Radiolab - Limits

Episode Date: April 5, 2010

On this hour of Radiolab: a journey to the edge of human limits.

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W. N. Y. C. See?

Yeah. And NPR. Who's the gentleman we're on the air with? Oh, there's going to be two of us. So one of them is named Jad. That's not me. His name is Jad. Like, his parents call him Jad.

Jad? But it's Jad, really. Had they been drinking? No, they're Lebanese. No. Oh, sorry. So we're going to begin the show with this delightful duo. I'm Julie.

Julie Moss. I'm Wendy. Wendy Ingram. Hi, Julie. Hi, Wendy. Hi, Dad. They've been friends for a really long time. Remember that one time you bought all that.

Everything in a tube. They both like to travel. They both like to shop. And they both like to run really long distances until they collapse usually in front of millions of people. Now, Wendy. Wendy was a classic athlete from day one. It was apparently born this way. Her mother tells me how she.

to channel her energy into sports. Yeah. I always considered myself a science project. What do you mean? We've been created. We have hands, feet. We have a mind. We have lungs. We have a heart. Let's see what it can do. Wendy, we're

very opposite in that. In that respect. Julie, Julie is an entirely different story, and we're going to tell you that story in just a moment. But first, we should say, this is Radio Lab. I'm Chad Appoonrod. And I'm Robert Coleridge. Our topic today is limits. Limits of the body, start there.

Then the limits of the brain. And finally, the limits of what we can know about everything. Julie, how did you get interested in this race that you're about to tell us about? Was it like an impulse or something? Well, no, it was a requirement to graduate. I had to do a, it's called a senior project. I went to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in California. And I was a PE major, which now I...

Like phys ed? You mean? Yeah. And that was just by default. I was a California surfer girl. I started surfing at 14, but I needed a senior project, and there I was in 1981 watching TV instead of studying. And on comes ABC Wild World of Sports.

Brought to you by Anheiser Bush Natural Light. The Iron Man from Hawaii, and I watched it, and it just sucked me in. This must have been like really early Iron Man. Oh, yeah, I think it was the fourth one. And I thought, it's in Hawaii. It's great. I know my mom will pay for it because I have to do this project for school. And so I started doing research on it.

And this just so we know, this is you swim, you bike, you run, that's the order. You swim 2.4 miles. You ride 112 miles. And then you run a marathon. So it was... Wait a second, though. Go ahead. That seems like a major decision to want to go 140.

I mean, were you a triathlete type person at that point in your life? Had you ran a marathon before? It was conceptual. Those were just the distances. Those were numbers. That wasn't reality. It was just you were in Hawaii. By the time I got off the plane to do the Iron Man, I still hadn't completed the total distance that I'd need to do on the bike or the swim.

Oh, my God. But I wasn't going over there to be competitive. I was going over there to do this event, have fun in Hawaii, and then I'll write up some sort of bogus, you know, physiological consequences or something. But I really just, I thought I was taking the easy way out. When you got off the bus or you walked into the room where the other ones were, did you suddenly think, uh-oh? Yeah, I mean, people were taking it very seriously. People had coordinated outfits. I thought I'm feeling a little like the country mouse, you know.

So I think when race day rolled around, it was sort of my day to get through and never do again. I mean, it was really, this is a one-time thing. So shall we run the race? Yeah, so, okay, let's just, you do the first two legs, the swimming, and then the biking. I'm doing really well. You see me on the bike, I'm riding along. I mean, from the old coverage of ABC, I'm smiling at the camera. I'm certainly not in an aerodynamic position.

Why would you want to be all crouched over when you keep sitting up, smiling? That was your beauty queen turn? You're going, hello! I was. I was doing parade waves. I really was. Loving the attention. And I had a Snickers bar early on the bike ride.

And I keep thinking, if I'd only eaten that Snickers bar instead of throwing it away, ABC came up on a camera. And there I was trying to open this melted Snickers bar with my teeth. And all of a sudden there's a camera. And it's like, oh, my gosh, I don't want to be messy on national TV. So I ditched this beautiful Snickers bar. And, you know, yeah. Okay, skipping to the third leg of the race, Julie's through the swim.

She's through the 112-mile bike ride onto the marathon. I came off the bike. They told me there's a woman ahead of you. She was a top-notch cyclist. Oh, so you were in second place? Yeah. Whoa, whoa, how could this happen? I was doing really well, and I started on the run.

And the one gal who had had a great bike ride had an Achilles injury. And sure enough, I think about eight miles or so, I caught her. And there I am in the lead. Wow. And all of a sudden, it was a little, things started to shift. I'm good at something. Yeah. And somebody's trying to take it away from me.

And that was the woman who was in second place, Kathleen McCartney. And even though she was a mile away, it felt like she was breathing down my neck and trying to take something that now I was becoming very attached to. I was also starting to fall apart physically. What were those early signs? cramping and a feeling that you weren't digesting your food, that everything was sort of sitting there sloshing around. Wendy's laughing. This is a serious moment, and she's laughing about it.

In any case, finally, Julie makes it to the last little itty-bitty stretch of the race. Probably about 400 meters from the finish. And she's still in first place. So, Julie, let's do this. I'm actually, as we're talking, I'm watching you on YouTube. Oh, stinker. Well, I just want you to take me into your head in these final moments because it's just, like, it's unwatchable, but you can't turn away. Yeah, it's a train wreck.

So I'm looking at you now, and you're running, and it's dark. Mm-hmm. Those people, like, on both sides cheering you. Mm-hmm. And so you're running, then you're slowing down, then you're really slowing down. Mm-hmm. And you're walking a little bit like you're on stilts. And then, like, right here.

Your legs give out. They give out. And I couldn't get back up. I mean, I thought, get up and my legs wouldn't work. So I actually sort of laid there on the ground and figured out if I put my arms in front of me and leaned on my arms, they would sort of form like a tripod and I could sort of lean on my arms and kind of got one leg up and one leg up. And kind of staggered to a walk and started walking again. All right, now you're walking again.

But you're like... Drunk monkey. Yeah, really wobbly. Yeah. Now all this time, you're conscious that number two is getting closer and closer? Are you conscious of her at all? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

And I had to keep finding a way to keep going, and my thought was, this is mine. Oh, you just fell again. Oh, yeah. See, this is the one that gets me right here. You fall down and your arms go back. It's like you're dying. Yeah. And as I was putting one hand in front of the other, I saw this pair of tennies go by and these legs, and I thought, that's her. She's gone by me. And it was just, I just thought, I quit. I just thought, I can't say it on National Public Radio, but eff it. F it. And all of a sudden, there's this voice that just said, get up. Get up. just keep moving forward.

I could see the finish line about 10 feet in front of me, and I thought, get up. I cannot, I can't get up again. I really, I get up. Do not think I've sort of worn out that tactic. Get up. But I can crawl. And I crawl.

And so here I am coming along, and the TV camera lights are blinding me. And no one's helping her. My life was going to be different. I mean, I felt my life changing. I made a deal with myself. A deal was struck. And I don't care if it hurts.

I don't care if it's messy. I don't care how it looks. I would finish. I would finish. So Julie Moss crawls the last 10 feet of the race literally an inch at a time. And that whole time the cameras are on her and they capture everything.

And I mean everything. Yeah. I pooped my pants on national TV. It doesn't get more shameful from that. Wendy teases me all the time. You know, you were chocolate mess from one way or the other. You can get up here and do this next thing. Yeah, but it was a pivotal moment in my life.

And to the stage, Julie, says, the person she is now, it all began with... That voice, that I hadn't ever called upon. That just said, keep moving forward. But that's the thing that gets to me. It didn't say to you, you can't. It actually said exactly the opposite. Isn't that cool? I would have thought it would have said, stop.

Come on, stop. Lie down. Lie down. Lie down. Now, that's your ego. That's your ego that will come in and sabotage. Your real self, there is no limit. You know, I really believe that.

You do? And I just, I absolutely do. No limit. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Yeah.

No. No. Let's take seriously what Julia Moss just said, that there are no limits. I think she meant to psychologically. Yes, I mean, there are obviously limits if she would... Well, yes. She could die.

You could die. Yeah. But short of that, you would say it is her muscles that are determining the limits, right? Exactly. And the cell, your muscles sell. Yeah, let's just question that for a second. Let me introduce you to a guy. His name is...

What's his name? David Jones. His name is David Jones. Hi. Hi. It's him. He's retired. physiologist.

A metropolitan university. And he's got a slight condition that interferes with his speech, just so you know. Okay. Anyways, he did a study, two studies, actually, that involve bikers. These are experienced cyclists. He'll have these people ride stationary bikes for really long distances. All the while, he'll shoot their muscles full of sugar, like with an IV. And you can actually get extremely high levels of glucose in the blood.

How much? Like a whole energy drinks worth of sugar? Straight into their blood? Oh, more than that. Probably several. I don't need you drinks. Oh. Now, theoretically, if it's your muscles that are controlling how far and fast you bike,

you should get this injection and just be like, they should be performing miracles, that's right. But it never works. It never works. Yeah, the people who have sugar in their muscles do the same as the people who don't. That's right. I mean, doesn't work at all? It made absolutely no difference in their performance.

Whoa, bad news for sugar. And what it suggests is that our muscles have way less to do with our limits than we think, which raises the obvious question. what is making the difference? So now I'm going to tell you about this second study, which I completely find mind-blowing. Although it's a hard study to summarize, but I'm going to try. Okay.

So you with me? I'm with you, so far. You haven't started yet, though. That's always a good place to be. I need your full participation and interest. Okay. Okay, so he does a study where he puts a bunch of bikers on bikes, and he has them pedal a lot.

It's about 40 kilometers. Long distance. Now, he's got two groups. Each group gets an energy drink, which they sort of have to, drink while biking while biking except they don't drink it the rule is they don't actually drink it they just swish it in their mouth and spit it's right that's what they do swish spit bike swish spit bike well I wouldn't want to be the towel guy in this particular experiment well they really have scientists

with buckets who just stand next to them and they spit into the pocket okay so half the people get real energy drink to swish and spit yeah half the people get fake energy drink to swish and spit. And they both taste the same. And nobody knows who's getting what. It's a double-blind experiments. So you would think in this scenario that nobody should get any benefit from this, because no one's actually drinking the drink. Nothing's getting into the body. Or, let's say, like the taste creates a placebo effect. Well, then everybody should get the placebo effect equally. Everybody should get it. But here's the thing. Only the people who swished, swished, not drank, but swished, the real energy drink, got a boost. How much of a boost?

It's a minute or a couple of minutes. Whoa, that's a lot. Yeah, a minute. That's the difference between finishing first and last. Yeah. Well, let me think here, but don't say anything for a minute. Let me just think about this. So maybe something in the first set of athletes who got the real drink,

something inside them knew something. Yeah. Here's the big theory. You went to the little theory or the big one first? Well, I'd like the big theory briefly. Okay, the big one, briefly. There's an idea that's been Florida. around for a while called the central governor theory, which is that inside your head there's

this little circuit, which you're starting to see on brain scans, but there's this little circuit that governs your energy supply. And when it feels like you're in danger of running low, it'll trigger signals of pain to be sent to your body to try and get you to rest. Now, what scientists are finding is that this governor circuit is really conservative. It'll send you a pain to try and get you to stop way before you are out of juice. So if you were a fuel tank, they would flash E, E, E, for empty. But you got a quarter tank left. So what might be happening with these bikers is that the sugar is landing on their tongue.

The tongue sees the sugar, sends a message to the brain. The governor sees this message and says, oh, if we're about to get some energy, then it's okay for you to spend some energy. and let me just give you some from my secret stash over here. And so, you feel a boost. So the conjecture here is you have a reservoir of extra stuff, but it is so deeply disguised that you can't even know that it's there. Exactly. And to skip to the punchline, when you feel tired, Mr. Kay,

not just tired, when you are dead. Spent. When you are spent. Yeah. Which does not feel like a subjective thing at all. That feels like an objective reality. You are done. Well, in fact, at that moment, maybe you're not.

Maybe you're just feeling the effects of that little governor lying to you. Oh. Which raises the question, what if you could lie back to her? Then, how far could you go? Hmm. So, with all that in mind, I'm going to kick it up a notch. Let me tell you about this competition called the Ride Across America. It should really be called The Ride Into the Hellfire Depths of Despair.

But we're going to call it the ride across America. I have quite the zing that the sponsor wanted. Ride it to the depths of this man with Wrigley, Spear with God. We heard about this first from a reporter named Daniel Coyle. So what is the ride across America? It is, basically, it's an insane event. You get on a bike in California and you bike across the country, 3,000 miles, the equivalent of four Mount Everest, and they don't sleep at all?

No, they will sleep. They'll sleep an hour a day, two hours a day. An hour a day? Yeah. So if this is a 10-day race, they will sleep for 10 hours over the length of the race? Yeah. It's a race that is designed to reveal what human limits are. Who does it?

Can you describe the kinds of people who are attracted to this? No, I think they come from all walks of life. They come from all over the globe. It's a really interesting cross-section. We actually got curious about this. We sent our producer Lulu Miller to track down a few of these guys. Two guys. Who'd you find?

Well, the first one. Yes. His name is Patrick. Patrick Otisier. I'm 47 years old from France. He's the rookie. Had you done any kind of long-distance cycling before? No, no, not at all.

He's actually a scientist. Biologist, yeah. Got a wife, two kids. Okay. And then we've got the champion. Okay, hello. He's here. So this is Yuri Robic.

Hello. He's won this thing four times. In on the back is a killer. My body is, I can go also in the rain or cold or the heat. His job is he's a soldier. Implied by a Slovenian army. What else? What would you like to know?

Okay, 2005. So it's the start where that's 7 a.m. In San Diego, start 9. You're going to win this year? Is it like 20 people or 100 people? 25, I think. So the tape you're hearing right now is actual footage from that day. Let's go, Patrick!

It turned out the year he did it. There was actually a film crew there following every single ride. And so I was, I mean, really scared. I mean, scared at hand. Not Yuri, though. No. He's just in front of Patrick. I'm really, how to say in English, I'm really sure in myself.

Four. Three, two, one. Then the race is in. It's easy. You just start your engine and go. Yeah, baby. But for me, since I didn't know what to expect, I was running very conservatively at the back of the pack. 14 states, 3,000 miles to go.

They don't go very fast. They'll cross the country going about 13, 14 miles an hour, which any 11-year-old could ride for a time. The difference is that they just don't stop. Seven hours later, California Desert. My watch says 109 degrees. We're in the shade in the car. This is Steve Towdy, the camera guy following Patrick in a van. Patrick's out here climbing a hill. I've never experienced this kind of temperature.

I mean 110 finite. Then 150 miles later. Arizona, rolling hills, sunset. 200 miles. 300 miles. Then the sun is rising. 400 miles. 500 miles.

Utah. It's still very hot. And then? Corrado. The mountains, the big mountains. Yuri's in the lead. He's just crested the top of a 12 mile climb. It was during the middle of the night, it was...

It was raining. It really heavy raining. He begins to coast downward. Descending. without battling. And after two kilometers, I was completely frozen. Shaking like I was electric. Your butt is like a hamburger.

Oh, yeah. I mean, it's all red. You don't have any skin at all. I mean, the bike is the most efficient machine for creating suffering ever in bed. The pressure's on your hands. The pressure is on your neck. This is this British guy named Chris Hopkinson

halfway through the race, and his neck. And his neck is just given out. People whose necks have given out will take duct tape and literally tie their heads up. They'll put a cord to the back of their helmet and then pin it, say to their belt, Jesus God, so that they can look because they can no longer hold their heads up.

Oh God. The pain is like waves, you know? And I don't know why is that, but it is... It's like waves. It's coming and it's going. It's coming and it's going. So Lulu is assuming that the central governor circuits inside the heads of all these riders

are creating those waves of pain, how do they soldier on? How do they ignore it? Well, I asked them that, and they each sort of have different techniques. So Patrick, he'll just start shouting back at it. Literally?

Yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah. And Yuri? Well, he gets his crew to come up alongside him and Blair. Slovenian war songs. Tourist speakers, yeah, very loudly. Is that what we're hearing? It is. This is him on his bike during the race.

Singing along. And all of this works for a while. But then, they hit the halfway point. Kansas. I don't know if you've been to Kansas, but don't leave there. It's awful. The scenery gets really monotonous. You don't have any sightseeing, nothing. And more than that, they've gone over a thousand miles without sleeping, basically. And that's where we see the sort of really interesting stuff start to happen.

It's here that we can catch a glimpse of the hidden potential of the human body. If you've done everything, if you've handled the heat and hydration, if your infrastructure is solid, all the stress goes to the last point, which is the mind. It came very suddenly. It was dark. I were in a forest, and very quickly, the environment got very aggressive. He said he saw shadows running across the road. It looked like the trees were trying to reach out to get him.

I was starting to have nightmares, but I was awake. These kinds of hallucinations are just a fact of the race. People seeing secret code in the cracks of the road, riders jumping off their bikes to square off and fight mailboxes. And it's what breaks a lot of people. Yeah. But strangely, these kinds of hallucinations might be the very key to Yuri's success. I saw everything, I mean, a lot of like monsters.

Like zombies, he's going to attack you, you know. And why would that help him? Well, think about why the central governor is in place. The system that's designed to always keep an emergency stash of energy there for you, should you ever need it. So those feelings of pain are really just a way of safeguarding that last little stash of energy that you could use if you absolutely had to. Yeah, like if your life was on the line or something, that's right. But what if you are convinced, and therefore your central governor was convinced,

that your life really was on the line? That year when you got to Ohio... He hallucinated that there were Mujahadins or Afghan horsemen chasing him. Yeah. With a gun, with a shotgun, and I said to my chief, they are shooting us. Come on, come on, do something. We are soldiers. something to this guy, they're attacking us.

The interesting thing about that is the way in which his team sees him hallucinating, Mujah Hadim, and their reaction is, oh yeah, we see him too. Come on Yuri, you are my escape. Wait, why? Because they're gaining on us. They're gaining on us. It's funny, you know, but for me it was not funny. They will use his hallucination as fuel, and they make no bones about it.

And when you see that. That's Madjiaz Plinich. Yuri's crew chief. When you see him riding that fast after five, six days almost dying on the bike, and then suddenly he explodes. Your hair on your arm will go up, on your neck will go up, and then you know that's why you are there, because you don't want to miss that moment,

because this is something out of this world. Yuri says that during the hallucinations... I mean, the pain is gone. Does it go away completely? Yeah. But the trade-off is that... When he watches videos of himself like this punching mailboxes and throwing his bike into a ditch, he says it's actually painful to watch.

You know, it's really tough for me to look at myself in these videos, in these films. How do I, my behavior is going. The reality is he's looking at a madman. It's not me. That's not me. Yeah. See, now I'm thinking, like Daniel, like if madness is the key, right? Right? To tricking your central governor into giving you access to that energy. Does that mean that if Robert and I went mad in that particular way that we would suddenly be really athletic? I mean, are there actually seriously cases like that? Well, there was actually in the early 1900s. There was a doctor named August Bierre who noticed a mental patient making a leap in an asylum. And he measured the leap. And it compared rather favorably to the world record at the time.

What? Yeah. And he was one of the early sort of propagators of this governor theory that obviously this patient from whom all the sort of governors have been lifted was capable of a feat of astounding strength. All right, so Lulu. What happened at the end of the race? Well, here he wins. I won the ram. That's something.

And what about Patrick? Well, let's rewind a couple days. He's just crossed the halfway point in Mount Vernon, Kansas, and he decides to hop off his bike, take a quick break, and he's in the van, he checks his email. Just to give me some motivation. And he sees an email from one of his friends. He said, we're so sad that the Dr. Breedlove accident.

Patrick had no idea what this guy was talking about, but it appeared to suggest that one of the 25 riders, a guy named Dr. Bob Breedlove, had just been hurt. And so I asked one of my crew members, what happened with Dr. Breedlove? and he said, well, he got an accident, and he died. On the race, during the race? Yeah. And so when he told me this, I mean, immediately I was, I mean, I was, I mean, not only shocked, but I was done.

I understand, Patrick. I feel bad, too. Obviously, I feel bad. And so, Steve, today the cameraman tried to. to push me. But it would be pointless to stop here where you have a wide shoulder, a van right behind you. Who's going to call and Cecile and tell her, oh, oh, sorry, but Patrick just fall down the road?

And so he's hospitalized or even worse. I have kids and I've worked. I went too far on this race. I understand Patrick, but how far the next time station? Why don't we go there? No, I'm dead. I don't want to continue that. That's okay.

I don't want to continue that. I'm just saying let's not throw in the towel just yet. So after that, I mean, I started riding again. But for them. Yeah. It was a magical night. It was very, very warm, a beautiful night. No clouds, nothing.

And as always, his crew is cheering him on, trying to pump him up. You're strong! Patrick, can I ask you why you're doing this? What? Can I ask you a question? You're doing what you want to talk? Why are you doing this?

But he's not saying anything back for hours. Then, around one in the morning, Patrick says his mind just goes quiet. Completely silent. Out of that silence, he said he heard a voice that said simply... You stop. stop. And so that's what I did. I said, I'm done. You're done? Why? I'm done, you're done. You asked me a question earlier, remember? Why I was doing that?

Yeah, why are you doing it? Because I just wanted to test my limit, physical, an limit and mental. And I touched twice this limit, yesterday morning and this morning. And I don't want to leave that again. And I quit. I quit. That's it. Huh.

I'm trying to figure who I would honor more. Yeah. The winner of the race or the man who insisted on losing. I'm 40. I've got kids. I identified more with the guy who stopped. Yeah. Yeah.

But I think also you see the guy who wins, and it makes you ask big questions about what's possible. You know? Yeah. Like, how do you do that? Yeah. I don't know that I'd want to be that guy or even hang out with him. I'd like the second guy.

I know I'd like the second guy. Dan, what do you think? I find myself looking at both of them kind of with my jaw on the floor. Daniel Coyle's latest book is called The Talent Code. And thanks, Lulu. Yeah, and a huge thanks to Stephen Auerbach, who made the film Bicycle Dreams.

That's where all this footage came from. Hey, Michael, this is Wendy Ingram, and I apologize, I have a pretty bad tool. Ready-A-Lad is funded in part by Alpsich-Belone Foundation in the National Science Foundation. This is Julie Moss. Radio Lab is produced by WN-Y-C and distributed by NPR.

Hey, I'm Chad Aboumron. And I'm Robert Krollowicz. This is Radio Lab. Today, our topic is limits. Limits. Yep, how far can you take your body? We've done that. We've exhausted that.

I think so. So let's go uptown to the limits of the brain. To tackle just a piece of that question, let's just take a look at memory. Okay, great. And we're going to do that by telling a story. A story that we heard from Joan O'Leary. You know, frequent guests on the show,

author of the books, Proust was a neuroscientist, how we decide. And the story begins in a small town in the old Soviet Union back in the 1920s. And it's about a newspaper reporter named Mr. S. At least that's what we're going to call him. Yeah, so Mr. S, the newspaper reporter. And one day, his boss starts yelling at him because his boss gives out these assignments, talks to the whole newsroom, and he notices that Mr. S never takes notes.

And this drives his boss crazy because his boss is, you know, saying all these things they have to report on. And Mr. S just never writes them down. And so his boss calls me to his office and says, are you lazy? Do you not take this job seriously? And Mr. S responds, well, I just remember it all. And the editor says, come on. And he sort of quizzes him. He says, what did I assign you yesterday?

His boss gives him this quiz. And sure enough, he remembers everything. He remembers everything the editor said word for word. And the editor's thinking, I don't know what's with this guy. I mean, he's not a great reporter, but he has something queer going on in his head. So he decides to send him to a famous medical doctor in Moscow, A.R. Luria. Who is Luria? Luria is a classical figure in neuropsychology and in psychology in general.

And who is this? Tell us your name. El Hadad Goldberg. I'm a clinical professor. Professor at the Wai-U medical school. Goldberg knew Luria. Luria was my mentor. I worked very closely with him.

Not only was he a student of Lurier, Luria gave him a present once. Ah, this is this book. The book about the original book about this. This book is one of the great works of early neuroscience. Wow. You made me by Lurier, that's him, yeah. Oh, so we're going to the right guy.

You have an autographed copy by the guy. It is a beautiful and almost novelistic description of what happened to Mr. S. And the original title was a little book about big memory. Yeah, what is in Russian? Maliqa, Kniuska of Balshoi. Okay, so Jonah, this guy, Mr. S goes to this psychologist, Luria. What does Luria do with him?

Luria during the book talks about how he wrote random numbers on a blackboard. Numbers like 1, 8, 6, 4, 3, about 50 numbers. And ask Mr. S to remember them. Okay, here we are on page 16. As would study the material on the board For about three minutes. Close his eyes. Open them again for a moment.

Okay. Done. And with that, he would relive this series precisely 6-6804 to 1-8-7-cham-4. Wow, that's like a superpower. Yeah, and this impresses Lurie, he says. So he takes it up to the next level. Then Lurier gives him, you know, this incredible assortment.

of memory tasks, you know, everything from Memorized Dante's Inferno to... Memorized Dante's inferred the whole thing? No, no. Well, not the whole thing. Just opening stances. But here's the really weird thing.

Mr. S does not read Italian, speak Italian. He had no idea what he was talking about. And yet the thing he memorizes, he gets word perfect. Yeah. And not only that, he was tested 15. years after he'd memorized those stances, and he still got it right. Yeah. Oh, wow. He remembered everything. He had...

Can you say everything? What didn't you mean? I mean everything, okay? So if he, suppose he interviewed you 10 years ago, he would have remembered the color of your sweater, whether you held the mic in the left hand or in the right hand, he would have remembered everything. I mean, everything. Lurian never talks about a computational limit on Mr. S's memory. As an experimenter, I soon found myself in the state verging on utter confusion. And they simply had to admit that the capacity of his memory had no distinct limits.

How can there be no limits? Because I'm thinking about the size of a normal head. It's like 50 centimeters or something in diameter. The brain is three pounds. It's a very confined little situation. How could there be no limits? I wish there was a good answer. Nobody has any idea why it is.

had this infinite capability for recall. What it does suggest, though, is that the brain has a capability to store an incredible amount of stuff. How much stuff, though? How much can you jam into a human brain? I don't think anyone knows. I mean, so let's just stop. Let's just call it quits.

No, no, no, no. Forget that. In fact, let me take you to a competition, which investigates that very question. We're going to change locations from where were we just now, Russia? We're in Russia. From Russia in 1920s to, you ready for this? London, 2009. Here we are at the World Memory Championships.

The World What? The World Memory Championships. Just go with me for a second. So we're in a hotel in Central London. The lobby is crowded with the world's best memorizers. We've got people here from, like, Oman. Grandi Raj. I'm Dr. Granthi.

Manchester. Hello, I'm Neil Ha. Netherlands. Yeah, Rick DeYoung. You even have a team of Chinese girls in the corner. doing a cheer. And what are we doing here? Well, the people here are a little bit like the guy you were describing, Mr. S.

They are walking experiments in brain stuffing. The difference is they're perfectly normal human beings. Could you start by introducing yourself? Like, take this guy. I'm Ben Fidmore. I'm the reigning world memory champion. I'm 33 years old and I live in Nottingham. Ben can take a string of numbers that is 1,400 numbers long. Random numbers.

Random numbers. And he can commit it to memory instantly. He can take a deck of cards and memorize it in 24 seconds. Wow. Yeah. We've not actually reached any kind of upper limit of what it's possible to memorize yet. Everybody's still consistently improving. So here's what we did.

We found a guy. Oh, my name's Ronnie White, and I'm the 2009 USA Memory Champion. He's a Navy reservist from Dallas, Texas. As a matter of fact, I had to get permission for my unit to come here. And we followed them around the competition. What's about to happen? Well, the competition's about to start. You know, it's day one.

It should be a fun day. Because we wanted to know, like, how do you do it? How do you take the limits of a normal brain and completely shatter them? So I walked in the room that day wearing my Michael Phelps t-shirt. You know, it said USA on the front. Okay, your one minute of medical preparation time starts now. The final minutes before you start an event, you're sitting. your chair and you're just collecting your thoughts.

I put on my military glasses. I got some, they look like Drew Carey's glasses. And I put those on to remind me, hey, remain calm. You know, I wore those all throughout my tour in Afghanistan. And if you're going down a road and you're needing to be on the lookout for IEDs, but you're not calm, you're nervous and jittery. You could die. Then I'll put on some noise-canceling headsets.

Then I just close my eyes, sit in my chair. seconds. Neurons on the ready, they say. Go! And at that moment, 60 people turn over papers. On these pieces of paper are numbers. Six, seven, one.

Nothing but numbers. Numbers, numbers, numbers, numbers, forever. And what are they doing? Well, they have to memorize them. So they're just seeing all these people staring at pieces of paper? Yeah, absolute silence. Heads down, 60 heads down,

staring at numbers. But here's the interesting thing. In their heads, three. They're not seeing numbers. Instead, those numbers are turning into... George Bush, Lawrence Nightingale, Randy Richardson, he's a friend, Barney Five, Arash, Michael Jordan, Chuck Norris, Donnie Brascoe, Bush, no, that was Boy George, Joe T, Martha Stewart, George Michael,

Ben Franklin, Chuck Norris, Ann Frank, Indiana Jones, my friend Ronnie, King Tut. I have a person assigned to every number from zero to 99. And then I have a verb assigned every person from 0 to 99. And then I have a noun assigned to every digit. So you're just taking person, verbs, and objects. Soft memorization. Please put the cards down. And you're putting them all together, and they really don't make sense.

What was some of the things? Give me the examples. The images I saw? Yeah. I saw Albert Einstein riding a roller coaster into a bunch of fog. That was one of the images. I saw Fat Albert cartoon character driving a car. 8199.

I saw Victoria's Secret Model, which was one of my favorite pictures. I saw Victoria's Secret Model shooting a gun. Hey Ronnie. Something like that. So there seems to be something about turning data into pictures that makes that data etch. It becomes easier to hold on to. Do you have any idea why? Do I have any idea?

No. But Jonah might. I don't know. I would just be purely speculating here. But the visual cortex has been hugely enhanced in human evolution. It's the rear half of our brain. Because we know that memories. You know, there is no memory center of the brain.

It's distributed in our sensory areas. It might make a little sense that given that we've got this huge chunk of visual cortex, that it's easier to store memory there. Okay, so let me ask you, how did Ron's visual cortex do in the big contest? Well, Ron, Ron didn't actually do so well. He did it? He was trying to memorize these 12 decks of cards, and he had constructed this whole, like, a stack of pictures.

But he did them in the wrong order, and he screwed it up. He lost? He lost really badly, unfortunately. I was shocked. I mean, I was just shocked. That knocked me out of any possible. You know who, by the way, who didn't lose? Remember Mr. S, the guy we started this conversation with?

Yeah, sure. This is interesting. It turns out that Mr. S also had little pictures and little characters running around in his mind. But unlike Ron, he never asked for the pictures. No, he couldn't. Even when he wanted not to do it, he couldn't help but do it. Meaning what? He was worn that way.

He had this tremendous memory without any effort and without any mnemonic techniques. This is the point. Do you mean his mind made the pictures automatically? Yeah. Mr. S had a condition called synesthesia, where your senses get kind of tangled up. So he heard voices in terms of colors. Right. Colors of voices.

Textures. Smells of words. And his numbers weren't just numbers. Sometimes he imagines walking through a crowded Moscow street and the numbers are scattered along the way. And so he describes how I'm walking down the street. There's the number one. This is a proud, well-built man.

Then I make a right turn. On to the side street, there's the number... Two is a high-spirited urban. Then I make a left turn. There's the number... Three, a gloomy person. Why? I don't know. Nobody knows.

Nobody knows exactly what accounts for the individual associations of synesthesia. They just exist. but they're this extra scaffold for Mr. S's memory to cling to. Wow, so he's like Ron, except he's using all his senses to remember numbers. Exactly. So, getting back to the plot, what did he do with this talent? He became a traveling circus freak, basically. Yeah, like, well, Circus.

Mr. Memory. Professional and a menomonist, yeah. He gave up journalism to perform for crowds. Just imagine he went something, I don't know, like this. Please welcome the Captain of Cognition, the master of memory, the spectacular Sheroschemsky. Imagine this is a big crowd. He walks onto the stage. He gives them an invitation.

He asks them to shout random numbers. 58. 25, 257, 5405. 45, 503. Then, after a little while, the crowd quiets down. And Mr. S would close his eyes and step forward. And he would remember them all. This was his job?

Yeah. And it wasn't just numbers, by the way. He was thrown weird phrases, nonsense sounds, nouns, verbs, and sometimes he'd do four shows a day. And the more he did, the more obvious it became, that this business of this,

it had a downside. Here's what we're going to finally reach, maybe the limits question that we're really examining in this program. He would hear all these nonsense phrases being thrown at him, and they would build up in his mind. And it's important to note this was incredibly frustrating for Mr. S. He had a constant stream of memories pouring into his brain. He couldn't get any of it out.

And on top of that, as they piled up, the memories began to kind of mush together. One would trigger another and then another and then another. It was the suffocating web association. The moment he encountered anything, everything, even the remote, totally related in his past to that something was immediately evoked in his memory. For example, let's suppose a man in the audience stands up and he shouts out the word, Dog. For a split second, Mr. S sees a dog, which suggests another dog, and then another dog,

and then... Every dog he ever saw. And the man suggests not just that man, but the man beside him and other men and men that he knew, that he knew and all the other competitions were a similar-looking man stood up and shouted something similar. He was barrage, he was deluge, he was deluge, with all kinds of memories, totally unrelated. Everything layered, one layered on top of the other. Well, that's horrible. I agree. That would be a bloody nightmare. The mind isn't just interested in storing information. It really wants to be able to get meaning out of that information, out of those memories.

that actually seems to be turned off, to be inhibited by remembering too much. In other words, there really is a limit in our heads. It's a different kind of limit, really. Not the limitless ability to remember one number after another, but a precious balance in your head. If you remember too much, you will make no sense of the world. It's weird. I've never actually thought of making sense of the world as being an act of negation. Yeah, it's very much that.

But it kind of makes sense because if you think about living here in New York City all the people you bump into if you remembered every freaking one like you wouldn't be able to have a relationship with your wife or your husband

your child because they'd just be lost in this thick crowd in your head just like get him out somehow that's the balance the act of forgetting is crucial to create preciousness. Although I do wish I had a better memory. That's your name weekend?

Hey, this is Chris Callahan from Berkeley, California, and Radio Lab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www. sloan.org. Hey, I'm Jadabumrod. I'm Robert Krelwich.

This is Radio Lab. And this next segment began with a simple question. Seeing as our topic so far has been limits, and we've done body. We did the brain. Now we're going to go really big. Yeah. Yeah. So we called up Steve Strogatz, mathematician at Cornell University, frequent guest on the show.

And we asked him, are there limits to human knowledge? Yeah. And his answer sent us on a little adventure. Yeah. Is there anything that's at the limits of our knowledge is a question that a lot of us scientists worry about? And certainly the 20th century taught us that there are many things that limit our knowledge, for instance, that the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in quantum physics showed us that you can't know the position and momentum of a subatomic particle at the same time. You just can't do it. It's not a matter of not having good enough instruments or not being clever enough. It's just a fundamental. barrier that nature puts in your way. In logic, girdles theorem tells us you can't prove certain things even though they're true. So there are all kinds of limits, but those seem a bit remote from everyday experience. And yet, I think there are really important limits on our knowledge that we're all familiar with. What I'm thinking of here is our inability to think about big numbers

because with your fingers, you've got 10, you know, normally. So we're good at 10. We're barely good at 100, and once you start getting to thousands, millions, billions, and trillions, it gets hazier and hazier. When you hear now about the trillions of dollars in the deficit or whatever it is, the debt, you know, that means nothing. How are you supposed to think about that? Now, when you ask, why can't we understand the common cold, but we can put a person on the moon, it has to do with large numbers.

Not just large numbers of numbers, says Steve, but large numbers of things interacting. That there are so many genes involved and so many biochemical reactions involved. Our brains are limited. Our memories are very limited. And so I worry a little bit that we might be approaching the end of our ability to have insight into certain kinds of questions. What Steve means by the word insight is not like a human who found the answer. It's like that. It's like a feeling.

Right. You know, like that, oh, I get it. The feeling you get when you really understand the answer. Yeah, that's satisfying feeling that I can see the real. reasoning. I can actually feel it in my bones. That's a very pleasurable feeling, but one that we may not always be able to enjoy. I mean, you can see the space. We weren't really quite sure how to feel about this, but then Steve said, yeah, don't take my word for it. Talk to these guys that work down the hall for me. You'll see. Yeah, we can we can go right ahead. Cool. Can you guys introduce

yourself? Tell me who I'm talking to. Yeah, so my name is Hodlipson. My name is Michael Schmitt. I'm a PhD student. And I'm a roboticist. And Hahn and Mike have developed this thing, which does make you wonder if Steve's right. It's a computer. Yes. Actually, many. A whole tower of computers that are all grinding away and performing calculations.

Actually, when you get down to it, it's just a piece of software, but they've named it. A eureka. Because that's what it was designed to do, to have eureka moments. Let's maybe a kind of simpler example. And the story of Eureka begins pretty simply. Let's think of a regular pendulum, okay?

With the pendulum. Just one of these things you see hanging off grandfather clock. Okay, I've got a regular pendulum swinging in my mind. Okay, swinging left and right. Now says how double it. Instead of a string connected to a ball, make it a string connected to a ball,

connected to another string connected to another ball. Which is basically like a double pendulum. The cool thing about this is you just put it up, you lift it up and let it go. And what you'll get, says Mike, is chaos. this really crazy behavior. Instead of nice and even, now you got random. It's almost impossible to actually try to predict where this thing will move.

So what they did was they got a camera connected it to Eureka and basically just had Eureka watch this thing, you know, move about crazily. And then they asked a computer a really simple question, can you make some kind of sense out of this erratic behavior? Like, is there something in this system that always stays the same. Tell me what about these pendulums over time is not changing. Because with everything, there's got to be some kind of logic in there.

So you're looking for a law, basically. You're looking for the law of the double pendulum. Yes, that's the idea. So Eureka is there watching this pendulum. There's about 3 a.m. in the lab. And it's basically spitting out all of these different guesses. It's formulating hypotheses. Can you cluster it.

Closter it. And then onto the screen, pops this simple formula. F equals M.A. What is F equals M.A? Is that actually the law that... F equals M.A is Newton's law of motion. The Isaac Newton. That's Sir Isaac to you. It's a basic law of physics.

One of the greatest discoveries in the history of human thinking. Took it about a day, 24 hours. But the interesting thing is that it came up with this thing without knowing anything about physics, nothing. That's why we kind of, we think that this algorithm might be able to find new laws that we don't know about you. In fact, once word got out about Eureka, that's when the e-mails started. A couple emails a day.

From scientists all over the place who are like, hey, do you mind if we borrow your robot? For what kinds of stuff? Anything you can think of from trying to predict behaviors of cows in a herd to particle physics to the stock market. And that's, and this is when we get to Steve's point about the limits of insight, that's when they meant this guy. My name is Garol Soel. Garol is a biologist. At the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.

He got in touch with Hodd. And he said, I have this amazing data, which is single cell dynamics. Meaning he's got this tiny little thing. It's a simple bacteria. Really basic. And he's been collecting this information on how it works. On its inside. How things go up and down.

Certain nutrients increase, certain nutrients decrease. time just like a pendulum. The thing is, in a cell, it's like thousands of pendulose. There's so many parts. Genes turning on and off. Thousands and thousands, tens of thousands. Proteins turning on other genes, nutrients going up and down. It's this crazy quilt of complicated feedback.

And he wanted to know inside of this cell, how are all of these things related? I mean, we can measure it all, we can see things going up and down and all that. But what are the rules? What are the rules? In this, he says, is the problem for biology. Biology is one of the least well-understood systems compared to, let's say, chemistry and physics. physics. They're still lacking the basics. So we said, look, Mr. Robot, can you tell us what you think are sort of the important principles governing this organism and maybe detect things

that were hidden from us? So he sent us the data and we analyzed it. And, uh, well, okay, let's not let's, yeah, so what happened? Suddenly, equations starting popping out. Almost immediately. The robot came back to us and said, Okay, here's a set of two equations that describe your data. Do you remember by any chance what the actual equation was? Not that we'd understand it, but just sort of to hear it said out loud. Yeah, no, I don't. I don't have my Rain Man skills developed to that degree.

The important thing is that the equation was telling him things like, when this protein goes up, this other thing always goes down. And when that thing goes down, this gene turns on, and then does a loop-de-loop. And when he went to his cell, to check all this out, the equation was right. equations match the data. And in fact, they explain new data. These equations could even predict what the cell was about to do. But hold the champagne. There's just one little problem here. The formulas check out, but... We don't know what they mean.

You don't know what they mean. Right. Meaning they don't know why these equations work. Why, when this goes up, does that go down? Why, when that goes up, does this go sideways? Why? I had to first look at this and try to make sense of it. We said like, oh, okay, I think we understand, and we're like, oh, maybe we don't. We think that we're close to understanding it. But, you know, now we're in this bizarre situation.

We can't even publish it right now because we can't just publish a equation without explaining it. So in the end, they're in this awkward position, where they've got the answer, but they don't have the insight. And I think it's a preview of what's the common science. The more we turn to computers with these big questions, the more they'll give us answers that we just don't understand. We'll be faced with this challenge of having to find ways to get a computer to explain what it found. But that will leave us if this really happens in some weird position as bystanders, where we're sort of listening to the Oracle, but not really understanding the answer. Is there going to be a time when we can't cut it anymore? We've had this window in human history

when we could not just know things but actually understand them. That is, you could know why they were true, not just know, but to know why. And that's a beautiful moment in human history, but I feel like it may only be a moment. Well, I don't really see it quite that sort of sad and dramatic. Because at the end, there will be simple principles to describe even the most complicated of processes. So you have a bias.

that prevents you from feeling the kind of despair that Steve feels and that we were hoping you would feel. Oh, well, I have a positive outlook. Well, I just wondering about the we. Look what we have discovered, you'll say when you're an old man with your robot sitting there and a dress next to you. And the robot will be holding your hand,

but that will be a cold hand. And Chad and I will be thinking, I don't know. Who's the we here, Isaiah? Well, I would say we is sort of knowledge. I'm just thirsty for understanding and thirsty for knowledge. Me and the cold hand holding my hand, we've accumulated and contributed to the overall understanding of something that we thought maybe 50 years ago wasn't possible. And that would be something that would make me happy. Hi, this is Steve Strogett. Radio Lab is produced by Jad Abumrod.

Our staff includes Ellen Horn, Michael Raphael, Soren Wheeler, Lulu, Lulu Miller, and Pat Walters. With help from Adi Narayan, Tim Howard and Sharon Shattuck. Special thanks to Stephen Auerbach. All right. Thank you. Bye-bye. End of mailbox.