Black Box

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) Signup for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected]. 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.

• 0:00Speaker 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.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  Wait, you're listening?

• 0:31Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  All right.

• 0:33Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  All right. You're listening to Radiolab. Radiolab. From... WNYC. See? Yep.

• 0:44Speaker 03

  Rewind.

• 0:49Speaker 04

  Batting first, producer Tim Howard.

• 0:51Speaker 05

  Cool. Wait, I'm just gonna get my level here. It is such a beautiful day.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  Beautiful. I think it's gotta be like 75 degrees out or something. Sunny.

• 1:02Speaker 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?

• 1:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. We're standing right now in front of the Bull Finch Building, which...

• 1:14Speaker 05

  And I went up to talk to him because in that building...

• 1:17Speaker 01

  Is...

• 1:18Speaker 05

  This is the one with the ether dome?

• 1:19Speaker 01

  Ether dome is inside this building.

• 1:20Speaker 05

  Is the story of the day that you could say humanity emerged from the Dark Ages. Oh, you laugh now. Just wait.

• 1:31Speaker 01

  Okay, here we go. It's on the fourth floor. It's on the fourth floor of this building.

• 1:34Speaker 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?

• 1:46Speaker 01

  It's like a mini amphitheater, right?

• 1:47Speaker 05

  It's also got this awesome dome. It's this beautiful domed room with lights streaming down from above.

• 1:56Speaker 05

  Like, the acoustics in here are crazy. It must have been terrifying, though, if you actually heard somebody screaming.

• 2:02Speaker 01

  I mean, it's so resonant in here. The screams would have been deafening and absolutely would have been terrifying.

• 2:09Speaker 05

  What is this place? Well, this was an operating room. Oh. And back in the 1800s, when this room was really in use...

• 2:16Speaker 06

  Being in an operation was so painful. It was often permanently damaging to a patient's emotional state.

• 2:22Speaker 05

  This is Julie.

• 2:23Speaker 06

  I'm Julie Fenster. I write about American history.

• 2:26Speaker 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.

• 2:42Speaker 06

  Some of the patients remembered the sound of their limb dropping to the ground.

• 2:46Speaker 05

  Oh, God.

• 2:47Speaker 06

  Or the saw going through their sinew and bones.

• 2:51Speaker 06

  The smell of their own body being cut into.

• 2:57Speaker 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.

• 3:22Speaker 05

  This is such a cool room.

• 3:25Speaker 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?

• 3:36Speaker 01

  The room is absolutely full.

• 3:37Speaker 06

  The students were all lined up to watch.

• 3:40Speaker 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...

• 3:45Speaker 06

  The most esteemed surgeon in America, Dr. John Warren.

• 3:50Speaker 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.

• 3:57Speaker 01

  Just about to start the surgery.

• 3:59Speaker 05

  When this mustachioed fellow bursts in. A dentist.

• 4:03Speaker 06

  William T. G. Morton.

• 4:05Speaker 05

  And he basically said to Warren something that must have sounded completely nuts. I can erase that man's pain.

• 4:13Speaker 05

  He didn't actually use those words. He actually had an appointment with Warren. But according to Julie, he did have a bag.

• 4:19Speaker 06

  He had a bag filled with gas.

• 4:21Speaker 05

  A gas called ether.

• 4:23Speaker 06

  And Dr. Warren, who had the scalpel raised.

• 4:27Speaker 05

  He puts it down.

• 4:27Speaker 06

  Stands aside and says with great sarcasm.

• 4:31Speaker 01

  Well, sir, your patient is ready.

• 4:33Speaker 05

  Wait a second, had he ever tested this? He claimed to have tried it out on some dental patients and...

• 4:38Speaker 06

  On his dog, on himself, and on his goldfish.

• 4:43Speaker 05

  Nice. So Morton gets to work.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  Morton sets up his gear, fills up the inhaler.

• 4:48Speaker 05

  Puts it up to the guy's face.

• 4:50Speaker 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...

• 5:13Speaker 06

  Your patient, sir.

• 5:15Speaker 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.

• 5:30Speaker 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.

• 5:43Speaker 05

  It must have felt like a miracle.

• 5:50Speaker 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.

• 6:05Speaker 05

  And basically, the blink of an eye, the most painful, horrible experience possibly imaginable became routine.

• 6:14Speaker 05

  Even forgettable.

• 6:16Speaker 04

  But also deeply peculiar, as was made clear to us when we talked a while back with one of our regulars.

• 6:22Speaker 07

  Carl Zimmer.

• 6:23Speaker 03

  Well, my wife and I, we were watching this movie one night. It was called Birth, starring Nicole Kidman.

• 6:28Speaker 04

  You, did you like it?

• 6:29Speaker 03

  I hated it.

• 6:29Speaker 04

  No, it's one of my favorites.

• 6:31Speaker 03

  Well, okay, I'm sitting there and I'm hating the movie.

• 6:34Speaker 04

  You're hating this movie?

• 6:35Speaker 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.

• 6:50Speaker 04

  Oh, so it's not the movie?

• 6:51Speaker 03

  It's not the movie. It's me.

• 6:54Speaker 04

  Appendix about to burst.

• 6:56Speaker 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.

• 7:10Speaker 04

  But he says it didn't seem to be working.

• 7:12Speaker 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.

• 7:47Speaker 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.

• 8:01Speaker 04

  Wow, that is weird.

• 8:02Speaker 07

  It's happened to me. It's, it's as if they splice time, take the time that you were in.

• 8:08Speaker 04

  And the time you are in subsequently, and the middle is totally missing. No experience whatsoever.

• 8:14Speaker 03

  It's not like sleep.

• 8:15Speaker 04

  No.

• 8:16Speaker 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.

• 8:30Speaker 04

  It sort of implies that it's like a switch.

• 8:32Speaker 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.

• 8:46Speaker 04

  Do, do people who do this for a living know exactly why this happened?

• 8:51Speaker 03

  You'd think that something that's been around since 1846 would be hammered out.

• 8:57Speaker 03

  Solid. But it's still almost a philosophical kind of mystery.

• 9:25Speaker 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.

• 10:06Speaker 05

  So here we got propofol, we got sevoflurane, dexamethasone, ketabine.

• 10:10Speaker 04

  We've got all these new drugs, but we still don't know exactly how they work.

• 10:15Speaker 05

  Which for Patrick is a very practical problem.

• 10:18Speaker 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?

• 10:25Speaker 05

  And in the 1950s and 60s, he says, this became a real issue because doctors started giving patients.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  Neuromuscular blocking agents.

• 10:32Speaker 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.

• 10:42Speaker 05

  Once in a blue moon.

• 10:46Speaker 05

  Where a patient would wake up in the middle of surgery.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  Literally trapped, unable to move.

• 10:52Speaker 05

  Eyes closed, totally still.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  You know, fully awake, but no one would be able to perceive it because they couldn't move.

• 10:59Speaker 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.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  I'd like to hear about it.

• 11:15Speaker 05

  No.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  I'm just saying.

• 11:16Speaker 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?

• 11:36Speaker 05

  I've heard different numbers, anywhere between 1 in 10,000 to much more often, like 1 in 1,000. Wow. But luckily...

• 11:44Speaker 01

  Let's take a look at these brain signals.

• 11:46Speaker 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.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  This experiment that we did in the, I guess, late 2000s.

• 11:58Speaker 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.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  Healthy volunteers.

• 12:06Speaker 05

  They hooked them up to an IV and started to very, very slowly give them propofol.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  Slowly administer the drug.

• 12:12Speaker 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.

• 12:19Speaker 01

  Chair, library.

• 12:21Speaker 05

  That they recognized.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  Submarine, you know, something like that. In addition, we had the subjects named too. Tim. Patrick.

• 12:27Speaker 05

  So the subjects would just sit there and listen and click.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  Chair. Library.

• 12:31Speaker 05

  On and on.

• 12:32Speaker 01

  Patrick.

• 12:34Speaker 05

  And every 15 minutes, they gave them a little bit more propofol.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  Submarine. Tim. Bip. Michael. Bip. Patrick. Bip.

• 12:44Speaker 05

  Patrick. Until eventually.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  They just stopped responding altogether.

• 12:50Speaker 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.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  Right at the moment of loss of consciousness. There was just one really, really clear motif that appeared.

• 13:10Speaker 05

  They saw this wave of electricity sweeping across the brain.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  This really low-frequency oscillation, about one cycle per second or less.

• 13:23Speaker 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.

• 13:35Speaker 04

  So when people went under, their brains just started to ring like a bell?

• 13:38Speaker 05

  Basically.

• 13:40Speaker 04

  And why would those... What are those waves doing exactly?

• 13:43Speaker 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.

• 14:12Speaker 03

  You know, there's one person talking, the other one talking back.

• 14:18Speaker 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.

• 14:30Speaker 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...

• 15:00Speaker 03

  Like in a matter of a second, your connectivity just collapses.

• 15:03Speaker 05

  Maybe that's what happened to you. It just cut, your connectivity got cut.

• 15:07Speaker 03

  It did.

• 15:08Speaker 05

  And here is the weird part.

• 15:09Speaker 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.

• 15:26Speaker 05

  That's spooky.

• 15:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:29Speaker 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.

• 15:35Speaker 03

  It's not, not your brain is just stopping.

• 15:38Speaker 05

  No, all those parts of the brain are still talking. They're just not talking to each other.

• 15:43Speaker 03

  Very well anymore.

• 15:44Speaker 05

  And that somehow knocks you out.

• 15:47Speaker 04

  So lots of chit chat amongst the different parts of my brain make me conscious, and not so much chit chat equals unconsciousness.

• 15:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's the idea.

• 15:56Speaker 04

  And how do the slow waves relate to that?

• 16:00Speaker 05

  Well, Patrick thinks of it in sort of in baseball terms.

• 16:03Speaker 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.

• 16:48Speaker 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.

• 17:00Speaker 04

  I dig the analogy, but I'm not quite following.

• 17:03Speaker 05

  It helps to zoom in on the brain and look at a smaller number of neurons.

• 17:08Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 17:09Speaker 05

  Which is what he did.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  Now, check this out. We conducted this study where we measured brain activity in individual neurons.

• 17:18Speaker 05

  They got some patients, planted these tiny little electrodes deep into their brains, so they could hear the individual neurons.

• 17:24Speaker 01

  So let's imagine that we zoom in to like tens to hundreds of neurons firing.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  And um.

• 17:32Speaker 05

  He says when they give that patient propofol, an anesthetic.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  What we noticed is that, right at the point of loss of consciousness.

• 17:39Speaker 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.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  They can only fire at a particular moment in this slow oscillation.

• 18:03Speaker 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.

• 18:43Speaker 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.

• 18:50Speaker 05

  Is it, it might be early to say, but it, does it feel kind of like you cracked the code?

• 18:55Speaker 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.

• 21:44Speaker 08

  This week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, will House Democrats try once again for impeachment?

• 21:49Speaker 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.

• 22:00Speaker 08

  Congressman Jamie Raskin joins us next time on the New Yorker Radio Hour from WNYC. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

• 22:18Speaker 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.

• 22:44Speaker 04

  I stand deep. Look, Tim Howard, I'm not sure I like your tone, OK?

• 22:50Speaker 05

  And I connected them with the guy who made the piece. Hello? I hear the sound of what sounds like another room.

• 22:58Speaker 10

  Does he sound like me now?

• 22:59Speaker 07

  Oh!

• 23:01Speaker 05

  His name is Jesse Cox.

• 23:02Speaker 07

  Wow, you sound so close, because you're far away.

• 23:05Speaker 05

  He's actually in Australia.

• 23:06Speaker 07

  Where everybody is, because they're upside down from the rest of us, they are very, very likely to fall into the sky.

• 23:12Speaker 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.

• 23:17Speaker 07

  Oh, good.

• 23:19Speaker 05

  OK, just to start, I mean, maybe just introduce us to your grandparents. Who are they?

• 23:23Speaker 10

  Well, my grandparents were mind readers.

• 23:27Speaker 10

  On the radio.

• 23:28Speaker 05

  Really?

• 23:29Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 23:30Speaker 05

  You're going to have to explain that. What are their names first?

• 23:32Speaker 10

  Lesley, Lesley Piddington and Sidney Piddington.

• 23:36Speaker 07

  Piddington?

• 23:36Speaker 10

  Piddington.

• 23:37Speaker 07

  And they had a, they had a radio show?

• 23:39Speaker 10

  Yeah. The show was called The Piddingtons or The Amazing Piddingtons, and it was on the BBC Radio in the 1950s.

• 23:46Speaker 04

  Now Jesse told us that for most of his life, he didn't know this.

• 23:50Speaker 10

  I guess the reason was that my grandfather and my grandma divorced well before I was born.

• 23:54Speaker 04

  And then his grandpa.

• 23:56Speaker 10

  He died when I was four or five.

• 23:58Speaker 04

  Then his grandma remarried, so nobody talked about it, crazily enough.

• 24:04Speaker 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?

• 24:18Speaker 04

  The reporter calls up his grandma and is like, hey, can I interview you?

• 24:21Speaker 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.

• 24:32Speaker 04

  To his grandma's house?

• 24:33Speaker 10

  And listened to it around the radio like they would have back in the 1950s and heard the story.

• 24:38Speaker 04

  And that's when Jesse discovered that his grandparents, Leslie and Sidney Piddington, one time had an audience of 20 million people.

• 24:44Speaker 10

  Yeah, yeah. Basically, the population of Australia was listening to my grandparents back in the 1950s.

• 24:50Speaker 04

  No way.

• 24:51Speaker 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?

• 24:55Speaker 04

  But he says it was really when he sat down and listened to the original broadcasts, what's left of them.

• 25:00Speaker 10

  Two hours of old BBC recordings that survive today because my grandparents pirated them from the BBC back in 1950.

• 25:09Speaker 04

  He says it wasn't until he heard those tapes.

• 25:12Speaker 10

  That I went, wow.

• 25:15Speaker 07

  You should now tell us this story.

• 25:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 25:17Speaker 07

  Tell us what you heard that made you go, wow.

• 25:20Speaker 10

  Well.

• 25:26Speaker 10

  You hear this very dramatic theme song. And this old BBC voice comes onto the tape and says.

• 25:34Speaker 02

  Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. We present the Piddington.

• 25:39Speaker 10

  And the music goes up. All very, very dramatic. And then the narrator sets the scene for you.

• 25:45Speaker 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.

• 25:50Speaker 10

  It was done in front of a live audience. And then you hear my grandfather's voice.

• 25:55Speaker 11

  Well, as Stephen Grenfell has just told you, life's been quite exciting for us.

• 26:00Speaker 10

  He was a stutterer.

• 26:01Speaker 11

  We've had a lot more letters.

• 26:05Speaker 10

  There were all these things that meant it should never have worked on radio. Anyhow.

• 26:08Speaker 11

  Anyhow, tonight.

• 26:09Speaker 10

  My grandfather is in the studio on the stage.

• 26:12Speaker 11

  And?

• 26:12Speaker 10

  My grandma.

• 26:13Speaker 11

  I'm sorry to say, Lesley isn't here.

• 26:16Speaker 10

  She was often somewhere dramatic.

• 26:17Speaker 12

  As in not in the studio?

• 26:18Speaker 10

  Somewhere exotic. One time she was in a diving bell.

• 26:21Speaker 11

  A diving bell.

• 26:22Speaker 10

  She was underwater.

• 26:23Speaker 11

  At the bottom of a test tank.

• 26:25Speaker 10

  Whoa. One time she was in the Tower of London.

• 26:27Speaker 11

  Are you there, Lesley, in the tower?

• 26:29Speaker 13

  Yes, I'm here.

• 26:30Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 26:31Speaker 11

  And a member of Piddington is here in the Piccadilly studio, and Lesley is in the Tower of London.

• 26:35Speaker 12

  So your grandpa is on stage and your grandma, you're saying, is in a tower? By phone, or?

• 26:40Speaker 10

  No, she's in front of a microphone. Now, this is back in the time when microphones were the size of small melons.

• 26:45Speaker 11

  We'll hear from them very shortly.

• 26:46Speaker 10

  There'd be a microphone set up in the Tower of London.

• 26:48Speaker 12

  Connected live?

• 26:49Speaker 10

  Yeah. My grandfather then comes on the air and sets up a series of telepathy tests that they're going to enact.

• 26:57Speaker 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.

• 27:06Speaker 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.

• 27:18Speaker 11

  Would you read out the line to the listening audience?

• 27:23Speaker 14

  The line selected is, "Be abandoned, as the electrician said, that they would have no current."

• 27:31Speaker 11

  Now.

• 27:32Speaker 10

  Completely random bit of text selected out of a stack of books.

• 27:36Speaker 12

  After the text had been chosen and only then.

• 27:38Speaker 11

  I shall now call in the Tower of London.

• 27:40Speaker 12

  They would connect to his grandma, Lesley.

• 27:42Speaker 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.

• 27:56Speaker 10

  And a gong would sound and he'd kind of very dramatically furrow his brow.

• 28:03Speaker 10

  And the next thing you heard was...

• 28:05Speaker 13

  Men?

• 28:06Speaker 10

  My grandmother.

• 28:08Speaker 13

  Men.

• 28:12Speaker 13

  Light.

• 28:13Speaker 10

  This sort of frail, gentle voice and she started to unpick

• 28:18Speaker 13

  Yep.

• 28:19Speaker 10

  what was being transmitted to her.

• 28:21Speaker 13

  Something to do...

• 28:25Speaker 13

  An electrician.

• 28:29Speaker 13

  Something about light and electricians.

• 28:34Speaker 10

  Remember that line again was?

• 28:35Speaker 14

  Be abandoned, as the electricians said, that there would have no current.

• 28:40Speaker 13

  Will you concentrate on the word?

• 28:44Speaker 13

  That's... Like being left, people being left.

• 28:49Speaker 10

  It's amazing to listen to, over sixty years later, listening to those tapes, I'm still on the edge of my seat.

• 28:55Speaker 13

  Abandoned?

• 28:57Speaker 13

  That...

• 29:00Speaker 13

  Not light.

• 29:04Speaker 13

  Concentrate on the word, like light.

• 29:07Speaker 10

  And, right at the end...

• 29:11Speaker 13

  I think the whole line is...

• 29:14Speaker 13

  Abandoned? As the electricians said, there would not be current.

• 29:22Speaker 14

  Be abandoned, as the electricians said, that there would have no current.

• 29:30Speaker 10

  Almost every time, it would be a hundred percent correct.

• 29:33Speaker 14

  Truly remarkable broadcast.

• 29:40Speaker 10

  It just was this feeling inside you that you get going, hang on, what?

• 29:46Speaker 04

  When Jesse heard those broadcasts, his obvious question was, how did they do that?

• 29:52Speaker 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.

• 30:13Speaker 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.

• 30:24Speaker 07

  But you are totally convinced that this was a carefully worked out trick of some kind?

• 30:30Speaker 10

  Yes, that is the one part of almost certainty I can say.

• 30:34Speaker 07

  There has to be some secret code, some tapping of the some something.

• 30:39Speaker 15

  Well, you're not the first person to say that. People were constantly trying to guess what the code was.

• 30:44Speaker 04

  That's Jim Steinmeier.

• 30:45Speaker 15

  I'm an author and a consultant to magicians.

• 30:47Speaker 04

  He says that at the time, some magicians in London

• 30:50Speaker 15

  thought that his stammer was part of the code.

• 30:55Speaker 11

  Do not think, I can just think yes.

• 30:57Speaker 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

• 31:06Speaker 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.

• 31:26Speaker 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.

• 31:43Speaker 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.

• 31:50Speaker 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.

• 31:58Speaker 10

  Yeah, that was a test they did on the aeroplane broadcast.

• 32:02Speaker 04

  In that broadcast, his grandma?

• 32:04Speaker 10

  She was in an aeroplane.

• 32:05Speaker 11

  Flying at a great height, at a great speed towards somewhere rather, but we're not sure where.

• 32:08Speaker 10

  Flying around Bristol.

• 32:10Speaker 04

  And she was in this plane at the same moment that he was on stage.

• 32:14Speaker 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."

• 32:23Speaker 04

  Just write a poem off the top of your head.

• 32:24Speaker 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.

• 32:43Speaker 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?

• 32:52Speaker 16

  Hello?

• 32:53Speaker 04

  Via shortwave relay.

• 32:54Speaker 16

  Lesley is still completely isolated.

• 32:56Speaker 04

  She can't even hear a word that they're saying.

• 32:58Speaker 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."

• 33:08Speaker 16

  We're ready for you.

• 33:10Speaker 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."

• 33:24Speaker 13

  A bird?

• 33:29Speaker 13

  One bird?

• 33:33Speaker 13

  Oh, it's, it's two lines.

• 33:38Speaker 13

  A bird, spirit... Oh, I've got it, I can guess it. "Hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou never wert."

• 33:47Speaker 11

  Miss Young, would you read out what is written down on the piece of paper that you hold?

• 33:53Speaker 17

  "Hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou never wert."

• 33:56Speaker 11

  Thank you.

• 34:00Speaker 04

  The crazy part is that in that trick, your grandpa doesn't even talk to her.

• 34:03Speaker 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.

• 34:18Speaker 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.

• 34:26Speaker 12

  Somehow encoded into that, that man's introduction is the answer.

• 34:31Speaker 07

  No, because the, because the audience hasn't yet gone and done its random act when he starts the show.

• 34:36Speaker 12

  Oh, yeah.

• 34:36Speaker 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.

• 35:02Speaker 07

  Hmm.

• 35:03Speaker 10

  Now, that is the only thing I can see where there's some kind of communication.

• 35:08Speaker 12

  Wait, but yeah.

• 35:09Speaker 07

  But how would stand by communicate something like a random sentence from a book or whatever?

• 35:14Speaker 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-

• 35:33Speaker 07

  You mean to this day you don't know?

• 35:35Speaker 10

  To this day, I do not know.

• 35:36Speaker 12

  Wait a second, wait a second, wait a second.

• 35:38Speaker 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-

• 35:44Speaker 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-

• 35:51Speaker 07

  Or the pilot, or the pilot. All they have to do is move their lips.

• 35:53Speaker 12

  There, there's something is happening with that man's eyebrows and that's the code. It's the eyebrows.

• 35:58Speaker 10

  I feel like I'm just listening to this, like what's been going on in my head for about 10, 12 years.

• 36:04Speaker 12

  So then I asked Jesse, like, what happened when he talked to his grandma?

• 36:08Speaker 10

  Total dead end.

• 36:09Speaker 12

  What do you mean total dead end? You mean like-

• 36:11Speaker 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.

• 36:29Speaker 16

  Anything to say?

• 36:30Speaker 13

  Well, only thanks very much, everyone, and- You're the judge.

• 36:34Speaker 16

  Well, I think, well, all right. I'm baffled. Now back to the Pittington and Piccadilly.

• 36:39Speaker 10

  She won't even give me the satisfaction of saying, yes, it was a trick. She won't even say that.

• 36:43Speaker 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.

• 36:55Speaker 10

  No.

• 36:55Speaker 12

  What about to her son, your father? What did she, did she tell, did she tell your dad?

• 37:00Speaker 10

  She told my dad something.

• 37:02Speaker 12

  What? What did she tell him?

• 37:04Speaker 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.

• 37:45Speaker 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.

• 37:53Speaker 10

  That's Jim Steinmeier again.

• 37:54Speaker 15

  They left people guessing and, and walked away.

• 37:59Speaker 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.

• 38:06Speaker 12

  Really? So they can actually do, I mean, like, you know, one of them is in a plane and others on the.

• 38:11Speaker 10

  Apparently, but they still themselves don't know a hundred percent for sure how my grandparents did it.

• 38:16Speaker 12

  If, if we could figure this out, would you want, it sounds like you would want to know the answer.

• 38:22Speaker 10

  I'm not so sure anymore.

• 38:24Speaker 12

  Really?

• 38:24Speaker 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.

• 38:43Speaker 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.

• 38:49Speaker 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.

• 38:59Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 39:00Speaker 07

  Because it will deeply disappoint you.

• 39:02Speaker 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.

• 39:47Speaker 12

  What, what happened? Hey, no, no, no, Jesse. Come back. No.

• 39:53Speaker 07

  We just went, we're straight on the hour. It was exactly, it's exactly nine seconds ago is the hour.

• 39:58Speaker 12

  Ah, mother.

• 40:00Speaker 05

  This is a cell phone. I'm just gonna call and see if I.

• 40:03Speaker 18

  Hello?

• 40:03Speaker 12

  Hello?

• 40:04Speaker 18

  Yeah, hi. Um, your booking ran out just a minute ago.

• 40:08Speaker 12

  Yeah, we noticed.

• 40:09Speaker 10

  That, that, um, yeah.

• 40:10Speaker 18

  Yeah, I think we probably need to use the phone because that booth now needs to be used. Sorry.

• 40:15Speaker 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.

• 40:25Speaker 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?

• 40:34Speaker 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.

• 40:54Speaker 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?

• 41:14Speaker 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.

• 41:27Speaker 10

  What do you mean you wouldn't be able to tell that grandson?

• 41:30Speaker 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.

• 41:42Speaker 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.

• 42:19Speaker 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.

• 42:43Speaker 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,

• 43:03Speaker 19

  Oh, it's a book test, right? It's a book test, it's an envelope switch.

• 43:07Speaker 07

  A what?

• 43:07Speaker 19

  And there are, you know, three or four ways to do them.

• 43:10Speaker 07

  What did he say? He said, basically, I can tell you how they did it.

• 43:14Speaker 19

  Yeah.

• 43:14Speaker 07

  Or how they might have done it, but you are not going to like it.

• 43:18Speaker 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.

• 43:29Speaker 07

  A beautiful secret is the kind of thing that's short and sweet, like, oh, he folded the hat twice, or?

• 43:33Speaker 19

  There's mirrors under that table.

• 43:35Speaker 07

  When you hear it, it's like, oh, of course, that's what they would do. And you love finding it out.

• 43:40Speaker 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.

• 43:48Speaker 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.

• 43:55Speaker 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.

• 44:33Speaker 07

  Basically, he said that your answer to this one is going to kill your joy.

• 44:37Speaker 19

  Yeah, it's ugly.

• 44:38Speaker 07

  So did he, did he tell you what they did? Yeah.

• 44:43Speaker 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.

• 44:48Speaker 19

  Now, a book test, we actually do one in our show.

• 44:53Speaker 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.

• 45:07Speaker 07

  This is like a kiss with a poison dart in his.

• 45:10Speaker 19

  I love how much I bugged your shit.

• 45:13Speaker 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?

• 45:24Speaker 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.

• 46:05Speaker 19

  You know, and I would have just given you that soundbite, which I just have.

• 46:12Speaker 07

  Except that we have pivoted the entire piece called, so?

• 46:18Speaker 07

  It's like, all eyes, all eyes have been directed to the next sentence. So that's a little difficult.

• 46:25Speaker 19

  But I want to see how you solve a problem that I solve every day.

• 46:30Speaker 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.

• 46:45Speaker 19

  You don't really, because I am not suggesting that you lie.

• 46:50Speaker 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.

• 47:05Speaker 04

  Yes, the whole deal.

• 47:05Speaker 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?

• 47:14Speaker 04

  Yeah. Are we entertainers or are we actually?

• 47:16Speaker 19

  Journalists.

• 47:17Speaker 04

  Journalists, you know?

• 47:18Speaker 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.

• 47:30Speaker 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.

• 47:47Speaker 04

  Radiolab.org/theuglytruth. Don't, no apostrophe, click this.

• 47:52Speaker 07

  And we just leave it to you. You can go there, or you cannot.

• 47:56Speaker 19

  All I have said to you is that it's a trick.

• 47:59Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 47:59Speaker 19

  And you knew that. The fact that it wasn't the trick you wanted it to be.

• 48:07Speaker 07

  You know, he did turn sweet at one moment. We were talking about the grandma.

• 48:12Speaker 19

  Right.

• 48:12Speaker 07

  Grandma tells the grandson in the conversation at the end. She is not sure she could explain to him.

• 48:18Speaker 19

  Yes.

• 48:19Speaker 07

  How it went.

• 48:19Speaker 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.

• 48:31Speaker 07

  And yet, she was a party to it. She's the one.

• 48:35Speaker 19

  Yeah.

• 48:35Speaker 07

  He says, you know, oftentimes, when you're doing tricks, somebody knows everything and the other person is, you know, in the dark.

• 48:43Speaker 04

  Yeah. You mean like one of the partners intentionally not knows what's happening?

• 48:48Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 48:48Speaker 19

  There are, there are tricks in the Penn and Teller show that I don't really know how they're done.

• 48:54Speaker 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.

• 49:26Speaker 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.

• 49:51Speaker 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.

• 50:00Speaker 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.

• 50:13Speaker 20

  On this week's On the Media from WNYC. Find On the Media wherever you get your podcasts.

• 50:25Speaker 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.

• 50:41Speaker 22

  I love it. Shall we go inside? Of course.

• 50:44Speaker 04

  And our next and final black box comes from our producer, Molly Webster, and it begins...

• 50:50Speaker 23

  ...into the butterfly rainforest.

• 50:52Speaker 22

  Oh.

• 50:56Speaker 23

  So that you can see the butterflies that are flying, in fact.

• 51:00Speaker 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.

• 51:17Speaker 23

  Yeah, so these are Heliconias butterflies.

• 51:19Speaker 22

  That's Andrei Surakoff.

• 51:20Speaker 23

  I started looking at butterflies when I was six years old, and I have never grew up.

• 51:25Speaker 22

  He was my guide.

• 51:26Speaker 23

  And here, under this leaf, you can see an owl butterfly.

• 51:31Speaker 22

  One wing is like the size of my palm. So there were red ones.

• 51:35Speaker 23

  Black and yellow ones.

• 51:36Speaker 22

  Blue ones.

• 51:37Speaker 23

  Zebra striped ones.

• 51:38Speaker 22

  Is that, is that a monarch?

• 51:40Speaker 23

  Yes. Watch out, don't step on this butterfly.

• 51:42Speaker 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.

• 51:56Speaker 22

  What I'm talking about is something called.

• 51:58Speaker 23

  The chrysalis.

• 51:59Speaker 04

  The chrysalis.

• 52:00Speaker 22

  Just to back up.

• 52:00Speaker 23

  Yeah.

• 52:00Speaker 22

  At a certain point in all caterpillars' lives, after they've eaten a lot of leaves, they hit a certain weight.

• 52:06Speaker 23

  That is coordinated in their gene as their final weight.

• 52:10Speaker 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.

• 52:19Speaker 23

  A caterpillar becomes a butterfly or moth.

• 52:27Speaker 04

  And this is a mystery?

• 52:29Speaker 22

  What do you think happens inside the chrysalis?

• 52:31Speaker 04

  I think that, actually, I've never thought about it, to be honest.

• 52:36Speaker 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?

• 52:41Speaker 24

  Yeah, I'm surprised. I thought like I knew and I don't.

• 52:45Speaker 22

  Those are folks I met at the museum.

• 52:46Speaker 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?

• 52:58Speaker 22

  No, that is actually what I thought, but that's not right at all.

• 53:03Speaker 23

  The Maguire Center is located on three floors.

• 53:07Speaker 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.

• 53:13Speaker 23

  Shall we do it?

• 53:15Speaker 22

  Yes. Which Andre was nice enough to do for me.

• 53:17Speaker 23

  Sorry.

• 53:18Speaker 22

  Even though he loves these guys. He took a tiny little chrysalis.

• 53:21Speaker 23

  Well, it's about an inch long.

• 53:24Speaker 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.

• 53:35Speaker 23

  I can see pupil.

• 53:39Speaker 22

  Oh.

• 53:42Speaker 04

  What?

• 53:42Speaker 22

  Oh my gosh.

• 53:44Speaker 04

  What?

• 53:45Speaker 22

  No, it was like, there was no caterpillar there.

• 53:47Speaker 04

  What do you mean?

• 53:48Speaker 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.

• 53:59Speaker 04

  What was there then?

• 54:00Speaker 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!

• 54:09Speaker 23

  That is nothing.

• 54:12Speaker 22

  It just, whoosh, exploded it. He exploded it. I think he looked shocked too.

• 54:18Speaker 04

  Wait, I don't understand. Where did the caterpillar go?

• 54:21Speaker 22

  It seems like, once the caterpillar gets into its shell, it sort of just melts.

• 54:27Speaker 22

  Its head, legs.

• 54:28Speaker 23

  Antenna, abdomen.

• 54:30Speaker 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.

• 54:44Speaker 04

  Wait, you're saying that the caterpillar just becomes like a soup of cells?

• 54:48Speaker 22

  Yeah. And yet somehow.

• 54:50Speaker 23

  This soup will magically be transformed

• 54:56Speaker 23

  into a butterfly or moth.

• 55:01Speaker 04

  Well, how does that happen?

• 55:02Speaker 22

  That question, that question is the big, fat, metaphysical, quasi-religious, semi-mystical, philosophical question that people have been asking forever.

• 55:15Speaker 25

  Yeah, so, one of the big arguments that was taking place.

• 55:20Speaker 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.

• 55:29Speaker 25

  The caterpillar.

• 55:30Speaker 22

  Goes into the chrysalis.

• 55:31Speaker 25

  And then it actually dies.

• 55:34Speaker 22

  Totally dies.

• 55:35Speaker 25

  And out of its burial cloth is gonna come the new life.

• 55:39Speaker 22

  This beautiful and completely new creature.

• 55:43Speaker 25

  Death, as it were, and then a kind of resurrection.

• 55:49Speaker 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.

• 55:58Speaker 26

  As a kind of spiritual ascent, says somewhere in the New Testament. Behold, the old has passed away, the new has surely come.

• 56:07Speaker 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.

• 56:27Speaker 23

  Feces and urine and other unappetizing substances.

• 56:31Speaker 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?

• 57:08Speaker 26

  It still has to be you that makes it to heaven.

• 57:11Speaker 22

  You can't change too much. Otherwise, like, someone else will be up there enjoying your afterlife.

• 57:15Speaker 26

  So certain memories and elements of your identity have to continue, just not all the elements.

• 57:22Speaker 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?

• 57:36Speaker 26

  That's a really interesting question.

• 57:38Speaker 27

  Cleaning out the poop and throwing away the, the moldy leaves. You have a lot of time to think.

• 57:43Speaker 22

  Which brings us to Martha Weiss.

• 57:44Speaker 27

  I am an associate professor of biology at Georgetown University.

• 57:48Speaker 22

  She got to thinking about this question in more concrete terms.

• 57:51Speaker 27

  Okay, so.

• 57:53Speaker 22

  She did an experiment.

• 57:54Speaker 27

  What we did was we took a big, green caterpillar and we did something that was not entirely nice.

• 58:01Speaker 22

  She put them in a box, filled it with a nasty odor. And is the odor like an odor of a plant?

• 58:06Speaker 27

  It's, it's actually a plant-based odor, but it smells kind of like nail polish remover.

• 58:10Speaker 22

  In any case, she gassed them with this nasty smell.

• 58:13Speaker 27

  And then, once they could smell the odor, then we gave them a zap.

• 58:17Speaker 22

  Is that just like a zap? Just a zoop? A zap?

• 58:20Speaker 27

  I think 10 seconds of zap.

• 58:22Speaker 22

  10 seconds. And they did this over and over.

• 58:25Speaker 27

  Odor, zap, odor, zap.

• 58:27Speaker 22

  Until eventually, most of these caterpillars learn to hate the smell. Every time they get a whiff, they head in the opposite direction.

• 58:36Speaker 27

  OK, so then we let them pupate.

• 58:38Speaker 22

  Meaning the caterpillar changes into its shell and

• 58:43Speaker 22

  organs dissolve, muscles melt, you get this.

• 58:46Speaker 27

  Cataclysmic, catastrophic, chaotic.

• 58:49Speaker 22

  Change.

• 58:54Speaker 27

  And then?

• 58:55Speaker 22

  One month later.

• 58:56Speaker 27

  The moth emerges. And now we're, the drum roll, we're ready for the drum roll.

• 59:04Speaker 22

  They give the moths a whiff.

• 59:05Speaker 04

  OK.

• 59:06Speaker 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.

• 59:16Speaker 04

  Somehow I'm confused. What does that mean?

• 59:17Speaker 22

  That means the memory made it through the goo.

• 59:20Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 59:20Speaker 22

  And it came out the other side.

• 59:22Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 59:22Speaker 22

  What's your, what's your feeling like coming out of this?

• 59:25Speaker 27

  My feeling is wow.

• 59:29Speaker 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.

• 59:50Speaker 04

  And how does that happen?

• 59:51Speaker 27

  The answer to this question is we do not know.

• 59:54Speaker 22

  But.

• 59:55Speaker 27

  But.

• 59:55Speaker 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.

• 1:00:20Speaker 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.

• 1:00:32Speaker 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?

• 1:00:44Speaker 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-

• 1:00:51Speaker 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.

• 1:01:18Speaker 22

  Well, here's the answer.

• 1:01:20Speaker 04

  What answer?

• 1:01:22Speaker 22

  Well, the, the answer to the question about what carries through. The continuity question.

• 1:01:26Speaker 04

  Oh, right, yes.

• 1:01:27Speaker 22

  And memory carries through.

• 1:01:29Speaker 04

  Which is freaking cool, I gotta say.

• 1:01:32Speaker 22

  It is freaking cool, but there's a little more freaking cool.

• 1:01:34Speaker 04

  All right.

• 1:01:35Speaker 22

  And that is that there's actually a continuity, but it goes in the reverse direction.

• 1:01:40Speaker 04

  What does that even mean?

• 1:01:41Speaker 22

  Well, Matthew Cobb told me this story about this guy.

• 1:01:45Speaker 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.

• 1:01:53Speaker 22

  Schwamerdam?

• 1:01:53Speaker 25

  Schwamerdam.

• 1:01:54Speaker 22

  Schwamerdam, okay. That's Jan Swamerdam, a Dutch microscopyist from the 1600s.

• 1:01:59Speaker 25

  He was definitely the first to do some very clear dissections of the chrysalis.

• 1:02:04Speaker 22

  And the caterpillar. And one day-

• 1:02:06Speaker 25

  In Paris, in front of this crowd of assembled worthies, bewigged and bestocking-

• 1:02:12Speaker 22

  He gets a fat white caterpillar-

• 1:02:13Speaker 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.

• 1:02:39Speaker 22

  So you peel back the skin of a caterpillar, and beneath it, you see-

• 1:02:46Speaker 22

  The a new, the new creature hidden.

• 1:02:50Speaker 25

  Absolutely.

• 1:02:51Speaker 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.

• 1:03:02Speaker 04

  Wait, and the wings also survive the goo?

• 1:03:04Speaker 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.

• 1:03:22Speaker 25

  What he then shown was, you know what? This isn't about death. This isn't about decay. This is actually about transformation.

• 1:03:34Speaker 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?

• 1:04:33Speaker 04

  Thanks to our producers this hour, Tim Howard, Molly Webster, Jesse Cox. And thanks to you guys for listening.

• 1:04:39Speaker 25

  Yeah.

• 1:04:44Speaker 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.

• 1:06:03Speaker 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.

• 1:06:54Speaker 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.