Pod Insights Radiolab Black Box About this episode In this episode, first aired in 2014, we examine three very different kinds of black boxes—spaces where we know what’s going in, we know what’s coming out, but can’t see what happens in-between.
From the darkest parts of metamorphosis to a sixty-year-old secret among magicians, and the nature of consciousness itself, we shine some light on three questions. But for each, we contend with an answerless space, leaving just enough room for the mystery and magic, always wondering what’s inside the Black Box.
EPISODE CREDITS: Reported by Tim Howard and Molly WebsterProduced by Tim Howard and Molly Webster
EPISODE CITATIONS:Radio Show: ABC's Keep Them Guessing (https://tinyurl.com/9r9zmftr)LATERAL CUTS:Last year we shared a story on our feed about butterfly researcher Dr. Martha Weiss, and how she befriended a little boy on the other side of the world who wanted to do his own caterpillar memory study.
Martha’s daughter Annie Rosenthal captured the whole adventure on tape and produced a gorgeous audio feature, “Caterpillar Roadshow,” which was first published in the audio magazine Signal Hill. You can find it on our feed (https://zpr.io/xPdAYXFUMr4s)–or on Signal Hill’s website. (https://zpr.io/a4bjPKeXJQWK)
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Transcript 10,724 words · 28 speakers
0:00 Speaker 00 Hey, Lulu here. This week, we are bringing back an episode full of intrepid humans trying to access places that are off limits, trying to solve the unsolvable, know the unknowable, see the unseeable. I can't say much more than that without giving everything away, so I'm just gonna buckle you into a time machine and beam you back to 2014. Phew, right into the studio with then-host Jad Abumrad and producer Tim Howard. Here we go.
0:30 Speaker 01 Wait, you're listening?
0:31 Speaker 02 Okay.
0:32 Speaker 01 All right.
0:33 Speaker 00 Okay.
0:34 Speaker 01 All right. You're listening to Radiolab. Radiolab. From... WNYC. See? Yep.
0:44 Speaker 03 Rewind.
0:49 Speaker 04 Batting first, producer Tim Howard.
0:51 Speaker 05 Cool. Wait, I'm just gonna get my level here. It is such a beautiful day.
0:58 Speaker 01 Beautiful. I think it's gotta be like 75 degrees out or something. Sunny.
1:02 Speaker 05 This is Patrick Purdon. He's a professor in anesthesia at Harvard Medical School and works at Mass General Hospital. You wanna just tell me where we are?
1:10 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah. We're standing right now in front of the Bull Finch Building, which...
1:14 Speaker 05 And I went up to talk to him because in that building...
1:17 Speaker 01 Is...
1:18 Speaker 05 This is the one with the ether dome?
1:19 Speaker 01 Ether dome is inside this building.
1:20 Speaker 05 Is the story of the day that you could say humanity emerged from the Dark Ages. Oh, you laugh now. Just wait.
1:31 Speaker 01 Okay, here we go. It's on the fourth floor. It's on the fourth floor of this building.
1:34 Speaker 05 We headed in, up three flights of stairs, into this room. What a cool room. Oh, my God. It's just like, how would you describe it?
1:46 Speaker 01 It's like a mini amphitheater, right?
1:47 Speaker 05 It's also got this awesome dome. It's this beautiful domed room with lights streaming down from above.
1:56 Speaker 05 Like, the acoustics in here are crazy. It must have been terrifying, though, if you actually heard somebody screaming.
2:02 Speaker 01 I mean, it's so resonant in here. The screams would have been deafening and absolutely would have been terrifying.
2:09 Speaker 05 What is this place? Well, this was an operating room. Oh. And back in the 1800s, when this room was really in use...
2:16 Speaker 06 Being in an operation was so painful. It was often permanently damaging to a patient's emotional state.
2:22 Speaker 05 This is Julie.
2:23 Speaker 06 I'm Julie Fenster. I write about American history.
2:26 Speaker 05 She wrote a book called Ether Day, which goes into a lot of detail about the dark, dark days of surgery in the early 1800s. Back then, during surgery, there were no painkillers, and patients were awake. Probably more awake than they'd ever been in their whole lives.
2:42 Speaker 06 Some of the patients remembered the sound of their limb dropping to the ground.
2:46 Speaker 05 Oh, God.
2:47 Speaker 06 Or the saw going through their sinew and bones.
2:51 Speaker 06 The smell of their own body being cut into.
2:57 Speaker 06 Usually, a surgeon would employ six burly men to hold a patient down. And instead of having an operation, some people committed suicide before they would face going into an operating room, which were usually located on the top floor of a hospital, in part because the hospital really didn't do itself a lot of good to have the screams heard by passersby.
3:22 Speaker 05 This is such a cool room.
3:25 Speaker 05 Here we are at the top of the Ether Dome. But then, everything changes. October 16th, 1846. It's a Friday morning. I assume the room is full?
3:36 Speaker 01 The room is absolutely full.
3:37 Speaker 06 The students were all lined up to watch.
3:40 Speaker 05 Crowded in the bleachers because they'd heard something big was gonna go down. And right there in the middle of the room is...
3:45 Speaker 06 The most esteemed surgeon in America, Dr. John Warren.
3:50 Speaker 05 About to do an operation. He brought in a patient who needed a tumor taken out of his neck, and he was just about to slice into the guy.
3:57 Speaker 01 Just about to start the surgery.
3:59 Speaker 05 When this mustachioed fellow bursts in. A dentist.
4:03 Speaker 06 William T. G. Morton.
4:05 Speaker 05 And he basically said to Warren something that must have sounded completely nuts. I can erase that man's pain.
4:13 Speaker 05 He didn't actually use those words. He actually had an appointment with Warren. But according to Julie, he did have a bag.
4:19 Speaker 06 He had a bag filled with gas.
4:21 Speaker 05 A gas called ether.
4:23 Speaker 06 And Dr. Warren, who had the scalpel raised.
4:27 Speaker 05 He puts it down.
4:27 Speaker 06 Stands aside and says with great sarcasm.
4:31 Speaker 01 Well, sir, your patient is ready.
4:33 Speaker 05 Wait a second, had he ever tested this? He claimed to have tried it out on some dental patients and...
4:38 Speaker 06 On his dog, on himself, and on his goldfish.
4:43 Speaker 05 Nice. So Morton gets to work.
4:45 Speaker 01 Morton sets up his gear, fills up the inhaler.
4:48 Speaker 05 Puts it up to the guy's face.
4:50 Speaker 01 And actually, because the valve system had just been constructed and he hadn't tested it, he actually literally had to manually operate the valves with every inhale and exhale of the patient. So he administers the ether using this inhaler. After about three or four minutes, the patient becomes unconscious. And just at that moment, Morton turns to Warren and says...
5:13 Speaker 06 Your patient, sir.
5:15 Speaker 05 Dr. Warren brings the scalpel down to the patient's neck and cuts. And really, for the first time in that room, you could hear the scalpel. You could hear the breathing.
5:30 Speaker 06 The silence was far more deafening than all the screams that had ever been heard in that operating theater. No squirming, no moving, no bulging eyes, no clenched fists.
5:43 Speaker 05 It must have felt like a miracle.
5:50 Speaker 06 The news of the operation went around the world as fast as anything. News of war or peace didn't travel faster than this. By the end of the year, doctors in Europe were using surgical anesthetics.
6:05 Speaker 05 And basically, the blink of an eye, the most painful, horrible experience possibly imaginable became routine.
6:14 Speaker 05 Even forgettable.
6:16 Speaker 04 But also deeply peculiar, as was made clear to us when we talked a while back with one of our regulars.
6:22 Speaker 07 Carl Zimmer.
6:23 Speaker 03 Well, my wife and I, we were watching this movie one night. It was called Birth, starring Nicole Kidman.
6:28 Speaker 04 You, did you like it?
6:29 Speaker 03 I hated it.
6:29 Speaker 04 No, it's one of my favorites.
6:31 Speaker 03 Well, okay, I'm sitting there and I'm hating the movie.
6:34 Speaker 04 You're hating this movie?
6:35 Speaker 03 Well, I'm just wondering, like, why am I reacting so negatively to this movie? I'm just in such a bad mood. I'm feeling lousy, and I think it's the movie, and I stand up and I say, oh, wait a minute. My abdomen is in incredible pain.
6:50 Speaker 04 Oh, so it's not the movie?
6:51 Speaker 03 It's not the movie. It's me.
6:54 Speaker 04 Appendix about to burst.
6:56 Speaker 03 We go to the hospital, and maybe four in the morning, five in the morning, they're prepping me for surgery. They, you know, put an IV in me, and then they're like, okay, now we're going to be putting in the anesthetic. You know, so just relax, and this will be taking effect.
7:10 Speaker 04 But he says it didn't seem to be working.
7:12 Speaker 03 So I start thinking about what they're going to be doing to me in half an hour. They're gonna like, take these knives, and they're gonna cut me open, they're gonna rip my intestines apart. They're gonna pull off this inflamed appendix, they're gonna sew up the intestines, they're gonna zip everything back up. And all this is gonna happen, supposedly, without me being aware of it. And I, and I'm not having any part of it. I just say, I was just like lying there saying, I don't think this is working. I'm not feeling anything. You're gonna have to do something more. I just want you to know that I'm not.
7:47 Speaker 03 And then, I was in another room, and there was no one else there. Where did they all go? Like, they had all left. And then, and then it occurred to me like, no, oh, oh, oh, the, the whole surgery's already happened.
8:01 Speaker 04 Wow, that is weird.
8:02 Speaker 07 It's happened to me. It's, it's as if they splice time, take the time that you were in.
8:08 Speaker 04 And the time you are in subsequently, and the middle is totally missing. No experience whatsoever.
8:14 Speaker 03 It's not like sleep.
8:15 Speaker 04 No.
8:16 Speaker 03 There was no like, oh, I'm getting sleepy. I was arguing with my doctors that they didn't know how to do their job. And the next thing, I'm in a hospital room with my appendix out and it's 10 hours later.
8:30 Speaker 04 It sort of implies that it's like a switch.
8:32 Speaker 03 It is, and that's what happens. I mean, when you raise the level of anesthesia in someone, and they've done studies on this, it isn't a gentle gradation down. You just, you raise it up, you raise it up, and then boom, you are into this other state.
8:46 Speaker 04 Do, do people who do this for a living know exactly why this happened?
8:51 Speaker 03 You'd think that something that's been around since 1846 would be hammered out.
8:57 Speaker 03 Solid. But it's still almost a philosophical kind of mystery.
9:25 Speaker 04 There's a term for this in physics. It's called a black box. It refers to a system where you can see what goes in. You can see that something different comes out. And you wonder like, what happened there in the middle? But you can't see it. Yeah. It's a mystery. It's black and it's closed up, therefore the box. I mean, it may not literally be a box, but today we have three different attempts. To open three very different black boxes. Starting with the box that's in front of us now, that gap that Carl talked about where you go boom. You're gone. And then suddenly you're back. What happens in that gap? That's what's crazy. It's been almost 170 years since William Morton did his thing in front of those med students, and we've moved way beyond ether.
10:06 Speaker 05 So here we got propofol, we got sevoflurane, dexamethasone, ketabine.
10:10 Speaker 04 We've got all these new drugs, but we still don't know exactly how they work.
10:15 Speaker 05 Which for Patrick is a very practical problem.
10:18 Speaker 01 It's very difficult, actually, to figure out when people, you know, aren't conscious because they can always be internally conscious to some degree, right?
10:25 Speaker 05 And in the 1950s and 60s, he says, this became a real issue because doctors started giving patients.
10:31 Speaker 01 Neuromuscular blocking agents.
10:32 Speaker 05 That would paralyze their muscles during surgery, so they wouldn't flop around, which is a good thing. But then you'd have these situations.
10:42 Speaker 05 Once in a blue moon.
10:46 Speaker 05 Where a patient would wake up in the middle of surgery.
10:49 Speaker 01 Literally trapped, unable to move.
10:52 Speaker 05 Eyes closed, totally still.
10:54 Speaker 01 You know, fully awake, but no one would be able to perceive it because they couldn't move.
10:59 Speaker 05 And that's a nightmare that, you know, may even be worse than having six strongmen hold you down. Yeah, we don't have to dwell on that. Well, I actually did find a bunch of these stories. I don't want to hear them. No, they're great. I mean, they're amazing. No. All right.
11:15 Speaker 01 I'd like to hear about it.
11:15 Speaker 05 No.
11:16 Speaker 01 I'm just saying.
11:16 Speaker 05 Here, I'll just play you one. No, I'd, no. All right, all right, all right. You aren't gonna regret it, but, uh... Well, anyway, the larger point is that if you can't understand how and why anesthesia works, then you're not going to be able to explain why every so often it just doesn't work. Really? How often is every so often?
11:36 Speaker 05 I've heard different numbers, anywhere between 1 in 10,000 to much more often, like 1 in 1,000. Wow. But luckily...
11:44 Speaker 01 Let's take a look at these brain signals.
11:46 Speaker 05 In the last few decades, scientists have begun to shine a little pin light into this black box. And Patrick and his team in particular have found something pretty cool.
11:54 Speaker 01 This experiment that we did in the, I guess, late 2000s.
11:58 Speaker 05 A couple of years ago, they wanted to know what happens in the brain right when that "fum" switch flips. So they got a bunch of volunteers.
12:05 Speaker 01 Healthy volunteers.
12:06 Speaker 05 They hooked them up to an IV and started to very, very slowly give them propofol.
12:11 Speaker 01 Slowly administer the drug.
12:12 Speaker 05 Which is a big anesthetic. And as they did, they told the subjects to click a button every time they heard a sound or a word.
12:19 Speaker 01 Chair, library.
12:21 Speaker 05 That they recognized.
12:21 Speaker 01 Submarine, you know, something like that. In addition, we had the subjects named too. Tim. Patrick.
12:27 Speaker 05 So the subjects would just sit there and listen and click.
12:30 Speaker 01 Chair. Library.
12:31 Speaker 05 On and on.
12:32 Speaker 01 Patrick.
12:34 Speaker 05 And every 15 minutes, they gave them a little bit more propofol.
12:36 Speaker 01 Submarine. Tim. Bip. Michael. Bip. Patrick. Bip.
12:44 Speaker 05 Patrick. Until eventually.
12:48 Speaker 01 They just stopped responding altogether.
12:50 Speaker 05 They were just out cold. Now, throughout this whole time, Patrick and his team were measuring the brainwaves of the subjects. That's the key. And he says what they saw right at the moment that that switch flipped.
13:04 Speaker 01 Right at the moment of loss of consciousness. There was just one really, really clear motif that appeared.
13:10 Speaker 05 They saw this wave of electricity sweeping across the brain.
13:14 Speaker 01 This really low-frequency oscillation, about one cycle per second or less.
13:23 Speaker 01 And in addition to that, there was this higher-frequency piece, an alpha wave, that appeared at the front of the head at that loss of consciousness moment.
13:35 Speaker 04 So when people went under, their brains just started to ring like a bell?
13:38 Speaker 05 Basically.
13:40 Speaker 04 And why would those... What are those waves doing exactly?
13:43 Speaker 05 It seems like those waves might be imposing a kind of deadly order on the brain. This is the thing that's very counterintuitive. You think that consciousness is order and synchrony, but it turns out that it's kind of the opposite. That consciousness is actually chaotic and noisy. It's all of those different parts of the brain, you know, facial recognition, touch, sound, language, engaged in this crazily complicated, multi-layered conversation.
14:12 Speaker 03 You know, there's one person talking, the other one talking back.
14:18 Speaker 05 This is Carl Zimmer again, and he says one of the hallmarks of the conscious brain is that you see a kind of conversational logic, a back-and-forth between the different parts. Yeah, my turn, your turn, my turn, your turn.
14:30 Speaker 03 The things you're seeing create signals in the back of your head, they go to the front of your head, back again, forward and back, and forward and back, and forward and back, and forward and back. And you can use this eavesdropping to calculate how connected the brain is, what they call connectivity. And when you're awake, you have a lot of connectivity. When you're dreaming, you also have a lot of connectivity. And then if someone gives you anesthesia...
15:00 Speaker 03 Like in a matter of a second, your connectivity just collapses.
15:03 Speaker 05 Maybe that's what happened to you. It just cut, your connectivity got cut.
15:07 Speaker 03 It did.
15:08 Speaker 05 And here is the weird part.
15:09 Speaker 03 Scientists will like play a sound to somebody who's under with anesthesia. And they can see that actually, the part of the brain that processes sound, the auditory cortex, is active. It takes in the sound. So your brain is hearing sounds.
15:26 Speaker 05 That's spooky.
15:28 Speaker 03 Yeah.
15:29 Speaker 05 So what could be happening is that when you're under anesthesia, all the different parts of your brain, to some degree, they could be awake.
15:35 Speaker 03 It's not, not your brain is just stopping.
15:38 Speaker 05 No, all those parts of the brain are still talking. They're just not talking to each other.
15:43 Speaker 03 Very well anymore.
15:44 Speaker 05 And that somehow knocks you out.
15:47 Speaker 04 So lots of chit chat amongst the different parts of my brain make me conscious, and not so much chit chat equals unconsciousness.
15:54 Speaker 05 Yeah, that's the idea.
15:56 Speaker 04 And how do the slow waves relate to that?
16:00 Speaker 05 Well, Patrick thinks of it in sort of in baseball terms.
16:03 Speaker 01 Right. So actually, I was at a Red Sox game the other day. It was the last one that they had with the Yankees at Fenway Park this year. And at some point, the wave started. So some part of the stadium decided to go into the wave. And here you go, the wave's coming around and coming around, and you're watching it, and it keeps coming around and coming around. And you know, after a while, it gets really tiresome. Because you're sitting there and you're just like, okay, I've gotta wait for the wave to come. Okay, here it is. Stand up, raise our arms, sit back down. And just a moment later, like, oh my god, I gotta stand up again. And you're waiting, oh dude, it's back again. And the thing is that when the wave is going on in the stadium, you can't really carry on a normal conversation.
16:48 Speaker 01 You can't have a normal interaction. You may not even be able to have a normal thought, because the thing is just coming by every couple of seconds to interrupt you. That is sort of the rationale for how these oscillations disrupt brain activity.
17:00 Speaker 04 I dig the analogy, but I'm not quite following.
17:03 Speaker 05 It helps to zoom in on the brain and look at a smaller number of neurons.
17:08 Speaker 04 Okay.
17:09 Speaker 05 Which is what he did.
17:10 Speaker 01 Now, check this out. We conducted this study where we measured brain activity in individual neurons.
17:18 Speaker 05 They got some patients, planted these tiny little electrodes deep into their brains, so they could hear the individual neurons.
17:24 Speaker 01 So let's imagine that we zoom in to like tens to hundreds of neurons firing.
17:31 Speaker 01 And um.
17:32 Speaker 05 He says when they give that patient propofol, an anesthetic.
17:35 Speaker 01 What we noticed is that, right at the point of loss of consciousness.
17:39 Speaker 05 Sure enough, they see those big, slow waves sweeping through. And just like in Fenway, when the wave hits you, you have to stop your conversation. But what that wave is really doing is it's only allowing each little cluster of neurons to talk once in a while.
17:56 Speaker 01 They can only fire at a particular moment in this slow oscillation.
18:03 Speaker 05 Like, you know how the wave goes up and down, up and down, or round and round and round, if you're in Fenway? It's only at this moment, say, that one group gets to talk. The problem is his buddy, he can only talk at this moment. And the neurons next door, they can only talk at this moment. Next group, same deal. Everybody gets a turn to talk, but they can't talk to each other because they're on slightly different schedules. When they're talking, the others can't listen. So there's still a lot of talking going on, but consciousness seems to be the brain talking and listening to itself. So when that slow wave rolls around.
18:43 Speaker 01 The neurons can't all fire at the same time and talk to one another. And in that state, it would be impossible to be conscious.
18:50 Speaker 05 Is it, it might be early to say, but it, does it feel kind of like you cracked the code?
18:55 Speaker 01 Well, I think we are in the process of cracking the code for anesthesia. You don't ever want to get, you know, too far out on a limb. But honestly, I mean, I feel if we can educate people about these rhythms, I, I, you know, I'd be willing to say it, sure. I, I, I think we have. I mean, I, I think this is gonna be huge. I'm, I'm not gonna lie to you. I think this is just gonna be absolutely huge. Yeah. I'll take the bait on that, sure.
21:44 Speaker 08 This week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, will House Democrats try once again for impeachment?
21:49 Speaker 09 Let's not make a fetish out of impeachment. Let's not make a taboo out of impeachment. We understand it's not a panacea, but it is an essential tool in the constitutional toolbox. That's always there.
22:00 Speaker 08 Congressman Jamie Raskin joins us next time on the New Yorker Radio Hour from WNYC. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
22:18 Speaker 05 OK, I'll do that. OK, let me do it one more time. Three, two, one. This is Tim Howard, and today on Radiolab, we've been talking about black boxes. And the next story started with a radio piece that I heard at the Third Coast International Audio Festival. There were a lot of incredible stories, but there was this one called "Keep Them Guessing" that I just loved, and I couldn't get it out of my head. So I sat Chad and Robert down in our little black box of a studio.
22:44 Speaker 04 I stand deep. Look, Tim Howard, I'm not sure I like your tone, OK?
22:50 Speaker 05 And I connected them with the guy who made the piece. Hello? I hear the sound of what sounds like another room.
22:58 Speaker 10 Does he sound like me now?
22:59 Speaker 07 Oh!
23:01 Speaker 05 His name is Jesse Cox.
23:02 Speaker 07 Wow, you sound so close, because you're far away.
23:05 Speaker 05 He's actually in Australia.
23:06 Speaker 07 Where everybody is, because they're upside down from the rest of us, they are very, very likely to fall into the sky.
23:12 Speaker 10 You have us Australians worked out down to a T, Robert. I'm gripping on with my hands to the table as we speak.
23:17 Speaker 07 Oh, good.
23:19 Speaker 05 OK, just to start, I mean, maybe just introduce us to your grandparents. Who are they?
23:23 Speaker 10 Well, my grandparents were mind readers.
23:27 Speaker 10 On the radio.
23:28 Speaker 05 Really?
23:29 Speaker 10 Yeah.
23:30 Speaker 05 You're going to have to explain that. What are their names first?
23:32 Speaker 10 Lesley, Lesley Piddington and Sidney Piddington.
23:36 Speaker 07 Piddington?
23:36 Speaker 10 Piddington.
23:37 Speaker 07 And they had a, they had a radio show?
23:39 Speaker 10 Yeah. The show was called The Piddingtons or The Amazing Piddingtons, and it was on the BBC Radio in the 1950s.
23:46 Speaker 04 Now Jesse told us that for most of his life, he didn't know this.
23:50 Speaker 10 I guess the reason was that my grandfather and my grandma divorced well before I was born.
23:54 Speaker 04 And then his grandpa.
23:56 Speaker 10 He died when I was four or five.
23:58 Speaker 04 Then his grandma remarried, so nobody talked about it, crazily enough.
24:04 Speaker 10 I knew that my grandparents had been famous and my grandma was an actress, but it really wasn't until I was a teenager and a radio producer actually discovered by accident that my grandma was alive and went, what? There's still a Piddington alive?
24:18 Speaker 04 The reporter calls up his grandma and is like, hey, can I interview you?
24:21 Speaker 10 And my grandma was hesitant. She was like, oh, I'm not sure I'll be very good. I can try and remember. And they came and interviewed her. And when it went to air, when it got broadcast, we all drove up.
24:32 Speaker 04 To his grandma's house?
24:33 Speaker 10 And listened to it around the radio like they would have back in the 1950s and heard the story.
24:38 Speaker 04 And that's when Jesse discovered that his grandparents, Leslie and Sidney Piddington, one time had an audience of 20 million people.
24:44 Speaker 10 Yeah, yeah. Basically, the population of Australia was listening to my grandparents back in the 1950s.
24:50 Speaker 04 No way.
24:51 Speaker 10 I was like, yeah, why, why don't I know this? This is, this is in my family and why, why don't I know it?
24:55 Speaker 04 But he says it was really when he sat down and listened to the original broadcasts, what's left of them.
25:00 Speaker 10 Two hours of old BBC recordings that survive today because my grandparents pirated them from the BBC back in 1950.
25:09 Speaker 04 He says it wasn't until he heard those tapes.
25:12 Speaker 10 That I went, wow.
25:15 Speaker 07 You should now tell us this story.
25:17 Speaker 04 Yeah.
25:17 Speaker 07 Tell us what you heard that made you go, wow.
25:20 Speaker 10 Well.
25:26 Speaker 10 You hear this very dramatic theme song. And this old BBC voice comes onto the tape and says.
25:34 Speaker 02 Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. We present the Piddington.
25:39 Speaker 10 And the music goes up. All very, very dramatic. And then the narrator sets the scene for you.
25:45 Speaker 11 Good evening to you all, both at home and here in the number one Piccadilly studio, right in the middle of the west end of London.
25:50 Speaker 10 It was done in front of a live audience. And then you hear my grandfather's voice.
25:55 Speaker 11 Well, as Stephen Grenfell has just told you, life's been quite exciting for us.
26:00 Speaker 10 He was a stutterer.
26:01 Speaker 11 We've had a lot more letters.
26:05 Speaker 10 There were all these things that meant it should never have worked on radio. Anyhow.
26:08 Speaker 11 Anyhow, tonight.
26:09 Speaker 10 My grandfather is in the studio on the stage.
26:12 Speaker 11 And?
26:12 Speaker 10 My grandma.
26:13 Speaker 11 I'm sorry to say, Lesley isn't here.
26:16 Speaker 10 She was often somewhere dramatic.
26:17 Speaker 12 As in not in the studio?
26:18 Speaker 10 Somewhere exotic. One time she was in a diving bell.
26:21 Speaker 11 A diving bell.
26:22 Speaker 10 She was underwater.
26:23 Speaker 11 At the bottom of a test tank.
26:25 Speaker 10 Whoa. One time she was in the Tower of London.
26:27 Speaker 11 Are you there, Lesley, in the tower?
26:29 Speaker 13 Yes, I'm here.
26:30 Speaker 10 Yeah.
26:31 Speaker 11 And a member of Piddington is here in the Piccadilly studio, and Lesley is in the Tower of London.
26:35 Speaker 12 So your grandpa is on stage and your grandma, you're saying, is in a tower? By phone, or?
26:40 Speaker 10 No, she's in front of a microphone. Now, this is back in the time when microphones were the size of small melons.
26:45 Speaker 11 We'll hear from them very shortly.
26:46 Speaker 10 There'd be a microphone set up in the Tower of London.
26:48 Speaker 12 Connected live?
26:49 Speaker 10 Yeah. My grandfather then comes on the air and sets up a series of telepathy tests that they're going to enact.
26:57 Speaker 11 And now, down to work. I will attempt to transmit to Lesley a line of print selected from a number of books on the table here in the studio.
27:06 Speaker 10 So there was a famous one called the book test. And this is where a member of the audience would come up to the stage, and there'd be a pile of books, and they'd randomly pick up a book, randomly open to a page, and point to a line.
27:18 Speaker 11 Would you read out the line to the listening audience?
27:23 Speaker 14 The line selected is, "Be abandoned, as the electrician said, that they would have no current."
27:31 Speaker 11 Now.
27:32 Speaker 10 Completely random bit of text selected out of a stack of books.
27:36 Speaker 12 After the text had been chosen and only then.
27:38 Speaker 11 I shall now call in the Tower of London.
27:40 Speaker 12 They would connect to his grandma, Lesley.
27:42 Speaker 11 In just a moment, at the sound of the gong, I want your complete silence, your sympathy, and your cooperation. Now concentrate on the line while I attempt to transmit it to Lesley.
27:56 Speaker 10 And a gong would sound and he'd kind of very dramatically furrow his brow.
28:03 Speaker 10 And the next thing you heard was...
28:05 Speaker 13 Men?
28:06 Speaker 10 My grandmother.
28:08 Speaker 13 Men.
28:12 Speaker 13 Light.
28:13 Speaker 10 This sort of frail, gentle voice and she started to unpick
28:18 Speaker 13 Yep.
28:19 Speaker 10 what was being transmitted to her.
28:21 Speaker 13 Something to do...
28:25 Speaker 13 An electrician.
28:29 Speaker 13 Something about light and electricians.
28:34 Speaker 10 Remember that line again was?
28:35 Speaker 14 Be abandoned, as the electricians said, that there would have no current.
28:40 Speaker 13 Will you concentrate on the word?
28:44 Speaker 13 That's... Like being left, people being left.
28:49 Speaker 10 It's amazing to listen to, over sixty years later, listening to those tapes, I'm still on the edge of my seat.
28:55 Speaker 13 Abandoned?
28:57 Speaker 13 That...
29:00 Speaker 13 Not light.
29:04 Speaker 13 Concentrate on the word, like light.
29:07 Speaker 10 And, right at the end...
29:11 Speaker 13 I think the whole line is...
29:14 Speaker 13 Abandoned? As the electricians said, there would not be current.
29:22 Speaker 14 Be abandoned, as the electricians said, that there would have no current.
29:30 Speaker 10 Almost every time, it would be a hundred percent correct.
29:33 Speaker 14 Truly remarkable broadcast.
29:40 Speaker 10 It just was this feeling inside you that you get going, hang on, what?
29:46 Speaker 04 When Jesse heard those broadcasts, his obvious question was, how did they do that?
29:52 Speaker 10 Well, this is the question that I, I have wanted to know for so long. And there have been many, many theories. I mean, they used to get letters in from listeners all the time. There's this box of press clippings we found at the bottom of my grandma's closet and we started going through these press clippings. And there were wild theories, like little Morse code transmitters in their teeth.
30:13 Speaker 10 Yeah, I mean, one of the theories I quite liked was someone who wrote in saying there was a green man that ran between their shoulders, and he knew this on authority because he also had a green man, and so that was precisely how they did it.
30:24 Speaker 07 But you are totally convinced that this was a carefully worked out trick of some kind?
30:30 Speaker 10 Yes, that is the one part of almost certainty I can say.
30:34 Speaker 07 There has to be some secret code, some tapping of the some something.
30:39 Speaker 15 Well, you're not the first person to say that. People were constantly trying to guess what the code was.
30:44 Speaker 04 That's Jim Steinmeier.
30:45 Speaker 15 I'm an author and a consultant to magicians.
30:47 Speaker 04 He says that at the time, some magicians in London
30:50 Speaker 15 thought that his stammer was part of the code.
30:55 Speaker 11 Do not think, I can just think yes.
30:57 Speaker 04 Jesse, for his part, ended up going through a ton of these theories as he interviewed magicians and historians, read through magic books. Initially, one of the theories that made sense to him
31:06 Speaker 10 is that the code was in the silence, that basically my grandparents and my grandma were so in sync that between each time a sound or a word was uttered, they'd inside their heads start going through the alphabet, and they'd be so in tune, so in sync, that whatever letter that matched up, that that would be a code.
31:26 Speaker 07 Wait, so Chad? A, B, C. Hi. D. Sub C. I'm wondering A, B, C, D, E, F, G. The next letter is going to be J. I'm going to be staring.
31:43 Speaker 10 Is that all? Yeah, of course, of course. As soon as you start playing any of these theories out in real time, you realize how ridiculous they are.
31:50 Speaker 04 And if you listen to the second broadcast of the two that survived, you hear something that makes the whole idea of a code seem kind of impossible.
31:58 Speaker 10 Yeah, that was a test they did on the aeroplane broadcast.
32:02 Speaker 04 In that broadcast, his grandma?
32:04 Speaker 10 She was in an aeroplane.
32:05 Speaker 11 Flying at a great height, at a great speed towards somewhere rather, but we're not sure where.
32:08 Speaker 10 Flying around Bristol.
32:10 Speaker 04 And she was in this plane at the same moment that he was on stage.
32:14 Speaker 10 Exactly, and on that time, there were numbered envelopes on everyone's seats. And my grandfather said, "Okay, everyone, write something and put it in the envelope. Seal it up."
32:23 Speaker 04 Just write a poem off the top of your head.
32:24 Speaker 10 Hundred and fifty people do this. And then Sid turns to one of the judges and says, "Okay, pick two numbers from one to a hundred and fifty." And then someone goes into the audience and goes and picks those two envelopes, brings them back to the stage, gives them to the judges, and then the judge picks one of the envelopes, pulls out the poem, and then holds it in front of my grandfather.
32:43 Speaker 04 And so here you have a poem chosen seemingly at random, and Lesley, the grandma, is several thousand feet in the air. When they finally connect to her... We're still coming, will you?
32:52 Speaker 16 Hello?
32:53 Speaker 04 Via shortwave relay.
32:54 Speaker 16 Lesley is still completely isolated.
32:56 Speaker 04 She can't even hear a word that they're saying.
32:58 Speaker 10 She never had a pair of headphones, so she could never actually hear what was going on in the studio. She literally just spoke into a microphone once the technician said, "Lesley, we're ready for you."
33:08 Speaker 16 We're ready for you.
33:10 Speaker 04 So thousands of feet below, Sidney is there furrowing his brow, and the poem he's trying to send her is from Keats. There's one line that goes, "Hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou never wert."
33:24 Speaker 13 A bird?
33:29 Speaker 13 One bird?
33:33 Speaker 13 Oh, it's, it's two lines.
33:38 Speaker 13 A bird, spirit... Oh, I've got it, I can guess it. "Hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou never wert."
33:47 Speaker 11 Miss Young, would you read out what is written down on the piece of paper that you hold?
33:53 Speaker 17 "Hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou never wert."
33:56 Speaker 11 Thank you.
34:00 Speaker 04 The crazy part is that in that trick, your grandpa doesn't even talk to her.
34:03 Speaker 10 There's complete silence between Sid and Lesley, and if there's silence, there can be no coding. So, you know, it was kind of this wonderful process of I'd talk to people, and even if they came up with theories, you'd listen to the tape and then realise that even the theories themselves just seemed so implausible.
34:18 Speaker 04 Well, maybe it's the narrator. Do you think it's the narrator? That whatever it is the narrator says each night, which is before you're, before the game is even on.
34:26 Speaker 12 Somehow encoded into that, that man's introduction is the answer.
34:31 Speaker 07 No, because the, because the audience hasn't yet gone and done its random act when he starts the show.
34:36 Speaker 12 Oh, yeah.
34:36 Speaker 10 There was one thing that I discovered from reading the magic books. And this was this whole idea about passing on a piece of information through a third party. Now, my grandfather never speaks to my grandma, but he says to the technician in the studio, can you please call Gilbert Sullivan in the Strada cruiser and ask my wife to stand by? Then the technician calls Gilbert and says, Gilbert, can you please ask Leslie to stand by? And then Gilbert Sullivan says to my grandma, Leslie, please stand by.
35:02 Speaker 07 Hmm.
35:03 Speaker 10 Now, that is the only thing I can see where there's some kind of communication.
35:08 Speaker 12 Wait, but yeah.
35:09 Speaker 07 But how would stand by communicate something like a random sentence from a book or whatever?
35:14 Speaker 10 Exactly. And that's then essentially where the theory falls down because then what happens next is that my grandma basically successfully recites a half-written crossword, which someone has put into an envelope and passed up to my grandpa. So like you go, how, how stand by means, means, you know, six down? I have no idea. So really I'm back to square one again. I can't work it out. I've got, you know, the closest I-
35:33 Speaker 07 You mean to this day you don't know?
35:35 Speaker 10 To this day, I do not know.
35:36 Speaker 12 Wait a second, wait a second, wait a second.
35:38 Speaker 07 No, we can't, no, there's gotta be somebody who knows. Can't believe when he comes to this interview, we have no, we have no-
35:44 Speaker 12 So it's, it's the technician, it's gotta be the technician. You gotta get to the technician because the technician is looking at her and he's doing something-
35:51 Speaker 07 Or the pilot, or the pilot. All they have to do is move their lips.
35:53 Speaker 12 There, there's something is happening with that man's eyebrows and that's the code. It's the eyebrows.
35:58 Speaker 10 I feel like I'm just listening to this, like what's been going on in my head for about 10, 12 years.
36:04 Speaker 12 So then I asked Jesse, like, what happened when he talked to his grandma?
36:08 Speaker 10 Total dead end.
36:09 Speaker 12 What do you mean total dead end? You mean like-
36:11 Speaker 10 Growing up, around, once we discovered this story, around the dinner table where we visited her, it would always be, but, but why don't you tell us? Why can't you tell us? We're family. Surely you can tell us. And she would fob us off and, and just say, you are the judge. That is the line that they finish. Well, that is the line they finish with every single broadcast.
36:29 Speaker 16 Anything to say?
36:30 Speaker 13 Well, only thanks very much, everyone, and- You're the judge.
36:34 Speaker 16 Well, I think, well, all right. I'm baffled. Now back to the Pittington and Piccadilly.
36:39 Speaker 10 She won't even give me the satisfaction of saying, yes, it was a trick. She won't even say that.
36:43 Speaker 07 Clearly, you aren't the favorite grandchild. There was probably another, another, you have a cousin or a sibling whom she really adored. And one day, without your knowing it, she whispered the secret to her.
36:55 Speaker 10 No.
36:55 Speaker 12 What about to her son, your father? What did she, did she tell, did she tell your dad?
37:00 Speaker 10 She told my dad something.
37:02 Speaker 12 What? What did she tell him?
37:04 Speaker 10 I have no idea. He will not even admit being told something. If she slipped up. This is Jesse's dad. And I'm not even sure that she did slip up. Um, but how to finish that sentence. And I have grilled my dad. I don't understand why you can't say, yes, Leslie did tell me something. I'm not going to tell you, but yes, she did actually tell me something. If my mom entrusted me with something all those years ago, then I will keep that trust. Why? Because I believe in keeping trust. My dad won't tell my mom. They've been together for over 30 years. You'll just have to continue not knowing.
37:45 Speaker 15 There's no book that's published. There's no one that came out and said, I was the fellow who worked behind the scenes with the Pittingtons. Let me tell you how it was done.
37:53 Speaker 10 That's Jim Steinmeier again.
37:54 Speaker 15 They left people guessing and, and walked away.
37:59 Speaker 10 Well, the, the thing that got me is when I was talking to magicians and they said, we can repeat everything that they did.
38:06 Speaker 12 Really? So they can actually do, I mean, like, you know, one of them is in a plane and others on the.
38:11 Speaker 10 Apparently, but they still themselves don't know a hundred percent for sure how my grandparents did it.
38:16 Speaker 12 If, if we could figure this out, would you want, it sounds like you would want to know the answer.
38:22 Speaker 10 I'm not so sure anymore.
38:24 Speaker 12 Really?
38:24 Speaker 10 We all say we want to know. We all go completely crazy and mad. But I, I feel like this story wouldn't have lasted for 60 years. It wouldn't still captivate people today. If they'd told people, if they hadn't kept to their line, you are the judge. I kind of feel like that's almost the greater magic than whatever magic they were doing.
38:43 Speaker 12 No, I just feel like this is a black box that we can shine a light into it and go, okay, check that one off the list. Now we can go to the other ones.
38:49 Speaker 07 Well, this is the cool thing. Now, if we can't figure it out, then you will be very happy with our program. If we can figure it out, we will call you and say, do not listen to this show.
38:59 Speaker 12 Yeah.
39:00 Speaker 07 Because it will deeply disappoint you.
39:02 Speaker 10 Well, I mean, the thing, the thing I think for me that made me come to peace with not finding out and not knowing the answer was that a lot of the interviews I did with my grandma were from a few years ago. And she actually isn't very well. She has dementia and she's been sick the past couple of years. And so she physically can't tell it anymore. And yeah, for me, there is something about, you know, I visit my grandma now and you go, she was amazing. She, not only did she make this incredible program with my grandfather, they had 20 million people listen to them, which is just incredible when you think of the 1950s. They've managed to.
39:47 Speaker 12 What, what happened? Hey, no, no, no, Jesse. Come back. No.
39:53 Speaker 07 We just went, we're straight on the hour. It was exactly, it's exactly nine seconds ago is the hour.
39:58 Speaker 12 Ah, mother.
40:00 Speaker 05 This is a cell phone. I'm just gonna call and see if I.
40:03 Speaker 18 Hello?
40:03 Speaker 12 Hello?
40:04 Speaker 18 Yeah, hi. Um, your booking ran out just a minute ago.
40:08 Speaker 12 Yeah, we noticed.
40:09 Speaker 10 That, that, um, yeah.
40:10 Speaker 18 Yeah, I think we probably need to use the phone because that booth now needs to be used. Sorry.
40:15 Speaker 12 So we called Jesse back and while we didn't drag him back into the studio, actually we couldn't, um, he did send us this tape.
40:25 Speaker 10 Now, you've held on to this secret for so many, so, so many years. Why haven't you wanted to reveal it to anybody?
40:34 Speaker 17 I think the reason I haven't ever wanted to reveal the secret is because it's a wonderful mystery. And I like to think that after I've died, people will still say, how did they do it? Was it or wasn't it? It just tickles me to think of that.
40:54 Speaker 10 A lot of secrets, magic secrets, they get passed down from generations and they get re-performed over and over again. I guess that very much becomes a part of that family. Now, as a performer myself, if I wanted to bring back the Pidditons, would you feel like you could hand down this magic trick to your grandson to carry it on?
41:14 Speaker 17 Of course, if I had a grandson who wanted to carry it on, I'd have enormous difficulty telling him how to. I don't think it'd be possible because there's an awful lot that I wouldn't be able to tell him.
41:27 Speaker 10 What do you mean you wouldn't be able to tell that grandson?
41:30 Speaker 17 It's hard to explain why I wouldn't be able to. It's just that I wouldn't be able to. That's all I can say about that.
41:42 Speaker 04 Our sincere thanks to Jesse Cox for so graciously allowing us to air that story. And also thank you to ABC National Radio's 360 Documentaries who produced the story with him. It's called Keep Them Guessing, and we've linked to the original story on our website, radiolab.org. And we'd also like to take a moment here, not only to thank Jesse for his amazing story, but to honor his memory. Jesse passed away very unexpectedly in 2017, caught all of us off guard, and he is incredibly, incredibly missed.
42:19 Speaker 07 Well, you know, I don't think it's actually time for us to end this because I didn't tell you this. We were so interested in trying to figure out how they did that trick that Soren and I, because we just wanted to find out, like, did somebody know how they did it? So we called this guy.
42:43 Speaker 07 Who ruined everything? This is Penn Gillette, who you probably know from Penn and Teller. Famous for doing magic tricks and then telling you how they're done. Now, I don't really know what I was expecting when we called him. I guess I was thinking he would know what they did, but he wouldn't choose to tell us. I didn't know. But when we called him and we played him the story, as soon as he heard it, he said,
43:03 Speaker 19 Oh, it's a book test, right? It's a book test, it's an envelope switch.
43:07 Speaker 07 A what?
43:07 Speaker 19 And there are, you know, three or four ways to do them.
43:10 Speaker 07 What did he say? He said, basically, I can tell you how they did it.
43:14 Speaker 19 Yeah.
43:14 Speaker 07 Or how they might have done it, but you are not going to like it.
43:18 Speaker 19 There, there you go. The only secret in magic, there's only one, and that is that the secret must be ugly. You cannot have a beautiful secret.
43:29 Speaker 07 A beautiful secret is the kind of thing that's short and sweet, like, oh, he folded the hat twice, or?
43:33 Speaker 19 There's mirrors under that table.
43:35 Speaker 07 When you hear it, it's like, oh, of course, that's what they would do. And you love finding it out.
43:40 Speaker 19 Then you will whisper it to the person next to you. So in magic, what you want is an idea that is not beautiful.
43:48 Speaker 07 So what he told us is a magic trick that stays secret is one that's so boring to tell, you don't want to tell it and you don't even want to hear it.
43:55 Speaker 19 If I have to say, he's lying about this and there's gaffer's tape over behind there and they're, they're not actually telling you the exact truth here and, and it gets so, uh, you don't get an aha. One of the strongest feelings you can get in life, one of the most rewarding feelings, is the feeling of an aha. I finally understand. If you don't have a wonderful aha, people won't figure it out. So, uh, I can tell you easily how they did that trick, but you will, uh, not get an aha.
44:33 Speaker 07 Basically, he said that your answer to this one is going to kill your joy.
44:37 Speaker 19 Yeah, it's ugly.
44:38 Speaker 07 So did he, did he tell you what they did? Yeah.
44:43 Speaker 07 What did he say? Well, I'll tell you, I'll tell you in just a second. He went into excruciating detail about how he thinks they did it.
44:48 Speaker 19 Now, a book test, we actually do one in our show.
44:53 Speaker 07 But the more important thing, he was so right. Once we heard the explanation and the details and all, we were, we were both like, huh. All right, well.
45:07 Speaker 07 This is like a kiss with a poison dart in his.
45:10 Speaker 19 I love how much I bugged your shit.
45:13 Speaker 07 As you can hear, he knew exactly what he was doing with us. And in a way, he's asking us a deeper and more philosophical question. I've done this to you. Will you turn around and do it to your audience?
45:24 Speaker 19 Well, all I've done to you, you know, because you get to edit, all I have done is put you in precisely the position I live my life in. You now have to make the exact same decisions that I make. And I will, I will tell you, and this is just true, that I would have played this particular thing differently with almost any other show, you know, my move on the, on the chessboard with another show would be to say, you know, I do have several ideas as to how this could be done, but I think I'm, I'm going to be like the grandmother and go to my grave with this.
46:05 Speaker 19 You know, and I would have just given you that soundbite, which I just have.
46:12 Speaker 07 Except that we have pivoted the entire piece called, so?
46:18 Speaker 07 It's like, all eyes, all eyes have been directed to the next sentence. So that's a little difficult.
46:25 Speaker 19 But I want to see how you solve a problem that I solve every day.
46:30 Speaker 07 But we have like a higher call, like you're entertaining, but we're entertaining with the caveat that we're supposed to be like telling the truth as best we understand it. So we have a slightly different set of gods than our Mount Olympus than you do, which makes it very confusing.
46:45 Speaker 19 You don't really, because I am not suggesting that you lie.
46:50 Speaker 07 You're just gonna have to tell your audience what you think they need to hear. And, and that's where he left it. So in the days after the interview, we, we just got into this debate about what we should do. We obviously have an obligation to you, you listening, to tell you what we know.
47:05 Speaker 04 Yes, the whole deal.
47:05 Speaker 07 Yeah. We can't pretend that we don't know something that we now do know, even if it would make a much more beautiful story. So this leaves us in a conundrum. Are we?
47:14 Speaker 04 Yeah. Are we entertainers or are we actually?
47:16 Speaker 19 Journalists.
47:17 Speaker 04 Journalists, you know?
47:18 Speaker 07 So here's where we ultimately came down. We have decided not to tell you how the Pittingtons did it. I mean, we're gonna tell you, but we're not gonna tell you here in this podcast, because.
47:30 Speaker 07 We have now been soiled by this truth we learned off the record. And you, if you want to be soiled, sure, come and soil yourself. You can go to this URL, radiolab.org/theuglytruth. Don't click this.
47:47 Speaker 04 Radiolab.org/theuglytruth. Don't, no apostrophe, click this.
47:52 Speaker 07 And we just leave it to you. You can go there, or you cannot.
47:56 Speaker 19 All I have said to you is that it's a trick.
47:59 Speaker 07 Yeah.
47:59 Speaker 19 And you knew that. The fact that it wasn't the trick you wanted it to be.
48:07 Speaker 07 You know, he did turn sweet at one moment. We were talking about the grandma.
48:12 Speaker 19 Right.
48:12 Speaker 07 Grandma tells the grandson in the conversation at the end. She is not sure she could explain to him.
48:18 Speaker 19 Yes.
48:19 Speaker 07 How it went.
48:19 Speaker 19 Well, that's beautiful. That is the most beautiful thing that happens in the whole thing. Because I think she's telling the truth. She may not know how the trick was done.
48:31 Speaker 07 And yet, she was a party to it. She's the one.
48:35 Speaker 19 Yeah.
48:35 Speaker 07 He says, you know, oftentimes, when you're doing tricks, somebody knows everything and the other person is, you know, in the dark.
48:43 Speaker 04 Yeah. You mean like one of the partners intentionally not knows what's happening?
48:48 Speaker 07 Yeah.
48:48 Speaker 19 There are, there are tricks in the Penn and Teller show that I don't really know how they're done.
48:54 Speaker 07 It might have happened here. He may have decided that he would be the knowing one. She would be the innocent. And maybe therefore, and this is just a hunch, but just possibly, everything she's saying to her grandchild, instead of being a kind of dodge, or a little bit of a lie, maybe it was the whole truth.
49:26 Speaker 00 Radiolab is supported by Capital One. With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder that Capital One Bank Guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs, even on weekends. It's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See capitalone.com/bankguy. Capital One, N.A., Member FDIC.
49:51 Speaker 20 After some actual fake polls came to light, pollsters are in the hot seat. But they say, don't be too quick to dismiss the entire industry.
50:00 Speaker 21 People want to raise taxes on the rich. I can tell you that definitively because we know it from polling. And if we lose trust in polls, we have no way to understand what Americans want to be done.
50:13 Speaker 20 On this week's On the Media from WNYC. Find On the Media wherever you get your podcasts.
50:25 Speaker 04 Hey, I'm Jadabum Rod. I'm Robert Krulwich. This is Radiolab, and today? Today, we are doing our Black Box Hour. Yeah, and a black box is, it's a thing, it's a box that something goes in, you can see what that is, something comes out, which is different, and you can see that. But you do not know what's going on in the middle. It's a mystery.
50:41 Speaker 22 I love it. Shall we go inside? Of course.
50:44 Speaker 04 And our next and final black box comes from our producer, Molly Webster, and it begins...
50:50 Speaker 23 ...into the butterfly rainforest.
50:52 Speaker 22 Oh.
50:56 Speaker 23 So that you can see the butterflies that are flying, in fact.
51:00 Speaker 22 So, a few days ago, I was in Gainesville, Florida, at the Florida Museum of Natural History, where they have a rainforest. It's, what, about three stories tall? It's like got a top that's all wrapped in a net, and then it was covered in butterflies. Oh, my gosh, there's so many, thousands.
51:17 Speaker 23 Yeah, so these are Heliconias butterflies.
51:19 Speaker 22 That's Andrei Surakoff.
51:20 Speaker 23 I started looking at butterflies when I was six years old, and I have never grew up.
51:25 Speaker 22 He was my guide.
51:26 Speaker 23 And here, under this leaf, you can see an owl butterfly.
51:31 Speaker 22 One wing is like the size of my palm. So there were red ones.
51:35 Speaker 23 Black and yellow ones.
51:36 Speaker 22 Blue ones.
51:37 Speaker 23 Zebra striped ones.
51:38 Speaker 22 Is that, is that a monarch?
51:40 Speaker 23 Yes. Watch out, don't step on this butterfly.
51:42 Speaker 22 It was like a Dr. Susie in land of butterflies. But I was there to look at the moment right before they become butterflies, which remains one of the most mysterious black boxes in nature.
51:56 Speaker 22 What I'm talking about is something called.
51:58 Speaker 23 The chrysalis.
51:59 Speaker 04 The chrysalis.
52:00 Speaker 22 Just to back up.
52:00 Speaker 23 Yeah.
52:00 Speaker 22 At a certain point in all caterpillars' lives, after they've eaten a lot of leaves, they hit a certain weight.
52:06 Speaker 23 That is coordinated in their gene as their final weight.
52:10 Speaker 22 Some hormones start pumping, some genetics turn on, and it starts growing a little shell. That's the chrysalis. And inside that chrysalis, as we know.
52:19 Speaker 23 A caterpillar becomes a butterfly or moth.
52:27 Speaker 04 And this is a mystery?
52:29 Speaker 22 What do you think happens inside the chrysalis?
52:31 Speaker 04 I think that, actually, I've never thought about it, to be honest.
52:36 Speaker 22 I don't know. I don't, I don't understand how it works. Not many people have. Are you like surprised that you actually don't know?
52:41 Speaker 24 Yeah, I'm surprised. I thought like I knew and I don't.
52:45 Speaker 22 Those are folks I met at the museum.
52:46 Speaker 04 Hey, hold up. Now that I've thought about it for a second, isn't it simply that the caterpillar is inside the shell? It sort of snuggles up and then it grows a wing off of its right side and then off of its left side, and it just pops wings out?
52:58 Speaker 22 No, that is actually what I thought, but that's not right at all.
53:03 Speaker 23 The Maguire Center is located on three floors.
53:07 Speaker 22 Because here's the thing. So now we're going into the bowels of the building. When you take one of those little black boxes and you slice it open.
53:13 Speaker 23 Shall we do it?
53:15 Speaker 22 Yes. Which Andre was nice enough to do for me.
53:17 Speaker 23 Sorry.
53:18 Speaker 22 Even though he loves these guys. He took a tiny little chrysalis.
53:21 Speaker 23 Well, it's about an inch long.
53:24 Speaker 22 Which a caterpillar had just gotten into one day ago. And he slowly began to cut. So we're taking our tweezer-like scissors. Through the outer layer of the chrysalis until.
53:35 Speaker 23 I can see pupil.
53:39 Speaker 22 Oh.
53:42 Speaker 04 What?
53:42 Speaker 22 Oh my gosh.
53:44 Speaker 04 What?
53:45 Speaker 22 No, it was like, there was no caterpillar there.
53:47 Speaker 04 What do you mean?
53:48 Speaker 22 There was no head, there were no legs, there was no antenna, no spiky spine. It's like a pale, white, yellow. It's very liquidy.
53:59 Speaker 04 What was there then?
54:00 Speaker 22 Basically just goo. Just like a runny goopy goo. Looks like snot. All he had to do is give it like a little squeeze and then just went. Oh!
54:09 Speaker 23 That is nothing.
54:12 Speaker 22 It just, whoosh, exploded it. He exploded it. I think he looked shocked too.
54:18 Speaker 04 Wait, I don't understand. Where did the caterpillar go?
54:21 Speaker 22 It seems like, once the caterpillar gets into its shell, it sort of just melts.
54:27 Speaker 22 Its head, legs.
54:28 Speaker 23 Antenna, abdomen.
54:30 Speaker 22 They all just dissolve. Muscles themselves just sort of like dissolve away into individual muscle cells. And some of the cells rupture, and so their insides, the amino acids, the proteins, those all go floating out into space.
54:44 Speaker 04 Wait, you're saying that the caterpillar just becomes like a soup of cells?
54:48 Speaker 22 Yeah. And yet somehow.
54:50 Speaker 23 This soup will magically be transformed
54:56 Speaker 23 into a butterfly or moth.
55:01 Speaker 04 Well, how does that happen?
55:02 Speaker 22 That question, that question is the big, fat, metaphysical, quasi-religious, semi-mystical, philosophical question that people have been asking forever.
55:15 Speaker 25 Yeah, so, one of the big arguments that was taking place.
55:20 Speaker 22 This is Matthew Cobb, he's a biologist and a historian, and he says, back in the 1600s, when naturalists saw that goo, they just thought, oh, well, clearly what's happening is that.
55:29 Speaker 25 The caterpillar.
55:30 Speaker 22 Goes into the chrysalis.
55:31 Speaker 25 And then it actually dies.
55:34 Speaker 22 Totally dies.
55:35 Speaker 25 And out of its burial cloth is gonna come the new life.
55:39 Speaker 22 This beautiful and completely new creature.
55:43 Speaker 25 Death, as it were, and then a kind of resurrection.
55:49 Speaker 22 That's Philip Clayton. He's a philosopher from the Claremont School of Theology. And he says, from the beginning, people thought about and wrote about metamorphosis.
55:58 Speaker 26 As a kind of spiritual ascent, says somewhere in the New Testament. Behold, the old has passed away, the new has surely come.
56:07 Speaker 22 Basically, people saw the caterpillar as a symbol of our lowly, earthbound, lazy bodies. Right? And then the butterfly was sort of casting away all of that. And it represented our soul up in heaven, sort of in its most perfect form. Never mind that butterflies actually like to eat.
56:27 Speaker 23 Feces and urine and other unappetizing substances.
56:31 Speaker 22 According to Andre. Sounds tasty. Never mind that. The metaphor is like inspiring at some level, right? Because you think, oh, I've got all, I'm going to just become more, a more perfect version of myself. Right? But then the converse side of that is you cut open a chrysalis and it looks like a whole bunch of goo. And you think, that is a hell of a lot of change. So the thing is, is that this transformation, either of the butterfly or of my soul, seems so dramatic, so miraculous, that it made some people think like, geez, if you're going to go to heaven and the process transformed that much, is it even you up there?
57:08 Speaker 26 It still has to be you that makes it to heaven.
57:11 Speaker 22 You can't change too much. Otherwise, like, someone else will be up there enjoying your afterlife.
57:15 Speaker 26 So certain memories and elements of your identity have to continue, just not all the elements.
57:22 Speaker 22 Yeah, I'm, I'm so intrigued by that because I also think like, what, like, what, when you undergo such a transformation, what, what do they think carries through?
57:36 Speaker 26 That's a really interesting question.
57:38 Speaker 27 Cleaning out the poop and throwing away the, the moldy leaves. You have a lot of time to think.
57:43 Speaker 22 Which brings us to Martha Weiss.
57:44 Speaker 27 I am an associate professor of biology at Georgetown University.
57:48 Speaker 22 She got to thinking about this question in more concrete terms.
57:51 Speaker 27 Okay, so.
57:53 Speaker 22 She did an experiment.
57:54 Speaker 27 What we did was we took a big, green caterpillar and we did something that was not entirely nice.
58:01 Speaker 22 She put them in a box, filled it with a nasty odor. And is the odor like an odor of a plant?
58:06 Speaker 27 It's, it's actually a plant-based odor, but it smells kind of like nail polish remover.
58:10 Speaker 22 In any case, she gassed them with this nasty smell.
58:13 Speaker 27 And then, once they could smell the odor, then we gave them a zap.
58:17 Speaker 22 Is that just like a zap? Just a zoop? A zap?
58:20 Speaker 27 I think 10 seconds of zap.
58:22 Speaker 22 10 seconds. And they did this over and over.
58:25 Speaker 27 Odor, zap, odor, zap.
58:27 Speaker 22 Until eventually, most of these caterpillars learn to hate the smell. Every time they get a whiff, they head in the opposite direction.
58:36 Speaker 27 OK, so then we let them pupate.
58:38 Speaker 22 Meaning the caterpillar changes into its shell and
58:43 Speaker 22 organs dissolve, muscles melt, you get this.
58:46 Speaker 27 Cataclysmic, catastrophic, chaotic.
58:49 Speaker 22 Change.
58:54 Speaker 27 And then?
58:55 Speaker 22 One month later.
58:56 Speaker 27 The moth emerges. And now we're, the drum roll, we're ready for the drum roll.
59:04 Speaker 22 They give the moths a whiff.
59:05 Speaker 04 OK.
59:06 Speaker 22 And the moths hate the smell. I mean, normally moths don't care about the smell at all. It's like 50/50, but these moths hated it.
59:16 Speaker 04 Somehow I'm confused. What does that mean?
59:17 Speaker 22 That means the memory made it through the goo.
59:20 Speaker 04 Oh.
59:20 Speaker 22 And it came out the other side.
59:22 Speaker 04 Oh.
59:22 Speaker 22 What's your, what's your feeling like coming out of this?
59:25 Speaker 27 My feeling is wow.
59:29 Speaker 27 I think it's amazing that a caterpillar can have an experience, go into its chrysalis, five weeks pass, emerge as a seemingly different organism, and that it still can recall experiences that happened to it when it was a caterpillar.
59:50 Speaker 04 And how does that happen?
59:51 Speaker 27 The answer to this question is we do not know.
59:54 Speaker 22 But.
59:55 Speaker 27 But.
59:55 Speaker 22 Out there floating in that sea of goo is actually a tiny little speck of brain. Some of the brain is dissolved away, but there's this like microscopic fragment that has made it through. And Martha suspects that nestled into that fragment is this memory. Oh, it's like a little boop. It's like a little beacon.
1:00:20 Speaker 22 And it turns out, there are others, too. There's a speck of gut, some nerves, some muscle. It's not as gooey as it seems.
1:00:32 Speaker 04 God, it's like, it's like, I can't help wondering, what does the butterfly know about its caterpillar life? Like, it knows this one tiny thing, but how much else? Does it know it crawled? That it had hair?
1:00:44 Speaker 22 There's no answer to that question. But Martha says that these types of questions, like, come up all the time. In fact, one of her colleagues-
1:00:51 Speaker 27 And I was talking to Doug the other day, and he said that he had gotten an email from a guy who was, uh... I'm not exactly sure what flavor of Christian, but had, but... He, he had gone into the whole resurrection thing. And he felt like this was, you know, when he ascended, that he wondered if he would then be able to remember his life on Earth.
1:01:18 Speaker 22 Well, here's the answer.
1:01:20 Speaker 04 What answer?
1:01:22 Speaker 22 Well, the, the answer to the question about what carries through. The continuity question.
1:01:26 Speaker 04 Oh, right, yes.
1:01:27 Speaker 22 And memory carries through.
1:01:29 Speaker 04 Which is freaking cool, I gotta say.
1:01:32 Speaker 22 It is freaking cool, but there's a little more freaking cool.
1:01:34 Speaker 04 All right.
1:01:35 Speaker 22 And that is that there's actually a continuity, but it goes in the reverse direction.
1:01:40 Speaker 04 What does that even mean?
1:01:41 Speaker 22 Well, Matthew Cobb told me this story about this guy.
1:01:45 Speaker 25 This 17th century man who I never, had never heard of. Jan, his name's written Swamerdam, but it's probably more pronounced Schwamerdam.
1:01:53 Speaker 22 Schwamerdam?
1:01:53 Speaker 25 Schwamerdam.
1:01:54 Speaker 22 Schwamerdam, okay. That's Jan Swamerdam, a Dutch microscopyist from the 1600s.
1:01:59 Speaker 25 He was definitely the first to do some very clear dissections of the chrysalis.
1:02:04 Speaker 22 And the caterpillar. And one day-
1:02:06 Speaker 25 In Paris, in front of this crowd of assembled worthies, bewigged and bestocking-
1:02:12 Speaker 22 He gets a fat white caterpillar-
1:02:13 Speaker 25 Gets a scalpel, or a tiny little thin bit of glass, and he dissects it. He just opens it up at the back, along its back, a long line. And what he sees inside, or what he can show them, is that in fact, there are some of the structures of the future butterfly, its wings, its antennae, and even its legs, that are actually already formed even before pupation takes place.
1:02:39 Speaker 22 So you peel back the skin of a caterpillar, and beneath it, you see-
1:02:46 Speaker 22 The a new, the new creature hidden.
1:02:50 Speaker 25 Absolutely.
1:02:51 Speaker 22 Ah, that's so bizarre. It's like, it's like if you were to skin me and, and there's my 70 year old self is inside of me or something.
1:03:02 Speaker 04 Wait, and the wings also survive the goo?
1:03:04 Speaker 22 Yeah, so it's like the caterpillar will actually start to grow little tiny adult parts that are super thin and transparent. And it just keeps them tightly rolled up and hidden up against the edges of the chrysalis. But they don't actually ever go through the goo or become the goo.
1:03:22 Speaker 25 What he then shown was, you know what? This isn't about death. This isn't about decay. This is actually about transformation.
1:03:34 Speaker 22 I don't know. It's kind of eerie. Like, it's not just what of me carries forward into the future. It's like, what of my future self is in me right now?
1:04:33 Speaker 04 Thanks to our producers this hour, Tim Howard, Molly Webster, Jesse Cox. And thanks to you guys for listening.
1:04:39 Speaker 25 Yeah.
1:04:44 Speaker 00 Real quick, before I let you go, I wanted to tell you that we shared an amazing story on our feed about the butterfly researcher you just heard, Dr. Martha Weiss, and how she later befriended a little boy on the other side of the world who wanted to do his own caterpillar memory study. Martha's daughter is actually an audio reporter, and she captured the whole adventure on tape, which was first published in the audio magazine Signal Hill. And it was so beautiful. We featured it on our feed last year. The episode is called Caterpillar Roadshow, and you can find it on Radiolab or on signalhill.fm.
1:06:03 Speaker 24 Hi, I'm Gabby. I'm from San Francisco, and here are the staff credits. Radiolab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser. Soren Wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah Sandback is our executive director. Our managing editor is Pat Walters. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Jeremy Bloom, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Nainasam Bandhan, Matt Keelty, Mona McGawker, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sarah Kari, Rebecca Rand, Anissa Vitza, Arianne Whack, Molly Webster, and Jessica Young, with help from Gabby Santas. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Natalie Middleton, Angeli Mercado, and Sophie Semai.
1:06:54 Speaker 24 Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
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