Radiolab - Lost & Found

Episode Date: January 25, 2011

In this episode, we steer our way through a series of stories about getting lost, and ask how our brains, and our hearts, help us find our way back home. 

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

Yeah. And NPR. Please enter your address. Denver, Colorado. Calculating route. Okay. Now I'm getting closer to him. Woo!

I promise I won't bite you. We begin our journey this hour. How old are you? I'm 42. Oh, man, I'm 63. This isn't going to work. I don't know. With this woman, her name is Sharon Roseman.

Okay, enough of that. Enough of that. All right. And we're going to talk about a little predicament she got herself into. I was about five years old. I lived in a small suburb of Chicago called Maywood, Illinois. And I was outside playing on the street. Her and a bunch of kids, they were playing this game.

Blind man's bluff. And she was it. The person who is it wears a blindfold and all the other kids try and scatter around and they have to freeze. And then they can taunt you and you can only hear them. And the objective is basically to feel around, follow the voices until you tag someone. Then they become it. And that's what she does. Everybody laughs because the person that I tagged is kind of the loser, you know, because they found them first.

So I'm playing the game, and they took the blindfold off, and suddenly I didn't know where I was. I didn't recognize anything. This horrible panic set in because nothing looked familiar to me, absolutely nothing. I just, I ran blindly just running just to run because I was so scared. And I ran into the backyard of this house in front of me. And I saw my mother sitting in a lawn chair. And I said, why are you here? And she said, what?

What do you mean? Why am I here? I said, why are you in this backyard? Where are we? She said, what are you talking about? We're at home. I'm in the backyard. And I said, but this is in our house.

And she said, yes, this is. What are you talking about? And I couldn't explain it. And I just kept crying and just kept saying, I don't know where I'm at. and she might your mother must have been very worried at that moment well unfortunately my mother said something to me that actually changed my life forever she pointed her finger in my face and she said don't ever tell anybody because they'll say you're a witch and they'll burn you what she said that because i don't know i don't know i don't

know and from that moment on it was my secret. She realizes now that what happened to her in that moment when she was five in playing the game was that her whole world had rotated. A quarter turn. A quarter turn. Picture where you're sitting right now, you would still be sitting in that same room but the wall that you're looking at right in front of you is now one wall over to the right. Let me make it easier. If I were on the toilet say sitting there, looking straight ahead, is now the bathtub in a different place than it was before, the sink in a different place by about 90 degrees? Everything.

Everything in the entire universe. But just horizontally, it doesn't tilt? No, it doesn't tilt. East-West becomes north-south. Like in Colorado here, the mountains, the Rocky Mountains are on the west end of town. Right. When this happens to me, they move to the north end of town. But everything else moves with it.

So the first time that happened, you say you do? You didn't know where you were, yet you recognized things, but they just weren't where they were supposed to be? No, I didn't even recognize them. That very first time I was so panicked. I just didn't know what to do. Did it ever happen again? Over and over and over. I mean, I get lost all the time, as do you, but that's...

This is different. Yeah. Before we go any further, let's just orient real quick. I'm Chad Abumrod. I'm Robert Krollwitch. This is Radio Lab this hour. We're calling it Lost and Found. going to be experiencing the feelings like Sharon just had of being totally lost.

And then that relief that you feel, as Sharon will feel eventually, of being totally found. Not totally. Let's go back to her story. Did it ever happen again? Over and over and over. She says this 90-degree rotation problem would come on in all kinds of situations. Sometimes, even when she had her eyes closed. But what saved me was that shortly after that first episode, I went to, to a little birthday party, and we were playing, um, pin the tail on the donkey. And they put a blindfold on me and spun me in circles.

You must have been like, oh, man, you didn't want to do that. It was, it was awful. Because after that first turn, everything did shift. But then, on the second turn, when they spun her around again, it fixed it. Really? Yeah. That's so weird. If I played a third time, crazy again.

So it's binary. It's like on off, on off. Exactly, exactly. But I couldn't tell anybody that. But now she had a fix, or temporary fix. So from that moment on, anytime her world would shift? I would go into the bathroom and I'd close the door so nobody could see me. And I would spin in circles until it fixed it.

You spin and it reasserts itself correctly. Yeah. And I still do that to this day. And with her secret spinning, Sharon has managed to lead a relatively normal life. She got married, had three kids. But when my children were babies, if one of them would cry out, just cry out in their sleep. Invariably, she'd wake up. Begging into a wall.

Completely turned around. And then I would have to follow their cries, the sound of their cries, until I could find their bedroom. There was no explanation for that. I had to just say I was clumsy. So you never told them? No. And my husband didn't know. And I'm not married to him anymore.

But, and you can leave that in there. The point is she kept it a secret. But one day when Sharon was 29, she was on her way to her brother's house, and she got turned around. So I called him from a pay phone, and I said, I can't find your house. She read him the names of the street signs.

And he said, Sharon, you're like two blocks from my house. And I just started crying, and I told him the story. He was just shocked. So he dragged her to the hospital. And they saw some specialists. And they kept me in the hospital for like a week doing every kind of test you can imagine. And it showed nothing. They basically told me it was psychological.

Like it's all in your head? Yes. Wow. And that you were the only one in the whole universe who had this problem. Yeah. I thought, okay, I must be a witch. Huh. I mean, that's just, that's a crazy story.

Okay, just to pull out for a bit, after we talked with Sharon, we ended up speaking with, well, if you've heard Radio Lab before, you probably know that voice. Jonah Lairor? They don't want to ask us like a question. Jonah Lairor. Yes, there you go. Jonah is a science writer and an author.

My last book was How We Decide. Knows a lot about the brain. And so we played him tape from the Sharon interview, just to see what he'd think. And he had an interesting take. Well, it's, I mean, it's just one of these great windows into this talent we completely take for granted. And you realize this is such sophisticated software. There are so many different algorithms that are running that allow us to not get lost in the way out of the bathroom. One way to think about this story, he says, is not why does Sharon get lost all the time,

but why don't the rest of us? And a lot of this is brand new science. So we're talking the last three, four, five years. But in that time, he says scientists have just begun to figure out how brains make maps of our surroundings from moment to moment. They've identified at least four different types of cells that make these maps possible. Everything from place cells to grid cells to border cells. Wait, can we go through place cells? Yeah, no, no, we'll slow down. But all these cells come together to give us these incredibly rich maps. This all began to make more sense to us when Jonas said, okay, let me do it this way. I just took a trip into this office building. I'm sitting in a radio station. Let me do the same thing as I did it in my brain. I got

out of my car. I walked to the front of the building. So I open up the door. And, and I'm And somehow, some way, my brain begins to make sense of this space. First thing that happens, he says, is little cells in his head called grid cells. Come online. Grid cells are pretty weird. I got to be honest. Before he's even taken a step into the building, these grid cells, kind of like mappers or surveyors. They just lay on a grid.

This grid, this matrix, over the hallway right in front of him. Unbeknownst to me, that grid is composed of equilateral triangles. Triangle. Wait, what? Triangles. Yeah, it's pretty spooky. As I'm walking down the hallway, I pass from one triangle to the next.

My brain is keeping track of exactly which triangle I'm in. I pass by a wall, so some border cells go off. Avoid the concrete wall. Which just respond to borders, edges, physical limits. I look to my right, and my head direction cells change, but then they change back. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, way, head direction cells? So there's a head direction neuron

firing all the time when I'm facing dead ahead. When I turn my head to the left, that neuron stops firing. We have a new head direction neuron firing. Now I'm back to the dead ahead. I turn to the right, new head direction neuron firing. Dead ahead. These cells keep you oriented so you know where you are in the grid.

And now it's time to fill in the details. And this is where things get really cool. Proceed down the corridor. As I take a couple more steps, now my play cells are probably beginning to get active. It's the I'm here cell. It's like for every landmark in the space, each body passes by, the brain will drop a little pin. It's like an I'm here pin. Here at the coffee table.

And then I'm here. At the potted plant. And I'm here? At the door in the studio. So now, as I imagine myself, walking from this little closet-like space, back to my car. As I pass by the coffee table with the magazines, that play cell fires. Now I'm by the front door. That play cell fires. Now I'm on the sidewalk. That play cell fires. Now I'm by my car. That play cell fires. And when you put it all together, the play cells,

the grid cells, the border cells, what you get, he says. Just a symphony of electricity, which somehow is translated for me into an idea of a space. And this whole neural symphony, it mostly takes place in a particular part of the brain. The hippocampus. So if Jonah were to just hazard a guess about Sharon. She should get her hippocampus checked out is what she should do. I mean, you know, that's just a guess. Now, getting back to that story.

Even though I was 29, I was an adult, I had children. The point at which we left off, Sharon had gone to the hospital, gotten a bunch of tests, and the doctors had told her that I needed to go see a psychiatrist. I felt like a freak. but then one day, years after that, I was watching some TV show. It was an oozy 2020-type thing about face blindness. People who can't recognize faces. And at the end of the show, the reporter mentions this website.

Sharon goes, she was curious. And when she gets there, this little window pops up that asks her if she wants to take a survey. So I thought, well, I'll do it. And it was mostly questions about face recognition. But as I got deeper and deeper into the questionnaire, the question started turning more to, have you ever experienced being in a place that should look familiar to you, but suddenly does not? And I was like, oh my gosh, that's me. And it asked for explanation.

So I was just typing away and typing away. And eventually, she meets the doctor who would finally de witch her. My name is Giuseppe I area. I'm a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Calgary. And do you have a strong sense of direction? I'm not a strong sense of direction. I'm not a gifted direction, like, you know, guy. But Giuseppe had this idea that maybe, just like face blindness, there could be such a thing as location blindness. So he asked Sharon to go online and play this game.

A sort of video game. It's like virtual reality. Not like where you have to shoot people and find people and blah, blah, blah. The screen would be showing you these landmarks, like a flower shop, a bar, bank. the bakery. And then eventually I needed to be able to say, where things are with respect to one another. Well, nothing.

Not even a guess for me. And it actually made me physically ill. And then Giuseppe told her something. Before you, I had met this woman. This lady who was complaining about orientation. And she also failed this test. So I brought her in, had her play the game. In the scanner, in the MRI scanner.

In the brain scanner. And we were able to find activity all over the brain. Except in one little place. We were not able to detect any increased activity within the hippocampus. Which just so happens to be the home of Jonah's little guys. Play cells, border cells, grid cells. That particular part of the brain, the hippocampus, just never developed. And at that point, that's when Giuseppe...

For the first time, told her, this thing has a name. DTD for developmental, topographical disorientation. And that's not trivial, because when something like this has a name, suddenly it's not your fault. I felt like I was reborn. I keep telling him you are my hero. You'll always be my hero. Have you ever met Sharon?

I haven't. And we are supposed to meet now in this fall. What if you like meet her and fall in love with her? And then she gets lost and you rescue her and the science is ruined, but you get married? I am already married. Oh, okay, never mind. But anyway, Giuseppe's there.

He's got a couple patients. And he's wondering, how many other folks like this are out there? So he puts up a website. We said, okay, we are looking for people who have this specific symptoms. One year later, we were basically dealing with 700 people. What? Whoa. With the same issue?

Yeah. So he sets up an internet forum where they can all talk to each other. I'm the moderator. And now Sharon corresponds with DTD sufferers from all over the place. There are others out there who experience the 90-degree rotation. Really? Oh. What about spinners, though?

Have you ever met a spinner? No. No. No. Actually, I should get some water. Oh, here. Well, there's one there. But then, a few months later,

she did. Another woman named Sharon. My name is Sharon M-A-C-H-E-L. Rhymes with Rachel. When this Sharon heard about the first Sharon, she said she bolted straight up. There is a woman in Colorado who has what I have. And it was such an emotional moment for me.

That she decided to fly to Colorado to meet Sharon Roseman. And they spent a day together. All right, so let's just start with the easy stuff. They spoke with reporter Dave Fender. Describe yesterday. I mean, what was like to get together yesterday? Yesterday was awesome. I got out of the car and we just gave each other a hug.

And it was a bond that I've never experienced with anybody else in my life ever. We sat down right away in the hotel lobby and started to laugh. We couldn't stop laughing everything we were telling our experiences right away and comparing notes, not even finishing our sentences. Now, we still don't know what's wrong with Sharon and Sharon and the others. We certainly don't know how to fix it. But whereas before, Sharon and Sharon were lost and alone, now they're lost and together. So in a way, it's like they're not really lost. Like we sat there probably for 15 minutes describing how we were going to navigate from this hotel to the shopping mall that we could see right out the window of the hotel.

And we had to come up with some contingency plans. Yeah. So we had the GPS if we needed it. Sharon had a map in her hands if we needed it. We had street names. We were just hoping that at least one of us was there instead of being messed. up. And so we got there. There it is. There it is. There it is. We were both so excited.

We were jumping up and down. It was really ridiculous if anybody saw us and had no clue why we were so excited that we found Nordstrom. Big thanks to Molly Webster for producing that piece with us. For more information on a lot of you. Anything you just heard or will hear, go to radialab.org, and you can subscribe to our podcast there. Hi, this is Sharon Roseman. Radio Lab is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern war. This is Giuseppe area from Calgary.

More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Hi, sorry, I'm so late. I've been on the road. I'm calling for myself on. Radio Lab is produced by WNYC and distributed by NPR. Hello, I'm Chad Aboumrod. And I'm Robert Krollwitch. This is Radio Lab. Today our program is... Lost and found.

Approaching zone without GPS. All right. Well, you know, I think we're getting real close. And here, driving into our next adventure is our producer, Tim Howard. Yeah, see if this is it. So, Saurid and I took a trip. I need your picture ID. to Fort Monmouth, New Jersey.

For what? Fort Monmouth. Is that a military base? Yep. We were going to this museum they have on the base. To meet this woman, Mindy. Mindy Rosowitz on the museum curator at U.S. Army Communications. She agreed to show us around.

To see what? Patience, Chad. Do you want to hear some stories? Absolutely. Okay. Here on display we have the war heroes. So she pointed to this one glass. case, sort of like a memorial.

Well, he was born in 1918, died here at Fort Mammoth in 1937, so he lived about 20 years, served with the Army Expeditionary Forces, he was wounded and blinded in one eye carrying a very important message. What's all this on his face there? Looks like putty, like... What's all this stuff on his nose? It's called crop, and it's a natural growth. I think it's a calcium growth, and some pigeons just get that.

Did she just say pigeons? You got it. A lot of get it. Here's another one. Mocker. This is a beautiful pigeon here. Yeah, but he has one eye. Oh, wow.

His eye was shot out in a war. Wait a second, Tim. What's the story? Why pigeons? Why pigeons? Yeah. Well, A, pigeons are awesome. And B, there's a big question here.

Which is. But let me just start you off training wheels with a simple little story. This is G. This is G. He's our hero pigeon. But there's one pigeon name. G.I. Joe's pretty cool. Well, he looks like a totally ordinary pigeon.

I wouldn't know that I'm standing a foot away from a war hero. I think he's cute. He's got yellow legs. Remember I told you about the legs? The feet? All right, so what's the story? Okay. So it's 1943. There was a town. The British have just taken this little Italian town.

Nicola Vecchio from the Germans. The bad guys. The problem is they took it really fast. And their American allies are about to bomb the town. In 20 minutes. Oh, the radios are down. They can't get anybody back to the basin time to tell them to call it off. How nearby is the space?

20 miles away. And so they only really have one option. Let me guess. Now wait, just so you really get this. Yeah, bring it home. This bird is in a place that he's never been before. Whole way there for hours. He's been in a dark box.

He should be completely confused. Should be. And yet, when they take him out and throw him in the air, like a cosmic zip cord. He's pulled over mountains, lakes, forests, None of which he's ever seen before. Right back to the Army base where he lives. Just in the nick of time.

Just as the bombers are about to take off. He's credited with saving over 1,000 British lives. American hatched G.I. Joe carried a message through an artillery bombardment in Italy and saved units of the 56th London Division. How the hell did he do that? How did he know exactly where to go? Some of them returned with the message capsule hanging from their leg and their breast bones shot open and all that kind of stuff,

but they would always fly back home. How? That's your question? Yep. Hello? Hello there. So I called this guy. This is Charlie Walcott.

He's a heavy hitter in the Pigeon world. Former director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. My question is, if G.I. Joe had never been to that town, how did he know how to get back home? Well, the first thing that G.I. Joe needs to know is where... Wait, wait. Tim, I'm sorry. I feel bad for saying this because it's your first piece for the show. but I mean, don't we know the answer to this? What's the answer, Jed?

Well, birds have a compass in their head. That's how they migrate. Chad, you dummy. You're just not getting the degree of difficulty. Think about it this way. If I take you in a little boat and put you out in the middle of a large body of water, all you can see is water in every direction.

Which way do you paddle to find New York City? Are you asking me? Yeah. Can I have a compass in this scenario? Sure. But that's not going to help you. Sure, it will. No, no.

What do you mean, no? Just think about it. Which way are you going to paddle first? Hmm. I don't know enough to say. Exactly. It depends a little bit on whether I've dumped you in the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, the Indian Ocean, or whatever. You can't swim home if you don't know which direction home is.

And you're saying this is what a pigeon does. You can throw it anywhere and it knows how to go back? That's my whole point. If you were a pigeon, I wouldn't need to tell you anything. Huh. How did G.I. Joe figure out where he is with relation to home? That's the great question. That is, okay, I'm with you now.

And I'm sorry for interrupting you earlier. That's all right. So how do they do it? Well, and if you have a one-sentence answer for it, then that's a short interview. It's a very, very easy answer. We don't know. But they have been doing a lot of crazy experiments on pigeons over the years, like 60 years now, to try and figure all this out. Like what?

Let us count the ways. We have tried flying pigeons with frosted contact lenses. Really? They've put coils on their heads. Top of the pigeon's head like a hat. They've glued little brass weights. To their backs. They've put radio transmitters on them.

Yes, indeed. They've followed pigeons in airplanes. The point is that it's a complex issue. And they have definitely not arrived at any consensus for how pigeons do this. They have theories? Plenty of theories. Oh, yeah. For example, the Italians, Floriano Poppy and his colleagues,

believed that when you take the pigeons out to the release point, they sample the odors on the way to the release point. All the smells of the places that they pass? Right. Essentially a series of olfactory landmarks. You know, you go past the chocolate factory and the olive groves, the garlic plantation, or whatever. Sounds like a beautiful place.

And so when a pigeon is released, what it does is it sniffs the breeze and says, aha. Continue past garlic. Take a left at chocolate. This is the odor that came to me on the north wind, and therefore I need to fly south in order to get home. But...

Charlie's actually put this idea of the test. We anesthetized the pigeons, put them in a box, artificial air. So they can't smell anything. In a rotating turntable, and transported them about 100 miles away. And when they got over being kind of car sick, they flew home just fine. So something else is going on here.

Yeah. And here's where we get to my personal favorite theory. Forget about smell. There are some researchers who think that the key to pigeon navigation is... Are you ready for this? Yeah, what is it? Metal. Which is to say, if you go all the way down into the center of the earth,

there's all this iron down there, churning. And as it's churning, it's throwing off this magnetism. Yes, lines of magnetic force. through the Earth, out into space. So imagine up there in the atmosphere above the planet, there are all these lines that are wiggling. And as Gia Jo is flying through the air, he's moving through these lines.

Do you think he sees the lines? Well, I can tell you that he might feel them because there are these little particles in his beak. Magnetite, magnetic iron particles. They're twitching. In some spots they twitch more, in some spots less. And if you can measure various aspects of the magnetic feel, like its strength and its angle, you can tell whereabouts you are.

Do you think that's what's actually happening? I think it may be partly what's happening. I mean, Charlie says there's probably a lot of things going down, and any time you think you've figured it out, the pigeon goes and messes you up. For example, he told me about this one place in New York. About 90 miles west of here called Jersey Hill Fire Tower, if we take Cornell Pigeons to Jersey Hill and let them go, they go random. And so they are essentially lost.

It is a Bermuda Triangle for Cornell Pigeons. Why would that be? That's soaring. If we knew, I would tell you. Is it a magnetic thing? No, no. There's nothing magnetically disturbed about it. Is it a sewage treatment capital?

No. Hyperactive radio frequencies? No, it's a hill surrounded by pine trees. It's just a hill. Does it make you wonder if there's a whole other system going on in a pigeon that we haven't even started to think about? Yes, of course. And then you say, well, what could it possibly be? Yeah.

And after a long day of being out there with the pigeons and releasing them and waiting for them to make up their mind and fly home and get the van. vanishing bearings. You come back and you open the loft and there they are, you know, all sitting on their little perches going, coo, coo, and you just long to grab one by the scruff of the neck and say, how do you do it? But so far, obviously, they haven't told us. One more thing. I didn't tell you about how they were monogamous. The pigeon mind might be unknowable, but the pigeon heart is an open book. Yeah. Well, Mindy said that with a lot of other birds, roosters and chickens. If you get them all together. They all go wild

and party. One thing leads to another. They all party. They're a jacuzzi, right? Well, maybe they go in the jacuzzi after. Maybe I don't know what they do in the jacuzzi. I'm not judging. But pigeons? They would mate. And they would stay mated until death, do they part? So one thing you can do to make the pigeon fly home faster is you take the

male out of his cage, you put another male in there with his girl, and of course he's going to get pissed off. His feathers are fluffing, and who is the stray male in my cage and all this kind of stuff? Drive them away. And he flies back so fast to clean house. Yes, this is called the widowhood method. And yes, it is a powerful motivator.

Yeah, they miss the misses. So, wow. So who knows how he did it? But what may have propelled G.I. Joe through those darkened, war-torn skies was jealous rage. Could have been. Could have been. You go, G. You go, G.

You go, G. You go, G.I. Joe. And if you have to save a thousand lives in the meantime, okay, just do it. Pretty good, pretty good, those pigeons. But I think we can go one more around for the human being and our natural ability to navigate. I met a woman named Lira Boroditsky. She's in the psychology department at Stanford University. She studies languages, and she's found that some languages have a curiously, I don't know how to put this,

a curiously pigeon-like power. No, seriously. There are languages that don't rely heavily on words like left and right, in some languages actually don't have those words at all. In the culture I got to spend some time in, they rely on north-south, east-west. Oh, you mean like instead of taking a left at the biscuit factory, I'm going to hang in east?

More so than that, you would say things like there's an ant on your southwest leg or move your cup to the north-northwest a little bit. Where are we talking about, by the way? Yeah, you should back up. This story is too good. You should start at the beginning. Yeah, where are we in the world right now?

This is a community called Pompereau on Cape York and Australia. Pomparao. When was this? This was a few years ago, I guess, 2006. There, the way you say hello in Pompurao is you say, which way are you going? So in English you say, how are you? Fine. In Pompurao, you say, which way are you going? And the answer must be something like north-northeast in the middle distance.

How about you? What? So imagine as you're walking around your studio, each person that says hi to you, you have to report your heading direction to them. So you literally can't get past hello in this language without knowing which way you're facing. And you said north, northwest in the middle direction, is it really that precise? It's actually more precise than that. There are 80-some different choices.

Whoa. Yeah. It was socially very awkward. People thought I was quite dim because I wasn't oriented and I didn't know exactly which way it was which all the time. You can ask a five-year-old there. can you point northeast and they'll point without hesitation. If you ask a Stanford professor or Harvard professor to do the same thing, they have no idea. But isn't this one of...

What if you were indoors? What if you were in a shelter? Could they still do it? Yep. They keep track of directions even when they're indoors. How? Without windows. You'd pay attention.

You just have to pay attention. And I think what's really striking about the discovery of languages like this and folks like this says they have an ability that we call dead reckoning. And it's an ability to, you know, after any kind of circuitous path to turn around and head straight back home. That ability we thought was beyond human capacity. We had observed it in ants and we had observed it in birds. But there's always some other explanation like birds have magnets in their beaks and ants are counting steps. You know, there's some kind of extra thing that they were doing. Now, there's seven thousand languages in the world about.

A third of the world's languages have this property. Whoa. Not a third of the world's speakers, but a third of the world's languages. Wow. And these are not folks that have magnets or special aunt superpowers. They're using this, the same cognitive system that we're using. They're just using it differently. They're paying attention to something that we normally don't pay attention to.

But interestingly, Leira says there was a moment, a very particular moment, when she sort of slipped into attention. Yeah, so I had this interesting experience when I was there. So after about a week of being there, I was, people were constantly pointing to locations, and I was constantly trying to stay oriented. And after about a week, I was walking along, I was kind of trudging through the sand, it was hot, and I was thinking about whether I was wasting my time there or not, I wasn't sure if the study was going to work out.

And all of a sudden I noticed that in my head there was this extra little, it seemed almost like an extra window, like in a video game. There was like a little console. And in that console was a bird's eye view of the landscape that I was walking on. And I was a little red dot that was traversing that landscape. No kidding. And you just become a pillow palo, whatever they're called them. And I thought, wow, that's really cool.

That makes it so much easier if you have that little extra module. And all of a sudden is the correct word? Is that happened all of a sudden? It popped in? I just saw it. It was just there. And then I kind of shyly shared this with someone. I said, you know, this weird thing happened.

I was walking along and I got this, had this view in my mind. And they looked at me kind of strangely and said, well, of course. How else would you do it? That's exactly. Of course you have a bird's eye view and you keep track of your location from a bird's eye view. Of course you do. I have had all the time. No, you don't.

No, I don't. I don't either. Proceed to break. And by the way, that voice right there that's been joining us from time to time, we should explain. That is Karen Jacobson. And I'm also known as the GPS girl. She was nice enough to agree to read some things that we could use in our stories, so that's what you've been hearing. Okay.

Shall we start with the script that I have in front of me? Yes, let's do that. Okay. Please enter your address. Wow. That's amazing. It sounds like you've actually gone into the machine somehow. I've got to work out how to bottle that.

Oh, I did. This is Jim Donahue from Fort Worth, Texas. Radio Lab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alpha P. Sloan Foundation enhancing public understanding of science and technology in a modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Hey, I'm Chad Abumran. I'm Robert Krollwich.

This is Radio Lab today on a new. this program we are calling it lost and found that's right we have stories of getting lost and of course getting found now i think we're going to we're going to make a little adjustment here recalculating shift gears approaching emotional lift turn thank god i don't know how to turn i don't give it to me this next story is a very different kind of lost and found sort of a love story if you can tell us your name oh here's the guy my name is alan lundgard Do you want to say anything more than that? I don't know.

Is this for like a credit? No, sometimes we'll let people introduce themselves. Oh, I don't know. I don't have a title. Okay. All right. So that's Alan. The girl, Emily, will meet her a bit later for reasons that will become clear.

The story begins on a fall day in Brooklyn. And so the day in question, I guess it was the morning of October 8th. They're both living in this one room loft in Brooklyn. And we woke up and, you know... Both 21. Went about her daily routine and prepared to go. He was in art school. She was taking some time off from art school to work for a local artist.

So she would take the bike and I would take the train. What was it morning like? It was a beautiful day. It was, you know, the sun was low in the sky, so they were, you know, long shadows. I strapped on her helmet and adjusted it, took her bike out for her. We kissed each other goodbye and said, I love you, and I watched her ride down the street. In this early morning and then, you know, on I went. down into the subway.

Six hours later, he's working in the studio doing some sculpture, and he gets a call from a cop. And he just said, Emily Gassio, she had an accident. She said, Bellevue, this is the address. And I said, oh, I mean, do you have any more information? He just told me that it was bad. I was carrying a bunch of stuff, and I just dropped everything and started running.

Now, Alan and Emily had only been, together nine months, but when it started, says Ellen. It was just so immediate. The night they got together, they both just kind of knew. It was sort of like a weird, prophetic kind of thing where I think it was the first day that the schools had a snow day. It was snowed out. It was kind of like this past blizzard, you know, sort of like the city shuts down,

magical kind of thing. He'd gone out with some friends just as the snow was coming down. And we were trapped at this party. And that's where he bumped into Emily. Pint-sized, these big, like, iridescent eyes and a very kind of, I have trouble describing your voice. It's almost as if, I know you guys are audio people, but it's like stereo almost. Truth is they'd known each other for a while, but that night, says Alan. Fireworks all of a sudden.

And it felt right. So you had a feeling this wasn't just a thing. This was a thing. Right, right. Or the thing. The thing. Right. The thing. The soul thing. Yeah. All right.

Well, Emily, there've always been boys around to Emily. That's Susan Gossio, Emily's mom. She says at first, when Emily told her about Alan, she thought, okay, so that's another boy. Emily seemed to have that effect on boys, perhaps because she didn't really seem to need them. Here is someone who's been obsessed with art and has given up everybody in her life for art. At the age of six? She was creating her own comic books. In junior high school, she took drawing classes every night and then in high school. She left us friends, boyfriends.

To go to a high school of the arts in Florida. No one stands in the way of her art. It's all she sees. It's all she focuses on. But then she visited Emily in May a few months before the accident, and she met Alan. I met Alan, and he was delightful. But there was a different look that I'd never seen in Emily's eyes before when she looked at him. and I didn't like it.

Tell us about the accident from your perspective. For when I... Yeah. I was at work. You're in New Orleans? Metery, which is a suburb of New Orleans. And I get a telephone call. And I looked and I saw it was Alan.

Alan has never called me before. Answered the phone. I said, hello, Alan. And he said, you have to come. Emily was hit by a truck. 18-wheel or semi-truck. And I took a breath and I said, Alan is Emily dead. And he said no, but you need to get here as soon as possible.

Six hours later, her and her husband, Emily's dad, were at Bellevue Hospital here in Manhattan. They brought us into her room in surgical ICU. We all went in. She was just lying in bed. And there were tubes. Tubes down her throat. Coming in and out. Her face was so swollen. Emily covered in blood. weighed probably at the time of the accident about 100 pounds. And she then weighed 128. She had swollen 28 pounds. She had multiple fractures in her leg and her pelvis in the left side of her face.

They had opened her abdomen and they had taken her intestines out and put them on top of her body so that she could breathe. And she was just lying completely still, you know. That first 48 hours, nothing moved. nothing. We took up shifts. Her mother would be there in the day and her father in the evening and then I would be there with her at night.

Her eyes weren't even flickering. And as she sat there watching Emily not move, she says she kept thinking, why? I've got these four kids and everything bad seems to happen to Emily. Starting at six months. Yeah. Ear infections. Then sinus infections,

then asthma. By kindergarten, Emily was losing her hearing for reasons no one could quite figure out. She had to get hearing aids. On both sides. But somehow her mom, mom says, all this just made Emily more fierce. If anyone can conquer this, it's Emily.

I think on the second day, they started to take her off her medication, expecting to see some sort of reaction from her. And nothing. Nothing. There was a nurse, and the nurse said that Emily was gone, and asked me about organ donations. And I said, yes. And so I worked up enough courage to go into what they call the track room, which is where the residents usually are. And there was one woman resident sitting at a computer.

And I went and I said, when are you going to let Emily go? And she said, we will have a family meeting tomorrow morning and we'll talk then. And so I said, okay, and I left. And I went back and I'm sitting with Emily, the side of her bed. and I'm telling her, Emily and I read the book, the Bridge of San Luis Ray, when she was a sophomore. And I remember the ending of the book. There's a land of the living, there's a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, and that love is the only thing that survives. And it's kind of the way it goes.

And so I was sitting there with Emily, and I was telling this, I was saying this and talking in her ear and saying this, and talking to her and telling her that I would love her eternally through all. all time that our love would never end. And Emily raised her left hand. Did, God, I could wait. What was... It was chaos. I was yelling for the nurse. I saw it. I saw her move. That was really one of the really abrupt moments. Now, they knew. Emily was not dead. Emily was alive. But how alive? Over the next few days, says Alan, she, she, Slowly started moving more. Not really in response to anything.

She'd rive in bed, scratch her leg, where there was a wound. We would hold her hand down, and she'd slap. She'd slap our hands away. But when they'd tell this to the doctors, the doctors would say, that's not indicative of any kind of mental functioning. Could just be a reflex, really. So the medical team began trying to determine just how damaged was she. The ophthalmologists' teams were coming in,

and they were trying to get Emily's eyes to, our pupils to respond, and they weren't responsive. And so I knew what that meant. What did that mean? It meant she could be blind. So Emily couldn't see, couldn't hear. Because remember she wore hearing aids. And why didn't she just put those in?

We tried. I mean, we tried many times to put it in, but she just wouldn't allow it. What would she do exactly when you did it? Flail her head, shake around. Kick, and she would hit. Had a lot of bruises on my body where she'd kicked me and pinched me. So we stopped. Every once in a while we would go back to it, but there was the question, you know, maybe she couldn't hear anymore.

What do you do to a person who's can't, you don't know what's going on inside her and you can't get to her? You send her to a nursing home, and, you know, that's where she would have remained. And after several weeks in the ICU, Emily. She was stable. And that meant they had to make a decision. Once you become stable, then you have to move off surgical ICU. and out of the hospital to either a rehabilitation or to a nursing home. So that became the new question. Where would she go? Could she be repaired, so to speak,

in which case she'd go to rehab? Or is this it for her? In which case, she'd go to a nursing home. Now, making that call medically is sometimes tricky. That's Dr. Mikhail Eisenberg. She's a physician at NYU, and it's her job to make that call. And she says one of the key criteria for getting someone into rehab. To do rehab on somebody, you need to have them react. acting to you. A person needs to be able to participate in a meaningful way for three hours of therapy a day. They have to be able to follow commands because that's how you rehabilitate someone. If the person can't hear, if the person can't see, then there's no way to communicate with her.

And so they made the assessment that she could not go to rehab. And that Emily should go to a nursing home. So sent my husband back to New Orleans to look for a nursing home. That they could bring her back to. They just kept it all secret from me that they were going to take her away from me. I mean, how do you tell someone who loves your daughter that much that we're taking her away? But there was not just one life that we had in our hands. It was two lives. We felt that that would be the best thing for him. And Alan could hate us. Maybe as a way for him, to bridge and let go with that grief. But then, as the doctors were prepping Emily

to move her to a nursing home, they had to remove her tracheotomy, which was helping her breathe. And she all of a sudden started talking. Really? She spoke. Yes. What was she saying?

She would curse. Don't touch me, you blank to blank, you know. She would say stop. This was in response to someone touching her? Touching her. And if she wasn't cursing, says Alan. She would call everybody Miss Dashwood. Certain people that were.

touching her where Miss Dashwood. What's from sense and sensibility? But quoting Jane Austen. Yeah, well. Oh, yeah, we had watched the movie like a couple months previous to this. So somehow she was locked in the movie. And it was just the assumption of the doctors that she was just sort of mentally damaged. But if she's calling people Miss Dashwood, doesn't that at least mean something?

No. It wasn't enough to say that Emily could follow a command like sit up, raise your right hand. So the plan was still the nursing home. Right. I mean, no, every possibility had not been exhausted. I can see him. He was sitting across the room, and his jaws were just clenched. I just was not going to give up.

And he was saying, you have to give her a chance. You have to give her the chance. Do you have a plan? No, I had no plan whatsoever. I was lost. This experience was just completely traumatic to me emotionally, but at the same time, I was going to help her in whatever way I could. The only trajectory I had was to help her.

And one night, just a few days before Emily was going to be discharged to a nursing home, away from him. I was there alone with her and it was 3 a.m. or something. And she was calm. Like she wasn't trying to fight me away or anything. I had helped her fix a thing that was wrong with her. Mouth wiring. It was like a wire that was poking her and I fixed it for it. And he says at that moment, something occurred to him.

It really just was like in the recesses of my mind. He thought of the story of Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan. He'd read about it a few years. days earlier online and he thought, hmm, what if I tried what Annie Sullivan did with Helen Keller on Emily? I took her left hand with my left hand and I leaned over and using her wrist as the baseline for the words. And his finger is the pen. I just wrote I waited a second. L. Waited a second. O. Waited a second. V. E. Waited a second. You. Then, according to Alan, she said to him,

She said, oh, you love me, thank you. She literally replied immediately to it? Did she know who you are? No, she has no idea who I am. But now he had a way to get to her, so he could figure out how much of her was actually there, and maybe even prove it to the doctors. You know, I had to have something that was conclusive

to present to them. The following evening, I took out my cell phone, and it has a record function on it, and I started recording question after question to determine her cognitive ability. What is your name? What? W-H-A-T. What? Is, I ask.

Is. You finger-spelled every letter? Yeah. You're... What are you? Seeing her name on the palm of my hand. Alan called me at 4 o'clock in the morning, said you have to come now. I have proof.

I'm now going to write years. Very good, very good. Right now I'm going to write hospital. Got there about 4.45 in the morning. Alan is over there by the bed, continuing to finger spell and talk to her. And she calls him Alan. She knows that this person who is finger spelling on her hand is named Alan. But Alan can't get her to understand who he really is, that it's her Allen.

Like, she just couldn't make that mental jump to connect her past life with her present. Alice, what ethnicity are you? Are you Asian? Am I Asian? Tell her no. Next thing I hear her say is, pull me out of the wall. She kept saying, Pull me out.

Please pull me out if you're... It's dark in here. Pull me out. Help me. I know you can do it. Pull me out of the wall. I kept saying, I can't. I would write on her hand, I can't.

Alan starts to sob, and I'm crying to. What are you thinking at this point? It wasn't enough. It wasn't enough. It wasn't enough. And I said, Alan, ask her about her hearing aids. And... So he fingerspels hearing aid.

And she said, okay. She agreed to put the hearing aid in for the first time. So we put it in and switched it on. He said, Emily, can you hear me? It's me, Alan. And immediately. Everything came back to me. I was there. I remembered everything. The door opened, and Emily stepped out. She was back. Yeah, it's just like hearing his voice. I knew it was him, and he said my mom was there.

And I heard her say what I had been waiting for her to say all those weeks. I screamed, Mommy, Mommy. She said, Mama. No, I couldn't believe they were there the whole time. We asked Emily, before she came back, where was she? I didn't know where I was, if I could see at all. I mean, all I knew is that I was sleeping, and I was always dreaming. She says people would come to her in her dreams and say,

Don't touch that. Stop scratching your wounds. My dreams would blend in with free. She says she knew somehow that there were people around her, but she couldn't get to them. And that she also knew she was in a dream. Why am I still sleeping? That she couldn't somehow wake up from. I felt helpless.

I felt really helpless. Were you waiting for someone like that? I mean, were you, because was it? I was waiting for some communication, you know? And I was relieved. She's a miracle to me. Emily's now at the Rusk Institute, which is one of New York City's leading rehab centers.

And on the day we visited her, she'd just had a breakthrough. Today was the first day I could stand on both legs and walk. Actually walk. I walked 100 feet today. After rehab, she'll be moving into an apartment in Lower Manhattan with Alan. She's blind, and the chances of her seeing again are slim. But Alan plans to spend his time helping her cope and helping her find a new way to make art. Emily, can you introduce yourself?

Do you want me to say my name is Emily Garcia? Yeah, just so we have it all on tape. They asked me if I would have a title, and I couldn't think of one, but I thought of one. A title? Yeah, I'll do mine. My name is Alan Lungard. I'm the boyfriend. My name is Emily Gossio.

I'm the girlfriend. You're the star of the show. If you want to know more about Alan and Emily, go to our website, radiolab.org. You can do all kinds of things there, like subscribe to our podcast. I guess we should go. Yeah, thanks for listening. You have reached your destination.

Oh, and thanks to Karen Jacobson. This is Alan Lundgren. Radio Lab is produced by Jed Bumrad and Tim Howard. Our staff includes Sorin-Fueler, Ellen Horne, Pat Walters, Brenna Farrell, and Lynn Levy. With help from Douglas Smith and Jessica Gross. Special thanks to Alice Gabby, Dave Feudor, Molly Webster, Mark Coins, Jordan Bowen, Susan and Eric Gossio, George Martin, Craig Anderson, and Gareth Cook. Thank you. Bye-bye. End of mailbox.