Radiolab - Loops

Episode Date: February 22, 2019

Our lives are filled with loops that hurt us, heal us, make us laugh, and, sometimes, leave us wanting more. This hour, Radiolab revisits the strange things that emerge when something happens, then happens again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and… well, again. In this episode of Radiolab, Jad and Robert try to explain an inexplicable comedy act, listen to a loop that literally dies in your ear, and they learn about a loop that sent a shudder up the collective spine of mathematicians everywhere. Finally, they talk to a woman who got to watch herself think the thought that she was watching herself think the thought that she was watching herself think the thought that ... you get the point. With Kristen Schaal and Kurt Braunohler,  Alex Bellos, Steven Strogatz, Janna Levin, and Melanie Thernstrom. Plus mind-bending musical accompaniment from Laguardia Arts High School singers Nathaniel Sabat, Julian Soto, Eli Greenhoe, Kelly Efthimiu, Julia Egan, and Ruby Froom. You can find the video Christine Campbell made of her mom Mary Sue here. Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate. 

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All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W-N-Y-C. See? So I guess our first question is like, what conceivable set of circumstances led to you doing what you did? I just thought it would be a weird thing to do.

Yeah. Yeah. It's like, well, that would be weird. We don't know if it's funny, but we try it out. Yeah, is it going to be weird? We'll do it. Yeah. Is it going to alienate half the audience?

Yeah, let's do it. Okay, wait, just to send things up. I think you'd better. Those two people you just heard. Kristen Shaw and Kurt Brown-Oller. They are comedians. That's it. And we first heard about the bit you're about to hear from Jesse Thorn.

Yes. The host of The Sound of Young America. Yes. Great show. Are you rolling over there, Jesse? No, let me record here. Okay, check on my phone. Okay, yeah, I'm rolling.

So you set it up. When Kurt and Kristen walk on stage, what happened? Well, there's a couple of jokes. up top. You know, they joke about this TV show that they hosted in the 70s. It was called Uncle Ben's Farmyard Courthouse. It explained the American judicial system using a courthouse made completely of animals. Yeah, it was canceled immediately. Yeah, I think that was...

And so the audience is kind of laughing at the jokes thinking like, oh, this is going to be a regular comedy sketch. We're going to do a sketch from it tonight. All right. Okay. Here we go. Are you ready? I'm ready. Okay.

Okay. And then, two, they go into the... this song. Oh, Kristen Charles a horse. Kristen Chal is a horse. Look at her dance. Oh. Does this maniacal singing and clapping.

And Kristen is doing this horsey dance. It just keeps going. What can you do this for? And like, why? Repetition, Chad. I mean, like, when we do it, we, it's like after the third repetition, people are laughed. They get it like, oh, they're just going to do that.

And then somewhere around like four, around the fourth time. Then it's not, it's really not funny. The audience is quiet. They're like, I'm done with it. I'm done. I don't want to watch this anymore. Why are they still doing it? And then... And then that changes to actual hatred.

And they're like, you stupid people, you two stupid people. But somewhere between like 9 and 11, then they're like, They're like, I like these stupid people. And they're like, ah. And you get this next level, which is they can't continue doing this. And then they do continue doing it. Like, they really, their eyes are starting to cross.

By that point, I'm dripping sweat. Kristen's angry that I've gone that long. I'm just like, look at it too. Look at a chew. I mean, you can hear Kurt in that thing, like losing track of the song. because he's going into some kind of fugue state. I have had her on stage whisper, Stop it.

I'm up here working my house. This is maybe my favorite thing in the history of the world. What I love about it is that your brain is trying to make it into what you want it to be, which is a joke. But there is no joke happening. And so what these two people are doing is creating the expectation that the expectation is going to be broken, but then breaking that expectation that the expectation is going to be broken by just delivering the thing that they've been delivering over and over for the past 10 minutes. What's the longest you've taken it?

10 minutes in Australia, because you were drunk. Yeah. It seemed like 10 minutes. We can't be sure if it was 10 minutes. It seems like there's no way it's 10 minutes. I will tell you what it was 10 minutes. and the audience went crazy. Hey, I'm sorry.

Justin Charles is a horse. Justin Charles is a horse. Better dance, let her go. They're dancing like a horse. Kristen Charles. Hey, I'm Chadabumran. I'm Robert Crilwood. This is Radio Lab, and today...

Today it's all about... Loops. Things that happen over. And over. And over. And over. And over. And over.

And over. And over. And over. Coming up. Lopes that hurt you. Strange. Loops that heal you. Dangerous things.

Loops that scare you. Loops. And loops to eat you. And loops that incomplete you. What? So where are you guys? We're in San Francisco. You're in San Francisco.

Oh. So you're not in Texas. No. Just sounds like we're in Texas. Yeah. She's from Texas. So. Oh.

Can you guys actually just, if you don't mind, introduce yourself so we know, just you have your name and that. Sure. I'm Mary Sue Campbell. I live in Nevada, California, and my daughter, Christine, is 30 years old. I live in San Francisco, and I was raised in Nevada in the house that said this didn't happen at. So. Shall we begin? Okay. Tell me the beginning, how the story starts. From the beginning. I think I, I, I, I, it was odd. Christine actually called me Tuesday morning about 10 o'clock and just said, oh, what are you doing, mom? And I said, oh, I'm just going to go out in the yard and do some yard work and run some errands. And she said, we ought to do the yard work early because it's going to be hot today. So we're in the summertime. It was August. It was August 24th. And apparently, what, 10 minutes later, half an hour later,

she said I called her. She had left me a voicemail. Something like, hey, Christine, it's mom. Something's, something's not right. Something's wrong. I need you to call me back. So I gave her a call back. and she said, something about the house isn't right. There's things look weird in here. Well, what's weird? What are you talking about? And then she said, well, I'm looking at the calendar and it says August 2010. And I'm like, uh-huh.

And she's like, well, that's not right. And I said, well, yes, it is. It's August 24th, 2010. And as soon as I said that out loud, I grabbed my purse to leave. Oh, my God, she's had a stroke. That was my first reaction. And, oh, that makes me feel emotional. And so...

Christine says she walked out of her house to the car, keeping her mom on the phone. What else do you see? I'm just trying to keep her talking to me. All the while her mom's telling her one thing after another just doesn't look right. She says there's a strange black truck on the driveway, which is the truck that belongs to her boyfriend that has been parked there for 10 years. So I'm, of course, increasingly... I mean, I'm just freaking out at this point. So she hangs up with her mom and then calls the paramedics,

and a half hour later, Christine arrives at the hospital. By the time I walked in, she had been there for five or ten minutes at the most. And as soon as I walked in, the doctor greeted me and said... I said... This is her doctor, Jonathan Vallejo's. Christine, it's immediately evident. It's not a stroke, not an infection. That's a huge relief.

But I said... Your mother has transient global amnesia. Transient, global. Transient, global. How did those words hit you? I'll be honest with you. I had no idea what that meant. I think the word I heard the most was amnesia.

Your mother has lost her ability to form new memories. She can't remember. But... He said it's not going to last forever. It usually lasts between one and 24 hours, and we're not sure what causes it. And it's at this point where the story goes from something kind of frightening to something a little more surreal.

Yeah, so when I came in, Her mother is sitting up in bed? She's a smiler. And she immediately started asking questions. Okay, so what's the date? I said, well, it's Tuesday, August 24th. And of course, we have a video on YouTube of this. My birthday's already passed?

Yep. I don't know if I remember that. I'm trying to remember the last date I remember. I don't remember my birthday. Yeah. We hung out. You came over to my house and we watched a video that I made for you when I was in Texas and all of your sisters and some of your brothers

said happy birthday to you on the video. Yeah, but we still have the video so you can watch it again, but you're going to remember eventually. They say it's just temporary. Where was that? Was it at home? You were at home, yep, you're at home doing some gardening and you called me and you were feeling confused. So we called the paramedics, had them come and get you, and then we came here. We did a bunch of tests on you. Okay, so what's the date? August 24th. It's Tuesday. I'm trying to remember the last day to remember. I mean, I don't remember my birthday. You don't remember your birthday, yeah.

Yeah, that must have just been recently. Yeah, a couple weeks ago. Now, you might have missed it, but this conversation they're having just started over. Since August? Because every 90 seconds, Mary Sue's memory resets. August 24th. But what's strange is a repetition. Like, we started that last clip you heard with her saying this.

I'm trying to remember the last day. I remember. 90 seconds later, after her memory reset, she says, I'm trying to remember the last date I remember. 90 seconds later. I'm trying to remember the last date I remember. And as you watch this video for a few minutes, you realize what's happening here is that Mary Sue...

You remember what day in the week it is? No. It's in a loop. And it goes like this. First, the date. Okay, so what's the date? August 24th. She then responds in almost the same way, every time.

My birthday's already passed? Yeah. She's missed her birthday. starting after my birthday. Yep. Darn. And every time she says that, darn, in exactly the same way. If you fast forward,

it's already past my birthday, though. Yep. Oh, darn. She must enjoy her birthday quite a bit. You're going to remember it eventually. Then she laughs. What happened? Then they recap.

You were working in the garden, and you gave me a call. Christine explains the whole thing, and it's usually when she says the word paramedics. Right there. And have them come and pick you up. The Mary Sue's eyes get really wide in this look of shit. Hear, utter disbelief. Yes.

Isn't that creepy? I mean, every single time. And you say that over and over. Yeah, I was just going to say. She's creepy. I know. 90 seconds later. This is so creepy.

90 seconds later. It's so creepy. And it's often at this point, right after creepy, that she resets. Okay, so I don't know what day is. It's Tuesday. Like somebody put it on rewind. Over and over and over again. It's after my birthday.

Yes. I'd repeated the birthday so much that the nurse apparently was behind me, mouthing the words. Oh, did I miss my birthday? Girl, it's like Groundhog's Day in here. Yep, Grandhog's Day. This is like every two minutes. We're doing a loop.

Yes, we have had the same conversation over and over again every two minutes for the last two and a half hours. Two and a half hours. Yeah, I know. Same thing. Same thing. Yeah. We can't seem to talk about anything else. That is what we're talking about today.

What day? The week is it? Tuesday. August 24th. You didn't miss it. You were there. Yeah. Watching it, I wanted to slap me.

I wanted to reach out and slap me and say, damn it, I just told you that. For the record, I would never slap my mother. No, she would not. No, she would not. Okay, so I've a big question here is, clearly this is a person who's lost her memory. Yeah. But why would her behavior from one cycle to the next be so precisely and consistently the same?

I mean, sometimes exactly the same. Yeah, why? I think what it is is one of the things the nurses said is that when you have something like this, your true self comes out. You're true. The word true is interesting. Yeah. Is that what we're seeing on that video is that your true self? Oh, yeah.

I mean, that's my mom through and through right there. What Christine means is not the repetition, but that her mom keeps asking so many questions. She's inquisitive. She just wants to know what's going on with all, you know, across the board. I love problems. I love puzzles. Are you like a Sudoku fiend? You know, I am, I hate to admit this. I play escape room games on the Internet. Escape room, what are those?

They're stupid little games where they have little hidden pixels that you find you're stuck in a room. and you have to get out. You've got to find the key to the door and there's all these little hidden places. Oh, that's just the perfect metaphor then. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I was my own escape room.

Remember what day of the week it is? Tuesday. There's a different way of seeing this. First of all, Jonathan Vlahos, that ER doctor who's seen a bunch of these cases. He said, well, that puzzler instinct, that's not just Mary Sue. What everybody does is struggle over and over again,

with where am I and when am I? It's just the brain in survival mode. And another thing that everybody does, and he's seen about six of these patients so far, is that everybody, not just Mary Sue, but everybody, becomes a broken record, right down to the phrasing of the sentences. Which creeps them out a little bit.

It makes the brain seem a little bit more like a machine. You give the machine the exact same set of inputs. Every 90 seconds give it the same. doctor, the same hospital room, same beeping machines, and see if the output ever varies. And it doesn't. It almost seems like the patient has no free well. And so sometimes, in the back of his head, he thinks, God, if I had that condition and someone videotaped me?

I would love to see, see my own tape. Why? You know, I think I want to see, could I somehow escape the loop? or would I end up with the rest of us Now thankfully, according to Jonathan what normally happens in this condition is that as time goes on

That 90-second loop starts to slowly expand You know, it's actually more like two minutes or three minutes Eventually four minutes Now it's five minutes And for Mary Sue after a few hours As her loop got longer and longer Her old memories started to creep back in By that evening

She was remembering up until like that Sunday. A few hours later, her memory began to extend into Monday morning. And by the time we left the hospital, she remembered Monday night. And then, finally... Shall we begin?

Okay. Tell me the beginning, how the story starts. From the beginning. I think I, I, I, it was odd, Christine actually called me Tuesday morning about 10 o'clock

and just said, oh, what are you doing, Mom? And apparently, what, 10 minutes later? Half hour later? I'm Robert Crilwich. I'm Chad. I'm Ron. And we'll be right back.

Message 1. This is Kurt Brownhauer, and these are the words you've told me to read. Radio Lab is funded in power by Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. Hi, my name is Christine Campbell. This is Mary Sue Campbell. Here we go. More information about Sloan at www.

at www.org. Thanks. Hope that was dumb enough for you. End of message. Hey, I'm Chad. I'm Umbud. And I'm Robert Quilwicz. This is Radio Lab and this hour we're talking about loops. Loops. Loops. Okay.

Loops. Something and nothing and something. Something and nothing. Here's one for you. I mean, zero is the obvious loop. And this loop shape is part of why zero is zero. Who's this? This is Alex Bellos.

And I'm the author of Here's Looking at Euclid. When I was a kid, I used to think, oh, zero, it's like the whole. with nothing in it, but actually zero was chosen by the Indians as kind of reflecting like the eternal cycles of the faces of heaven. The Romans and the Greeks and the Jews, we didn't have a zero. We just had, you know, everything started at one. And one reason why we didn't is that we were kind of afraid of the void. Afraid of the void.

Well, I mean, how would you describe something that isn't there? Nothing. There's nothing to say. Is that scary somehow? Yeah, it's an emptiness and a nothingness, and it means you're so alone, you don't even know where you are. And so this sort of was a psychological barrier to us grasping this zero. But in India, everything and nothing was the same thing.

They had this very sort of fluidity, and they grasped this idea that nothingness was something. And oddly enough, the way they decided to represent the nothing was they took a little piece of nothing, and they drew a circle around it, which turns the nothing into a something. And it's a loop. And it's a loop.

So this idea of eternity and continuity and continuity and infinity is actually contained with our numeral for zero. I mean, I kind of love the idea that actually he is kind of the most mystical, kind of magical, spiritual digit of them all. You know, and we use it every day. See. Are you rolling? Yeah.

So here's two of the workhorses. These are like my old... Next up, a story from reporter Mark Phillips. All right. As you can see here, there's all these containers of tape loops. Okay, so set this up. Who is this guy? His name's William Bizzinski.

He's a musician who makes this really hard to describe music. He's been doing it for about 30 years, and basically what he does is he takes a little bit of classical music or muzac, records it onto tape. Analog tape And he loops it See if I can find something from He cuts the beginning, the end Tapes it together into a circle Threads it through a tape machine

Messes with the speeds And you get something that sounds like this This little phrase that just repeats Over and over and over again And never changes You know loops are everywhere They're cycles, they're in nature They're just universal

And if you can find a loop that can repeat without becoming redundant, then you can sort of fall into a different space and time even. Sort of like a bubble of eternity or something, I don't know. So that's what that sounds like. Well, in the summer of 2001, I was archiving all these old tape loops, transferring them to digital. And something kind of weird happened. He grabbed this one piece of tape. hey, put it on, and it was this wonderful grave, very stately loop I'd totally forgotten about.

And I set it up and turned on the CD burner and left the control room, went to the kitchen, got some coffee, and came back, and I started realizing something was changing. I looked and I could see that the tape was shredding. The thing to understand about tape is that when you record music onto analog tape onto a bit of it, that music... What it is is it's iron oxide powder glued to just a piece of plastic. So the iron powder is actually the music? Yeah.

But after 20, 30 years... The glue loses its strength. And the dust falls off. Onto the floor. His music was actually falling on the floor? Yeah. And I thought, oh my God, what's going to happen? and what happened was in the course of about an hour

the music disintegrated and you put more loops on and it kept happening but the really interesting thing was while some disintegrated quickly some slowly they all sort of had the same pattern what do you mean? Just listen to this one so this is one of his loops at the beginning

and after it went around and around for 20 minutes or so So the dust started to fall off, and then it sounded like this. All the notes are still there, but the tails... They're getting shorter. Yeah. And that's what would always happen. The sustains and decays of the notes seem to fall away, like from the back, moving backwards.

It gets shorter and shorter. Instead of being held for four seconds, it's held for three seconds, two seconds. And finally, you just really hear... Like the attacks and the... ...accents. Just the beginnings of the notes. Only the beginning. Those seem to hold on.

At least for a little while. I was thinking, wow, this is like... I'm recording the life and death of a melody. It just made me think of human beings, you know, and how we die. You can really really... here the disintegration on this particular loop. I think this was number five. It starts sounding like the rest, like this. But after just 15 minutes, it's basically completely gone. And the tape on this one, you know, tape is normally brown. Right now it's clear, like scotch tape.

The dust is gone. And there's a little bit of brown here, but now it's just clear. Oh, it's almost all gone. The next loop is a sly one, and you're going to have to wait a bit for its loopiness to kick in. Ready? Born ready. Producer Linnevee. The smell of a dead whale is you have to experience to know what it's like. It's like nothing I've ever smelled.

This is Craig Smith, Professor of Oceanography. It really is, yeah, it's really putrid. Back when Craig was a graduate student. This was in 1982. He heard there was a dead whale floating off the coast of San Diego. About a third out of the water with seabirds on it, pecking at it. How big? Around 25 to 30 feet long.

So what is that, like a train car? More like a size of a small yacht, I guess. Big freaking whale. Craig wanted to sink that whale. No one had ever studied what happens when a whale sinks to the seafloor. People just speculated about it. So no one had ever followed it down to the bottom? No one had followed the whale down to the bottom.

Huh. Right? So we towed the carcass out to sea. And they had all these little scraps of steel that they tied to the whale's tail, one at a time. About 2,000 pounds. And... Nothing. It wasn't enough to sink the whale. Whale kept floating there like a big smelly balloon.

Its belly was all full of... Decompositional gas. And the captain of the ship goes, well... I have a big rifle. Let's bring that out, so he got out his rifle. And all the other guys in the boats take out their guns. Shooting the whale... Yeah, yeah. This also doesn't work.

It doesn't work. It didn't really do anything. But Craig, tried again and again, and eventually, not with that whale, but with others, he got to see something so cool. So a whale dies and sinks down into the dark. And... And then, this incredible cycle begins.

Within minutes, scavengers will be at the carcass. Lots of them. How do these little creatures see the whale if it's so dark? They smell it. They smell the whale. Within hours, it may well have hundreds of have... They're terrified. These eel-like animals, they have grinding plates instead of teeth, and they burrow into the carcass.

Hundreds like a hagfish convention. This writhing mass of eels. What does that look like? Well, it looks like a giant Medusa head. Over the next few days, a bunch of other scavengers show up. Including stone crabs, shrimp sea scuds, sharks, crustaceans. Huge feeding frenzy. Flesh flying everywhere.

Sometimes the hagfish get ticked off and they try to defend their territory. Hagfish have an very interesting ability to produce mucus. You can put a couple of hagfish into a bucket of water and kick it and they can produce enough mucus to essentially turn the bucket of water into something like gelatin. Wow. So it's like a medusa head in a cloud of mucus.

And all that is just the first stage. The mobile scavenger stage. Okay. So what happens after that? Well, after the mobile scavenger stage is the enrichment opportunist stage. At that point. The whale is beginning to look pretty dilapidated. Little bits of whale soft tissue get implanted in the seafloor.

And so the ground around the whale becomes sort of its own little ecosystem, and a bunch of new animals show up. They're worms. They're wriggly little worms. Just like tons of them. We can get 30 or 40,000 of them per square meter. Sometimes the sediment around a whale fall looks like a lawn of grass, where these worms are just wriggling, sticking up out of the sediment,

and waving back and forth. What color are these worms? Do you know? I think they're white. So a field of white worms. Yeah. White grass. It's kind of ghostly. Yeah.

And finally, the last stage. Something we call the sulfur-loving stage. At this point, the whale looks like a skeleton just covered with this actually beautiful mat of white bacteria. Huh. And it's fluffy and just looks like a polar bear's fur. Covering the bones of the whale? Yeah. Think about a whale skeleton draped in a polar bear fur coat.

Sulfur is coming out of the bones and the bacteria are just clustering around, sucking it up for years. When you step back and look at it, these dead whales, they become like planets. And you find creatures living on them that you don't find anywhere else. There are now about 55 species that haven't been found in any other habitat. Species of animals that only live on whale falls. Does that mean that these creatures, like the whale is their entire world? They don't know anything else? For some of them, yeah.

What do they do the rest of the time? I mean, this can't happen that often. Well, that's a good question. It may be that they are living as fugitive species. In other words, they just drift around, sort of waiting. Can I say hoping? For, and when that happens. They grow quickly, produce hundreds, thousands, maybe even millions of larvae that they then broadcast out into the water column.

Then their babies drift around in the darkness waiting until... Find another such habitat. Tens or maybe even hundreds of kilometers away. and repeat. So altogether, I mean, how long can a whale fall last? Well, a whale fall can last. A large whale skeleton, that of a blue, large blue whale or a fin whale, can support a community for 50 to 75 years.

Wow. Which really astounded us. And how does that compare to the lifespan of the whale? Well, it's probably pretty comparable, actually. whales live on the order of 50 to 70 years. There's something kind of poetic about that, the idea that, you know, for the same amount of time that the whale lived, it's going to support this life. Yeah, it is very appealing. Okay, ready?

This is Radio Lab? Oh, okay. Yeah, you start. Okay. This is Radio Lab. Today we're talking about loops. I'm Robert Crulwich. Jan Abumran.

This is Radio Lab. It's all about loops. Yep, I'm Jad. And I'm Robert. You're listening to Radio Lab. Today we're talking about loops. I'm Robert. I'm Jad.

And it's all about loops. I'm Jad. I'm Robert. We're talking about loops. And speaking of things that happen over and over and over again. Here on this show here. Hello. Here he is again.

Hi, Jad. Hey, Steve. Steven Strokes. How are you? Mathematician. Cornel University. How's it going? I'm good.

And Steve told us a story about a mathematical loop. That threw mathematicians all over the world. Four. A loop. Story starts way back with a guy named Gotlob. Riga. Gotlob Frege? How do you spell gotlob? Yeah, it's not Gottlieb. It seems to be L-O-B at the end, unless it's a typo in every book I've ever seen. Now, to set this up very quickly,

Gottlob Frege was a mathematician back in the 1870s and 80s, and he had a dream that mathematics could unlock the secrets of the universe, that you could maybe even build a machine, feed it some basic mathematical rules, and it would just start churning out discoveries. Wouldn't even need a human being. That's how powerful he thought math could be. But that led him to a question, if math is the most fundamental thing in the universe, what is the most fundamental part of math? What's at the foundation? Is it numbers? Is it, you know, one, two, three? Well, that's what you would think. But Gottlab. He said, no, there's a deeper thing than numbers. The deepest thing of all is what today we call sets, the set of things. The set of things.

A set. Yeah, so like, what's a set? You know, you could... Steve explained it to us, using, of all things, Sesame Street. old episode. As far as just to set it up here, it's two people working at the furry arms hotel. There's Humphrey. All right, Ingrid. Who's got a green nose and a pink face. And his girlfriend, I don't actually know what she is. She might be his wife.

Ingrid. And so they're hotel keepers. And Ernie is in the background. And so Ingrid and Humphrey are taking an order. Hello. How may I help you? Room service order from a room full of Penguin. We're hungry.

You know, Humphrey says, I'll take your order, Mr. Penguin, sir. What would you like? A fish. Fish. A fish. Fish. Fish. Fish.

Then Humphrey says, let me check if I got that right. Fish, fish, fish, fish, fish. You got it. And then he calls over to Ingrid, who's going to call it into the kitchen. So he tells Ingrid. Fish, fish, fish, fish, fish. And Ingrid says fish, fish, fish, fish. And Humphrey said, no, that's not right.

Fish, fish. Because she only says it five times. But then Ernie explains. Excuse me, uh, Ingrid and Humphrey, I have a better way for you to do this. A better way? Mm-hmm. Count the fish. Fish?

Fish. Two. Fish. Three, four, five, six fish. Holy mackerel! They both realize Ingrid and Humphrey how powerful this is, and they say, does it work for... Does it work on other stuff? Say, cinnamon rolls?

Yep. Spark plugs? Absolutely. Wow. Wow. That's the point that what cinnamon buns and spark plugs and fish, the sets have... in common is that there are six in each. Right? I mean, if you try to say, what does six really mean?

It's the thing that those sets have in common. According to Steve, it's not so much the number six that's important here. Yeah, that's just a label for this characteristic that all these piles seem to share. It's the pile itself, the set. That is the most basic thing. So if you said... Holy mackerel! Well, this is it.

Sets are... The bedrock that I've been looking for. Yeah, we can build the rest of math on top of it. Yeah, and then I can make my math mission. that'll solve the universe. And I think he published a book sort of showing how this might work, except that Russell...

Bertrand Russell, the mathematician, then found a devastating paradox that ended up, well, annihilating what Frege had tried to do. Russell's paradox has now become known as the Barber paradox. It's a little thought experiment. So in this case, the set is a town.

Yep. A town with people. Yep. One barber. With the following rules. In this town, the barber-shaded. everyone who doesn't shave himself.

The barber. Sounds reasonable, right? ...shaves everyone who doesn't shave himself. So some people shave themselves, some people go to the barber. That's the universe. We're in a town where everyone who doesn't shave himself is shaven by this barber. And now the question is, who shaves the barber? Who shaves...

Remember, the barber has the property that he shaves everyone who doesn't shave himself. So he can't shave himself. Ah. But on the other hand... Couldn't he... If he doesn't shave himself, Then he's one of those people who doesn't shave himself and is therefore shaven by the barber. Well, maybe the barber, here's two solutions for you guys.

The barber could not shave. Couldn't he just not shave? No. Or maybe he could set up some sort of mechanical device. It's sort of like one of those rude Goldberg things. No, no, you can't do that. You can't change the rule. You can't answer sensibly what happens to the barber.

And no one has. There's nothing to say. He either does or doesn't shave himself by ordinary Aristotelian logic because the barber can't shave himself and he can't. not shave himself. And that's what ruined? That's what ruined the machine that would solve the universe? Wait, we just see us. I think it could ruin an afternoon, or you could have to wait for a couple hours

like after lunch before you go swimming. But I can't see that like overthrowing all life's work. It does. It does. It turns out to be very, very problematic for the foundations of math. Because what this Barber paradox, the reason it was so annoying to mathematicians was that math is supposed to be. this logical thing, right?

Logic is the lifeblood of math. And yet here, you had this little bit of math that was illogical, a self-contradicting set. But Bertrand Russell, the guy who came up with all this, he didn't lose faith. He thought, well, this is just a problem with set theory. So then he spent a long time trying to make a theory,

I think he called it a theory of types instead of sets. And these, he had certain admission rules that he thought would prevent paradoxes from happening. And for a while, it was looking pretty good. Under Bertrand Russell's system, there was no logical problems, no paradoxes, until... This scrawny little German guy comes along.

And you say his name, Girdle? I hear it often pronounced, well, I don't speak German, but mathematicians often say it like the woman's piece of clothing, you know, from the old days. It sounds like Goodle. Gurdle. So there's a kind of er-or-so in the middle. This is Jana.

Jan-Ele-Loveen. She has written a book about Girdle. And I'm a professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College. And she says the point at which Gouldl enters our story, it's 1930s, Vienna, Austria. He had just recently finished his what would be equivalent to like a doctoral degree, a PhD. Smart dude. Kind of a rising star. It was no question that people around him understood that.

But he was also maybe a little bit off. He had real breaks with, you know, reality. He was in the biographies they'd call him a paranoid schizophrenic, but he seemed more a kind of obsessive, depressive. I don't know if my armchair psychology terms are accurate. But he was in and out of sanatoria. And he had real difficulties being sure what was real. The only reality he really trusted was math. Circles, shapes, prime numbers, formulas, axioms.

Right. And at a certain point, he got into paradoxes. Perhaps it was the Barber paradox that lured him in, we don't know. But he began to think about and actually experiment with some of these paradoxical loops. So he took something like the paradox of the liar. The Paradox of the Liar says, this statement is a lie. This statement is a lie. Right.

If it's true, then it's false. And if it's false, then it's true. This statement is a lie. If you think about that too much, you might explode. Right. So Goodell was interested in that phrase, and for various reasons, he took it, tweaked it a little bit to come up with. The following statement. This statement is unprovable.

This statement is unprovable. Which is very important to notice. If it's provable, then it's unprovable. Obviously a little bit of a word game, but Goodle thought, forget words. What would happen

if I converted this statement into math? Because in math, things are either provable or unprovable. They cannot be both at the same time. It's either true or false. And if it's true,

well, then damn it. You should be able to prove it. Yeah. So he said, I'm going to assign a special number, a unique number, to make that a purely mathematical statement by coding it in a very clever way

into arithmetic. To be honest, we don't completely get this part. Very, very clever. But once he did his math-y stuff, he had a rigorous mathematical statement right there on the page. He looked at it and he realized that what he just said in math... Is it the following statement? This statement is unprovable. Is...

It's true because it's actually unprovable. Meaning, in math, this statement actually is unprovable. Because it is true, the logic of math will not let you... prove that it is true. So it might be true. We'll just never know. Nothing like that is supposed to happen in math. Things are supposed to be true or not true. And you're supposed to be able to prove every true thing, says Steve. So if there's something true that you can't prove, that means that the math is strangely, woefully incomplete. It's always called his incompleteness theorem. That's the phrase. The girdle incompleteness

theorem is that if you have a system of axioms that are consistent, meaning they don't contradict themselves, they're necessarily incomplete. That is, there are certain statements you can make within that system that you can't prove or disprove. And all of math has this character. This is the big shock, that this is not just about word games about logic puzzles with barbers. This is as devastating for even just counting for one, two, three, four. In other words, math is shot through and through with these kind of statements that you can't either prove or disprove. Seriously, the deep thinkers at the time were amazed at this. It was recognized as one of the great ideas of the 20th century, for sure, maybe of all time.

I mean, maybe I should make it more concrete. There's a question that, as far as I know, is still not solved. Steve gave us this example of a problem. Something called Goldbox conjecture. That kind of gives you a sense of what incompleteness feels like. So Goldbox conjecture says that you can always write. write any even number as a sum of two prime numbers. So let me give you some examples of that.

Like, say, 12. Yeah. Remember, first of all, prime number means you can divide it by one and by itself, like seven, is a prime number. You could divide by one and seven, but nothing else. Okay. All right. So 12, which is an even number, is seven plus five.

Those are both prime numbers. All right, let's try another one. How about 24? That's 11 plus 13. Right. Okay, or 36, 19 plus 17. Any even number. Now, this has been checked out to, I don't know what, billions, trillions, maybe hundreds of trillion.

So no one has ever found a counter example to Gold Box conjecture. And here's the thing. You might think that either it's true or it's false. It might be that this statement, every even number is the sum of two primes, it might be neither true nor false. but what we today call undecidable. Undecidable is a term that comes from girdle. Undecidable. Yeah.

I mean, suppose in some ethereal or transcendental sense, like that is, suppose that there's God and God knows that this is true. Then, you know, what about us here among the world of human beings? All we can do is check each even number. And every time we check, it's true. That would never constitute a proof. because we'd never run out of numbers. If you then say that to understand everything,

you either have to defer to God, who does understand everything if you believe in God, but if you don't believe in God, you then have to live with mystery and not knowing. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That's all you're going to say? Mm-hmm.

I'm going to say, yes. I'm going to say, uh-huh. Well, I think you've encapsulated it perfectly, and I think that Gertl himself was, I think, a believer in all kinds of mystical things. Like for him, this was very freeing and liberating because it meant that there were, that we couldn't be mechanized. There was profound mystery forever. Hold on.

I'm on your team here, but let me just point on something. Goodle, when he died, he was not exactly liberated. He was a paranoid, like, he thought people were trying to poison him. He starved himself to death. He wasn't exactly liberated from the end. But I choose to believe that somewhere in his tortured mind, and I guess his mind was pretty tortured, there was a little fellow humming a song, a song of liberation. This problem's unsolvable. This problem's unsolvable.

This problem's unsolvable. This problem's unsolvable. Thanks to Steve Strogatz, he has a new book called Infinite Powers, How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe. And also thanks to Jan 11, her book about Goodle is called A Madman Dreamer. dreams of Turing machines. And finally, our last lupy piece. Yeah, this one, like the last one, involves things feeding back on themselves. Kind of like your classic positive feedback loop.

Which is what exactly? Well, it's like when you can do it with audio, you take a speaker and a mic, you put the, you feed the sound from the speaker into the mic and then back into the speaker and into the mic. The multiply, the multiplies, and then you get something like, Painful is what that's horrible. Definitely be painful. But that kind of feedback loop, like in the case of our next story, can also take the pain away. Yes.

Comes to us from this lady. I'm Melanie Thurnstrom. She's a writer. The author of a book on pain called The Pain Chronicles. Which is a book that began as a chronicling of her own pain, which she's been suffering from. Every day. For the last 15 years. And what sort of pain?

Oh, pain in my neck and right shoulder. and right side of my head. All at once? Yeah, it's all the once. Did it start with something? Did you hit it there? How did it start? It didn't start with an injury of any kind,

but it did start at a discreet time. Goes back to 1997. She was upstate New York at a country house on a date. It was our first date, and I wanted to impress him. So I swam across a pond about a mile across. Was this your idea or was this his idea? It was my idea. Wow, that's a different kind of first day.

And you made it all the way there and back. Yes, and nothing happened. But that night... When you got in the bed. I was kept awake by this strange burning sensation in my shoulder and neck. I didn't get the head pain for like four more years. And that particular pain never went away and got worse over time. Burning.

So it was like a nerve, a nerve was... Yeah, I mean, eventually I got an MRI a couple years later, and there was nerve impingement in my spine. And over the years, she says she's tried everything. She's tried drugs, and she's tried physical therapy. She's tried distraction. Like, I'll go to a matinee, and if it's a scary movie, I just don't stay focused on the pain. So distraction can work. But then she says, as soon as she gets out of the movie, it's back.

And it's angry for being ignored. Sometimes I'd have the sensation that that right side of my head was like dying, like the nerves were dying, that dead tree and that image would kind of frighten me. And that thought, she'd find that that thought would make the pain worse. And making the pain worse will inspire further negative fantasies. Which will make the pain worse. Which will make the pain worse. Which will inspire more fantasies.

Yes. And so the loop goes. Positive feedback loop. Yeah. In a negative sort of way. Right. And eventually, Melanie decided, okay, I'm going to write a book about this. Let me do some research.

So I was reading a lot about self-inflicted pain and religious rights. And I actually went to witness a Hindi festival, Tai Pusam and Kuala Lumpur. And what she saw really changed her mind about things. And you can see video of this festival on YouTube. What you see is a dense school. crowd of folks. In the middle of the crowd, there are these monks doing insane acts of devotion. They literally, like, thread needles through their tongues, poke skewers through their cheeks, weighted fishhucks dangle from their backs. And yet, she says, when she would look in their faces,

they seemed relaxed. Like, their eyes don't tear up. They don't gasp her breath. Like, really relaxed. It wasn't just that they were tolerating the pain. It actually seemed like They weren't in pain. At all. And I would think, okay, this person here has a skewer in his mouth. I'm in pain. This is pathetic. You know, and you can't become a religious Hindi in order to experience this analgesic benefit.

Like, that's cheating. But I did feel like, okay, so one way to describe it is faith. But for every way that you can describe in religious terms, there's all. also a way you can describe things in scientific terms. Yeah, the reality is all of our pain is in our head. Which brings us to this guy. This is Sean Mackie. Chief of the Stanford Pain Management Division. And he will tell you that one of the most basic facts about pain is that it is not purely physical.

We've got signals coming up from the body that are sending us a message. Like if you whack a toe, the signal shoots up some nerves in your leg, into your spine. And those signals converge in our brain. And before you even feel a thing, there are a multitude of what I refer to as little amplifiers throughout our brain that turn up and turn down the overall pain experience. And these amplifiers are things like your mood. Anxiety, depression, attention, expectations.

All of these things feed back onto that signal coming up from the body and they can either boost it up, up, up, past a certain point where you get a sensation of pain. Or they can deaden it down, down, down, down, down, down. down, down, down, down to where you don't feel anything at all. Oh. Point is pain is a conversation between the brain and the body, and Sean thought, what would happen if I actually let people see that conversation? Could they, you know...

Take control of it. Yes. So he did a study, and Melanie signed up. Mm-hmm. So describe what happens in this experiment. So you put in this MRI machine. We put somebody into a scanner. A brain scanner.

And you have a screen in front of you. And what you see on this screen is something. that normally only the researchers would see. You see your own brain in real time. Yeah. Well, you're not seeing the whole thing. You're just seeing one peak. Called the anterior cingulate cortex. There are many parts of the brain that respond to pain, but that's the one that...

It's an area that has been shown to be involved with pain perception, turning pain up and down. It's thought to give pain, it's emotional valence. It's negativity. And do you actually see an image of this little piece of your brain right there in front of you on the screen? I mean, are you looking at your brain? No, no. That's confusing to every. So instead we give a visual metaphor.

You see an image of fire flames in an ice cave. Ooh. I mean, it is kind of a cartoon flame, but it looks realistic. So are you flickering flames? Do they leap into the, do they leap? Yes, they leap. And the more activation there is in that region, the higher the flames go. So Melanie is lying in the scanner watching her own pain flames, and Sean gives her a set of instructions.

We say, okay, we want you to imagine that you're sitting in a nice, warm, soothing jacuzzi. You know, this burning is a warm bath. This burning is very relaxing. I'm relaxing into it. Yeah. But pretty soon it was like hot, hot. It's kind of hot. Ha!

It's scalding me. I could have got out. And before she knew it, the flames were... rowing. So, Sean says, okay, okay. So how about you're... Lying on a beautiful beach? Yes.

You know, this burning is a... a pleasant sun tan. And the sand is nice and warm and pleasant. I'm going to look so good in my new bathing suit if I just keep getting burnt like this. And sunburn. Oh, it's kidding. All right.

And then the flames would kind of go crazy. Her thoughts kept slipping out of her control. Every time she would see those flames rise, she would think, oh, no, the flames are rising, which would make them rise even more, and then more and more until she had this bonfire on the zone. screen. You're immediately struck by, they look like the flames where you're going to, the flames where you're burned at the stake. I've been reading a lot of lives of saints at that point.

But then Melanie had an idea. She said, why don't I take this, this negative image and flip it? Then I started trying to move into the idea of being a saint or a martyr and that I, you know, believe that I would have no pain and that I was protected by my faith. And as Melanie started thinking about this, she could see the flames. Dying down. Just a little bit. Which is odd because this isn't, you know, you don't know me, but this isn't actually like part of my fantasy life.

But she thought, okay, I'll try this. Let me keep going in that kind of feeling. So I was trying to pick one of the few prayers. I knew, I mean, I didn't, I'm half Jewish and half Christian. So I was sort of not settled in onto what kind of. of martyr I was. You know, I started thinking, should I really be a Jewish martyr? Since, you know, if you're half Jewish, you know, my mother's Jewish, it's the right side.

Really, I'm Jewish more than Christian. And then I started thinking about Jewish martyrs and like, what prayers did they say? And as she added and revised details. That continued to make the flames go down. Okay, I'm in the right brain state. Let me do more of that. So Melanie finally decided, okay, I'm going to be this one particular Jewish. martyrs, named Akiva Ben Joseph. He was burned at the stake by the Romans for teaching the Torah.

And there's a particular legend that just as the executioner is about to set fire to the logs right underneath his feet, Akiva stared the executioner in the eyes and smiled. And the executioner was like, why are you smiling? You're about to be burned alive. And Akiva said, all my life, when I said those words, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, I was sad because I thought, when shall I be able to fulfill that command? And now that I'm giving my life and my resolution remains firm, why shouldn't I smile? And by the time Melanie had this fantasy built up in her mind, she looked over at the flames and she noticed they were almost gone. Like zero, you know, zero pain. For the first time, she'd taken control of it. I felt like

Wow, I am watching my brain thinking my thoughts, and I am changing my thoughts by thinking and watching myself do this. So you are looking at yourself, looking at yourself, looking at yourself, looking at yourself. Yeah. It's like peering inside and seeing the ghost in the machine. I felt, you know, like someone taking their first step on the moon. Like, I am watching my brain thinking my thoughts, and I am thinking my thoughts, changing my thoughts, changing my thoughts by thinking and watching my thoughts, watching my thoughts, watching my brain, changing my thoughts by thinking and watching myself do this. Well, I need to establish, I need to establish this, that once you were, did your two sessions and you're in-between exercises, without all these gizmos, could you, could you address your pain?

Yeah. Better? No. Like you think, well, okay, can't you just get the feedback from your own body? But somehow this sensation isn't quite direct enough that I think that you could do it without the visual feedback. But for that moment, in that machine? It was power. For we go a very special.

Special thanks to our singers who joined us this hour from the new music ensemble at LaGuardia High School. They are. Kelly F. The Mu. Julian Soto. Eli Greenhope. Julia Egan. Ruby Frum. Those guys wrote and performed all the music between the pieces.

You guys rock. And thanks to the guy who teaches them and who organized this Mr. Robert Apostle. My thoughts and I am changing my thoughts by watching my brain thinking my thoughts. And I am changing my thoughts. And I am changing my thoughts. Stop! And let's begin. Gidey as the formal greeting goes.

This is Jake calling from the other side of the planet in Adelaide, South Australia, Australia. Radio Lab was created by Chad Aberrude and is produced by Soren Wheeler. Dylan Keefe is a director of sound design. Susie Lechtenberg is our executive producer. Our staff include Simon Adler, Becker Bressler, Rachel Cusick, David Gebel, Bethel Hapty, Tracy Hunt, Matt Kilty, Robert Krulwich, Julia Longoria, Annie McEwan, Latif Nasser, Melissa O'Donnell, Kelly Prime, Sarah Kari, Ariane Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster.

With help from Shima Olialli, Audrey Quinn and Neil Danesha, our fact checker is Michelle Harris. Thank you guys.