Lost & Found

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Okay, now I'm getting closer to him. I promise I won't actually. We begin our journey this hour. How old are you?

I'm 42. Oh, me and I'm 63. This isn't going to work. I don't know.

With this woman, her name is Sharon Roseman. Okay, enough of that. Enough of that. And we're going to talk about a little about a particular man she got herself into.

I was about five years old. I lived in a small suburb of Chicago called Maywood, Illinois. And I was outside playing on the street. Heard a bunch of kids.

They're playing this game. Blind Man's Bluff. And she was it. The person who is it wears a blindfold.

And all the other kids try and scatter around and they have to freeze. And then they can taunt you and you can only hear them. And the objective is basically to feel around, follow the voices until you tag someone. Then they become it.

And that's what she does. Everybody laughs because the person that I tagged is kind of the loser. You know, because they found that first. So I'm playing the game and they took the blindfold off and suddenly I didn't know where I was.

I didn't recognize anything. This horrible panic set in because nothing looked familiar to me. Absolutely nothing. I just, I ran blindly just running just to run because I was so scared.

And I ran into the backyard of this house in front of me and I saw my mother sitting in a lawn chair. And I said, why are you here? And she said, what? What do you mean, why am I here?

I said, why are you in this backyard? Where are we? I said, what are you talking about? We're at home.

I'm in the backyard. And I said, but this is in our house. And she said, yes, this is. What are you talking about?

And I couldn't explain it. And I just kept crying and just kept saying, I don't know where I'm at. And your mother must have been very worried at that moment. Well, unfortunately, my mother said something to me that actually changed my life forever.

She pointed her finger in my face and she said, don't ever tell anybody because they'll say you're a witch and they'll burn you. What? Yes. She said that because you...

No, I don't know. And from that moment on, it was my secret. She realizes now that what happened to her in that moment when she was five and playing the game was that her whole world had rotated. The quarter turn.

A quarter turn. Picture where you're sitting right now. You would still be sitting in that same room. But the wall that you're looking at right in front of you is now one wall over to the right.

Let me make it easier. If I were on the toilet, say, sitting there looking straight ahead, is now the bathtub in a different place than it was before, the sink in a different place by about 90 degrees. Everything. Everything in the entire universe.

But just horizontally, it doesn't tilt? No, it doesn't tilt. East West becomes north south. Like in Colorado here, the mountains, the Rocky Mountains are on the west end of town.

When this happens to me, they move to the north end of town. But everything else moves with it. So the first time that happened, did you say you didn't know where you were? You recognized things, but they just weren't where they were supposed to be?

No, I didn't even recognize them. That very first time I was so panicked, I just didn't know what to do. Did it ever happen again? Over and over and over.

I might get lost all the time as you, but that's... This is different. Yeah. Before we go any further, let's just orient real quick.

I'm Jada Bumrod. I'm Robert Croweich. Now this hour, we're currently lost and found. So we're going to be experiencing the feelings, like Sharon's, of being totally awesome.

And then that relief that you feel, that Sharon will feel eventually, of being totally found. Not totally. Let's go back to her story. Did it ever happen again?

Over and over and over. She says this 90 degree rotation problem would come on in all kinds of situations. Sometimes even when she had her eyes closed. But what saved me was that shortly after that first episode, I went to a little birthday party and we were playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey.

And they put a blindfold on me and spun me in circles. You must have been like, oh man. You didn't want to do that. It was awful.

Because after that first turn, everything did shift. But then, on the second turn, when they spun her around again, it fixed it. Really? Yeah.

That's so weird. If I played a third time, crazy again. So it's binary, it's like on off. Exactly.

Exactly. But I couldn't tell anybody that. But now she had a fix, or a temporary fix. So from that moment on, any time her world would shift, I would go into the bathroom and I'd close the door so nobody could see me.

And I would spin in circles until it fixed it. You spin and it reasserts itself correctly. Yeah. And I still do that to this day.

But when my children were babies, if one of them would cry out and just cry out in their sleep. And veryably, she'd wake up. Being into a wall completely turned around. And then I would have to follow their cries, the sound of their cries until I could find their bedroom.

There was no explanation for that. I had to just say I was clumsy. Well, so you never told them? No.

And my husband didn't know. And I'm not married to him anymore. But, and you can leave that in there. The point is she got to the secret.

But one day when Sharon was 29, she was on her way to her brother's house and she got turned around. So I called him from a payphone and I said, I can't find your house. She read in the names of the street signs. And he said, Sharon, you like two blocks from my house.

And I just started crying and I told him the story. He was just shocked. So he dragged you to the hospital and he saw some specialists. And they kept me in the hospital for like a week doing every kind of test you can imagine.

And it showed nothing. They basically told me it was psychological. Like it's all in your head? Yes.

And that you were the only one in the whole universe who had this problem. Yeah. I thought, OK, I must be a witch. Huh.

I mean, that's just that's a crazy story. OK, just to pull out for a bit. After we talk with Sharon, we ended up speaking with them. Well, if you've heard Radio Lab before, you probably know that voice.

Jonah Lehrer? No, let me ask you like a question. Jonah Lehrer. Yes, there you go.

Jonah is a science writer and an author. My last book was How We Decide. He knows a lot about the brain. And so we played him tape from the Sharon interview just to see what you think.

And he had an interesting take. Well, it's just one of these great windows into this talent we completely take for granted. And you realize this is such sophisticated software. There are so many different algorithms that are running that allow us to not get lost in the bathroom.

One way to think about the story, he says, is not why does Sharon get lost all the time, but why don't the rest of us? Exactly. And a lot of this is brand new science. So we're talking the last three, four, five years.

But in that time, he says scientists have just begun to figure out how brains make maps of our surroundings from moment to moment. They've identified at least four different types of cells that make these maps possible. Everything from play cells to grid cells to border cells. Wait, can we go through play cells?

Yeah, no, no, no. We'll slow down. But all these cells come together to give us these incredibly rich masses. This all began to make more sense to us when Jonas and I said, okay, let me do it this way.

I just took a trip into this office, but I'm sitting in a radio station. Let me do the same thing as I did in my brain. I got out of my car, I walked to the front of the building. So I open up the door and somehow, someway, my brain begins to make sense of the space.

First thing that happens, he says, is little cells in his head called grid cells. Come on, mind. Grid cells are pretty weird. I gotta be honest.

Before he's even taking a step into the building, these grid cells kind of like mappers or surveyors. They just lay on a grid. This grid is matrix over the hallway right in front of them. Unbeknownst to me, that grid is composed of equilateral triangles.

Triangle. Triangle. Yeah, it's pretty spooky. As I'm walking down the hallway, I pass from one triangle to the next.

My brain is keeping track of exactly which triangle I'm in. I pass by wall so some border cells go off. Avoid the concrete wall which just respond to border's, edges, physical limits. I look to my right and my head direction cells change, but then they change the back.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Head direction cell. So there's a head direction neuron, all the time when I'm facing, dead ahead. When I turn my head to the left, that neuron stops firing.

We have a new head direction neuron firing. Now I'm back to the dead head. I turn to the right, new head direction neuron firing. Dead head.

These cells keep you oriented so you know where you are in the grid. And now it's time to fill in the details. This is where things get really cool. Proceed down the corridor.

As I take a couple more steps, now my place cells are probably beginning to get acted. It's the I'm here cell. It's like for every landmark in the space, each body passes by, the brain will drop a little. In.

It's like an I'm here pin. Here at the coffee table. And in I'm here. At the pot of plant.

I'm here. At the door. In the studio. As I imagine myself walking from this little closet like space back to my car.

As I pass by the coffee table with the magazines. That place cell fires. Now I'm by the front door. That place cell fires.

Now I'm on the sidewalk. That place cell fires. Now I'm by my car. That place cell fires.

And when you put it all together, the place cells, the grid cells, the border cells, what you get. He says, just a symphony of electricity. Which somehow is translated for me. Into an idea of a space.

And this whole neural symphony? It mostly takes place in a particular part of the brain. The hippocampus. So if you want to just hazard a guess about Sharon.

She should get her hippocampus checked out. That's what you should do. I mean, you know, that's just a guess. Now getting back to that story.

Even though I was 29, I was an adult. I had children. The point which we left off. Sharon had gone to the hospital, gotten a bunch of tests.

And the doctors had told her. I needed to go see a psychiatrist. I felt like a freak. But then one day, years after that, I was watching some TV show.

Imagine standing a crowd. It was a newzy 2020 type thing about face blindness. People who can't recognize faces. And at the end of the show, the reporter mentions this website.

Sharon goes. She was curious. And when she gets there, this little window pops up that asks her. She wants to take a survey.

Well, I'll do it. And it was mostly questions about face recognition. But as I got deeper and deeper into the questionnaire, the questions started turning more to, have you ever experienced being in a place that should look familiar to you but suddenly does not. And I was like, oh my gosh, that's me.

And it asked for explanation. So I was just typing away and typing away. And eventually she meets the doctor who would finally dewitch her. My name is Giuseppe Yaria.

I'm a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Calgary. And do you have a strong sense of direction? I'm not a curious person. I'm not a gifted direction.

I'm like, you know, a guy. But Giuseppe had this idea that maybe, just like face blindness, there, there's a lot of things that could be such a thing as location blindness. So he asked Sharon to go online and play this game. It's like virtual reality.

Not like where you have to shoot people and find people. The screen would be showing you these landmarks, like a flower shop, a bar, a bank, and then eventually I needed to be able to say where things are with respect to one another. Well, nothing. Not even a guess for me.

And it actually made me physically ill. And then Giuseppe told her something. Before you, I'd met this woman. This lady was complaining about orientation.

And she also failed this test. So I brought her in. Had her play the game. In the scanner, in the MRI scanner.

And we were able to find activity all over the brain. Except in one little place. We were not able to detect an increased activity within the hippocampus. Which just so happens to be the home of Jonah's little guys.

Play cell, quarter cell, grid cells. That particular part of the brain, the hippocampus, just never developed. And at that point, that's one Giuseppe. The first time, told her, this thing has a name.

D-T-D for developmental, topographical. Disorientation. And that's not trivial. Because when something like this has a name, suddenly it's not your fault.

I felt like I was reborn. I keep telling him, you are my hero. You'll always be my hero. Have you ever met Sharon?

Have you ever met Sharon? I mean, face it. And we are supposed to meet now in this fall. What if you like me here and fall in love with her?

And then she gets lost and you rescue her and the sciences ruin, but you get married? I am already married. She's nevermind. But anyway, Giuseppe is there.

He's got a couple of patients. And he's wondering, how many other folks like this are out there? So he puts up a website. We said, okay, we are looking for people who have this specific symptoms.

One year later, we were basically dealing with 700 people. What? With the same issue? With the same issue.

Yeah. So he sets up an internet forum where they can all talk to each other? I'm the moderator. And now Sharon corresponds with DTD sufferers from all over the place.

There are others out there who experience the 90 degree rotation. Oh, what about the spinners though? Do you have you ever met a spinner? No.

No. Actually, I should get some water because if I don't get it. Oh, here. Well, there's one thing.

But then, a few months later, she did. Another woman named Sharon. My name is Sharon Mitchell. That last name is M-A-C-H-E-L.

Where I'm so three, Chyl. When this Sharon heard about the first Sharon, she says she bolted straight up. There is a woman in Colorado who has what I have. And it was such an emotional moment for me.

That she decided to fly to Colorado to meet Sharon Roseman. And they spent a day together. Alright, so let's just start with easy stuff and they spoke with reporter Dave Fender. Describe yesterday.

I mean, what was it like to get together yesterday? Yesterday was awesome. I got out of the car and we just gave each other a hug and it was, it was, it was a band that I've never experienced with anybody else in my life ever. We sat down right away in the hotel lobby and started to laugh.

We couldn't stop laughing. Everything we were telling our experiences right away and comparing notes, not even finishing our sentences. Now, we still don't know what's wrong with Sharon and Sharon and the others. We certainly don't know how to fix it.

But whereas before, Sharon and Sharon were lost and alone, now they're lost and together. This bond that we share. So in a way, it's like they're not really lost. Like we sat there probably for 15 minutes describing how we were going to navigate from this hotel to the shopping mall.

And we could see right out the window of the hotel. And we had to come up with some contingency plans. Yeah. So we had the GPS if we needed it.

Sharon had a map in her hands. If we needed it. We had street names. We were just hoping that at least one of us was there instead of being messed up.

And so we got there. There it is. There it is. We were most excited.

We were jumping up and down. It was really ridiculous if anybody saw us and they had no clue why we were so excited that we found Nordstrom. Big thanks to Molly Webster for producing that piece of this. For more information on anything you just heard or will here, go to radiolab.org and you can subscribe to our podcast there.

Hi, this is Sharon Rosen. Radio ad is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. I'm seeing public understanding of science and technology in the modern war.

This is your video from Calgary. More information about Sloan at www. I'm sorry I'm so late. I've been on the road.

I'm calling for my health funds. Radio ad is produced by WNYC distributed by NPR. WNYC's journalism and storytelling is heard by millions of passionate listeners. Sponsors of our program and gain our listeners attention and their respect.

Learn about how your organization can support WNYC and WNYC studios at sponsorship.wNYC.org. Hello, I'm Jan Abumran. Hi, I'm Robert Colewich. This is Radio Lab.

Today our program is Lost and Found. Approaching is going without GPS. Alright, well, you know, I think we're getting real close. Here driving into our next adventure is our producer, Tim Howard.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. So, Sorene and I took a trip. I need your picture ID. To Fort Monmouth, New Jersey.

For what? Fort Monmouth. Is that a military base? Yep.

We were going to this museum. They have on the base. To meet this woman, Mindy. Mindy Rose What's on the museum curator at US Army Communications.

She agreed to show us around to see what? Patience, Chad. Do you want to hear some stories? Absolutely.

Okay, here on display we have the war heroes. So she pointed to this one glass case, sort of like a memorial. Well, he was born in 1918. Died here at Fort Monmouth in 1937, so he lived about 20 years.

Served with the Army Expeditionary Forces. He was wounded and blinded in one eye carrying a very important message. What's all this on his face there? Looks like putty.

What's all this stuff on his nose? It's called crop and it's a natural growth. I think it's a calcium growth and some pigeons just get that. Did you just say pigeons?

You got it. A lot of them get it. There's another one, Mocker. That's a beautiful pigeon here.

Yeah, but he has one eye. Oh, wow. Wait a second, Tim. What's the story?

Why pigeons? Well, A, pigeons are awesome and B, there's a big question here, which is, but let me just start you off training wheels with a simple little story. On this is G.I. Joe, he's our hero pigeon.

But there's one pigeon named G.I. Joe. G.I. Joe's pretty cool.

Well, he looks like a totally ordinary pigeon. I wouldn't know that I'm standing foot away from a war hero. I think he's cute. He's got yellow legs.

Remember I told you about the legs, the feet? All right, so what's the story? Okay. So it's 1943.

It was a town. The British have just taken this little Italian town. The Cola of Vichia. Cola Vichia from the Germans.

The bad guys. They took it really fast and their American allies are about to bomb the town in 20 minutes. The radios are down. They can't get anybody back to the base and tell them to call it off.

How near bias the space? 20 miles away. And so they only really have one option. Let me guess.

No wait, just so you really get this. Yeah, bring it home. This bird is in a place that he's never been before. Whole way there for hours.

He's been in a dark box. He should be completely confused. He should be. And yet when they take him out and throw him in the air, like a cosmic sift court, he's pulled over mountains, lakes, forests, none of which he's ever seen before.

Right back to the army base where he lives. Just as the neck of time. The numbers are about to take off. He's credited with saving over 1000 British lives.

And they can hatch to G.I. Joe, carry the message through an artillery bombardment in Italy. And save units of the 56th of London Division. How the hell did he do that?

How did he know exactly where to go? Some of them returned with the message caps of hanging from their leg and their breast bones shot open and all that kind of stuff. But they would always fly back home. How?

That's your question? Yep. Hello. Hello there.

So I call this guy. This is Charlie Walcott. He's a heavy hitter in the vision world. Former director of the Cornell Lab of Hornithology.

My question is if G.I. Joe had never been to that town. How did he know how to get back home? Well, the first thing that G.I.

Joe needs to know is where... Wait, Tim, I'm sorry. I feel bad for saying this because it's your first piece for the show. But I mean, don't we know the answer to this?

What's the answer, John? Birds have a compass in their head. That's how they migrate. Jed, you dummy.

You're just not getting the degree of difficulty. I think about it this way. If I take you in a little boat and put you out in the middle of a large body of water, all you can see is water in every direction. Which way do you paddle to find New York City?

Are you asking me? Yeah. Can I have a compass in the scenario? Sure.

But that's not going to help you. Sure, Will. Just think about it. Which way are you going to paddle first?

Hmm. I don't know enough to say. Exactly. It depends a little bit on whether I've dumped you in the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, the Indian Ocean, or whatever.

You can't swim home if you don't know which direction home is. And you're saying this is what a pigeon does. You can throw it anywhere and it knows? That's my whole point.

If you were a pigeon, I wouldn't need to tell you anything. How did G.I. Joe figure out where he is with relation to home? That's the great question.

That is, okay. I'm with you now. And I'm sorry for interrupting you earlier. That's all right.

So how do they do it? Well, if you have a one sentence answer first, then that's a short interview. It's a very, very easy answer. We don't know.

But they have been doing a lot of crazy experiments on pigeons over the years, like 60 years now, to try and figure all this out. Like, well, let us count the ways. We have tried flying pigeons with frosted contact lenses. They put coils on their heads.

They put the pigeons head like a hat. They glued little brass weights to their backs. They put radio transmitters on them. Yes, indeed.

They followed pigeons and airplanes. The point is that it's a complex issue. And they have definitely not arrived at any consensus for how pigeons do this. They have theories?

Plenty of theories. Oh, yeah. For example, the Italians, Floriano Papi and his colleagues, and the Italians. Papi and his colleagues believed that when you take the pigeons out to the release point, they sample the odors on the way to the release point.

All the smells of the places that they pass. Right. Essentially, a series of old factory landmarks. You know, you go past the chocolate factory and the olive groves, the garlic plantation, or whatever.

Sounds like a beautiful place. And so when a pigeon is released, what it does is it sniffs the breeze and says, aha! Continue past garlic. Take a lift at chocolate.

This is the odor that came to me on the North Wind, and therefore I need to fly south in order to get home. But... Charlie's actually put this idea of the test. Now we anesthetized the pigeons, put them in a box, artificial air.

So they can't smell anything? And our rotating turntable, and transported them about 100 miles away. And when they got over being kind of car sick, they flew home just fine. So something else is going on here?

Yeah. And here's where we get to my personal favorite theory. Right? Forget about smell.

There are some researchers who think that the key to pigeon navigation is... You ready for this? Yeah. What is it?

Metal. Which is to say, if you go all the way down into the center of the earth, there's all this iron down there, churning. And as it's churning, it's throwing off this magnetism. It's flying through the earth, out in the space.

So imagine up there in the atmosphere, above the planet, there are all these lines that are wiggling. And as G.E.G.E. Joe is flying through the air, he's moving through these lines. Do you think he sees the lines?

Well, I can tell you that he might feel them because there are these little particles in his beak. Magnetite, magnetic iron particles. They're twitching. In some spots they twitch more, in some spots less.

And if you can measure various aspects of the magnetic field like its strength and its angle, you can tell where about you are. Do you think that's what's actually happening? I think it may be partly what's happening. I mean, Charlie says there's probably a lot of things going down.

And anytime you think you figured it out, the pigeon goes and messes you up. For example, he told me about this one place in New York. About 90 miles west of here, called Jersey Hill Fire Tower. If we take Cornell pigeons to Jersey Hill and let them go, they go random.

And so they are essentially lost. It is a Bermuda triangle for Cornell pigeons. Why would that be? That's sorry.

If we knew, I would tell you. Is it a magnetic thing? No. No.

There's nothing magnetically disturbed about it. Is it a sewage treatment capital? No. Hyperactive radio frequencies?

No, it's a hill surrounded by pine trees. It's just a hill. Does it make you wonder if there's a whole other system going on in a pigeon that we haven't even started to think about? Yes, of course.

And then you say, well, what could it possibly be? And after a long day of being out there with pigeons and releasing them and waiting for them to make up their mind and fly home and get the vanishing bearings. You come back and you open the loft and there they are, you know, all sitting on their little perches going, Goo, goo. You just want to grab one by the scruff of the neck and say, how do you do it?

They're so far, obviously. They haven't told us. One more thing. I didn't tell you about how they were monogamous.

The pigeon mind might be unknowable, but the pigeon heart is an open book. Yeah. Oh, Mindy said that with a lot of other birds. Roosters and chickens.

If you get them all together. They all go wild and party. One thing leads to another. They're jacuzzi, right?

Well, maybe they don't go on the jacuzzi. I don't know what they do in the jacuzzi. I'm not judging. Pigeons?

They would mate. And they would stay mated until death. Do they part? What you can do to make the pigeon fly home faster is you take the male out of his cage.

You put another male in there with his girl and of course he's going to get pissed off. His feathers are fluffing and who is the stray male in my cage and all this kind of stuff. Drive him away. He flies back so fast to clean house.

Yes, this is called the widowhood method and yes, it is a powerful motivator. Yeah, they miss the misses. So, who knows how he did it. But what may have propelled GI Joe through those dark and war-torn skies was jealous rage.

Go to bed. Go to bed. You go, G.I. Joe.

You go get that young boy. You go, G.I. Joe. And if you have to save a thousand lives in the meantime, okay, just do it.

Pretty good. Pretty good. Those pigeons. But I think we can go one more round for the human being and our natural ability to navigate.

I met a woman named Leera Borintzitsky. She's in the psychology department at Stanford University. She studies languages and she's found that some languages have a curiously, I don't know how to put this, a curiously pigeon-like power. No, seriously.

There are languages that don't rely heavily on words like left and right and some languages actually don't have those words at all. In the culture, I got to spend some time in. They rely on North-South East-West. Oh, I mean, like, instead of taking a left at the biscuit factory, I'm going to hang in East.

More so than that, you would say things like, there's an ant on your southwest leg or move your cup to the northwest a little bit. Where are we talking about, by the way? Yeah, you should back up. This story is too good.

You should start at the end. Where are we in the world right now? This is a community called Pumphorau in Cape York in Australia. Pumphorau.

When was this? This was a few years ago, I guess 2006. There, the way you say hello in Pumphorau is you say, which way are you going? So in English you say, how are you?

Fine. In Pumphorau you say, which way are you going? And the answer must be something like, North-North East in the Middle Distance, how about you? What?

If you're a little bit more interested in each person that says, hi to you, you have to report your heading direction to them. So you literally can't get past hello in this language without knowing which way you're facing. And you said, North and Northwest in the Middle direction, is it really that precise? It's actually more precise than that.

There are 80 some different choices. Whoa. Yeah, it was socially very awkward. People thought I was quite dim because I wasn't oriented and I didn't know exactly which way it was all the time.

You can ask a five-year-old there. Can you point northeast and point without hesitation? If you ask a Stanford professor or a Harvard professor to do the same thing, they have no idea. But this is something that I've...

What if you were indoors? What if you were in a shelter? Could they still do it? Yep.

They keep track of directions even when they're indoors. How? Without windows? You'd pay attention.

You'd just have to pay attention. And I think what's really striking about the discovery of languages like this and folks like this is they have an ability that we call dead reckoning. And it's an ability to, you know, after any kind of circuitous path to turn around and head straight back home. That ability we thought was beyond human capacity.

We had observed it in ants and we had observed it in birds. But there was always some other explanation. Like birds have magnets in their beaks and ants or counting steps. You know, there's some kind of extra thing that they were doing.

Now there's 7,000 languages in the world about a third of the world's languages have this property. Not a third of the world's speakers, but a third of the world's languages. And these are not folks that have magnets or special ant superpowers. They're using the same cognitive system that we're using.

They're just using it differently. They're paying attention to something that we normally don't pay attention to. But interestingly, Lyra says there was a moment, a very particular moment when she sort of slipped into attention. Yeah.

So I had this interesting experience and I was there. So after about a week of being there, I was, people were constantly pointing to locations and I was constantly trying to stay oriented. And after about a week, I was walking along, I was kind of trudging through the sand. It was hot and I was thinking about whether I was wasting my time there or not.

I wasn't sure if the study was going to work out. And all of a sudden I noticed that in my head, there was this extra little, it seemed almost like a window, like an video game. There was like a little console. And then that console was a bird's eye view of the landscape that I was walking on.

And I was a little red dot that was traversing out landscape. No kidding. And you just become a pillow or whatever they're called. And I thought, wow, that's really cool.

That makes it so much easier if you have that little extra module. And all of a sudden is the correct word. Has that happened all of a sudden? Yeah.

I just saw it. It was just there. And then I kind of shyly shared this with someone. I said, you know this weird thing happened.

I was walking along and I got this, I had this view in my mind. And they looked at me kind of strangely and said, well, of course, how would you do it? That's exactly. Of course you have a bird's eye view and you keep track of your location from a bird's eye view.

Of course you do. I have that all the time. No, you don't. No, I don't.

I don't mean that. There's a voice right there that's been joining us from time to time. We should explain that as Karen Jacobson. And I'm also known as the GPIS girl.

She was nice enough to agree to read some things that we could use in our stories. That's what we've been hearing. Okay. Well, shall we start with the script that I have in front of you?

Yeah, I'll do that. Okay. Please enter your address. Wow.

Well that's amazing. It sounds like you've gone into the machine somehow. That's what I worked out out of bottle bath. Oh, I did!

This is Jim Donahue from Fort Worth, Texas. Regular Ed is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alpha Peace Sloan Foundation enhancing public understanding of science and technology in a modern world. More information about Sloan at www.slown.org. Whether it's news from around the world or the latest from your neighborhood, New Yorkers engage with WNYC studios for the information and connection they can only get from our programming.

Be a part of that conversation through your business's support. Learn more at sponsorship.wnyc.org Hey, I'm Chad Abumran. I'm Robert Colbridge. This is Radio Lab today.

On this program we are calling it... Lost and Found. That's right. We have stories of getting lost.

And of course getting found. Now I think we're gonna make a little adjustment here. Recalculating... Shift gears.

Approaching emotional lift turn. Thank God. I don't know how to turn it. I'll give it to me.

This next story is a very different kind of Lost and Found. Sort of a love story. If you can tell us your name. Oh.

Here's the guy. My name is Alan Lundgaard. Do you want to even say anything more than that? I don't know.

Is this for like a credit? No, I'll tell you. Sometimes we have to let people introduce themselves. Oh.

I don't know. I don't have a title. Okay. All right.

So that's Alan. The girl Emily will meet her a bit later for reasons it will become clear. The story begins on a fall day in Brooklyn. So the day in question, I guess, was the morning of October 8th.

They're both living in this one room loft in Brooklyn. And we woke up in, you know, both 21. Went about her daily routine and prepared to go. He was in art school.

She was taking some time off from art school to work for a local artist. So she would take the bike and I would take the train. What was the morning like? It was a beautiful day.

It was, you know, the sun was low in the sky. So there were long shadows. I strapped on her helmet and adjusted it. Took her bike out for her.

We kissed each other goodbye and said I love you. And I watched her ride down the street. And this early morning then, you know, and I went down into the subway. Six hours later, he's working in the studio doing some sculpture.