Loops

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Okay on to the show Wait, you're listening to Radio Lab Radio Lab from WNYC So the I guess our first question is like what what conceivable set of circumstances led to you doing what you did I just thought it would be a weird thing to do. Yeah. Yeah, it's like well that would be weird We don't know if it's funny, but we try it out. So yeah, is it gonna be weird?

We'll do it. Yeah, is it gonna alienate half the audience? Okay, wait just to set things up. Do better.

Let's do people you just heard Charest and Shaw and Kurt Brown older they are comedians We first heard about the bit you're about to hear from Jesse Thorn. Yes, the host of the Sound of Young America. Yes, Rachel. Are you rolling over there Jesse?

No, let me record you. Okay, check them a phone. Okay. Yeah, I'm really So you say that when Kurt and Kristin walk on stage.

What happens? Well, there's a couple of jokes up top You know they joke about this this TV show that they hosted in the 70s Uncle Ben's Farmyard Courthouse. It explained the American judicial system using a courthouse made completely of animals Yeah, it was canceled immediately. Yeah, I think that was And so the audience is kind of laughing at the jokes thinking like oh, this is going to be a regular comedy sketch All right, there you go.

I'm ready. Okay. Okay. And then they go into this song Does this maniacal singing and clapping in Kristin is doing this horsey dance Why Jad when we do it we like after the third repetition People are laughing they get it like oh, they're just gonna do that over and over and then somewhere around like for around the fourth time Then it's not really not funny.

I Just quite like I'm done. I don't want to watch this anymore. Why are they still doing it? And then and then that changes to actual hatred and they're like you stupid people you too stupid people But somewhere between like nine and eleven then they then they're like I Like You get this next level which is they can't continue doing this and then they do continue doing it Like they really their eyes are starting to cross that everyone I'm dripping sweat Kristin's angry that I've gone that long I mean you can hear a Kurt in that thing like losing track of the song because he's going into some kind of I have better on stage whisper stop it What Maybe my favorite thing in the history of the world What I love about it is that your brain is trying to make it into what you want it to be which is a joke But there is no joke happening And so what these two people are doing is creating the expectation that the expectation is going to be broken But then breaking that expectation that the expectation is going to be broken by just delivering the thing that they've been delivering over and over For the past ten minutes.

What's the longest you take it ten minutes in Australia because you were drunk Yeah, it seemed like it seemed like ten minutes. We can't be sure if it was ten minutes It seems like there's no way it's a minute. I'll tell you what it was ten minutes and the audience went crazy Hey, I'm jadabun Ron This is radio lab and today Today it's all about loops things that happen over and over and over and over and over and over and over coming up loops that hurt you stream Loops that heal you think you're so scared you And look that incomplete you what? So we're you guys what we're in San Francisco, you're not in Texas.

No, just sounds like we're in Texas. Yeah, she's from Texas So can you guys actually just if you don't mind introduce yourself? So we know just you have your name and all that sure I'm Mary Sue Campbell I live in Nevada, California and my daughter Christine is 30 years old. I live in San Francisco And I was raised in the bottom in the house that said this is gonna happen that how we begin okay Tell me the begin how the story starts from the beginning I It was odd Christine actually called me Tuesday morning about 10 o'clock and just said oh what are you doing mom?

I'm just gonna go out in the yard and do some yard work and mince and she said we ought to do the Hard work early because it's gonna be hot today. So we're in the summertime It was August August 24th and apparently what ten minutes later half hour later She said I called her she had left me a voicemail something like hey Christine It's mom something something's not right something's wrong. I need you to call me back So I gave her a call back and and she said something about the house isn't right There's things like weird in here. What's weird?

What are you talking about? And then she said well, I'm looking at the calendar and it says August 2010 And I'm like, uh-huh. She's like well, that's not right and I said well Yes, it is August 24th 2010 and as soon as I said that out loud I grabbed my purse to leave Oh my god. She's had a stroke.

That was my my my first reaction and oh that makes me feel emotional And so Christine says she walked out of her house to the car keeping her mom on the phone What else you see? I'm just trying to keep her talking to me all the while her mom's telling her one thing after another just doesn't look right She says there's a strange black truck on the driveway Which is the truck that belongs to her boyfriend that has been parked there for ten years So I'm of course increasingly I mean, I'm just freaking out at this point So she hangs up with her mom and then calls the paramedics and a half hour later Christine arrives at the hospital by the time I walked in She had been there for five or ten minutes at the most and as soon as I walked in the doctor greeted me and said I said uh- This is her doctor Jonathan Belayos Christine. It's immediately evident. It's not a stroke not an infection That's that's a huge relief, but I said your mother has transient global amnesia Global transient global.

How do those words hit you? I'll be honest with you I had no idea what that meant. I think the word I heard the most was in Asia Your mother has lost her ability to form new memories. She can't remember But he said it's not going to last forever.

Um, it usually lasts between one and 24 hours And we're not sure what causes it and it's at this point where the story goes from something kind of frightening to something a little more surreal Yeah, so when I came in her mother is sitting up in bed She's a smileer and she immediately started asking questions Nice that well Tuesday August 24th, and of course we have a video on YouTube of this I'm trying to remember the last date. I remember Yeah, we hung out you came over to my house and we watched a video that I made for you When I was in Texas and all of your sisters and some of your brothers said happy birthday to you on the video Yeah, but we still have the videos we can watch again, but you're gonna remember eventually face. It's just temporary Where was that? You're at home.

Yep, you're at home doing some gardening and you called me and you're feeling confused So you called the paramedics have them come and get you and then we came here. Did you have to test on you? August 24th Tuesday But this conversation they're having just started over because every 90 seconds Mary Sue's memory resets August 24th, but what's strange is the repetition like we started that last clip you heard with her saying this 90 seconds later after remembering reset she says 90 seconds later The last Do you remember and as you watch this video for a few minutes you realize what's happening here is that Mary Sue? Is in a loop and it goes like this first the date She then responds in almost the same way every time She's missed her birthday.

Yeah, and every time she says that darn in exactly the same way if you fast forward Yeah She must enjoy her birthday quite a bit you're gonna remember it eventually then she laughs what happened then they recap You're working in the garden and you gave me a call Christine explains the whole thing And it's usually when she says that we're paramedics called the paramedics right there and have them come and pick you up The Mary Sue's eyes get really wide and just look at her under disbelief. Yes. Yeah, isn't that creepy? I mean every single thing that was 90 seconds later And it's often at this point right after creepy That you said Like somebody could it on rewind over and over and over again.

Yes, I repeated the birthday so much that the nurse apparently was behind me Now the words yeah Yes, we do that we have had the same conversation over and over again every two hours Yeah, we can't see to talk about anything else August 24th Watching it I wanted to slap me I just told you that for the record never I have a question here is like this is a person who's lost her memory Yeah, but why would her behavior for one cycle to the next be so precisely and consistently the same and sometimes exactly the same Yeah, why I think what it is is one of the things the nurses said is that when you have something like this your true self Comes out, huh your true the word true is interesting. Yeah, yeah See on the video is that your true person your true song. Oh, yeah I mean that's my mom threw in through right there I mean she's what Christine means is not the repetition but that her mom keeps asking so many questions She just wants to know what's going on with with all you know across the board. I love problems.

I love puzzles Are you like a Sudoku fiend? You know, I am I hate to admit this. I play escape room games on the internet escape room What are those there's stupid little games where they have little hidden pixels that you find you're stuck in a room And you have to get out you gotta find the key to the door and there's all these little hidden places Oh, that's just the perfect metaphor. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, I was my own escape room There's a different way of seeing this first of all Jonathan Blahos that you are a doctor who's seen a bunch of these cases He said well that puzzle or instinct. That's not just Mary Sue What everybody does is struggle over and over again with where am I and when am I? It's just the brain in survival mode and another thing that everybody does and he's seen about six of these patients so far is it everybody Not just Mary Sue, but everybody becomes a broken record right down to the phrasing of the sentences Which creeps them out a little bit it it makes it the brain seem a little bit more like a Machine, you know, you give the machine the exact same set of inputs every 90 seconds Give the same doctor the same hospital room same beeping machines and see if the output ever varies and it doesn't it almost seems like the patient Has no free well And so sometimes in the back of his head he thinks god if I had that condition and someone videotaped me I would love to see see my own tape why you know, I think I want to see could I somehow escape the loop? Or would I would I end up end up with the rest of us?

Now thankfully according to Jonathan what normally happens in this condition is that it's time goes on that 90 second loop starts to slowly Expand it's actually more like two minutes or three minutes eventually four minutes now It's five minutes and from Mary Sue after a few hours as her loop got longer and longer her old memories start to creep back in by that evening She was remembering up until like that Sunday few hours later her memory began to extend into Monday morning By the time we left the hospital she remembered Monday night and then finally how we begin okay Tell me the beginning how the story starts It was odd Christine actually called me Tuesday morning about 10 o'clock I'm Robert Crowech and we'll be right back Message one. This is trip around or these I offered peace loan foundation technology in the modern world. Hi. My name is Christine Campbell This is Mary Sue Campbell here we go for information about loan at www.slown.org I'm not for you and this message Hey, I'm Jad Abunrod and I'm Robert Crowech.

This is Radio Lab and this hour we're talking about loops loops loops. Okay Is the obvious loop and it's loop shape is part of y-zero is zero Who's this is Alex Bellos and I'm the author of he is looking at Euclid When I was a kid I used to think I was zero it's just like the whole with nothing in it But actually zero was chosen by the Indians as kind of reflecting like the eternal cycles of the faces of heaven The Romans and the Greeks and the Jews we didn't have a zero We just had you know start everything started at one and one reason why we didn't is that we're kind of afraid of the void Afraid of the void well, I mean how would you describe something? It isn't there? There's nothing to say that carries them out.

Yeah, it's an emptiness and a nothing is in means You're so long you don't even know where you are and so this sort of was a psychological barrier to us grasping this zero But in India everything and nothing was the same thing they had this very fluidity and they grasped this idea that nothing less was something In oddly enough the way they decided to represent the nothing was a little piece of nothing and they drew a circle around it Which turns the nothing into a something and it's a loop and it's a loop So this idea of eternity and continuity and infinity is actually contained with the new rule for zero I kind of love the idea that that actually he is kind of the most mystical kind of magical spiritual Digit of them all you know and it's we use every day Yeah, so here's two of the work horses. These are like next up a story from reporter Mark Phillips Alright as you can see here. There's all these containers of tape Okay, so set this up. Who is this guy?

His name is William Bizinski. He's a musician who makes this really hard to describe music He's been doing it for about 30 years and basically what he does is he takes a little bit of classical music or music records it onto tape Analog tape and he loops it. I can find something from he cuts the beginning again tapes it together into a circle Fred's a third tape machine messes with the speeds and you get something that sounds like this This little phrase that just repeats over and over and over again and never changes You know loops are everywhere. They're cycles.

They're in nature They're just universal and if you can find a loop that can repeat without becoming redundant Then you can sort of fall into a different space Sort of like a bubble of eternity or something. I don't know so that's what that sounds like Well in the summer of 2001 I was archiving all these old tape loops transferring them to digital and something kind of weird happened He grabbed this one piece of tape put it on and it was this wonderful grave very stately looped by Totally forgotten about and I set it up and turned on the CD burner and left the control room went to the kitchen got some coffee Came back and I started realizing something was changing. I could see that the tape was shredding The thing to understand about tape is that when you record music onto analog tape onto a bit of it that music What it is is its iron oxide powder glued to just a piece of plastic so the iron powder is actually the music Yeah, but after 20 30 years the glue loses its strength and the dust falls off onto the floor His music was actually falling on the floor. Yeah, I thought my god.

What's gonna happen? And what happened was in the course of about an hour the music Disintegrated and you put more loops on and it kept happening But the really interesting thing was while some disintegrated quickly some slowly they all sort of had the same pattern What do you mean? Just listen to this one. So this is one of his loops at the beginning Okay, and after it went around and around for 20 minutes or so the dust started to fall off and then it sounded like this All the all the notes are still there, but the tails are being shorter Yeah, and that's what would always happen the sustains and the case of the notes seem to fall away like from the back moving backwards It gets shorter and shorter instead of being held for four seconds.

It's held for three seconds two seconds And finally you just really hear like the attacks and the accents Just the beginnings of the notes only the beginning those seem to hold on at least for a little while I was thinking wow, this is like I'm recording the life and death of a melody It just made me think of human beings, you know, how we die You can really hear that this integration on this particular loop, but I think this was number five It starts sounding like the rest like this But after just 15 minutes, it's basically completely gone and the tape on this one, you know tape is normally brown Right now, it's it's clear like scotch tape the dust is gone. There's a little bit of brown here, but now it's just clear It's almost all gone This next loop is a sly one and you're gonna have to wait a bit for its looping is to kick in ready Born ready pretty sick with leafy the smell of a dead whale is you have to experience the note to know what it's like It's like nothing. I've ever smelled this is Craig Smith professor of ocean otter. It's really it's really putrid back when Craig was a graduate student This is a 1982 you heard there was a dead whale floating off the coast of San Diego about a third I was a water with zebrids on it pecking at it how big around?

25 to 30 feet long so what is that like a train car more like a size of a small yacht? I guess big freakin whale. Yeah Craig wanted to sink that whale No one had ever studied what happens when a whale sinks to the sea floor people just speculated about it So no one had ever followed it down to the bottom? No one had followed the whale down to the bottom, right?

So we towed the carcass out to sea and they had all these little scraps of steel that they tied to the whales tail one at a time about two thousand pounds and Nothing it wasn't enough to sink the whale. Well kept floating there like a big smelly balloon It's belly was awful the compositional gas and the captain of the ship goes well a big rifle Let's bring that out so he got out his rifle and all the other guys in the boat take out their gun shooting the whale Yeah, yeah It doesn't work it doesn't work it didn't really do anything the Craig tried again and again and eventually not with that whale But with others he got to see something So cool, so a whale dies and sinks down into the dark and and then This incredible cycle begins within minutes Scavengers will be at the carcass lots of how do these little creatures see the whale if it's so dark? They smell it they smell the whale with an hour's it may well have hundreds of hagfish on there terrified these you like animals They have grinding plates instead of teeth and they burrow into the carcass hundreds like a hagfish convention It's a really massive up eels. What does that look like well?

It looks like a like a vagina doosa head Over the next few days a bunch of other scavengers show up including Stone crab shrimp sea scud Chark stations huge for your friends flesh flying everywhere Sometimes the hagfish get ticked off and they try to defend their territory hagfish have a very interesting ability to produce mucus You can put a couple of hagfish into a bucket of water and kick it and they can produce enough mucus essentially turn the bucket of Water into something like gelatin Wow, so it's like a medusa head in a cloud of mucus and all that is just the first stage the mobile scavenger stage Okay, so what happens after that? Well after the mobile scavenger stage is the enrichment opportunist aid that point the whale is beginning to look pretty dilapidated Little bits of whale soft tissue get implanted in the sea floor And so the ground around the whale becomes like sort of its own little ecosystem and a bunch of new animals show up their worms The they're wiggly little worms just like tons of them we can get 30 or 40,000 of them per square meter Sometimes a sediment around a whale fall looks like a lawn of grass where these worms are just wriggling sticking up out of the sediment and waving back and forth What color these worms do you know? I think they're white so field of white words. Yeah white grass It's gonna go to sleep.

Yeah, and finally the last stage something we call the sulfur-loving stage At this point the whale looks like a skeleton Just covered with this actually beautiful mat of white bacteria and it's fluffy and just looks like a polar bear's fur Covering the bones of the whale? Yeah Think about a whale skeleton draped in a polar bear fur coat Sulfur is coming out of the bones and the bacteria are just clustering around Fucking it up for years When you step back and look at it these dead whales they become like planets and you find creatures living on them that you don't find anywhere else They're now about 55 species that haven't been found in any other habitat species of animals that only live on whale falls Does that mean that these creatures like the whale is their entire world? They don't know anything else for some of them? Yeah, what do they do the rest of the time?

This can't happen that often? Well, that's a good question Maybe that they are living as what we as fugitive species in other words. They just drift around sort of waiting Can I say hoping for? When that happens they grow quickly produce Hundreds thousands maybe even millions of larvae that they then broadcast out into the water column then their babies drift around in the darkness waiting until Few of them find another such habitat times or maybe even hundreds of kilometers away and repeat So altogether and I mean how long can can a whale fall last?

Well a whale fall can last a large whale skeleton that of a blue large blue whale or a fin whale can support a community for 50 to 75 years Wow, which really astounded us and how does that compare to the lifespan of the whale? Well, it's probably pretty comparable actually whales live on the order of 50 to 70 years There's something kind of poetic about that the idea that you know for the same amount of time that the whale lived it's gonna support this life Yeah, it is very appealing Okay, ready this is radio lab. Oh, okay. Yes, you start.

Okay. This is radio lab today. We're talking about loops I'm Robert Grohl which Jan Ron. This is radio lab.

It's all about loops. Yep. I'm Jan and I'm Robert. You're listening to radio Today we're talking about loops.

I'm Robert. I'm Jad and it's all about Lucas. I'm Jad and Robert talk about loops And speaking things have happened over and over again. Here you go.

Hello. Here you go. Hi, Jad. Hey, Steve.

Steven's Ruggas How are you? Good and Steve tell us a story about a mathematical loop the through mathematicians all over the world for Oh, look story starts way back with a guy named Bob Fraga. Got lob Fraga. How do you spoke?

It's not got leave it seems to be LOB at the end unless it's a typo in every book I've ever seen now Just like this I've very quickly got Bob Fraga was a mathematician back in the 1870s and 80s and he had a dream that mathematics could unlock the secrets of the universe that you could Maybe even build a machine beaded some basic mathematical rules and it would just start churning out discoveries Wouldn't even get a human being that's how powerful he thought math could be but that led into a question if math is the most fundamental thing in the universe What is the most fundamental part math? What's at the foundation? Is it numbers? Is it you know one two three?

That's what you would think but God lab. He said no There's a deeper thing than numbers the deepest thing of all is is what today we call sets the set of things, you know So yeah, so like what's a set you know you could Steve explain it to us using the wall things Sesame Street really old episode as far as just to set it up here It's two people working at the furry arms hotel There's Humphrey who's got a green nose and a pink face and his girlfriend in or I actually know what she is She might be his wife in grid and so their hotel keepers and Ernie is in the background and so in grid and Humphrey are taking an order Yeah, how may I help you room service order from a room full of penguins? You know Humphrey says I'll take your order mr. Penguin sir Would you like a fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish then Humphrey says let me check I got that right fish fish fish fish fish fish fish Fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish No, that's not right She only says a five times but then Ernie explains excuse me Ingrid and Humphrey I have a better way for you to do this a better way Count the fish fish one fish do fish and Six fish they both realize in grid and Humphrey how powerful this is and they say does it work for other stuff say cinnamon rolls spark Well, absolutely wow.

That's the point that what cinnamon buns and spark plugs and fish the sets have in common Is that there are six in each? I mean if you try to say what does six really mean? It's the thing that those sets have in common according to Steve It's not so much the number six that's important here Yeah, that's just a label for this characteristic that all these piles seem to share It's the pile itself the set that is the most basic thing so Frigga said This is it sets are the bedrock that I've been looking for yeah, we can build the rest of math on top of yeah And I can make my math machine a little solve the universe and I think you published a book sort of showing how this might work Except that Russell Bertrand was a mathematician then found a devastating paradox that ended up well Annihilating what Frigga had tried to do Russell's paradox is now become known as the barber paradox It's a little thought experiment in this case the set is a town. Yep a town with people.

Yep one barber with the following rules in this town The barber shaves everyone who doesn't shave himself the barber sounds three people, right? Everyone who doesn't shave himself some people shave themselves some people go to the barber. That's the universe We're in a town where everyone who doesn't shave himself is shaven by this barber and now the question is who saves the barber? Who shaves remember the barber the barber has a property that he shaves everyone who doesn't shave himself who can't shave himself But on the other hand if he doesn't shave himself then he's one of those people who doesn't shave himself and is therefore shaving by the barber But maybe the barber here's two solutions for you guys Barber could not shave couldn't he just not shave no or maybe in sound shapes maybe he could set up some sort of mechanical device It's sort of like no, you can't do that you can't change you can't answer sensibly what happens to the barber and no one has there's nothing To say he either does or doesn't shave himself by ordinary Eurystotelian logic because the barber can't shave himself and he can't not shave himself So so there's that's what ruin that's what ruin the Universe wait, we just see I think it could ruin an afternoon You're gonna have to wait for a couple hours again to budge before you go swimming back I can't see that overthrowing all all life's work.

It does it does It turns out to be very very problematic for the foundations of math because what this barber paradox the reason it was so annoying to math Mathematicians was that math is supposed to be this logical thing right logic is the lifeblood of math and yet here you had this Little bit of math it was illogical a self-contradicting set but Bertrand Russell came up with all this he didn't lose faith He thought well, this is just a problem with set theory so then he spent a long time trying to make a theory I think he called a theory of types instead of sets and these he had certain admission rules that he thought would prevent paradoxes from happening and for Well, it was looking pretty good under Bertrand Russell system. There was no logical problems. No paradoxes until This is a little German guy comes along and you say his name girdle I hear it I hear it often pronounced well I don't speak German but mathematicians often say like the woman's piece of clothing, you know from the old days This is Jenna she has written a book about good And I'm a professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College and she says the point which good will enters our story It's 1930s Vienna Austria He had just recently finished his what would be a good one to like a doctoral degree a PhD smart dude kind of a rising star It was no question that people around him understood that but he was also maybe a little bit off He had real breaks with you know reality. He was in the biography.

They call him a paranoid schizophrenic But he seemed more a kind of obsessive depressive I don't know my arms like holiday terms are accurate But he was in and out of sanatorium and and he had real difficulties being sure what was real the only reality He really trusted was math circles shapes prime numbers formulas axioms right and a certain point he got into paradoxes Perhaps it was the barber paradox that lured him in We don't know but he began to think about and actually experiment with some of these paradoxic loops So he took something like the paradox of the liar the paradox of the liar says this statement is a lie This statement is a lie right if it's true, then it's false and if it's false, then it's true This statement is a lie if you think about that too much you might So good will it was interested in that phrase and for various reasons You took it tweaked a little bit to come up with the following statement this statement is unprovable this statement is unprovable Which is very important to notice if it's if it's provable then it's Unprovable obviously a little bit of a word game at Google thought forget words What would happen if I converted this statement into math because in math things are either provable or unprovable They cannot be both at the same time it's either true or false and if it's true well then damn it You should be able to prove it Yeah So he said I'm going to assign a special number unique number to make that a purely mathematical statement by coding it in a very clever way into A rhythm to be honest we don't completely get this part very very clever But once he did his math he stuff he had a rigorous mathematical statement right there on the page He looked at it and he realized that what he just said in math is that the following statement this statement is unprovable is It's true because it's actually unprovable meaning in math this statement actually is unprovable Because it is true the logic of math will not let you prove that it is true so it might be true We'll just never know nothing like that is supposed to happen in math things are supposed to be true or not true And you're supposed to be able to prove every true things as Steve so if there's something true that you can't prove that means that the math is is strangely hopefully Incomplete it's always called his incompleteness theorem That's the phrase the girdle incompleteness theorem is that if you have a system of axioms that are Consistent meaning they don't contradict themselves They're necessarily incomplete that is there are certain statements you can make within that system that you can't prove or disprove And all of math has this character This is the big shock that this is not just about word games about logic puzzles with barbers This is as devastating for even just counting for one two three four In other words math is shocked through and through with these kind of statements that you can't either prove or disprove Seriously the deep thinkers at the time were amazed at this it was recognized as one of the great ideas of the of the 20th century for sure Maybe of all time Maybe I should make it more concrete. There's a question that as far as I know is still not solved Steve gave us this example of a problem something called gold box conjecture that kind of gives you a sense of what incompleteness feels like So gold box conjecture says that you can always write any even number as a sum of two prime numbers So let me give you some examples of that like say 12 Yeah, remember first of all prime number means you can divide it by one and by itself like seven is a prime number You could divide by one and seven but nothing else. Okay, all right So 12 which is an even number is seven plus five those are both prime numbers. All right Let's try another one.

How about 24? That's 11 plus 13 right, okay, or 36 19 plus 17 and even number now this has been checked out to I don't know what billions trillions Maybe hundreds of trillions So no one has ever found a counter example to gold box conjecture and here's the thing you might think that either it's true or It's false. It might be that this statement every even number is a sum of two primes It might be neither true nor false, but what we today call undecidable Mm-hundesidable as a turn that comes from good old undecided. Yeah, I mean suppose in some Ethereal or transcendental sense like that is suppose that there's God and God knows that this is true Then you know what about us here among the world of human beings all we can do is check each even number and every time we check It's true with that that would never constitute a proof because we'd never run out of numbers You then say that to understand everything you either have to defer to God who does understand everything if you believe in God But if you don't believe in God you then have to live with mystery and not knowing Mm-hmm I'm gonna say yes.

I'm just I'm gonna say uh-huh. I think you've encapsulated it perfectly And I think that girdle himself was I think a believer in all kinds of mystical things like for him This was very freeing and liberating because it meant that there were that we couldn't be mechanized There was profound mystery forever Hold on. I I'm on your team here, but let me just point out something good old when he died He was not exactly liberated. He was a paranoid like he thought people were trying to poison him He starved himself to death.

He wasn't exactly liberated well Well, but I choose to believe that somewhere in his tortured mind and I guess it might was pretty tortured There was a little fellow coming a song a song of liberation Thanks to Steve Strogatz he has a new book called infinite powers how calculus reveals the secrets of the universe and Also, thanks to Jan 11 her book about goodle is called a madman dreams of Turing machines And finally our last doopies yeah, this one like the last one involves things feeding back on themselves Kind of like a classic positive feedback loop, which is what exactly what's like when you can do it with audio You take a speaker and a mic you put the feed the sound from the speaker into the mic and then back into the speaker into the mic and then multiplies and then you get something like Painful is what's horrible definitely painful, but that kind of feedback loop like in the case of our next story can also take the pain away Yes, comes to us from this lady. I'm Melanie There's a writer the author of a book on pain called the pain chronicles which is a book that began as a chronicling of her own pain Which has been suffering from every day for the last 15 years and what sort of pain? Oh pain in my neck and right shoulder and right side of my head all at once yeah Yeah, it's all one did it start with something did you hit it there or how did it start? It didn't start with an injury of any kind, but it did start at a discrete time goes back to 1997 She was upstate New York at a country house on a date I was our first date and I wanted to impress him so I swam across a pond about a mile across Was this your idea or was this his idea?

It was my idea Wow, that's a different kind of first year And you made it all the way there and back yes and nothing happened but that night when she got in the bed I was kept awake by the strange burning sensation in my shoulder and neck I didn't get the the head pain for like four more years and that particular pain never went away and got worse over time So it's like a nerve a nerve was being yeah, I mean eventually I got an MRI a couple years later And there was nerve impingement in my spine and over the years she says she's tried everything She's tried drugs and she's tried physical therapy She's tried distraction like I'll go to a matinee and if it's a scary movie I just don't stay focused on the pain so distraction can work, but then she says as soon as she gets out of the movie It's back and it's angry for being ignored Sometimes I'd have the sensation like that that right side of my head was like dying like nerves were dying That image would kind of frighten me and that thought she find that that thought would make the pain worse and Making the pain worse will inspire further negative fantasies which will make the pain worse which will inspire more fantasies. Yeah It's how the loop goes positive feedback loop. Yeah in a negative sort of way, right? And eventually Melanie said decided okay, I'm gonna write a book about this and do some research I was reading a lot about self-inflicted pain and religious rights and I actually went to witness a Hindi festival type who Sam And swallowed them par and what she saw really changed her mind about things and you can see video of this festival on YouTube What you see is a dense crowd of folks in the middle of the crowd They're doing insane acts of devotion They literally like thread needles through their tongues poke skewers through their cheeks weighted fish hooks dangle from their backs And yet she says when she was looking their faces they seemed relaxed Like their eyes don't tear up.

They don't gas for breath really relaxed wasn't just that they were tolerating the pain It actually seemed like they weren't in pain At all and I would think okay this person here eyes is fewer You know you can't become a religious Hindi in order to experience this analgesic kind of it like that's cheating But I did feel like okay, so one way to describe it is faith But for every way that you can describe in religious terms There's also a way you can describe things in in scientific terms. Yeah, the reality is all of our pain is in our head Which brings us to this guy? This is Sean Mackey chief of the Stanford Pain Management Division And he will tell you that one of the most basic facts about pain is that it is not purely physical We've got signals coming up from the body They're sending us a message like if you whack a toe the signal shoots up some nerves in your leg into your spine and those signals converge in our brain And before you even feel a thing There are a multitude of what I refer to as little amplifiers throughout our brain to turn up and turn down the overall pain experience And these amplifiers are things like your mood anxiety depression Attention expectations all of these things feedback onto that signal coming up from the body and they can either boost it up up Up past a certain point where you get a sensation of pain Or they can deaden it down down down down down down down down to where you don't feel anything Oh point is pain is a conversation between the brain and the body and Sean thought what would happen if I actually let people see that conversation Could they you know take control of it? Yes, so we did a study in Melanie signed up.

Mm-hmm So describe what happens in this experiment? So you put in this MRI machine We put somebody into a scanner brain scanner and you have a screen in front of you And what you see on the screen is something that normally only the researchers would see you see your own brain in real time Yeah, well, you're not seeing the whole thing You're just in one peek all the anterior cingulate cortex There are many parts of the brain that respond to pain, but that's the one that it's an area that has been shown to be involved with pain perception turning pain up and down It's thought to give pain. It's emotional Vailance it's negativity and you actually see an image of this little piece of your brain right there in front of you on the screen I mean you're looking at your brain. No, no, that's confusing to everybody.

So instead we give a visual metaphor You see an image of fire flames in an ice cave. Oh, it is kind of a cartoon flame, but it looks realistic So you're flickering flame. Do they leap into the study? Yes, they and the more activation there is in that region The higher the plane So Melanie is lying in the scanner watching her own pain flames and Sean gives her a set of instructions We say okay, we want you to imagine that you're sitting in a nice warm soothing jacuzzi You know this bringing is a warm bath.

This bringing is very relaxing. I'm relaxing into it. Yeah I pretty soon it was like I kicked out before she knew what the flames were really so it's not okay. Okay, so how about you're lying on a beautiful beach?

Yes You know this breathing is a pleasant cent hand and the sand is nice and warm and pleasant I'm gonna look so good in my new bathing suit if I just keep getting burnt like this. Yes, I'm burning All right, and then the flames would kind of go crazy her thoughts kept slipping out of her control You know every time she would see those flames rise She would think oh no the flames are rising which would make them rise even more and then more and more until she had this bonfire on the screen You're immediately struck by they look like the flames where you're gonna the flames where you're burned at the stake I've been reading a lot of lives of saints about that But then Melanie had an idea she said why don't I take this this negative image and flip it Then I started trying to move into the idea of being a saint or a martyr and that I you know I believe that I would have no pain and that I was protected by my faith And as Melanie started thinking about this she could see the flames dying down just a little bit Which is you know, which is I this isn't you know, you don't know me But this isn't actually like part of my fantasy life, but she thought okay I'll try this let me keep going in that kind of feeling so I was trying to pick one of the few prayers I knew I mean I didn't I'm half Jewish and have Christian So I was sort of not settled in on to what kind of martyr I was You know, I started thinking should I really be Jewish martyr since you know, if you're half Jewish You know, I'm not a shoe is the right side really I'm Jewish morning Christian and I think about Jewish martyrs And like what prayers did they say and as she added and revised details that continue to make the flames go down? Okay, I'm in the right brain state. Let me do more of that so Melanie finally decided, okay I'm gonna be this one particular Jewish martyrs names Akiva Ben Joseph He was burned at the stake by the Romans for teaching the Torah And there's a particular legend that just as the executioner is about to set fire to the logs right underneath his feet Akiva Stared the executioner in the eyes and smiled and the executioner was like why are you smiling?

You're about to be burned alive and Akiva said all my life when I said those words You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart with all your soul I was sad because I thought when shall I be able to fulfill that command and now that I'm giving my life and my resolution remains firm Why shouldn't I smile and by the time Melanie had this fantasy built up in her mind? She looked over at the flames and she noticed they were almost gone like zero, you know zero pain for the first time She'd take in control of it. I felt like wow. I am watching my brain thinking my thoughts and I am Changing my thoughts by thinking and watching myself do this.

So you are looking at yourself looking at yourself looking at yourself Looking at yourself. Yes, it's like peering inside and seeing the ghost in the machine I felt you know like someone taking their first step on the moon like I am watching my brain Thinking my thoughts and I am thinking my thoughts changing my thoughts by thinking and watching my thoughts watching my brain changing my thoughts By thinking and watching myself do this Well, I need to establish this that once you were did your two sessions and you're in between exercises without this all these gizmos Could you could you address your pain? Yeah better? No, like you think well, okay?

Can't you just get the feedback from your own body? But somehow this sensation isn't quite Direct enough that I think that you could do it without the visual feedback But for that moment in that machine it was um power For you a very special thanks to our singers who joined us this hour from the new music ensemble at LaGuardia High School They are Kelly of the new Julian Soto Eli Greenhoel I'm really from those guys wrote and performed all the music between the pieces you guys rock and thanks to the guy who teaches them and Organized this mr. Robert Apostle And let's begin G'day as the formal greeting goes This is jake calling from the other side of the planet in Adelaide, South Australia, Australia Radio Lab was created by Chad Abunrod and is produced by Sorin Wheeler dealing key for the director of sound design Suzy Lechtenberg is our executive producer Our staff includes Simon Adler, Becker Bressler, Rachel Kusick, David Gebel, Bethel Hapti, Tracy Hunt, Matt Kilte, Robert Kruhlwich, Julia Alungoria, Annie McEwen, Latif Nasser, Melissa O'Donnell, Kelly Prime, Sarah Kari, Ariane Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster With help from Shima Ali Aiyi, Audrey Quinn and Neil Danisher, our Fett Checker is Michelle Harris. Thank you guys