LEVIN: Yeah, umlaut.
JAD: This is Janna.
JANNA LEVIN: Janna Levin.
JAD: She has written a book about Gödel.
JANNA LEVIN: And I'm a professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College.
JAD: And she says the point at which Gödel enters our story, it's 1930s, Vienna, Austria.
JANNA LEVIN: He had just recently finished his what would be equivalent to, like, a doctoral degree, a PhD.
JAD: Smart dude.
JANNA LEVIN: Kind of a rising star. It was no question that people around him understood that.
JAD: He was also maybe a little bit off.
JANNA LEVIN: He had real breaks with, you know, reality. He was—in the biographies they'd call him a paranoid schizophrenic, but he seemed more of kind of obsessive, depressive. I don't know if my armchair psychology terms are accurate. But he was in and out of sanitoria, and he had real difficulties being sure what was real.
JAD: The only reality he really trusted was math.
JANNA LEVIN: Circles.
JAD: Shapes.
JANNA LEVIN: Prime numbers.
JAD: Formulas, axioms.
JANNA LEVIN: Right.
JAD: And at a certain point, he got into paradoxes. Perhaps it was the barber paradox that lured him in, we don't know. But he began to think about and actually experiment with some of these paradoxical loops.
JANNA LEVIN: So he took something like the paradox of the liar. The paradox of the liar says, "This statement is a lie."
JAD: This statement is a lie.
JANNA LEVIN: Right.
JAD: Huh.
JANNA LEVIN: If it's true, then it's false. And if it's false, then it's true.
JAD: This statement is a lie. If you think about that too much, you might explode.
JANNA LEVIN: [laughs] Right.
JAD: So Gödel was interested in that phrase, and for various reasons he took it, tweaked it a little bit to come up with ...
JANNA LEVIN: The following statement: "This statement is unprovable."
JAD: This statement is unprovable.
JANNA LEVIN: Which is very important to know is if it's provable, then it's unprovable.
JAD: Obviously, a little bit of a word game. But Gödel thought forget words. What would happen if I converted this statement into math? Because in math, things are either provable or unprovable. They cannot be both at the same time. It's either true or false. And if it's true? Well then, damn it ...
ROBERT: You should be able to prove it.
JAD: Yeah.
JANNA LEVIN: So he said, "I'm going to assign a special number, unique number to make that a purely mathematical statement by coding it in a very clever way into arithmetic."
ROBERT: To be honest, we don't completely get this part.
JANNA LEVIN: It's very, very clever.
ROBERT: But once he did his math-y stuff, he had a rigorous mathematical statement right there on the page. He looked at it, and he realized that what he'd just said in math ...
JAD: ... is that the following statement ...
JANNA LEVIN: This statement is unprovable.
JAD: ... is ...
JANNA LEVIN: It's true because it's actually unprovable.
JAD: Meaning in math, this statement actually is unprovable.
JANNA LEVIN: [laughs]
JAD: Because it is true, the logic of math will not let you prove that it is true. So it might be true, we'll just never know.
STEVEN STROGATZ: Nothing like that is supposed to happen in math. Things are supposed to be true or not true.
ROBERT: And you're supposed to be able to prove every true thing, says Steve. So if there's something true that you can't prove, that means that the math is strangely, woefully incomplete.
STEVEN STROGATZ: It's always called his incompleteness theorem. That's the phrase. The Gödel incompleteness theorem is that if you have a system of axioms that are consistent, meaning they don't contradict themselves, they're necessarily incomplete. That is, there are certain statements you can make within that system that you can't prove or disprove. And all of math has this character. This is the big shock. This is not just about word games, about logic puzzles with barbers. This is as devastating for even just counting. For one, two, three, four. In other words, math is shot through and through with these kind of statements that you can't either prove or disprove. Seriously, the deep thinkers at the time were amazed at this. It was recognized as one of the great ideas of the 20th century, for sure, maybe of all time. Maybe I should make it more concrete. There's a question that as far as I know is still not solved.
JAD: Steve gave us this example of a problem.
STEVEN STROGATZ: Something called Goldbach's conjecture.
JAD: That kind of gives you a sense of what incompleteness feels like.
STEVEN STROGATZ: So Goldbach's conjecture says that you can always write any even number as a sum of two prime numbers. So let me give you some examples of that. Like, say, 12.
JAD: Yeah.
STEVEN STROGATZ: Remember, first of all prime number means you can divide it by one and by itself. Like, 7 is a prime number—you could divide by 1 and 7 but nothing else.
JAD: Okay.
STEVEN STROGATZ: All right. So 12, which is an even number, is 7 plus 5.
JAD: Those are primes.
STEVEN STROGATZ: Those are both prime numbers. All right. Let's try another one. How about 24. That's 11 plus 13.
JAD: Right.
STEVEN STROGATZ: Okay. Or 36? 19 plus 17. Any even number. Now this has been checked out to—I don't know what, billions, trillions, maybe hundreds of trillions. So no one has ever found a counter-example to Goldbach's conjecture. And here's the thing: you might think that either it's true or it's false. It might be that this statement: every even number is a sum of two primes, it might be neither true nor false, but what we today call undecidable.
JAD: Hmm.
STEVEN STROGATZ: Undecidable is a term that comes from Gödel.
JAD: Undecidable.
STEVEN STROGATZ: Yeah. I mean, supposed in some ethereal or transcendental sense—like that is, suppose that there's God, and God knows that this is true.
ROBERT: [laughs]
STEVEN STROGATZ: Then, you know, what about us here among the world of human beings? All we can do is check each even number, and every time we check, it's true. That would never constitute a proof because we'd never run out of numbers.
ROBERT: If you then say that to understand everything, you either have to defer to God who does understand everything, if you believe in God. But if you don't believe in God, you then have to live with mystery and not knowing.
STEVEN STROGATZ: Mm-hmm. Yes.
ROBERT: That's all you can say?
STEVEN STROGATZ: I'm gonna say yes. I'm gonna say uh-huh. Well, I think you've encapsulated it perfectly. I think that Gödel himself was, I think, a believer in all kinds of mystical things. Like, for him, this was very freeing and liberating because it meant that there were—that we couldn't be mechanized. There was profound mystery forever.
ROBERT: Hmm.
JAD: Hold—hold on. I'm on your team here, but let me just point out something. Gödel, when he died, he was not exactly liberated. He was a paranoid—like, he thought people were trying to poison him. He starved himself to death. He wasn't exactly liberated in the end.
ROBERT: Well, but I choose to believe that somewhere in his tortured mind—and I guess his mind was pretty tortured—there was a little fellow humming a song, a song of liberation.
[choir singing]
ROBERT: Thanks to Steve Strogatz. He's currently working on a new book which he calls The Joy of X. Not "Sex," just X. We don't even know what he's experiencing the joy of.
JAD: [laughs] And Jana Levin, her book about Gödel is called A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines.
[choir singing]
ROBERT: And finally our last loopy piece.
JAD: Yeah. And this one, like the last one, involves things feeding back on themselves.
ROBERT: Mm-hmm.
JAD: Kind of like your classic positive feedback loop.
ROBERT: Which is what, exactly?
JAD: Well, it's like what—you can do with audio. You take a speaker and a mic, you put the—you feed the sound from the speaker into the mic, and then back into the speaker and into the mic, it multiplies and multiplies, and then you get something like ...
[feedback squeal]
ROBERT: Painful is what that is. That's horrible!
JAD: Yeah. It can definitely be painful. But that kind of feedback loop, like in the case of our next story, can also take the pain away.
MELANIE THERNSTROM: Yes.
JAD: Comes to us from this lady.
MELANIE THERNSTROM: I'm Melanie Thernstrom.
JAD: She's a writer.
MELANIE THERNSTROM: The author of a book on pain called The Pain Chronicles.
JAD: Which is a book that began as a chronicling of her own pain, which she's been suffering from ...
MELANIE THERNSTROM: Every day.
JAD: ... for the last 15 years.
JAD: And what sort of pain?
MELANIE THERNSTROM: Oh, pain in my neck and right shoulder and right side of my head.
ROBERT: All at once?
MELANIE THERNSTROM: Yeah. It's all at once.
ROBERT: Oh my gosh.
JAD: Did it start with something? Did you hit it there? Or how did it start?
MELANIE THERNSTROM: It didn't start with an injury of any kind, but it did start at discreet time.
JAD: Goes back to 1997. She was in upstate in New York at a country house on a date.
MELANIE THERNSTROM: It was our first date. And I wanted to impress him, so I swam across a pond, about a mile across.
JAD: Was this your idea or was this his idea?
MELANIE THERNSTROM: It was my idea.
JAD: Wow. That's a different kind of first date. And you made it all the way there and back?
MELANIE THERNSTROM: Yes. And nothing happened, but that night ...
JAD: When she got into bed ...
MELANIE THERNSTROM: ... I was kept awake by this strange burning sensation in my shoulder and neck. I didn't get the head pain for four more years. And that particular pain never went away and got worse over time.
ROBERT: Burning. So, it was like a nerve was being ...
MELANIE THERNSTROM: Yeah. I mean, eventually, I got an MRI a couple years later and there was nerve impingement in my spine. And so there was ...
ROBERT: Over the years, she says, she's tried everything. She's tried drugs and she's tried physical therapy. She's tried distraction.
MELANIE THERNSTROM: Like, I'll go to a matinee and if it's a scary movie, I just don't stay focused on the pain.
JAD: So distraction can work.
ROBERT: But then she says as soon as she gets out of the movie, it's back.
JAD: And it's angry for being ignored.
MELANIE THERNSTROM: Sometimes I'd have the sensation, like, that that right side of my head was dying. Like, the nerves were dying. Like a dead tree. And that image would kind of frighten me.
ROBERT: And that thought? She'd find that that thought would ...
MELANIE THERNSTROM: Make the pain worse. And making the pain worse will inspire further negative fantasies.
JAD: Which will make the pain worse.
MELANIE THERNSTROM: Which will make the pain worse.
JAD: Which will inspire more fantasies.
MELANIE THERNSTROM: Yes. So the loop goes.
JAD: Positive feedback loop.
MELANIE THERNSTROM: Yeah.
ROBERT: In a negative sort of way.
JAD: Right. And eventually, Melanie decided, "Okay, I'm gonna write a book about this. Let me do some research."
MELANIE THERNSTROM: So I was reading a lot about self-inflicted pain and religious rites. And I actually went to witness a Hindi festival, Thaipusam, in Kuala Lumpur.
JAD: And what she saw really changed her mind about things. And you can see video of this festival on YouTube.
ROBERT: What you see is a dense crowd of folks. And in the middle of the crowd, there are these monks doing insane acts of devotion.
MELANIE THERNSTROM: They literally, like, thread needles through their tongues, poke skewers through their cheeks. Weighted fish hooks dangle from their backs.
JAD: And yet, she says when she would look in their faces, they seemed relaxed.
MELANIE THERNSTROM: Like, their eyes don't tear up. They don't gasp for breath.
JAD: Like really relaxed. It wasn't just that they were tolerating the pain, it actually seemed like they weren't ...
MELANIE THERNSTROM: In pain.
JAD: At all.
MELANIE THERNSTROM: And I would think, "Okay, this person here has a skewer in his mouth. I'm in pain? This is pathetic." You know, and you can't become a religious Hindi in order to experience this analgesic benefit. Like, that's cheating. But I did feel like, "Okay, so one way to describe it is faith. But for every way that you can describe in religious terms, there's also a way you can describe things in scientific terms."
SEAN MACKEY: Yeah. The reality is all of our pain is in our head.
JAD: Which brings us to this guy. This is Sean Mackey.
SEAN MACKEY: Chief of the Stanford Pain Management Division.
JAD: And he will tell you that one of the most basic facts about pain is that it is not purely physical.
SEAN MACKEY: We've got signals coming up from the body that are sending us a message.
JAD: Like if you whack a toe, the signal shoots up some nerves in your leg into your spine.
SEAN MACKEY: And those signals converge in our brain.
JAD: And before you even feel a thing ...
SEAN MACKEY: There are a multitude of what I refer to as little amplifiers throughout our brain that turn up and turn down the overall pain experience.
JAD: And these amplifiers are things like your mood ...
SEAN MACKEY: Anxiety, depression.
JAD: ... attention ...
SEAN MACKEY: Expectations.
JAD: All of these things feed back onto that signal coming up from the body. And they can either boost it up, up, up, up, past a certain point where you get a sensation of pain, or they can deaden it down, down, down, down, down, down, down, to where you don't feel anything at all.
ROBERT: Huh.
JAD: Point is pain is a conversation between the brain and the body. And Sean thought, "What would happen if I actually let people see that conversation?" Could they, you know ...
SEAN MACKEY: Take control of it.
MELANIE THERNSTROM: Yes.
JAD: So he did a study, and Melanie signed up.
MELANIE THERNSTROM: Mm-hmm.
ROBERT: So describe what happens in this experiment.
MELANIE THERNSTROM: So you're put in this MRI machine.
SEAN MACKEY: We put somebody into a scanner.
JAD: A brain scanner.
MELANIE THERNSTROM: And you have a screen in front of you.
JAD: And what you see on this screen is something that normally only the researchers would see. You see your own brain in real time.
SEAN MACKEY: Yeah.
ROBERT: Well, you're not seeing the whole thing. You're just seeing one piece.
SEAN MACKEY: Called the anterior cingulate cortex.
MELANIE THERNSTROM: There are many parts of the brain that respond to pain, but that's the one that ...
SEAN MACKEY: It's an area that has been shown to be involved with pain perception, turning pain up and down.
MELANIE THERNSTROM: It's thought to give pain its emotional valence, its negativity.
JAD: And do you actually see an image of this little piece of your brain, right there in front of you on the screen? Are you looking at your brain?
MELANIE THERNSTROM: No, no.
SEAN MACKEY: That's confusing to everybody. So instead, we give a visual metaphor.
MELANIE THERNSTROM: You see an image of ...
SEAN MACKEY: Fire.
MELANIE THERNSTROM: ... flames.
SEAN MACKEY: In an ice cave. And it is kind of a cartoon flame, but it looks realistic.
ROBERT: So are these flickering flames? Do they leap into the—do they leap?
MELANIE THERNSTROM: Yes. They leap, and the more activation there is in that region, the higher the flames go.
JAD: So Melanie is lying in a scanner, watching her own pain flames. And Sean gives her a set of instructions.
SEAN MACKEY: We say, "Okay. We want you to imagine that you're sitting in a nice, warm, soothing jacuzzi."
MELANIE THERNSTROM: You know, this burning is a warm bath, this burning is very relaxing. I'm relaxing into it.
JAD: Yeah. But pretty soon, it was like, "Hot. Hot! It's kind of hot. It's scalding me. I have to get out." And before she knew it, the flames were ...
MELANIE THERNSTROM: Growing.
ROBERT: So Sean says, "Okay. Okay. So how about you're lying on a beautiful beach?"
JAD: Yes!
MELANIE THERNSTROM: You know, this burning is a pleasant suntan.
SEAN MACKEY: And the sand is nice and warm and pleasant.
MELANIE THERNSTROM: I'm gonna look so good in my new bathing suit if I just keep getting burnt like this.
JAD: Yeah, sunburn. Hot. All right ...
MELANIE THERNSTROM: And then the flames would kind of go crazy.
JAD: Her thoughts keep slipping out of her control.
MELANIE THERNSTROM: You know, if ...
JAD: Every time she would see those flames rise, she would think, "Oh, no. The flames are rising," which would make them rise even more, and then more and more until she had this bonfire on the screen.
MELANIE THERNSTROM: You're immediately struck by—they look like the flames where you're gonna—the flames where you're burned at the stake. I'd been reading a lot of lives of saints at that point.
JAD: [laughs]
ROBERT: But then Melanie had an idea. She said, "Why don't I take this negative image and flip it?"
MELANIE THERNSTROM: And then I started trying to move into the idea of being a saint or a martyr, and that I, you know, believed that I would have no pain, and that I was protected by my faith.
ROBERT: Oh!
JAD: And as Melanie started thinking about this, she could see the flames ...
MELANIE THERNSTROM: Dying down.
JAD: Just a little bit.
JAD: Wow.
MELANIE THERNSTROM: Which is odd because this isn't—you don't know me, but this isn't actually, like, part of my fantasy life.
ROBERT: Yes.
JAD: But she thought, "Okay, I'll try this."
MELANIE THERNSTROM: Let me keep going in that kind of feeling. So I was trying to pick one of the few prayers I knew. I mean, I didn't—I'm half Jewish and half Christian, so I was sort of not settled in onto what kind of martyr I was.
ROBERT: [laughs]
MELANIE THERNSTROM: You know, I started thinking, "Should I really be a Jewish martyr since if you're half Jewish, your mother's Jewish. It's the right side. Really I'm Jewish more than Christian." And then I started thinking about Jewish martyrs and, like, what prayers did they say.
JAD: And as she added and revised details ...
MELANIE THERNSTROM: That continued to make the flames go down. Okay. I'm in the right brain state. Let me do more of that.
JAD: So Melanie finally decided, "Okay, I'm gonna be this one particular Jewish martyr. His name is Akiba ben Yosef." He was burned at the stake by the Romans for teaching the Torah. And there's a particular legend that just as the executioner is about to set fire to the logs right underneath his feet, Akiba stared the executioner in the eyes and smiled. And the executioner was like, "Why are you smiling? You're about to be burned alive." And Akiba said, "All my life, when I said those words, 'You shall love the Lord, your God with all your heart, with all your soul,' I was sad because I thought 'When shall I be able to fulfill that command?' And now that I'm giving my life and my resolution remains firm, why shouldn't I smile?"
ROBERT: And by the time Melanie had this fantasy built up in her mind, she looked over at the flames and she noticed they were almost gone.
MELANIE THERNSTROM: Like zero. You know, zero pain.
JAD: For the first time, she'd taken control of it.
MELANIE THERNSTROM: I felt like, "Wow! I am watching my brain thinking my thoughts, and I am changing my thoughts by thinking and watching myself do this."
JAD: So you were looking at yourself looking at yourself looking at yourself looking at yourself.
MELANIE THERNSTROM: Yes!
SEAN MACKEY: It's like peering inside and seeing the ghost in the machine.
MELANIE THERNSTROM: I felt, you know, like someone taking their first step on the moon. Like, I am watching my brain thinking my thoughts. And I am thinking my thoughts, changing my thoughts by thinking and watching my thoughts, watching my brain, changing my thoughts by thinking and watching myself do this.
ROBERT: Well, I need to establish this, that once you were—did your two sessions and you're in between exercises, without all these gizmos, could you address your pain better?
MELANIE THERNSTROM: No. Like, you'd think, "Well, okay. Can't you just get the feedback from your own body?" But somehow, this sensation isn't quite direct enough that I think that you could do it without the visual feedback.
JAD: But for that moment, in that machine?
MELANIE THERNSTROM: It was power.
JAD: Before we go, a very special thanks to our singers who joined us this hour from the New Music Ensemble at LaGuardia High School. They are ...
KELLY ETHEMEU: Kelly Ethemeu.
JULIAN SOTTO: Julian Sotto.
ELI GREENHOE: Eli Greenhoe.
JULIA EGAN: Julia Egan.
RUBY FRUME: Ruby Frume.
JAD: Those guys wrote and performed all the music between the pieces. You guys rock. And thanks to the guy who teaches them and who organized this, Mr. Robert Apostle.
ROBERT APOSTLE: Stop!
ROBERT: And let's begin.
[LISTENER: G'day, as the formal greeting goes. This is Jake calling from the other side of the planet in Adelaide, South Australia, Australia. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is produced by Soren Wheeler. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Suzie Lechtenberg is our executive producer. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Becca Bressler, Rachael Cusick, David Gebel, Bethel Habte, Tracie Hunte, Matt Kielty, Robert Krulwich, Julia Longoria, Annie McEwen, Latif Nasser, Malissa O'Donnell, Kelly Prime, Sarah Qari, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. With help from Shima Oliaee, Audrey Quinn and Neel Danesha. Our fact-checker is Michelle Harris. Thank you, guys.]
-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.
