Radiolab - Where Am I?

Episode Date: May 5, 2006

OK. Maybe you're in your desk chair. You're in your office. You're in New York, or Detroit, or Timbuktu. You're on planet Earth. But where are you, really? This hour, Radiolab tries to find out.

You're listening to Radio Lab. From New York Public Radio. Public Radio. WNYC. Testing, testing. This is Radio Lab. I'm Chad Abumrod. And I'm Robert Crowley.

And since this hour we'll be talking about brains and bodies and how they communicate, we thought we'd begin the program with a guy that we go to quite often. He knows about this sort of thing. Oliver Sacks. Oliver is a neurologist. Very famous author. He took us to his study to show us something that just fascinates him. I've become fascinated.

Incidentally, I hope you have to be careful with your watch or your computers. He showed us a silver ball. I should just describe here. I am looking at a silver ball about the size of a small, small ping pong ball. Which he handed to you. Would you care to lift up that little steel ball? And as soon as he did, I am trying.

The ball went flying through the air, taking your hand with it smack into the nearest bit of metal in the vicinity, which was a plate. A little to your left. Very fast, and it hurt. Wow. Be careful. I've got it. Okay. Don't put it too near your watch.

And also you have to put it down very gently. Otherwise, it may fly with great violence onto this nickel slab. What is that? And where are we talking about it? Okay. Well, this is a little rare earth metal magnet. of great strength. These magnets orient themselves

almost violently to the Earth's magnetic field. If you have a couple of these things, say, in your pockets and you go for a walk, as you turn a corner, you will feel them reorient themselves in your pockets, like little animals. So your pockets would tell you whether you were going north, south, east or west? Your pockets or wherever you're.

you have the rare earth magnets. And how, you're a very weird man, how would you propose to use this? In what situation that you have imagined would it be a happy advantage? Well, I myself, I'm always getting lost. I have no sense of direction. I would function better.

I said to you, Oliver, come downtown to meet me. You would know, because of the pressure on your thighs from these little balls that you were carrying out, whether you were going downtown or not downtown. And I made me things like this. I am very bad at orienting myself in space. He's trying to do what the birds do. Right.

Because birds have magnets in their brains or something like magnets, which lets them fly south. Yeah, so they know where they're going to when they're migrating. Right. He's trying to start a conversation like a bird, but in his case he's chosen his thighs. He wants his thighs to talk to his brain. I've often wondered as an aside,

the extent to which one could develop a new sense. That's what this hour of Radio Lab is about. Human beings, not just Oliver, all kinds of folks who are attempting to add senses and mostly to subtract senses. We'll have stories about both adding and losing senses, and more generally, a look at how brains and bodies communicate. Often fail to communicate.

Because, believe it or not, it's not an easy relationship between your brain and your body. There's a lot of confusion, deception, even. That's what new research shows, and we'll get into all of that. So let's get into it. All right. Okay, ready? Yeah.

We're first. Well, let's begin with a neurologist. Let's see, my cell phone is ringing, so let me pause until it stops. That's Robert Sapolsky. He's a professor of biology at Stanford. I've never figured out how to do voice messaging or whatever it is that is done in this. century prisoners of our machines. Okay, we're in business here.

Okay, so to begin now, I said to Robert Sapolsky, just to get my head around this, let's imagine that I decide to visit my best friend in the world. Tommy? Tommy. I walk over to his house. I have a key, so I open the front door. Tommy? I walk into his apartment.

Tommy? And then I see him sprawled on the floor dead. And in a horrible, tragic instant like that, I wonder what would be going on in my brain? And I asked this because his answer, Sapolsky's answer, was so weird. According to Sapolsky, what happens happens in the following order. First, light bounces off Tommy's corpse and enters my eye. Okay, it goes up some nerve from your eyes and into one part of the brain, which turfs it on to the next part. And then the information keeps moving.

A couple of steps down, it gets into... what's called your visual cortex, which turns the dots into lines and lines into shapes. And that's just like a local train you're taking. Eventually, that local train carrying the image of Tommy will chug and chug deeper into my brain, to my cortex, and after a few more stops, I will finally know, I will consciously know, that Tommy is dead. DEMI! But now here's the surprise. Information can move through the brain in different ways at the same time.

And there is a second route, it turns out. There's a second pathway. Into my body, into my nervous system. Which bypasses all of that visual cortex stuff. Like a bullet train. And goes straight to this area called the amygdala. And what the amygdala does is... Instantly, it tells the heart to pound.

Your heart speeds up. The stomach to clench. Stomach muscles clench. Tears to flow. And you're still a couple of seconds away from even consciously making sense of what you're seeing. And by then already your stomach is heading towards your... your throat or your throats in your mouth or whatever the cliche is. So as I'm standing there, in Tommy's apartment,

looking at this figure on the ground, before I even know what I'm looking at, before I am consciously aware that Tommy is dead, my body already knows. That's exactly the punchline. Your body knows it before you consciously know it. Which is an astonishing idea. It is astonishing.

But it's not a new idea. Yeah. This goes back to, What was originally viewed is this totally asinine theory in psychology back around 1900, one of the, you know, grand old poohas of psychology, William James. William James, and he's trying to answer the question where feelings came from. That's Joan O'Leara, a science writer. He really likes William James.

He's written a lot about him. And he says, 100 years ago, William James poses a thought experiment. He gives the example of a bear. He says, imagine you're walking through the woods. All of a sudden, from behind a tree. A bear. attacks and he wondered, William James did. Okay, so the bear attacks, you're going to feel scared.

But what exactly is that feeling of fear made of? Which seems like a strange question to ask. Yeah, but he was trying to be empirical about it. He was trying to be a good psychologist. And his answer was that the feeling is the perception of your body. Meaning step one,

you see the bear. You see a bear. With his teeth and his claws. Step two, your body responds. The fast heartbeat, the adrenaline cursing in your bloodstream. It's only in step three, when the brain sees the body respond, does it then trigger the feeling of fear? The feeling of fear comes from the perception of those changes in your body.

If you took away the heartbeat, if you took away the body, there'd be nothing left to feel. Needless to say, when William James proposed this idea, people thought... He was nuts, completely nuts. They said, you know, if you're right, then someone who's paralyzed from the neck down and who doesn't get signals from their body, Well, that person would see the bear in the woods, and they wouldn't get scared.

Which is ridiculous, right? Completely ridiculous. So the critics said William James is wrong, dead wrong, and that's the end of it. Well, it's not quite the end of it. Hello. We happened to bump into a neurologist. Antonio Damazio, director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California. Wow, what a nice play.

So we're sitting there with Damazio, and we happen to be talking about William James and his critics, which we always do. Always do. We don't go into a luncheonette for lunch. Before we order a tuna fish sandwich, we always mention William James and his critics. This is something we do. So I said to Damasio,

you know, the critics call James wrong because he said people who were paralyzed couldn't feel anything. And he says, you know, it's funny you should mention this because there's been a series of studies thinking about James one more time. And it's very interesting

because the first study that was made in this area was made by a paraplegic, who thought that he felt less emotional than he was before, and he talked to others, and others reported the same. The studies reported that people who had once been able-bodied and then became paralyzed felt less. Less happy than able-bodied people, less sad than able-bodied people,

just less. Our being is rooted in a body state. If I would be able to remove from your brain the representation of your body, you would not know that you were you. And would I not be sorry at my friend's death? You definitely would not be sorry at anything. What is, in fact, the essence of being joyful or sad if you don't hook those notions on a changed body?

He's right, you know. I mean, if you think about the last time you were sad, like really sad, how would you describe that feeling to yourself? Well, in fairness, I guess I would. I would say I felt dragged out and heavy. Yeah, that feeling is completely rooted in your flesh. Well, the brain has nothing to do with it. A thought made me sad, and then my body felt. Oh, crap.

I forgot to turn the ring off. Hold on. Hello? Oh, hi. Yeah, hold on one second. It's your wife. We're here? Hello. Robert?

Yeah. I can't believe you're still there. What are you doing there? What do you mean? What am I doing here? You were supposed to be home an hour ago. Tamar. Tamar, you, you called me in the studio.

We're on the air. I don't care. What do you mean you don't take there? You were supposed to be home an hour ago. I reminded you this morning. I reminded you last night. I was... It's just not important to you.

There's not such a big deal. I'll be back and... Actually, this is a perfect example of what we've been talking about. No. Robert's having a... fight with his wife Tamar. And while he's fighting inside his body, his stomach is clenching, his heart is palpitating hers, is doing the same. Their brains are picking up these signals. I'm thinking, anger. Feel angry.

I'm working with other people here. There are other people who we... My work is just as important as your work. And you've now screwed it up. How did I screw it up? How did I screw up? Now, at a certain point, Robert will probably realize he has screwed up. And... Just get home. He'll apologize. Okay. If I get home in 20 minutes, I'm really sorry. I know this is horrible. Robert, is everything okay? Yeah, it's just a section.

I'm really sorry. Okay. Now, when it comes to brains and bodies in men and women, the interesting thing is that when a man and women fight, these systems in their body, the heart palpitating, the stomach clenching, while these systems do turn on at the same speed. And it takes like two seconds. According to Robert Spolsky,

where there's an interesting gender difference is how long it takes to turn off the system. And ladies, sorry in advance. And in general, it turns off more slowly in women than in men. Which may explain something that happens to couples. all the time. Okay. I'm really sorry. This just isn't right. I know. Oh, I'm really sorry. Like, here we are.

Maybe, like, maybe later we'll go do something or I'm really sorry. Robert's stomach is relaxing. This is really stupid, I know. His heart is slowing. Very stupid. He thinks the fight might be over. Okay. But, you know, this is something you do all the time. Remember when we

were having a dinner right after we got engaged and we went to the restaurant and I was waiting for you and I made the reservation That was in the Carter administration. I was sitting there for like 45 minutes. You didn't even call. I just apologized. Did you hear what just happened there?

It's this William James stuff coming back to haunt us a century later. Sapolsky says sometimes the body actually tricks the brain. Tamar knows the fight is over mentally, but her body is still tense. Her heart is still racing and her brain thinks, wait. If my heart is still racing and I consciously know that this issue has been resolved, it must be because I'm still pissed off about that thing that happened in the car. Carter administration. Minimize everything

everything that is for you. The brain fills a vacuum. What, do you have a list? You have a list there or something? I do. I have a long list. Do you know how often you do this sort of thing? I do it like once.

No, I can count on this. You know, the babysitter calls if I'm going to be out of town and says, should I make dinner for Robert? Because, of course, you can't make dinner for yourself and the kids, no. I do. I do much of anything.

Baked potatoes last week, Wednesday. I made the baked potatoes. That's just applying heat. I want to thank my wife Tamer Llewin for what I think was a pretty startlingly real... I mean, a performance, which I don't know how she did that because it's so unlike the rest of our marriage. The story, by the way, came from Robert Sapolsky

and he tells it about his wife, too, but they're not reporters, they're scientists, so they do it differently. My wife's in the same business as me, So the very words we will say to each other is, honey, don't forget what the half-life is on the autonomic nervous system. Then suddenly us all over with. That's such a rare exchange between two people, you know. I know, we're just sentimentalists.

By the way, Robert Spolsky's latest book is called Monkey Love, which is where that wife anecdote came from. And speaking of brains and bodies, Let's put the science on pause for a moment and take a brief detour because often what gets you into these ideas like take this kid for example Christopher Steele, go to Blake High School

isn't the science, it's more basic than that it's seeing something disgusting and not being able to look away you really just can't believe that if something feels like this it actually came out of a real person, you just don't get the feeling when we bumped into Christopher he was gingerly holding a pair of human lungs But it is a real person, but you just don't really associate with the real person

because it's there in front of you and it just look like a real person. In any case, that sense of, whoa, that's why we originally went to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. But here's what happened. Our tour guide... Okay, Stephen, S-E-V-E-N, Solomon, S-O-L-M-O-N. He showed us a particular photo that got us thinking. This is a famous photo in our archives. It's called Field Day.

It's a Civil War photo. hanging in a side gallery. It's a picture of legs. A pile of amputated legs. A huge heap of severed legs. Some feet thrown sort of haphazardly into a pile. Wow. It's oddly beautiful in a way.

Cruesome. But the next thought immediately after was what was happening at that moment? Right to one side of the picture frame must have been an operating table. And on the table, a soldier, inhaling chloroform, and at the foot of the table, must have been a doctor, sowing away. A circular amputation involved cutting straight through the skin to the bone.

A flap amputation required the tissue to be cut, leaving two flaps of skin that were used to create a stump. And in fact, your typical army surgeon was basically graded on how quickly they could do an amputation. It was one of the first wars where you really had doctors being aggressive in terms of taking off limbs. Like I said, that photo got us thinking. So we went back to Jonah Lehrer, who has written about a very ghostly side effect that pops up during the Civil War as a direct result of all of that taking off of limbs. This one astonishing syndrome that these men who have had their limbs taken off, they describe very, very often. This is a very common thing that they still feel their phantom limbs. They say, they say, I feel it.

Yeah, they say doctor. I still feel it. that hurt. You can feel it sometimes get hot, sometimes very cold. Imagine you're a Civil War doctor and you hear this. You don't even know what germs are yet. But one guy. Dr. Silas Ware-Mitchell decides he's going to get to the bottom of it. The first thing you did was he wrote some clinical reports. Only about 5% of the men who have suffered amputation never have any feeling of the part as being still present.

And circulated them around the hospitals. While the remainder seemed to retain a sense of its existence so vivid as to be more definite and intrusive than it is of the truly living fellow members. The stump is liable to the most horrible neuralgous and to a certain curious spasmodic paralysis. No one could make sense of this. Even our guy. William James. Even he looks into it. He did a very authoritative study where he sent out questionnaires to all these amputee victims and wanted to know about their lost limbs. He asked all of these civil war amputees, all these questions. Does your phantom limb hurt? Can you move it if you really concentrate?

And what he found was that there were no patterns. No stereotypical lost limb. typical lost limb. Every experience was different. In other words, phantom limbs are like real limbs. They're yours. Well, on this topic of phantom limbs, there is a guy who has figured at least something out about this phenomenon. Dr. V. S. Ramachandran. I am V.S. Ramachandran. Remember him? I remember him. He's a well-known neurologist. He works in California. The University of California, San Diego. And one day, he says, a patient showed up in his office. And it seems that the guy, had had his arm amputated. It was his left arm. And then ever since, this man had an uncanny

feeling that he still had an arm where his real arm used to be. Yes. Now, it's important to emphasize this is not a delusion. He doesn't think he has an arm. He knows he doesn't. He's not crazy. But he vividly feels its presence. And the rough part was that this arm, it hurt. This sometimes happens to people with phantom limbs. He would have days where his phantom arm would seize up in pain. Doctor, it hurts. Really badly. It goes into this painful clenching spasm. The nails dig into my palm. So he has a phantom hand at the end of his phantom limb. Yes. And he'll say things like it's going into a cramp with the nails digging into the phantom palm and it's excruciatingly painful. But there are no nails. There is no palm. And weirdest of all,

the patient couldn't do anything about it. He'd try to unclench his phantom nails from his phantom palm to make the pain stop, but he couldn't. He said, I cannot move the phantom. The phantom arm wouldn't obey. I cannot volitionally move it. And I started thinking to myself, what does he mean when he says he cannot move his phantom limb? It's like an oxymoron.

There is no arm there. Dr. Ramashandran was confused. What's going on? He checked with the patient and discovered that 11 years earlier, before the amputation, he'd had an injury to his spine. and after that his real left arm was paralyzed. He could not move it. He tried.

His brain would issue the commands. His brain was saying, move the arm. But he was getting visual feedback, and indeed feedback from his muscles, saying, nope, move the arm. No. Move, no. And this went on for months. Move, no. So maybe, thought Dr. Ramashandran, maybe this patient got so frustrated trying to move his real arm

that at some point... After a few months or a year, the paralysis got learnt by the brain. brain, stamped into the circuitry of the brain. And I call it learned. Learned paralysis. So even when they cut the patient's arm off a year after the accident, he still didn't get any relief because the problem wasn't in his arm. It was learned paralysis.

It was in his head now. And that is when Ramashandran thought, well, maybe the solution here is to trick this man's brain to unparalyzed, to get his cells to think, well, actually, we can move in But how do you trick a brain? How would you do that? How would you do that? How would you do that indeed? He thought for a bit.

Then I hit on this way of using a mirror propped inside a cardboard box. A what? A mirror, mirror propped inside a cardboard box. A mirror parked inside a car... I mean like a box... Propped up. Oh. It was kind of a Home Depot solution, really.

Ramashondra took a long and skinny mirror the kind of you'd hang on a closet door. Right. And he propped it up using a... cardboard box and then turned it sideways. Place the side right in front of the patient, like right on his nose. So he couldn't see himself? No, he couldn't see anything in the mirror yet. Unless he hooked his neck around, took a peek.

Otherwise, he's just looking at the side. Ramosajan says, I want you to imagine this with me, Jed. Sure. He says, I want you to take your good arm, your real arm, okay, and stick it out in front of the mirror. So do that. Okay. Now make it do what the phantom arm does. Take your good arm, make it stiff, curl your hand into a fist, dig your your arm.

your fingernails into your palm deeply. Make it hurt. You're doing that? Yeah, it's kind of hurting. Okay. Now, when I tell you, cook your head so you can look into the mirror and on your left, just where the phantom ought to be, let's pretend that that's your phantom arm. It's cramped, it's curled exactly as you'd imagine it.

So now look in the mirror. Okay. And there's your arm. You see it there in the mirror. Your phantom arm. Got it. Now very slowly, keeping your eye on the mirror now, I want you to un-curl your curl your hand.

Patience says, okay, he opens his real hand. My God. And of course, it looks like his phantom is opening. That's not surprising. He's got a mirror there. But he says, my God, doctor, you're not going to believe this. The movements have all come back. All these movements in my fingers, in my elbow, in my wrist from 11 years ago come flooding

into my mind. So his pretend nails are now ungripping from his pretend palm and the whole problem of the pretend pain goes away. Goes away. That's what he said. For how long, by the way? Till the mirror was in place. But when Dr. Ramachandran took away the mirrors,

the pain came back. I said, fine. Say, lavi, you know. And then I said, look, why don't you practice with the mirror for a few weeks, every day, for an hour? Then maybe if you do it repeatedly,

you can unlearn the learned pain. So the guy goes home, gets out of a mirror. You give him a mirror? to take home? Correct. And he does this open over. I said, it was $2,000, take it with you.

So he takes it with him, he's delighted. And then after about another week, he phones me, and he sounds all agitated on the phone. And I said, what's going on? He said, doctor, you're not going to believe this. It's gone. I said, what's gone? I thought maybe the mirror was gone. He said, no, no, not the mirror.

The phantom is gone. Gone gone? That's what I said. Gone gone? What do you mean phantom is gone? He said, well, this phantom arm I've been having for the last 11 years is disappeared. My initial reaction is alarm. I said, my God, does this bother you, Derek?

He said, no, you know what? This happened three days ago. And in the last three days, you remember the excruciating elbow pain and wrist pain I got several times a day. But I don't have them anymore because I don't have an arm. But my fingers, they have not disappeared and they're still up here dangling near my shoulder. And they're still painful. You mean just disconnected, disembodied fingerlets? Yeah, fingerlets dangling from the shoulder.

What? What does that mean? This guy's saying that he seems to have fingertips hanging on his shoulder. He said, your mirror doesn't work anymore. So can you redesign it and push it, prop it near my nose so I can look at the reflection and maybe get rid of the fingers? So he now wants to get Dr. Ramashondon to prop up the mirror, point. point them at these phantom fingertips and have the mirror erase the fingertips. He thought I was a magician and I could, you know, eliminate his different body parts in sequence. And this is amputation by mirror.

Yeah. As I tell my medical colleagues jokingly, I say this is the first example in the history of medicine of a successful amputation of a phantom limb. So don't even be hanging here. Did the phantom fingers eventually dissolve? No, we still haven't been able to devise a technique to get them. And it turns out of the pain there subsided a bit, so he's not that worried about us getting rid of them. So somewhere in California, there's still a guy walking around with a sense.

With fingers on his shoulder. Yeah, are still dangling out of his shoulder, which is not only weird, it suggests that there's an awful lot to know about how brains and bodies interact, many things to learn. But for a work-a-day doc who has to deal with whatever comes through the door, Dr. Ramashandran had what I would call a pretty good day at the office. Yeah, exactly.

V.S. Ramachandran is a neuroscientist at the University of California in San Diego, author of many books, including a brief tour of human consciousness, which is where you can find out all about the mirror experiment. Next up, let's scale it up a bit. We're going to go from lost limbs to a guy who's lost everything, his entire sense of his body. I'm Chad Abramrod. Robert Krowich and I will continue in a moment.

You're listening to Radio Lab. From New York Public Radio, WNYC, and NPR. Hello, this is Stefania Elorriaga, originally from Caracas, Venezuela, and currently living in Corvallis, Oregon. Radio Lab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public art understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. This is Radio Lab. I'm Chad Abumrod. And I'm Robert Krollwich.

And in this hour on Radio Lab, we're talking about the relationship, sometimes the uneasy relationship between the brain and the body. I think most people who have brains, and that would include, I think, most of the listeners here, think the relationship between brain and body is more like the relationship of a commander to a commandee. Right. The brain makes the orders. And the body response. But I think the more accurate way is to think of this as a conversation between the brain and the body. How do you mean?

Well, because any movement, even a very basic one, let's just say wagging my tongue. Okay. Very simple, really. But it still involves three steps. First, the brain has to issue the command. Tongue station, tongue station. This is mission control. Commence wagging.

Second, the command must be executed. And third, now, this is the crucial step. The tongue, in this case, reports back to the brain. Mission control, we have wagging. I repeat, we have wagging. And by completing the loop. Mission control, this is foot. Come in foot.

Mission control, this is foot. Giving your coordinates over. Roger, that mission control. Now, this happens, this conversation you're hearing right now. Uh-huh. It happens constantly, all over your. body, your brain is issuing command. Left knee, come in left knee.

Parts of your body are receiving the command. This is left knee. And reporting back. Right leg standing by. And this conversation adds up to something really quite important. It adds up to a sense of yourself. It's an unconscious sense which really allows you to move normally. That's Oliver Sacks, again, the neurologist we talked to at the start of the program. You have, of course, a sense of smell and of touch and of taste.

He says this sixth sense also has a name. It's sometimes called proprioception. Propreception. Propreception is the unconscious sense by which the position of one's limbs, the posture of one's body is automatically monitored. Now imagine, he says, what would happen if all of a sudden this sixth sense,

this conversation that you are always having with your body, suppose it went away? We all have this in a slight way, for example, if you go to the dentist, and sometimes half of your mouth or your tongue is numbed, the tongue may feel very large. You may grab the dental mirror to reassure yourself that all is okay, and this does and doesn't reassure you. But you can still wag your tongue. Your brain is still sending messages to the tongue.

Tong station, tongue station, this is mission control. But the tongue... Come in tongue. Isn't sending messages back anymore. Uh, tongue. Tung. So you can't feel anything. You know that feeling?

Yeah, of course. Now, could you imagine that instead of just losing your tongue, your tongue not responding, suppose your whole body doesn't respond? What would that be like? I mean, we have words like deaf or blind. We don't have a word for being in effect death and blind to one's own body. There you go. That's probably bigger, has it?

And yet there are people who have a condition that rare and that horrible. No proprioception. We talked to such a person, Ian Waterman, and convinced him and his doctor and very good friend Jonathan Cole to crowd themselves into a very little recording studio. That's a folly, isn't it? The BBC lent us in Southampton and England. Hello, America.

And we asked them to talk to us. Hello. Oh, you've got a sexy voice. Scary. Ah, can you hear us? Can you hear me, rather? Hi. I can. Yeah. Thank you guys for coming and doing this with us. Okay.

Yeah, well, you just ask us some questions and we'll answer them as best we can. Far away. All right. Well, let me just start it then. Now, can you remember, I'm sure you can, what happened that led to this total change in your life? Yes, it began with what I thought was about a... the flu or a very heavy, heady cold. And I was at the shop where I worked

and felt tired and lethargic. The guy that owned the shop said, look, you know, you look unwell, go home, take it easy. I took the day off, went home. And I've always been pretty energetic and I hate being stuck indoors and what I've thought, well, the fresh air will do me

some good. Got to the shed and pulled the motor mower out. Pulled the what out? What do you call it? The mower, the lawnmower out of the shed. I thought it was going to be one of those cultural moments where you guys call it something else. No, not quite. Pulled the lawnmower out of the shed and primed it up and started it. And it started chugging away.

And as I engaged the gear, off it went and I couldn't keep up with it. It was a fairly slowly and ponderous sort of lawnmower. And I just stood there bemused thinking, how come I just can't keep up with the mower? And didn't really attend to much more than, you know, I'm just tired. and sluggish and lethargic and went back to my bedroom and laid down and did some serious sleeping. And the following morning, I went to get up and out of bed and collapsed against a radiator. I fell, slid, fell, tumbled out of the bed and fell against the radiator. It's very difficult to describe.

As I lay then, I was laying flat. I had a rippling sensation in my tummy. I ran the ankles, a tingling sensation. For want to a better term, I felt disembodied. I remember waking up with a hand on my face and not realizing that it was mine. Simple movement. Simple movement's the simplest of movements.

To pick up a cup, to eat a biscuit. Those things were suddenly very hard. I couldn't control anything totally. I mean, from the neck down, I had no control over my limbs. And for the next 12 years, he went from hospitals to hospital. Doctors couldn't help him because they'd never seen anything quite this drastic until he finally did meet a doctor, Jonathan Cole, who began to help him figure out what might be going on.

So let me ask Jonathan for a second. What is wrong with Ian? Ian, at the time he had his illness, had lost class of peripheral nerve cells to do with sensation. He'd lost touch, but also his movement. and position sense had gone. Is this unusual? I mean, in your experience?

I mean, it depends who we talk to, but I normally say that we know of about six in the world who are like this. No one really in the world knew what proprioception did and what the effects of the loss of proporeception would be until Ian. And when they first met, Dr. Call said to him, he said, how do you manage? How do you cope with this?

unbelievably, he was the first doctor to ask that question. Ian told him that on his own, over the 12 years, he had figured out how to walk again and how to grasp a cup again. And he explained that he did this by carefully breaking down and then reassembling every single move he made. Started this way. I was laying in bed one day in hospital, and I wanted to sit up. and it just wouldn't happen. And then laying there in frustration, I just thought the whole process through

and I broke it down into quite simple, small movements. And I lay flat, I checked where absolutely everything was before I started, and then I then started with the head and folded and tucked my chin onto my chest as if to start the first part of the curl, then I moved my arm slightly forward, and I started to tighten some muscles in my tummy and around my back, and then I started to curl my skin,

to sit in an upright position. And when I got, though, I was so damned euphoric I only fell out of bed. Ian has studied movement in a way no one in history has ever studied before. No ballet dancer, no professor of neurology has ever had to study movement

the way Ian does every day. Because every day, every move that Ian makes, he has to consciously direct. It's as though Ian were two people, a puppeteer and a puppet. His mind is directing, and his body is obeying. And the strings of Ian's puppet, interestingly, are his eyes.

My eyes. I control all my movement with my sight. Because he doesn't have this feedback information coming from his limbs back to his brain. The pro-perceptive feedback. Because that's missing. Unless he looks directly at the limb he wants to move, he can't move it. If I look away from my hand, I lose all connection with it. Well, what happens if it's dark or if the lights are out? Well, you know, he can't afford darkness. If the lights go out accidentally...

That's quite a dangerous place to be. I fall over. He has not turned out the lights in the night in the last decades. Wow. To stay in the world, in motion, he must focus, always focus. In fact, he spent a long time just training with paper clips. Yeah, I use them now occasionally, and I still don't like the little devils. You know, I mean...

When you're manipulating the paperclip, what are you actually trying to figure out how much... Sorry, he had gesturing the way, and he's... I lost my earphones. His headphones fell off, so if you could repeat that. Oh, okay. We should do, jester. Is the headphones back on yet? Hang on, I'll do it.

My job. By the way, is he able to put on... I mean, is this... You can tell me what's going on, but is he able to grab the headphones? He can answer. I can't grab the headphones, but the mom, but because putting the headphones over the top of my head, I can't see exactly where the headphones are in relation to the rest of me.

Although I would finally get there, it's a lot quicker if Jonathan just puts them on. And he likes to feel you. So what I was asking was, what were you doing with the paper clips all that time? I was given paper clips as an exercise to get my fingers to move again and to threadle them together and then to unclip them. A very, very frustrating therapy, but one has to admit that it is a good one. and it takes an awful lot of fine dexterous movement to get paper clips together and apart again. But the idea of breaking down every move you make

into sub-moves and sub-sub-moves and then relearning everything, it's exhausting. Very, very mentally tiring. Because it takes such total concentration. What if you were walking down the street and suddenly a thought, like a daydream, pops into it? Jonathan has a very good, memory of that and maybe

that would be good to come from Jonathan. Ian and I were walking through Oxford having done some groundbreaking experiment or whatever and Ian suddenly stumbled and I'd never seen him stumble ever before and he was looking at a pretty girl and his thoughts

had drifted from walking and from the concrete ahead of him to what he'd like to do to this girl. Well she was about 18 she had nut brown hair lovely legs and mini skirt and it was a navy blue dress with white polka dots. This is a family program.

But you see really in walks anyway, he has to think the whole time about walking at the floor. So merely the erotic sort of charge cost you your ability to walk? Be it that sort of charge but any distraction really took me away from my focus

which is where is my left foot in relation to my right foot and where am I balance at the moment and how am I actually going through this process at what stage am I in this movement? And to suddenly be detracted by that by a waft of perfume and a pretty girl, took all that concentration away. It can be taken away by the song of a bird or the sound of music drifting from somewhere. Just on that day, it was a pretty girl.

Today, if you saw Ian on the street, you wouldn't be able to tell that he has this handicap. He has figured out how to live a very deliberate and in a way kind of a normal life. He drives a car. He works. He drives a car? Yeah, my latest car, which is a very nice Mercedes. Do you drive the same speed as everybody else and all around? I can react as quickly as anybody else.

It's an automatic car and it has hand controls. That's the only favor to my disability, really. But I tend to do with my driving what I do in the way that I manage my life, which is I plan ahead. My last question really for Ian, I guess, is have you solved this problem? as best you can. I mean, do you feel like you're one person, or do you feel cut in half,

like a mind directing a body, like maybe two people? I don't think about it in the way that you've just related there. I just think about I want to get up, I want a cup of tea, and this is the process that I have to apply to do that. Yep, that's what we all do. I don't think stories like this involve heroes, they involve people who try their best under certain circumstances and are tested in a way that many of us are not.

We can learn from that. You're dealt a hand and you play it as best you can. Thanks to Ian Waterman and to neurologist Jonathan Cole. Dr. Cole wrote a very nice lovely book about Ian called Pride and Daily Marathon. They spoke to us together from the BBC Studios in South Hampton. Oh, that was fun. That was fun. Gosh, I really should read the book, you know. Hang on lunch.

God, this room doesn't get any bigger, doesn't it? It's a night, though. You're listening to Radio Lab. From New York Public Radio. Public Radio WNYC. And NPR. Hey, this is Chelsea, from Atlanta, Georgia, where the cicadas are singing. Radio Lab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world.

More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. This is Radio Lab. I'm Jad Abumrod. I'm Robert Kulwich. And today on our program, we're looking at brains and bodies and how sometimes brains and bodies can get wildly out of sync. And let me offer one more flavor on this theme, which has to do with something that neuropsychosovo. Paul Brox calls body schema. Body schema is the brain's sort of working model of the body. In order for the brain to keep track of where you are, where everything is,

it creates an inner representation of you. This is what he thinks. A model, very much in the virtual reality sense, of where it thinks you are in space and where it thinks you aren't. The point is that we, although we think there's a very solid distinction between where our body, end and the world begins. In fact, the brain has to work quite hard to produce this kind of consistency of experience, and clearly it can go wrong. This brings us to pilots. Okay. My name is Dan Fuljum. I spent 32 years in the Air Force, 25 of that in active flying.

And this incidence occurred in July of 1952 at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona. Our story begins on a normal training day. It was really hot. In the cockpit, flying down at low level, below 3,000 feet, he was over 100 degrees. And Colonel Dan Fulgin was on his fifth run, flying in formation, doing a training maneuver he'd done a million times before. But this time, something happened. He pulled the plane up hard, rolled out. And the next thing I knew, I was, seemed to be sitting up on the back of the airplane looking down into the cockpit. Suddenly he was outside the plane, not inside. I could see what was going on.

I could see the ground. I could see another airplane. And when he looked in the cockpit, where he was supposed to be, he could see a pilot. I was watching myself, not knowing it was me, what's going on here? I'm just going to watch this for a little while. So he just sat there. On the wing of his own plane, watching himself fly the plane. And just all of a sudden the curtain snaps up and you guys, no.

It's not a dream. Actually, that's me in the cockpit, and I'm flying the airplane again. But we began to realize that Luke that in the eight weeks of training period that I was there, we lost nine pilots. They died? Yeah. Wow. And most of them for running into the ground or running into each other in the air and that's sort of thing.

And that's an awful lot of pilots to lose just in training. Okay, fast forward in many years. Army engineers are studying this problem and they've figured out some stuff about it, but not much. And then along comes this guy. I'm Jim Winnery. Jim Winnery is his name. I'm at the Federal Aviation Administration and Air Medical Research Program. And he had a radical notion.

If we're going to really understand this, I mean, really get to the bottom of this, we have to induce this experience on purpose. Make them go blank? Make them go? Yeah, create the conditions that exist in a fighter jet on the ground in a controlled environment so they can study this. His idea was let's put pilots in a centrifuge.

This big centrifuge. One of these things that the astronauts use, got a 50-foot arm that spins round and round. Round and around. And on the end of that 50-foot arm... There's a cockpit. A cockpit. Pretend cockpit.

Mocked up to be exactly like what a fighter aircraft might be like with all the controls, the screens, the throttle. That's where the pilot sits and gets spun around real fast. I see. So Winery put out a call for volunteers. I'm Tim Sestak. Commander Sestak. I met Dr. Winnery. He was one of the ones that got involved in his research, heroically volunteered to fly this centrifuge and to deliberately knock himself out.

Scared? Pilots don't do scared. Three, two, one, pressure. This is a recording from the experiment. The task was to chase this little airplane, so I'd sit there and you'd follow it, and the first couple maneuvers would be, you know, three Gs. G forces is the... Well, it's like when you're on a roller coaster.

Five Gs. That force that pins you back in your seat? Yeah, yeah. Seven Gs. Except really on a roller coaster, you're only ever going to experience about two Gs. And then 9 G's. Nothing like these guys. The hygiene forces hurt.

The skin on your face sagged, your eyelids sag so low that you can't see out from under them. You wind up tilting your head back to look out from under your own eyelids that are sagging down in front of your face. Meanwhile, you're tensing all your leg muscles and your abdominal muscles and your arm muscles as hard as you can. You learn to use your body to fight it, and what you do is you tense every muscle from your toes to your calves and thighs. Push it out. Push it all the way up. All the way up. Okay. And you take a breath. And you start to say the word hook. And you hold it for three seconds.

And then you finish it off by finishing the k of the hook. So these pilots, they sound like they're wrestling or fighting or something. Hook. And they're grunting and groaning and hook. Making all these hook noises. It's like that. The most G I've ever pulled was 12.4 G's. Just to give you a sense of what that might feel like,

for a pilot like Tim Sestak who weighs about 200 pounds, once he makes a 12.4G turn, his body goes from 200 pounds to almost 2,500 pounds. So that's like over the weight of a car. Because of the pressure pushing down. Yeah, exactly. More crucially, says Winery, those G forces pull blood violently from the brain. is pushed from the head down toward the feet, and it pools in the abdomen and the lower extremities. And when it pools down there, it can't get back up to the brain.

And that's when the problem starts. Well, this doesn't sound very good. No, Dr. Winnery documented a particular sequence that happens when blood is pulled from the brain. The first thing you lose is vision. Usually the first thing to go, your eyes. And you have what's called gray out or loss of peripheral vision. And you start getting tunnel vision. Then you go through blackout where you can see nothing.

You lose your sight. And then if you take the acceleration forces a little higher, you'll lose consciousness. When I woke up, I remember just sitting there, and I'm in this little white space. I actually had no idea who I was. Who am I? Where I was? Or what I was doing? Why am I doing this?

So I'm sitting in this little white ball, and I'm looking around and what is this all about? I hear this beeping. There's this white light. beeping. And then at that moment, I realize that I'm in a little room and that I'm supposed to do something and that one of the things I'm supposed to do is press that button. So I press the button. And at that moment, I realized, holy mackerel, I'm a pilot, I'm in an airplane, and I'm not flying it. And I grab the controls and then just a giant rush. I'm Tim Sestak. Holy mack. I'm Tim Sestack. I'm Tim Sestack. I'm a pilot. I'm flying.

and the centrifuge, all came back to me at once, and I was okay. Commander Sust to Dr. Bennett, how you feeling? Like you, I feel like I've been going a long time. Over the course of 15 years, Winnery tested about 500 pilots in the centrifuge. He recorded their experiences, measured everything he could think of. And he found a few things. First, that the average blackout lasted somewhere between 12 and 24 seconds. 24 seconds.

Yeah. And while blacked out, this is the interesting. thing. Pilots experienced these strange little visions. Visions? I give you an example of the individual that lost consciousness had convulsive movements where he was moving his arms forward and back for about two or three seconds. When he came to, we asked him what had happened. He said, yeah, it was a nice warm day and I was out at the lake fishing. All of a sudden I could feel like I had about a five-pound bass on my line and he was tugging. And each time he

he tugged, I would pull back. And then all of a sudden, I was back in the centrifuge. I don't know what happened. These little dreamlets, Winnery thinks this is the brain, confused. It's cut off. Meaning... Think it from the brain's perspective.

It's lost the body. And yet the body is convulsing. Trying to get blood back up to the brain. The brain has no idea why it's convulsing. It just sees arms flailing about, and it thinks, well, my arms are jerking back and forth. I must be bass fishing. The things that are happening around you frequently get incorporated

into those short dreamlets. Here's one of his own. Turns out he has tested himself in the centrifuge many times. The little dreamlet that I had, I was going down the aisle of a grocery store, floating, if you will. I don't know that I was on a magic carpet, but I sure wasn't having to walk. And I was just really motivated to try to pick up some ice cream

as I was going down the aisle. And I was moving down through there, and I could see the freezer. I knew the ice cream was over there, and I just could not move my hand over to get it. The next thing I realized was I was trying to turn off the buzzer in the centrifuge with my hand, and I could hear it, I could not move it, and then just momentarily, I got the ability to have motor control return, and I could turn it off. Shit, I don't know where I am.

I don't know where the hell I am. I thought I was at the grocery store. By the way, the other thing is I couldn't control my arm to get the sound off either. That's interesting. This recording you're listening to is from a day when Dr. Winery blacked out five times in a row. I don't remember anything on that one. Okay. And after that fifth run, which you're about to hear, something weird happened.

Let you take a break just a few seconds. Catch your breath. I don't know about that one. I don't remember starting that one. Last ride coming up. God, I don't... If you can take one more. I'm hesitating because I'm not ready yet.

Sir? I'm hesitating because I'm not quite ready yet. Okay, just let me know whenever you get ready. Go ahead and relax, let your blood flow through your brain a little bit. Okay, I'm ready for the last one, I guess. Okay, final checklist, data station. Data station is ready, operator. Operator is ready. operator is ready. Medical is ready. Final ready, please.

Okay, sir, final ready has been activated. Are you ready? I guess I'm going up this time, right? Yes, sir. I remember going up on this one. Yes, sir. Three, two, one, pressure. I think that was enough. At the end of that last run, Dr. Winnery, got off the centrifuge, woozy, and stumbled down the hall. I was really confused when I got off the centrifuge, and I was walking down the hall back to my laboratory, and all of a sudden I began to realize that I was above and behind myself,

and I could see somebody who was myself walking down the hall. And I said, oh, man, that's unusual. Pilots are generally not new-age kind of guys, but at least 40 of them in Winnery's study did report what he just described, having an out-of-body experience. Weirder still an even smaller sub-sub-group reported seeing the classic tunnel with white light type thing. All Dr. Winery can say,

is it that last sub-sub-group? They were the ones who were out the longest. They had the most intense blackouts. He's not ready to draw any conclusions. But he does suspect that the dreamlets, the visions of seeing yourself from above, even the tunnel in white lights, it's all part of the same situation,

The brain is just confused at having lost the body. Anne Heperman and Kara Oler produced that piece for us. Thank you to them. And thanks also to our pilots, Dan Folgium, Tim Sestak, and of course, Jim Winery. Wow. That's all the time we have. For more information on anything you heard this hour, visit our website, RadioLab.org.

And while you are there, send us an email. Our email address, you know it. Uh, no. Come on. I've never really learned it. It's radio lab.org or something like that? No, that's our website address. If you would like to email us, we do like to get email.

The address is RadioLab at WNYC.org. I'm Jad Aboumrod. And I'm Robert Kowler. Thanks for listening. Radio Lab is produced by Jod Abumrad and Ellen Horn, with help from Sarah Pellegrini, Sally Hirschips, Melissa Kevel, Lulu, Mulu Miller, Amber Saly, and Brett Byer. Special thanks to Arwen Curry,

Tim R. Lewin, Nick Capadochi, and Keith Scott, production management by Dean Capello and Michael L. Sessor. And a very special thanks to me. I'm Tim Sestak, fully conscious and happy to be speaking to you from this side of the Great Divide. Radio Lab is produced by New York Public Radio WNYC and distributed by NDR. Okay, thanks.