Origin Stories

SPEAKER_06: Radiolab is supported by Apple Card. Apple Card has a cash-back rewards program unlike other credit cards. You earn unlimited daily cash on every purchase, receive it daily, and can grow it at 4.15 annual percentage yield when you open a savings account. Apply for Apple Card in the Wallet app on iPhone. Apple Card subject to credit approval. Savings is available to Apple Card owners subject to eligibility requirements. Savings accounts provided by Goldman Sachs Bank USA. Member FDIC terms apply. SPEAKER_13: Listener supported. WNYC Studios. SPEAKER_16: Crack cocaine plagued the United States for more than a decade. This week on Notes from America, author Donovan Ramsey explains how the myths of crack prolonged a disastrous era and shaped millions of lives. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_09: Oh, wait, you're listening? Okay. SPEAKER_17: All right. Okay. All right. SPEAKER_15: Three, two, one. Hey, I'm Lettif Nasser. SPEAKER_13: I'm Lulu Miller. SPEAKER_17: This is Radiolab. SPEAKER_09: Today we've got a mashup of two stories. SPEAKER_06: One is about musical hallucinations and one is about spiritual machinations. SPEAKER_10: We are celebrating Radiolab's 20th birthday this spring. And you know, when you are celebrating your birthday, sometimes you just like bust out the old photo albums and look at, you know, baby pictures and pictures of awkward haircuts and stuff like that. And this is our version of that. Our editor Soren asked us to dredge up our first ever Radiolab stories, Lulu and mine. And not only our first ever Radiolab stories, our first ever radio stories. And we wanted to play them for you. SPEAKER_06: Yes. And Lettif, what was yours? What was your first one? SPEAKER_10: Oh, we're going to start with mine. Okay, fine. The first radio story I ever did ended up being called A Clockwork Miracle. I was at the time a very enthusiastic Radiolab listener with pretty much zero journalistic experience. Okay. I was studying the history of science. And it was during that time that I also started listening to Radiolab and then pitching Radiolab. It was like shotgun blast of pitches where it'd be like, and then there's this thing, and then there's this thing, and this is an exciting thing. And how about this? And I never looked into this and I always wanted to. I had just been pitching constantly. I'd been pitching and pitching so many stories to the powers that be at Radiolab, which to me were mostly just sort of names on email addresses. I didn't know anybody and everyone was like nice, but saying no to all of them. And then this time I sat with it. I thought about it. I like, I wrote down a big list of like possible ideas. And then I found this article in a scholarly anthology by a sculptor. I mean, it was such a once upon a time story, you know? It's like haunting and beautiful. And it felt like a, yeah, like a fable. Yeah, it feels like a fairy tale that like we all had read, but we'd never read it. SPEAKER_06: But then it's also about like engineering. Yeah, yeah, yeah. SPEAKER_10: And so then I sent it in and then I remember I walked in the building. Pat Walters actually, I think was the one who like tapped me in through the security gate or whatever. And that was my first time at WNYC. The first time I met Jad. I think first time I met Sorin and I like sat down. SPEAKER_08: I've heard rumors whispered by Sorin mostly about a pooping duck. Oh, so the pooping duck is really famous actually. SPEAKER_10: The duck wasn't really eating and pooping, but they had like a store of like pre-pooped duck poop. I don't know what it was. SPEAKER_08: Looked like duck poop maybe. And you would feed this robot duck and then watch it actually poop? I mean, all you see is you see sort of this in and this out. SPEAKER_10: And people believed it? People thought this was a pooping duck. SPEAKER_08: So we talked about a bunch of these ancient robots and most of them were kind of funny. But then he told us about one in particular that was... Actually was kind of haunting. Yeah, it's not poopy at all. SPEAKER_10: So the year is 1562. This is 450 years ago. Not so long after Columbus. SPEAKER_07: Ferdinand and Isabella are dead and there's a new king of Spain. Philip. Yeah, and he has a son. SPEAKER_10: The 17-year-old crown prince, his name is Don Carlos. And one day... He's in the royal lodgings. He's walking down a flight of stairs. He trips, he falls, he bashes his head against a door near the bottom of the stairs. SPEAKER_08: This is the crown prince, you say? The crown prince of Spain. So this is a national calamity. It is a national calamity because he's the heir apparent, right? SPEAKER_10: So at first it doesn't look like it's such a bad injury. He's still conscious. But then his head starts to swell to this kind of crazy size. He becomes delirious and feverish. He's struck blind. And so at this point the king comes, right? This is King Philip II. So he is at this time, he is the most powerful man in the world, right? So he basically controls all of the Americas. He controls much of Europe. The Philippines is named after him. He was tied with the pope. At this time, the pope and the king were kind of like, you know, BFF. So the whole Spanish court is going nuts. Across the country, people are seeing this, reading this as a kind of sign that God's very angry. And so they're fasting. They're doing these kinds of prayer processions, things like this. SPEAKER_08: And according to Latif, the king calls all the best doctors in Europe to come to Spain to help his son. And these doctors are trying everything. SPEAKER_10: They are drilling a hole in his skull. SPEAKER_08: To relieve the pressure? To relieve the pressure. SPEAKER_10: They are bleeding him and blistering him and they are purging him to the extent that he has like 20 bowel movements within just like a certain few hours. They're like smearing all over the wound. They're smearing like turpentine and honey. Poor darn Carlos. But even after all of this, they sort of look at each other. They look at him and it's kind of like, this is, he's gonna die. So he's dying? Yeah. SPEAKER_08: He's actually on his deathbed. So at this point, according to Latif, the king goes to his son. SPEAKER_10: Legend goes that he kneels beside his son at his son's deathbed and he makes a pact with God. The pact is, if you help me, if you heal my son, if you do this miracle for me, I'll do a miracle for you. Well, that's quite hubristic of a human being to say to God. SPEAKER_08: Let's also remember that he's the most powerful man in the world at this point. SPEAKER_10: He is a God among men, really. Yeah, hubristic or not, this is what he says. Yeah, okay. All of a sudden, his son just gets better. SPEAKER_10: Really? Within a week, he can see again. Within a month, it's as if he didn't fall at all. He just pops right back up? SPEAKER_07: Yeah. And King Philip must have thought, well, my God, this is amazing. Exactly, my God, is probably exactly what he thought. SPEAKER_08: And when his son can finally speak, he says to him, Dad, you know, the weirdest thing SPEAKER_08: happened when I was out. I had this dream. SPEAKER_05: That's a great story. SPEAKER_08: This is Elizabeth King. I'm an artist and a professor in the sculpture department at Virginia Commonwealth University. SPEAKER_08: She's actually the one that hooked Latif on the story. Yeah. In any case, the dream. SPEAKER_05: There are documents of Don Carlo next morning saying that he had had a dream. This vision that a figure in a Franciscan habit, shaved head, sharp nose, this marvelous SPEAKER_10: monk entered his room and approached his deathbed holding a cross and basically told him, you're going to be fine. SPEAKER_05: And that's quite well documented. SPEAKER_07: Apparently there was a witness in the room. SPEAKER_05: In the sacrum with him that night. Who overheard the prince talking to a ghost, sort of mumbling things in his delirium. SPEAKER_08: So Don Carlos has this dream. Suddenly he's fine. And the natural question that people are asking is, who is this monk? Yeah. SPEAKER_07: Yeah. I mean, is it just a generic monk or is it somebody specific, some messenger from God? And from his description. Physical description. SPEAKER_10: The shaved head. SPEAKER_08: The pointy nose. The monk's habit. Piercing eyes. Even the kind of cross he was using. Everybody in town, the king, everyone was like, oh yeah. Like we know exactly who this guy is. SPEAKER_10: Can only really be one guy. Kind of local friar who died a hundred years before named Diego de Alcala. Diego de Alcala. SPEAKER_18: Who's he? SPEAKER_05: He is a local holy figure whose corpse was associated with a number of documented miracles. SPEAKER_08: In fact, this guy was so holy in this town. Actually, not just in the town. You want to know something? There's a bit of trivia. Ever heard of San Diego? SPEAKER_08: California, you mean? Yeah. As in the Padres. What does he have to, is this the same guy? SPEAKER_07: Same guy. He was the patron saint of the people who founded San Diego. SPEAKER_08: He is holy. There you go. So he was so holy in this town that people believed his corpse, his 100 year dead corpse had healing powers. SPEAKER_10: And some people, there are different stories, but some people say that even they, these... SPEAKER_08: That unbeknownst to Don Carlos, that night that he had the dream? The priesthood and the king himself, according to some stories, went and they got this corpse SPEAKER_05: out of the church, out of the crypt. They carried it through the streets. They brought it to the bedroom. They literally put it, they sort of snuck it in bed with Don Carlos and that's how he healed. SPEAKER_10: They didn't stick him in bed with his bones. SPEAKER_07: They just kind of, they brought him into the room. SPEAKER_05: There's different reports, but there's a picture of him in this engraving. And you can, you probably can't see it, but look at this picture right here. SPEAKER_07: She had a copy of a 16th, roughly a 16th century woodcut showing you this scene. Where you could kind of see. SPEAKER_08: Oh wait, so there you go. SPEAKER_05: They're dunking him over the bed. SPEAKER_04: He's in bed. The two men in bed together. SPEAKER_08: One guy who's alive, barely, and another guy who's been dead 100 years. SPEAKER_05: Well they could be, you know, they could be just laying him down. Okay. It was caught in the middle. SPEAKER_08: We're seeing it at great good. Meanwhile, back to our story. You got Philip II who has asked God for a miracle. God came through, through this monk, and now Philip II is like, uh oh. SPEAKER_08: I gotta deliver. King Philip is on the hook. He knows he owes God a miracle. SPEAKER_10: And he's, he's acutely aware of this. So basically what he does is he enlists this really renowned clockmaker. A clockmaker? SPEAKER_08: Yep. SPEAKER_10: Named Juanelo Turiano. A huge man. SPEAKER_05: A big ox of a man. Described as always being filthy and blustery and not a lot of fun to be around. But a great, great clockmaker. SPEAKER_08: Certainly among the best. SPEAKER_05: In Spain. SPEAKER_07: Maybe the entire Holy Roman Empire. SPEAKER_10: So the king goes to this guy and he says, look, I want you to make a mechanical version of Diego de Alcalá. What? SPEAKER_08: A mechanical version of this 100 year dead holy priest. SPEAKER_10: Yes. Like a mechanical monk. A robotic padre. SPEAKER_08: Yeah. Which, and this I did not expect, still exists. SPEAKER_10: Now the monk bod is in the Smithsonian, perfect working order. No way. I swear, I swear that since 1977. No. SPEAKER_02: Yeah. The first time I saw this figure, I was drawn to it and then repelled. SPEAKER_08: That's Carlene Stevens. She is a curator at the Smithsonian in DC. About a week after Latif and I spoke, we ended up in DC meeting with her and she showed us. Oh wow. Wow. The monk who lives in a little glass case. SPEAKER_02: What we have here is an automaton. Over 400 years old. SPEAKER_08: Is this the first robot that we know of? No. No. SPEAKER_02: No. No idiot. The ancient Greeks had things that could be considered robots. Okay, back to our story. SPEAKER_08: 450 some odd years ago, our clock maker, what's his name? SPEAKER_07: Toriano. Toriano. He goes into his shop and he does whatever he does. SPEAKER_08: Connects one gear to another to another. After hours, weeks, months. SPEAKER_10: No idea how long it takes and I don't think anybody does. But emerges one day into the bright sunshine. SPEAKER_08: With, what did you call it? A robotic padre. SPEAKER_10: Yeah. It's a 15 inch high figure made of wood and iron. Has the sort of habit, has the sandals, has the rosary, has the cross. SPEAKER_08: And poking out of the top of the habit is a little bald hairless head with that sharp SPEAKER_08: nose like a razor. SPEAKER_02: And the rather ferocious eyes. SPEAKER_07: Like intense or like doing business ferocious? Well like, I'm focused. SPEAKER_08: Maybe I'm only 15 inches tall but I am focused on something much bigger than you, you human. So did you like turn it on or push something? SPEAKER_07: Yeah. SPEAKER_08: Then why would I get on a train and go for three hours just to look at it? Obvious question. Okay, do you want to find it? Sure. Yeah. Okay. Do it. So Carleen takes us out into the hall. Carleen gives Latif a little brass key. He sticks it into the secret slot in the monk's side. And I think it goes counterclockwise. SPEAKER_02: You would tend to want to do it this way. And Latif winds up the monk. SPEAKER_08: And I'm turning it counterclockwise and it's surprisingly sort of taut. SPEAKER_09: How much should I turn? And so if you sort of wind up this sort of secret spring. SPEAKER_10: I think there's a stop and it'll… SPEAKER_09: Okay. I'm going. I'm going. Put it on the ground. Alright. SPEAKER_02: Let him go. Yeah. SPEAKER_10: Give him a push. It'll walk very slowly. SPEAKER_05: One foot after the other coming out from under the cassock. In fact there's actually little wheels under there. But yet you see the feet coming out. The head is turning from right to left. The eyes are rolling in the head. The mouth is opening and closing. As if it's sort of muttering like a prayer. SPEAKER_05: The arms are in motion. One arm is raising and lowering a cross. The other arm is beating the chest. SPEAKER_17: Wow. SPEAKER_02: A symbolic gesture… To a Catholic. …that is called the mea culpa. After three or four steps, the arm holding the cross does something new. SPEAKER_05: It moves two different new directions to bring the cross to the mouth. And the figure kisses the cross. Wow. SPEAKER_08: It's oddly like mesmerizing. Yes. SPEAKER_05: Yeah. The next thing it's doing is that it's turning and moving in a different direction and then walking its paces and kissing the cross. SPEAKER_08: As we watched it turn once, then twice, then three times, four times, and then it got back to where it started. SPEAKER_05: So if you imagine a table with a number of people sitting around it, probably it's going to sort of at one point or another head for you and then turn away and head for someone else and then turn away. SPEAKER_07: Why would the king of Spain, who could have, I don't know, built a church or taken a crusade to Jerusalem or done something, you know, he could have done anything, why did he decide to commemorate his son's revival by making a little automatic doll? Like, what was that for? Yeah, Lotov, what was he thinking? SPEAKER_05: Yeah, it's a good question. That's the $64,000 question. It's a great question. SPEAKER_02: It's a really good question. SPEAKER_08: The truth is there's really no way to know for sure. As a historian, I gotta rely on the documentation. SPEAKER_08: And there's not a whole lot of that in this case. But one interpretation certainly could be that, you know, the king had this amazing, miraculous thing happen to his son and now he had a way of sharing that with his subjects. Because he's got this device where it's an illusion, like the machinery of it is completely hidden. SPEAKER_10: There's no visible, that's, yeah, that's one of the craziest parts, that it's all sort of hidden underneath the robe. So when he put it down on a table or in a courtyard, people would have seen it move SPEAKER_08: on its own. They would have been amazed, as we were, and he could have said, look, here is the miracle. Look what God did for our country. God likes Spaniards. Yeah, look at what God did for Spain, which would have been a useful thing for a king to be able to say, right? So that's one possibility. The other is that just on a more utilitarian level, this was a machine that was built to SPEAKER_05: pray. It was a period when you could buy prayer repetitions. So if you had the money, you could get someone to pray for you while you go do something else. Oh, that's so cool. So you're covered. You're covered. SPEAKER_08: And if you think about it from Philip's perspective, he needed to say thank you to God. And here he had this thing that if he wound up, was an automated thank you machine. SPEAKER_07: Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. SPEAKER_08: Yeah, it could be thank you, thank you, thank you. Or it could be, I love you, I love you, I love you. SPEAKER_10: It could also be, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Or it could be please, please, please, please, please. SPEAKER_08: Whatever you need. But if you think about it more expansively, says Latif, like what did it mean at that time to be a Catholic? Like what did it really mean? Well, then this robot was maybe the best Catholic you could ever hope to be. SPEAKER_10: What counted as prayer was quite specific in the sense that if you say the right things and do the right actions in the right order, in the right time, and in the right place, sort of that's prayer. That's when God notices. So it's about method. It's about method. It's about. SPEAKER_08: And maybe this monk, he says, was like method embodied. SPEAKER_02: That's a good one. I mean, why not? It is in fact perfect. It repeats itself over and over and over and it replicates the ideal. SPEAKER_10: So it's basically what it is. A little teaching object. SPEAKER_10: Like this is what you're aiming for. Here's how you do it. Like this is it. This is the perfect prayer. The perfect prayer. This is doing it the perfect way every time. And I, because I'm just this lowly, imperfect human, I can only aspire to this perfect piety. Are you making this up or do you think that the monk might have actually been seen this SPEAKER_08: way? It could be true. It could be crazy. Especially if you think about what was happening at that moment. This is Counter-Reformation Spain, right? SPEAKER_10: Not so long after Luther is nailing his theses on the wall. And there's this big debate raging about how actually do you get closer to God? SPEAKER_10: You have the kind of protesters with Luther who are saying it's not about works. It's not about saying something this many times. It's about whether you feel it. And then you have the kind of Catholic argument, which is to say you do these rituals because these are the rituals and these are the way you get. This is the way you get close to God. This is the way you pray. SPEAKER_08: You pray like this thing. SPEAKER_07: Just like this thing. And if you're a Catholic king and if God's a Catholic, you better hope he is. SPEAKER_08: And if you're Philip II, you look at the sky and you say, God, you and me are square. SPEAKER_06: Hey, listeners. Yes, Radiolab comes in audio form, but we have also been dabbling in print. We have a newsletter that we've been revamping and I just wanted to remind you it was there in case you haven't checked it out. Each week we give you links and ways of diving deeper into that week's episode. But now we're experimenting with little essays, book reviews, staff recommendations. And these things are good. Like a recent one that I really loved came from producer Maria Paz Gutierrez, who made a playlist for plants. It's really great. That's just one of them. They come out every week. And if you like Radiolab, it's just another way to engage with the hive mind that is this show. And we'll also be inviting more participation from you, your questions, your comments, your art. So we would love if you go check it out. You can sign up at Radiolab.org slash newsletter. And if you have ideas of how to make it better, things we should add, things we should not have, please let us know on Twitter, Instagram or email. And thanks. Lulu here. If you ever heard the classic Radiolab episode, sometimes behave so strangely, you know that speech can suddenly leap into music and really how strange and magic sound itself can be. We at Radiolab take sound seriously and use it to make our journalism as impactful as it can be. And we need your help to keep doing it. The best way to support us is to join our membership program, the lab. This month, all new members will get a T-shirt that says sometimes behave so strangely to check out the T-shirt and support the show. Go to Radiolab.org slash join. Radiolab is supported by Capital One with no fees or minimums. Banking with Capital One is the easiest decision in the history of decisions. Even easier than deciding to listen to another episode of your favorite podcast. And with no overdraft fees, is it even a decision? That's banking reimagined. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See Capital One dot com slash bank Capital One N.A. member FDIC. Radiolab is supported by Apple Card. Apple Card has a cash back rewards program unlike other credit cards. You earn unlimited daily cash on every purchase, receive it daily and can grow it at four point one five annual percentage yield when you open a savings account. Apply for Apple Card in the wallet app on iPhone. Apple Card subject to credit approval. Savings is available to Apple Card owners subject to eligibility requirements. Savings accounts provided by Goldman Sachs Bank USA member FDIC. Terms apply. SPEAKER_19: After but her emails became shorthand in 2016 for the media's deep focus on Hillary Clinton's server hygiene at the expense of policy issues. Is history repeating itself? SPEAKER_13: You can almost see an equation again, I would say, led by the Times in Biden being old with Donald Trump being under dozens of felony indictments. SPEAKER_19: Listen to on the media from WNYC. Find on the media wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_10: OK, now this is so satisfying. I didn't want to go first, but now I'm glad I did because I get to turn the table. Turn the tables. That's funny in that expression. SPEAKER_06: Because the story is musical. SPEAKER_10: No just turn the tables in that you now are in the hot seat and I get to ask the questions here. What's the story behind the story? How did this start? OK, so this was 2008. SPEAKER_06: So I'd been working there for almost three years as a producer and I was cutting interviews and structuring stuff. But this was the first story that I reported and voiced. I was shy. Like I was still really afraid of calling people up and asking my nosy questions and bursting into their world, which turns out is something you have to do a lot if you want to be a reporter. And we were working on this story about musical hallucinations. And Robert had just talked to Oliver Sacks about his new book. SPEAKER_10: Wasn't it like Musicophilia or something? Yeah. Yeah. SPEAKER_06: Oh, I remember. And he mentioned this old man in his 90s who had musical hallucinations. And Robert just did this huge kindness where he just said, oh, yeah, I could ask Oliver for that guy's number. You could just call him. SPEAKER_10: Yeah. Did you call him up or you went to see him in person? I called him. Yeah. SPEAKER_06: He was in L.A. And so we did it through the studio. We got like a nice studio connection. And I remember going into the studio by myself because by this point I knew how to use it really well and just kind of slipping into that darkness of radio interviewing space. And then he was just with me. And then it was like, ah. SPEAKER_10: Now Lulu, let's play your first ever story. It was part of a bigger episode about earworms. SPEAKER_06: About songs that get stuck in your head. SPEAKER_10: And you can't get them out. Take it away, Lulu. SPEAKER_07: This is Radiolab. I'm Robert Quillwich. And this hour, I'm going to curse you, Jad. I'm going to ask you to just simply do this one thing. You know, that song that we both hate? Which one? Um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um. God, it's like the moment you start that. Can you sing it? SPEAKER_07: There are some songs that I can stick in your head and they just won't leave. There's somebody, poor Suzanne, who got this song somehow stuck in her head. And then there's songs that just won't go away because you didn't even invite them and they stay. This is an hour on the music in our heads. Where does the songs come from? Why do they stay? A whole hour without Suzanne Vega on Radiolab. SPEAKER_08: Let me ask you a question to get us started here. When a song gets stuck in your head, do you have one in there right now by any chance? Oliver, the Broadway show tune. Of course. What does it sound like when it's in there? What does it sound like? Oh. No, but just think before you answer it, just think, what does it really sound like? Describe it musically. Um, well, it does, well, it's funny that you mentioned this. SPEAKER_07: It doesn't actually, I don't hear any musicians. Is it loud? No, it's nothing. It's not loud. Does it have like a location? No. Tambour? No, it just has a melody. A vague, foggy. SPEAKER_08: Like a shadowy melody. Yes, exactly. Okay, well, so that's our starting point. You know, most of us get a song in our head, it's kind of like what you described. Vague. But there are people who, when they get songs stuck in their head, it's a whole different experience. It is not vague. In fact, they wish it were vague. They wish it were a shadow. And you'll know what I mean in a second. Let me introduce you to someone. Mary had a little lamb, little lamb, little lamb. SPEAKER_08: Always has songs running through his head. SPEAKER_04: Everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go. SPEAKER_08: He's plagued by them, actually. And he spoke with our producer Lulu Miller. SPEAKER_06: And so that was going through your head just now? That's right. SPEAKER_04: Mary had a little lamb. Over and over again. SPEAKER_06: You know, let me have you just introduce yourself really quickly. SPEAKER_04: My name is Leo Rangel, and I'm not young. I just had my 94th birthday. I've been in LA since I was in the war, World War II. SPEAKER_06: Leo's a psychoanalyst. Oh, yeah. SPEAKER_04: I'm still in practice. SPEAKER_06: So he finds everything that's been going on in his own head sort of intriguing, like from a professional standpoint. SPEAKER_04: I'm trying to think, what the hell am I doing? SPEAKER_06: Anyway, this whole thing started for him about 12 years ago. He just had major heart surgery, and he wakes up in his hospital bed. Oh, I wake up in the ICU. SPEAKER_04: And almost as soon as I'm conscious, outside my hospital window, I hear music. SPEAKER_04: And it was distant. It sounded funereal, like hymns. I hear these songs. I look out the window. I think, Jesus, a rabbi is out there. I say to my kids, I casually say, hey, there's a rabbi out there singing. They said, what do you mean? So I said, there must be a rabbi school, and he must be teaching young people how to be rabbis. And the kids looked at each other. SPEAKER_06: Because they weren't hearing anything. But at that moment, that didn't matter to Leo, because the music was so loud and vivid to him, so totally coming through that window that— I dismissed them as, oh, well, they could have their opinion if they want. SPEAKER_04: I didn't think anything of it. And then the rest of the week in the hospital, you know, I'm getting better and better. And as I get better, the music changes. I start being more perky, and the songs, the music out the window changes to Chattanooga choo choo, the yodel-dee-dee-chattanoogachoo, Chattanooga choo choo. One in the morning, two in the morning, I'm waking up with these songs. SPEAKER_06: Always coming in from right outside that window. Then I thought, Jesus, there's a pretty energetic group there across the street. SPEAKER_06: At this point, Leo was beginning to suspect that something a little weird was going on. SPEAKER_04: But the real coup de grace came when I was going to leave the hospital after a week or so and this tune, I didn't know the words at first, but I started to hear da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da SPEAKER_06: And as he packed up, signed out of the hospital, and got into his car, I was reflecting. SPEAKER_04: That's when it hit him. I still was hearing the song. The song was still coming from outside a window, but now the scenery was moving. SPEAKER_04: I thought it was related to the hospital and to the thing across the street. Here I am in the car listening to this. SPEAKER_06: And that's when the lyrics appeared. SPEAKER_04: Finally the words come. When Johnny comes marching home again, hurrah, hurrah. SPEAKER_06: He couldn't ignore it anymore. Not only was the song following him home, it's like the song was about him. He was the Johnny. Marching home, coming home from the hospital. SPEAKER_04: I realized I am listening to me. I am listening to me. SPEAKER_08: OK, is he really though? I mean, is he really listening to anything or is he just think he's hearing something? Well, there's nothing out there for him to hear. Right, but from the inside, like is his brain actually hearing music? Ah. Well, lucky for us, there's a professor in England who had the exact same question. I called him up. Hello. Hi, can I speak to Professor Griffith, please? Speaking. Tim Griffith is his name. He is a professor of cognitive neurology at Newcastle University. Here's what he did. He took 35 people who are like Leo who claim to be hallucinating music. Yeah. And he scanned their brains. Very simple experiment. SPEAKER_20: I just put people in a scanner and said, what are you hearing now? What are you hearing now? And when they told him, there. SPEAKER_08: There, I'm hearing music. At that moment, he would snap a picture of their brain. Right. Then he took a different group of people who have no hallucinations, played them real music. Actual music. Scanned their brains. And then he compared the pictures. And if you look. They looked virtually identical. SPEAKER_20: If you were to put those in front of me and say one's people hallucinating, the other's people being played music, I wouldn't be able to tell you which was which. SPEAKER_08: Which tells you two things. First, this condition is real. These people are not making it up. And second, this goes way beyond the ordinary experience the rest of us have where we get a song stuck in our head. These people are getting the full hi-fi experience of listening to music. Their entire brain is lit up. The music sounds so convincingly like real life music. SPEAKER_12: What are you to think when it suddenly appears? That's Diana Deutsch, a psychologist at the University of California, San Diego, who's been collecting emails from hundreds of different people who hallucinate music. SPEAKER_08: One person described it in the following way. SPEAKER_12: He said, imagine that you were at a rock concert standing right by loudspeaker. Well, it's louder than that. SPEAKER_04: At the beginning, when I didn't know what was going to happen, I thought it was going to take over my mind. It started interfering with sleep. It's the adjacent to be and the center of a. Like all night. I got mad. I used to say, stop it already. Stop it. Cut it out. Come on. Enough, enough, enough. But you're never free. I thought I'd never sleep again. SPEAKER_04: That was the low point. I thought, I've got to get help for this. SPEAKER_06: At what point did you bring it up with doctors? Well, the doctors were completely impotent. SPEAKER_04: To this day, they roll their eyes when I tell them about it. SPEAKER_06: One doctor told him that maybe it was the fillings in his teeth picking up the radio. OK. I hoped it was. SPEAKER_04: But it wasn't. It continued forever. SPEAKER_06: Nothing he could do could make it stop. I don't have an off button. It's like there was a jukebox in his head run by an evil gremlin. And the worst part? The gremlin would mess with the tempo. Like, uh, OK, uh, da da da da da. SPEAKER_04: Da da da da da, da da da da da, da da da da da da da, da da da da da da da. The men on the flying trip, he is. Very young men on the flying trip. Then it starts speeding up. Oh, he flies. Da da da da da da da da. With the electric washer. He's very young men. Right, that's the worst. When that started to happen, I really was getting close to panic. I had the feeling that it could go at its rate and I couldn't stop it. It's like you're on a galloping horse and the horse is running away with you. I once told that to my daughter and she said, Dad, why don't you just instead think of the song Silent Night. And I could control the tempo and instead, when that was galloping, SPEAKER_04: I would go, Silent Night. And immediately I'm completely relaxed. And the gallop is SPEAKER_04: completely gone. And I could even let it come back and it would start now being... And that SPEAKER_04: was no longer ever a problem of the tempo running away with me. Okay, so let's just SPEAKER_08: assume that Leo is not crazy. I never thought I was psychotic. Never, never. Because most SPEAKER_08: people, it turns out, with this condition are not crazy. There's nothing else wrong SPEAKER_12: with them, according to Diana Deutsch. So then the question becomes, how can a person SPEAKER_08: who is otherwise sane hallucinate to such a crazy degree? Well, in the 60s, there was a Polish psychologist named Jerzy Konorski who thought about this. And he came up with SPEAKER_04: a simple, kind of beautiful idea based on an assumption that he couldn't prove yet, SPEAKER_08: which was that between the ears and the brain, there are some connections, he thought, just a few stray connections that run backwards. Brain back to ear, which would allow sound to run in reverse. Now this was just an idea, he couldn't really test it. But many years later, neuroscientists like Tim Griffith start to poke around in the brain, they start to explore, and what they find is that he was right. Very right. SPEAKER_20: If you look at the pathway between the ears and the brain, probably about 70% of the fibers don't actually go up, they go down. They go the other way towards the ears. SPEAKER_07: 70% go up? SPEAKER_08: 70% go from the brain to the ears. It's like our ears are literally wired to hear our brains. Now Konorski's idea was that normally our ears wouldn't hear what the brain was saying because it was too busy taking in all the sounds from the outside. But what if, he thought, the sound from the outside stopped? Maybe then there would be a kind of backflow. The sound stored in your brain would start to flow backwards. Now again this is just an idea but there might be something to this because it would explain why most of the people who suffer from musical hallucinations, according to Tim Griffith, have one thing in common. SPEAKER_20: By far and away the commonest situation you see it in is in people who have deafness, usually in middle or later life. SPEAKER_03: And you don't have to take his word for it. Nearly the instant that I went deaf, I started experiencing, round the clock, 24-7 auditory hallucinations. SPEAKER_08: This is Michael Korost. When he was 36 he lost all of his hearing and he remembers the moment it happened. He was in the emergency room talking to a nurse and suddenly the sound started to go. It was like going from talking like this to talking like this to talking like this to SPEAKER_03: talking like this. My ears were just draining out, like water draining out of the bathtub. I was just getting deafer and deafer and deafer. And at the same time I was starting to hear a very loud ringing sound in my ears. It was gradually morphing into sort of formless, SPEAKER_03: eerie, ethereal music. Music of the spheres really I would call it. And we would slowly morph into some version of the Ave Maria. It was almost as if, as a sort of recompense to being deaf, I was like plugged into some sort of deep background melody in the cosmos. SPEAKER_08: Now here's the question. What would happen if Michael suddenly got his hearing back? Well, a couple of months later Michael got a cochlear implant installed. This is a little chip that's put into his brain which promised to return at least part of his hearing. And he says when the doctors turned it on, the moment he says they turned it on, the sounds from the world came rushing in and the music stopped. SPEAKER_03: Stopped, called, just went away almost instantaneously. There you go. SPEAKER_07: Well, but I happen to know a woman who had a very, very different experience. What do you mean? She had the same problem. She went deaf. She started hearing music. What kind of music was it? SPEAKER_11: Hymns, spirituals, patriotic songs. Her name, this is actually her real name, it's Cheryl C. is what we're going to call her. SPEAKER_07: She wanted the music in her head to stop and she'd heard about a patient like your friend there. Who had musical hallucinations, received a cochlear implant and her hallucinations disappeared. SPEAKER_11: So I wanted to do it. SPEAKER_07: So she did it. She got the implant. She wakes up on the operating table. I heard the music. It was inside me. SPEAKER_11: Still there. Just was there. I can't stop it. Why in the first case, they're kind of the same situation. SPEAKER_08: They are very much the same. Why would there be that difference? I don't know why there is this difference between them. So I asked Dr. Oliver Sacks, SPEAKER_07: who we often talk to on these questions. How do you explain the difference? As a physician, you know, one sees patients, you ask about SPEAKER_18: their symptoms, they produce their symptoms, but it is equally important to see the relation of the symptoms of the disease to the person themselves, to their identity. He's discovered over the years that the problem as expressed in the patient is partly a disease. SPEAKER_07: I mean, the person is sick or in trouble in some way. At the same time, the disease is reflecting something about the person in front of him. SPEAKER_18: And sees interaction and a liaison, a collusion, a collision, I don't know what word to use, between the self and a symptom. SPEAKER_07: And sometimes it can come out so strangely. For example, there's a patient he has who was a Jewish kid. He was a Jewish boy who'd grown up in Hamburg in the 1920s and 1930s, and he had been terrified SPEAKER_18: by the Nazi youth. And for some horrible reason... He hallucinated Nazi marching songs. He was tormented. But on the other hand, Oliver told me about an old woman he once met in a nursing home SPEAKER_07: who was haunted by lullabies. SPEAKER_18: One after the other, nonstop. But she was an orphan. Her father died before she was born, and her mother before she was five, orphaned, alone. She found the songs in her head deeply comforting. The music and the hallucinations, in fact, seem to be a door into a lost part of childhood. SPEAKER_07: So then the differences between people when music floods into their head. What's going on, says Oliver, is the disease and the person, they're talking to each other. SPEAKER_18: The self can be molded by hallucination, but it can mold them in turn. SPEAKER_08: I wonder where Leo fits into this. Lulu? Yeah. How would you say that Leo self-interacts with his symptoms, or vice versa? SPEAKER_06: Well, he's a psychoanalyst. So whenever he gets a song stuck in his head, which is like all the time, he analyzes it. He looks for a hidden meaning in it. SPEAKER_04: Like, you know, the way dreams reveal your inner life. The same thing with songs. SPEAKER_06: Leo will tell you that every song is a message from his subconscious. Everything has an unconscious connection, pleasant or unpleasant. SPEAKER_06: And he's just got to figure out what it is. SPEAKER_04: I'm analyzing me like I have a patient in front of me. SPEAKER_06: Like when I first called him up, he had, Mary Had a Little Lamb stuck in his head. That, he told me, was because he'd been thinking about the passivity of the American people in following a leader that misleads them. SPEAKER_04: And everywhere that Mary went, the lambs were sure to go. I mean, and the connection is obvious. Or when he first got home from the hospital, he always had America the Beautiful stuck in his head. SPEAKER_04: And I'm certainly not a raving patriot, but what this meant was home, sweet home. America to me was home. SPEAKER_06: OK, it's easy to think that this is kind of a stretch. I mean, every song has some very specific meaning for him. But I don't know. There was this one time he told me about where he woke up with a song in his head. I start going to brush my teeth. SPEAKER_04: I'm singing along as I go to the bathroom. He didn't know why. This is what it was. SPEAKER_06: It was just a few years after his wife had died. My bonnie lies over the ocean. SPEAKER_04: My bonnie lies over the sea. My bonnie lies over the ocean. Da da da da da da da da. Bring back, bring back, bring back my bonnie to me, to me. SPEAKER_04: You know? And um... I realized when I, I thought, why am I singing that song? And then suddenly I realized it was our wedding anniversary that week. It was one of our major anniversaries. You know, that song can kill me when I hear it. SPEAKER_06: Even so, he told me that when that song comes, he doesn't want it to go. SPEAKER_04: I found that when the song disappeared, I didn't want it to disappear. It's now been over a decade of hallucinating music for Leo. SPEAKER_06: And he found that at some point, the music switched. It went from intruder to friend. SPEAKER_09: Da da da da da da. SPEAKER_06: Now he looks forward to the songs. SPEAKER_04: Stars and steel guitars. They keep him company. Because often, he finds himself alone. Da da da in Monterey. It's true that one of the things about being 94 is that when you look at your telephone address book, half of them are not there anymore. You scratch out the name. And that's not easy. Just Molly and me. SPEAKER_06: SPEAKER_04: And baby makes dreams. All happy in my balloon heaven. SPEAKER_08: Radio Lab's Lulu Miller. SPEAKER_06: Baby reporter Lulu. SPEAKER_10: Muppet baby Lulu. Thanks Lulu. SPEAKER_06: Yeah, thanks to Leo. SPEAKER_08: Leo has a book out about living with musical hallucinations. It's called Music in the Head. Living at the brain-mind border. And so does Michael Korost. He's the guy with the cochlear implant. His book is called Rebuilt. My journey back to the hearing world. SPEAKER_07: And special thanks to Oliver Sacks who basically gave us his Rolodex. And we were able to find all these people and interview them. Well, thanks to Oliver and Kate Edgar, he's the assistant. SPEAKER_17: Radio Lab was created by Chad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. SPEAKER_15: Lulu Miller and Lutef Nasser are our co-hosts. Suzie Lechtenberg is our executive producer. Dailing Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Blum, Becca Bresler, Rachel Cusick, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz-Coutieris, Sindhu Nyanisambindam, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sara Khari, Ana Roskvet-Paz, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. With help from Carolyn McCusker and Sarah Sonbach. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Adam Shibell. SPEAKER_00: Hi, I'm Ram from India. Leadership support for Radio Lab science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, Assignment Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radio Lab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. SPEAKER_14: WNYC Studios is supported by On Being with Krista Tippett. SPEAKER_01: I'm Krista Tippett of On Being, where we take up the big questions of meaning for this world now. In our new podcast season, we're going to have a different human conversation about AI and also the intelligence of our bodies, grief and joy, social creativity and poetry, and so much more. A conversation to live by every Thursday.