Radiolab - A 4-Track Mind

Episode Date: December 8, 2023

In this short episode, first aired in 2011, a neurologist issues a dare to a ragtime piano player and a famous conductor. When the two men face off in an fMRI machine, the challenge is so unimaginably difficult that one man instantly gives up. But the other achieves a musical feat that ought to be impossible. Reporter Jessica Benko went to Michigan to visit Bob Milne, one of the best ragtime piano players in the world, and a preternaturally talented musician. Usually, Bob sticks to playing piano for small groups of ragtime enthusiasts, but he recently caught the attention of Penn State neuroscientist Kerstin Betterman, who had heard that Bob had a rare talent: He can play technically challenging pieces of music on demand while carrying on a conversation and cracking jokes. According to Kerstin, our brains just aren't wired for that. So she decided to investigate Bob's brain, and along the way she discovered that Bob has an even more amazing ability ... one that we could hardly believe and science can't explain. Our newsletter comes out every Wednesday. It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [e-mail]. Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Hey, it's Latif. We've got an oldie but a goodie today from 2011. This episode, and I mean, I can say this because I had nothing to do with making it, it pulls off one of the most difficult and satisfying things. A story, really a story in any medium can do, which is that it stretches your conception of what a human being is capable of. And besides being just a jaw-dropping portrait of a human with a brain, it also just makes you wonder what obscure superpowers we are all just walking around with, totally oblivious that they are even superpowers.

Anyway, if you haven't heard of it before, I'm jealous of you. If you have completely holds up, even 10 plus years later, this is 4-track mind. Enjoy. Yeah, wait, wait, you're listening to Radio Lab. radio from W and wife Why No, I won't be so bad. Oh, do you should we do that now? Yep. Hey, I'm chat album rod. This is radio lab Yes, we yes, it is no, we're doing the introduction. Oh Radio Lab? Yes, yes it is. No, we're doing the introduction.

Oh, ready, here we go. Let's do it for real. Hey, I'm Chad Abumrod. I'm Robert Crowley. This is Radio Lab, and today on the podcast we're gonna tell you about a guy who hears music in a way that is just extraordinary. Yeah.

And painful. And just thinking about this story makes me hurt. That's Jessica Benco, she's a reporter, and she's the one who initially told me the story. So a little while ago I went up to visit this guy. Bob Mill. Bob is nice to see you. Excuse my snowy feet here. And he lives in a tiny town in Michigan with his wife Linda. And who is he? He's an amazing piano player. Linda. And who is he? He's an amazing piano player. The Library of Congress actually called him a national treasure. He's had this special relationship with

music ever since he was a boy. Did you grow up with any other instruments inside the house other than the piano or was that what you started out of? Well, I am. My mother made me take piano lessons and I hated it. I didn't like the sound of minor keys and the piano teachers had me playing a recital in which there was a shubber to minor key piece in it. So on the recital they played it in major. And everyone thought that was a travesty. These days though his main music isn't so much suburb. It's actually ragtime is that oftentimes the player is actually playing two different rhythms at the same time, one with the left hand, one with the right hand. And then he puts the rhythm some three in the right hand. The thing about Bob is he can do this like times a thousand.

Oh. What does that even mean? Well let me back up. I first heard about Bob from a neurologist named Kirsten Bederman, who is now at Penn State. The university. First time I heard about Bob Millen was who friends. Kirsten heard about Bob from a colleague who'd seen him play for an audience. Well I might just take a tune like a... He was actually playing multiple rhythms with his two different hands, and switching back

and forth between different pieces of music and carrying on a conversation at the same time. You can look up videos of Bob on YouTube, and you can see him performing and throwing out jokes, but at times you'll see him carry on a full conversation while playing. From the perspective of a neurologist, this is actually really hard, because the part of your brain that should be engaged

in playing a piece of music that complicated should also be engaged in having a conversation. The talking part and the playing part of the same part? They have the same part in most of us. For most people, that sort of thing, playing a complex piece of music and having a conversation would interfere with one another. Yes, that's what you usually would think. Unless you're a highly skilled and you play maybe one piece of music at a time that you've done

multiple times, but even then it would be very difficult to this degree. So Kirsten got in touch with Bob and she started asking him some questions about the way you would perceive music and how he was in the course of chatting with him and talking about how he perceives music and all of this, he happened to say to her. But I could hear an entire symphony in my head and I didn't think that was too big a deal because I always listened to two of them at once. He told her, I only have to focus on the one mentally that I want to hear at a given time, and then that's a piece I play, but I hear them all ongoing.

Did he just say he can hear two different symphonies? In his head. At the same time. And we thought this was very unusual. Yeah. But I mean, are we talking the full symphonies or just the melodies? Every instrument. Every instrument.

And he can focus in and turn one of them up, one of them down and they both run simultaneously. Huh. So then she pushed to the envelope and asked me if I can I hear three pieces of music. I said, well, I don't know, never tried. But he was like, yeah, I think I could do three. When we challenged him a little bit,

actually you said I can do four if you asked me. What? But I wouldn't go any further than that. No, that's total b****. Just four symphonies at the same time. That's just nothing but noise. Absolute quickophony. You know, the four pieces of music that just was,

wow, I said, nobody can do this. It was almost really critical. Yeah, because it's not true. We had to think about how to test this. Let me tell you about how the experiment worked, and then tell me if you think it's true. All right. We came up with a behavioral test,

and we... So the first thing Kirsten had to do was find a control, someone to compare Bob to, so she found a conductor. Peter Peret, who's the former conductor of the Winston-Salem Symphony, who is himself an accomplished musician. Before the test, she sent him and Bob. Four pieces of music. We had Schubert Symphony.

We had Brahms. We had Brahms. We had Beethoven. And finally, one from Mendelssohn. So you have to keep in mind, these four symphonies are in different keys and different tempas. Very different in their themes and instrumentations. And the challenge for them was to learn these four pieces of music.

Completely memorize them. Four different tunes, and they only gave me a couple of days to listen to them. And then play them in their mind, and we would then ask them where, in a certain piece, they would be after an arbitrary time. I'm not really following what they do. Okay, so here's what they did. They put these guys in the scanner and they said to them, I want you to play the music in your mind.

Play the music in your mind. Close your eyes and imagine the music. So no music is playing out loud. No music playing just inside their head. And are they imagining it however they want or are like on the CD? No, no. Exactly what they had heard on the CD. So say, Minster Mids coming in and out.

Yep. Same tempo. Yep. So if it was Vavace on the CD, Vavace in their head? Exactly. And why were they doing this again? Well, they wanted to see if these guys could track via memory. These really complicated pieces of music.

I see. So they put the guys in the scanner, they're laying there. And on a screen in front of them, the words start flashes. And at that moment, they start playing the first piece of music back in their head. In the control room, they're tracking the music themselves to follow the timing. The researchers?

Yeah. Oh, so while Bob and the studio are imagining it, they're actually keeping track of where the real CD is. Exactly. They let it go for a while. And at an arbitrary moment, they say, stop. And then they say, sing to me exactly where you are in the music.

Like the note? The exact phrase. They go where you are in the music. Like the note? The exact phrase. Da da da da da. They go back, they compare the timing. To the CD. Right. To find out if these guys can really recreate inside their heads exactly what they'd heard.

And so our conductor, our control, was able to listen to one piece of music at a time and wants to really write on target with the right answer and timing was in a second. Well, so this conductor's imagined Symphony was only a second off from the real one? Yep, same with Bob. So Bob's within a note or two. Not bad.

Now, round two. The multi-song task, as we called it. They told them both to start that first piece of music again. And then a little bit later, they said, start the second piece of music in your head. Simultaneous. Yep. Alright, I'm already like, come on. It's crazy. Like, this is, we're simply slipped in the fantasy.

Well, and that's what happened for the conductor. He couldn't do it. He couldn't do two simultaneously. Yeah, of course he couldn't do it, it's impossible. And it was a little chance, he said this is an overwhelming impossible task. His brain just shut down. Well, like he, he died or something? He stopped even being able to track the first piece of music.

He just got confused. Now we got a bob. They put me into the MRI and they asked me to start tune one in your head. So I did. Then roughly 10, 15 seconds later, I got a message on the screen. It says continue listening to one start two And then 15 seconds later continue listening to tunes one on two start three And then the same thing was turned 4. Then on the screen it's in staff. And then Kristen came on a little, I could hear her talking to me from somewhere. And she says, Bob, tell us, where are you?

Where are you in tune one? Be two phones, sit for me. Right now, where are you? Where are you in tune one? Beethoven's. Symphony. Right now. What do you hear? So I told her and I described what the piece was playing at that point. And the same thing with tune two. Three and four.

She announced that I was exactly right on to the note in each one of the symphonies. Jess, you're telling me something that's just not... Curses are really... No, I've got a lot of intensity. It's just my common sense right now is yelling like a three-year-old. It really is mind-boggling to think about and mix my brain hurt. But you know, we prove to you. You can do it.

When Curses and gave you different piece of music to listen to, did any of them clash? No. No, they don't clash. They're all just playing different pieces. There's nothing chaotic about it. All right. So assuming this is true, how does he do this?

How does he explain to himself how he does this? So I think there's two things going on here. The first has to do with emotion. Emotion. Bob is using different brain areas, I think. In his case, probably more emotional brain centers. Emotion deepens the way that we experience things, make stronger memories, and Bob has a really strong emotional relationship with music. What do we all?

Yeah, but it's a little bit beyond the whole minor keys, McMeanfield Sad. He has really specific emotions associated with individual keys on the scale. When I hear C major, it's a very bland key. It's like, I don't know how to describe. It's like eating water soup or something like that. But the major, the bright key that makes me want to dance, even though I can't dance. And every key, every one of the keys of the piano

had a different emotional attachment to me. So for Bob, if just the keys are triggering different emotions, imagine what it must be like when you get to actual music. So you think that something about how he experiences the emotions of the music makes it etch more deeply in his brain or something? Yeah, I think he's when he's got these four pieces of music going, he's not thinking hard about tracking each one of them. He's already in them.

He feels them inside his body, and you can feel more with him when feeling at a time. So that's one idea. The second idea has to do actually more with image and space really. So Bob often closes his eyes when he's talking, it just helps him focus. So I asked him if he could try playing back two pieces of music right now. And I asked him, when you hear these two symphonies in your head, what are you seeing? I can picture two symphony orchestras sitting side by side. He actually sees the literal orchestras in his head? Yeah, and I see them as silhouettes. There's no conductor in front of either one.

There's a brownish hue out in front of them like it's the floor. There's a brownish hue out in front of them, like it's the floor. That's more the color of the deep brown of a violin. And in back of them, there's a semi-circle that's bluish in color. Then when I listen to them, I'm going to listen to brown's second symphony over in the left side. And over in the right side, I'll turn on the emperor and share it all. Third movement. Beethoven. So I'm listening to that. Now these are in two different keys. Emperors in E flat. Brahms is in D. So now if I want to pay particular attention, oh let's say I'm going to listen to

the emperor here. I'm going to go into the E major. I just sped it up. See, I can speed the thing up, go to some other part in it, I can jump backwards. Let's see, just a minute, I can hear it in F, I can put it into any key I want to. But I'm going to roar forward in this third movement of the emperor here. And I'm listening to the E major variation on the piano, which is just like a, or it's just racking on this beautiful E major chord pivoting around to the E flat note and going up and down from there on the piano. Wow. Wow. So his crazy sounds may have something to do with this movie-making thing that he does in his head. Yeah, but it's not just a movie, it's like a 3D movie. He can use it to find out where a specific instrument is.

How do you mean? In his mind's eye, he can fly out over these orchestras and actually look down on the individual instrument he wants to see. Man, I'm looking down and I see the piano out in front of them. He can zoom in and see them playing their instrument. Okay, now I'm up there in the air listening to this thing and over and over on my left side, I can still hear this bram is going along. And brams, I can only see the siloets from the front.

Whereas the guy, the Emperor over here, I can see full color in every person's face in it. Plus here, the lines that they're playing. And as he's flying out over these orchestras, the instruments actually get louder and softer depending on where he is. Like if he goes behind orchestra number one. I can hear the bass much much louder and let's see. Yeah, then if I go over to the left side I'm hearing the violin. And he says he can float right above the players and actually see what they're doing.

I can see every wrinkle in the pleated shirts of their textitos. And I can see the deep brownish orangeish color of the violas. And I can hear the deep, sound, beautiful sound of that low viola. And I can hear every little rat-rasim scrunch across their bones. God listening to music for this guy must be like an acid trip.

The way that he's describing it? I think it is. And when he listens to recorded music, it's so much diminished from what he feels when he's imagining it. So he doesn't listen to CDs? He cannot stand listening to CDs. That wow. Yeah. He's a real example of the extremes of the human mind.

So what does he do with these crazy talents? I mean, is he like a billionaire? Nope. First of all, Ragtime's not exactly the most popular form of music in the United States at this point, but it's what he likes to play. And he plays, you know, 250 shows a year, but a lot of them are at historical societies or churches. Oh, Linda and I, we've got a small motorhome.

It's an airport bus, one of those little 15 passenger buses. It's got a hot shower and a bathroom and a bed, of course. So, you know, he travels around in his little motor home with his wife when he can and without her when he can't and sleeps in Walmart parking lots. He's working on an opera, which is mostly done. And he writes it in his head while he's driving. And then he sits down in a McDonald's and writes it out on paper. And you know, that's pretty much what he does with this

life. Thanks to reporter Jess Banco for that great story and also to producer Mark Phillips for making it sound so good. But why should we share the information we just did? Why not do the outro in a way that Bob Miln would fully and completely appreciate it? You mean so we should say it all together in a big channel? Simultaneously, are he'll be able to think the Jad side and then the Roberts.

Okay, ready? One, two, three, four. Thank you to people who play the piano. Thank you to listeners of the piano players, who play the piano. Thank you to all of the more the two members of those pianos, thank you to Walmart and for discounting goods. The left hand hitting the piano.

Thank you Robert. Thank you. See you later. Radio Lab was created by Chad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Lotta Fnaasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keith is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Aketty Foster Keys, W. Harry Fortuna,

David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindu Nyanosambadam, Matt Kilti, Annie McEwan, Alex Niesin, Alyssa John Perry, Saurikari, Sarah Sambak, Aryan Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. With help from Timmy Broderick, our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton. Hi, I'm Luis Beta and I'm calling from Mexico City. Leadership support for Radio Lab Science Programming is provided by the Gordon and very

more Foundation. Science Sandbox, the Simon's Foundation Initiative and the John Temple Foundation. Foundation and support for Radio Lab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.