Science Friday - Heart History, Disease Seasonality, Beatboxing. Nov 9, 2018, Part 2

Episode Date: November 9, 2018

The case presented a medical mystery. A man had entered his doctor’s office complaining of chest pain, so his doctors ordered an angiogram, an X-ray of the arteries of his heart. His condition was serious: a complete blockage of one of his coronary arteries, and a severe dysfunction of his left ventricle. The doctor realized his patient had been having a heart attack for more than 24 hours. On the face of it, nothing would seem unusual about the case. Heart disease is the number one killer of men and women in the U.S., claiming more than 600,000 lives a year. But this case was different. This man had none of the risk factors. He wasn’t diabetic, or a smoker, and had no hypertension. Even more confounding: He was only 30 years old. He was, however, of South Asian descent—a group that suffers a disproportionate risk of heart problems with no obvious cause, according to cardiologist Sandeep Jauhar. Jauhar writes about that, and the daring and sometimes tragic treatments that revolutionized how we fix the heart, in his new book Heart: A History. He joins guest host Flora Lichtman to talk about it. You’ve heard of flu season, of course (consider this your friendly reminder to get a flu shot!). But a surprising number of other illnesses also have a seasonal component, peaking at certain times of the year. Chickenpox outbreaks peak each spring, for instance, while polio historically tended to surge in the summer. Micaela Martinez, an environmental health researcher at Columbia University, believes that all infectious diseases may have some seasonal aspect to them. She collected information on almost 70 different human diseases from African sleeping sickness to Zika and looked at factors that could connect each to the calendar. In some cases, the seasonality of the disease is due to weather, while in other cases more complex interactions of host, vector, and human behavior come into play.  Beatboxers can create the sound of snare drums, bass lines, high hats and other beats all at once. And while it’s entertaining to listen to, what’s the science behind those beats? Scientists scanned beatboxers in a MRI machine to figure out how these musicians manipulate their vocal tracts to keep the beat. They found that beatboxers may use parts of their vocal tract in a way different way than is used when speaking. In fact, some of the sounds were unlike any found in human language. Linguist Reed Blaylock and beatboxer Devon Guinn break down how beatboxers coordinate their lips, tongue and throat to create a beat and how this compares to human speech. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Flora Lichten. Iraflato is away. Later in the hour, we'll talk about the pioneering early days of heart surgery and the first surgery that put not one, but two, patients at risk. But first, unless you've been living on the moon in recent weeks, which would be really cool. So if that's you, please tweet us. Someone has probably told you to get your flu shot because flu season is coming. but do other illnesses have seasons too? My next guest says she thinks that most, maybe all, infectious diseases have some sort of seasonal component. Michaela Martinez is an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at Columbia University here in New York.

She wrote about this idea this week in the journal Plas Pathogens, and she joins me here in our New York studios. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you for having me. So it's not just the flu. No, it's not just the flu. There's evidence that all infectious diseases are seasonal. That's amazing. I want to start with chickenpox.

Okay. Near and dear to my childhood. What is chicken pox season? So chicken pox season, so chicken pox, I should say, is a classic childhood infectious disease. And so chickenpox transmission tends to ramp up when kids go back to school in the autumn. And that's when we see cases start to climb and climb and climb until the epidemics hit their peak in around March, and then they turn around and we see the cases fall away, and then this repeats like a clock every single year happens over and over in the countries that don't vaccinate

against varicela. I was going to ask, I mean, this must have changed here when people started vaccinating. Yes, we've been vaccinating since the 90s in the United States, but there are only five countries right now that use the varicela vaccine, so it's still epidemic in most of the world. What about sexually transmitted diseases? Yeah, so I was actually quite surprised to see that there's documented seasonality for sexually transmitted infections. There weren't too many studies that had actually looked into this, but the studies that I found were done in the United States and found the seasonal peaks for some of the STDs like gonorrhea being in the summertime.

Do we know why? Is it for the reason we might suspect? So seasonal differences in sexual activity would definitely be a driver of that transmission. We also know that there are seasonal changes in the numbers of babies born, so that could also indicate that that's one of the mechanisms. What about, I know you looked at polio as well. Is there a seasonal cycle to polio? Yes, there is.

So polio is kind of this anomaly in terms of childhood infections in that polio epidemics when they were rampant occurred in the summertime. And for the other childhood diseases, they're usually associated with school terms. And for polio, it's still not known why. there have been studies that looked at shutting down swimming pools and theaters and all looking at summertime activities to see if that was driving it and the causative mechanism still hasn't been found. Are there any hypotheses out there? Yes. There's a hypothesis proposed back in 2001 by a researcher named Scott Dell, who used to be at CDC now.

He's at Gates Foundation. And he had actually proposed that the summertime seasonality of polio and some of the other infections could be driven by seasonal. changes in the human body. So perhaps we have changes in our hormones or our immunity that influence disease susceptibility. How would you go about testing that idea? Well, in fact, my lab is currently testing that right now. We want to know whether or not the human body is, in fact, seasonal. So starting next month, we have people that are going to be coming into specialized labs that are using in the United Kingdom and have people come into the lab every single season of the year. So this winter solstice and then during the spring and autumn equinox

and summer solstice over this next year come in. And then we're going to look at all aspects of their physiology. So their immune system, their hormones, their metabolism, even the microbes in their gut. And we want to see, does the human body change with the seasons? Is some of that because of differences in our activity or things we're exposed to or differences that are just innate to our bodies? Could it be related to the things people are eating them? in different seasons? Does it have to be internal? It doesn't necessarily have to be internal. No, our world is very seasonal. Everything from agriculture, our sleep, not just the temperature and weather that we're experiencing.

Seasonality is a fundamental property of our planet. I mean, does that, might that, do you have any hypotheses about when your immune system might be more depleted? I mean, mine would be the winter when people seem to get sick a lot, But that's a lay perspective. Yeah, well, the thing that, so this investigation that I did looking at the seasonality and cross infections really shows that there's a time of year for each disease. So it's not that we're particularly susceptible at one time of year, susceptible to everything at one time of year and then kind of protected at others. It seems to be that there's a restructuring to what we might be susceptible to as well as restructuring of transmission of. various infections throughout the year. So people are getting sick all throughout the year, but the identity

of what they're getting sick from varies. Like you might be more susceptible to one illness at one time in the year than you are to another. Exactly. And that's why, so this idea of the calendar of epidemics, you can think of it as that structuring through time. So spring being chicken pox season, summer being polio season, the common cold season being autumn and then flu being wintertime. And it sounds like some of that might have to do with the characteristics of the illness, and maybe some of that has to do with us. Absolutely. And we still don't know. So really, the identification of seasonality and cross infections is just a kind of enticing bit of evidence that a lot more research needs to be done in this area. Do you think that understanding the seasonality of diseases can help us eradicate or prevent transmission? Absolutely. So because epidemics are structured seasonally, that means that there's a low time in the year for each infection when there are very few cases in the population.

And the way I see that is a window of opportunity when we can go in with vaccines or other preventative measures to hit pathogens when they're at their most vulnerable because they're few of them. Hit them while they're down. Exactly. Are there examples of this where people have done interventions based on seasonality? No, not to this point. I recently saw. talk by some PhD students that were looking in sub-Saharan Africa, whether or not it would be possible to administer the measles vaccine seasonally based on this idea. But as of right now, I haven't seen any published papers doing that.

What about something like Lyme disease where you also have an animal reservoir? Yes. So Lyme disease is one of these infections that the seasonality is extremely complicated because you have humans, you have animal reservoirs that vary in their competence for transmissible. the infection, and then you also have the tick. And so all of these wildlife species, including the ticks, have their own seasonal cycles. And so not only the seasonality, but the control and interventions that we would use are quite complicated by the fact you have all these species interacting to generate these outbreaks.

Could you use an understanding of, say, the seasonality of the animal reservoir to help predict how bad the season is going to be for, say, Lyme disease? You could, but it takes a lot of integration or would take a lot of integration of data from all of the hosts and the vectors to be able to make the intervention on the human side. But there are other infections like mosquito transmitted infections where that might be more straightforward like Zika. Are we any different from other animals in terms of our seasonality of illnesses? Well, I don't know, because there haven't been these very widespread studies looking across infections for species. To my knowledge, I haven't seen anything where they've done a similar study, but looking at all the diseases of, I don't know, bears or some rodent.

I would be interested in that. That would be very cool. You looked at almost 70 diseases in this paper. Yes. What jumped out to you? What surprised you? When I set off to do this study, I went in with the hypothesis that the acute infectious diseases, so those that don't infect for very long, you might be infected for a month or so, that those would be seasonal.

But actually the chronic infections that can last your entire life, that they would not be seasonal. And I found that everything was seasonal. So I was quite surprised by that. Such as, what was like one of the most surprising? HIV. And even though there is only one study that I had found for HIV, well, first of all, the researchers that conducted the study are extremely thorough. But what they had found was that the progression to AIDS was influenced by malnutrition. And malnutrition is seasonal in developing countries. And so you can think of that as malnutrition causing stress that makes it, makes a body less capable to deal with the progression of the disease so it happens more rapidly. And so I was very, very surprised by that. Where do you go next with this research?

Well, my lab is, like I had mentioned before, looking at the seasonality in the human immune system and the human body in general, but we're also working on studies modeling chickenpox epidemics, and if we can do the seasonal tailoring of intervention, so we're calling them smart interventions where we're leveraging disease seasonality for eradication and elimination initiatives. When is that going to roll out? In terms of the actual implementation, you know, that's up to each country. Every country decides on their routine immunization and their mass vaccination campaigns

for those countries that use them. So it's a suggestion. Exactly. And that's always the best that we can do is academic scientists. And what about the other study that you mentioned where you're taking people and trying to understand the seasonality of their bodies? What are you going to be looking for? Yeah. So at its basis in terms of the mechanism, what we think is happening is like in other mammals and in birds, well, we know that humans have circadian rhythms.

So these are changes in our body around the day, night cycle. And in other mammals and birds, these circadian rhythms are modulated with the seasons as the light. cycle changes with the seasons. As we know, it's a lot darker in winter. And that affects the circadian rhythms and it can actually generate seasonal biology. And so that's what we're going to be looking at for humans. What do you mean seasonal biology? In terms of seasonal changes in our immune systems, seasonal changes in our hormone levels and seasonal changes in our metabolism. That's so fascinating. I can't wait to hear more. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining us. Michaela Martinez is an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at Columbia University here in New York.

Thanks again. Thanks. When we come back, why you really can die of fright or a broken heart. Stay with us. This is Science Friday, and I'm Flora Lichten. Here's a medical mystery for you. A man entered his doctor's office complaining of chest pain. So his doctors ordered an angiogram, an x-ray of the arteries of his heart.

And his condition was serious, a complete blockage of one of his coronary arteries and a severe dysfunction of his left ventricle. Okay, so so far, this might not seem so mysterious. Heart disease is the number one killer of men and women in the U.S. But here's the twist. He had none of the common risk factors, not diabetic, not a smoker, no hypertension, and he was only 30 years old. That's just one of many mysteries of the heart that cardiologist Sandeep Jahar writes about in his new book, Heart, a History. He's here with me now in our New York studios, and we have an excerpt of his book up at ScienceFriiday.com slash heart. Welcome to Science Friday, Sandeep. Thank you.

And listeners, do you have a question about the workings of the heart? Give us a call 844-724-8255. That's 844-Sight-Talk or tweet us at ScyTalk. fry. Cindy solved this mystery for us. What was going on? So this was a gentleman who was actually an intern at my hospital, and he presented with chest pain, and of course, a 30-year-old with no risk factors, never smoked, can't have coronary disease. As a cardiologist, I completely missed the ball. And what I didn't appreciate and I appreciate a lot better, you know, since I wrote the book, is that the emotions and emotional health is a key factor in our heart health.

So there are a lot of folks who have no classic risk factors for heart disease. Those risk factors are diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and so on. And those risk factors were elucid. in a large study called the Framingham study. The Framingham study really focused on a very small subset of the American population, basically 5,000 people living in a small town in Massachusetts called Framingham, and they were mostly white and of Western European descent. It appears that the risk factors for these folks, the so-called classic Framingham risk factors that we use, to diagnose heart disease may not fully apply to other ethnic groups, like, for example, this gentleman

who was 30 years old was South Asian, and South Asians happened to have a very malignant predisposition to heart disease. Do we know why? We don't. We need to do a Framingham-type study of South Asians to really get to the answer. but, you know, there are factors that the Framingham investigators essentially ignored. You know, this was a large-scale public health study, one of the first that looked at chronic disease. And the investigators really wanted to focus on objective factors, stuff that they could measure.

You know, high cholesterol, high blood pressure. They deliberately excluded things like marital dysfunction, occupational stress. We know today that those things affect our hearts. In fact, primarily because of Framingham, the American Heart Association still does not list emotional stress as a key modifiable risk factor for heart disease. This was one of the big ahas of your book for me, that your emotions can really determine your heart health. how well accepted is that? Do doctors look out for that?

I think that doctors are increasingly aware and cognizant of it. But, I mean, I'll be honest, like, you know, I went through a whole cardiology fellowship and we talked about compliance of chambers, of heart chambers. We talked about resistance of blood vessels. but the fact that our emotional lives could affect our hearts was largely ignored. Is that because scientists don't like emotions? I don't know if it's... You know, I think it's because it's partly the history of Framingham.

It's partly that emotional health is not easily measured. You know, it's a lot easier to take a problem. pill to lower cholesterol than it is to reduce social and emotional disruption. But there is a broken heart syndrome. Absolutely. And that is something that's been increasingly recognized in the last few decades. That's called broken heart syndrome or taco subo cardiomyopathy. The reason why it's called takosubo is because the heart in conditions of high,

emotional distress, for example, after the breakup of a romantic relationship or the death of a loved one, the heart will actually acutely weaken and change into a distinctive shape called a Takasubo, which is a Japanese word for octopus trapping pot. So the heart kind of constricts at the top part, and it kind of balloons out at the apex, and it assumes this sort of distinctive shape, and it weakens. And this happens if you're grieving? Yes. It very often happens because of acute emotional distress. And very often the shape and the strength of the heart returned to normal once the emotional state has resolved.

I had a patient whose husband had died a couple of weeks prior. And, you know, he had been sick for a long time. he had dementia. So, you know, immediately after he died, you know, she was probably, you know, obviously she was very sad, but she was probably a little relieved. And, you know, it had been a very long illness. But a couple weeks after the funeral, she looked at his picture and she got teary. And all of a sudden she started getting chest pain, shortness of breath. And she went into acute congestive heart failure. And we did an echocardiogram with an ultrasound of the heart. And the heart had acutely weakened into this Takasubo shape.

And subsequently, you know, after her emotional state had returned to normal, we did another echocardiogram and her heart also had returned to normal. So the point I make in my book is that the emotional heart, this heart, this sort of metaphorical object that was supposed to contain the emotions or be the sea of the soul, that entity intersects the biological heart. in clear ways, but still in mysterious ways. Yes, I mean, the idea that you can truly die of a broken heart is so powerful. And I think validates a lot of people's lived experience.

Absolutely. I mean, you know, we feel the stress, you know, in the center of our chest. And, you know, it's not just acute stress, but chronic stress too. So, for example, there have been many studies, for example, the Whitehall studies that looked at British civil servants. Those who had more occupational stress tended to develop more heart disease irrespective of usual risk factors like blood pressure or cholesterol. So we know that these things do affect our hearts, but, you know, I think that we need to to dissatisfy, emanate that within medicine and try to come up with better ways of ameliorating it. One of the stories you tell in the book is about your grandfather, who died at a very young age.

Can you tell us that story? Yeah. One of the reasons I wrote the book, frankly, is because I have a malignant family history of heart disease. My grandfather was in his early 50s when he died suddenly of a heart attack. Now, the actual story is that he was working in his store in India, and he got bitten by a snake. But he didn't see the snake. And he was feeling kind of okay. He went home to have lunch, and neighbors knocked on the door and brought in the dead snake. And it turned out it was a cobra.

And he took one look at it, and he started, he became. faint. And my father was actually with him. They were sitting together and my grandfather slumped to the floor and went unconscious. My father witnessed this. And, you know,

he, you know, he, my grandfather had died. He, he, you know, was, he never regained consciousness. An ambulance came by and the family insisted that they take my grandfather,

and the snake to the hospital. And the doctor at the hospital said, you know, this man died of a heart attack. He did not die of a snake bite. And, you know, like many people who have witnessed a sudden death of a family member, honestly, my father never got over it. He grieved for most of his adult life.

And as a child, I grew up with this. fear of the heart as the executioner of men in the prime of their lives. And that was one of the sort of early fascinations I had, that, you know, here's this object, here's this machine that works so hard and yet is so vulnerable to stopping that it can extinguish a human life, even though the human is ostensibly healthy. No other organ can do that. You can be healthy and still die. And that, to me, as a child, was like, the biggest cheat of all.

Hmm. It seems like the heart has been mysterious in this way for many, for hundreds and hundreds of years. Like, you wrote in the book that it was the last organ to be operated on? That's right. So most people don't realize that the human heart, heart had never been operated on, at least in any controlled way, up till the latter part of the 19th century. Every other organ in the body had been operated on the brain, the kidney, the liver, but not the heart. Now, why is that? Well, in part, there were cultural prohibitions.

You know, the heart was the seat of the soul. It was the, it was where emotions resided. The idea of cutting into it was sort of cultural. taboo. But the larger issue, frankly, was that the heart poses unique biological obstacles to being manipulated. For one, it's always moving. It's very hard to cut into something that's moving all the time. The other is that it's constantly filled with blood. In fact, the entire blood supply in the body passes through the heart once a minute. So if you cut it open, you'd bleed to death. So the obvious solution is that you have to stop the heart

and empty it of blood to operate on it. But if you do that, you would develop vital organ damage, like brain damage, within about three minutes. So how do you do this? How do you solve this conundrum? So that's a significant portion of my book is sort of analyzing this question and explaining how it was.

done. Now, the obvious solution is that we know today is the heart-lung machine, but that took a long time to develop for many, many reasons. So they were sort of kind of outlandish schemes prior to the development of the heart-lung machine to kind of address this problem. Yes, I want to talk about this. I'm Flora Lichtman, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Let's talk about cross-circulation, because this story really blew my mind. Yeah. So cross-circulation was one of the most outlandish schemes probably in all of medical history. It was innovated by perhaps the most innovative surgeon of the 20th century, a guy named Walt Lilahi who worked in Minnesota. Many, many people thought he would win the Nobel Prize.

He never won the Nobel Prize, but he won pretty much everything short of the Nobel Prize. but his idea was the following. He knew that a pregnant mother supplies blood and oxygen to her fetus. So he reasoned, well, if I have a child that I want to operate on, let's say, fix a hole inside the heart, why can I connect that child up to his or her parent? artery to artery, vein to vein, and have the parent's circulation take over the child circulation while I stop the child's heart,

empty it of blood, fix it, and then disconnect the two human beings and hope for the best. And, you know, he did these experiments initially on dogs, and the dogs, many of them, develop brain damage. So this was exceedingly difficult to do. but eventually he got to the point where he was able to do these surgeries with donor dogs and recipient dogs. He would operate on the recipient dog while the donor dog served as an animal heart-lung machine. Eventually, he decided to do this on a child.

And the first case was a child named Gregory Gliddens, and it turned out that his father had the same blood type. So he spoke to the father and he said, you know, this technique has only been done on dogs. But if I had a child in this situation, Gregory had what's called a ventricular septal defect, he had a hole in the wall separating the two lower chambers of the heart. This was a terminal condition. And he said, I would do this if I had a child with this. condition and Gregory's parents signed a consent form and the consent form said basically we the undersigned agree to allow Dr. Lilaai and his staff to do to perform any procedure they

deem necessary on my child and you think about how much informed consent has progressed and change evolved since that time. Thankfully. Thankfully. Yes. This is when? This was in 1950. Wow. So not that long ago.

It was in the early 1950s. So Gregory, so they did the operation, and believe it or not, it worked. Lillehi was able to fix the hole in Gregory's heart. He was a five-year-old boy, and he separated the father from his son, and they both did fine initially, but Gregory died of pneumonia several days later. You know, it's amazing. You know, we tend to forget, you know, in this era of medicine, that in medicine there's always a learning curve, and someone has to go first.

And in the early 1950s, those who went first typically were little kids. We're going to talk lots more when we come back. After this short break, we have Sandeep Jihar with us, and we're taking your questions, 844-724-8255. That's 844-Sy-Talk or tweet us at SciFri. Stay with us. This is Science Friday, and I'm Flora Lichten. My guest is Sandeep Jahar, author of the new book Heart, A History.

He writes about some of the great clinical mysteries of the heart today and the daring discoveries made by early cardiologists. One thing that struck me when I was reading your book is how hard the heart works for us. Every day, every second of the day. It's really amazing. It's probably the most amazing machine that has, the nature has evolved. So a typical human heart beats about three billion times in a lifetime. It pumps blood through more than 100,000.

miles of blood vessels. And a typical human heart works so hard that it could empty a swimming pool in a week. So it's really one of the hardest working organs in the body, and it's constantly toiling. And it's amazing in that, you know, it's self-sustaining. So the heart doesn't just pump blood to the rest of the body. It pumps blood to itself. So the heart has to pump in order to pump. So it has this sort of self-sustaining self-referential quality that no other organ has.

And so for all those reasons, I've just been fascinated by it. How long do heart cells live? Are they the same cells pumping over your entire life? Yeah, we think that heart cells are probably terminally differentiated, that they don't divide. You know, there's a lot of controversy right now about that, whether cardiac stem cells can regenerate organs. But heart cells can be cultured in a petri dish and last for many, many months with proper nutrient broth. And what's interesting is that when the cells are cultured, they tend to aggregate and start beating. So the heart cells really just really, really want to beat.

That's what they want to do. Yeah, that's what they're designed to do. We have special cells inside our hearts that start to beat spontaneously. They don't require any external stimulus. Let's go to the phones. Let's go to Larry in Wyoming. Hi, Larry. Good afternoon.

What's your question? I felt AFIF about a dozen years ago, and I've noticed that several of my friends have also developed it. And I was just wondering what the latest science on AFIB is. And I'll take it through off there. You got it. So AFIB is atrial fibrillation. It's when the upper chambers start to pump erratically. It's a very common arrhythmia to have.

It's the most common arrhythmia in older people. and people usually can tolerate it pretty well. We have really amazing new techniques to actually terminate atrial fibrillation by actually burning out the cells that seem to subservate it. Those are called ablation techniques. We also have drugs that we can use to control not just the atrial fibrillation, but then the response to the atrofurbulation. So it's a very fertile area.

Sandeep, you said that for much of your life, this idea that the heart could snuff you out, even though you were healthy, haunted you. Did writing the book change your thoughts on the heart or your feelings on the heart? Well, you know, so I've been fascinated by the heart for many, many reasons. You know, the family history and the fact that. history of discovery. And then a few years back, I learned that I myself have coronary disease, the beginnings of coronary disease. And that was like a ton of bricks. You know, that was, you know, I had two small kids, and I thought I was living a pretty healthy life.

And so, you know, I made some changes. But that fear of, you know, sudden death, really preoccupied my thinking. I would say that today, I, you know, several years after I learned this, my mother died of a heart attack, and she had Parkinson's disease, and she was deteriorating. And I remember my brother once said, you know, I hope mom goes quickly. And I remember just being so angry that he said that, that I wanted my mom to live for as long as possible. But when she died suddenly, I just realized, you know, I appreciate what a merciful death it was. And so I think it's just important that, you know, we have so many great technologies in cardiology today that prevent sudden death. Sudden death is sort of a paradox.

It's the most desirable way to die, but it's also the most feared. I just think that a lot of the technologies we've developed like implantable defibrillators do prevent sudden death. But, you know, for some people, they take away the sudden death option. And the sudden death option is not such a bad option for some people. So, you know, it's important for us as cardiologists to talk about this with our patients. It's not a very easy conversation to have. Your book is wonderful, Heart, A History. We've run out of time, but I want to thank you for joining us today. Thank you for.

Sandeep Jihar is a cardiologist and a New York Times contributing opinion writer and author of the new book, Heart, a History. You can find an excerpt at Science Friday.com slash heart. If you've ever heard a beatboxer, you have probably wondered, how does she do it? how does a person create a full percussion section in her mouth at once? You're not alone with that question. A group of researchers at the University of Southern California wanted to know the answer to, so they scanned beatboxers in an MRI machine to see how beatboxers move their vocal tracks and squeeze the air in their throat and mouth to make music.

Let me introduce my guess. Reed Blaylock is part of that group. He is a PhD student in linguistics at USC, and Devin Gwynn is an educator and beatbox performer based in Brooklyn. Devin's in the studio with us today. Welcome to you both. Thank you, Flora. Thank you. Devin, let's start by giving the people what they want, which is a demonstration of beatboxing.

I've seen you perform before, and every time I see you perform, and hear you perform. and here you perform, I think, how can you possibly be doing that with your mouth? Well, that's why it's so exciting to see the MRI studies that Reid's been doing. What a perfect segue. Reed, tell us a little bit about this new study, what you did and what you're finding. Sure. Well, this is part of a bigger research program at USC where we're trying to take images of the human vocal track to see what it can do under lots of different conditions.

what do singers do, what do talkers do, what do you do when you're emotional, what do you do when you're talking when you've had a glossectomy, part of your tongue removed? The new stuff that we're looking at now is beatboxing, why we're here. And the beatboxing research that we've done so far has been to take five different beatboxers, some who have a lot of experience, some who have not so much experience, put them in the MRI and ask them to make all the sounds that they can make. And we've seen a lot of ridiculous sounds, and we've been asking the same question that everybody else has, too,

How on earth are you making these sounds? But we have some images to help us figure it out. What was known before your study about how beatboxers make the sounds that they do? Well, we knew that beatboxers are using their mouths. So that's something. We know that your mouth doesn't change what's inside of it unless you're eating. You've got the tongue, the lips, the vocal folds in your larynx, your soft palate, your vealum.

All these different parts are still there and they still move around. That's what you're using when you're speaking normally. So far, I would have deduced that. Well, that's about as much as we knew. I think the beatboxing community has a good sense of what some of the different parts of their mouth are doing to make a lot of the different sounds, perhaps especially the labial sounds. Devin, you've done more beatboxing learning than I have. I don't know if you've got a good sense of what beatboxes know and don't know about their mouths.

Yeah, well, it's interesting because I think a lot of beatboxers don't have the tools to necessarily describe what they're doing. So something you come across a lot when you're learning how to beatbox or when you're trying to teach somebody how to beatbox is how to either explain to somebody how to make a specific sound or just show them. So I hear a lot of beatboxers say, oh, I worked for months and months on this lip roll sound or something like that. And then finally I watched a video of Napalm doing it and it just clicked. Napalm is the stage name of a specific beatboxer. And seeing the video helped. Seeing it helped, well, for him specifically, he sort of really exaggerates some of the lip movements, and so you can really clearly see what he's doing.

But for the sounds that are articulated further back, you know, outside of just the place you can see with the naked eye, it's much more difficult. How did you learn those sounds? I think lots of practice. I lived in a place called the Beatbox house in Brooklyn, and hearing them do it all the time, kind of putting my face right up to their face watching them do it. Helped a lot. Reed, are all the, do these sounds all exist in language or music that beatboxers are making?

They do not. In fact, a lot of the sounds do not exist in language. Although, there are plenty of beatboxing sounds that do exist in language. It's sort of a, I guess it's a mix. So the kick drum is a common beatboxing sound. I'll even give it a try myself. There we go. It's what we call a bilabial adjective sound.

You make it by closing your lips together, closing your vocal folds, and then lifting your larynx to pump air out of the mouth. It's similar to an English P, as in potato, except that in the P&P potato, you are pumping air from your lungs instead of from your larynx moving up. Those kinds of sounds, these adjective sounds are used in plenty of languages. Georgian is one. I think Quechua is another one. There's a bunch of languages that have these kinds of sounds and beatboxers use.

a lot of them to get a particular punchy, percussive quality. But there are a bunch of other sounds that we've never seen in language before. That's amazing. Yeah, it is. I was flabbergastive when I looked at these videos for the first time. I thought I knew most of what the human tongue could do, but I was wrong. There's some great videos of people moving their tongues very far back and sucking their lips in. The N-word K is one of my favorites.

It's a simple enough sound. It's kind of like the K that you use in ketchup, but instead of breathing out, you breathe in, and it's a great way for beatboxes to refill their lungs so they can keep going without having to stop for air. I'm Flora Lickman, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Devin, can you demonstrate it? So in inward K, there are lots of flavors of it,

but so it might sound... And what are you doing? I'm creating... Well, let's see. So I'm basically closing my vocal folds and then bringing my tongue up to create like a lack of pressure in that space. And so then when I move my tongue down very quickly, they are rushes in making that percussive sound. I think, does that sound right, read? That sounds above, right?

I think you're breathing into your lungs, right? It's refilling your whole lung capacity. Oh, yeah, that's true. So if I'm doing the with the lungs, it sounds like and then if I'm doing it without using my lungs as the airstream mechanism, then I can go. Oh, so that's when I don't have on video is that inward K, but with the larynx moving down, instead of refilling the air into the lungs. Can you come over to California while putting the MRI? Absolutely, yeah, I'd love to. Devin, what questions do you have about beatboxing as a beatboxer?

Well, it's funny because actually when I was finishing my undergrad at Harvard, we tried to research some of these similar things, but we didn't have the tools to, like the MRI and everything, to necessarily look at. at how the sounds were being made. One of the questions that I have is really about whether Reed thinks that beatboxing sounds follow certain patterns similar to speech sounds. So, like, if there's a phonology to beatboxing. So I'm very curious if, if, like, the beatboxing patterns actually have logical rules that you can then sort of suss out.

That's such a great question. That's my favorite question. It's my favorite question. So, first of all, let me just say, the phonological rules that we're talking about are things that you, as a speaker of your language, just kind of implicitly know. There are things that you know about how to move your mouth and how to coordinate all the different parts of your speech without even thinking about it. It's what differentiates the quality of an English bee as in boy from the quality of a Spanish bee. These are language-specific things that we often know, things that nobody ever had to teach you. You learn them on your own from listening to others.

And it's thought by some linguists that these things are somewhat special to speech, or at least we usually only focus on the speech rules or the speech phonology that we have. And so Devon's asking the same question that I've been asking, which is, does beatboxing have a similar kind of structure, a hidden structure that beatboxers never put together consciously, but managed to learn implicitly? And I think the answer is yes. I just did a conference a couple months ago where I showed, or started to show at least, that beatboxers maybe use a particular kind of harmony in their beatboxing.

Harmony is something, it's not what we think of when we think of singing, where you have different voices building on top of each other to create beautiful chords or complex structures. Harmony and language refers to sounds in a sequence becoming more like each over, more like each other over longer distances, or sometimes short distances, but usually we think if it's being over longer distances. So a case of this is English has some accidental harmony, like in the word orangutan. Some people have learned to say it as orangutang, the n at the end of orang has moved to the end of tang as well. That's kind of like a harmony process. And there are some beatboxing sounds that, Devin, these are the lingual aggressive sounds. These are the ones where your

tongue body makes a closure in the mouth and some other part of your tongue or your lips further ahead also makes a closure and the tongue squeezes air out past that closure. So would this be like something along those lines or? It could be. Without seeing you in the MRI, it's hard to tell. There's the difference between the sounds where you're making a closure with vocal folds and moving the air out from the larynx and sounds where you're making closure with the tongue and squeezing the air out from your tongue.

Can you do a little demo for us? Yeah, so if I'm trying to do that, then it would be something like... That's it. Yeah, and you can kind of hear that it's all, like, maybe flattened or just a different flavor to all of those sounds because of the different airstream mechanism.

That's right. And you did all of them the same way, I think it's a crucial point here, is that you picked to do these, all with that same airstream mechanism, that lingual aggressive airstream mechanism, rather than switching up been doing a bunch of other airstream mechanisms like you might do into different utterance.

So I think this is a harmony process that beatboxers have learned, and I think that's very similar to the kind of harmony we find in language. That's so fascinating. We've run out of time, but you can see Devin performing their videos on Devin's website. You should check them out because they are mesmerizing. And I want to thank you both for joining me today. Reed Blaylock is a Ph.D. student in linguistics at USC, and Devin Gwyn is an educator and beatbox performer based in Brooklyn.

Thanks to you both. Thank you, Flora. Thank you. B.J. Leederman composed our theme music. If you have missed any part of this program or you want to hear it again, subscribe to our podcast. Ira is back next week and you can find me on the Every Little Thing podcast, wherever you get your podcasts. In New York, I'm Flora Lichtman.