Pod Insights Radiolab Vertigogo About this episode In this episode, first aired in 2012, we have two stories of brains pushed off-course. We relive a surreal day in the life of a young researcher hijacked by her own brain, and hear from a librarian experiencing a bizarre and mysterious set of symptoms that she called “gravitational anarchy.”
Special thanks to Sarah Montague and Ellen Horn, as well as actress Hope Davis, who read Rosemary Morton’s story. And the late Berton Roueché, who wrote that story down.
EPISODE CREDITS:
Produced by - Brenna FarrellOriginal music and sound design contributed by - Tim Howard and Douglas Smith
EPISODE CITATIONS:
Books -
Berton Roueché’s story about Rosemary Morton,”Essentially Normal” first appeared in the New Yorker in 1958 and was later published by Dutton in a book called "The Medical Detectives."
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Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 Radiolab is supported by Dell. Gifts mean more when they have the power to unwrap more of who you are. This Black Friday, give a gift that goes beyond the box. The Dell XPS 13 laptop. Dell says it is the thinnest, lightest XPS laptop yet, with a long battery life, beautiful design, powerful performance with Intel Core processors. The XPS laptop, according to Dell, unlocks more of what you love. Plus, at dell.com, you will find perks like Dell Rewards, fast free shipping, flexible financing, big savings. Head to dell.com/deals. That's dell.com/deals.
0:42 Speaker 01 Hey, this is Radiolab. I'm Lulu. I'm here with my brain. You are there with yours. And usually, you know, you and your brain have a kind of quiet agreement to just get along enough to go through your day. But every now and then, you and your brain fall out of agreement. And then you can slip into a kind of disorienting, tilt-a-whirl-y place. Well, today, we have two stories for you about just that. People walking around with a new kind of vertigo. These stories come from the archives, and we're calling today's show Vertigo Go Go. So here we go.
1:21 Speaker 02 Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. Okay. All right.
1:27 Speaker 00 You're listening to Radiolab.
1:31 Speaker 02 Radiolab.
1:32 Speaker 00 From...
1:33 Speaker 02 WNYC.
1:34 Speaker 00 Rewind.
1:40 Speaker 03 Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krolwich. This is Radiolab. The podcast. And today on the podcast, a show about brains. Yes. A short time ago, we got an email from a listener in San Francisco. Something...
1:52 Speaker 04 Odd had happened to her and she wanted to share it with us.
1:55 Speaker 03 I missed, I didn't hit the record button fast enough. Could you just tell me your name again?
1:59 Speaker 05 Sure. My name is Liza Schoenfeld and I'm a research technician at the Gladstone Institute at the University of California, San Francisco.
2:06 Speaker 03 Now, Liza is just getting started with her scientific career.
2:09 Speaker 05 Finished my undergraduate degree about a year and a half ago.
2:12 Speaker 03 And this story takes place as she was about to take that next step after college and apply to grad school.
2:18 Speaker 04 And the star of our story, other than of course Liza herself, is a little mischievous part of her brain, well, everyone's brain.
2:25 Speaker 05 Part of your brain called the basal ganglia.
2:26 Speaker 03 Basal ganglia, which at the time she'd been studying.
2:30 Speaker 05 So basal ganglia is a fairly large part of your brain.
2:32 Speaker 03 It's actually this big hunk deep in the center.
2:34 Speaker 05 And it's responsible for controlling and coordinating movement.
2:36 Speaker 04 When I move my neck back and forth, am I using my basal ganglia?
2:40 Speaker 05 Yeah.
2:40 Speaker 04 When I make an expression in my face, am I using my basal ganglia?
2:43 Speaker 05 Definitely.
2:43 Speaker 03 What about if I'm reading The New Yorker?
2:46 Speaker 05 I don't think so.
2:47 Speaker 04 Apologies to The New Yorker and its employees.
2:49 Speaker 03 Point is, this part of your brain is really basic.
2:51 Speaker 04 And at the lab where she was working, they had figured out this particular basal ganglia trick.
2:57 Speaker 05 Using this really cool technology called optogenetics.
3:00 Speaker 03 What they'd done is they'd found a way to take a mouse, thread a little fiber optic cable through its skull, deep into its brain, into its basal ganglia.
3:07 Speaker 05 So that when you shine a blue laser, literally, we just shine lasers into mouse brains.
3:11 Speaker 03 They could actually turn its basal ganglia, or parts of it, on or off.
3:15 Speaker 04 And this is in a live mouse?
3:16 Speaker 05 This is in a live mouse. So we have these really cool videos showing a mouse running around, having a great mouse time. You turn the light on. Boom. We can get him to freeze.
3:28 Speaker 04 In mid-strive?
3:29 Speaker 05 Yeah.
3:30 Speaker 04 So you hit the laser and boom, the mouse stops?
3:32 Speaker 05 Mouse is like this.
3:34 Speaker 03 So you use light to like puppetize the mouse?
3:36 Speaker 05 Yes.
3:37 Speaker 03 If you're this mouse, no matter how hard you try, move feet, move, as long as that light is on.
3:44 Speaker 04 Come on, move.
3:45 Speaker 03 You can't do it. Liza is holding the strings.
3:48 Speaker 04 Not exactly. It turns out she doesn't get to play with the laser that much.
3:51 Speaker 05 I'm kind of like, I'm the bottom of the totem pole, so I do a lot of pipetting.
3:54 Speaker 03 It's like where you squirt liquid from one tube to another.
3:56 Speaker 05 I'm working on my pipetting skills these days.
3:59 Speaker 03 Groundwork. Get the thumb muscles up.
4:01 Speaker 05 Oh, I could beat anyone in the thumb wrestling competition right now.
4:03 Speaker 03 So, at a certain point, she was like, enough of this, it's time for me to apply to grad school.
4:07 Speaker 05 Yeah, I applied to five: University of California, San Diego, University of Washington, and Seattle, UCSF, Rockefeller University, and Harvard.
4:17 Speaker 03 Okay, so you're going big.
4:18 Speaker 05 Yeah, go big or go home.
4:19 Speaker 03 Right, exactly.
4:21 Speaker 04 So she heads off to her first interview.
4:23 Speaker 05 University of Washington, went great, I loved it. Went down to UCSD in San Diego, it's a beautiful place, great scientist, it's actually the largest neuroscience community in the world.
4:31 Speaker 03 So far, so good.
4:32 Speaker 04 Did you ever go back to San Francisco, where we are now?
4:35 Speaker 03 This is where things get strange.
4:39 Speaker 05 Yes, so my last interview, my very last interview was at UCSF.
4:42 Speaker 03 And she says about a week before that interview.
4:44 Speaker 05 I got really sick, pretty severe nausea, I wasn't really able to eat or do anything.
4:48 Speaker 03 Throwing up?
4:49 Speaker 05 Yeah, all sorts of, I don't know, I had some bad dim sum the weekend before, that could have been it.
4:54 Speaker 04 Yeah, that's it. So, she goes to the doctor, he gives her some pills to fight the nausea.
4:58 Speaker 05 And then the next day was my interview, Friday was my interview. So, I went, you know, there was the nice introduction, they give you breakfast.
5:04 Speaker 03 At this point, she's pretty familiar with the whole routine.
5:06 Speaker 05 Generally, the way these interviews are structured is that we talk a little bit about my research in dopamine in the basal ganglia and these mice.
5:12 Speaker 03 They tell her about their work.
5:14 Speaker 05 I have to think of a couple witty questions, I ask my questions.
5:16 Speaker 03 Anyhow, she's raring to go, and she heads in to meet her first basal gangliatitian of the day.
5:21 Speaker 05 And he studies, one of the things he studies is dopamine.
5:26 Speaker 03 In the basal ganglia.
5:27 Speaker 05 He studies stuff that's a little bit more molecular than what I know, but we had a good conversation about dopamine, and at this point in the day, I was feeling okay.
5:34 Speaker 04 No nausea.
5:35 Speaker 05 Then I went to my second interview, which is this woman that I was so excited to talk to, her name is Allison Dope, and she's pretty well-known.
5:41 Speaker 04 Her name is Allison Dope?
5:42 Speaker 05 Allison Dope.
5:44 Speaker 04 Wow, and she studies dopamine?
5:47 Speaker 05 She studies songbirds.
5:48 Speaker 04 Songbirds.
5:49 Speaker 03 Which is what Liza really wanted to study.
5:50 Speaker 05 So, birds have basal ganglia, too.
5:52 Speaker 03 So, she's pretty fired up.
5:53 Speaker 05 And, kind of at the beginning of that interview, my face started to feel a little bit strange, and I was wearing glasses that day, so what I thought was happening was that my glasses were, you know, your glasses get loose, and they kind of start to slip down your nose, and you have to kind of tighten. The muscles around your ears to try and keep your glasses on. So we were talking and I just kept on feeling like, God, why can't I stop tightening that? It was kind of got to the point where it started to distract me, but I felt okay. Then we went to lunch and this was a lunch with all the current students and a lot of the current faculty and all the prospective students. And at lunch, I remember on the walk to lunch, my head just started spontaneously turning to the right.
6:32 Speaker 03 Like?
6:32 Speaker 05 Like I would be trying to sit here and face you and I would just turn over here and face Robert.
6:37 Speaker 03 That's such a funny thing. It's with your neck moving and you're like, no neck, don't do that neck.
6:41 Speaker 05 Yes, this is exactly what was happening. I was trying to send signals to my neck being like, all right, sitting here having lunch with an important professor, why don't you just face him, talk to him? And instead I'm just turning over here, turning over here, turning over here.
6:54 Speaker 04 Oh, you're turning a fairly wide arc.
6:55 Speaker 05 Yeah.
6:56 Speaker 04 You are turning away from the professor.
6:58 Speaker 05 So I remember, I remember at one point in lunch, turning my chair like this.
7:01 Speaker 04 You're trying to rotate.
7:06 Speaker 04 A permanent side long glance.
7:08 Speaker 05 Yeah.
7:08 Speaker 03 But you figured, must just be a cramp or something.
7:11 Speaker 05 And I'm kind of thinking, oh, okay, so I slept funny last night. I must have slept on a weird angle on my pillow. Now I'm having a neck cramp. My glasses are loose. I just got to tighten the glasses.
7:21 Speaker 03 Yeah, everything under control.
7:22 Speaker 05 So, so then I, after lunch, was going to go to my third interview. It was with Alison Dope's husband, who also studies songbirds. So he's familiar with the basal ganglia too.
7:31 Speaker 03 They meet up to walk over to his office together.
7:33 Speaker 05 And so I explained to him on the walk over, I think I'm having neck cramps. Would it be possible maybe to try and get a hot pad?
7:39 Speaker 04 He says, sure, I may track one down.
7:41 Speaker 05 But on the walk, not only now does my neck start turning to the right, but it's snapping itself back.
7:47 Speaker 04 Involuntarily.
7:48 Speaker 05 Yeah, my head's snapping back.
7:49 Speaker 03 So you're, suddenly your eyes are pointed up at the sky.
7:51 Speaker 05 And then as I'm talking to him, I'm realizing that I can't control my eyebrows from raising pretty tightly.
7:57 Speaker 03 Like you're doing right now?
7:58 Speaker 05 Like I'm doing right now.
7:58 Speaker 04 So you're in a state of, of deep surprise.
8:00 Speaker 05 Yes, constant deep surprise.
8:02 Speaker 04 High eyebrow.
8:03 Speaker 05 I can't stop it. I look surprised at everything I'm saying and I can't stop it. So after the eyebrows start and I can't pull them back down, then, then the mouth, then all this area starts to go.
8:13 Speaker 04 The lower face.
8:14 Speaker 05 Yes.
8:14 Speaker 03 What is it doing?
8:16 Speaker 05 It turns into this really twisted, painful, grimacing smile.
8:22 Speaker 03 Would you mind demonstrating?
8:24 Speaker 05 I'll demo it, I'll demo it. Okay, so I've got the neck, it's like this.
8:27 Speaker 03 Crane back.
8:27 Speaker 05 The eyebrows are like this.
8:28 Speaker 03 Total surprise.
8:29 Speaker 05 My face is a little bit like this.
8:31 Speaker 03 Crazy Frankenstein face.
8:34 Speaker 04 This is not the obviously the best demeanor for a graduate interview.
8:38 Speaker 05 No, yeah, it's not, it's not going well at that point.
8:41 Speaker 04 Now is Michael now noticing that something is...
8:43 Speaker 05 Yeah, I think at that point, he thought I was just really excited to be talking about neuroscience. And I'm just trying to think, okay, mouth, like, try, try and just calm down a little bit. And it was pretty painful, too. I mean, it was like, imagine like a charlie horse near your face.
8:57 Speaker 04 Oh.
8:58 Speaker 05 Yeah.
8:58 Speaker 04 But she gets through the interview.
9:00 Speaker 05 I actually do okay. You know, he asks me tough questions about science and I can answer them, I think. And I leave the interview and then I'm met by the woman who's the head of the admissions weekend.
9:11 Speaker 03 And she took one look at Liza.
9:12 Speaker 05 And she said, I don't know if you should do the rest of your interviews. And with her is my student host.
9:18 Speaker 03 And Liza decides, all right, let me just call my dad.
9:20 Speaker 05 Just to say, hey dad, I'm in the middle of my interview and someone kind of funny's happening with my face. I can't control it. And while I'm talking to him, I lose control of my mouth and my tongue. So I can't, I can kind of talk, but it's, it's pretty bad.
9:34 Speaker 04 Pretty bad. Is your dad a doctor?
9:38 Speaker 05 No. Imagine your kid calling you being like, I'm losing control of my face. And as they're telling you that, I started to think something's really wrong.
9:48 Speaker 05 And then my student host comes rushing back in, running. And he looks at me and he tries to put on a calm face and he says, so now we need to go to the emergency room.
9:57 Speaker 03 So they throw into a taxi.
9:59 Speaker 05 And in the taxi, it went from, I can't control my mouth to a, I mean, a complete...
10:04 Speaker 04 Palsy and a torque.
10:06 Speaker 05 I did not look good.
10:09 Speaker 05 And as we're pulling up to the emergency room was when my throat started tightening up.
10:13 Speaker 03 They rush her inside.
10:14 Speaker 05 And they have me in a gurney, in a room in the back of the ER, surrounded by six people within two minutes.
10:19 Speaker 04 Doctors swarming all around her.
10:21 Speaker 05 Oxygen masks, EKG leads all over my chest. They do an IV.
10:25 Speaker 04 And she's lying there on the table and she's thinking like, what's wrong with me? Why can't I control my throat? Why can't I control my body?
10:31 Speaker 05 And I just, I couldn't, I remember frantically sending messages like, you've got to cut this out now.
10:36 Speaker 03 But she wasn't in control. And it turned out...
10:41 Speaker 03 That while she was going from interview to interview to interview, talking about how her lab had taken these little mice and seized control of their basal ganglia?
10:49 Speaker 05 The compazine that I took-
10:50 Speaker 04 That nausea drug?
10:51 Speaker 05 Was actually affecting the dopamine systems in my basal ganglia.
10:55 Speaker 03 In other words, that drug had been doing to her-
10:58 Speaker 04 Pretty much what she'd been-
10:59 Speaker 03 Doing to those mice.
11:01 Speaker 05 1% to 2% of people who take compazine, they can have what's called an acute dystonia, which is what happened to me.
11:07 Speaker 03 During all those interviews?
11:09 Speaker 05 And the crazy thing is, the guy that I talked to first in the morning was the molecular dopamine guy. You know, how does dopamine get packed in the vesicles? How does it get released? And it wasn't until I started talking with the more systems level people who study the behavioral output of the basal ganglia, that I started to have behavioral deficits in my basal ganglia.
11:25 Speaker 04 So your basal ganglia are testing the San Francisco docs, and they are failing in issue to issue?
11:31 Speaker 05 Yeah.
11:32 Speaker 04 Did you get into San Francisco State?
11:34 Speaker 05 UCSF.
11:35 Speaker 04 UCSF?
11:37 Speaker 05 No.
11:37 Speaker 03 No. Oh. Damn it, basal ganglia. We should probably tell everybody that Liza's obviously doing OK. Back in the ER, when the doctors finally figured out what was going on, they just gave her some Benadryl, of all things.
11:50 Speaker 05 And actually, within 20 minutes, I was feeling a lot better.
11:54 Speaker 03 She could breathe, her face unclenched. And when we asked her, how has this little adventure changed you? She said, "Well, I'm still working with those mice." Because when we talked to her, grad school hadn't started yet. And now, when I go into that room with a little laser-
12:09 Speaker 05 I go in now, and I just really, I empathize with them.
12:14 Speaker 04 Come on, little Casper, this would just be for a couple of minutes. You can do it.
12:17 Speaker 05 Yeah, I'm thinking a lot about that.
12:27 Speaker 04 Liza Schoenfeld is now a proud PhD candidate at the University of Washington.
12:31 Speaker 03 And thanks to Brenna Farrell for production help on that story.
12:36 Speaker 03 I'm Jan Avram, Rod.
12:37 Speaker 04 I'm Robert Krulwich.
12:38 Speaker 03 We'll be back.
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14:12 Speaker 06 I'm Merlon Woods. I'm Nigel Poor. We're the hosts and creators of Ear Hustle from PRX's Radiotopia. When we met, I was doing time at San Quentin State Prison in California. And I was coming in as a volunteer. The stories we tell are probably not what people expect from a prison podcast. Like cooking meals in a prison cell. Keeping little pets. Prison nicknames. And trying to be a parent from inside. Stories about life on the inside, shared by those who live it. Find Ear Hustle wherever you get your podcasts.
14:47 Speaker 03 I'm Jad Abumrad.
14:48 Speaker 04 I'm Robert Krulwich.
14:49 Speaker 03 This is Radiolab.
14:50 Speaker 04 And today...
14:50 Speaker 03 Times when you and your brain have a falling out, so to speak.
14:53 Speaker 04 Okay, so Liza's disagreement with her brain didn't last very long. It was over within, really, less than a day.
14:59 Speaker 03 Yeah.
14:59 Speaker 04 But there are people who get into fusses with their heads that last longer. So here's a bigger, better, and broader story.
15:07 Speaker 03 Also a true story, comes from an essay written many years ago by a guy named Burton Rushe, who's this great, I don't know, how would you describe him?
15:15 Speaker 04 Burton Rushe, he was a great essayist, journalism essayist.
15:20 Speaker 03 Yeah, and this essay was published in 1958 in The New Yorker. And it's kind of an interesting essay, because it's essentially one long quote from this woman that Burton interviewed, Rosemary Morton. It reads like a novel, even though it's nonfiction. So we asked an actress, who's been in some movies, Hope Davis, to read excerpts from Rosemary's story. The story begins on a normal night, Rosemary's at home with her husband Frank. And everything's fine, for the moment.
15:50 Speaker 06 I'd been home about an hour. Dinner was ready and waiting in the oven, and I was sitting at the piano, not really playing, just amusing myself. That's something I often do at the end of the day, it helps me relax. My husband was in the kitchen, making us a cocktail, which is another Morton custom. We usually have a drink or two before dinner. So, everything was quite ordinary and normal, until Frank came in with the drinks. I got up to join him on the sofa, and as I did, as I started across the room, I felt the floor sort of shake. "Good heavens," I said.
16:35 Speaker 06 What was that? Frank just looked at me. His face was a perfect blank. He made some remark about old buildings stretching and settling and handed me my drink.
16:48 Speaker 03 So she doesn't really think too much of this because it was very momentary. Okay. But a week later, she's at work. She's actually in the library because she's a librarian. She's at her desk.
16:57 Speaker 06 I worked at my desk for about an hour and it was heaven, so quiet, so peaceful. Then I got up to get a book from the stacks or a drink of water or something and it happened.
17:11 Speaker 06 The floor gave a shake and sank. It went down and up, just one lurch, maybe a little more pronounced than the first time. And then everything was back to normal.
17:29 Speaker 06 Except for my state of mind. I didn't know what to think. The best I could do was tell myself that this was an old building too. It was built around 1900.
17:42 Speaker 03 So that was her sense at first, just old buildings.
17:45 Speaker 06 It never occurred to me that there might be any other explanation.
17:49 Speaker 03 But then, over the next few days, very odd things begin to happen.
17:53 Speaker 06 I don't know how to describe it, but I had the feeling that my sense of touch was getting more and more acute.
18:03 Speaker 06 Especially in the soles of my feet. I could feel little tremors that other people couldn't.
18:15 Speaker 06 I didn't tell Frank until the middle of the following week, on Wednesday night, to be exact. By then, I had to. I couldn't keep it to myself any longer.
18:28 Speaker 06 There was something wrong with me.
18:35 Speaker 06 There just wasn't any word for the awful sensations I'd been having. The floor shaking feeling was only one of them. I don't know how many times that happened over the weekend, seven or eight at least, but even that began to have a different feeling. At first, the floor had moved or sagged as a whole. It still did, only now I could feel another movement too, a kind of counterpoint. Sometimes it was as if I were sinking into the floor. The room would tilt, and I'd take a step, and the floor was like snow. It would give under my foot, and I would sink.
19:20 Speaker 06 And other times, it was just the reverse, the floor would rise up to meet me. By then, it wasn't simply the floor that moved. When the floor tilted, the walls of the room tilted with it, and the ceiling. I mean, the shape of the room never changed, only its position in space.
19:42 Speaker 03 So Rosemary went to see her doctor. And her doctor sent her to some specialists, and they ran some tests. And then a short while later, she went back to her doctor to get the results.
19:54 Speaker 06 He'd read me their conclusions, and they were all the same. They even used the same phrase. "Impression, essentially normal." I'll never forget that phrase. "Normal, essentially normal." It sounds so reassuring, so comforting. But it isn't. At least, it wasn't to me. It was terrifying.
20:24 Speaker 03 After this diagnosis, or non-diagnosis, things really take a turn. Fast forward a few months.
20:30 Speaker 06 There were times in March and early April when I was absolutely certain I was going to die. But my reaction to death was peculiar. I don't remember feeling afraid. All I remember is an overwhelming sense of urgency. So little time, so little done, so much I wanted to do.
20:56 Speaker 06 I dragged Frank to the theater more than once. And I never thought of refusing when he suggested the Philharmonic or the Metropolitan.
21:05 Speaker 06 My response to music had never been so complete. I spent hours listening to records. I'd play some old favorite, like Beecham conducting Haydn's London Symphony. And it was amazing.
21:27 Speaker 06 It seemed to me that I could hear the inner structure more clearly than ever before. So the idea of a dinner and a concert wasn't at all unusual. My only mistake was to take that dreadful underground passage.
21:47 Speaker 06 It was raining and I was in a hurry, but even so, I should have realized. When I did, it was too late. The passage was jammed with commuters, shoving and pushing and surging toward me. But I didn't dare turn back. The floor was beginning to wobble, and I knew if I tried to swing around, it would tip me head over heels. All I could do was go on. The traffic was still all against me. People kept looming up, towering up. They came charging at me like giants.
22:26 Speaker 06 And then I felt something right out of a nightmare. I was almost at the end of the passage when I felt the movement change.
22:37 Speaker 06 It was as if someone had pulled a lever.
22:42 Speaker 06 There was a little jolt. And the floor was moving, very slowly, backward down the passage. I was walking on a treadmill.
22:55 Speaker 06 Only for a minute, though. Then I reached the stairs. I drove myself up to the lobby and collapsed in a chair.
23:05 Speaker 06 I was jelly.
23:10 Speaker 06 From early April, I began to move in a different world. I was conscious of a new dimension, a new plane. I had a new relationship to space. My legs, my arms, my face, my whole body felt different. It had no permanent shape. It changed by the minute. I seemed to be completely at the mercy of some outside force, some atmospheric pressure. I was amorphous. My left leg would seem to lengthen, or my right arm, or my neck, or one whole side
23:55 Speaker 06 of me would double or treble in size. And yet, that doesn't fully describe it. There were times when the force seemed to be the rotation of the Earth. I would have the feeling that I was vertically aligned with the Earth's axis. I could feel a sort of winding movement start up inside me. Then, one of my legs would begin to shorten, as if it were an anchor being drawn slowly up by a winch. The other leg would dangle. After a minute, the winch would shift. It would engage the dangling leg, and just as slowly, bring it up to match the other.
24:39 Speaker 04 This feels like some kind of a nightmare cartoon of some kind. So what is wrong with her?
24:46 Speaker 03 Well, after months of this, at the end of the essay, she does finally learn that this condition she has has a name.
24:54 Speaker 06 My trouble was a disturbance of the internal ear called labyrinthitis.
24:59 Speaker 04 Labyrinthitis?
25:00 Speaker 06 The suffix -itis meant inflammation.
25:04 Speaker 03 Swelling.
25:04 Speaker 06 So the meaning of labyrinthitis as a word was simply an inflammation of the oral labyrinth.
25:11 Speaker 04 You know, I think people in science and medicine love to give big fat names to "I don't know."
25:15 Speaker 03 Well, actually, this condition, you should know, goes by another name.
25:20 Speaker 04 What?
25:21 Speaker 03 Vertigo.
25:23 Speaker 04 Oh.
25:29 Speaker 03 That's why I liked the story, because like, I didn't know. I mean, like, I always thought of vertigo like from the movie.
25:34 Speaker 04 Yeah.
25:35 Speaker 03 Like, you're on a stairs and you're like, woo! Like, it's just a thing with heights. You know, like, that's what it was in the Hitchcock film. But what Rosemary Morton goes through in this story, it's like, seems way deeper.
25:50 Speaker 03 And at some point in the essay, she actually refers to her situation as a case of gravitational anarchy.
25:58 Speaker 04 That's an interesting phrase.
25:59 Speaker 03 Phrase I kinda, I kinda like.
26:01 Speaker 04 Yeah. Well, does she get better?
26:04 Speaker 03 Yep.
26:05 Speaker 06 It's impossible to say exactly when it all ended. But I think it was Frank who really sensed it first. It was after dinner one night in late August, and he suddenly smiled and remarked that I must be feeling much better. I asked him what he meant. "You never look scared anymore," he said.
26:27 Speaker 03 It's very mysterious, but her vertigo just went away. Poof.
26:31 Speaker 04 Without explanation for the coming and no explanation for the going?
26:35 Speaker 03 Some things just don't have explanations, Robert. But they have wonderful sound design.
26:42 Speaker 03 And that's Radiolab. No explanations, pretty sounds.
26:48 Speaker 04 I'd buy a ticket for that, Mr. Jekers.
26:51 Speaker 04 I'm crazy for sound design. Speaking of not knowing anything.
26:58 Speaker 03 Thanks to Burton Roche. Well, he's not alive anymore, but, uh, but you can find his story, "Essentially Normal," in the awesome book, "Medical Detectives," which was published in 1984 by Dutton. Our sincere thanks to actress Hope Davis and to Sarah Montague and Ellen Horn for directing Hope in the studio. And thanks to Tim Howard and Douglas Smith for the scoring help with that piece. And lastly, huh, thanks to you for listening.
27:26 Speaker 06 Hey, I'm Lemon, and I'm from Richmond, Indiana. And here are the staff credits. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Zorn Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasr are our co-hosts. Dylan Keith is our Director of Sound Design. Our staff include- Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Pressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Cindy Uñanan Sambandan, Matt Keelty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sarah Kari, Sarah Sandback, Anissa Vita, Emery Yan Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton.
28:09 Speaker 05 Hi, my name is Teresa. I'm calling from Colchester in Essex, UK. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, the Seaman's Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
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