Radiolab - The Theater of David Byrne's Mind

Episode Date: October 7, 2022

It all started when the rockstar David Byrne did a Freaky-Friday-like body-swap with a Barbie Doll. That’s what inspired him — along with his collaborator Mala Gaonkar — to transform a 15,000 square-foot warehouse in Denver, Colorado into a brainy funhouse known as the Theater of the Mind. This episode, co-Host Latif Nasser moderates a live conversation between Byrne and Neuroscientist Thalia Wheatley at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. The trio talk about how we don’t see what we think we see, don’t hear what we think we hear, and don’t know what we think we know, but also how all that… might actually be a good thing. Special thanks to Charlie Miller and everyone else at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Emily Simoness and everyone else at the Arbutus Foundation, Boen Wang, and Heather Radke.   Episode Credits: Produced by Suzie Lechtenberg   CITATIONS Theater of the mind website: https://theateroftheminddenver.com/   Our newsletter comes out every Wednesday. It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)!Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab(https://members.radiolab.org/) today.Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [e-mail]. Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.  

Wait, you're listening to radio lab from W and Y Yeah, I don't know the program. Well, let me just do the thing and then like because I'm still like I don't quite get it Okay, great. Okay, let this radio lab, Lulu, you have been out there making your chart topping new series, the restrials. I've been out in the musical nature children's trenches.

Yeah, that's right. And you were out in the world. Yeah, so I've been doing some other stuff. I've been sort of keeping myself busy. Uh-huh. I wanted to tell you about one of the projects that I did, which is a few weeks ago, our executive producer, Susie Lactimorgonai, went to Denver, Colorado, and I moderated a conversation with the one and only literal rock star

David burn. What was getting the call to do that like? Oh man, it was, it was, well, first let me say if you happen to not know who David burn is, he was the front man of, and the co-founder of the band talking heads, you know, you probably seen him like on HBO or on Broadway. His music is in your head.

For sure. For sure. Yes. Hello everyone, welcome. Welcome. Thank you for being here. So the reason that they asked me to do an event with him was that he created this immersive theatrical,

it's like a happening, I don't know, it's an event, I don't know what you're calling. We are here tonight to celebrate the world premiere production of Theater of the Mind and experience many years in the making. It was an article about it and it basically just said, it's like the headline was, take a trip through David Burns head, which is basically what it is. It's like a giant warehouse where you walk through. And like, hear things and see things.

And hear things and see things, and then it's also very kind of, it involves a lot of neuroscience about. I'm sensing why they called Mr. Lachiff Nasser. Now it is- That's right, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Our moderator for this evening,

please welcome to the stage Lachiff Nasser. So basically it was a live conversation. There were 900 people in this giant ballroom. And I was on stage with David Byrne and the neuroscientist Talia Wheatley from Dartmouth College. Wow. Wow, welcome.

Welcome everybody. So what I want to do today is play for you and for everyone, some of that conversation. Okay. You don't need to have seen the show for it to make sense. The vast majority of the people in the audience had not seen the show. Instead, what we've got planned for tonight.

But is something a bit different? There's sort of two reasons I'm playing it. One is because it feels like a throwback to very early old school radio lab when every episode was about neuroscience. But also, like I found this conversation, like I found it sort of unsettling. It kind of makes this argument, I think.

Both David and Talia do, where it's like, you're not perceiving what you think you're perceiving. You're not seeing what you're seeing, you're not hearing what you think you're hearing. You don't know what you think you know, but also, none of that is necessarily a bad thing. Well, that's how I'm taking it right now. But there's another way to take all of this

that I think Talia and David both will kind of gift to you in the course of this conversation. Okay. So here we go. So to start, Talia, I'll actually, I'll rope you in a moment. But first I just wanted to get off the top, the origin story of this show, Theodore of the Mind,

which is the reason why we are all here. David, just tell us what is Theodore of the Mind, which is the reason why we are all here. David, just tell us what is Theodore of the Mind and how did it start? Well, in 2011, I think it was. I read a story in a magazine called New Scientist about a experiment that a lab in Stockholm did, and their paper was called Being Barbie. And Barbie, Barbie, like the doll.

They were exaggerating a little bit, but basically it was the experiment you, the subject, was embodied in the body of a doll. You felt like you were doll size. What they found interesting was that being that size changed your relationship to everything. How far away you thought things were, how big you thought things were, that those things weren't constant, but they were based on your body image.

And if you thought you were small, then things look big. And, but I read this and they didn't use a Barbie doll. Barbie dolls are anatomically not human beings. Yeah, not really human beings. You can't really be embodied in a Barbie doll. So I'm originally for those of you who are hoping. Yeah, if you were hoping. Yeah. I read this, and my first thought was, I want to do this. I want to experience this.

So I wrote to them, kind of cold, and wrote to them, and said, I would love to present your experiment in an art gallery in New York. So one person at a time, visitors to the art gallery could experience what you're doing. Much, much later, I got a response that was a little bit fantastical and very imaginative, but was not really a yes. I'm not put it aside, but didn't forget it. And I just as an amateur enthusiast, I read more books and things about neuroscience and psychology and things.

And began to kind of collect other things. Oh, that thing sounds like it would be fun to do. That sounds like we really amazing to experience. And would that change the way I see things? I started collecting a thing. I ran into the woman, Mala Gankar, who became my writing partner on this. And we both saw science as being a very creative endeavor,

very much akin to the arts. So we thought, what if we could present more of these things and not just one and make a whole little project out of it. So we dreamed and collected things and kept at it and started doing workshops. And eventually we did sort of a smaller version in Menlo Park, California, that's Silicon Valley. And it included some of the experiences that are in the present show, but it also included some other ones

that were more kind of social and psychological and things like that. And we discovered that some of those things didn't. They worked as science. The results were valid and the way people were thought it, but they didn't work as an audience experience. Because they were boring, like, what, what? Well, you want me to go in and go in and go in and go in.

Right? All right. Tell you, you're familiar with this one. I think one of them was based on the work of a guy named Alex Totorov, who does a lot of work on faces, face recognition, how you determine what people are expressing with their faces. And so he did one where you would be shown very quickly Two images of politicians There were real politicians, but they you didn't know them. They weren't well-known politicians

They were from different regional areas You weren't told what party they were from you weren't told their names anything else you just saw these headshots and you were asked Tell us which one you think is gonna win Just and then we go to the next one, the next one, the next one, the next. You tally up the average of all the people, and it could be as high as 70% matched the election results. Yeah, whoof, whoof. That was the audience reaction too. It was like, I didn't decide that. And it was just like bad news. It was bad news. It sort of undermines your fifth and democracy a little bit. Yeah, yeah. All that.

It undermines your fifth and democracy. It makes you feel like, is that what we are? Is that the way we are? Really, that's what you're telling us here? I realized, there's another way to do this. So we had to, it's valid science and it's interesting work, but as a show, it did not. It didn't work.

So we learned that and we also learned that what we were doing and the way we were presenting it was much more, it needed to be more theatrical than just a series of experiences. That led us basically to where we were. It turns out a friend of Charlie's who was just standing here. Charlie Miller, who's a producer for Theodore of the Mind. I saw that in version and mentioned it to Charlie and eventually Charlie tracked me down 2018 maybe and Charlie said, I'm interested in your show I want you to come and look at a possible space. It was a gross space that had been busted. They've been busted for looping,

which means they're selling small quantities to the same people over and over again, what you're not allowed to do. And it was kind of a crime scene. God bless you Denver. Yeah. We walked into the space which kind of what it was big enough and the police had saw the top off the safe. Oh wow. As many of you probably know, this business is all cash business. How did we get here? What are we talking about? All right. Anyway, long story short, I came back again. We looked at other places.

That one didn't work out. And eventually, script rewrites. We had a director, Andrew Scovill, who did an incredible job, an incredible creative team. So, right, so just for those of you who just to give you the bare bones of what the show is, so it's exactly as David said, the actual experience is a series of rooms you go through where each room, they're based on different neuroscientific research. So I saw the show last night. When I went through the show, there was one of the experiments

that sort of caught my ear, and I wanted to play it for everybody tonight. It involves a gorgeous piece of orchestral music. Shall we do it? Okay. Can we play the tri-tone? Well, you said that was it. Okay, and we will play it again, but before we do, I want you to listen to the notes carefully

and pay attention to whether the notes are going up, whether they're ascending, or going down, whether they're descending. If you hear them going up, I want you to raise your hand. If they're going down, put your hand on your heart. Okay, and Talian, David, you do it too. Can we ask people to close their eyes? Yeah, that's right. Right. So you're not influenced by what your name is.

So think. Everybody close your eyes, close your eyes, close my eyes. Okay, let's play the tritone again. Okay, so again, up, if it's up's up on your heart if it's going down. Okay, now everybody open your eyes. Whoa! Nice. I think it's kind of extraordinary.

Yeah. 50ish, maybe a little more on heart, maybe? Okay, now let's do it. I'm going to play it one more time. on heart, maybe? Okay, now let's do it. I'm gonna play it one more time. Now like actively try to hear the other thing. And if you can raise your hand. Okay, let's play the tri-tone again.

You can flip from one to the other. Well, I could not flip. OK, so Talia, I know this is not exactly your area of expertise, but what just happened? And is it just that all the people who didn't hear what I heard need to go to an audiologist or something? I didn't hear what you heard. Yeah. audio-adjusted or something. I didn't hear what you heard. OK. Yeah, so what you just heard was a pair of shepherd tones, half octave apart, and the shepherd tone is really

interesting because it's the same note played in all the octaves at the same time. So imagine you're at a keyboard and you're hitting all of the C's, right? And then that's a shepherd tone C. And then you're hitting all of the F sharps. That's a cheperton F sharp. Now, and you might know this, if you're sitting

in front of a keyboard, the middle octave kind of sounds to our ears as that it's the louder of the octaves. Like, as you go further away from the middle to the end of the keyboard, it gets quieter. And that's really helpful because that orients us to where we are in pitch space so we can tell whether things are going up or down.

But remember that Chebertons are all of the C's at the same time. So there is no help from where you are on the keyboard. And if you think about it, any given C is up from one F-sharp and down from another. And all the F one F-sharp is up from another, and all the F-sharp is from another C and down from the C. So it's a perfectly ambiguous stimulus. There is no right answer, right? So our brains don't really like ambiguity.

We want answers to things. So all of us, all of our brains are trying to resolve what was going on, right? And there's no right answer, but people have a tendency to go one way or the other. And you can use conscious control. Some of us can use conscious control to flip it, but it's hard, but we all have a natural tendency

to go one way or the other. Yeah, David, I'm curious as a musician. Well, first of all, the fact that you've heard this now so many times, but also as a musician, are you hearing this different from the rest of us? No, not at all. I think I'm as susceptible as anyone else. For me, what is incredibly interesting about this is that what we just saw, that the

audience gets more or less split and you realize what other things are we not experiencing the same? What are we seeing things different? Are we tasting things different? What else do we don't even know about? Tell you, how do you become one person who goes one way or the other? This is where, for me, it gets really psychologically interesting and deep, because it's not random.

It's based on your experiences. So it's based on the sounds you hear in your daily life. So there are actually your parts of the country tend to go one way, that another part of the country goes another way. And it's the accents that you're hearing. It's the languages that you're hearing. It's the music that you're steeping in. Your experiences are tuning your brain.

Your brain wants to adapt to the environment it's in, and so it wants to fit. And so it's constantly, continuously in flux. We are the sounds we hear, we're the music we listen to, just as we are the books we read and the films we watch and the conversations we engage in. Our minds are constantly changing and adapting. We're continuously in flux.

Well, okay, so there is actually another experiment that you do with your students at Dartmouth. You wanna direct right here right now? It's fun too. Okay, so I'm gonna show you. Okay, so at this point during the show, we did this thing with the audience where we flashed them two images.

Okay, a pair of images, okay. And they are very similar. It looked like they were identical pictures of a big red barn in a lush green wooded area, right? And they looked identical. Okay, but they're not perfectly the same. a big red barn in a lush green wooded area, right? And they looked identical. OK. But they're not perfectly the same.

And then Talia told us that there was one non-trivial difference between these two images. And I want you to try to spot the change from one image to the other. And I want you to raise your hand as soon as you spot it. OK. All right. Don't shout out what it is.

Don't shout what it is. Yeah, just raise your hand as soon as you spot it. Okay, all right, let's do it. Don't shout out what it is. Don't shout what it is. Yeah, just raise your hand when you see it. So, and we went back and forth. So it would be like image A, image B, image A, image B, image A, image B. And you just literally going flashing back and forth back and forth. And as you're looking at it, your eyes are kind of like racing around trying to like

to be like, where's the gorilla? Where's the orange flower? Yeah, okay. Totally. And it was like, okay, raise your hand if you see it. Okay, three hands are up, four, five, six, seven, eight, 10, I'm gonna say 20. And like, people would like raise their hands slowly,

like in this 900 person audience. 30, come on, keep trying. And like people would like raise their hands slowly at like in this 900 person audience 30 Come on keep trying what's slowly raised their hand as they saw it? All right, what are we up to about 25% 30% If you have not seen it yet, and you are very frustrated know that it took me way longer It took me Literally the entire dress rehearsal To figure this out. Okay, we're about half the room now. All right Took me literally the entire dress rehearsal

to figure this out. Okay, we're about half the room now. All right. Shall we give them a hint? Yeah, come here. All right, look at the tree branch. Oh, I love that. Oh, that's so delicious.

That, oh, OK. OK. Off of the tree branch was another branch that had like leaves and bright red berries. And it was like a huge thing. So what? How could you miss? It's not like a subtle, right?

How could you miss that? And the reason that is surprising to us that we miss it is because we walk around and our brain delivers this beautiful image of seeing all of this room all at once, all color out to the edges, all perfectly detailed. That's not actually how we see. First of all, there's a color in the world that's our brain's painting color onto the world based on wavelengths of light.

And we don't see detail all around us. That's our brain constructing it based on a lot of assumptions. How we actually see is our attention picks out some details, details, details, details, with our eye movements four times a second or so. And from that little bits of information, we paint out the entire thing. That's an amazing hallucination. It's an amazing construction of reality that our brains do this and do this so well

that you have to create these kinds of visual illusions just to see the man behind the curtain, right? Just to see who's creating this Wizard of Oz. Because we don't see all this. We just see that. And why some people got it faster than others. If you got it right away, it's because you just got lucky. You just happened to look at just the spot that changed.

And others of you are like, ah, ah, ah. And then you try to do it methodically, you know. That's why it takes so long because that's how vision works. But aren't we lucky that we have brains that create these beautiful images for it? David, how long did it take you? To be forever, to be a really long time. Funny.

Okay, we're gonna take a quick break. When we come back, the conversation will go from our individual ways of perceiving the world to what that means when we interact with each other. That's in just a minute. We're back picking up again where we left off in the live Convo I had with David burn and Talia Wheatley on stage live at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. Talia, your research sort of takes this even a step further. So if we're all perceiving the world differently and then we're interacting with one another, how does that play out? What happens next? You have a few examples of this from your own research, from your colleagues' research.

Right, well, it's not the case that we see, we all see the world differently. I think things just couldn't get off the ground if we were all completely different. We kind of cluster together. Some of us see the world more similarly than others. And that's important. We've known for a long time, by the way,

the people cluster together. I mean, your friends probably are around the same age as you, probably the same gender as you. Are people kind of cluster? Girls want to be with the girls? It's an old talking-ass reference if you get that. But demographics only goes so far, right? I mean, I'm not friends with all the girls.

I'm only, you know, our inner circle is like four to six people big. So how do we choose who those people are? And it turns out that friends' brains are remarkably similar. They process the world in remarkably similar ways. We took people who were friends, and we took people who were friends of friends. So these are people that are not directly friends, and we took people who were friends of friends.

These are people that are not directly friends, but they have a friend in common. We took people who are three degrees separated, friends of friends of friends, and we scanned their brains while they watched comedy clips, music videos, politics, science, nature, all sorts of things. and we found that friends' brains were in sync. They weren't watching them together, they were in the scanner independently and they'd never seen them before together, but they were processing those video clips in the same way. And people who were friends of friends were a little less similar

and people who were friends of friends were even more dissimilar. And we just did a study actually where we got people who had just come off the bus to Dartmouth, college students before they met each other. And we put them in a brain scanner and we scanned the brains. And then we waited until the social network got stable and they had found each other. And lo and behold, we could take their brain activity when they were strangers and we could predict who's gonna become friends? Who's gonna become friends of friends?

And who's gonna become friends of friends of friends? Yeah. It's pretty cool. Thanks. Alright. Does Facebook know about this? Yeah. No, there was a reason, there's a study, it wasn't mine.

But they used to write a technique, this was about a. There's a study. It wasn't mine. But they used their technique. This is about a month ago that it came out where married couples, it predicts married couples satisfaction with their marriage, how synchronized they are, how similar their brain activities are. So opposite to tract, but if you want the long haul, it's similarity all the way down. it's a track, but if you want the long haul, it's similarity all the way down. So, interesting.

So, actually, we're sort of magnetically pulled and kept there to people like us. Yes. It makes us feel connected. It's about common ground. When we're with our friends, it's effortless. We're in sync. We're literally in sync. And then we can have a conversation

and go on a collective road trip all over the place. And it's fun, right? It's wonderful. It's so easy. It's comfortable. Being in sync, I mean, when we're in a music concert, I think what's great about live music performance, and I'm so glad my partner, I just

went to a live music performance. And it's been so long because of COVID. But you know, you're there with everybody just bopping together and tapping. And it's just the best, right? It just feels right. So yeah, Synchrony is great to an extent. Yeah.

David, have you ever been to a live concerter? I've experienced that same phenomenon on a stage. Yes. Playing together with other musicians, you give up a little bit of yourself in order to synchronize with other people, but you gain something else. You really feel this kind of lifting.

And the audience feels the same thing. They're participating in that too. So it's this ec ecstatic wonderful communal thing It also have but it's also can be used for whatever ends you want to use it for Mm-hmm in the military It's you they drill people march them back and forth and that marching helps cement them as a synchronized unit Mm-hmm and

Helps people act as a team, which you want, and if you're military thing, you want them to do that. You want them to everybody to act in sync. But it can be used to direct people to do things like that. And so one could say that music and that kind of synchronized behavior is neutral, but you have to, yes, so be careful how it's being used.

Have you seen any of that dark side in your research or in, yeah, what other? Sure. Yeah. I think, well, I think what happens when you take it to the extreme, so it feels good, and we want to find the people that we're in sync with. And that's just so great. It's just so great. And you think about music as the foundation of ritual.

You think about the songs that we sing at rituals, like Happy Birthday to you or Diana, what Passover, what have you. It's always songs that we can all sing together in unison and feel that bond, right? It's all a good thing. But if you take it to the extreme, what you get are echo chambers,

if you are only looking for people who think like you, who synchronize with you, then you play that out and you get these bubbles, and you get stagnation, you get people being derivative, because they're just playing the same things. And so you've got to, I think there's a human drive to synchronize and be as one and communal and that's great. But you also need a kind of countervailing force that's going to not let it get too far.

So you need the people that have the unpopular opinions that don't synchronize that have an independent voice, that just to pull that out so that we don't totally get in our own heads and in this bubble, you've got to keep trying to get out, to change the key, to change the story. Huh, do you know any weirdos like that, David? We're just like who? Like what? Oh yeah, I don't know, it's just talking so abstractly.

But no, but that does seem, that like, it actually does seem like a thing you do well. You don't just find the beat of everybody else's drum. You kind of find your own. And you're well known for, for example, I read a, I think it was in pitchfork. There was a line. It was like, David Bern would collaborate with anybody

for half a bag of Doritos. There's some truth to that. Yeah. But I love collaborating. And but also with people who are not necessarily the people whose brains light up and exactly the same, maybe people across, you know, different kinds of musicians,

across generations, like you collaborate with high school kids, you do all kinds of different things like that. I love that experience of getting out of my comfort zone. But at the same time, I realized that part of that collaboration is finding that place where you can kind of synchronize and find something in common.

So it's a little bit of both. A little bit of that. Yeah. I'm also aware that, yeah, I go to concerts and participate in them. Sometimes when everybody's moving on mass, I find it slightly frightening. Even when I'm the one singing. Really? I find it going, oh, this is a little bit too much power here. Wow. You know, and you go, oh, can I subvert this? Or what, what, what, what do you do? Maybe, maybe I make a joke or...

Yeah, listen, things up a little bit. A joke that only half the people in the audience will get. Yeah. Uh. Yeah. Um, yeah, can you, like, are there collaborations like that? Do you feel like you have especially moved you or that have been momentous for you? Oh, myself? Yeah.

This, well this show, my co-writer, Mala, her writing is much more poetic than mine. Mine is more kind of everyday, like everyday speech, and lots of ums and ahs and hey, hey, all this, all that kind of stuff. Hers is much more poetic, but together we get some kind of balance between the two that I think in the end I thought I would have never, ever come up with that by myself. Please tell me that there was a moment where you were writing a very logical everyday sentence and then she was like, stop making sense. But okay.

But okay, like what, because these issues that we're talking about, these are non-trivial problems, like the echo chamber, the blinds, but the collective blind spots, like these are, these are real problems that are making it hard for us to exist as a democracy. If you have a relative who you've ever talked about vaccines with or something, I mean, you've felt this on a real level. Like, what is the hack here? Well, what's our way out of this? Talia. All right. Please.

Thanks. No pressure. I think it's trying to get, as you said, David, get out of your comfort zone, trying to make sure you have connections with some people who don't necessarily see everything the same way you do. I love it when students are thrown together with roommates from different backgrounds. I think we don't do enough of that.

We just gravitate towards our friends because it's just easier. And but that's problematic. I think if we try to listen to different music on occasion, try to understand, if you're a liberal, try to understand, try to find a conservative that isn't, you know, you don't think is absolutely crazy. And try, you know, because there's a point of view there that isn't necessarily nuts.

So, and vice versa, obviously. So, right, I think trying to break out of that kind of bubble that you might be in is really, really important, but it's getting increasingly challenging, especially the way we absorb our music and our information. Yeah. What about you, David? Do you have any thoughts about? I mean, because I feel like you've kind of done it in your career. You keep breaking the form you just made.

Yeah. I'm not sure I could recommend that to everybody. I'm not sure I could recommend that to everybody. I mean, there's certain aspects of society. We want reliability and not something. Oh, our store doesn't sell that anymore. Because I felt different. I felt I wanted to do something different. Yeah.

The surgeon is like, I'm trying a new site specific thing. If you don't want that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. I'm one thing I've learned is that no matter how smart we think we are, we're all susceptible to this stuff. But I do think, like as just having seen the show

and still Stariide from it, like I do think that's one of the beautiful things about the show, which is not spoiling anything. I do think it's a kind of tribute to intellectual humility. It's about how, like, at the very, at the very most basic level of the machinery we are born with, you know, you know a lot less than you think you do.

And even that you have sort of based your, the parts of you that you've based your whole sense of cell fund, those aren't as concrete as you, as you kind of wish they were. Exactly. And the tricky part is that let the audience feel and everyone else that this is not a bad thing. This changeability and malleability and sometimes the unreliability is not entirely bad. It sounds like you're delivering bad news, but it actually allows us the possibility

of change. Because if we weren't malleable, we'd have one idea, one point of view, and stick with it to the end of our lives. And that would become a terrible. Yeah. Applause I think we did. Please. I think that's absolutely right. I mean, I know as a neuroscientist that our brains are constantly changing,

but I think we... That comes in tension with the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and the stories that the people tell us about who we are. Because stories by designer made to stick, a good story sticks. The best success the story could ever have is being handed down generation to generation unchanged. And so we get stuck, I think, in these stories about ourselves that don't respect the fact that we are actually changing

and capable of change. And so I think one of the kindest things we can do for ourselves is to shake off an old story, a story that maybe fit us 10 years ago, or maybe when we were kids, but doesn't define us now. And when I go home to, um, visit my parents, I love my parents, I don't know if they're watching.

But they love me, but they have a story about me that got stuck when I was like age 12. And at age 12, I was kind of a lazy, unmotivated mess. And so every time I come home, I'm that kid. Like that's how they see me. And they love me despite it, but that's how they see me. And it doesn't really matter what I've done with my life since then.

I'm still that 12-year-old lazy, unmotivated mess. And I internalize that for a really long time. Until actually, after I got 10-year-old, and I'd be like school, all right? And And then I thought yeah, there's data here, you know I don't think this story fits me anymore, you know I love imagining the scene of the tenure committee interviewing your parents and There is a thing we are almost out of time, but there was one thing that was just so great that Talia said, and this will, just is the perfect ender to an evening like this about applause.

Do you want to? Sure. Well, this isn't having all the time. But sometimes when applause goes on a really long time, like when you're waiting for a band to come back for an encore, the crowd will spontaneously synchronize. The drive to synchronize with our neighbors is really, really strong.

And so this weird thing happens, where we start off all sort of asynchronous smattering of a pause. And then it's like that, right? So just throwing it out there. I don't know how long the applause is going to go on there, but it might just happen. Have you noticed that? It's just, especially when, yeah, what Talia says when it's like, it has to go on. So it won't try to bring the band back. Right.

So there's a name for long. And it's like, it's almost as if if we do it together at the same rhythm, that don't bring them out. Yeah. Yeah. OK. Well, I think we are basically out of time here. First of all, I wanted to thank these two wonderful folks.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, David, for putting on, I mean, years in the making this gorgeous show that I hope all of you get to see, not to mention, I guess you did a few other things before that. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Talia, for helping us make sense of this machinery. We all have in our heads that none of us understand,

apparently, really appreciate it. And thank you all for coming. And now it's like, it's actually kind of an experiment. What you're going to do when you applaud. But thank you all so much. I hope you have a great night. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I forgot my tongue. Thank you. Thank you. I forgot my tongue. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I forgot my tongue. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Cheers! The theater of the mind, the theater of the mind, you know no what you find in the theater of the mind, tall inside your head, it's all inside your head, the things you think So like I don't know who I am, but that might allow me to kind of fly through the rest of my life like a kite and you know, and have better encounters and take more risks than change. Yeah, yeah, that I'm not the person who always does this. I'm not the person who always, you know, always has to wait for someone else to approach me. Like I can, I could, oh yeah, oh sure, I could, maybe there was one time when I did, sure,

maybe yeah, let's do it, let's try it, yeah. It's a, it's a, yeah yeah kite is the feeling I keep having it's like a revisioning of feeling untethered instead of that feeling Swirling it's it's kind of liberating Hmm. That's cool. Okay, hey anything else last thing I need to say I think is Big hat tip for pre-production research to Susie Lektemberg and as well, special thanks to everybody at the Arbutus Foundation and the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, as well as Bowen Wong and Heather Radke.

Bowen, Heather, cool! All right. See you next time. I mean, to the extent that we can see one another, you get what I mean, Catch you on the flip side. Radio Lab was created by Jad Abhamrad and is edited by Sora Noiler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasir are our co-host. Susie Lecktenberg is our executive producer. Dylan Keith is our director of sound design.

Our staff include Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Beckup wrestler, Richard Q. Sik, a Kedi Foster Keyes, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Pasco, T.R.S. Sindhu Nyanasambandam, Matt Kiyoti, Annie McEwan, Alex Niesin, Sara Kari, Anna Rascoet, PASS, Sarah Sandback, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster, with help from Andrew Vinyales. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton. Hi, I'm Ram from India. Leadership support for Radio Lab Science Programming is provided by the Gordon and Biti Mode Foundation.

Science Sandbox is Simon Foundation initiative and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundation support for Radio Lab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.