LULU MILLER: Hey, this is Radiolab. I'm Lulu. I'm here with my brain, you are there with yours. And usually, you know, you and your brain have a kind of quiet agreement to just get along, enough to go through your day. But every now and then, you and your brain fall out of agreement, and then you can slip into a kind of disorienting tilt-a-whirl-y place. Well today, we have two stories for you about just that: People walking around with a new kind of vertigo. These stories come from the archives, and we're calling today's show Vertigogogo. So here we go.

[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: The podcast.

JAD: And today on the podcast, a show about brains.

ROBERT: Yes.

JAD: A short time ago, we got an email from a listener in San Francisco.

ROBERT: Something odd had happened to her, and she wanted to share it with us.

JAD: I missed—I didn't hit the record button fast enough. Could you just tell me your name again? And ...

LIZA SHOENFELD: My name is Liza Shoenfeld, and I'm a research technician at the Gladstone Institute at the University of California—San Francisco.

JAD: Now Liza is just getting started with her scientific career.

LIZA SHOENFELD: I finished my undergraduate degree about a year and a half ago.

JAD: And this story takes place as she was about to take that next step after college and apply to grad school.

ROBERT: And the star of our story, other than, of course, Liza herself, is a little mischievous part of her brain. Well, everyone's brain ...

LIZA SHOENFELD: Part of your brain called the basal ganglia.

JAD: Basal ganglia, which at the time she'd been studying.

LIZA SHOENFELD: So basal ganglia is a fairly large part of your brain.

JAD: It's actually this big hunk deep in the center.

LIZA SHOENFELD: And it's responsible for controlling and coordinating movement.

ROBERT: When I move my neck back and forth, am I using my basal ganglia?

LIZA SHOENFELD: Yeah.

ROBERT: When I make an expression in my face am I using my basal ganglia?

LIZA SHOENFELD: Definitely.

JAD: What about if I'm reading The New Yorker?

LIZA SHOENFELD: I don't think so.

ROBERT: Apologies to The New Yorker and its employees.

JAD: Point is, this part of your brain is really basic.

ROBERT: And at the lab where she was working, they had figured out this particular basal ganglia trick.

LIZA SHOENFELD: Using this really cool technology called optogenetics.

JAD: What they'd done is they found a way to take a mouse, thread a little fiber optic cable through its skull, deep into its brain, into its basal ganglia.

LIZA SHOENFELD: So that when you shine a blue laser, literally, we just shine lasers into mouse brains.

JAD: They could actually turn its basal ganglia—or parts of it—on or off.

ROBERT: And this is in a live mouse?

LIZA SHOENFELD: This is in a live mouse. So we have these really cool videos showing a mouse running around, having a great mouse time. You turn the light on, we can get him to freeze ...

ROBERT: In mid-stride?

LIZA SHOENFELD: Yeah.

ROBERT: So you hit the laser and—boom!—the mouse stops?

LIZA SHOENFELD: Mouse is like this.

JAD: So you use light to, like, puppetize the mouse?

LIZA SHOENFELD: Yes.

JAD: If you're this mouse, no matter how hard you try ...

ROBERT: Move feet, move!

JAD: ... as long as that light is on ...

ROBERT: Come on, move!

JAD: ... you can't do it. Liza is holding the strings.

ROBERT: Not exactly. It turns out she doesn't get to play with the laser that much.

LIZA SHOENFELD: I'm kind of like I'm the bottom of the totem pole, so I do a lot of pipetting.

JAD: It's like where you squirt liquid from one tube to another.

LIZA SHOENFELD: I'm working on my pipetting skills these days.

JAD: Grunt work. Get the thumb muscles up.

LIZA SHOENFELD: Oh, I could beat anyone in the thumb-wrestling competition right now.

JAD: So at a certain point, she was like, "Enough of this. Time for me to apply to grad school."

LIZA SHOENFELD: Yeah, I applied to five. University of California-San Diego, University of Washington in Seattle, UCSF, Rockefeller University and Harvard.

JAD: Okay. So you're going big.

LIZA SHOENFELD: Yeah. Go big or go home.

JAD: Right. Exactly.

ROBERT: So she heads off to her first interview.

LIZA SHOENFELD: University of Washington went great. I loved it. I went down to UCSD in San Diego. It's a beautiful place, great scientists. It's actually the largest neuroscience community in the world.

JAD: So far, so good.

ROBERT: Did you ever go back to San Francisco where we are now?

JAD: This is where things get strange.

LIZA SHOENFELD: Yes. So my last interview. My very last interview, it was at UCSF.

JAD: And she says about a week before that interview ...

LIZA SHOENFELD: I got really sick. Pretty severe nausea. I wasn't really able to eat or do anything and ...

JAD: Throwing up?

LIZA SHOENFELD: Yeah, all sorts—I don't know. I had some bad dim sum the weekend before. That could have been it.

ROBERT: Yeah, that's it. So she goes to the doctor, he gives her some pills to fight the nausea.

LIZA SHOENFELD: And then the next day was my interview. Friday was my interview. So I went, you know, there's the nice introduction and they give you breakfast.

JAD: At this point, she's pretty familiar with the whole routine.

LIZA SHOENFELD: Generally, the way these interviews are structured is that we talk a little bit about my research in dopamine and the basal ganglia and these mice.

JAD: They tell her about their work.

LIZA SHOENFELD: I have to think of a couple witty questions. I ask my questions.

JAD: Anyhow, she's raring to go, and she heads in to meet her first basal gangliatician of the day.

LIZA SHOENFELD: And he studies—one of the things he studies is dopamine.

JAD: In the basal ganglia.

LIZA SHOENFELD: He studies stuff that's a little bit more molecular than what I—than what I know. But we had a good conversation about dopamine. And at this point in the day, I was feeling okay ...

ROBERT: No nausea.

LIZA SHOENFELD: Then I went to my second interview, which is this woman that I was so excited to talk to. Her name is Allison Doupe, and she's pretty well known.

ROBERT: Her name is Allison Doupe?

LIZA SHOENFELD: Allison Doupe.

ROBERT: Wow. And she studies dopamine?

LIZA SHOENFELD: [laughs] She studies songbirds.

ROBERT: Songbirds.

JAD: Which is what Liza really wanted to study.

LIZA SHOENFELD: So birds have basal ganglias, too.

JAD: So she's pretty fired up.

LIZA SHOENFELD: And kind of the beginning of that interview, my—my face started to feel a little bit strange. And I was wearing glasses that day, so what I thought was happening was that my glasses were—you know, your glasses get loose and they kind of start to slip down your nose and you have to kind of tighten the muscles around your ears to try and keep your glasses on. So we were talking and I just kept on feeling like, "God, why can't I stop tightening that?" It was—kind of got to the point where it started to distract me, but I felt okay. Then we went to lunch, and this was a lunch with all the current students and a lot of the current faculty and all the prospective students. And at lunch, I remember on the walk to lunch my head just started spontaneously turning to the right like ...

JAD: Like ...

LIZA SHOENFELD: Like I—like I would be trying to sit here and face you and I would just turn over here and face Robert.

JAD: That's—that's such a funny thing.

LIZA SHOENFELD: It's strange.

JAD: Was your neck moving and you're like, "No neck. Don't do that, neck."

LIZA SHOENFELD: Yes, exactly what was happening. I was trying to send signals to my neck being like, "All right, sitting here having lunch with an important professor, why don't you just face him, talk to him," and instead I'm just turning over here, turning over here, turning over here.

ROBERT: Oh, you're turning a fairly wide arc.

LIZA SHOENFELD: Yeah.

ROBERT: You are turning away from the professor.

LIZA SHOENFELD: Oh, yeah. So I remember—I remember at one point in lunch turning my chair like this.

ROBERT: You're trying to rotate? [laughs]

LIZA SHOENFELD: So I could talk to him.

ROBERT: A permanent sidelong glance.

LIZA SHOENFELD: Yeah.

JAD: But she figured it must just be a cramp or something.

LIZA SHOENFELD: I'm kind of thinking. "Oh, okay. So I slept funny last night. I must have slept on a weird angle on my pillow. Now I'm having a neck cramp. My glasses are loose. I just gotta tighten the glasses."

JAD: Yeah. Everything under control.

LIZA SHOENFELD: So—so then I, after lunch was going to go to my third interview. It was with Allison Doupe's husband, who also studies songbirds. So he's familiar with the basal ganglia, too.

JAD: They meet up to walk over to his office together.

LIZA SHOENFELD: And so I explained to him on the walk over, "I think I'm having neck cramps. Would it be possible maybe to try and get a hot pad?"

ROBERT: He says, "Sure." And they track one down.

LIZA SHOENFELD: But on the walk, not only now does my neck start turning to the right, but it's snapping itself back.

ROBERT: Involuntarily.

LIZA SHOENFELD: Yeah, my head snapping back.

JAD: So suddenly your eyes are pointing up at the sky.

LIZA SHOENFELD: And then as I'm talking to him, I'm realizing that I can't control my eyebrows from raising pretty tightly. So I look like ...

JAD: Like you're doing right now?

LIZA SHOENFELD: Like I'm doing right now.

ROBERT: So you're in a state of—of deep surprise, to read your face. High eyebrow.

LIZA SHOENFELD: Constant deep surprise, I can't stop it. I look surprised at everything I'm saying and I can't stop it. So after the eyebrows start and I can't pull them back down, then—then the mouth, then all this area starts to go.

ROBERT: Your lower face.

LIZA SHOENFELD: Yes.

JAD: What is it doing?

LIZA SHOENFELD: It turns into this really twisted, painful, grimacing smile.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: Would you mind demonstrating?

LIZA SHOENFELD: I'll demo it. I'll demo it. Okay so I've got the neck, it looks like this.

JAD: Crane back.

LIZA SHOENFELD: The eyebrows are like this.

JAD: Total surprise.

LIZA SHOENFELD: My face is a lot like this.

JAD: Crazy Frankenstein face.

ROBERT: [laughs] This is not the—obviously the best demeanor for a graduate interview.

LIZA SHOENFELD: No. Yeah, it's not—it's not going well at that point. And I'm—and I'm very ...

ROBERT: Now is Michael now noticing that something is ...

LIZA SHOENFELD: Yeah, I think at that point he thought I was just really excited to be talking about neuroscience, and I'm just trying to think, "Okay, mouth, like, try—try and just calm down a little bit." And it was pretty painful too. I mean, it was like, imagine like a charley horse in your face.

ROBERT: Oh!

LIZA SHOENFELD: Yeah.

ROBERT: But she gets through the interview.

LIZA SHOENFELD: I actually do okay. You know, he asks me tough questions about science and I can answer him, I think. And I leave the interview. And then I'm met by the woman who's the head of the admissions weekend.

JAD: And she took one look at Liza ...

LIZA SHOENFELD: And she said, "You know, I don't know if you should do the rest of the interviews." And with her is my student host.

JAD: And Liza decides, all right, let me just call my dad.

LIZA SHOENFELD: Just to say, "Hey, Dad. I'm in the middle of my interview and something kind of funny is happening with my face. I can't control it." And while I'm talking to him, I lose control of my mouth and my tongue. So I can't—I can kind of talk, but it's pretty bad, really. It's pretty bad.

ROBERT: And is your dad a doctor?

LIZA SHOENFELD: No. Imagine your kid calling you being like, "I'm losing control of my face." And as they're telling you that, I started to think something's really wrong. And then my student host comes rushing back in running, and he looks at me and he tries to put on a calm face, and he says, "So now we need to go to the emergency room."

JAD: So they throw her into a taxi.

LIZA SHOENFELD: And in the taxi it went from, "I can't control my mouth" to a—I mean, a complete ...

ROBERT: All palsied in a torque.

LIZA SHOENFELD: I did not look good. And as we're pulling up to the emergency room was when my throat started tightening up.

JAD: They rush her inside.

LIZA SHOENFELD: And they have me in a gurney in a room in the back of the ER, surrounded by six people within two minutes.

ROBERT: Doctors swarming all around her.

LIZA SHOENFELD: An oxygen mask. EKG leads all over my chest. They do an IV.

ROBERT: And as she's lying there on the table and she's thinking, like, "What's wrong with me? Why can't I control my throat? Why can't I control my body?"

LIZA SHOENFELD: And I just—I couldn't—I remember frantically sending messages like, "You gotta cut this out now."

JAD: But she wasn't in control. And it turned out that while she was going from interview to interview to interview, talking about how her lab had taken these little mices and seized control of their basal ganglia ...

LIZA SHOENFELD: The Compazine that I took …

ROBERT: ... that nausea drug?

LIZA SHOENFELD: ... was actually affecting dopamine systems in my basal ganglia.

JAD: In other words, that drug had been doing to her ...

ROBERT: Pretty much what [laughs] what she'd been ...

JAD: ... doing to those mice.

LIZA SHOENFELD: One to two percent of people who take Compazine, they can have what's called an "acute dystonia." Which is what happened to me.

JAD: During all those interviews.

LIZA SHOENFELD: And the crazy thing is, the guy that I talked to first in the morning was the molecular dopamine guy. You know, how does dopamine get packed into vesicles? How does it get released? And it wasn't until I started talking with the more systems-level people who studied the behavioral output of the basal ganglia that I started to have behavioral deficits in my basal ganglia.

ROBERT: Wow! So your basal ganglia are testing the San Francisco docs, and they are failing and ...

LIZA SHOENFELD: [laughs] Yeah.

ROBERT: Did you get into San Francisco State?

LIZA SHOENFELD: UCSF?

ROBERT: UCSF?

LIZA SHOENFELD: No.

JAD: Damn it, basal ganglia!

LIZA SHOENFELD: [laughs]

JAD: We should probably tell everybody that Liza's obviously doing okay. Back in the ER, when the doctors finally figured out what was going on, they just gave her some Benadryl, of all things.

LIZA SHOENFELD: And—and actually, within 20 minutes, I was feeling a lot better.

JAD: She could breathe, her face had unclenched. And when we asked her, "How has this little adventure changed you?" She said, "Well, I'm still working with those mice," because when we talked to her, grad school hadn't started yet. "And now when I go into that room with a little laser ..."

LIZA SHOENFELD: I go in now and I just really I empathize with them.

ROBERT: [laughs] Come on, little Casper. This will just be for a couple of minutes.

JAD: You can do it!

LIZA SHOENFELD: Yeah, I'm thinking a lot about that.

ROBERT: Liza Schoenfeld is now a proud PhD candidate at the University of Washington.

JAD: And thanks to Brenna Farrell for production help on that story.

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: We'll be back.

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: And today ...

JAD: Times when you and your brain have a falling out, so to speak.

ROBERT: Okay, so Liza's disagreement with her brain didn't last very long. It was over within, really less than a day.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: But there are people who get into fusses with their heads that last longer. So here's a bigger, badder and broader story.

JAD: Also a true story. Comes from an essay written many years ago by a guy named Berton Roueché, who's this great—I don't know. How would you describe him?

ROBERT: Berton Roueché, he was a great essayist, journalism essayist.

JAD: Yeah. And this essay was published in 1958 in The New Yorker, and it's kind of an interesting essay because it's essentially one long quote from this woman that Berton interviewed, Rosemary Morton. It reads like a novel, even though it's non-fiction. So we asked an actress who's been in some movies, Hope Davis, to read excerpts from Rosemary's story. And the story begins on a normal night. Rosemary's at home with her husband Frank. And everything's fine—for the moment.

ROSEMARY MORTON: I'd been home about an hour. Dinner was ready and waiting in the oven, and I was sitting at the piano not really playing, just amusing myself. That's something I often do at the end of the day. It helps me relax. My husband was in the kitchen making us a cocktail, which is another Morton custom. We usually have a drink or two before dinner. So everything was quite ordinary and normal until Frank came in with the drinks.

ROSEMARY MORTON: I got up to join him on the sofa, and as I did, as I started across the room, I felt the floor sort of shake. "Good heavens," I said. "What was that?" Frank just looked at me, his face was a perfect blank. He made some remark about old buildings stretching and settling, and handed me my drink.

JAD: So she doesn't really think too much of this because it was very momentary.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: But a week later she's at work. She's actually in the library because she's a librarian. She's at her desk.

ROSEMARY MORTON: I worked at my desk for about an hour, and it was heaven. So quiet, so peaceful. Then I got up to get a book from the stacks or a drink of water or something, and it happened—the floor gave a shake and sank. It went down and up, just one lurch. Maybe a little more pronounced than the first time. And then everything was back to normal—except for my state of mind. I didn't know what to think. The best I could do was tell myself that this was an old building too. It was built around 1900.

JAD: So that was her sense at first: just old buildings.

ROSEMARY MORTON: It never occurred to me that there might be any other explanation.

JAD: But then over the next few days, very odd things begin to happen.

ROSEMARY MORTON: I don't know how to describe it, but I had the feeling that my sense of touch was getting more and more acute, especially in the soles of my feet. I could feel little tremors that other people couldn't. I didn't tell Frank until the middle of the following week, on Wednesday night to be exact. By then, I had to. I couldn't keep it to myself any longer. There was something wrong with me. There just wasn't any word for the awful sensations I'd been having. The floor-shaking feeling was only one of them. I don't know how many times that happened over the weekend, seven or eight at least. But even that began to have a different feeling.

ROSEMARY MORTON: At first, the floor had moved or sagged as a whole. It still did, only now I could feel another movement too, a kind of counterpoint. Sometimes it was as if I were sinking into the floor. The room would tilt, and I'd take a step and the floor was like snow. It would give under my foot and I would sink. And other times it was just the reverse: the floor would rise up to meet me. By then, it wasn't simply the floor that moved—when the floor tilted, the walls of the room tilted with it. And the ceiling. I mean, the shape of the room never changed, only its position in space.

JAD: So Rosemary went to see her doctor, and her doctor sent her to some specialists and they ran some tests. And then a short while later, she went back to her doctor to get the results.

ROSEMARY MORTON: He read me their conclusions, and they were all the same. They even used the same phrase: "Impression, essentially normal." I'll never forget that phrase: normal. Essentially normal. It sounds so reassuring, so comforting. But it isn't. At least it wasn't to me. It was terrifying.

JAD: After this diagnosis—or non-diagnosis—things really take a turn. Fast forward a few months ...

ROSEMARY MORTON: There were times in March and early April when I was absolutely certain I was going to die. But my reaction to death was peculiar. I don't remember feeling afraid. All I remembered is an overwhelming sense of urgency. So little time, so little done, so much I wanted to do.

ROSEMARY MORTON: I dragged Frank to the theater more than once, and I never thought of refusing when he suggested the Philharmonic or the Metropolitan. My response to music had never been so complete. I spent hours listening to records. I'd play some old favorite like Beecham conducting Haydn's London Symphony, and it was amazing. It seemed to me that I could hear the inner structure more clearly than ever before. So the idea of a dinner and a concert wasn't at all unusual. My only mistake was to take that dreadful underground passage.

ROSEMARY MORTON: It was raining and I was in a hurry, but even so I should have realized. When I did, it was too late. The passage was jammed with commuters shoving and pushing and surging toward me, but I didn't dare turn back. The floor was beginning to wobble, and I knew if I tried to swing around it would tip me head over heels. All I could do was go on. The traffic was still all against me. People kept looming up, towering up. They came charging at me like giants. And then I felt something right out of a nightmare.

ROSEMARY MORTON: I was almost at the end of the passage when I felt the movement change. It was as if someone had pulled a lever. There was a little jolt, and the floor was moving very slowly backward down the passage. I was walking on a treadmill. Only for a minute, though. Then I reached the stairs. I drove myself up to the lobby and collapsed in a chair. I was jelly.

ROSEMARY MORTON: From early April, I began to move in a different world. I was conscious of a new dimension, a new plane. I had a new relationship to space. My legs, my arms, my face, my whole body felt different. It had no permanent shape, it changed by the minute. I seemed to be completely at the mercy of some outside force, some atmospheric pressure. I was amorphous. My left leg would seem to lengthen, or my right arm or my neck, or one whole side of me would double or treble in size. And yet that doesn't fully describe it.

ROSEMARY MORTON: There were times when the force seemed to be the rotation of the Earth. I would have the feeling that I was vertically aligned with the Earth's axis. I could feel a sort of winding movement start up inside me. Then one of my legs would begin to shorten as if it were an anchor being drawn slowly up by a winch. The other leg would dangle. After a minute, the winch would shift, it would engage the dangling leg, and just as slowly bring it up to match the other.

ROBERT: This feels like some kind of a nightmare cartoon of some kind.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: So what is—what is wrong with her?

JAD: Well, after months of this, at the end of the essay she does finally learn that this condition she has has a name.

ROSEMARY MORTON: My trouble was a disturbance of the internal ear called "labyrinthitis."

ROBERT: Labyrinthitis.

ROSEMARY MORTON: The suffix "-itis" meant inflammation.

JAD: Swelling.

ROSEMARY MORTON: So the meaning of labyrinthitis as a word was simply an inflammation of the aural labyrinth.

ROBERT: You know, I think people in science and medicine love to give big fat names to "I don't know."

JAD: Well actually, this condition you should know. It goes by another name.

ROBERT: What?

JAD: Vertigo.

ROBERT: Oh!

JAD: That's why I like this story because, like, I didn't know. I mean, like, I always thought of vertigo like from the movie.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: Like, you're on the stairs and you're like, "Whoa! Whoa!" Like, it's just a thing with heights, you know? Like, that's what it was in the Hitchcock film. But what Rosemary Morton goes through in this story, it's like—seems way deeper. And at some point in the essay, she actually refers to her situation as a "case of gravitational anarchy."

ROBERT: That's an interesting phrase.

JAD: A phrase I kind of—I kind of like.

ROBERT: Yeah. Well, does she get better?

JAD: Yep.

ROSEMARY MORTON: It's impossible to say exactly when it all ended, but I think it was Frank who really sensed it first. It was after dinner one night in late August, and he suddenly smiled and remarked that I must be feeling much better. I asked him what he meant. "You never look scared anymore," he said.

JAD: It's very mysterious, but her vertigo just went away—poof!

ROBERT: Without explanation for the coming and no explanation for the going?

JAD: Some things just don't have explanations, Robert, but they have wonderful sound design.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: And that's Radiolab: no explanations, pretty sounds. [laughs]

ROBERT: I'd buy a ticket to that, Mr. Jensen! I'm crazy for sound design!

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: Not knowing anything.

JAD: Thanks to Berton Roueché—well, he's not alive anymore, but you can find his story, "Essentially Normal" in the awesome book Medical Detectives, which was published in 1984 by Dutton. Our sincere thanks to actress Hope Davis, and to Sarah Montague and Ellen Horne for directing Hope in the studio. And thanks to Tim Howard and Douglas Smith for the scoring help with that piece. And lastly, thanks to you for listening.

[LISTENER: Hey, I'm Lemmon and I'm from Richmond, Indiana. And here are the staff credits. 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, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Sarah Qari, Sarah Sandbach, Anisa Vietze, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton.]

[LISTENER: Hi, my name's Teresa. I'm calling from Colchester in Essex, UK. 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.]

LULU: All right. Here goes! Hi, it's Lulu, and that is the sound of me returning to the host chair after maternity leave. It is so nice to be back. Hello! And while I was gone, one of my favorite things we released was an episode reported by producer Sarah Qari all about Stockholm syndrome. You know, a very close and nuanced look at its origins and the surprising ways that it has affected you and me. All of us. That episode is called "How Stockholm Stuck." If you missed it, highly recommend you check it out.

LULU: And we have an addendum to that episode. It's a very real and raw and searching conversation between Sarah and one of the most prominent proponents of Stockholm syndrome, a psychiatrist named Frank Ochberg. And you can listen to that conversation over in our VIP party room, The Lab. That, of course, is our members-only feed where you can get extra goodies like this, extra conversations, bonus audio. So Lab members, check that out. If you're not a Lab member but you ever thought about maybe supporting Radiolab, now is a great time to check out if joining The Lab is for you over at www.radiolab.org/join. To become a member, listen to that conversation and a bunch of others. Again, that's Radiolab.org/join. Join us!

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