Radiolab - A 4-Track Mind

Episode Date: October 2, 2026

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] 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.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hey, Lulu here. Today we are reaching back into the archives for a radio lab classic, a really good one, which I can say because I had nothing to do with making it. But it pulls off one of the most difficult and satisfying things as story, really any story in any medium can do, which is that it stretches your conception of what a human being is capable of. And besides just being a jaw-dropping portrait of a human with a brain, it also makes you wonder what obscure superpowers we might all be walking around with. totally unaware that they are even superpowers. So please enjoy this episode. We are calling a four-track mind. Here we go. Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right.

Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W-N-Y-S. See? Re-Wind. No, it won't be so bad.

Oh, should we do that now? Yep. Hey, I'm Chad I boom rod. This is Radio Lab. Yes, we, yes, it is. No, we're doing the introduction. Oh. Ready?

Here we go. Let's do it for real. Hey, I'm Chad I boomrod. I'm Robert Krollwit. This is Radio Lab. And today on the podcast, I want to tell you about a guy who hears music in a way that is just extraordinary. Yeah. And painful.

Just thinking about this story makes my head hurt. That's Jessica Benko. She's a reporter. Yep. And she's the one who initially told me this. story. So a little while ago, I went up to visit this guy. Hi. Bob Mill. It's nice to see you. And he lives in a tiny town in Michigan with his wife Linda.

And who is he? He's an amazing piano player. The Library of Congress actually called him a national treasure. Really? 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 there? Well, 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 Schubert minor key piece in it.

So on the recital I played it in major. And everyone thought that was a travesty. These days though, his main music isn't so much Schubert. It's actually ragtime. Ragtime is one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, the rhythms. So the thing about 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 rhythms of 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 Betterman, who is now at Penn State. First time I heard about Bob Mel 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 are the same part? They're 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 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 he would perceive music.

And in the course of chatting with him and talking about how he perceives music and all of this, he happened to say to her that 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 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? 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 he said I can do four if you asked me.

What? I wouldn't go any further than that. No, that's total b-h. Just four symphonies at the same time? That's just nothing but noise. Absolute crocophony. You know, the four pieces of music that just was, wow, I said, nobody can do this. It was 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 the behavioral test. So the first thing Kirsten had to do was find a control, someone to compare Bob to. So she found a conductor. Peter Perre, 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's Symphony. 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 tempos. Very different in their themes and instrumentations. And the challenge for them was to learn these people. 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. 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 in a second. their head. And are they imagining it however they want or on the CD? Exactly what they had heard on the CD. So same instruments coming in and out? Yep. Same tempo? Yep. So if it was Vovace 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 and they're laying there. And on a screen in front of them, the word 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 this dude 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 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 was really right on target with the right answer and timing within a second. Wow. 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. Simultaneously.

Yep. All right, I'm already like, come on. It's crazy. Like, this is, we've slipped into 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. There was no chance. He said this is an overwhelming impossible task. His brain just shut down. Well, like he died or something? He stopped even being able to track the first. first piece of music. He just got confused. Now we go to Bob. They put me into the MRI and they asked me start tune one in your head. So I did. Then roughly 10, 15 seconds later, I got a message

on the screen and says, continue listening to one, start two. And then 15 seconds later, continue listening to tunes one and two, start three. And then the same thing with tune four. On the screen it said stop. And then Kirsten 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?

Beethoven. 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... Christen's a really... She's got a lot of integrity. It's just my common sense right now is yelling like a three-year-old. It really is mind-boggling to think about and makes my brain hurt. But, you know, we proved to you.

You can't do it. When Kirsten gave you different pieces 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 center.

You know, emotion deepens the way that we experience things, makes stronger memories. And Bob has a really strong emotional relationship with music. Don't we all? Yeah, but it's a little bit beyond the whole minor keys make me feel 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 D major, it's a 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 brain. body and you can feel more than one feeling at a time. Huh. 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.

That's more the color of the deep brown of a violin. And in back of them, there's a semi-circle that's blueish and blue. color. Then when I listen to them, I'm going to listen to Brahms' Second Symphony over in the left side. And over on the right side, I'll turn on the Emperor Concerto third movement of Beethoven. So I'm listening to that. Now, these aren't two different keys. Emperor's in E flat. Brahms is in D. So now, if I want to pay particular attention, oh, let's say I want to listen to the Emperor here. I'm going to go into the E flat. I just spit it up. See, I can speed the thing up to go to some other part in it. I can jump

backwards. Let's see, just a minute. I can hear it in a half. 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. I'm listening to the E major variation on the piano, which is just like a, it's just rocking on this beautiful E major chord, pivoting around to the E flat note. And go, I'm going to up and down from there on the piano. Wow. Wow. So his crazy talents 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. And 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. Over on my left side, I can still hear this Brahms going along. On Brahms, I can only see the silhouettes from the front, whereas the emperor over here I can see full color in every person's face in it, plus here the lines of their 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 louder. Let's see. Yeah, then if I go over to the left side, I'm hearing the violins. And he says he can float right above the players and actually see what they're doing. I can see every wrinkle in the pleaded shirts of their tuxedoes. And I can see the deep, brownish-orange-ish color of the violas.

And I can hear the deep sound, beautiful sound of that low viola. And I can hear every little red rosin scratch. across their bows. 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. 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. Linda and I, we've got a small motor home. It's an airport bus, one of those little 15 passenger buses. It's got a hot shower and a bathroom and a bathroom. 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 his life. Thanks to reporter Jess Benko for that great story, and also to producer Mark Phillips for making it sound so good. But why should we share the information the way we just did? Why not do the outro in a way that Bob Milne would fully and completely appreciate it. You mean so we should say it all together in a big job? Simultaneously, and he'll be able to think the Jad side and then the Roberts side. Okay, ready?

Yep. Thank you to people who play the piano. Thank you to listeners of the piano. players who play the piano. Thank you, of course, to tuners of those pianos. Thank you to Walmart and for discount. Thank you, Robert. Thank you, Robert.

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