Radiolab - Vanishing Words

Episode Date: December 17, 2021

When Alana Casanova-Burgess set out to make a podcast series about Puerto Rico, she struggled with what to call it. Until one word came to mind, a word that captures a certain essence of life in Puerto Rico, but eludes easy translation into English. We talk to Alana about her series, and that particular word, then turn to an old story about treating words as signals of something happening just beneath the surface.  Agatha Christie's clever detective novels may reveal more about the inner workings of the human mind than she intended. According to Dr. Ian Lancashire at the University of Toronto, the Queen of Crime left behind hidden clues to the real-life mysteries of human aging in her writing. Meanwhile, Dr. Kelvin Lim and Dr. Serguei Pakhomov from the University of Minnesota add to the intrigue with the story of an unexpected find in a convent archive that could someday help pinpoint very early warning signs for Alzheimer's disease and dementia. Sister Alberta Sheridan, a 94-year-old Nun Study participant, reads an essay she wrote more than 70 years ago. La Brega update was produced by Maria Paz Gutierrez

Wait, you're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From WNYC. Hey, I'm Lula Miller. Hey, hey, hey, this is Radio Lab. And before we get to the show, it's so great to talk to you. I want to introduce you to someone as I'm now obsessed with your work. Oh goodness. This is Elana Casanova, Burgess. She's another reporter here at WNYC and earlier this year,

she released a new show. Yeah, a history podcast about Puerto Rican life wherever that takes place. And the reason she's here is because, well, honestly, I just wanted you to know about the show. I have a hunch you like podcasts, and this one is beautifully sound-designed. It is full of stories with all kinds of plot twists and really interesting people. But I also wanted to take just a couple of minutes to talk to her about this very interesting and kind of maddening choice she made, which is what she named the show. Okay, so before you say what it is, were there any runner-up names?

I think the worst one is this Puerto Rican life. Super bad. Yeah, it's pretty bad. And then here's another, this allego, which means like relief or venting because allego ad means to drown. And so when you say to your friend like, oh, can I just have a this allego, like can I just vent really quick? It means like undrowning.

That's good. Turns out they had a long list. Territoryo or teritoria. Aladariva. A drift. Insulac. Like having to had a long list. Territoryo, or Teritoria, a drift, insulat, like having to do with an island, to stone. The delish is plantain, that's the sweet one, right? I think you're thinking of maduros. Really clever name ideas.

Like we are here, homeland. La isla. And what they finally settled on was. La Breda. Now, I can't tell you what that means, because there's no perfect English translation for this word that Puerto Ricans use all the time. And I was so fascinated by this choice to name your show something that will remain inscrutable

to so many of your listeners. Exactly, yeah. No, to be fair, Alana spends the entire first episode trying to translate the term. La Brega. She turns to other Puerto Ricans to try to explain what La Brega means. When I hear or use La Brega, I'm referring to the struggle.

The struggle. Lucha, vina del hoso. Naling in hoso. In the hoso, a hoso.. Coming in joso. In the hustle. A hustle. La brega has to deal with everyday life. Cotidianidad. Determinación, sobrevivencia, trabajo. Determination, survival, work.

I'll wait to do something and circumstances that don't let you get ahead grinding. You know what it means to do it. And finally, Alana tries synthesizing all of the meanings of the term herself. There's an imbalance of power when you're beregando, whether it's against your boss or some larger injustice.

It's an underdog's word. A berega implies a challenge we can't really solve, so you have to hustle to get around it. Okay, so by the end of the episode, do you think you've captured it? Oh, that's a good question. And actually, no. And this, to me at least, is the genius of choosing this name.

As an outsider, knowing that I still don't quite know what Labraiga means, pulls me in. It makes me want to keep looking and listening to try to understand what I'm missing out on. And in the rest of the series, instead of using words, tidy definitions or translations or sussorises or synonyms to try to explain La Brega, Alana uses stories. So as Alana tells it, La Brega is the 2004 Olympics where the Puerto Rican basketball team beat the US. It's finally happened. The United States moves us in a Olympic player with NBA players. It was like a David versus Goliath moment. like a David versus Goliath moment. And in another episode, it's how Puerto Ricans respond to the debt crisis.

Being a Puerto Rican now requires you to also be like a disasterologist and an economist. Or it's how they reacted to the surveillance of the independence movement. Be careful, you know, they're gonna create a file on you. Which is one of the few cases in history of surveillance records being returned back to the victims of surveillance. This series is an anthology about Puerto Rico. Each episode opens a door to a different aspect of the Puerto Rican experience, our brega, and hope you enjoy it.

I sure did. The New York Times did, the New Yorker did. They both just placed it on their best podcast of the year. And you can find La Bréga wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks, Alana. Thanks. So talking to Alana about the secrets hidden behind or beyond words, well, it got meana about the secrets hidden behind or beyond words.

Well, it got me thinking about this episode I want to play for you that's about the secrets that words can contain. In this case, the secret isn't being kept from outsiders. The secret is being kept from the person speaking or typing the words. I will let Jad and Robert take it from here. Hey, I'm Jad I'm a Rob and I'm Robert Kroich. Yep, this is Radio Lab. And today, just to start things off for this podcast, all right, let's just say that you love an author. But somehow the text isn't enough. Okay, doesn't get you close enough to the author.

So what do you do? You know what you do? But take off your shoes. You take off your stocks. And you stand on the floor. And your whole body says, let me in. Yeah, let me give you a different flavor of that. Hello, how about you take the text, give it to this guy, he puts it into a computer and you turn it into data. What do you mean? Who is that? This is a... My name is Ian Lankasher.

I'm a professor of English at the University of Toronto. No, Ian, as he said, is an English professor, but he's also a computer guy. Right. Founded a computing center with Alpavibian Canada. And the reason he combines those two is because he's interested in the secrets behind the author's words. And that desire, he says, to take a text, spin it into that as a way to get into that author's head,

well, that goes back a long way. It goes back to the fathers of the Christian church. It's the Bible. In the early Middle Ages. So monks decided to make what's called a concordance of the Bible, and what that means is they were going to take every single word in the Bible and there are 960,243 of them, at least in the King James Version, and they were going to list them all alphabetically, notate each time every single word was used and the context.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yes, imagine it. You begin with the first verse. In the beginning. with the first verse in the beginning. You create a heading for the first word and then for the second word, the and then for the third beginning. Every time you come across those words, you have to write a context in Genesis 1 verse 1, in the beginning Genesis 1 verse 6, verse 2, and God said, let there be Firmina in them. It's all handwritten. And at the end, you end up with a lot of pieces of paper. So many that it took those first monks, who decided to do this an entire lifetime to complete it.

Nowadays, with computers, you can be done in under 15 seconds. Bam! So that all just basically sets the stage for the story that I'm about to tell you. It's the 1980s in is an English professor at Toronto. He's got a lab full of computers and he's using them to analyze his favorite authors. Samuel Taylor-Colaridge, T.O.C.E.L.E.A. James Joyce, Katmai, Shawcer, Shakespeare. And he's starting up some interesting stuff, sort of. For example, in his poetry, Milton didn't use the word because. Who knows why?

Yeah. But at a certain point, Ian decided to look at more modern authors. And so I turned to Agatha Christie. At the time he was doing this, we're now in the 90s, Agatha Christie happened to be the most published author ever. She sold a billion books. A billion?

Like B-billion? She was number one. Oh, my God. After, after the Bible, I think. So what I did is I collected two of her earliest novels, written in the early 20s. You've had those two into the computer? I did the third.

Eventually you would add in 14 additional books that cover 50 years of Agatha Christie's writing. What is the computer doing exactly? Measuring the individual concordance, word frequency, the vocabulary of the works. And all the while, it's spitting out these reports. And I saw the totals at the bottom. Now, first of all, the woman wrote 80 detective novels, which is just amazing in of itself. The computer found that her use of language was relatively consistent in a normal, uh,

4D first, 72 of those books. But something happened on book number 73, something drastic. What? Suddenly her use of words like... Words like thing, anything, something, nothing. What Ian calls indefinite words. These!

These words increased six times. But also when the computer added up the vocabulary size of that book. That is how many different words are there in the first 50,000 words of a text. It found in this book there were 20% fewer different words. That is astounding. That's one fifth of a vocabulary lost. It gradually dawned on him that what he might be seeing was the very beginning stages of an author losing herself. She had developed Alzheimer's.

I delayed publishing my results for two years. I had to have the results analyzed by computational linguist and a statistician. And in her lifetime, was she ever actually diagnosed? Absolutely not. There was no diagnosis. He said that some of her biographers suspected that something was up in her later years.

One point, apparently, she cut off all her hair. She was not doing very well in interviews. But as far as we know, she was never taken to a doctor, never got diagnosed. I think her family closed around her and protected her. I realized that I was seeing something about the human mind. I was seeing the author in the text in a way

that people hadn't seen the author in the text in a way that people hadn't seen the author in the text before. Which raised the question for me, and I think this could apply to anyone. We all write a bazillion emails a day. I've got a decades worth on my computer. Does that stuff hold clues about what will be? Like early warning signs? I think it's possible it does. Yes, and it's well worth doing research about how a loss of vocabulary can be determined,

let's say, in one's email over five or six years. Indications are, he says, that those clues are there. Not only that, they may actually be there practically from the beginning. Oh, yep. A very famous example is the so-called Nun Study. Okay, the Nun Study actually began in 1990. This is Dr. Kelvin Lim. He worked at the University of Minnesota and is the current director of the so-called Nun Study.

And this study, more than any other that we know, really makes the point about the predictive power of the words we choose. Study began with a guy named David Snowden who wanted to look at aging over time. So he chose nuns because he wanted a group that was healthy. For example, they don't smoke, they don't drink. They all have similar lifestyles. Obviously haven't had children.

So he approached this one particular order in Connecticut. All the school sisters of Notre Dame. And he signed up just short of 700 nuns and the only stipulation being. You had to be at least 75 years of age. And so we're now 20 years in the study so that means the youngest of the sisters is about 95. Yeah I think I am I am the youngest. And you are 94 years old. Yes sir. Not 95. Not 95. This is sister Alberta Sheridan.

I like the way you said that. Do you happen to know who the oldest remaining sister in the study is? Wait a minute. The one who was buried today, Chad, was 101. I think she was the oldest one in the study in our province, yes. The study began, innocently enough, she says. Researchers would show up to the convent every year, give the nuns a bunch of tests. Like mostly for memory, just questioning back and forth.

And then over the years, as the nuns passed away, which many of them have at this point. They've all gone, Jed. Of the original 678 sisters? At this point, we have approximately 40 sisters still alive and participating in the study. And I'm the only one left here in the Wilton province. And as the Nuns would pass away, the researchers had arranged it so that they would get a small piece of their brains. Yes. Which they could examine for plaques and tangles. Now the morning we buried a sister here I told you. The funeral was delayed a bit because she had to be taken to the hospital

to have a portion of her brain removed to further the study. Now. Mm-hmm. Hello, this is David from Berlin. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in Hansen Public Understanding of Science and Technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Science reporting on Radio Lab is supported in part by Science Sandbox, a Simon's Foundation

initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science. Okay, so here's why I bring this study up. Because of an accident that happened pretty early on, that changed everything in the study. David Snowden, the main dude, was in the Convent Archives and he was talking to the Archivist. The Archivist says to him, hey, you know all of these nuns that you're studying who right now are over the age of 75, I actually have the essays that they wrote right when they got here. And they did this roughly at about age 18, like 60 years before.

Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I have a copy of his at home. That's great. Come on in, Naomi. Thank you so much. We actually asked the reporter Naomi Sterebin to visit Sister Alberta at her home in Connecticut.

Are you late today? And having her read her essay that is now 76 years old. Yeah, go ahead. Two days after the birth of the Christ child, I was brought as a belated Christmas gift to a mystery Mrs. Albert Joseph Sheridan of Providence, Rhode Island. A week later, the sparkly waters of baptism

were poured over me. I'm not gonna read all this silly stuff that when I first entered. Why not? It sounds kind of saccharin. I was only a teenager when I wrote... But here's the thing, when the researchers found the essays like the one you just heard, it was a goldmine.

There's a major, major find. So they analyzed the essays looking primarily at... Two specific features of the language that was contained in these narratives. That's Surjey Pahoma. He does the analysis for the current non-study. Particularly, they looked at the notion of grammatical complexity and idea density. what is idea density? what does that mean? idea density is a measure that looks at how many basic units of meaning are contained

in any given utterance divided by the total number of words in that utterance. in other words, the date of my birth is December 27th. Like if you were to listen to Sister Albert's autobiography. When I was 11 years of age, my dear mother was called to God. It's the number of little discrete ideas she's able to cram into one sentence. This was to be a turning point in my life, as I had always had the ardent desire to become a sister.

Here's a classic example of the difference between low and high idea density. Here's low. From Sister Helen, I was born in a Claire Wisconsin on May 24, 1913, and was baptized in same James Church. Okay, that's low. Now, here's high. From Sister Emma, it was about a half hour before midnight between February 28th and 29th of the leap year 1912 when I began to live and to die as the third child of my mother,

whose maiden name is Hilda Hoffmann and my father Otto Schmidt. I got to say I'm liking the first one. Jed probably knew as a journalist, seen the first one as straight to the point. Yeah, it's good writing. And the second one seems kind of embellished. A little bit. Yeah. But here's the punchline of all this.

Turns out that the people who, when they were 18, wrote in that journalistically very precise low idea density sort of way, those people, 60 years later, were vastly, vastly more likely to develop dementia. In fact, based on those essays alone, the researchers could predict with about 85% accuracy, what the nuns' brains would look like when they died and were able to look at the brains. Would the brains have plaques and tangles that you associate with Alzheimer's, or would they not? What?

I mean, that's or would they not? What? I mean, that's just crazy. Wait, why? It's backwards reasoning. Well, we'll see. I mean, I'm just suddenly I'm suspicious. Here's a man who, from what you just said, has found the ones who got sick and working backwards

found certain incidences of this or the other. And he's, ah, this is a cause that produces this effect. No, no, no, no, there's no cause and effect here. These studies are demonstrating associations, right? They're not demonstrating causality. Right? It's a very important distinction. This is just a correlation, okay?

But you know, that may be one of 190 correlations that produce people who get Alzheimer's in the end. Yeah, I mean, yeah. I mean, but let me argue your case actually from a different angle. Like, would this kind of linguistic analysis actually be relevant in the age of Twitter, where everything is short and clipped and short? People who Twitter don't. Only Twitter, they might also write small short dense essays for their. Yeah, but, you know, I guess you are right. It's like it's mostly about the thoughts in your head not so much what you write

Well, so what about Agatha Christie? Was there a conclusion about Agatha? Yeah, there was Agatha Christie writing elephants can remember this brings us back to Ian Lancaster and that 73rd book of Agatha Christie's that he analyzed found that her Vocabulary dipped well before he did the analysis, he picked up that book and gave it a read. And like most people who read it didn't like it. Initially, I thought it was very poorly written, badly plotted, full of errors of time,

of dating, terrible read. Then I realized when I looked at the title, elephants can remember. He realized that maybe Agatha Christie sensed what was happening to her. She was responding to that truism that elephants never forget. The chief character is an aging female novelist named Ariadne, who is a foil for Agatha herself, and she Ariadne, is suffering from memory loss. In the story, she tries to help a detective solve this crime, but she has trouble because

she keeps forgetting. And the last sentence in that novel, in fact, is Agatha saying, well, maybe it's okay not to remember. She was trying to defend herself, defend her sense that she was forgetting. She was losing her vocabulary. She was losing her language. I began to see that Christy was heroic. Still writing despite this handicap, and her willingness to do that at an age of 81, 82 struck me as heroic in a way. I understand that. The muse wouldn't quit, but the tools all left the room.

Yeah. I think we should leave the room. Okay. Radio Lab was created by Jada Boomerod and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and La Tifnasser are co co-hosts Suzy Lektinberg is our executive producer and Dylan Keef is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Brestler, Rachel Q6, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Pascutietes, Sndernione Sombendum, Matt Kilti, Annie McEwan, Alex Neeson, Sara Carrey, Aryan Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster.

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It's a movement. Yeah. I like it's a members only wonderland. I'm just picturing people with members only jackets. Having a tea party with a mad hat. No, but it is okay. So what do you get in this space? It's about what you don't get.

Yeah. You don't get me reading you Casper ads. I'm a little sad about that because you don't have to have the mad hat. But it is, okay, so what do you get in this space? It's about what you don't get. You don't get me reading you Casper ads. I'm a little sad about that because you don't have to have the interruptions and you also get lots of bonus stuff. We got some magnets, we got some embroidered retro patches, we got topax, but we also have special bonus content. You get special extra stories and interviews that no one else gets to hear. You get invites to events where you can connect with us,

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