transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] 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 going to buckle you into a time machine and beam you back to 2014, right into the studio with then host Jad Abumrad and producer Tim Howard.

Speaker 2:
[00:29] Here we go.

Speaker 3:
[00:30] Wait, wait, you're listening.

Speaker 4:
[00:31] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[00:33] All right.

Speaker 5:
[00:39] Radiolab, Radiolab, from WNYC.

Speaker 6:
[00:45] Rewind.

Speaker 3:
[00:49] Batting first, producer Tim Howard.

Speaker 7:
[00:51] Cool, wait, I'm just gonna get my level here. Da da da da da da da.

Speaker 8:
[00:57] It is such a beautiful day.

Speaker 5:
[00:59] Beautiful, I think it's gotta be like 75 degrees out or something, sunny.

Speaker 8:
[01:02] This is Patrick Perdin. He's a professor in anesthesia at Harvard Medical School and works at Mass General Hospital.

Speaker 7:
[01:09] You wanna just tell me where we are?

Speaker 5:
[01:10] We're standing right now in front of the Bullfinch building.

Speaker 8:
[01:14] And I went up to talk to him because in that building, this is the one with the ether dome?

Speaker 5:
[01:19] Ether dome is inside this building.

Speaker 8:
[01:20] Is the story of the day that you could say humanity emerged from the dark ages. Oh, you laugh now. Just wait.

Speaker 5:
[01:31] Okay, here we go.

Speaker 7:
[01:32] It's on the fourth floor.

Speaker 5:
[01:33] It's on the fourth floor of this building.

Speaker 8:
[01:34] We headed in, up three flights of stairs into this room.

Speaker 7:
[01:40] What a cool room.

Speaker 4:
[01:42] Oh my God.

Speaker 8:
[01:44] Is this like, how would you describe it?

Speaker 5:
[01:46] It's like a mini amphitheater, right?

Speaker 8:
[01:47] It's also got this awesome dome. It's this beautiful domed room with light streaming down from above. Like the acoustics in here are crazy. It must have been terrifying though if you actually heard somebody screaming.

Speaker 5:
[02:02] I mean, it's so resonant in here. The screams would have been deafening and absolutely would have been terrifying.

Speaker 8:
[02:09] What is this place? Well, this was an operating room. Back in the 1800s when this room was really in use.

Speaker 9:
[02:16] Being in an operation was so painful. It was often permanently damaging to a patient's emotional state.

Speaker 8:
[02:22] This is Julie.

Speaker 9:
[02:23] I'm Julie Fenster. I write about American history.

Speaker 8:
[02:26] 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.

Speaker 9:
[02:42] Some of the patients remembered the sound of their limb dropping to the ground, or the saw going through their sinew and bones. The smell of their own body being cut into. 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.

Speaker 8:
[03:22] This is such a cool room. Here we are at the top of the Etherdome. But then everything changes. October 16th, 1846. It's a Friday morning. I assume the room is full.

Speaker 5:
[03:36] The room is absolutely full.

Speaker 9:
[03:37] Students were all lined up to watch.

Speaker 8:
[03:40] Crowded in the bleachers because they'd heard something big was going to go down, and right there in the middle of the room is.

Speaker 9:
[03:45] The most esteemed surgeon in America, Dr. John Warren.

Speaker 8:
[03:50] 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.

Speaker 5:
[03:57] Just about to start the surgery.

Speaker 8:
[03:59] When this mustachioed fellow bursts in, a dentist.

Speaker 9:
[04:04] William TG. Morton.

Speaker 8:
[04:05] He basically said to Warren something that must have sounded completely nuts. I can erase that man's pain. He didn't actually use those words. He actually had an appointment with Warren. But according to Julie, he did have a bag.

Speaker 9:
[04:19] He had a bag filled with gas.

Speaker 8:
[04:21] A gas called ether.

Speaker 9:
[04:23] And Dr. Warren, who had the scalpel raised.

Speaker 8:
[04:27] He puts it down.

Speaker 9:
[04:27] Stands aside and says, with great sarcasm, Well, sir, your patient is ready.

Speaker 3:
[04:33] Thirty seconds, had he ever tested this?

Speaker 8:
[04:34] He claimed to have tried it out on some dental patients and...

Speaker 9:
[04:38] On his dog, on himself, and on his goldfish.

Speaker 3:
[04:43] Nice.

Speaker 8:
[04:44] So, Morton gets to work.

Speaker 5:
[04:45] Morton sets up his gear, fills up the inhaler.

Speaker 8:
[04:48] Puts it up to the guy's face.

Speaker 5:
[04:50] 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, You're a patient, sir.

Speaker 8:
[05:15] 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.

Speaker 9:
[05:30] 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.

Speaker 8:
[05:43] It must have felt like a miracle.

Speaker 9:
[05:50] This, the news of the operation went around the world as fast as anything. News of, you know, war or peace didn't travel faster than this. By the end of the year, doctors in Europe were using surgical anesthetics.

Speaker 8:
[06:05] And basically, the blink of an eye, the most painful, horrible experience possibly imaginable, became routine, even forgettable.

Speaker 3:
[06:16] But also deeply peculiar, as was made clear to us when we talked a while back with one of our regulars, Carl Zimmer.

Speaker 10:
[06:23] Well, my wife and I, we were watching this movie one night. It was called Birth, starring Nicole Kidman.

Speaker 3:
[06:28] Did you like it? I hated it. No, it's one of my favorites.

Speaker 10:
[06:31] Well, okay, I'm sitting there and I'm hating the movie.

Speaker 3:
[06:34] You're hating this movie?

Speaker 10:
[06:35] 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.

Speaker 11:
[06:50] Oh, so it's not the movie.

Speaker 10:
[06:51] It's not the movie. It's me.

Speaker 3:
[06:54] Appendix about to burst.

Speaker 10:
[06:56] We go to the hospital, and maybe 4 in the morning, 5 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.

Speaker 3:
[07:10] But he says it didn't seem to be working.

Speaker 10:
[07:11] So I start thinking about what they're going to be doing to me, and half an hour, they're going to like take these knives, and they're going to cut me open, they're going to rip my intestines apart, they're going to pull off this inflamed appendix, they're going to sew up the intestines, they're going to zip everything back up, and all this is going to happen supposedly without me being aware of it. 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 going to have to do something more. I just want you to know that I'm not... And then I was in another room, and there was no one else there. Where did they all go? They had all left. And then it occurred to me like, no, oh, oh, oh. The whole surgery has already happened.

Speaker 3:
[08:01] Wow, that is weird.

Speaker 12:
[08:03] It's happened to me. It's as if they splice time, take the time that you were in, and the time you are in subsequently, and the middle is totally missing. No experience whatsoever.

Speaker 10:
[08:14] It's not like sleep.

Speaker 12:
[08:15] No.

Speaker 10:
[08:16] 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.

Speaker 3:
[08:30] It sort of implies that it's like a switch.

Speaker 10:
[08:32] 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, phwoom, you are into this other state.

Speaker 12:
[08:46] Do people who do this for living know exactly why this happened?

Speaker 10:
[08:51] You'd think that something that's been around since 1846 would be hammered out. Solid. But it's still almost a philosophical kind of mystery.

Speaker 12:
[09:25] There's a term for this in physics. It's called a black box.

Speaker 3:
[09:29] It refers to a system where you can see what goes in. You can see that something different comes out.

Speaker 12:
[09:33] And you wonder, like, what happened there in the middle?

Speaker 3:
[09:35] But you can't see it.

Speaker 12:
[09:37] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[09:38] It's a mystery.

Speaker 12:
[09:38] It's black, and it's closed up. Therefore, the box.

Speaker 3:
[09:41] I mean, it might 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. Then suddenly you're back. What happens in that gap?

Speaker 8:
[09:58] 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.

Speaker 5:
[10:06] So here we got propofol, we got sivoflurane, dexamethamphetamine, ketamine.

Speaker 8:
[10:10] We've got all these new drugs, but we still don't know exactly how they work, which for Patrick is a very practical problem.

Speaker 5:
[10:18] It's very difficult actually to figure out when people aren't conscious, because they can always be internally conscious to some degree, right?

Speaker 8:
[10:25] And in the 1950s and 60s, he says, this became a real issue because doctors started giving patients neuromuscular blocking agents 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, once in a blue moon, where a patient would wake up in the middle of surgery, literally trapped, unable to move, eyes closed, totally still, you know, fully awake, but no one would be able to perceive it because they couldn't move. And that's the nightmare that, you know, may even be worse than having six strongmen hold you down.

Speaker 3:
[11:06] Yeah, we don't have to dwell on that.

Speaker 8:
[11:07] Well, I actually did find a bunch of these stories.

Speaker 3:
[11:09] I don't want to hear them.

Speaker 8:
[11:10] No, they're great. I mean, they're amazing.

Speaker 3:
[11:14] All right.

Speaker 12:
[11:15] I'd like to hear about it.

Speaker 8:
[11:15] No.

Speaker 12:
[11:16] I'm just saying.

Speaker 8:
[11:17] Here, I'll just play you one.

Speaker 3:
[11:17] No, no.

Speaker 9:
[11:18] All right, all right, all right.

Speaker 8:
[11:20] You are going to regret it. 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.

Speaker 3:
[11:32] Really? How often is every so often?

Speaker 8:
[11:36] I've heard different numbers anywhere between one in 10,000 to much more often, like one in 1,000. Wow.

Speaker 5:
[11:43] But luckily, let's take a look at these brain signals.

Speaker 8:
[11:46] In the last few decades, scientists have begun to shine a little pin light into this black box. Patrick and his team in particular have found something pretty cool.

Speaker 5:
[11:54] This experiment that we did in the, I guess, late 2000s.

Speaker 8:
[11:58] A couple of years ago, they wanted to know what happens in the brain right when that switch flips. So they got a bunch of volunteers, they hooked them up to an IV, and started to very, very slowly give them propofol, 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 that they recognized.

Speaker 5:
[12:22] Something like that. In addition, we had the subjects' name too. Tim, Patrick.

Speaker 8:
[12:27] So the subjects would just sit there and listen and click.

Speaker 5:
[12:30] Chair, library.

Speaker 8:
[12:31] On and on.

Speaker 5:
[12:32] Patrick.

Speaker 8:
[12:34] And every 15 minutes, they gave them a little bit more propofol.

Speaker 5:
[12:36] Submarine, Tim, Michael, Patrick. Until eventually, they just stopped responding altogether.

Speaker 8:
[12:50] They were just out cold. Now, throughout this whole time, Patrick and his team were measuring the brain waves of the subjects. That's the key. And he says what they saw right at the moment that that switch flipped.

Speaker 5:
[13:04] Right at the moment of loss of consciousness. There was just one really, really clear motif that appeared.

Speaker 8:
[13:10] They saw this wave of electricity sweeping across the brain.

Speaker 5:
[13:14] This really low-frequency oscillation about one cycle per second or less. 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.

Speaker 3:
[13:35] So when people went under, their brains just started to ring like a bell, basically. And why would those, what are those waves doing exactly?

Speaker 8:
[13:44] 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.

Speaker 10:
[14:12] You know, there's one person talking, the other one talking back.

Speaker 8:
[14:19] 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.

Speaker 3:
[14:28] Yeah, my turn, your turn, my turn, your turn.

Speaker 10:
[14:30] The things you're seeing create signals in the back of your head, they go to the front of your head, back, 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, like in a matter of a second, your connectivity just collapses.

Speaker 3:
[15:04] Maybe that's what happened to you. It just cut, your connectivity got cut.

Speaker 10:
[15:07] It did.

Speaker 8:
[15:08] And here is the weird part.

Speaker 10:
[15:10] Scientists will 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.

Speaker 3:
[15:27] That's spooky.

Speaker 10:
[15:28] Yeah.

Speaker 8:
[15:29] 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.

Speaker 10:
[15:35] It's not that your brain is just stopping.

Speaker 8:
[15:38] No, all those parts of the brain are still talking. They're just not talking to each other.

Speaker 10:
[15:43] Very well anymore.

Speaker 8:
[15:44] And that somehow knocks you out.

Speaker 3:
[15:48] So lots of chit chat amongst the different parts of my brain make me conscious, and not so much chit chat equals unconsciousness.

Speaker 8:
[15:55] Yeah, that's the idea.

Speaker 3:
[15:56] And how do the slow waves relate to that?

Speaker 8:
[16:00] Well, Patrick thinks of it sort of in baseball terms.

Speaker 5:
[16:03] 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 after a while, it gets really tiresome, because you're sitting there, and you're just like, OK, I've got to wait for the wave to come. OK, here it is, OK, stand up, raise our arms, sit back down. And just a moment later, you're like, oh my god, I've got to 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. 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.

Speaker 3:
[17:01] I dig the analogy, but I'm not quite following.

Speaker 8:
[17:04] It helps to zoom in on the brain and look at a smaller number of neurons, which is what he did.

Speaker 5:
[17:10] Now check this out. We conducted this study where we measured brain activity in individual neurons.

Speaker 8:
[17:18] They got some patients, planted these tiny little electrodes deep into their brains, so they could hear the individual neurons.

Speaker 5:
[17:24] So let's imagine that we zoom in to like tens to hundreds of neurons firing. And he says when they give that patient propofol in anesthetic, what we notice is that right at the point of loss of consciousness.

Speaker 8:
[17:39] 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.

Speaker 5:
[17:56] They can only fire at a particular moment in this slow oscillation.

Speaker 8:
[18:03] 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.

Speaker 5:
[18:43] 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.

Speaker 8:
[18:50] Is it, it might be early to say, but it does it feel kind of like you crack the code?

Speaker 5:
[18:55] Well, I think we are in the process of cracking the code for anesthesia. You don't ever want to get too far out of the limb. But honestly, I mean, I feel if we can educate people about these rhythms, I'd be willing to say it. Sure. I think we have. I mean, I think this is going to be huge. I'm not going to lie to you. I think this is just going to be absolutely huge. Yeah. I'll take the bait on that.

Speaker 10:
[19:18] Sure.

Speaker 3:
[19:20] Practi-coke? Really? That's a little bold.

Speaker 8:
[19:24] Well, what it means to Patrick.

Speaker 9:
[19:26] How keeping turnover between anesthesia, turnover 38 takes the follow-up.

Speaker 8:
[19:31] In very practical terms, he can now peek into that black box of the brain.

Speaker 7:
[19:38] Okay. Here I am. I'm wearing my scrubs.

Speaker 8:
[19:39] For example, Patrick and his colleague, Emory Brown.

Speaker 10:
[19:42] I'm an anesthesiologist here at Mass General.

Speaker 8:
[19:44] They let me watch a couple surgeries, and I met a woman named Doris.

Speaker 7:
[19:48] Good morning.

Speaker 13:
[19:49] Morning.

Speaker 8:
[19:50] What kind of surgery are you having today?

Speaker 13:
[19:52] I only have the repairing of hernias.

Speaker 8:
[19:55] It's a surgery that 170 years ago would have been unthinkable. But here she is.

Speaker 13:
[20:00] I feel comfortable.

Speaker 8:
[20:02] Not too worried.

Speaker 7:
[20:03] So they're about to give her the first anesthetic.

Speaker 14:
[20:05] First anesthetic, propofol.

Speaker 5:
[20:07] That's right, yep.

Speaker 8:
[20:08] And as she starts to go under.

Speaker 14:
[20:10] Deep breath, Doris.

Speaker 5:
[20:11] In and out.

Speaker 10:
[20:12] Don't stop, Doris.

Speaker 5:
[20:14] So I'm going to just switch over to the spectrogram display and see what it shows.

Speaker 7:
[20:17] Deep breath, Doris.

Speaker 8:
[20:18] On one of these monitors.

Speaker 5:
[20:19] Oh, look at that. Did you see that change?

Speaker 8:
[20:20] Yeah. It's this color display. You can actually see it happen.

Speaker 7:
[20:23] You can see the slow waves, right?

Speaker 15:
[20:26] Now she's got some slow oscillation.

Speaker 8:
[20:27] If you imagine the screen is like this field of blues and yellows and greens, suddenly these bands of red just extend right along the bottom. And considering that for the last 160 years, anytime somebody like Doris has been put on a table and cut open, the doctors basically couldn't be sure what was going on in their head.

Speaker 7:
[20:49] Are they awake?

Speaker 16:
[20:50] Are they okay?

Speaker 8:
[20:51] And so with that in mind, being there in the operating room and seeing that band of red appear on the screen and hearing Emery Brown declare without hesitation, this patient is unconscious. It's kind of cool. And you say that with what percent confidence?

Speaker 6:
[21:09] Oh, 99.99.

Speaker 11:
[21:11] Nine.

Speaker 4:
[21:12] Nine.

Speaker 8:
[21:14] Nine.

Speaker 4:
[21:16] Nine. Nine.

Speaker 11:
[21:22] Nine.

Speaker 8:
[21:48] Okay, I'll do that, okay, 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 Jad and Robert down in our little black box of a studio.

Speaker 6:
[22:15] Okay, wait.

Speaker 8:
[22:15] ICND.

Speaker 3:
[22:16] Look, Tim Howard, I'm not sure I like your tone, okay?

Speaker 8:
[22:20] And I connected them with the guy who made the piece.

Speaker 6:
[22:22] Hello.

Speaker 3:
[22:24] I hear the sound of what sounds like another room.

Speaker 17:
[22:28] Does he sound like me now?

Speaker 12:
[22:29] Oh. There he is.

Speaker 8:
[22:31] His name is Jesse Cox.

Speaker 12:
[22:32] Wow, you sound so close because you're so far away.

Speaker 8:
[22:35] He's actually in Australia.

Speaker 12:
[22:36] Where everybody is, because they're upside down from the rest of us, they are very, very likely to fall into the sky.

Speaker 17:
[22:42] You have us Australians worked out down to a T, Robert. I'm grouping on with my hands at the table as we speak.

Speaker 15:
[22:47] Good.

Speaker 3:
[22:49] Okay, just to start, maybe just introduce us to your grandparents. Who are they?

Speaker 17:
[22:53] Well, my grandparents were mine readers on the radio.

Speaker 3:
[22:58] Really?

Speaker 17:
[22:59] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[23:00] You have to explain that.

Speaker 17:
[23:01] What are their names first? Leslie Pittington and Sydney Pittington.

Speaker 12:
[23:06] Pittington?

Speaker 17:
[23:06] Pittington.

Speaker 12:
[23:08] They had a radio show?

Speaker 17:
[23:09] Yeah. The show was called The Pittingtons or The Amazing Pittingtons, and it was on the BBC radio in the 1950s.

Speaker 3:
[23:16] Now, Jesse told us that for most of his life, he didn't know this.

Speaker 17:
[23:19] I guess the reason was that my grandfather and my grandma divorced well before I was born.

Speaker 3:
[23:24] And then his grandpa?

Speaker 17:
[23:26] He died when I was four or five.

Speaker 3:
[23:28] Then his grandma remarried, so nobody talked about it, crazily enough.

Speaker 17:
[23:34] 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? They're still at Pittington alive?

Speaker 3:
[23:48] The reporter calls up his grandma and is like, hey, can I interview you?

Speaker 17:
[23:51] 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 to his grandma's house and listened to it around the radio like they would have back in the 1950s and heard the story.

Speaker 3:
[24:08] And that's when Jesse discovered that his grandparents, Lesley and Sidney Pittington, one time had an audience of 20 million people.

Speaker 11:
[24:14] Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 17:
[24:16] Basically, the population of Australia was listening to my grandparents back in the 1950s.

Speaker 11:
[24:20] No way.

Speaker 17:
[24:21] I was like, yeah, why don't I know this? This is in my family and why don't I know it?

Speaker 3:
[24:25] But he says it was really when he sat down and listened to the original broadcasts, what's left of them.

Speaker 17:
[24:30] Two hours of old BBC recordings that survive today because my grandparents pirated them from the BBC back in 1950.

Speaker 3:
[24:39] He says it wasn't until he heard those tapes that I went, wow, you should now tell us this story.

Speaker 12:
[24:47] Yeah, tell us what you heard that made you go, wow.

Speaker 17:
[24:50] Well, I... You hear this very dramatic theme song, and this old BBC voice comes under the tape and says, Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.

Speaker 18:
[25:06] We present the Piddington.

Speaker 17:
[25:09] And the music goes up. All very, very dramatic. And then the narrator sets the scene for you.

Speaker 18:
[25:15] Good evening to you all, both at home and here in the number one Picketley studio, right in the middle of the west end of London.

Speaker 17:
[25:20] It was done in front of a live audience. And then you hear my grandfather's voice.

Speaker 18:
[25:25] Well, as Stephen Grenfell has just told you, life's been quite exciting for us.

Speaker 17:
[25:30] He was a stutterer.

Speaker 18:
[25:32] We've had a lot more letters.

Speaker 17:
[25:35] There were all these things that meant it should never have worked on radio. Anyhow.

Speaker 18:
[25:38] Anyhow, tonight...

Speaker 17:
[25:39] My grandfather was in the studio on the stage. And my grandma...

Speaker 18:
[25:43] I'm sorry to say Lesley isn't here.

Speaker 17:
[25:45] She was often somewhere dramatic.

Speaker 3:
[25:47] As a nut in the studio.

Speaker 17:
[25:48] Somewhere exotic. One time she was in a diving bell.

Speaker 18:
[25:54] She was under water.

Speaker 17:
[25:55] One time she was in the Tower of London.

Speaker 18:
[25:57] Are you there, Lesley, in the Tower?

Speaker 19:
[25:58] Yes, I'm here.

Speaker 18:
[26:01] And remember, Piddington is here in the Piccadilly studio and Lesley is in the Tower of London.

Speaker 3:
[26:05] So your grandpa is on stage and your grandma, you're saying, is in a tower by phone?

Speaker 17:
[26:10] No, she's in front of a microphone. Now this is back in the time when microphones were the size of small melons. There would be a microphone set up in the Tower of London.

Speaker 3:
[26:18] Connected live?

Speaker 17:
[26:19] Yeah, my grandfather then comes on the air and sets up a series of telepathy tests that they're going to enact.

Speaker 18:
[26:27] 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.

Speaker 17:
[26:36] 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.

Speaker 18:
[26:48] Would you read out the line to the listening audience? The line selected is be abandoned as the electrician said that they would have no current.

Speaker 17:
[27:01] Now, completely random bit of text selected out of a stack of books.

Speaker 3:
[27:06] After the text had been chosen and only then, I shall now call in the Tower of London. They would connect to his grandma Leslie.

Speaker 18:
[27:12] 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 Leslie.

Speaker 17:
[27:26] And a gong would sound and he'd kind of very dramatically furrow his brow. And the next thing you heard was...

Speaker 4:
[27:35] Men.

Speaker 17:
[27:36] My grandmother.

Speaker 4:
[27:38] Men.

Speaker 19:
[27:42] Light.

Speaker 17:
[27:43] This sort of frail, gentle voice. And she started to unpick what was being transmitted to her.

Speaker 19:
[27:51] Something to do... An electrician. Something about light and electricians.

Speaker 3:
[28:04] Remember that line again was...

Speaker 18:
[28:05] Be abandoned as the electrician said that they would have no current.

Speaker 19:
[28:10] Will you concentrate on the word that's like being left, people being left?

Speaker 17:
[28:19] It's amazing to listen to over 60 years later listening to those tapes. I'm still on the edge of my seat.

Speaker 19:
[28:26] Abandoned, that's not light. Concentrate on the word like light.

Speaker 17:
[28:37] And right at the end.

Speaker 19:
[28:41] I think the whole line is abandoned as the electricians said there would not be current.

Speaker 18:
[28:52] Be abandoned as the electricians said that they would have no current.

Speaker 17:
[28:59] APPLAUSE Almost every time, it would be 100% correct.

Speaker 18:
[29:03] Truly remarkable broadcast.

Speaker 17:
[29:09] APPLAUSE It just was this feeling inside you that you get going, hang on, what?

Speaker 3:
[29:16] When Jesse heard those broadcasts, his obvious question was, how did they do that?

Speaker 17:
[29:22] Well, this is the question that 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. 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.

Speaker 12:
[29:55] But you are totally convinced that this was a carefully worked out trick of some kind.

Speaker 17:
[30:00] Yes. That is the one part of almost certainty I can say.

Speaker 12:
[30:04] There has to be some secret code, some tapping of the some something.

Speaker 2:
[30:09] Well, you're not the first person to say that. The people were constantly trying to guess what the code was.

Speaker 3:
[30:14] That's Jim Steinmeier.

Speaker 2:
[30:15] I'm an author and a consultant to magicians. He says that at the time, some magicians in London thought that his stammer was part of the code.

Speaker 3:
[30:22] Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah We will listen to some of the names that Jad mentioned in the podcast.

Speaker 17:
[30:36] He said, 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 head 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.

Speaker 12:
[30:57] Wait. So Jad?

Speaker 11:
[30:59] A, B, C.

Speaker 12:
[31:01] Hi.

Speaker 11:
[31:02] D. No, stop at C.

Speaker 12:
[31:04] I'm wondering.

Speaker 11:
[31:05] A, B, C, D, E, F, G.

Speaker 12:
[31:09] The next letter is going to be J. I'm gonna be staring at you for a whole day.

Speaker 17:
[31:14] 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.

Speaker 3:
[31:20] 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.

Speaker 17:
[31:28] Yeah, that was a test they did on the aeroplane broadcast.

Speaker 3:
[31:32] In that broadcast, his grandma?

Speaker 17:
[31:34] She was in an aeroplane.

Speaker 18:
[31:35] Flying at a great height, at a great speed, towards somewhere other, but we're not sure where.

Speaker 17:
[31:38] Flying around Bristol.

Speaker 3:
[31:40] And she was in this plane at the same moment that he was on stage.

Speaker 17:
[31:44] Exactly. And on that time, there were numbered envelopes on everyone's seat. And my grandfather said, okay, everyone write something and put it in the envelope, seal it up.

Speaker 3:
[31:53] Just write a poem off the top of your head.

Speaker 17:
[31:54] 150 people do this. And then Sid turns to one of the judges and says, okay, pick two numbers from 1 to 150. 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.

Speaker 3:
[32:13] 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?

Speaker 18:
[32:22] Hello?

Speaker 3:
[32:23] via shortwave relay.

Speaker 18:
[32:24] Lesley is still completely isolated.

Speaker 3:
[32:26] She can't even hear a word that they're saying.

Speaker 17:
[32:28] 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.

Speaker 6:
[32:38] We're ready for you.

Speaker 3:
[32:40] So thousands of feet below, Sydney is there furrowing his brow, and the poem he's trying to send her is from Keats. One line that goes, Hail to thee, Blythe Spirit, Bird thou never wert.

Speaker 19:
[32:54] A bird? One bird. Oh, it's two lines. A bird, spirit. Oh, I've got it. I can guess it. Hail to thee, Blythe Spirit, Bird, thou never wert.

Speaker 18:
[33:18] Miss Young, would you read out what is written down on the piece of paper that you hold?

Speaker 13:
[33:23] Hail to the Blythe Spirit, Bird, thou never wert.

Speaker 18:
[33:26] Thank you.

Speaker 3:
[33:30] The crazy part is that in that trick, your grandpa doesn't even talk to her.

Speaker 17:
[33:33] There's complete silence between Sid and Leslie, and if there's silence, there can be no coding. So, you know, it was kind of this wonderful process. I'd talk to people, and even as they came up with theories, you'd listen to the tape and then realize that even the theories themselves just seem so implausible.

Speaker 3:
[33:48] Well, maybe it's the narrator. Do you think it's the narrator? Whatever it is the narrator says each night, which is before the game is even on, somehow encoded into that lap man's introduction is the answer.

Speaker 12:
[34:01] No, because the audience hasn't yet gone and done its random act when he starts the show.

Speaker 17:
[34:06] 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 Strata 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. Now, that is the only thing I can see where there's some kind of communication.

Speaker 12:
[34:38] But then how would stand by communicate something like a random sentence from a book or whatever?

Speaker 17:
[34:44] 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 stand by 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 like...

Speaker 12:
[35:03] You mean to this day you don't know?

Speaker 17:
[35:05] To this day, I do not know.

Speaker 3:
[35:07] Wait a second.

Speaker 12:
[35:08] No, we can't. No, there's got to be somebody who knows. Can't believe we can come to this interview. We have no...

Speaker 3:
[35:14] So, it's the technician. It's got to be the technician. You got to get to the technician, because the technician is looking at her, and he's doing something.

Speaker 12:
[35:21] Or the pilot. Or the pilot.

Speaker 11:
[35:21] And all they have to do is move their lips.

Speaker 3:
[35:24] Something is happening with that man's eyebrows, and that's the code. It's the eyebrows.

Speaker 17:
[35:28] I feel like I'm just listening to this, like what's been going on in my head for about 10, 12 years.

Speaker 3:
[35:34] So then I asked Jesse, like, what happened when he talked to his grandma?

Speaker 17:
[35:38] Total dead end.

Speaker 20:
[35:39] What do you mean total dead end?

Speaker 3:
[35:41] What do you mean, like...

Speaker 17:
[35:41] Growing up, once we discovered this story, around the dinner table when we visited her, it would always be, 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 just say, you are the judge. That is the line that they finished. Or that is the line they finished with every single broadcast.

Speaker 18:
[35:58] Anything to say?

Speaker 19:
[36:00] Well, only thanks very much, everyone, and you're the judge. Well, I think maybe...

Speaker 18:
[36:05] Well, all right, and I'm baffled. Now back to Cindy Piddington and Piccadilly.

Speaker 17:
[36:09] She won't even give me the satisfaction of saying, yes, it was a trick. She won't even say that.

Speaker 12:
[36:13] Clearly, you aren't the favorite grandchild. There was probably another... You have a cousin or a sibling whom she really adored. And one day, without your knowing it, she whispered a secret to her.

Speaker 17:
[36:25] No.

Speaker 3:
[36:25] What about to her son, your father? What did she...

Speaker 11:
[36:28] Did she tell... Did she tell your dad?

Speaker 17:
[36:30] She told my dad something.

Speaker 11:
[36:32] What?

Speaker 3:
[36:33] What did she tell him?

Speaker 17:
[36:34] I have no idea. He will not even admit being told something.

Speaker 16:
[36:38] If she slipped up... This is Jesse's dad. And I'm not even sure that she did slip up. But how to finish that scene, Steve?

Speaker 17:
[36:48] And I have thrilled 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.

Speaker 16:
[36:55] If my mum entrusted me with something all those years ago, then I will keep that trust. Why? Because I believe in keeping trust.

Speaker 17:
[37:07] My dad won't tell my mum. They've been together for over 30 years.

Speaker 16:
[37:10] You just have to continue on nothing.

Speaker 2:
[37:15] 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 Piddingtons. Let me tell you how it was done.

Speaker 3:
[37:23] That's Jim Steinmeier again.

Speaker 2:
[37:24] They left people guessing and walked away.

Speaker 17:
[37:29] The thing that got me is when I was talking to magicians and they said, we can repeat everything that they did.

Speaker 3:
[37:36] Really? So they can actually do, one of them is in a plane and the other one is on the...

Speaker 17:
[37:41] Apparently. But they still themselves don't know 100% for sure how my grandparents did it.

Speaker 3:
[37:47] If we could figure this out, it sounds like you would want to know the answer.

Speaker 17:
[37:52] I'm not so sure anymore.

Speaker 3:
[37:54] Really?

Speaker 17:
[37:54] We all say we want to know. We all go completely crazy and mad. But I feel like this story wouldn't have lasted for 60 years. It wouldn't still captivate people today if they 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 in the studio.

Speaker 3:
[38:13] 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.

Speaker 12:
[38:18] 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 because it will deeply disappoint you.

Speaker 17:
[38:32] Well, I mean, 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. And you think of the 1950s, they've managed to.

Speaker 20:
[39:17] What, what happened? Hey, no, no, no, Jess, come back.

Speaker 15:
[39:21] No.

Speaker 12:
[39:23] We just went, we're straight on the hour. It was exactly, it's exactly nine seconds ago.

Speaker 3:
[39:28] Oh, mother.

Speaker 6:
[39:31] I'm just going to call him.

Speaker 12:
[39:31] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[39:33] Hello.

Speaker 6:
[39:33] Hello.

Speaker 21:
[39:34] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[39:35] Hi.

Speaker 21:
[39:36] Your booking ran out just a minute ago.

Speaker 3:
[39:38] Yeah. We noticed.

Speaker 7:
[39:40] Yeah. I think we'll probably need to use the phone because that booth now needs to be used.

Speaker 4:
[39:44] Sorry.

Speaker 3:
[39:45] So we called Jesse back and while we didn't drag him back into the studio, actually, we couldn't. He did send us this tape.

Speaker 17:
[39:55] Now you've held on to this secret for so many, so, so many years.

Speaker 4:
[40:01] Why haven't you wanted to reveal it to anybody?

Speaker 13:
[40:04] 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.

Speaker 17:
[40:24] 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 pititans, would you feel like you could hand down this magic trick to your grandson to carry it on?

Speaker 13:
[40:44] 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 would be possible, because there's an awful lot that I wouldn't be able to tell him.

Speaker 17:
[40:57] What do you mean you wouldn't be able to tell that grandson?

Speaker 13:
[41:00] 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.

Speaker 3:
[41:16] 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. So...

Speaker 12:
[41:50] 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 Sorin and I... Because we just wanted to find out, like, did somebody know how they did it? So we called this guy...

Speaker 4:
[42:09] LAUGHS...

Speaker 12:
[42:12] who ruined everything. This is Penn Jillette, who you probably know from Penn & Teller, famous for doing magic tricks and then telling you how they are 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, Oh, it's a book test, right?

Speaker 22:
[42:35] It's a book test. It's an envelope switch. A what? And there are, you know, three or four ways to do that.

Speaker 12:
[42:40] What did he say? He said basically, I can tell you how they did it.

Speaker 22:
[42:43] Yeah.

Speaker 12:
[42:44] Or how they might have done it. But you are not going to like it.

Speaker 22:
[42:48] 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.

Speaker 12:
[42:58] A beautiful secret is the kind of thing that's short and sweet. Like, he folded the hat twice, or?

Speaker 22:
[43:03] There's mirrors under that table.

Speaker 12:
[43:05] When you hear it, it's like, oh, of course, that's what they would do, and you love finding it out.

Speaker 22:
[43:10] Then you will whisper it to the person next to you. So in magic, what you want is an idea that is not beautiful.

Speaker 12:
[43:18] 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.

Speaker 22:
[43:25] If I have to say, he's lying about this, and there's Gaffer's tape over behind there, and they're not actually telling you the exact truth here, and it gets so, 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, I can tell you easily how they did that trick, but you will not get an aha.

Speaker 12:
[44:03] Basically, he said the true answer to this one is gonna kill your joy.

Speaker 22:
[44:07] Yeah, it's ugly.

Speaker 3:
[44:08] So did he tell you what they did?

Speaker 4:
[44:10] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[44:13] What did he say?

Speaker 12:
[44:13] Well, I'll tell you in just a second. He went into excruciating detail about how he thinks they did it.

Speaker 22:
[44:18] Now, a book test, we actually do one in our show.

Speaker 12:
[44:23] But the more important thing, he was so right. Once we heard the explanation and the details and all, we were both like, all right, well. This is like a kiss with a poison dart in it.

Speaker 22:
[44:40] I love how much I've bugged your shit.

Speaker 12:
[44:43] 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?

Speaker 22:
[44:54] 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 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 chestboard 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 going to be like the grandmother and go to my grave with this. You know, and I would have just given you that sound bite, which I just have.

Speaker 12:
[45:42] Except that we have pivoted the entire piece called, so? It's like all eyes have been directed to the next sentence, so that's a little difficult.

Speaker 22:
[45:55] But I want to see how you solve a problem that I solve every day.

Speaker 12:
[46:00] But we have like a higher call. 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 in our Mount Olympus than you do, which makes it very confusing.

Speaker 22:
[46:15] No, you don't really, because I am not suggesting that you lie.

Speaker 12:
[46:20] You're just going to have to tell your audience what you think they need to hear. And that's where he left it. So in the days after the interview, 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.

Speaker 3:
[46:35] Yes, the whole deal.

Speaker 12:
[46:36] 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?

Speaker 3:
[46:44] Yeah, are we entertainers or are we actually?

Speaker 12:
[46:46] Journalists.

Speaker 3:
[46:47] Journalists, yes.

Speaker 12:
[46:48] So here's where we ultimately came down. We have decided not to tell you how the Pittingtons did it. I mean, we're going to tell you, but we're not going to tell you here in this podcast, because we have now been soiled by this truth we learned off the record. And if you want to be soiled, sure, come and soil yourself. You can go to this URL, radiolab.org/theuglytruthdontclickthis.

Speaker 3:
[47:20] radiolab.org/theuglytruthdont, no apostrophe, click this.

Speaker 12:
[47:22] And we just leave it to you. You can go there, or you cannot.

Speaker 22:
[47:26] All I have said to you is that it's a trick.

Speaker 3:
[47:29] Yeah.

Speaker 22:
[47:29] And you knew that. The fact that it wasn't the trick you wanted it to be.

Speaker 12:
[47:37] You know, he did turn sweet at one moment. We were talking about the grandma.

Speaker 22:
[47:42] Right.

Speaker 12:
[47:42] The grandma tells the grandson in the conversation at the end, she's not sure she could explain to him.

Speaker 22:
[47:48] Yes.

Speaker 12:
[47:49] How it went.

Speaker 22:
[47:49] 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.

Speaker 12:
[48:02] And yet she was a party to it. She's the one who... Yeah. He says, you know, oftentimes when you're doing tricks, somebody knows everything and the other person is, you know, in the dark.

Speaker 3:
[48:13] Yeah. You mean like one of the partners intentionally not knows what's happening?

Speaker 12:
[48:18] Yeah.

Speaker 22:
[48:19] There are tricks in the pen and teller show that I don't really know how they're done.

Speaker 12:
[48:24] And 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.

Speaker 3:
[48:59] Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

Speaker 12:
[49:00] I'm Robert Krulwich.

Speaker 3:
[49:01] This is Radiolab, and today...

Speaker 12:
[49:02] Today, we are doing our Black Box Hour.

Speaker 3:
[49:05] Yeah, and a black box is... It's a thing, it's like a box that when something goes in, you can see what that is. Something comes out, which is different, and you can see that.

Speaker 12:
[49:12] But you do not know what's going on in the middle.

Speaker 3:
[49:15] It's a mystery.

Speaker 23:
[49:15] I love it. Shall we go inside?

Speaker 3:
[49:18] And our next and final black box comes from our producer, Molly Webster, and it begins...

Speaker 14:
[49:23] Into the butterfly rainforest.

Speaker 4:
[49:26] Whoa!

Speaker 14:
[49:30] So that you can see the butterflies that are flying, in fact.

Speaker 23:
[49:34] 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 at a top that's all wrapped in a net, and then it was covered in butterflies. Oh my gosh, there's so many. Thousands.

Speaker 14:
[49:51] So this is a heliconius butterfly.

Speaker 23:
[49:53] That's Andrei Surakov.

Speaker 14:
[49:54] I started looking at butterflies when I was six years old, and I have never grew up.

Speaker 23:
[49:59] He was my guide.

Speaker 14:
[50:00] And here under this leaf, you can see an owl butterfly.

Speaker 23:
[50:05] One wing is like the size of my palm. So there were red ones.

Speaker 14:
[50:09] Black and yellow ones.

Speaker 23:
[50:10] Blue ones.

Speaker 14:
[50:11] Zebra striped ones.

Speaker 23:
[50:13] Is that a monarch?

Speaker 14:
[50:13] Yes. Watch out, don't step on this butterfly.

Speaker 23:
[50:16] It was like a Dr. Seussian 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. What I'm talking about is something called...

Speaker 6:
[50:32] The chrysalis. The chrysalis.

Speaker 23:
[50:33] Just to back up. At a certain point in all caterpillars' lives, after they've eaten a lot of leaves, they hit a certain weight.

Speaker 14:
[50:40] That is coded in their gene as their final weight.

Speaker 23:
[50:44] Some hormones start pumping, some genetics turn on, and it starts growing a little shell. That's the chrysalis.

Speaker 14:
[50:51] And inside that chrysalis, as we know, a caterpillar becomes a butterfly or moth.

Speaker 3:
[51:01] And this is a mystery?

Speaker 23:
[51:03] What do you think happens inside the chrysalis?

Speaker 11:
[51:05] I think that...

Speaker 3:
[51:08] I've never thought about it, to be honest.

Speaker 4:
[51:09] I don't know.

Speaker 9:
[51:11] I don't understand how it works.

Speaker 23:
[51:12] Not many people have. Are you, like, surprised that you actually don't know? Yeah, I'm surprised. I thought, like, I knew, and I don't. Those are folks I met at the museum.

Speaker 3:
[51:20] 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?

Speaker 23:
[51:32] No. That is actually what I thought, but that's not right at all.

Speaker 14:
[51:37] The Maguire Center is located on three floors.

Speaker 23:
[51:41] 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, shall we do it?

Speaker 14:
[51:48] Yes.

Speaker 23:
[51:49] Which Andre was nice enough to do for me.

Speaker 14:
[51:51] Sorry.

Speaker 23:
[51:52] Even though he loves these guys, he took a tiny little chrysalis.

Speaker 14:
[51:55] Well, it's about an inch long.

Speaker 23:
[51:58] Which a caterpillar had just gotten into one day ago, and he slowly began to cut. We're taking our tweezer-like scissors through the outer layer of the chrysalis until...

Speaker 14:
[52:09] Let's see if you can...

Speaker 4:
[52:11] Oh. Oh.

Speaker 11:
[52:16] What?

Speaker 23:
[52:16] Oh my gosh.

Speaker 11:
[52:18] What?

Speaker 23:
[52:19] No, it was like there was no caterpillar there.

Speaker 11:
[52:21] What do you mean?

Speaker 23:
[52:22] 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.

Speaker 3:
[52:32] What was there then?

Speaker 23:
[52:33] Basically just goo. It's just like a runny goopy goo. Looks like snot. All you had to do is give it like a little squeeze and then just went.

Speaker 4:
[52:42] Oh, oh.

Speaker 23:
[52:46] It just, whoosh, exploded it.

Speaker 6:
[52:48] He exploded it.

Speaker 23:
[52:50] I think he looked shocked too.

Speaker 3:
[52:52] Wait, I don't understand. Where did the caterpillar go?

Speaker 23:
[52:55] It seems like once the caterpillar gets into its shell, it sort of just melts. It's head, legs.

Speaker 14:
[53:02] Antenna, abdomen.

Speaker 23:
[53:04] 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 in a space.

Speaker 3:
[53:18] Wait, you're saying that the caterpillar just becomes like a soup of cells?

Speaker 23:
[53:22] Yeah, and yet somehow...

Speaker 14:
[53:24] This soup will magically be transformed into a butterfly mouth.

Speaker 3:
[53:35] Well, how does that happen?

Speaker 23:
[53:36] That question, that question is the big fat metaphysical, quasi-religious, semi-mystical philosophical question that people have been asking forever.

Speaker 24:
[53:49] Yeah, so one of the big arguments that was taking place...

Speaker 23:
[53:54] 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...

Speaker 24:
[54:03] The caterpillar...

Speaker 23:
[54:04] Goes into the chrysalis...

Speaker 24:
[54:05] And then it actually dies...

Speaker 23:
[54:08] Totally dies.

Speaker 24:
[54:09] And out of its burial cloth is going to come the new life.

Speaker 23:
[54:13] This beautiful and completely new creature...

Speaker 15:
[54:17] Death, as it were, and then a kind of resurrection.

Speaker 23:
[54:23] 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...

Speaker 15:
[54:32] As a kind of spiritual ascent. It says somewhere in the New Testament, behold, the old has passed away, the new has surely come.

Speaker 23:
[54:40] 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.

Speaker 14:
[55:01] Feces and urine and other unappetizing substances.

Speaker 23:
[55:05] 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, jeez, if you're going to go to heaven in the process, transform that much, is it even you up there?

Speaker 15:
[55:41] It still has to be you that makes it to heaven.

Speaker 23:
[55:44] You can't change too much, otherwise, like, someone else will be up there enjoying your afterlife.

Speaker 15:
[55:49] So certain memories and elements of your identity have to continue, just not all the elements.

Speaker 23:
[55:56] Yeah, I'm so intrigued by that, because I also think, like, what, like, what, when you undergo such a transformation, what do they think carries through?

Speaker 15:
[56:10] That's a really interesting question.

Speaker 21:
[56:12] Cleaning out the poop and throwing away the moldy leaves, you have a lot of time to think.

Speaker 23:
[56:17] Which brings us to Martha Weiss.

Speaker 21:
[56:18] I am an associate professor of biology at Georgetown University.

Speaker 23:
[56:22] She got to thinking about this question in more concrete terms.

Speaker 21:
[56:25] Okay, so.

Speaker 23:
[56:27] She did an experiment.

Speaker 21:
[56:28] What we did was we took a big green caterpillar, and we did something that was not entirely nice.

Speaker 23:
[56:34] She put them in a box, filled it with a nasty odor. And is the odor like an odor of a plant or?

Speaker 21:
[56:41] It's actually a plant-based odor, but it smells kind of like nail polish remover.

Speaker 23:
[56:44] In any case, she gassed them with this nasty smell.

Speaker 21:
[56:47] And then once they could smell the odor, then we gave them a zap.

Speaker 23:
[56:51] Is that just like a zap? Just a zup? A zap?

Speaker 21:
[56:54] I think 10 seconds of zap.

Speaker 23:
[56:56] 10 seconds. And they did this over and over.

Speaker 21:
[56:59] Odor, zap, odor, zap, odor.

Speaker 23:
[57:01] Eventually, most of these caterpillars learned to hate the smell. Every time they get a whiff, they head in the opposite direction.

Speaker 21:
[57:10] Okay, so then we let them pupate.

Speaker 23:
[57:12] Meaning the caterpillar changes into its shell and... Organs dissolve, muscles melt. You get this.

Speaker 21:
[57:20] Cataclysmic, catastrophic, chaotic.

Speaker 23:
[57:23] Change.

Speaker 21:
[57:28] And then...

Speaker 23:
[57:29] One month later...

Speaker 21:
[57:30] The moth emerges, and now we're, the drum roll, we're ready for the drum roll.

Speaker 23:
[57:38] They give the moths a whiff.

Speaker 21:
[57:39] Okay.

Speaker 23:
[57:40] 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.

Speaker 3:
[57:50] Somehow I'm confused. What does that mean?

Speaker 23:
[57:51] That means a memory made it through the goo.

Speaker 3:
[57:54] Oh!

Speaker 23:
[57:54] And it came out the other side. What's your feeling like coming out of this?

Speaker 21:
[57:59] My feeling is wow. 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.

Speaker 3:
[58:24] And how does that happen?

Speaker 21:
[58:25] The answer to this question is we do not know.

Speaker 23:
[58:28] But 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 microscopic fragment that has made it through. And Martha suspects that nestled into that fragment is this memory.

Speaker 10:
[58:49] Oh, it's like a little boop, like a little beacon.

Speaker 23:
[58:54] 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.

Speaker 3:
[59:05] 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?

Speaker 23:
[59:17] There's no answer to that question. Well, Martha says that these types of questions, like, come up all the time. In fact, one of her colleagues...

Speaker 21:
[59:25] And I was talking to Doug the other day, and he said that he had gotten an email from a guy who was... I'm not exactly sure what flavor of Christian, but 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.

Speaker 23:
[59:52] Well, here's the answer.

Speaker 3:
[59:54] What answer?

Speaker 23:
[59:55] Well, the answer to the question about what carries through, the continuity question.

Speaker 3:
[60:00] Oh, right, yes.

Speaker 23:
[60:01] And memory carries through.

Speaker 3:
[60:03] Which is freaking cool, I gotta say.

Speaker 23:
[60:05] It is freaking cool, but there's a little more freaking cool.

Speaker 3:
[60:08] All right.

Speaker 23:
[60:09] And that is that there's actually a continuity, but it goes in the reverse direction.

Speaker 3:
[60:14] What does that even mean?

Speaker 23:
[60:15] Well, Matthew Cobb told me this story about this guy.

Speaker 24:
[60:19] This 17th century man who I had never heard of, Jean, his name is written Swammerdam, but is probably more pronounced Svammerdam.

Speaker 23:
[60:26] Svammerdam.

Speaker 24:
[60:27] Svammerdam.

Speaker 23:
[60:28] Svammerdam, okay. That's Jan Svammerdam, a Dutch microscopist from the 1600s.

Speaker 24:
[60:33] He was definitely the first to do some very clear dissections of the chrysalis.

Speaker 23:
[60:37] And the caterpillar.

Speaker 24:
[60:39] And one day, in Paris, in front of this crowd of assembled worthies, bewigged and bestocking, he gets a fat white caterpillar, 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.

Speaker 23:
[61:13] So you peel back the skin of a caterpillar, and beneath it, you see a new creature hidden.

Speaker 24:
[61:23] Absolutely. There's no decay.

Speaker 4:
[61:25] Ah, that's so bizarre!

Speaker 23:
[61:28] It's like you were to skin me, and my 70-year-old self is inside of me or something.

Speaker 3:
[61:36] Wait, and the wings also survive the goo?

Speaker 23:
[61:38] 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.

Speaker 24:
[61:56] What he then shown was, you know what, this isn't about death, this isn't about decay. This is actually about transformation.

Speaker 23:
[62:07] 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?

Speaker 3:
[63:07] Thanks to our producers this hour, Tim Howard, Molly Webster, Jesse Cox. And thanks to you guys for listening.

Speaker 24:
[63:13] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[63:18] 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. 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.

Speaker 25:
[64:37] Hi, I'm Gabby. I'm from San Francisco, and here are the staff credits. Radiolab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser. Soran Wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah Sandbach 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 Nainasambandhan, Matt Keelty, Mona McGawker, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sara Khare, Rebecca Rand, Anisa Vitsa, Arianne Wack, Molly Webster, and Jessica Young, with help from Gabby Santis. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Natalie Middleton, Angelique Mercado, and Sophie Semayi. 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.