Radiolab - Vertigogo

Episode Date: February 7, 2025

In this episode, first aired in 2012, we have two stories of brains pushed off-course. We relive a surreal day in the life of a young researcher hijacked by her own brain, and hear from a librarian experiencing a bizarre and mysterious set of symptoms that she called “gravitational anarchy.”Special thanks to Sarah Montague and Ellen Horn, as well as actress Hope Davis, who read Rosemary Morton’s story. And the late Berton Roueché, who wrote that story down. EPISODE CREDITS: Produced by - Brenna FarrellOriginal music and sound design contributed by - Tim Howard and Douglas Smith EPISODE CITATIONS:Books - Berton Roueché’s story about Rosemary Morton,”Essentially Normal” first appeared in the New Yorker in 1958 and was later published by Dutton in a book called "The Medical Detectives."Signup for our newsletter. 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] 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.

Hey, this is Radiolab. I'm Lulu. I'm here with my brain. You are there with yours. And usually, you know, you and your brain have a kind of quiet agreement to just get along, enough to go through your day. But every now and then, you and your brain fall out of agreement. And then you can slip into a kind of disorienting, tilt-a-whirly place.

Well today we have two stories for you about just that. People walking around with a new kind of vertigo. These stories come from the archives and we're calling today's show Vertigo Go Go. So here we go. Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. Okay.

All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From? WNYC. C? C. Rewind.

Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krollwitz. This is Radio Lab. The podcast. And today on the podcast, a show about brains. Yes. A short time ago, we got an email from a listener in San Francisco.

Something odd had happened to her and she wanted to share it with us. I missed, I didn't hit the record button fast enough. Could you just tell me your name again? Sure. My name is Liza Schoenfeld and I'm a research technician at the Gladstone Institute at the University of California, San Francisco. Now Liza is just getting started with her scientific career.

Finished my undergraduate degree about a year and a half ago. And this story takes place as she was about to take that next step after college and apply to grad school. And the star of our story, other than, of course, Liza herself, is a little mischievous part of her brain. Well, everyone's brain. Part of your brain called the basal ganglia. Basal ganglia.

Which, at the time, she'd been studying. So, basal ganglia is a fairly large part of your brain. It's actually this big hunk deep in the center. And it's responsible for controlling and coordinating movement. When I move my neck back and forth, am I using my basal ganglia? Yeah. When I make an expression in my face,

am I using my basal ganglia? Definitely. What about if I'm reading The New Yorker? I don't think so. Apologies to The New Yorker and its employees. Point is, this part of your brain is really basic. And at the lab where she was working, they had figured out this particular basal ganglia trick.

Using this really cool technology called optogenetics. What they'd done is they'd found a way to take a mouse, thread a little fiber optic cable through its skull deep into its brain, into its basal ganglia, so that when you shine a blue laser, literally we just shine lasers into mouse brains. They could actually turn its basal ganglia, or parts of it, on or off. And this is in a live mouse? This is in a live mouse.

So we have these really cool videos showing a mouse running around having a great mouse time. You turn the light on. We can get him to freeze. In mid-stribe? Yeah. So you hit the laser and boom the mouse stops? The mouse is like this. So you use light to like puppetize the mouse. Yes. If you're this mouse no matter how hard you try, move feet! Move! As long as that light is on, come on, move! You can't do it. Liza is holding the strings.

Not exactly. It turns out she doesn't get to play with the laser that much. I'm kind of like, I'm the bottom of the totem pole, so I do a lot of pipetting. It's like where you squirt liquid from one tube to another. I'm working on my pipetting skills these days. Groundwork. Work at the thumb muscles. Oh, I could beat anyone in the thumb wrestling competition

right now. So at a certain point, she was like, enough of this. Time for me to apply to grad school. Yeah, I applied to five. University of California, San Diego, University of Washington in Seattle, UCSF, Rockefeller University, and Harvard. Okay, so you're going big.

Yeah, go big or go home. Right, exactly. So she heads off to her first interview. University of Washington. Went great, I loved it. Went down to UCSD in San Diego. It's a beautiful place. Great scientists. It's actually the largest neuroscience community in the world. So far so good. Did you ever go back to San Francisco, where we are now?

This is where things get strange. Yes, so my last interview, my very last interview was at UCSF. And she says about a week before that interview. I got really sick, pretty severe nausea. I wasn't really able to eat or do anything. Throwing up? Yeah, all sorts of, I don't know, I had some bad dim sum the weekend before that could have been in. Yeah, that's it.

So she goes to the doctor, he gives her some pills to fight the nausea. And then the next day was my interview. Friday was my interview. So I went, you know, there's a nice introduction, they give you breakfast. At this point, she's pretty familiar with the whole routine. Generally, the way these interviews are structured is that we talk a little bit about my research in dopamine and the basal ganglia and these mice. They tell her about their work.

I have to think of a couple of witty questions. I ask my questions. Anyhow, she's raring to go and she heads in to meet her first basal ganglia tition of the day. And he studies, one of the things he studies is dopamine. In the basal ganglia. He studies stuff that's a little bit more molecular than what I know, but we had a good conversation about dopamine. And at this point in the day I was feeling okay. No nausea.

Then I went to my second interview, which is this woman that I was so excited to talk to her name is Alison dope and she's pretty well known Her name is Alison dope. Well, Alison dope Wow, she studies dopamine She studies songbirds songbirds, which is what Liza really wanted to study. So birds have basic English, too So she's pretty fired up and kind of the beginning of that interview My my face started to feel a little bit strange and I was wearing glasses that day. So what I thought was happening was that my glasses were, you know, your glasses get loose and they kind of start to slip down your nose and you have to kind of tighten the muscles

around your ears to try and keep your glasses on. So we were talking and I just kept on feeling like, God, why can't I stop tightening that? It was kind of got to the point where it started to distract me, but I felt okay. Then we went to lunch and this was a lunch with all the current students and a lot of the current faculty and all the prospective students. And at lunch, I remember on the walk to lunch, my head just started spontaneously turning to the right. Like I would be trying to sit here and face you and I would just turn over here and face Robert. That's such a funny thing. It's strange.

With your neck moving and you're like, no neck, don't do that neck. Yes, this is exactly what was happening. I was trying to send signals to my neck being like, all right, sitting here having lunch with an important professor, why don't you just face him, talk to him, and instead I'm just turning over here,

and turning over here, turning over here. Oh, you're turning a fairly wide arc. Yeah. You are turning away from the professor. So I remember at one point in lunch turning my chair like this So I could you're trying to rotate A Permanent side long glance. Yeah, but you figured must just be a cramp or something. I'm kind of thinking

Oh, okay. So I slept funny last night. I must have slept on a weird angle on my pillow now I'm having a neck cramp. My glasses loose I just got a tight in the glasses yeah everything under control so so then I after lunch was going to go to my third interview was with Allison dope's husband who also studies songbirds so he's familiar with the basil ganglia too they meet up to walk over to his office together and so I explained to him on the walkover I think I'm having neck cramps would it be possible maybe to try and get a hot pad? He says, sure, I may track one down.

But on the walk, not only now does my neck start turning to the right, but it's snapping itself back. Involuntarily. Yeah, my head's snapping back. Suddenly your eyes are pointed up at the sky. And then as I'm talking to him, I'm realizing that I can't control my eyebrows from raising pretty tightly.

So I look like I'm doing right now. So you're in a state of deep surprise? Yes. Constant deep surprise. High eyebrows. I can't stop it. I look surprised at everything I'm saying and I can't stop it. So after the eyebrows start and I can't pull them back down, then the mouth, then all this area starts to go. The lower face. Yes. What is it doing? It turns into this really twisted, painful, grimacing smile. Would you mind demonstrating? I'll demo it. I'll demo it. Okay, so I've got the neck that's like this.

Crane back. The eyebrows are like this. Total surprise. My face is a little bit like this. Crazy Frankenstein face. This is not the obviously the best demeanor for a graduate interview. No, yeah, it's not going well at that point. This is not the best demeanor for a graduate interview. No, yeah, it's not going well at that point.

Now is Michael now noticing that something has been... Yeah, I think at that point he thought I was just really excited to be talking about neuroscience. And I'm just trying to think, okay, mouth, like, try and just calm down a little bit. And it was pretty painful too. I mean, it was like, imagine like a charlie horse in your face. But she gets through the interview. It was pretty painful too. I mean, it was like imagine like a charley horse in your face. Oh. Yeah. But she gets through the interview. I actually do okay. You know, he asks me tough questions about science and I can answer him, I think. And I leave the interview and then I'm met by the woman who's the head of the

admissions weekend. And she took one look at Liza. And she said, I don't know if you should do the rest of your interviews. And with her is my student host. And Liza decides, all right, let me just call my dad. Just to say, hey, dad, I'm in the middle of my interview, and someone kind of funny's happening with my face. I can't control it.

And while I'm talking to him, I lose control of my mouth and my tongue. So I can kind of talk, but it's pretty bad. It's pretty bad. Is your dad a doctor? No. Imagine your dad a doctor? No. Imagine your kid calling you being like, I'm losing control of my face.

And as they're telling you that, I started to think something's really wrong. And then my student host comes rushing back in, running, and he looks at me and he tries to put on a calm face and he says, so now we need to go to the emergency room. So they throw into a taxi. And in the taxi it went from, I can't control my mouth to a complete, I mean a complete, The mouth was

Palsy to the torque. I did not look good. As we're pulling up to the emergency room was when my throat started tightening up. They rush her inside. And they have me in a gurney, in a room in the back of the ER, surrounded by six people within two minutes. Doctors swarming all around her. Oxygen masks, EKG

leads all over my chest. They do an IV. And as she's lying there on the table and she's thinking like what's wrong with me? Why can't I control my throat? Why can't I control my body? And I just I couldn't I remember frantically sending messages like you got to cut this out now. But she wasn't in control and it turned out that while she was going from interview to interview to interview, talking about how her lab had taken these little miceys and seized control of their basal ganglia, the Compazine that I took,

That nausea drug? Was actually affecting the dopamine systems in my basal ganglia. In other words, that drug had been doing to her pretty much what she'd been doing to those mice. One to two percent of people who take Compazine, they can have what's called an acute dystonia, which is what happened to me.

During all those interviews. And the crazy thing is, the guy that I talked to first in the morning was the molecular dopamine guy. You know, how does dopamine get packed in the vesicles? How does it get released? And it wasn't until I started talking with the more systems level people who study the behavioral output of the basal ganglia that I started to have behavioral deficits in my basal ganglia.

Wow. So your basal ganglia are testing the San Francisco docs and they are failing in issue of dish. Yeah. Did you get into San Francisco State? UCSF. UCSF? No.

No. Oh. Damn it, Basil Ganglera. We should probably tell everybody that Liza's obviously doing okay. Back in the ER, when the doctors finally figured out what was going on, they just gave her some Benadryl of all things. And actually, within 20 minutes, I was feeling a lot better. She could breathe, her face unclenched.

And when we asked her, how has this little adventure changed you, she said well I'm still working with those mice because when we talked to her grad school hadn't started yet and now when I go into that room with a little laser I go in now and I just really I empathize with them. Come on little Casper this would for a couple of minutes. You can do it. Yeah, I'm thinking a lot about that. Liza Schonfeld is now a proud PhD candidate at the University of Washington. And thanks to Brenna Farrell for production help on that story. I'm Jan Ivovimrod. I'm Robert Krovich.

We'll be back. I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Kralvich. This is Radiolab. And today. Times when you and your brain have a falling out, so to speak. Okay, so Liza's disagreement with her brain didn't last very long. It was over within really less than a day. But there are people who get into fusses with their heads that last longer. So here's a bigger, badder, and broader story. Also, a true story. Comes from an essay written many years ago by a guy named Burton Rouchet, who's this great... I don't know, how would you describe him? Burton Rouchet, he was a great essayist, journalism essayist.

Yeah, and this essay was published in 1958 in The New Yorker, and it's kind of an interesting essay because it's essentially one long quote from this woman that Bertrand interviewed, Rosemary Morton. It reads like a novel, even though it's nonfiction. So we asked an actress who's been in some movies, Hope Davis, to read excerpts from Rosemary's story. The story begins on a normal night, Rosemary's at home with her husband Frank. And everything's fine for the moment. I'd been home about an hour. Dinner was ready and waiting in the oven, and I was sitting at the piano, not really playing, just amusing myself.

That's something I often do at the end of the really playing, just amusing myself. That's something I often do at the end of the day. It helps me relax. My husband was in the kitchen making us a cocktail, which is another Morton custom. We usually have a drink or two before dinner, so everything was quite ordinary and normal, until Frank came in with the drinks. I got up to join him on the sofa, and as I did, as I started across the room, I felt the floor sort of... shake. Good heavens, I said, what was that?

Frank just looked at me, His face was a perfect blank. He made some remark about old buildings stretching and settling and handed me my drink. So she doesn't really think too much of this, because it was very momentary. But a week later, she's at work. She's actually in the library, because she's a librarian. She's at her desk.

I worked at my desk for about an hour, and it was heaven so quiet, so peaceful. Then I got up to get a book from the stacks, or a drink of water or something, and it happened. The floor gave a shake and sank. It went down and up, just one lurch, maybe a little more pronounced than the first time. And then everything was back to normal. Except for my state of mind. I didn't know what to think. The best I could do was tell myself that this was an old building too. It was built around 1900. So that was your sense at first.

Just old buildings. It never occurred to me that there might be any other explanation. But then, over the next few days, very odd things began to happen. I don't know how to describe it, but I had the feeling that my sense of touch was getting more and more acute. Especially in the soles of my feet. I could feel little tremors. That other people couldn't.

I didn't tell Frank until the middle of the following week, on Wednesday night to be exact. By then, I had to. I couldn't keep it to myself any longer. There was something wrong with me. There just wasn't any word for the awful sensations I'd been having. The floor shaking feeling was only one of them. I don't know how many times that happened over the weekend, seven or eight at least, but even that began to have a different feeling. At first the floor had moved or sagged as a whole.

It still did, only now I could feel another movement too, a kind of counterpoint. Sometimes it was as if I were sinking into the floor. The room would tilt and I'd take a step and the floor was like snow. It would give under my foot and I would sink. And other times it was just the reverse of floor would rise up to meet me. By then it wasn't simply the floor that moved. When the floor tilted, the walls of the room tilted with it and the ceiling. I mean the shape of the room never changed, only its position in space. room never changed, only its position in space. So Rosemary went to see her doctor, and her doctor sent her to some specialists and they

ran some tests. And then a short while later, she went back to her doctor to get the results. He'd read me their conclusions, and they were all the same. They even used the same phrase. Impression, essentially normal. I'll never forget that phrase, normal, essentially normal. It sounds so reassuring, so comforting. But it isn't. At least it wasn't to me. It was terrifying.

After this diagnosis, or non-diagnosis, things really take a turn. Fast forward a few months. There were times in March and early April when I was absolutely certain I was going to die. But my reaction to death was peculiar. I don't remember feeling afraid. All I remember is an overwhelming sense of urgency. So little time, so little done, so much I wanted to do. I dragged Frank to the theater more than once and I never thought of refusing when he suggested the Philharmonic or the Metropolitan. My response to music had never been so complete. I spent hours listening to records. I'd play some old favorite like Beecham conducting Haydn's London Symphony, and it was amazing.

It seemed to me that I could hear the inner structure more clearly than ever before, so the idea of a dinner and a concert wasn't at all unusual. My only mistake was to take that dreadful underground passage. It was raining and I was in a hurry, but even so I should have realized. When I did, it was too late. The passage was jammed with commuters shoving and pushing and surging toward me, but I didn't dare turn back. The floor was beginning to wobble and I knew if I tried to swing around it would tip me head over heels.

All I could do was go on. The traffic was still all against me. People kept looming up, towering up. They came charging at me like giants. And then I felt something right out of a nightmare. I was almost at the end of the passage when I felt the movement change. It was as if someone had pulled a lever. There was a little jolt, and the floor was moving very slowly backward down the passage.

I was walking on a treadmill. Only for a minute though. Then I reached the stairs. I drove myself up to the lobby and collapsed in a chair. I was jelly. From early April, I began to move in a different world. I was conscious of a new dimension, a new plane. I had a new relationship to space.

My legs, my arms, my face, my whole body felt different. It had no permanent shape. It changed by the minute. I seemed to be completely at the mercy of some outside force, some atmospheric pressure. I was amorphous. My left leg would seem to lengthen, or my right arm, or my neck, or one whole side of me would double or treble in size. And yet that doesn't fully describe it. There were times when the force seemed to be the rotation of the Earth. I would have the feeling that I was vertically aligned with the Earth's axis.

I could feel a sort of winding movement start up inside me. Then one of my legs would begin to shorten, as if it were an anchor being drawn slowly up by a winch. The other leg would dangle. After a minute, the winch would shift. It would engage the dangling leg, and just as slowly, bring it up to match the other. This feels like some kind of a nightmare cartoon of some kind. Yeah. So what is wrong with her? Well, after months of this, at the end of the essay she does finally learn that this

condition she has has a name. My trouble was a disturbance of the internal ear called labyrinthitis. Labyrinthitis. The suffix-itis meant inflammation. Swelling. So the meaning of labyrinthitis as a word was simply an inflammation of the oral labyrinth. You know, I think people in science and medicine love to give big fat names to I don't know. Well, actually this condition you should know goes by another name.

What? Vertigo. Oh. That's why I like the story because like, I didn't know. I mean, like I always thought of Vertigo like from the movie. Yeah. Like you're on a stairs and you're like, woo.

Yeah. Like it's just a thing and you're like, woo! Like it's just a thing with heights, you know, like that's what it was in the Hitchcock film. But what Rosemary Morton goes through in this story, it's like, seems way deeper. And at some point in the essay, she actually refers to her situation as a case of gravitational anarchy. That's an interesting phrase. A phrase I kind of like. Well, does she get better? Yep.

It's impossible to say exactly when it all ended, but I think it was Frank who really sensed it first. It was after dinner one night in late August, and he suddenly smiled and remarked that I must be feeling much better. I asked him what he meant. You never look scared anymore, he said. It's very mysterious, but her vertigo just went away. Poof.

Without explanation for the coming and no explanation for the going? Some things just don't have explanations, Robert. But they have wonderful sound design. And that's Radiolab. No explanations, pretty sounds. I'd buy a ticket to that, Mr. Jekers. I'm crazy for sound design. Speaking of not knowing anything... Thanks to Burton Rouchet. Well, he's not alive anymore, but you can find his story essentially normal in the awesome book Medical Detectives, which was published in 1984 by Dutton.

Our sincere thanks to actress Hope Davis and to Sarah Montague and Ellen Horn for directing Hope in the studio. And thanks to Tim Howard and Douglas Smith for the scoring help with that piece. And lastly, thanks to you for listening. Hey, I'm Lemon and I'm from Richmond, Indiana, and here are the staff credits. Radio Lab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler.

Lulu Miller and LotsofNasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keith is our Director of Sound Design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Pressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Nyanan Sambandhan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwan, Alex Niesen, Sara Khari, Sarah Sandback, Anisa Vitsa, Ariane Whack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton. Hi, my name is Treza.

I'm calling from Colchester in Essex, UK. Leadership support for Radiolab Science Programming is provided by the Gordon and Betsy Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, the Seymonds Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.