Black Box

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 Jada Buhrod and producer Tim Howard. Here we go. Yeah, wait, wait, you're listening to Radio Lab. Radio from WNYC. Badding first, producer Tim Howard. It is such a beautiful day. Beautiful, I think it's got to be like 75 degrees out or something. Sunny. This is Patrick Perden. He's a professor in anesthesia at Harvard Medical School and works at Mass General Hospital. You want to just tell me where we are? We're standing right now in front of the bullfinch building. And I went up to talk to him because in that building is this is the one, but the ether dome? The dome is inside this building. Is the story of the day that you could say humanity emerged from the dark ages. Oh, you laugh now. Just wait. Okay, here we go. From the fourth floor. It's on the fourth floor of this building. We headed in up three flights of stairs into this room. What a cool room. Oh my God. It's just like, how would you describe it? I've seen it. You mean the amphitheater, right? It's also got this awesome dome. It's this beautiful domed room with light streaming down from above. Like the acoustics in here, crazy. It must have been terrifying though if you actually heard somebody screaming. I mean, it's so resonant in here, the screams would have been deafening and absolutely would have been terrifying. What is this place? Well, this was an operating room. Oh. And back in the 1800s, when this room was really in use, being in an operation was so painful. It was often permanently damaging to a patient's emotional state. This is Julie. I'm Julie Fenster. I write about American history. She wrote a book called "Etherday," 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. Only more awake than they'd ever been in their whole lives. 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, it's 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 passers-by. This is such a cool room. Here we are at the top of the ether dome, but then everything changes. October 16, 1846. It's a Friday morning. I assume the room is full. The students were all lined up to watch, 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. The most esteemed surgeon in America, Dr. John Warren, 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. Just about to start the surgery when this mustachioid fellow bursts in, a dentist. William T.G. Morton. He's had to warn 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. He had a bag filled with gas. A gas called ether. And Dr. Warren, who had the scalpel raised. He puts it down. Stands aside and says, with great sarcasm. Well, sir, your patient is ready. The second, had he ever tested this? He claimed to have tried it out on some dental patients and. On his dog, on himself, and on his goldfish. Nice. So, Morton gets to work. Morton sets up his gear, fills up the inhaler, puts it up to the guy's face. 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." 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. The silence was far more deafening than all the screams that had ever been heard in that operating theatre. No squirming, no moving, no bulging eyes, no clenched fists. It must have felt like a miracle. This, the news of the operation went around the world as fast as anything. News of war or peace didn't travel faster than this. By the end of the year, doctors in Europe were using surgical anesthetics. And basically, the blink of an eye, the most painful, horrible experience, possibly imaginable, became routine, even forgettable. But also deeply peculiar, as was made clear to us when we talked a while back with one of our regulars. Carl Zimmer. Well, my wife and I, we were watching this movie one night, it was called Birth, starting called Kidman. You, did you like it? I hated it. No. It's one of my favorites. Well, okay, I'm sitting there and I'm hating the movie. You're hating this movie? 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 an incredible pain." Oh, so it's not the movie? Not the movie. It's me. Appendix. About the burst. We go to the hospital and maybe four in the morning, five in the morning, they're prepping me for surgery. They, you know, put an IV in me and then they're like, "Okay, now we're going to be putting in the anesthetic, you know, so just relax and this will be taking effect." But he says it didn't seem to be working. So I start thinking about what they're going to be doing to me in 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'm just saying, I'm 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? Huh. Like they'd all left and then it occurred to me like, "No, oh, oh, oh, the whole surgery has already happened." Wow. That is weird. It's happened to me. It's as if they splice time, take the time you were in and the time you are in subsequently and the middle is totally missing. No experience whatsoever. It's not like sleep. No. 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. It sort of implies that it's like a switch. 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 you are into this other state. Do people who do this for living know exactly why this happened? 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. There's a term for this in physics. It's called a black box. It refers to a system where you can see what goes in. You can see that something different comes out and you wonder, like, what happened there in the middle? But you can't see it. Yeah. It's a mystery. It's black and it's closed up, therefore the box. I mean, it may not literally be a box, but today we have three different attempts to open three very different black boxes. Starting with the box that's in front of us now, that gap that Carl talked about where you go, oh, you're gone. And then suddenly you're back. What happens in that gap? That's what's crazy. It's been almost. to 170 years since William Morton did his thing in front of those med students and we've moved way beyond ether. So here we've got propylfoil, we've got seval fluorane, dexmenitimony ketobene, 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. It's very difficult actually to figure out when people aren't conscious because they can always be internally conscious to some degree, right? And then in the 1950s and 60s he says this became a real issue because doctors started giving patients. I'm neuromuscular blocking agents. They 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. And a fully awake, but no one would be able to perceive it because they couldn't move. And that's the nightmare that may even be worse than having six strong men hold you down. Oh, yeah, we don't have to dwell on that. Well, I actually did find a bunch of these stories. I don't want to hear them. No, they're great. I mean, they're amazing. No. They're amazing. All right. I'd like to hear about them. No. I'm just saying. I'll just play it one more time. No, I didn't know. All right. All right. 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. Oh, really? How often is every so often? I've heard different numbers anywhere between one in 10,000 to much more often, like one in 1,000. Wow. But luckily, let's take a look at these brain signals. In the last few decades, scientists have begun to shine a little pinlite into this black box. And Patrick and his team in particular have found something pretty cool. This experiment that we did in the, I guess, late 2000s, a couple of years ago, they wanted to know what happens in the brain right when that flip, switch flips. So they got a bunch of volunteers. Healthy volunteers. They hooked them up to an IV and started to very, very slowly give them propyl. Slowly the matter's to the drug, 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. They shared a library that they recognized. Submarine. Something like that. In addition, we had the subjects named too. Tim, Patrick. So the subjects would just sit there and listen and click. A library. On and on. Patrick. And every 15 minutes, they gave them a little bit more propyl. Submarine. Tim. Tim. Michael. Tim. Patrick. Tim. Patrick. Until eventually, they just stopped responding. All together, they're just out cold. Now they're out 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. Right at the moment of loss of consciousness. There was just one really, really clear motif that appeared. They saw this wave of electricity sweeping across the brain. 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. 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? 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. The 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, multilayered conversation. You know, it's one person talking, the other one talking back. 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 of back and forth between the different parts. Yeah, my turn, your turn, my turn, your turn. The things you're seeing create signals in the back of your head, they'll go to the front of your head, back again, forward and back, forward and back, forward and back, 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. This would happen to you. It just cut your connectivity out cut. It did. And here is the weird part. And it just 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, that's spooky. Yeah. 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. It's not that your brain is just stopping. No, all those parts of the brain are still talking. They're just not talking to each other very well anymore. And that somehow knocks you out. So lots of chit-chat amongst the different parts of my brain make me conscious and not so much chit-chat equals unconsciousness. Yeah, that's the idea. And how do the slow waves relate to that? Well, Patrick thinks of it sort of in baseball terms. Right. Red Sox game, the other day, it was the last one that they had with the Yankees at FN Way Park this year. And at some point, the waves started. So some part of the stadium decided to go into the wave and here you go, the waves coming around and coming around and you're watching it, it keeps coming around and coming around. And you know, after a while, it gets really tiresome because you're sitting there and just like, okay, I've got a wait for the wave to come, okay, here it is and your kids stand up, raise their arms and sit back down. And just a moment later, they're like, oh my God, I 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. I dig the analogy, but I'm not quite following. It helps to zoom in on the brain and look at a smaller number of neurons, which is what he did. Now check this out. We conducted this study where we measured brain activity and individual neurons. They got some patients planted these tiny little electrodes deep into their brains so they could hear the individual neurons. So let's imagine that we zoom in to like tens to hundreds of neurons firing. And he says when they give that patient a propyl in anesthetic, what we notice is that right at the point of loss of consciousness, 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. They can only fire at a particular moment in this slow oscillation. Like you know how the wave goes up and down and 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 this buddy, he can only talk at this moment in the neurons next door. He 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, 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. It might be early to say, but does it feel kind of like you crack the code? Well I think we are in the process of cracking the code for anesthesia. You don't want everyone to get too far in 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. Sure. (Laughs) Practical? Really? That's a little bold. Well, it means the Patrick. How can he be turned over to the anesthesia, turned over to the A and came to power? Is it in very practical terms? He can now peek into that black box of the brain. Okay, here I am, I'm wearing my scrubs. For example, Patrick and his colleague, Emory Brown. I'm an anesthesiologist here at Mass General. They let me watch a couple surgeries, and I met a woman named Doris. Good morning. Good morning. What kind of a surgery are you having today? I only have the repair enough for hair nails. It's a surgery that, you know, 170 years ago would have been unthinkable. - Here she is, it should count though. - Not too worried. - So they were about to give her the first anesthetic, first anesthetic, fruitful. - Oh, that's right, yep. - And as she starts to go under, - Deep breath dors and then I've done stop dors. - So I'm gonna just switch over the spectrogrammed display and see what it shows. - Deep breath dors. - On one of these monitors. - Oh, look at that, did you see that change? - Yeah. - This color display, you can actually see it happen. - You can see the slow ways, right? Now she's got some slow oscillations. 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 dors has been put on a table and cut open, the doctors basically couldn't be sure what was going on in their head. Are they awake? Are they okay? And so with that in mind, being there in the operating room and seeing that band of red appear on the screen and hearing Emory Brown declare without hesitation. - This patient is unconscious. - It's kinda cool. - And you say that with a what percent confidence? - Oh, 99.5, nine. 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9. - Oh, okay, I'll do that, okay, let me do one time. Three, two, one. This is Tim Howard and today on Radio Lab, we've been talking about black boxes. And the next story started with a radio piece that I heard at the Third Coast International Audio Festival. There were a lot of incredible stories, but there was this one called Keep Them Guessing that I just loved and I couldn't get it out of my head. So I sat Chad and Robert down in our little black box of a studio. - Okay, I see N.D. - Look Tim Howard, I'm not sure I like your tone, okay? And I connected them with the guy who made the piece. - Hello. I hear the sound of what sounds like another room. - Does he sound like me now? - Oh, his name is Jesse Cox. - Wow, you sound so close because you're full far away. - He's actually in Australia. - Where everybody is, because they're upside down from the rest of us, they are very, very likely to fall into the sky. You have us Australians worked out down to the tea, Robert. I'm gripping on with my hands at the table as we speak. - Oh, good. - Okay, just to start, I mean, maybe just introduce us to your grandparents, who are they? - Well, my grandparents were mine readers on the radio. - Really? - Yeah. - You now have to explain that. What are their names first? - Leslie Pieddington and Sydney Pieddington. - Pieddington. - Pieddington. - And they had a radio show? - Yeah. - They just called the Piedentians or the amazing Piedentians and was on the BBC radio in the 1950s. - No, Jesse told us for most of his life, he didn't know this. - I guess the reason was that my grandfather and my grandma divorced well before I was born. And then his grandpa, he died when I was four or five. Then his grandma remarried. So nobody talked about it. Crazy enough. I knew that my grandparents had been famous and my grandma was an actress, that it really wasn't until they were a teenager and a radio producer actually discovered by accident that my grandma was alive and went, what? They still are Pieddington alive. The reporter calls up his grandma and's like, "Hey, can I interview you?" 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. And that's when Jesse discovered that his grandparents, Leslie and Sydney Pieddington, one time had an audience of 20 million people. Yeah, yeah. Basically, the population of Australia was at least into my grandparents back in the 1950s. No way. I was like, "Yeah, why don't I know this? This is in my family and why don't I know it?" But he says, it was really when he sat down and listened to the original broadcasts, where it's left to them. Two hours of old BBC recordings that survived today because my grandparents pirated them from the BBC. Back in 1950. He says, "It wasn't until you heard those tapes that I went." Wow. You could now tell us this story. Yeah, that's what you heard. That made you go, "Wow." Well, you hear this very dramatic theme song. And this old BBC voice comes under the tape and says, "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. We present the Piddington." And the music goes up, all very very dramatic. And then the narrator sets the scene for you. Feeding to all those at home and here in the number one picketly studio right in the middle of the West End of London. It was done in front of a live audience. And then you hear my grandfather's voice. Well, as Stephen Grenfell has just told you, life's been quite exciting for us. He was a stutterer. We've had a lot more letters. Though all these things that minute should never have worked on radio, anyhow, my grandfather is in the studio on the stage and my grandma. I'm sorry to say, a Leslie isn't here. She was often somewhere dramatic as a nut in the studio. Some were exotic. One time she was in a diving bell. She was underwater at the bottom of a test tank. One time she was in the Tower of London. Are you there Leslie in the tower? Yes, I'm here. And remember, Piddington is here in the picketly studio. And Leslie is in the Tower of London. So your grandpa is on stage. And your grandma, you're saying, is in a tower by phone? No, she's in front of a microphone. Now, this is back in the time when microphones were the size of small millions. Yeah, from then very shortly. There'd be a microphone set up in the Tower of London. Connected live? Yeah. My grandfather then comes on the air and sets up a series of telepathy tests that they go into an act. And now, down to work. I will attempt to transmit to Leslie a line of print selected from a number of books on the table here in the studio. 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. Would you read out the line to the listening audience? The line selected is be abandoned, as the electricians said, that they would have no current. Now, completely random bit of text selected out of a stack of books. 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. In just a moment, at the sound of the gong, I want your complete silence, your sympathy, and your cooperation. And now concentrate on the line while I attempt to transmit it to Leslie. And a gong would sound, and he'd kind of very dramatically furrow his brow. And the next thing you heard was men. My grandmother. Men. Light. This sort of frailed gentle voice. And she started to unpick what was being transmitted to her. There's something to do. An electrician. There's something about light and electricians. Remember that line again was? The abandoned, as the electricians said, that they would have no current. Will you concentrate on the word that's like being left, people being left? It's amazing to listen to it over 60 years later, listening to those tapes I'm still on the edge of my seat. The abandoned, that not light, concentrate on the word light light. And right at the end. I think the whole line is abandoned. As the electricians said, there would not be current. Almost every time it would be 100% correct. Certainly remarkable broadcast. It just was this feeling inside you that you get going, hang on. What? When Jesse heard those broadcasts, his obvious question was, how did they do that? This is the question that I 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 sort of authority because he also had a green man. And so that was precisely how they did it. But you are totally convinced that this was a carefully worked out trick of some kind. Yes. That is the one part of almost certainty I can say. There has to be some secret code, some tapping of the sum, something. Well, you're not the first person to say that. The people were constantly trying to guess what the code was. That's Jim Steinmeier. 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. To not see. I can just think is. Jesse for his part ended up going through a ton of these theories as he interviewed Magicians, in historians, read through magic books. Initially, one of the theories that made sense to him is that the code was in the silence. That basically my grandparents and my grandma were so in sync that between each time a sound or a word was uttered, they'd inside their 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. Wait, so Chad? A, B, C. Hi, D. Cup of C. No, it's up to C. I'm wondering. A, B, C, D, E, F, G. The next letter is going to be J. I'm going to be J. I'm going to be J. Of course, as soon as you start paying any of these theories out on real time, you realize how ridiculous they are. 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. Yeah, that was a test they did on the aeroplane broadcast. And that broadcast is grandma. She was in an aeroplane. Flying at a great height, at a great speed toward some or other, but we're not sure where. Flying around Bristol, and she was in this plane at the same moment that he was on stage. 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. Just write a poem off the top of your head. 150 people do this. And then Sid turns to one of the judges and says, okay, pick two numbers from one 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. So here you have a poem chosen seemingly at random. And Leslie, the grandma, is several thousand feet in the air when they finally connect her. Bristol, come in, will you? Hello. Via shortwave relay. Leslie is still completely isolated. She can't even hear a word that they're saying. 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, Leslie, we're ready for you. We're ready for you. All right. So thousands of people, those Sidney, is there, furrowing his brow. And the poem he's trying to send her is from Keats. One line that goes, "Hail to the blind spirit bird that will never wort." A bird? One bird. Oh, it's two lines. A bird's spirit. Oh, I've got it. I can guess it. "Hail to the blind spirit bird that will never wort." Miss Young, would you read out what has written down on the piece of paper that you hold? "Hail to the blind spirit bird that will never wort." Thank you. The crazy part is that in that trick, your grandpa doesn't even talk to her. 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 that I talked to people. And even if they came up with theories, you'd listen to the tape and then realize that even the theories themselves just seem so implausible. Well, maybe it's the narrator. You think it's the narrator that whatever it is, the narrator says each night, which is before the game is even on, somehow encoded into that, that man's introduction is the answer. No, because the audience hasn't yet gone and done its random act when he starts this show. There was one thing that I discovered from reading the magic books. And this is 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's is the only thing I can see where there's some kind of communication. But then how it stands by communicates something like a random sentence from a book or whatever. Exactly. And that sentence, you wear 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 pass up to my grandpa. So he goes, "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. You mean to this day you don't know? To this day, I do not know. To this day. Wait a second, wait a second, wait a second. No, we can't. No, there's got to be somebody who knows. Can't believe we can go into this interview. We have no way, we have no way. 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. I have to compile it. I have to do is move their lips. There's something is happening with that man's eyebrows. That's the code. It's the eyebrows. I feel like I'm just listening to this. Like what's been going on in my head for about 10, 12 years. So then he asked Jesse, "What happened when he talked to his grandma?" Total dead end. You mean total dead end? Well you mean like 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 focus off and just say, "You are the judge." That is the line they finished. Well that is the line they finished with every single broadcast. They think the same. Well only thanks very much everyone and you're the judge. Well I think we're not going to say that well. All right and I'm careful. Now that's the depending on the figure, didn't it? She won't even give me this satisfaction of saying, yes it was a trick. She won't even say that. 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 you knowing it, she whispered to her. No secret to her. Not about to her son, your father. Did she tell your dad? She told my dad something. What? Where did you tell him? I have no idea. He will not even admit being told something. If she slipped up, this is Jesse's dad. And I'm not even sure that she did slip up. But I have finished that scene. And I have ruined my dad. I don't understand why you can't say yes. Leslie did tell me something. I'm not going to tell you but yes, she did actually tell me something. If my mum entrusted me with something all those years ago, then I will keep that trust. Why? Because I believe in keeping trust. My dad won't tell my mum. They've been together for over 30 years. You just have to continue on nothing. 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 Pitting Tens. Let me tell you how it was done." That's Jim Stein, my arrogant. They left people guessing and walked away. The thing that got me when I was talking to magicians and they said, "We can repeat everything that they did." Really? So they can actually do. One of them is in a plane and the other is on the scene. Apparently. But they still themselves don't know 100% for sure how my grandparents did it. If we could figure this out, it sounds like you would want to know the answer. I'm not so sure anymore. Really? 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're 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. 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. 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." 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 when you think of the 1950s. They've managed to. Well, what happened? Hey, no, no! No, Jesse, come back! No! We just went, it was straight on the hour. It was exactly, it's exactly, it's nine seconds ago, is it? Oh, mother. Just cell phone, I'm just going to call him. Yeah. Hello. Hello. Yeah, hi. And you're booking right now, just a minute ago. Yeah, we know that, yeah. Yeah, I think we probably need to use the phone because that booth now needs to be used. Sorry. 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. Now, you've held on to this secret for so many, so, so many years. Please, why have any wanted to reveal it to anybody? 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 it. A lot of secrets, magic secrets, they get passed down from generations and they get re-performed and over and over again, I guess they're very much the concern of that family. Now, as a performer myself, if I wanted to bring out the pollutants, would you feel like you could hand down this magic trip to your grandson to carry it on? Of course, if I had a grandson who wanted to carry it on, I'd have enormous difficulty telling him how to. I don't think it'd be possible because there's an awful lot that I wouldn't be able to tell him. What do you mean you wouldn't tell him, tell him that grandson? It's hard to explain why I wouldn't be able to, it's just that I wouldn't be able to. It's all I can say about that. 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. 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 missed. 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 Sorn and I, because we just wanted to find out, did somebody know how they did it? So we called this guy, who ruined everything. This is Penn Gillette who you probably know from Penn and Teller, famous for doing magic tricks and telling you how they're done. Now I don't really know what I was expecting when we called him. I guess I was thinking he would know what they did, but he wouldn't choose to tell us. I didn't know. But when we called them, and we played them the story, as soon as he heard it, he said, "Oh, it's a book test, it's a book test, it's an envelope switch," and there are three or four ways to do that. What did he say? He said, "Basically, I can tell you how they did it or how they might have done it, but you are not going to like it." 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. A beautiful secret is the kind of thing that's short and sweet, like he folded the hat twice. There's mirrors under that table. When you hear it, it's like, "Oh, of course, that's what they would do," and you love finding it out. Then you will whisper it to the person next to you. So in magic, what you want is an idea that is not beautiful. 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. 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. Basically, he said that you answered this one is going to kill your joy. Yeah. It's ugly. So did he tell you what they did? Yeah. What do you say? Well, I'll tell you just a second. You went into excruciating detail about how he thinks they did it. Now, a book test, we actually do one in our show, depending on it. But the more important thing, he was so right. Once we heard the explanation and the details and all, we were both like, hmm, all right. Well, this is like a kiss with a poison dart in his head. I love how much I bummed your ship. 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? Well, all I've done to you, you know, because you get to edit. All I have done is put you in precisely the position I live my life in. You now have to make the exact same decisions that I make. And I will, I will tell you, and this is just true, that I would have played this particular thing differently with almost any other show, you know. I move on the, on the chess board with another show would be to say, you know, I do have several ideas as to how this could be done. But I think I'm, I'm going to be like the Graham mother and go to my grave with this, you know. And I would have just given you that sound bite, which I just have, except that we have pivoted the entire piece called so it's like all eyes, all eyes have been directed to the next sentence. So that's a little difficult. But I want to see how you solve a problem that I solve every day. But we have like a higher call, like you're entertaining, but we're entertaining with the caveat that we're supposed to be like telling the truth as best we understand it. So we have a slightly different set of gods and our amount of Olympus than you do, I, which knows the thing. You don't really, you don't really, because I am not suggesting that you lie. 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. Yes, the whole deal. 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, are we entertainers or are we journalists, journalists? Yes. So here's where we ultimately came down. We have decided not to tell you how the Pittington 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 you, if you want to be soiled, sure, come and soil yourself. You can go to this URL, radialab.org/theuglytruth don't click this. Radialab.org/theuglytruth don't know apostrophe, click this. And we just leave it to you. You can go there or you cannot. All I have said to you is that it's a trick. Yeah. And you knew that. That's the fact that it wasn't the trick you wanted it to be. You know, he did turn sweet at one moment. We were talking about the grandma. Right. Grandma tells the grandson in the conversation at the end, she's not sure she could explain to him. Yes. How it went. 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. And yet she was a party to it. She's the one. He says, you know, oftentimes when you're doing tricks, somebody knows everything and the other person is, you know, in the dark. Yeah. You mean like one of the partners intentionally not knows what's happening? Yeah. There are tricks in the pen and tell the show that I don't really know how they're done. 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 a grandchild, instead of being a kind of dodge or a little bit of a lie, maybe it was the whole truth. Hey up, Jaddup and Ron. I'm Robert Crowewich. This is Radio Lab and today we are doing our black box hour. Yeah. And a black box is, it's a thing, it's a box that something goes in, you can see what that is, something comes out, which is different, you can see that. But you do not know what's going on in the middle. It's a mystery. I love it. Shall we go inside? And our next and final black box comes from our producer, Molly Webster, and it begins into the Butterfly Rainforest. Oh. So that you can see the butterflies that are flying in fact. So a few days ago, I was in Gainesville, Florida, at the Florida Museum of Natural History, where they have a rain forest. It's what about three stories tall, it's got a top that's all wrapped in a net, and then it was covered in butterflies. Oh my gosh, there are so many thousands. Yes, so these are hilly cognins, butterfly. It's Andre Syracal. I started looking at butterflies when I was six years old and I have never grew up. He was my girl. And here under this leaf, you can see an owl butterfly. One wing is like the size of my palm, so there were red ones. It's like a yellow one. Blue ones. Deeper, striped ones. Is that a monarch? Yes. Which I don't step on this butterfly. It's like the Dr. Susie and 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 the Chrysalis. The Chrysalis. 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. That is coded in their gene as their final weight. Some hormones start pumping, some genetics turn on, and it starts growing a little shell. That's the Chrysalis. And inside that Chrysalis, as we know, a caterpillar becomes a butterfly or mouth. And this is a mystery? What do you think happens inside the Chrysalis? I think that. I've never thought about it to be honest. I don't know. I don't understand how it works. Not many people have. Are you surprised that you actually don't know? Yeah. I'm surprised. I thought I knew and I don't. Those are folks I met at the museum. They 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 its left side, and it just pops wings out. No. That is actually what I thought, but that's not right at all. My car simply is located on three floors. 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, which Andre was nice enough to do for me, even though he loves these guys, he took a tiny little chrysalis. Oh, it's about an inch long. Which a caterpillar had just gotten into one day ago, and he slowly began to cut. So we're taking our tweezer-like scissors through the outer layer of the chrysalis, until- You can see people- Oh. What? Oh my gosh. What? No, it's like there was no caterpillar there. What do you mean? 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. What was there then? Basically just goo. It's just like a runny goopy goo. Looks like snot. All he had to do was give it like a little squeeze and then just went, "Oh, oh, it just exploded it, it exploded it." It seems like once the caterpillar gets into its shell, it's sort of just melts. It's head, legs, antenna, abdomen. They all just dissolve. Muscles themselves just sort of like dissolve away into individual muscle cells, and some of the cells rupture, and so they're inside the amino acids, the proteins, those all go floating out in a space. Wait, you're saying that the caterpillar just becomes like a soup of cells? Yeah. And yet somehow… This soup will magically be transformed into a butterfly, a moth. How does that happen? That question. That question is the big, fat, metaphysical, quasi-religious, semi-mystical, philosophical question that people have been asking forever. Yeah. So, one of the big arguments that was taking place. This is Matthew Cobb. He's a biologist in 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. " The caterpillar. Goes into the chrysalis. And then it actually dies. Totally dies. And out of its burial cloth is going to come the new life. This beautiful and completely new creature. Death, as it were, and then a kind of resurrection. 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. As a kind of spiritual ascent, says somewhere in the New Testament, "Behold, the old has passed away. The new has surely come." So, 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. Feces, and urine, and other, un-appetizing substances. According to Andre, I'm 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, "It has a hell of a lot of change." So the thing is, is that this transformation, either of the butterfly or of my soul, seems so dramatic, so miraculous, that it made some people think like, "Geez, if you're going to go to heaven in the process, transform that much, is it even you up there?" It still has to be you that makes it to heaven. You can't change too much, otherwise, like, someone else will be up there enjoying your afterlife. So certain memories and elements of your identity have to continue, just not all the elements. 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? That's a really interesting question. Leaning out the poop and throwing away the moldy leaves, you have a lot of time to think. Which brings us to Martha Weiss. I am an associate professor of biology at Georgetown University. She got to thinking about this question in more concrete terms. Okay, so she did an experiment. What we did was we took a big green caterpillar, and we did something that was not entirely nice. We put them in a box, filled it with a nasty odor, and is the odor like an odor of a plant? It's actually a plant-based odor, but it smells kind of like nail polish remover. In any case, she gasped them with this nasty smell, and then once they could smell the odor, then we gave them a zap. Is that just like a zap? Just a zap? A zap? I think ten seconds of zap. Ten seconds. And they did this over and over. Oater. Zap. Oater. Most of these caterpillars learned to hate the smell. Every time they get a whiff, they head in the opposite direction. Okay, so then we let them pupate, meaning the caterpillar changes into its shell and organs, dissolved, muscles, and milk. You get this. Cataclysmic. Catastrophic. Chaotic. Change. And then one month later, the moth emerges, and now we're ready for the drum roll. They give the moths a whiff, 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. Somehow I'm confused. What does that mean? That means the memory made it through the goo. Oh. And it came out the other side. Oh. It's your feeling like coming out of this. 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. And how does that happen? The answer to this question is we do not know. But, 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. Oh, it's like a little boop, it's like a little beacon. And it turns out there are others, too. There's the speck of gut, some nerves, some muscle. It's not as gooey as it seems. 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 has here? There's no answer to that question. But Martha says that these types of questions come up all the time. In fact, one of her colleagues, 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 pristion but had. 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. Well, here's the answer. What answer? William, the answer to the question about what carries through. The continuity question oh right yes memory carries through which is freaking cool I gotta say it is freaking cool but there's a little more freaking cool right and that is that there's actually a continuity but it goes in the reverse direction what does that even mean well Matthew Cobb told me this story about this guy this 70th century man who I never had never heard of John his name is written swamadam but is probably more pronounced swamadam swamadam swamadam okay that's Jan swamadam a Dutch microscopist from the 1600s he was definitely the first to do some very clear dissections of the chrysalis and the caterpillar and one day in Paris in front of this crowd of assembled were these bewegged and be stocking he gets a fat white caterpillar gets a scalpel or a tiny little thin bit of glass and he dies sets 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 so you peel back the skin of a caterpillar and beneath it you see the anew the new creature hidden absolutely that's so bizarre it's like it's like if you were to skin me and and there's my 70 year old self is inside of me or something wait the and the wings also survive the goo 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 what he then shown was you know what this isn't about death this isn't about decay this is actually about transformation yeah 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 thanks to our producers this hour Tim Howard while the webster Jesse Cox and thanks to you guys for listening yeah real quick before I let you go I wanted to tell you that we shared an amazing story on our feed about the butterfly researcher you just heard Dr. Martha Weiss and how she later befriended a little boy on the other side of the world who wanted to do his own caterpillar memory study Martha's daughter is actually an audio reporter and she captured the whole adventure on tape which was first published in the audio magazine signal hill and it was so beautiful we featured it on our feed last year the episode is called caterpillar roadshow and you can find it on radialab or on signalhill.fm hi I'm Gabby I'm from San Francisco and here are the staff credits radialab is hosted by Lula Miller and let's if not sir soren 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 Gabel Maria Paz Gutierrez Sindu nine Assambandan Matt Keeltee Mona McGawker Annie McEwan Alex Neeson Sarah Carrey Rebecca Rand Anissa Vista Aryan Wack Molly Webster and Jessica Young with help from Gabby Santis our fact checkers are Diane Kelly Emily Krieger Natalie Middleton Angelie Mercado and Sophie Semi leadership support for radialab science programming is provided by the Simon's foundation and the John Templeton foundation foundational support for radialab was provided by the Alfred P. Slown Foundation