Words

Wait, you're listening to Radio Lab from WNYC. See you. And NPR. Okay, let us begin with an unusual encounter which comes from this lady.

I'm Susan Schaller and where do you want me to start? Her story starts abruptly. I was indeed riding a bicycle to high school and catering for KIDME. Oh, yeah, yeah.

And I was put in the hospital with a concussion. I was 17 years old and the concussion was bad enough that it slowed my brain enough that I couldn't read. And so naturally I couldn't go to school. Which sucked for her.

At 17 I was very much a nerd and I was bored out of my mind. So imagine students sitting there in the hospital one day, one of her friends. A friend of mine who was just a little older and had graduated a semester before me, suggested going to the nearby university and crashing classes. Why would you go, if your brain was working slowly, why wouldn't you go sitting?

I couldn't read but I could listen and I could hear and the person was saying, oh, it's a lot better than high school. And so one day she was at this college. She was just kind of wandering down a random hallway. And I opened the first door on the left.

That was the accident that changed my whole life, just picking that door. At the front of the room there was this older guy who was thin, he was bald, and he was tracing shapes in the air with his hands. It was as if there were pictures being painted in the air and then they immediately disappeared. Then another picture appeared.

I was mesmerized. And the professor was signing. This class was actually one of the first classes to teach sign at a regular hearing university. I had also walked into history but didn't know it.

Fast forward five years, Susan now is fluent in sign. She moves to Los Angeles. It's the late 1970s. And I was snatched and put into interpreter training programs because at that time there were very, very few interpreters.

And I found myself in a classroom. In a community college. In something called a reading skills class. So she walks into the class.

She's kids all over the classroom, making big, excited gestures one to the other. And at the door I saw this man holding himself. Kind of off by himself. Making his own straight jacket.

She went over to the instructor and she pointed at the guy and she was that guy over there. And the instructor said, well, he was born to have his uncle. He has this kind of insistent uncle who brings him here every day. We don't know exactly what to do with him though.

And what did this guy look like? He was a beautiful, well now I know. I don't know if I would have had that in my head at the time. But a beautiful looking Mayan.

You know, high cheekbones and black hair, black eyes. And something about his eyes caught her attention. He was studying mouse. And I walked up to him and said, hello, my name is Susan.

And this is where things start to get a little weird. He looks at her and instead of signing his name, whatever it was. He brings up his hands. It signs right back to her.

Hello, my name is Susan. Susan, like Shakespeare does not know. I am Susan. And he responds, no, no, I am Susan.

Everything you said he tried to say? Exactly. I call it visual echolalia. Echolalia.

Echolalia. And I remember thinking, why is he doing this? I mean, Susan, did he look like he had some kind of disability or? He was intelligent.

I wouldn't have been able to answer if you had asked me. How can you see intelligence? But you can actually see intelligence in people's eyes. He was just missing something.

To copy me meant that he didn't really know what I was doing. And that's when it occurred to me. This man doesn't have language. Wait, how old was this guy?

He was 27 years old. And in all that time, no one had taught him sign language or anything? Well, he didn't know he was deaf. He was born deaf.

He didn't know there was sound. Really? 27 years. No idea that there was sound.

You could see the mouse moving. You could see people responding. He thought we figured all the stuff out visually. And he thought, I must be stupid.

And so here's the question for our hour. This is Radio Lab. I'm Jan Applerod. I'm Robert Colich.

Words. What do words do for us? Are they necessary? Can you live without them?

Can you dream without them? Can you? Can you swim without them? No, no, no, no.

Back to the story. So this man that Susan met, we don't actually know his real name, but when she wrote about him in her book, a man without words, she called him Ildafonso. There they are, sitting in the classroom. She's right there with him.

Of course she's wondering. What have you been doing for 27 years? So she thinks, let me see if I can teach him some just basic sign language. In an interesting case, she takes out a book and makes a sign.

But the sign for book, it looks like opening up a book. So he thought I was ordering him to open a book. So he had the book and he opened it. He thought I was asking him to do something.

It was very difficult. If I gave him the sign for standing up, he thought I wanted him to stand up. And so I couldn't have a conversation with him. And it was the most frustrating thing I have ever done in my life.

Wait a second, how long did this go on for? Well, weeks. It was weeks. Often times when we say goodbye, you're just laughing.

You couldn't really say goodbye. I really believed that we wouldn't see each other again. And I was often times very surprised when he would be sitting there at the table. And I think sometimes he looked surprised that I showed up.

But after a couple of weeks of him constantly miming, copying me. She had an idea. Perhaps it's just possible that if I died tomorrow, I would have had only one really, really good thought in my life. And this is it.

I thought I'm going to ignore him. I taught an invisible student. I stopped talking to him and I stopped having eye contact. And I set up an empty chair.

And then she says she would hold up to this empty chair, a picture of a cat. And I was trying to explain to this invisible student that this creature, a cat, so I'd be miming a cat and petting a cat. And then I signed the sign for cat. Then she would hop to the other seat, the invisible student seat, pretend to get it.

Oh, I know my facial expression. I want to get it. So you're playing all the parts. You're both the teacher and the invisible student.

That's right. That's right. Doing all these crazy things. And he just watched me.

He stopped copying her, which was good. But I'd do this over and over and over for days and days and days. And she says he just didn't get it. He looked bored a lot of times.

But one day in the middle of one of these endless pretend student exercises. Something happened. How did the corner of her eye, she sees him shift his body? And he looked, it's interesting how his body was upright and he looked like something was about to happen.

He looked around the room. This is a 27 year old man and he looks around the room as if he had just landed from Mars and it's the first time he ever saw anything. Something was about to happen. His eyes grew wider.

She says, and then wider. And then he stops his hands on the table. Oh, everything has a name. And he looks at me in this demanding way.

And I sign table. And he points to the door and I sign door. And he points to the clock and he points to me and I sign Susan. And then he started crying.

He just collapsed and he started crying. What is it that happens in human beings when we get symbols and we start trading symbols? It changes our thinking. It changes our ideas.

It's no longer the thing a table that we eat on. But there's something about the symbol table that makes the table look different. Ildefonso was in love. He was in love.

Everything has a name. And for the first couple weeks he had this list of names that kept growing and growing. Paper, Eagle, Clock, Green. I got copying words for him.

Cats are the kind of hat. Carnal. They gave him the sign for door. Door.

The name would... Door. White D O R. Serpent.

And he folded this paper. Paper. As if. Treasure.

Treasure. Treasure. And he would pull it out every day and he would lie in. Carefully unfold it.

Apple do J. Thinking. Please. Partially.

I'd be on the table. Bird. Wall. The name.

The red. Right. Cow. The black.

The black. The red. The black. The red.

The red. The red. The red. The red.

The red. The red. The red. The red.

The red. The red. The red. The red.

A red. word for table. Suddenly the table, like this table right here, looks different. Like it somehow the word changes the world in some fundamental way.

Now I don't know if that's true about the table thing, but consider what happens when you put words together. Okay, when you link them up. Good. Okay.

So I want to tell you about this experiment. Fantastic. I learned about it from a fellow I talk to you sometimes. Charles Fernihoe, I'm a psychologist at Durham University in the UK.

Fernihoe. And when I first read about this experiment in Charles' book, it blew my mind out of my nose and onto the book. A little messy. I never want to be with you in a library.

Takes a little journey to get to the mind-blowing part. But luckily, I'll let Charles explain it. The whole thing happens in a room. Yeah, you're put into this room, which is completely white.

The walls are white. The ceiling is white. So it's all white? All white.

Everything's white. And you can tell where you are to the extent that some of the walls are longer than others. So when you're left-hand-spangled, it's what you're in to go. Yeah, it's a rectangular room.

Are you with me so far? I'm with you so far. Okay, just to give you a sense of the baseline conditions here, imagine you were a rat in this room. Okay.

And somebody comes along and hides an object in one corner of the room. What? It can be anything ever rat to use food. Like a biscuit or something?

Yeah. Yeah. So you don't know where you are. You don't know which direction you're facing it.

And then they say, right now, go find the biscuit. So if you do this with a rat, what will happen is it'll say, all right, let me go find the biscuit. And it will go to one corner, which looks right. But of course, the room also looks like that if you turn around to 180 degrees and face exactly the opposite direction.

Because it's a rectangle. So they get it right about 50% of the time. We go to the corner, there's a rectangle, just two of them are identical. Yeah.

All right, so we got on with this because I'm well aware of a rectangle. I just needed them to get that out of the way. Okay. And they turned to blue.

So imagine this scenario, you're in this room. We've got these four white walls, or rather three white walls. One of them is blue. Right.

Well, now you're not confused anymore. You can relate everything to the blue wall. You can be like, oh, the corner with the biscuit was left of the blue wall or right of the blue wall. You now have the blue wall as a navigational clue.

Yes. That makes sense. We would all be able to do that. That's not going to be difficult for us.

All right. We got to the good part yet. It's going to be turns out though. The rats, he says.

They're still scoring 50-50. What? It's as if they can't take any notice of the blue wall. They're only finding the biscuit 50% of the time.

Wait a second. Can a rat see color? Yeah. Rats can do color.

They do color pretty well. They also do left, right? Just fine. But what they can't do is connect those two bits of information together.

In other words, they can only do left. That they can do blue. They can do blue, but they're both separate. They can't do left of blue.

These different kinds of knowledge can't talk to each other. How does anyone know that? I mean, who would rats have been interviewed for this survey? What?

David, they infer this based on studying the rats. So the rat doesn't have what? Doesn't have the neurons? Doesn't have the what does he doesn't have?

The rat can't do it. I don't know. I'm going to make it weird right now. Neither can some humans.

I spent the first 10 or 15 years of my scientific life studying creatures who don't talk yet. That's Elizabeth Belk. She's a psychologist at Harvard. Quite famous for her work with...

Kai. As you can hear. Babies, and I was interested in their abilities and abilities and abilities of other animals. We're going to go to the monkey room.

So, she began the baby development lab which is filled with toys and on any given day, five or six really timed kids. Who this? Mom and they can't. Toddlers too?

How old are you? Three and a half. F, big time. So at a certain point, Elizabeth Spelke decided to build a version of the white room in this lab, because she wondered if rats have so much trouble connecting the idea of left to blue.

What about, maybe humans? A self-respecting 18-month-old human child. We'll succeed in putting them together. But no.

What we find is that children behave just like the rats. Just like the rats. Just like the rats. Just like the rats are almost like the rats.

Well, we don't test them with food, we don't test them with digging, so in superficial ways, superficial features of the studies are different. But she says kids, like the rats cannot connect the idea of left to the idea of blue. They just can't do it. And they can't do it.

They can't do it at two. They can't do it at three. Four, five. And we find that those children start performing like adults around six years of age.

Now I'm interested. Good. Something happens at the ripe old age of six. It is shockingly late, right?

Yeah. Well, something happens at the age of six that suddenly allows the kid to connect concepts like left to concepts like blue. And the question is what? What happens?

Several people have suggested that one candidate for a process that's doing this is language. What do you mean is the language kids are talking or certainly at three, four, five, and six, they're talking like a, like a, too much. So not what they haven't yet started to use is spatial language and particularly the kinds of spatial language that adults would use in this situation to describe what they're doing. And somewhere around the age of six they start to use phrases like left of the blue wall.

And those aren't just words that come out of the child's mouth. Liz thinks that inside the child's brain, what that phrase does is link these concepts together. Plink. And at that moment, left of the blue wall.

The child leaves the rats behind. Like, okay. She doesn't think that kids have that. What, let me put it to you a different way.

Okay. And this is my best understanding of what she thinks. Their basic idea is that a child's brain begins as a series of islands. And on one island, we over here in the brain, you've got, say, color.

We call that the blue island. That's the part of you that perceives the color blue. We only have the other brain. You've got the part of you that perceives spatial stuff.

Like left. The third object's like wall. These things are there from the beginning. But they're separate.

Then you get to where it's left, blue wall. And then the child for the first time comes upon the phrase left of the blue wall. In that moment, all the islands come together. It is literally the phrase itself.

She says that creates that internal connection. Everybody's always talked about how language is this incredible tool for communication. It allows us to exchange information with other people so much more richly and effectively than other animals can. But language also seems to me to serve as a mechanism of communication between different systems within a single mind.

There you go. Wouldn't it be just as possible? Just listen to me here. The kid's brain is developing some new connections and what follows the end follows from the changes in the brain.

So the words are like an after. After. After a fact. Yeah, well that's a good.

No. The experimenter is actually accounted for that. What the experimenters did next is that they thought, okay, if language is adding this extra element, let's try and knock it out. How would you do that?

Would you like to shoot something into their brain that kills the language part or something? It's much imploding it and a much more humane thing that you can do. What we did is put adults in the room. And then she says she gave them an iPod.

They've got headphones on. Playing through those headphones as someone talking. Yep. And their job while they're in the room is to just repeat what the person is saying.

Continuously listening to speech and repeating it the whole time they were in there. It's actually a really hard thing to do. If you've ever tried shadowing somebody speaking. Can we try it?

You go. And I'll shadow you. Okay, John. I'm going to start speaking now.

I'm going to say it right back to you. Exactly. That's really hard. It is hard.

Yeah. And what that does is it knocks out your capacity to use language for yourself. Basically battering the words out of the adult's head. Why are they doing this again?

Well, they want to see. Like if you blast the words out of somebody's head. What would happen? Can they find the biscuit?

Will they be able to form that simple thought left of the blue wall or will they be like the rats? You can't. And we actually got very dramatic results. They went right back to not the rats.

Wow. Yeah. So Charles, what I'm wondering is if language allows you to construct a thought that is so basic as the biscuit is left of the wall, what is thought without language? Well, I don't think it's very much at all.

What do you mean? I'm going to put it in a different way. And this involves making quite a controversial statement. I don't think very young children do think.

Like think period? Was there a period of the amount of sense? I don't think they think in the way that I want to call thinking, which is a bit of a cheat. But let me say what I mean by thinking.

Okay. If you reflect on your own experience, if you think about what's going on inside your head as you're just walking to work or sitting on a subway train. Much of what's going on in your head at that point is actually verbal. I'm going to suggest that the central thread of all that is actually language.

It's a stream of inner speech. That's what most of us think of as thinking. Well, on the other hand, what I'm most aware of when I'm reflecting is the stuff that I can't put into words. I think that he's exaggerating the role of language here.

Yes. This all really hinges on how you would define thinking. Yes. And let's say take a musician.

Like I'll give you my example, Bill Evans. Here is a form of thought that carries you through a definite sequence of the word. A definite sequence of phrases, feelings, emotions, changes. And there are no words.

But there's something that we get access to when we gain a full natural language that we can use not only to communicate with other people, but with ourselves. Two heroes. Test test you. Test test test test.

Language is fundamentally a combinatorial system. As we head up the steps, where is this? We're going to Columbia University. See, we got interested in the last thing that Liz Belkey said about language being a combinatorial thing.

System. Right. And that led us to Columbia. You have words now.

You have words in combination now. Now you can play with the combination. And that is here. Just that's really good.

It just that's really good. It just that's really good. Opens up. A kind of infinity.

Head to Fort Now is the total fuels, hardly trip with a lot of fathers, mothers, daughters, sons, baked in and pasted with the Parching Streets, they lend a tearness and a light to their violins. This is Shakespeare. When I sat in middle school and they gave us Shakespeare, roasted in a wrath and fire, and thus or sized it with coagulate gold. I was completely confused and I felt stupid.

That's just to introduce yourself first. This is James Shapiro. He is a Shakespeare scholar, obviously. At Columbia University where I've taught for 25 years.

And one reason he says that Shakespeare can be confusing is that often Shakespeare behaved not so much like a writer, but more like a chemist combining elements. He's taking words and he's shoving them together, smashing them together, if you will, combining. Sometimes these words experiment, they didn't go so well. The Prince's Orgulus.

Orgulus has not stopped. That doesn't mean... What does it mean? You got me?

I mean, I shouldn't know. But don't we need to just add a little prefix on this. There's so many words that we're now familiar with, unnerved. You know, we don't know what that means.

But nobody had heard unnerved, unaware, uncomfortable. He made up uncomfortable? He was the first to use that word. On a stage.

Right. Unearthly. Unhand. Undress.

Uneducated. Ungarden. Unmitigated. Unpublished.

Unsolicited. Unsued. Unclogged. Unchanging.

Unreal. He made up unreal. He's the first to use it in print on stage. What an audience that time I've understood with the un-prefix meant?

Not real. I think it takes you a split second. Unreal. To kind of put that on.

On the real. But then suddenly you've got this new concept that there's something real, but none. He's taking words that ordinarily are not stuck together. Things like madcap, ladlebird, shoving them together.

Eye drops to achieve a kind of atomic power. Eye sore. Eye ball. He did eyeball?

Yes. That's hard to understand how that... It seems like it's always been there. If you ask me what his greatest gift is, he's putting them together into phrases that have stuck in our heads.

So truth will out. Truth will out. What's done is done. I could go on and on.

You want to go on and on? Crack of doom. My favorite, dead as a doornail. A dish fit for the gods.

All will have his day. Fanged hearted, fools paradise. Forever and a day for gone conclusion. The game is a foot game is up.

Greek to me. In a pickle. In my heart of hearts. In my mind's eyes.

Kill. With kindness. Believe it or not. Knock knock.

Who's there? Oh! The stuff with the stitches. Love is blind.

What the dickens. All's well and ends well. Something wicked this way comes. And a sorry sight.

Wow. That's a chance. That's pretty fantastic. How did he create phrases that stick in the mind?

Then make it seem as if they always existed. Yeah. You're taking out a book. I think I have a passage here.

That is maybe the biggest book I've ever seen. Nonsense. It was at least 3,000 pages. Shakespeare does write a lot about process.

But there are one or two places where he does. In a poem called Lucrice. In which a woman is raped. Lucrice is raped.

And she has to write a letter to her husband explaining what happened to her. And she's struggling to find the words in which to do this. And finally she picks up the pen. And it shows.

She prepares to write. First hovering over the paper with a quill. Conceit and grief and eager combat fight. What wit sets down is blotted straight with a whale.

This too curious. Good. This one at the nail. Much like oppressive people at a door.

Wrong her inventions. Which shall go before. I'll read that couple again. Much like oppressive people at a door.

Throng her inventions. Which shall go before. If you want to extrapolate from this something that Shakespeare might have from self experience. You'll have a situation with all these ideas oppressing.

It's like a throng of them. Who's getting through that doorway first? It's a little bit maybe like that experience you might have at a nightmare in New York club. Where you've got like thousands of people in a tiny space and everyone's trying to push their way out.

And I'm like, jot, let me do the door. Get out of my way. It's just like this. Of images.

Of sounds, conceits, thoughts, ideas. And they are providing the pressure that's needed to produce the word. You know what? What?

This makes sense to me. This interpretation. And not just for Shakespeare, we'd be for anybody. I don't think the guy we met at the beginning, Ildefonso.

Who'd you just learn words for the first time? Yeah, I mean as you move through the world, if you're sensitive at all and you're observant, you're gonna get filled up with all of these things which you have to express but can't until you get those words. Then boom, the door opens. And thanks to James Shapiro, professor at Columbia University, whose newest book is, Contested Will, who wrote Shakespeare?

Also thanks to our kids, Louisa Krasnau, Stella Storey and Isaiah Harrison, and also thanks to the moms at Brockhamen, Theresa Tripoli, Carrie Donohue and Patricia Staric. Hello, Susan Fowler. Radio Lab is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Charles Berryhead.

This week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, Steve Kerr, one of the best coaches in the NBA, and certainly one of the most outspoken. Calling the president of Bofu, I kind of regret that, even though I felt it in my heart, because I'm representing a large group of people, not only for our organization but our fans too. Steve Kerr joins us next time on the New Yorker Radio Hour from the WNYC. Listen, wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Jada Boomeran. I'm Robert Krollich. This is Radio Lab. This hour.

Oh, that's a lot of words. A lot of words. So once words enter your head, once they tickle in there, and we just explain how that happens. Sort of.

Then they're always there. I know. What if they're not? What would happen if that's wrong that isn't your head?

What if all of that stuff, whatever's in your head, suddenly went... Got yanked right out of your head. What would be left? Well, this got us thinking about a very famous talk.

After one of the TED conferences. I grew up to study the brain. A talk given by a neuroanonymous named Jill Bolty. Is it Bolty or Bolty?

Bolty Taylor. Yeah. And all you really need to know is that one morning in December of 1996, Dr. Taylor had a...

I woke up to a pounding pain behind my left eye. And it was the kind of pain, caustic pain that you get when you bite into ice cream. And it just gripped me. And then it released me.

And it was very unusual for me to ever experience any kind of pain. So I thought, okay, I'll just start my normal routine. So I got up and I jumped onto my cardiac lighter, which is a full body, full exercise machine. And I'm jamming away on this thing.

And I'm realizing that my hands look like primitive claws grasping onto the bar. And I thought, whoa, I'm a weird looking thing. So I get off the machine. And I'm standing in my bathroom getting ready to step into the shower.

And then I lost my balance and I'm propped up against the wall. And I'm asking myself, what is wrong with me? What is going on? And in that moment my right arm went totally paralyzed by my side.

In fact, a blood vessel in the left hemisphere of Jill's brain had popped. And that part of her brain was starting to shut down. And it was the shutdown that really caught her attention. In that moment, my brain chatter went totally silent.

Just like someone took a remote control and pushed the mute button. So here I am in this space and my job and any stress related to my job, it was gone. And I felt lighter in my body. And then all of a sudden I left hemisphere, comes back online and it says to me, Hey, I'm having a stroke.

We got to get some help. But I'm going, oh, I got a problem. I got a problem. So I was like, OK, OK, I got a problem.

But then I immediately drifted right back out. And I affectionately refer to this space as La La Land. But I'm just watching my brain become more and more incapable of functioning. That is Jill Bokey Taylor herself.

Hi, Robert. We actually got her into a studio. Hello, Jan. Hello.

Because I want to ask her some questions about that moment when her inner voices went away. So let's not talk about brain chatter for a moment. In the story that we've told so far, you're still asking yourself questions. Now, did that stop?

On the morning of the stroke, I was doing this wafting dance between the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere. So language would come back on. But once I got to the emergency room and I passed out when I woke later that afternoon, I had absolutely no language. Did you know your name?

No. Did you know your address? No. Did you know about your summer from 1983?

No. You know, like my mom is so excited. I didn't know any of them. I didn't know any of that.

But imagine she's lying in her bed. Her head is shaved, wrapped in bandages. She's had hours of brain surgery. She's got tubes coming out of her mouth.

She's lost her career. She's lost her language. I lost all my memories. And yet, she says, sitting there in that suddenly wordless space.

I had found a piece inside of myself that I had not known before. I had pure silence inside of my mind. Pure silence? Pure silence?

Pure silence. You know, not that little voice that, you know, you wake up in the morning and the first thing your brain says is, oh, man, the sun is shining. Well, imagine that you don't hear that little voice saying, man, the sun is shining. And you just experience the sun and the shining.

Is this the absence of reflection of any kind? Is it just sensual intake and period? No, it's exactly what it was. It was all of the present moment.

Did you have thoughts? I had joy. I just had joy. I had this magnificent experience of this collection of these beautiful cells.

I'm organic. I'm this organic entity. You have a dead head period by any chance. You know, I missed that by a few years.

But I get a lot of that. And the other thing that she told us is that lying in that bed with outwards, she says she felt connected to things, to everything in a way that she never had before. Oh, yeah. I lost all definition of myself in relationship to everything in the external world.

I mean, like you couldn't figure out where you ended? How much of that was about language? A little part? A lot?

I mean... Well, I would say it was huge. Language is an ongoing information processing. It's the constant reminder.

I am. This is my name. This is all the data related to me. These are my likes and my dislikes.

These are my beliefs. I am an individual. I am a single. I'm a solid.

I'm separate from you. No, as fruity as this may sound, to print all this on language, we have run into this idea before. A couple of seasons ago, Paul Brock's remember him. Yeah, neuropsychologist.

He told me that there is a theory out there, which he believes. Actually that all a person is in the end. Like all the person who have a person, the I, or the you of a person. All that is in the end is...

Story. Story you tell yourself. What we normally think of when we think about ourselves is really a story. It's the story of what's happened at that body at the time.

I did not have that portion of my language center that tells a story. Me, Jill, Bultitaylor, Kleinman, Harvard, Ladder, through language. Loves dissection, cutting up thing. That language was gone.

I got to essentially become an infant. Again. This is the problem here. What do you mean?

When you drop out of the inus of yourself or the story of yourself, then you are left. She says at peace, I could argue that that's just stranded. That's stranded in the sunshine with the wind in the now. But I mean, it's not like she stayed there.

That's true. It wouldn't be a dog to her if she had. And as she started to recover, she ran into something kind of interesting, which sounded to me sort of like what maybe the rats and the babies go through in the white room. She would have these disparate thoughts and then stall out.

Like she couldn't bring them together. Yeah. When people would speak to me, I remembered in pictures. So if somebody would ask me, who's the president of the United States of America, this is a huge question.

So for the next several hours, I'd be pondering president, president, president. What's the president? And then I would get a picture in my mind of a president as a leader. It was actually, it still flashes into my mind.

It's a picture of a silhouette of a male. A presidential profile. Like maybe the idea of a president. So that was a president.

And then I had to figure out a United States. And so eventually I come up with this map in my mind, this picture of the United States. Like the line drawing. So now she's got this map.

She's got this silhouette of a guy. And she said, after hours. President, United States, President, United States. And it's like, oh my God.