[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. So okay, so this one—so this one I think you weren't around for the first.

ROBERT: I wasn't. I was gone for it. But then I listened afterwards.

JAD: You hate listened.

ROBERT: I hate listened. Exactly. I hate listened, and then as is often the case, I sort of reluctantly became a like listener.

JAD: Aww! That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: No, so this one is a—it's a—you know, me, I'm a music nerd, right?

ROBERT: Yes, you are.

JAD: This is a story about the weirdness of creativity and a piece of music that frankly I had to study in school, but which unites two people across space and time in a really bizarre way. It's a kind of rhyme. The first story begins in the early 1980s in Vancouver, British Columbia, with a woman named Anne Adams, who by all accounts was a brilliant cell biologist.

ROBERT ADAMS: Oh, yes. Anne was highly articulate.

JAD: That's her husband, Robert Adams.

ROBERT ADAMS: You know, extremely capable with language. She did cancer research. She actually developed a cell line that I believe still exists.

JAD: Wow.

ROBERT: So she was very sharp.

JAD: He says that as a scientist, she was a natural. But then rather suddenly at the age of 46, Anne kind of did a 180.

ROBERT ADAMS: Something happened in '86 which changed the course of her life.

JAD: It all started when their third son, Alex, gets into a really bad car accident.

ROBERT ADAMS: And we were told that he would probably never ever walk again.

JAD: Anne decides she's gonna take some time off to help him recover. And he does, he does learn to walk again. But while at home, she just decides to quit. To quit science and become a painter.

ROBERT ADAMS: Yeah. Anne made up her mind then and there that she was gonna take up art full time.

JAD: Had she ever painted before?

ROBERT ADAMS: Well, she did a fair amount of it when she was in high school.

JAD: Which was a very long time ago, so the whole thing struck him as kind out of the blue. But he rolled with it, and within a short period of time, she had converted a room in their house into a studio. And she was painting ...

ROBERT ADAMS: Houses and buildings, little churches.

JAD: Simple at first. But then after that ...

ROBERT ADAMS: Brightly colored versions of what you see when you look down the barrel of a microscope.

JAD: You know, cells, bacteria. After that ...

ROBERT ADAMS: Strawberries.

JAD: A series of paintings involving these blazing red strawberries.

ROBERT ADAMS: For instance, a water faucet, and out of it would be coming a stream of strawberries. There was things called "Strawberry Universe," where the strawberries had rings around them like Saturn and so on. And I think there was something like 35 or 36 strawberry paintings.

JAD: Wow!

ROBERT ADAMS: But then she would switch to something else.

JAD: Even after their son had fully recovered.

ROBERT ADAMS: Even threw away his crutches and went back to school.

JAD: Anne kept on painting.

ROBERT ADAMS: And she would work all day long.

JAD: 10 hours a day, making these paintings that got bigger and bigger and more abstract. And there were times, he says, when he was like ...

ROBERT ADAMS: Wow! [laughs]

JAD: Because for someone who hadn't painted since high school, she was suddenly ...

ROBERT ADAMS: So prolific. And it's entirely possible that something was happening to her even then.

JAD: Way below the surface. I mean, on the surface, she was just painting and it was working. People were buying the paintings, she was having solo shows, she was becoming a successful artist. But then in 1994 ...

ROBERT ADAMS: She decided—I don't know what gave her this idea. I never knew what gave her any of her ideas, but she decided she was going to do ...

JAD: A painting of—well, this ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, "Boléro"]

ROBERT ADAMS: Boléro.

JAD: Boléro.

ROBERT ADAMS: Yes. Yeah, Boléro.

JAD: Robert says he's not quite sure how it happened, but at some point that year, Anne heard this famous piece by Maurice Ravel, became obsessed, couldn't stop listening to it, then playing it on the piano, then deconstructing it, mapping every pitch and the melody and the bass to a color.

ROBERT ADAMS: Here's one page that isn't very long.

JAD: This is from her notes.

ROBERT ADAMS: She's got A, silver, A flat, copper, B, leaf green, B flat, metallic green.

JAD: Eventually, the painting ...

ROBERT ADAMS: It was quite a large work. Two panels side by side, very electric colors.

JAD: A blizzard of symbols and triangles. Little tooth-type things with marks on them that all mean something, and rectangles and marching ...

ROBERT ADAMS: Back and forth across the first panel. There was a triangle in the bottom of each one of the rectangles. And the height of the rectangle represented the loudness.

JAD: It's an incredibly obsessive translation of the music into visual language. And just like the melody in Boléro, the symbols repeat and repeat and repeat, obsessively getting bigger and bigger and bigger until, at the very end of the second panel, things unravel.

ROBERT ADAMS: By the way, her title for the painting was "Unraveling Boléro."

JAD: And that unraveling turns out had happened before.

ROBERT: When we come back, we're going to —we're gonna explain what we mean by a rhyme. We don't have to explain it, it'll just rhyme.

[LISTENER: Hello, this is Emily Valani from Austin, Texas. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

JAD: Jad.

ROBERT: Robert.

JAD: Radiolab. Getting back to our story. We heard Anne's story about the strawberries and then painting the painting of that piece of music.

ROBERT: Now we're gonna tell you a different story.

JAD: Different time, different place, different person.

ROBERT: But strangely rhymed.

JAD: Story number two.

JAD: Well, okay. Should we jump in?

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: Yeah, please.

JAD: This is Arbie Orenstein.

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: Professor of music at The Aaron Copland School of Music at Queen's College.

JAD: He's written about Ravel, performed Ravel, talked to anyone who ever knew Ravel.

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: He kind of is a—what shall I say, a kind of a living presence inside my head.

JAD: So, okay. Maurice Ravel is a composer. Obviously, one of the greats.

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: Born in 1875. Papa was an engineer. Mother was from an old Basque family.

JAD: As in she was Spanish?

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: Yes.

JAD: Which is why some of his music, like Boléro, does sound a bit Spanish. In any case, mom encourages him to study music. He goes off to Paris in the 1890s, meets Claude Debussy. And together they sort of invent this style of music which we now call impressionism, which was this kind of ...

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: Free floating, almost dreamlike, sensuous. A lot of colors.

JAD: Very flowery.

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: Yes.

JAD: But then, like Anne, Ravel makes a kind of shift ...

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: 1928.

JAD: ... when he was 53, about the same age Anne was when she did the painting.

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: Ravel is having an absolutely phenomenal year.

JAD: Just toured the United States, performed for thousands.

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: He's at the zenith of his creativity.

JAD: And he's back in France at a beach house.

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: Wearing a pink bathing suit.

JAD: And the story goes, right before he steps out onto the beach, this melody swoops into his head. He runs over to the piano ...

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: Takes his index finger, and he goes, da, da-da-dee-da-dee-da-dun-dun-da. (in the tune of Boléro). There it was.

JAD: It just came to him fully formed?

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: Well, he—I don't know if he played the whole melody, but he at least started it off.

JAD: But here's the shift: when he sat down to flesh the whole thing out, instead of developing the melody, making it super flowery like his other stuff, he decided no, I'm not gonna do that. I'm gonna take this melody and repeat it again and again and again. And then again some more. And then some more.

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: The theme never changes one note.

JAD: The only thing that does change is the orchestration, which grows around the melody.

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: Very slowly.

JAD: Bit by bit, it gets bigger, bigger ...

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: More accompaniment, more instruments play the melody.

JAD: But the melody itself, for 340 bars, never varies. To the point, he says, where the performers ...

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: They're ready to see a psychiatrist by the time they're done playing this piece. And Ravel at the first performance in Paris, some woman screamed out, "He's crazy!"

JAD: Which turned out to be, well, not exactly true, but in the neighborhood. Six years after he wrote Boléro—this is 1933—Ravel begins to forget words. He'd always been forgetful, so no one really noticed at first, but then one day at dinner he grabs the knife by the wrong side.

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: And he doesn't realize it.

JAD: And he continues to try to eat ...

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: Holding the sharp side of the knife and trying to cut with the handle.

JAD: Then he visits a friend. Leaves ...

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: Not two hours go by. Knock on the door. It's Ravel again. He didn't remember that he'd been there before.

JAD: Just two hours earlier ...

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: Eventually ...

JAD: By 1935 ...

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: He could not write anymore.

JAD: Or speak. His language had evaporated. Arbie says there are documents where you can see Ravel desperately trying to relearn the alphabet.

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: A. A. A. A. Over and over again.

JAD: Wow.

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: B. B. With a kind of a shaking hand. Very small. It's very, very painful to see.

ROBERT ADAMS: Whatever it was that was wrong was getting worse.

JAD: Here's the weird symmetry: just like Ravel, six years after finishing her Boléro ...

ROBERT ADAMS: By 2000, I would say.

JAD: ... Anne also begins to forget words.

ROBERT ADAMS: She would try to say things and couldn't. She would try to find words and couldn't.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, researcher: So how are you today?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Anne Adams: Fine. [laughs]]

JAD: Eventually, Anne ends up at the University of California-San Francisco.

ROBERT ADAMS: And this was in 2002. And they gave her a bunch of tests.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, researcher: Can you tell me your full name, please?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Anne Adams: Anne Teresa Adams.]

JAD: There's a video of one of these tests, and in it you can see Anne sitting at a table in a black sweater, gray hair, glasses, very composed.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, researcher: And can you tell me your address?]

JAD: Like someone who's used to knowing the answers to questions that people ask her.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Anne Adams: 4—um. 23.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, researcher: Which town?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Anne Adams: Um, which town?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, researcher: Mm-hmm.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Anne Adams: Vancouver.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, researcher: Great.]

BRUCE MILLER: By the time that Anne had come to see us, her communication abilities were markedly diminished.

JAD: That's Dr. Bruce Miller. He's a neurologist. He runs the memory and aging center at UCSF.

BRUCE MILLER: Example, we asked her to describe a ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, researcher: Okay, Anne. I'd like you to take a look at this picture.]

BRUCE MILLER: Very complex, rich picture with ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, researcher: Take your time.]

BRUCE MILLER: ... children with a kite, with a sailboat on the ocean.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, researcher: And please tell me what you see. And if you can, please try to speak in sentences.]

BRUCE MILLER: Anne would be able to say single words with no grammar. She'd go, "Sailboat ..."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Anne Adams: Tree.]

BRUCE MILLER: "Boy ..."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Anne Adams: Um …]

BRUCE MILLER: "Water ..."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Anne Adams: People.]

BRUCE MILLER: "Kite ..."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Anne Adams: Kite. Flag.]

BRUCE MILLER: And that four or five words would come out over about a minute's time. She was very frustrated.

JAD: Both Anne Adams and Maurice Ravel were unraveling in the exact same way at the exact same speed to the same soundtrack, you might say, but just roughly 60 years apart.

BRUCE MILLER: We think he and Anne down to the very molecular process had the exact same disease.

JAD: And he thinks Boléro, the music and then the painting, in both their cases was the first symptom of that disease. This takes a couple steps to explain, so bear with me. But to start, the disease is called ...

JONAH LEHRER: Frontotemporal dementia.

JAD: That's Jonah Lehrer, author, regular on our show.

John: And it begins when spindly cells in your frontal cortex ...

JAD: This part kind of right above your forehead ...

JONAH LEHRER: ... start to wither and die. And so your frontal cortex is pockmarked with sometimes visible holes.

JAD: We know this about Anne from tests and brain scans. We suspect it about Ravel because, according to Arbie, just before he died ...

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: On December 28, 1937 …

JAD: A French surgeon opened up his skull and saw ...

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: That one of the lobes of the two lobes of the brain had sunk.

JAD: Because it was disintegrating. Now in both their cases, the part of the brain, the part of their cortex that got hit was on the left. This is the part that does a lot of things. It has a lot to do with memory, but most importantly for our story, this is the part of your brain that largely governs language. And what you see is that the people who suffer from frontotemporal dementia, they lose their words, they can no longer string words together. And here's the thing about losing something like language: it has all kinds of other effects in the brain because according to Bruce, you know, our brain is a series of interconnected circuits. And when, in a normal brain, a dominant circuit like language turns on, it's basically wired to turn a bunch of other circuits off. It basically goes "Shh" to other parts of the brain.

BRUCE MILLER: We have this constant dance where one circuit or many circuits turn on, and then they're obligatorily turning off other circuits.

JAD: So language acts as a kind of break on other things the brain could be doing, like daydreaming, thinking in pictures. But when the language is no longer there to hold things back, often what can happen is that those other parts, like, say, the visual parts, can just rush forward, and suddenly the mind is flooded with images, and you hear reports of people having these intensely visual experiences they've got to express.

BRUCE MILLER: This is very common. We see a number of patients who become visually obsessed.

JAD: He says he sees, you know, investment bankers who've never shown any interest in art ...

JONAH LEHRER: Never even walked into an art museum.
JAD: All of a sudden they decide in their 50s, "Well, I'm gonna move into a loft, take up painting."

BRUCE MILLER: That's right.

JAD: How many of these cases have you seen?

BRUCE MILLER: 50, 60. Some of them have sculpted, some of them have painted.

JAD: He says he's seen people take up gardening, graphic design. And what so many of the cases have in common is that the sort of visual creativity that bursts forth, it's not the free-flowing kind. It's very mechanical.

BRUCE MILLER: The repetition, the obsession.

JAD: They get stuck in a kind of loop, taking one visual idea and doing it again and again and again. Like an Anne Adams painting. Or Boléro.

BRUCE MILLER: This drive to repeat happens very early in the course of this illness.

JAD: So, he says, what can seem like a simple creative choice to repeat a melody may actually be driven by a condition that you won't even know you have for six years.

BRUCE MILLER: We think that this had something to do with the very unusual, rhythmic, repetitive sorts of music that Ravel produced.

JAD: I asked Bruce, so why the repetition? Where does—where does that come from?

BRUCE MILLER: Um ...

JAD: And, um ...

BRUCE MILLER: I think this is the release of ...

JAD: He says we don't really know, but he offered up a theory which I find fascinating, which may get to the root of creative obsession of any kind. He says there might be several parts of the brain that are held back by the language circuit, and one of them is this very ancient part of the brain.

BRUCE MILLER: The basal ganglia, the part of the brain we move with.

JAD: You can call it our reptile brain. This is the part of us that governs, you know, basic behaviors like eating, running.

BRUCE MILLER: Motor programs that we do repetitively every day.

JAD: That's all it does. It sends commands saying, "Move, move, eat, eat, run, run." Birds and snakes get by with basically just this part of the brain. It keeps them alive. Now normally, he thinks, the language part of us ...

BRUCE MILLER: Inhibits these habits, these repetitive motor programs that ...

JAD: But when the language part is not there to do the shushing, these motor commands filter up too. So imagine you're one of these people. Your mind is suddenly flooded with all of these images, maybe sounds. It's also flooded with these kinetic, repetitive instructions: move, move, move, do it again. And in the early stages of the illness, you still have enough brain to make sense of it all.

BRUCE MILLER: There's still a lot of cortex that is still available to act upon this desire to repeat.

JAD: And so you get art that is obsessive and repetitive, but also beautiful and abstract, like Anne's painting "Unraveling Boléro." But then, Bruce says, as the disease progresses and more of that sort of cortex-y, human-y fades away ...

BRUCE MILLER: The repetition becomes much simpler.

JAD: In the latter stages of a disease, he says, you'll often see patients ...

BRUCE MILLER: Pouring water into a cup a hundred times in a day, squishing ants over and over again. The complexity of the behaviors are diminishing as we're losing these parts of the brain that make us so human.

JAD: This is sort of what you see in Anne's work. Her paintings start off simple, explode into abstraction and then get simple again. But what's unusual, compared to the other patients, is that she kept painting almost all the way to the end.

ROBERT ADAMS: Until literally, it was not possible for her to hold and direct a brush or a pen.

JAD: That's her husband Robert again.

BRUCE MILLER: Anne became progressively paralyzed on the right side of her body.

ROBERT ADAMS: She lost the ability to paint in 2005, early. And that—that was sad.

JAD: Towards the end, he says, he would go into her studio ...

ROBERT ADAMS: And I would see her there ...

JAD: In front of a blank canvas.

ROBERT ADAMS: And she wouldn't be doing anything. She would just be looking at it. And I'd come back a couple of hours later and she still wouldn't have done anything. She had lost the ability to do the art.

JAD: And that to me is one of the, I dare say, beautiful parts of Anne's story, that the drive to create is as primal as anything else in the body, that even after she couldn't eat, after she could barely swallow, she still sat there in her studio trying to paint.

ROBERT ADAMS: She had gone downhill so far by that time that—that she was hardly recognizable as herself.

JAD: At some point in the disease—and you can see that in this early tape—painting was really all she had.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Anne Adams: I don't have the—the memories of this.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, researcher: Okay.]

JAD: It was basically all she was.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, researcher: Can you tell me what your job is? Or are you still working?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Anne Adams: I do art.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, researcher: Great.]

JAD: She died in 2007?

ROBERT ADAMS: Yes, in January of 2007.

JAD: Almost exactly 60 years after Maurice Ravel.

JAD: Thanks to Robert Adams, Bruce Miller at the University of California-San Francisco and Arbie Orenstein at Queen's College.

ROBERT: Well, that's a song that's—that's a piece that is not gonna stay the same.

JAD: Mm-mm. It's funny, I used to think of Boléro as like a happy, jaunty tune, and now I'm like, "Ooh, it's kind of haunted."

ROBERT: It's an interesting sort of a paradox, that this thing ends on: she sits in front of her canvas ferociously stalls.

JAD: Hmm.

ROBERT: I mean, it's the ferocious part. That creativity comes from a kind of restlessness, and the rest may be one of the things that leaves last.

JAD: Yeah. All right. Speaking of leaving, we should go.

ROBERT: Yup.

JAD: Thanks for listening.

[LISTENER: Hi, this is Mitch Leto from Kalamazoo, Michigan. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is produced by Soren Wheeler. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Maria Matasar-Padilla is our managing director. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Maggie Bartolomeo, Becca Bressler, Rachael Cusick, David Gabel, Bethel Habte, Tracie Hunte, Matt Kielty, Robert Krulwich, Annie McEwen, Latif Nasser, Malissa O'Donnell, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. With help from Amanda Aronczyk, Shima Oliaee, Jake Arlow and Reid Canan. Our fact checker is Michelle Harris.]

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