Black Box

Summary

Radiolab: “Black Box”

Original Air Date: February 27, 2026
Podcast: Radiolab (WNYC Studios)
Hosts: Lulu Miller, Latif Nasser
Featured Contributors: Jad Abumrad, Robert Krulwich, Tim Howard, Soren Wheeler, Patrick Purdon, Carl Zimmer, Jesse Cox, and others

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Episode Overview

Theme:
"Black Box" dives into the mysteries hidden within literal and metaphorical black boxes—systems where something goes in, something comes out, but the process in between is obscure or unknowable. The episode explores three “black boxes”:

1. The loss and return of consciousness under anesthesia
2. The seemingly impossible telepathy act of the Piddingtons, a 1950s mind reader couple
3. The metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly within its chrysalis

Through storytelling, sound design, and expert interviews, the episode probes the limits of what can be known, how mysteries captivate us, and what it means to reveal (or hide) the secrets within a box.

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Segment 1: The Mystery of Anesthesia

[00:59]–[21:09]

Key Discussion Points

• Historical Horror of Surgery: (01:10–03:22)
  Surgery before anesthesia was a traumatic, excruciating ordeal. Patients were restrained by "six burly men," and some chose suicide instead of the operating room. The invention of anesthesia was a revolutionary moment in medical history.

  “Some people committed suicide before they would face going into an operating room.”
  — Lulu Miller [02:16]

• The First Public Use of Ether: (03:22–05:42)
  The story is told of William T.G. Morton’s demonstration of ether anesthesia in 1846, where for the first time, a patient underwent surgery without pain or scream—"the silence was far more deafening than the screams."

  “You could hear the scalpel, you could hear the breathing.”
  — Tim Howard [05:15]
  “The silence was far more deafening than all the screams that had ever been heard in that operating theater.”
  — Lulu Miller [05:30]

• Consciousness: Switch Off, Switch On (06:23–09:06)
  Writer Carl Zimmer describes his own surgery, where he was convinced the anesthesia "wasn't working", then suddenly was awake—hours later, appendix gone, time simply “missing.”

  “I was arguing with my doctors that they didn’t know how to do their job, and the next thing, I’m in a hospital room with my appendix out, and it’s 10 hours later.”
  — Carl Zimmer [08:16]

• The Black Box of Anesthesia (09:29–11:32)
  Scientists still don’t fully understand how anesthesia causes loss of consciousness—a medical black box where inputs (drugs) cause outputs (unconsciousness), but the internal mechanism is mysterious.

• Scientific Breakthroughs: Brain Waves and Connectivity (11:46–18:43)

  • Patrick Purdon's team uses EEGs to observe what happens as subjects drift into unconsciousness.
  • Discovery: As consciousness fades, a single low-frequency oscillation sweeps across the brain, and connectivity between brain regions collapses.

  “You raise [anesthesia], you raise it up, and then you are into this other state.”
  — Carl Zimmer [08:32]
  “The wave is going on in the stadium, you can’t really carry on a normal conversation.”
  — Patrick Purdon (baseball wave analogy) [16:03]

  The brain under anesthesia doesn’t stop working; parts still process sound, but they can no longer communicate, so consciousness disappears.

• Real-World Impact (19:30–21:09)
  These findings translate into monitoring technology for surgeons: now they can “see” when a patient is fully unconscious via real-time brainwave spectrograms.

  “This patient is unconscious, it’s kind of cool.”
  — Tim Howard [20:51]
  “99.9999% confidence.”
  — Jesse Cox [21:09]

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Segment 2: The Piddingtons—A Telepathic Black Box

[22:14]–[47:29]

Key Discussion Points

• The Piddington Act Introduction (22:53–26:01)
  Jesse Cox uncovers the hidden history of his grandparents, Leslie & Sidney Piddington, BBC radio “mind readers” who stunned audiences in the 1950s by performing telepathy acts under astonishing conditions (e.g., Leslie in a diving bell or airplane, Sidney in the studio).

  “One time she was in the Tower of London.”
  — Jesse Cox [25:53]

• How Did They Do It? Wild Theories and the Unsatisfying Truth (26:18–41:00)

  • Listeners and experts speculate: Morse code in teeth? Stammering as code? Third-party communication? All seem implausible.
  • Even magicians can replicate the illusion, but are unsure of the Piddingtons’ exact method.

  “You're the judge. That is the line that they finished, or that is the line they finished with every single broadcast.”
  — Jesse Cox [36:00]

• Family Secrets and Reluctance to Reveal (35:34–40:57)
  Leslie Piddington maintains the secret:

  “It's a wonderful mystery. And I like to think that after I've died, people will still say, how did they do it? ... Just tickles me to think of that.”
  — Leslie Piddington [40:04]

  Even Jesse’s father, possibly knowing the secret, refuses to divulge, “If my mum entrusted me with something all those years ago, then I will keep that trust.” [36:58]

• The Philosophy of Secrets—Penn Jillette’s Perspective (41:50–47:29)
  Magician Penn Jillette explains why the true solutions to great magic are always “ugly” and anti-climactic, not beautiful aha! moments:

  “The only secret in magic, there’s only one, and that is that the secret must be ugly. You cannot have a beautiful secret.”
  — Penn Jillette [42:48]
  The producers debate whether to share the method, ultimately linking to “the ugly truth” online for those who truly want to know, but intentionally keep the mystery alive for listeners.

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Segment 3: The Chrysalis—The Black Box of Metamorphosis

[49:18]–[62:58]

Key Discussion Points

• Butterfly Rainforest, Awe & Mystery (49:18–51:37)
  Reporting from Florida’s butterfly rainforest, Latif Nasser sets up the enigmatic transformation from caterpillar to butterfly, a process literally hidden inside a “black box” chrysalis.

• Inside the Chrysalis: Total Breakdown, Total Transformation (51:37–54:06)
  Slicing open a chrysalis reveals not a caterpillar-in-waiting, but a formless goo—no head, legs, or antennae. The caterpillar essentially dissolves itself.

  “There was no head. There were no legs. There was no antenna, no spiky spine. ... It's very liquidy. … Basically, just goo.”
  — Latif Nasser [52:19]

• Centuries of Mystery and Metaphor (54:06–55:44)
  For generations, the process led to metaphysical speculation: death/rebirth, spiritual ascension, symbolism for the soul, etc.

  “Behold, the old has passed away, the new has surely come.”
  — Philip Clayton [54:35]

• Carrying Memories Through the Goo (55:56–58:28)
  Professor Martha Weiss’s experiments show that caterpillars trained to hate a smell will, after metamorphosis, emerge as moths that still fear that smell.

  “A memory made it through the goo. And it came out the other side.”
  — Latif Nasser [57:54]
  “I think it’s amazing that a caterpillar can have an experience, go into its chrysalis ... and that it still can recall experiences.”
  — Martha Weiss [57:59]

• Continuity—What Survives the Change? (58:28–62:58)
  While much dissolves, some pieces of the brain, gut, nerves and muscle persist through transformation, carrying information and identity across radical change.
  The story of Jan Swammerdam, a 17th-century scientist, reveals that parts of the adult butterfly are present, hidden within the caterpillar, even before metamorphosis.

  “You peel back the skin of a caterpillar and beneath it you see the new creature hidden.”
  — Latif Nasser [61:13]

  Philosophically, the segment questions: how much change can occur and still preserve continuity of self? What of our future selves is already present inside us?

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Anesthesia’s Mystery:
  “A black box. You can see what goes in, you can see what comes out, but you don’t know what happens inside.”
  — Soren Wheeler [09:10]

• On Family Secrets and Magic:
  “She won't even give me the satisfaction of saying, yes, it was a trick. She won't even say that ... She would fob us off and just say, ‘you are the judge.’”
  — Jesse Cox [36:00]

• On the Ugly Truth of Magic:
  “In magic, what you want is an idea that is not beautiful.”
  — Penn Jillette [43:18]

• On Metamorphosis and Identity:
  “It's like if you were to skin me and there's my 70 year old self is inside of me or something.”
  — Latif Nasser [61:25]
  “What of my future self is in me right now?”
  — Latif Nasser [62:07]

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Segment Timestamps

• Historical anesthesia: 00:59–06:17
• Brain waves & scientific breakthroughs: 11:46–18:43
• Real-time monitoring in surgery: 19:30–21:09
• The Piddingtons’ mystery: 22:53–41:00
• The philosophy of secrets (Penn Jillette): 41:50–47:29
• Chrysalis and metamorphosis: 49:18–62:58

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Episode Tone & Language

Radiolab’s trademark playful, inquisitive, and sound-rich storytelling infuses the episode. Hosts and contributors riff with curiosity, skepticism, and awe, moving nimbly from scientific explanation to emotional reflection.

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Takeaways

• Even with modern science, black boxes persist—whether in our minds, magic acts, or natural transformations.
• Sometimes the truth inside a black box is less satisfying than the mystery itself.
• Continuity and identity survive radical change, both in brains and in butterflies—sometimes, memory literally survives the goo.
• The joy and power of mystery, and the decision whether or not to reveal it, is as significant as the answer itself.

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Listen If You Wonder...

• What does anesthesia actually do to your brain—and what are doctors watching for on those monitors?
• How could a 1950s act convince millions of “live” telepathy?
• What happens inside a chrysalis, and do memories survive transformation?
• Whether you’d really want to know the answer to every secret—or if sometimes, “you are the judge” is enough.

Transcript

[Lulu Miller]

Hey, Lulu, here. This week, we are bringing back an episode full of intrepid humans trying to access places that are off limits. Trying to solve the unsolvable. Know the unknowable. See the unseeable. I can't say much more than that without giving everything away. So I'm just gonna buckle you into a time machine and beam you back to 2014.

[Latif Nasser]

Phew.

[Lulu Miller]

Right into the studio with. With then host Jad Abumrad and producer Tim Howard. Here we go.

[Robert Krulwich]

Wait, you're listening?

[Lulu Miller]

All right. Okay.

[Jesse Cox]

All right. You're listening to Radiolab Radio from wny.

[Carl Zimmer]

Rewind.

[Robert Krulwich]

Batting first, producer Tim Howard.

[Tim Howard]

Cool. Wait, I'm just gonna get my level here. It is such a beautiful day. Beautiful.

[Patrick Purdon]

I think it's got to be, like, 75 degrees out or something. Sunny.

[Tim Howard]

This is Patrick Purdon. He's a professor in anesthesia at Harvard Medical School and works at Mass General Hospital. You want to just tell me where we are?

[Patrick Purdon]

We're standing right now in front of the Bulfinch building.

[Tim Howard]

And I went up to talk to him because in that building, this is the one with the aether dome.

[Patrick Purdon]

Ether dome is inside this building is

[Tim Howard]

the story of the day that you could say humanity emerged from the Dark Ages. Oh, you laugh now? Just wait.

[Patrick Purdon]

Okay, here we go.

[Jesse Cox]

It's on the fourth floor.

[Patrick Purdon]

It's on the fourth floor of this building.

[Tim Howard]

We headed in up three flights of stairs into this room. What a cool room.

[Jesse Cox]

Oh, my God.

[Robert Krulwich]

Is this, like.

[Tim Howard]

How would you describe it?

[Patrick Purdon]

I've seen mini amphitheater.

[Tim Howard]

Right.

[Jesse Cox]

It's also gotism.

[Tim Howard]

Awesome dome. It's this beautiful domed room with light streaming down from above. Like the acoustics in here. Crazy. It must have been terrifying, though, if you actually heard somebody screaming.

[Patrick Purdon]

I mean, it's so resonant in here. The screams would have been deafening and absolutely would have been terrifying.

[Soren Wheeler]

What is this place?

[Tim Howard]

Well, this was an operating room.

[Robert Krulwich]

No.

[Tim Howard]

And back in the 1800s, when this room was really in use, these being

[Lulu Miller]

in an operation was so painful, it was often permanently damaging to a patient's emotional state.

[Tim Howard]

This is Julie.

[Lulu Miller]

I'm Julie Fenster. I write about American history.

[Tim Howard]

She wrote a book called Ether Day, which goes into a lot of detail about the dark, dark days of surgery in the early 1800s. Back then, during surgery, there were no painkillers, and patients were awake, probably more awake than they'd ever been in their whole lives.

[Lulu Miller]

Some of the patients remembered the sound of their limb dropping to the ground or the saw going through their sinew and bones. The Smell of their own body being cut into. Usually, a surgeon would employ six burly men to hold a patient down. And instead of having an operation, some people committed suicide before they would face going into an operating room, which were usually located on the top floor of a hospital, in part because the hospital really didn't do itself a lot of good to have the screams heard by passersby.

[Tim Howard]

This is such a cool room. Here we are at the top of the ether dome. But then everything changes. October 16, 1846. It's a Friday morning. I assume the room is full.

[Patrick Purdon]

The room is absolutely full.

[Lulu Miller]

The students were all lined up to

[Tim Howard]

watch, crowded in the bleachers because they'd heard something big was gonna down. And right there in the middle of

[Lulu Miller]

the room is the most esteemed surgeon in America, Dr. John Warren, about to do an operation.

[Tim Howard]

He brought in a patient who needed a tumor taken out of his neck. And he was just about to slice into the guy, just about to start the surgery, when this mustachioed fellow bursts in. A dentist, William T.G.

[Lulu Miller]

morton.

[Tim Howard]

And he basically said to warn something that must have sounded completely nuts. I can erase that man's pain. He didn't actually use those words. He actually had an appointment with Warren. But according to Julie, he did have a bag.

[Lulu Miller]

He had a bag filled with gas,

[Tim Howard]

a gas called ether.

[Lulu Miller]

And Dr. Warren, who had the scalpel raised, he puts it down, stands aside and says with great sarcasm, well, sir,

[Patrick Purdon]

your patient is ready.

[Robert Krulwich]

Wait a second. Had he ever tested this, He.

[Tim Howard]

He claimed to have tried it out on some dental patients and on his

[Lulu Miller]

dog, on himself and on his goldfish.

[Robert Krulwich]

Nice.

[Tim Howard]

So Morton gets to work.

[Patrick Purdon]

Morton sets up his gear, fills up

[Tim Howard]

the inhaler, puts it up to the guy's face.

[Patrick Purdon]

And actually, because the valve system had just been constructed and he hadn't tested it, he actually literally had to manually operate the valves with every inhale and exhale of the patient. So he administers the ether using this inhaler. After about three or four minutes, the patient becomes unconscious. And just at that moment, Morton turns to Warren and says, you're a patient, sir.

[Tim Howard]

Dr. Warren brings the scalpel down to the patient's neck and cuts. And really, for the first time in that room, you could hear the scalpel, you could hear the breathing.

[Lulu Miller]

The silence was far more deafening than all the screams that had ever been heard in that operating theater. No squirming, no moving, no bulging eyes, no clenched fists.

[Tim Howard]

It must have felt like a miracle.

[Lulu Miller]

The news of the operation went around the world as fast as Anything. News of, you know, war or peace didn't travel faster than this. By the end of the year, doctors in Europe were using surgical anesthetics in

[Tim Howard]

basically the blink of an eye. The most painful, horrible experience possibly imaginable became routine, even forgettable, but also deeply

[Robert Krulwich]

peculiar, as was made clear to us when we talked a while back with one of our regulars, Carl Zimmer.

[Carl Zimmer]

Well, my wife and I, we were watching this movie one night. It was called Birth, starring Nicole Kidman.

[Robert Krulwich]

Did you like it?

[Jesse Cox]

I hated it.

[Robert Krulwich]

No, it's one of my favorites.

[Carl Zimmer]

Well, okay. I'm sitting there and I'm hating the movie.

[Robert Krulwich]

You're hating this movie?

[Carl Zimmer]

Well, I'm just wondering, like, why am I reacting so negatively to this movie? I'm just in such a bad mood. I'm feeling lousy, and I think it's the movie. And I stand up and I say, oh, wait a minute. My abdomen is in incredible pain.

[Robert Krulwich]

Oh, so it's not the movie.

[Carl Zimmer]

It's not the movie.

[Robert Krulwich]

It's me appendix about to burst.

[Carl Zimmer]

We go to the hospital, and maybe four in the morning, five in the morning, they're prepping me for surgery. They, you know, put an IV in me, and then they're like, okay, now we're gonna be putting in the anesthetic, you know, so just relax. And this will be taking effect.

[Robert Krulwich]

But he says it didn't seem to be working.

[Carl Zimmer]

So I start thinking about what they're going to be doing to me in half an hour. They're gonna, like, take these knives and they're gonna cut me open. They're gonna rip my intestines apart. They're gonna pull off this inflamed appendix. They're gonna sew up the intestines. They're go everything back up. And all this is going to happen supposedly without me being aware of it, and I'm not having any part of it. I just say. I was just, like, lying there saying, I don't think this is working. I'm not feeling anything. You're going to have to do something more. I just want you to know that I'm not. And then I was in another room, and there was no one else there. Where did they all go? Like they had all left. And then it occurred to me, like, no. Oh, oh, oh. The whole surgery's already happened.

[Robert Krulwich]

Wow, that is weird.

[Soren Wheeler]

It's happened to me. It's as if they splice time. Take the time that you were in and the time that you are in subsequently, and the middle is totally missing. No experience. Whatsoever.

[Carl Zimmer]

It's not like sleep.

[Tim Howard]

No.

[Carl Zimmer]

There was no, like, oh, I'm getting sleepy. I was arguing with my doctors that they didn't know how to do their job. And the next thing, I'm in a hospital room with my appendix out, and it's 10 hours later.

[Robert Krulwich]

It sort of implies that it's like a switch.

[Carl Zimmer]

It is. And that's what happens. I mean, when you raise the level of anesthesia in someone, they've done studies on this. It isn't a gentle gradation down. You just. You raise it up, you raise it up, and then you are into this other state.

[Soren Wheeler]

Do people who do this for a living know exactly why this happened?

[Carl Zimmer]

You'd think that something that's been around since 1846 would be hammered out solid, but it's still almost a philosophical kind of mystery.

[Lulu Miller]

I am sleeping.

[Soren Wheeler]

I. There's a term for this in physics. It's called a black box.

[Robert Krulwich]

It refers to a system where you can see what goes in. You can see that something different comes

[Soren Wheeler]

out, and you wonder, like, what happened

[Robert Krulwich]

there in the middle, but you can't see it. Yeah, it's a mystery.

[Soren Wheeler]

It's black and it's closed up. Therefore, the box.

[Robert Krulwich]

I mean, it might not literally be a box, but today we have three

[Soren Wheeler]

different attempts to open three very different

[Robert Krulwich]

black boxes, starting with the box that's in front of us. Now, that gap that Carl talked about where you go, boom, you're gone, and then suddenly you're back. What happens in that gap, that's what's crazy.

[Tim Howard]

It's been almost 170 years since William Morton did his thing in front of those med students. And we've moved way beyond ether.

[Patrick Purdon]

So here we got propofol, we've got sevoflurane, Dexmedetomine, ketabine, We've got all these

[Tim Howard]

new drugs, but we still don't know exactly how they work, which for Patrick is a very practical problem.

[Patrick Purdon]

It's very difficult, actually, to figure out when people aren't conscious, because they can always be internally conscious to some degree.

[Tim Howard]

Right. And in the 1950s and 60s, he says, this became a real issue because doctors started giving patients neuromuscular blocking agents that would paralyze their muscles during surgery so they wouldn't flop around, which is good thing. But then you'd have these situations once in a blue moon, where a patient would wake up in the middle of

[Patrick Purdon]

surgery, literally trapped, unable to move, eyes

[Tim Howard]

closed, totally still, you know, fully awake,

[Patrick Purdon]

but no one would be able to perceive it because they couldn't move.

[Tim Howard]

And that's a nightmare that, you know, may even be worse than having six strongmen hold you down.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah, we don't have to dwell on that.

[Tim Howard]

Well, I actually did find a bunch of these stories.

[Robert Krulwich]

I don't want to hear them.

[Tim Howard]

No, they're great. I mean, they're amazing, but.

[Robert Krulwich]

All right, I'd like to hear about it.

[Soren Wheeler]

No, I'm just saying.

[Tim Howard]

Here, I'll just play one.

[Robert Krulwich]

No, I. No.

[Jesse Cox]

All right, all right, all right.

[Tim Howard]

You are going to regret it.

[Lulu Miller]

But.

[Tim Howard]

Well, anyway, the larger point is that if you can't understand how and why anesthesia works, then you're not going to be able to explain why every so often, it just doesn't work.

[Latif Nasser]

Really?

[Robert Krulwich]

How often is every so often?

[Tim Howard]

I've heard different numbers. Anywhere between 1 in 10,000 to much more often, like 1 in 1,000.

[Robert Krulwich]

Wow.

[Patrick Purdon]

But luckily, let's take a look at these brain signals.

[Tim Howard]

In the last few decades, scientists have begun to shine a little pin light into this black box. And Patrick and his team in particular, have found something pretty cool.

[Patrick Purdon]

This experiment that we did in the, I guess, late 2000s, a couple years

[Tim Howard]

ago, they wanted to know what happens in the brain right when that switch flips. So they got a bunch of volunteers, healthy volunteers. They hooked them up to an IV and started to very, very slowly give

[Patrick Purdon]

them propofol, slowly administer the drug, which

[Tim Howard]

is a big anesthetic. And as they did, they told the subjects to click a button every time they heard a sound or a word.

[Patrick Purdon]

Chair library.

[Tim Howard]

That they recognized.

[Patrick Purdon]

Submarine. You know, something like that. In addition, we had the subject's name, too.

[Tim Howard]

Tim.

[Jesse Cox]

Beep Patrick.

[Tim Howard]

So the subjects would just sit there and listen and click Chair library. On and on.

[Jesse Cox]

Patrick.

[Tim Howard]

And every 15 minutes, they gave them a little bit more propofol.

[Patrick Purdon]

Submarine. Beep, Tim.

[Lulu Miller]

Beep Michael.

[Penn Jillette]

Beep

[Jesse Cox]

beep Patrick.

[Patrick Purdon]

Until eventually they just stopped responding altogether.

[Tim Howard]

They were just out cold. Now, throughout this whole time, Patrick and his team were measuring the brain waves of the subjects. That's the key. And he says what they saw right at the moment that that switch flipped,

[Patrick Purdon]

right at the moment of loss of consciousness, there was just one really, really clear motif that appeared.

[Tim Howard]

They saw this wave of electricity sweeping

[Patrick Purdon]

across the brain, this really low frequency oscillation, about one cycle per second per second or less. And in addition to that, there was this higher frequency piece, an alpha wave that appeared at the front of the head at that loss of consciousness moment.

[Robert Krulwich]

So when people went under, their brains just started to ring like a bell, basically. And why would Those. What are those waves doing exactly?

[Tim Howard]

It seems like those waves might be imposing a kind of deadly order on the brain. This is the thing that's very counterintuitive. You think that consciousness is order and synchrony, but it turns out that it's kind of the opposite, that consciousness is actually chaotic and noisy. It's all of those different parts of the brain. You know, facial recognition, touch, sound, language engaged in this crazily complicated multilayered conversation.

[Carl Zimmer]

You know, is one person talking, the other one talking back?

[Tim Howard]

This is Carl Zimmer again, and he says one of the hallmarks of the conscious brain is that you see a kind of conversational logic, a back and forth between the different parts.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah, my turn, your turn. My turn, your turn.

[Carl Zimmer]

The things you're seeing create signals in the back of your head. They go to the front of your head, back again, forward and back and forward and back and forward, forward and

[Jesse Cox]

back and forward and back.

[Carl Zimmer]

And you can use this eavesdropping to calculate how connected the brain is, what they call connectivity. And when you're awake, you have a lot of connectivity. When you're dreaming, you also have a lot of connectivity. And then if someone gives you anesthesia, like in a matter of a second, your connectivity just collapses.

[Robert Krulwich]

Oh, maybe that's what happened to you.

[Jesse Cox]

It just cut.

[Robert Krulwich]

Your connectivity got cut.

[Lulu Miller]

It did.

[Tim Howard]

And here is the weird part.

[Carl Zimmer]

Scientists will play a sound to somebody who's under with anesthesia, and they can see that actually the part of the brain that processes sound, the auditory cortex, is active. It takes in the sound. So your brain is hearing sounds.

[Robert Krulwich]

That's spooky.

[Carl Zimmer]

Yeah.

[Tim Howard]

So what could be happening is that when you're under anesthesia, all the different parts of your brain, to some degree, they could be awake.

[Carl Zimmer]

It's not your brain is just stopping?

[Tim Howard]

No, all those parts of the brain are still talking. They're just not talking to each other very well anymore. And that somehow knocks you out.

[Robert Krulwich]

So lots of chit chat amongst the different parts of my brain make me conscious and not so much. Chit chat equals unconsciousness.

[Tim Howard]

Yeah, that's the idea.

[Robert Krulwich]

And how do the slow waves relate to that?

[Tim Howard]

Well, Patrick thinks of it sort of in baseball terms.

[Patrick Purdon]

Right. So actually, I was at a Red Sox game the other day. It was the last one that they had with the Yankees at Fenway park this year. And at some point, the wave started. So some part of the stadium decided to go into the wave. And here you go. The wave's coming around and coming around, and you're Watching it, and it keeps coming around and coming around. And, you know, after a while, it gets really tiresome because you're sitting there and just like, okay, I've got to wait for the wave to come. Okay, here it is. Okay, let's stand up, raise our arms, sit back down, and just a moment later, they're like, oh, my God, I got to stand up again.

[Carl Zimmer]

And.

[Patrick Purdon]

And you're waiting. Oh, dude, it's back again. And the thing is that when the wave is going on in the stadium, you can't really carry on a normal conversation. You can't have a normal interaction. You may not even be able to have a normal thought because the thing is just coming by every couple seconds to interrupt you. That is sort of the rationale for how these oscillations disrupt brain activity.

[Robert Krulwich]

I dig the analogy, but I'm not quite following.

[Tim Howard]

It helps to zoom in on the brain and look at a smaller number of neurons, which is what he did.

[Patrick Purdon]

Now, check this out. We conducted this study where we measured brain activity in individual neurons.

[Tim Howard]

They got some patients planted these tiny little electrodes deep into their brains so they could hear the individual neurons.

[Patrick Purdon]

So let's imagine that we zoom in to, like, tens to hundreds of neurons firing.

[Tim Howard]

And he says, when they give that patient propofol in anesthetic, what we notice

[Patrick Purdon]

is that right at the point of

[Tim Howard]

loss of consciousness, sure enough, they see those big, slow waves sweeping through. And just like in Fenway, when the wave hits you, you have to stop your conversation. But what that wave is really doing is it's only allowing each little cluster of neurons to talk once in a while.

[Patrick Purdon]

They can only fire at a particular moment in this slow oscillation.

[Tim Howard]

Like, you know, how the wave goes up and down, up and down, or round and round and round. If you're in Fenway, it's only at this moment, say, that one group gets to talk. The problem is, as Buddy, he can only talk at this moment, and the neurons next door, they can only talk at this moment. Next group, same deal. Everybody gets a turn to talk, but they can't talk to each other because they're on slightly different schedules. When they're talking, the others can't listen. So there's still a lot of talking going on. But consciousness seems to be the brain talking and listening to itself. So when that slow wave rolls around,

[Patrick Purdon]

the neurons can't all fire at the same time and talk to one another. And in that state, it would be impossible to be conscious.

[Robert Krulwich]

Is it.

[Tim Howard]

It might be early to say, but does it feel kind of like you cracked the code.

[Patrick Purdon]

Well, I think we are in the process of cracking the code for anesthesia. You don't ever want to get, you know, too far on a limb. But honestly, I mean, I feel if we can educate people about these rhythms, I'd be willing to say it.

[Tim Howard]

Sure.

[Patrick Purdon]

I, I, I, I think we have. I mean, I, I think this is going to be huge. I'm, I'm not going to lie to you. I think this is just going to be absolutely huge. Yeah, I'll take the bait on that.

[Robert Krulwich]

Sure. Crack the coke. Really? That's a, that's a little bold.

[Tim Howard]

Well, it means to Patrick, Housekeeping Turnover

[Lulu Miller]

Team anesthesia turnover, 38.

[Tim Howard]

Is that in very practical terms. He can now peek into that, that black box of the brain. Okay, here I am. I'm wearing my scrubs, for example, Patrick and his colleague, Emory Brown.

[Carl Zimmer]

I'm an anesthesiologist here at Mass General.

[Tim Howard]

They let me watch a couple surgeries, and I met a woman named Doris. Good morning.

[Penn Jillette]

Morning.

[Tim Howard]

What kind of surgery are you having today?

[Lulu Miller]

I only have the repairing of hernias.

[Tim Howard]

It's a surgery that, you know, 170 years ago would have been unthinkable. But here she is.

[Jesse Cox]

We feel comfortable, not too worried.

[Tim Howard]

So they're about to give her the first anesthetic. First anesthetic. Propofol. That's right. Yep. And as she starts to go under.

[Lulu Miller]

Deep breath, Doris.

[Jesse Cox]

In and out.

[Lulu Miller]

Don't stop, Doris.

[Patrick Purdon]

So I'm going to just switch over to the spectrogram display and see what it shows us.

[Lulu Miller]

Deep breath, Doris.

[Tim Howard]

On one of these monitors.

[Jesse Cox]

Oh, look at that.

[Patrick Purdon]

Did you see that change?

[Tim Howard]

Yeah, it says color display. You can actually see it happen.

[Patrick Purdon]

You can see the slow waves right now.

[Jesse Cox]

Now she's got some slow oscillation.

[Tim Howard]

If you imagine the screen is like this field of blues and yellows and greens, suddenly these bands of red just extend right along the bottom. And considering that for the last 160 years, anytime somebody like Doris has been put on a table and cut open, the doctors basically couldn't be sure what was going on in their head. Are they awake?

[Soren Wheeler]

Are they okay?

[Tim Howard]

And so with that in mind, being there in the operating room and seeing that band of red appear on the screen and hearing Emery Brown declare without hesitation, this patient is unconscious, it's kind of cool. And you say that with what, percent confidence?

[Jesse Cox]

Oh, 99.9999.

[Tim Howard]

Okay, I'll do that. Okay, let me do it one more time. 3, 2, 1. This is Tim Howard, and today on Radiolab, we've been talking about black boxes. And the next story started with a radio piece that I heard at the 3rd Coast International Audio Festival. There were a lot of incredible stories, but there was this one called Keep Them Guessing that I just loved. And I couldn't get it out of my head, so I sat Chad and Robert down in our little black box of a studio.

[Robert Krulwich]

Okay, ISD Look, Tim Howard, I'm not sure I like your tone.

[Jesse Cox]

Okay.

[Tim Howard]

And I connected them with the guy who made the piece.

[Robert Krulwich]

Hello? I hear the sound of what sounds like another room.

[Jesse Cox]

Does he sound like me now?

[Tim Howard]

Oh, his name is Jesse Cox.

[Soren Wheeler]

Wow, you sound so close. Cause you're so far away.

[Tim Howard]

He's actually in Australia, where everybody is,

[Soren Wheeler]

because they're upside down from the rest of us. They are very, very likely to fall into the sky.

[Jesse Cox]

You have us Australians worked out down to a T. Robert, I'm gripping on with my hands to the table as we speak. Oh, good.

[Robert Krulwich]

Okay, just to start, I mean, maybe just introduce us to your grandparents. Who are they?

[Jesse Cox]

Well, my. My grandparents were mind readers on the radio.

[Robert Krulwich]

Really?

[Jesse Cox]

Yeah.

[Tim Howard]

You're have to explain that.

[Robert Krulwich]

What are their names first?

[Jesse Cox]

Leslie. Leslie Piddington and Sidney Piddington.

[Soren Wheeler]

Piddington.

[Jesse Cox]

Piddington.

[Soren Wheeler]

And they had a radio show?

[Jesse Cox]

Yeah, the show was called the Piddingtons or the Amazing Piddingtons, and was on the BBC radio in the 1950s.

[Robert Krulwich]

Now, Jesse told us that for most of his life, he didn't know this.

[Jesse Cox]

I guess the reason was that my grandfather and my grandma divorced well before I was born.

[Robert Krulwich]

And then his grandpa, he died when I was 4 or 5. Then his grandma remarried, so nobody talked about it crazily enough.

[Jesse Cox]

I knew that my grandparents had been famous and my grandma was an actress. But it really wasn't until I was a teenager and a radio producer actually discovered by accident that my grandma was alive and went, what? There's still a Piddington alive?

[Robert Krulwich]

The reporter calls up his grandma and is like, hey, can I interview you?

[Jesse Cox]

And my grandma was hesitant. She was like, oh, I'm not sure. I'll be very good. I can try and remember.

[Lulu Miller]

And.

[Jesse Cox]

And they came and interviewed her. And when it went to air, when it got broadcast, we all drove up to his grandma's house and listened to it around the radio like they would have back in the 1950s and heard the story.

[Robert Krulwich]

And that's when Jesse discovered that his grandparents, Leslie and Sidney Piddington, one time had an audience of 20 million people. Yeah.

[Jesse Cox]

Yeah. Basically, the population of Australia was listening to my grandparents back in the 1950s.

[Robert Krulwich]

No way.

[Jesse Cox]

But I was like, yeah, why don't I know this? This is in my family. And why. Why don't I know it?

[Tim Howard]

But I.

[Robert Krulwich]

But he says it was really when he sat down and listened to the original broadcasts, what's left of them.

[Jesse Cox]

Two hours of old BBC recordings that survive today because my grandparents pirated them from the BBC back in 1950.

[Robert Krulwich]

He says it wasn't until he heard those tapes that I went, wow.

[Soren Wheeler]

You should now tell us this story. Yeah, tell us what you heard that made you go, wow.

[Jesse Cox]

Well, You hear this very dramatic theme song, and this old BBC voice comes under the tape and says, good evening, ladies and gentlemen, we present the Piddingtons. And the music goes up, all very, very dramatic. And then the narrator sets the scene for you. Good evening to you all both at home. And here in the number one Piccadilly studio, right in the middle of the West End of London, it was done in front of a live audience. And then you hear my grandfather's. Well, as Stephen Grenfell has just told you, life's been quite exciting for us. He was a stutterer. We've had a lot more letters. There were all these things that meant it should never have worked on radio anyhow. Anyhow, tonight, my grandfather is in the studio on the stage, and my grandma, I'm sorry to say Leslie, isn't here. She was often somewhere dramatic, as in

[Robert Krulwich]

not in the studio.

[Jesse Cox]

Some were exotic. One time she was in a diving bell. Diving bell? She was underwater at the bottom of a test tank. Whoa. One time she was in the Tower of London.

[Soren Wheeler]

Are you there, Leslie?

[Jesse Cox]

In the tower?

[Lulu Miller]

Yes, I'm here.

[Jesse Cox]

And remember, Piddington is here in the Piccadilly studio and Leslie is in the Tower of London.

[Robert Krulwich]

So. So your grandpa is on stage and your grandma, you're saying, is in a tower. By phone or.

[Jesse Cox]

No, she's in front of. She's in front of a microphone. Now, this is back in the time when microphones were the size of small melons. There'd be a microphone set up in the Tower of London.

[Robert Krulwich]

Connected live.

[Tim Howard]

Yeah.

[Jesse Cox]

My grandfather then comes on the air and sets up a series of telepathy tests that they're going to enact. And now, down to work. I will attempt to transmit to Lesley a line of print selected from a number of books on the table here in the studio. So there was a famous one called the Book Test. And this is where a member of the audience Would come up to the stage and there'd be a pile of books. And they'd randomly pick up a book, randomly open to a page and point to a line. Would you read out the line to the listening audience? The line selected is be abandoned as the electrician said that they would have no current. Now, completely random bit of text selected out of a stack of books after

[Robert Krulwich]

the text had been chosen, and only

[Jesse Cox]

then I shall now call in the Tower of London.

[Robert Krulwich]

They would connect to his grandma Leslie,

[Jesse Cox]

in just a moment at the sound of the gong. I want your complete silence, your sympathy and your cooperation. Now concentrate on the line while I attempt to transmit it to Leslie. And a gong would sound and he'd kind of very dramatically furrow his brow. And the next thing you heard was men. My grandmother, men.

[Lulu Miller]

Light.

[Jesse Cox]

This sort of frail, gentle voice. And she started to unpick what was being transmitted to her.

[Lulu Miller]

Something to do an electrician, something about light and electricians.

[Robert Krulwich]

Remember that line again was be abandoned

[Jesse Cox]

as the electricians said that they would have no current.

[Lulu Miller]

Will you concentrate on the word? That's like being left. People being left.

[Jesse Cox]

It's amazing to listen to over 60 years later, listening to those tapes. I'm still on the edge of my seat.

[Lulu Miller]

Abandoned that. Not light. Concentrate on the word like light.

[Jesse Cox]

And right at the end, I think

[Lulu Miller]

the whole line is abandoned. As the electricians said there would not be current.

[Jesse Cox]

Be abandoned as the electrician said that they would have no current. Almost every time it would be 100 correct. Truly remarkable broadcast. It just was this feeling inside you that you get going. Hang on. What?

[Robert Krulwich]

When Jesse heard those broadcasts, his obvious question was, was how did they do that?

[Jesse Cox]

Well, this is the question that I wanted to know for so long. And there have been many, many theories. I mean, they used to get letters in from listeners all the time. There's this box of press clippings we found at the bottom of my grandma's closet. And we started going through these press clippings, and there were wild theories, like little Morse code transmitters in their teeth. Yeah, I mean, one of the theories I quite liked was someone who wrote in saying there was a green man that ran between their shoulders. And he knew this on authority because he also had a green man. And so that was precisely how they did it.

[Soren Wheeler]

But you are totally convinced that this was a carefully worked out trick of some kind?

[Jesse Cox]

Yes. That is the one part of almost certainty I can say.

[Soren Wheeler]

There has to be some secret code, some tapping of the. Some. Something.

[Tim Howard]

Well, you're not the first person to

[Patrick Purdon]

say that people were constantly trying to

[Penn Jillette]

guess what the code was.

[Robert Krulwich]

That's Jim Steinmeier.

[Jesse Cox]

I'm an author and a consultant to magicians.

[Robert Krulwich]

He says that at the time, some

[Tim Howard]

magicians in London thought that his stammer was part of the code.

[Jesse Cox]

Two nuts.

[Lulu Miller]

I can just think.

[Jesse Cox]

Yes.

[Robert Krulwich]

Jesse, for his part, ended up going through a ton of these theories as he interviewed magicians and historians, read through magic books. Initially, one of the theories that made

[Jesse Cox]

sense to him is that the code was in the silence. That basically my grandparents and my grandma was so in sync that between each time a sound or a word was uttered, they'd inside their head, start going through the Alphabet, and they'd be so in tune and so in sync that whatever letter that matched up, that, that would be a code.

[Soren Wheeler]

Wait, let me ask. So, Chad.

[Robert Krulwich]

A, B, C. Hi.

[Soren Wheeler]

D. No, stop at C. I am wondering.

[Robert Krulwich]

A, B, C, D, E, F, G.

[Soren Wheeler]

The next letter is going to be J. I'm going to be standing for

[Jesse Cox]

a whole F. Yeah, of course, of course.

[Tim Howard]

I.

[Jesse Cox]

As soon as you start playing any of these theories out in real time, you realize how ridiculous they are.

[Robert Krulwich]

And if you listen to the second broadcast of the two that survived, you hear something that makes the whole idea of a code seem kind of impossible.

[Jesse Cox]

Yeah, that was a test they did on the airplane broadcast.

[Robert Krulwich]

In that broadcast, his grandma, she was

[Jesse Cox]

in an aeroplane, flying at a great height, at a great speed towards some or other, but we're not sure where, flying around Bristol.

[Robert Krulwich]

And she was in this place at the same moment that he was on stage.

[Jesse Cox]

Exactly. And on that time, there were numbered envelopes on everyone's seat. And my grandfather said, okay, everyone write something and put it in the envelope. Seal it up.

[Robert Krulwich]

Just write a poem off the top of your head.

[Jesse Cox]

150 people do this. And then Sid turns to one of the judges and says, okay, pick two numbers from one to 150. And then someone goes into the audience and goes and picks those two envelopes, brings them back to the stage, gives them to the judges, and then the judge picks one of the envelopes, pulls out the poem, and then holds it in front of my grandfather.

[Robert Krulwich]

So here you have a poem chosen seemingly at random. And Leslie, the grandma, is several thousand feet in the air. And when they finally connect to her.

[Jesse Cox]

Bristol.

[Lulu Miller]

Come in, will you?

[Jesse Cox]

Hello. Via shortwave relay, Leslie is still completely isolated.

[Robert Krulwich]

She can't even hear a word that they're saying.

[Jesse Cox]

She never had a pair of headphones, so she could never actually hear what was going on in the studio. She literally just spoke in to a microphone once. The technician said, leslie, we're ready for you. We're ready for you.

[Lulu Miller]

All right.

[Robert Krulwich]

So thousands of feet below, Sidney is there furrowing his brow. And the poem he's trying to send her is from Keats. One line that goes, Hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou never wert.

[Lulu Miller]

A bird.

[Jesse Cox]

One bird.

[Lulu Miller]

Oh, it's. It's two lines. Bird, spirit.

[Robert Krulwich]

I've got it.

[Lulu Miller]

I can guess it. Hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou never wert.

[Jesse Cox]

Ms. Young, would you read out what is written down on the piece of paper that you hold?

[Lulu Miller]

Hail to the blithe spirit, bird thou never wert.

[Jesse Cox]

Thank you.

[Robert Krulwich]

The crazy part is that in that trick, your grandpa doesn't even talk to her.

[Jesse Cox]

There's complete silence between Sid and Leslie. And if there's silence, there can be no coding. So, you know, it was kind of this, this wonderful process. I'd talk to people, and even as they came up with theories, you'd listen to the tape and then realize that even the theories themselves just seem so implausible.

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, maybe it's the narrator. Do you think it's the narrator? That whatever it is the narrator says each night, which is before you're. Before the game is even on, somehow encoded into that, that man's introduction is

[Soren Wheeler]

the answer no, because the audience hasn't yet gone and done its random act when he starts the show.

[Jesse Cox]

There was one thing that I discovered from reading the magic books, and this was this whole idea about passing on a piece of information through a third party. Now, my grandfather never speaks to my grandma, but he says to the technician in the studio, can you please call Gilbert Sullivan in the strada cruiser and ask my wife to stand by? Then the technician calls Gilbert and says, gilbert, can you please ask Lesley to stand by? And then Gilbert Sullivan says to my grandma, Leslie, please stand by. Now, that is the only thing I can see where there's some kind of communication.

[Soren Wheeler]

But then how would Standby communicate something like a random sentence from a book or whatever?

[Jesse Cox]

Exactly. And that's then essentially where the theory falls down. Because then what happens next is that my grandma basically successfully recites a half written crossword which someone has put into an envelope and pass up to my grandpa. So, like, you go, how. How standby means. Means, you know, six down? I have no idea. So really, I'm back to square one again. I can't work it out. I've got, you know, the question.

[Soren Wheeler]

To this day, you don't know to

[Jesse Cox]

this day, I do not know where to say.

[Tim Howard]

Where's the.

[Robert Krulwich]

Wait.

[Soren Wheeler]

No, we can't. No, there's got to be somebody who knows. Can't believe we could go to this interview.

[Jesse Cox]

We have no.

[Soren Wheeler]

We have no.

[Robert Krulwich]

So it's. It's the technician. It's gotta be the technician. You gotta get to the technician because the technician is looking at her and his doing something or the pilot.

[Soren Wheeler]

All have to do is move their lips.

[Robert Krulwich]

Something is happening with that man's eyebrows. That's the code. It's the eyebrows.

[Jesse Cox]

I feel like I'm just listening to this, like, what's been going on in my head for about 10, 12 years.

[Robert Krulwich]

So then I asked Jesse, like, what happened when he talked to his grandma.

[Jesse Cox]

Total dead end. You mean, like growing up around. Once we discovered this story around the dinner table when we visited her, it would always be, but why don't you tell us? Why can't you tell us? We're family. Surely you can tell us. And she would fob us off and just say, you are the judge. That is the line that they finished, or that is the line they finished with every single broadcast. Anything to say?

[Lulu Miller]

Well, only. Thanks very much, everyone, and you're the judge.

[Jesse Cox]

Well, I think we.

[Penn Jillette]

Well, all right, I'm baffled.

[Jesse Cox]

Now back to Sidney Piddington in Piccadilly. She won't even give me the satisfaction of saying, yes, it was a trick. She won't even say that.

[Soren Wheeler]

Clearly, you aren't the favorite grandchildren. There was probably another. You have a cousin or a sibling whom she really adored. And one day, without your knowing it, she whispered the secret to her.

[Robert Krulwich]

What about to her son, your father. Did she tell your dad?

[Jesse Cox]

She told my dad something.

[Robert Krulwich]

What? What did she tell him?

[Jesse Cox]

I have no idea. He will not even admit being told something if she slipped up.

[Robert Krulwich]

This is Jesse's dad.

[Jesse Cox]

And I'm not even sure that she. She did slip up, but I had to finish that sentence. And I had grilled my dad. I don't understand why you can't say, yes, Leslie did tell me something. I'm not going to tell you, but, yes, she did actually tell me something.

[Robert Krulwich]

If my mum entrusted me with something

[Jesse Cox]

all those years ago, then I will keep that trust. Why? Because I believe in keeping trust. My dad won't tell my mum. They've been together for over 30 years. You'll just have to. To continue not knowing. There's no book that's published.

[Patrick Purdon]

There's no one that came out and

[Penn Jillette]

said, I was the fellow who worked behind the scenes.

[Patrick Purdon]

With the Piddingtons.

[Jesse Cox]

Let me tell you how it was done.

[Robert Krulwich]

That's Jim Steinmeier again.

[Jesse Cox]

They left people guessing and walked away. Well, the thing that got me is when I was talking to magicians and they said we can repeat everything that they did, really?

[Robert Krulwich]

So they can actually do. I mean, like, you know, one of them is in a plane and another one's on the.

[Jesse Cox]

Apparently. But they still themselves don't know 100% for sure how my grandparents did it.

[Robert Krulwich]

If we could figure this out, would you want. It sounds like you would want to know the answer.

[Jesse Cox]

I'm not so sure anymore, really. We all say we want to know and we all go completely crazy and mad. But I feel like this story wouldn't have lasted for 60 years. It wouldn't still captivate people today if they'd told people, if they hadn't kept to their line. You are the judge. I kind of feel like that's almost the greater magic than whatever magic they were doing.

[Robert Krulwich]

I just feel like this is a black box that we can shine a light into it and go, okay, check that one off the list. Now we can go to the other one.

[Soren Wheeler]

This is the cool thing. Now, if we can't figure it out, then you will be very happy with our program. If we can figure it out, we will call you and say, do not listen to this show because it will deeply disappoint you.

[Jesse Cox]

Well, I mean, the thing I think for me that made me come to peace with not finding out and not knowing the answer was that a lot of the interviews I did with my grandma were from a few years ago and she actually isn't very well. She has dementia and she's been sick the past couple of years and so she physically can't tell it anymore. And yeah, for me, there is something about. You know, I visit my grandma now and you go, she was amazing. She not only did she make this incredible program with my grandfather that had 20 million people listen to them, which is just incredible when you think of the 1950s, they've managed to.

[Tim Howard]

What?

[Robert Krulwich]

What happened?

[Soren Wheeler]

Hey.

[Robert Krulwich]

No, no, no.

[Lulu Miller]

Jesse, come back.

[Soren Wheeler]

No, we just went straight on the hour. It was exactly. It's exactly nine seconds ago is the hour.

[Robert Krulwich]

Mother, his cell phone.

[Tim Howard]

I'm just going to call him.

[Soren Wheeler]

Yeah.

[Lulu Miller]

Hello?

[Robert Krulwich]

Hello?

[Lulu Miller]

Yeah, hi. Your booking ran out just a minute ago.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah, we noticed that it. That.

[Lulu Miller]

Yeah, yeah, I think we'll probably need to use the phone cuz that booth now needs to be used. Sorry.

[Robert Krulwich]

So we called Jesse back and while we didn't Drag him back into the studio. Actually, we couldn't. He did send us this tape.

[Jesse Cox]

Now, you've held onto this secret for so many, so, so many years. Why haven't you wanted to reveal it to anybody?

[Lulu Miller]

I think the reason I haven't ever wanted to reveal the secret is because it's a wonderful mystery. And I like to think that after I've died, people will still say, how did they do it? Was it or wasn't? Just tickles me to think of that.

[Jesse Cox]

A lot of secrets, magic secrets, they get passed down from generations and they get re performed over and over again. I guess that very much becomes a part of that family. Now, as a performer myself, if I wanted to bring back the Pitytons, would you feel like you could hand down this magic trick to his, to your grandson to carry it on?

[Lulu Miller]

Of course. If I had a grandson who wanted to carry it on, I'd have enormous difficulty telling him how to. I don't think it would be possible because there's an awful lot that I wouldn't be able to tell him.

[Jesse Cox]

What do you mean you wouldn't be able to tell that grandson?

[Lulu Miller]

It's hard to explain why I wouldn't be able to. It's just that I wouldn't be able to. That's all I can say about that.

[Robert Krulwich]

Our sincere thanks to Jesse Cox for so graciously allowing us to air that story. And also thank you to ABC National Radio's 360documentaries, who produced the story with him. It's called Keep Them Guessing. And we've linked to the original story on our website, Radiolab.org and we'd also like to take a moment here not only to thank Jesse for his amazing story, but to honor his memory. Jesse passed away very unexpectedly in 2017. Caught all of us off guard, and he is incredibly, incredibly missed. So.

[Soren Wheeler]

Well, you know, I don't think it's actually time for us to end this because I didn't tell you this. We were so interested in trying to figure out how they did that trick that Soren and I, because we just wanted to find out, like, did somebody know how they did it? So we called this guy. Who ruined everything. This is Penn Jillette, who you probably know from Penn and Teller, famous for doing magic tricks and then telling you how they're done now. I don't really know what I was expecting when we called him. I guess I was thinking he would know what they did, but he wouldn't choose to tell us. I didn't know. But when we called him and we played him the story. As soon as he heard it, he

[Penn Jillette]

said, oh, it's a book test. Right? It's a book test. It's an envelope switch.

[Robert Krulwich]

A what?

[Penn Jillette]

And there are, you know, three or four ways to do that.

[Robert Krulwich]

What did he say?

[Soren Wheeler]

He said, basically, I can tell you how they did it.

[Penn Jillette]

Yeah.

[Soren Wheeler]

Or how they might have done it, but you are not going to like it.

[Penn Jillette]

There you go. The only secret in magic, there's only one, and that is that the secret must be ugly. You cannot have a beautiful secret.

[Soren Wheeler]

A beautiful secret's the kind of thing that's short and sweet, like, he folded the hat twice.

[Penn Jillette]

Or there's mirrors under that table.

[Soren Wheeler]

When you hear it, it's like, oh, of course that's what they would do. And you love finding it out.

[Penn Jillette]

Then you will whisper it to the person next to you. So in magic, what you want is an idea that is not beautiful.

[Soren Wheeler]

So what he told us is a magic trick that stays secret is one that's so boring to tell. You don't want to tell it, and you don't even want to hear it.

[Penn Jillette]

If I have to say, he's lying about this. And there's gaffer's tape over behind there, and they're not actually telling you the exact truth here. And it gets. So you don't get an aha. One of the strongest feelings you can get in life, one of the most rewarding feelings is the feeling of an aha. I finally understand, if you don't have a wonderful aha, people won't figure it out. So I can tell you easily how they did that trick, but you will not get an aha.

[Soren Wheeler]

Basically, he said, the true answer to this one is gonna kill your joy.

[Penn Jillette]

Yeah, it's ugly.

[Robert Krulwich]

So did he. Did he tell you what they did?

[Jesse Cox]

Yeah.

[Robert Krulwich]

What did he say?

[Soren Wheeler]

Well, I'll tell you in just a second. He went into excruciating detail about how he thinks they did it.

[Penn Jillette]

Now, a book test. We actually do one in our show the Pentagon.

[Soren Wheeler]

But the more important thing, he was so right. Once we heard the explanation and the details and all, we were. We were both like, all right, well, This is like a kiss with a poison dart in it.

[Penn Jillette]

I love how much I bummed your shit.

[Soren Wheeler]

As you can hear, he knew exactly what he was doing. And in a way, he's asking us a deeper and more philosophical question. I've done this to you. Will you turn around and do it to your audience?

[Penn Jillette]

Well, all I've done to you because you get to edit all I have done is put you in precisely the position I live my life in. You now have to make the exact same decisions that I make. And I will tell you, and this is just true, that I would have played this particular thing differently with almost any other show. My move on the chessboard with another show would be to say, you know, I do have several ideas as to how this could be done, but I think I'm gonna be like the grandmother and go to my grave with this. You know, And I would have just given you that soundbite, which I just

[Soren Wheeler]

have, except that we have pivoted the entire piece called. So it's like all eyes have been directed to the next sentence. So that's a little difficult, but I

[Penn Jillette]

want to see how you solve a problem that I solve every day.

[Soren Wheeler]

But we have, like, a higher. You're entertaining, but we're entertaining with the caveat that we're supposed to be telling the truth as best we understand it. So we have a slightly different set of gods in our Mount Olympus than you do, which makes you very clear.

[Penn Jillette]

You don't really. You don't really. Because I am not suggesting that you lie.

[Soren Wheeler]

You're just gonna have to tell your audience what you think they need to hear. And that's where he left him. So in the days after the interview, we just got into this debate about what we should do. We obviously have an obligation to you. You listening? To tell you what we know.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yes. The whole deal.

[Penn Jillette]

Yeah.

[Soren Wheeler]

We can't pretend that we don't know something that we now do know. Know, even if it would make a much more beautiful story. So this leaves us in a conundrum. Are we.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah. Are we entertainers or are we actors?

[Soren Wheeler]

Journalists.

[Robert Krulwich]

Journalists.

[Jesse Cox]

You know.

[Soren Wheeler]

So here's where we ultimately came down. We have decided not to tell you how the Piddingtons did it. I mean, we're gonna tell you, but we're not gonna tell you here in this podcast, because we have now been soiled by this truth we learned off the record. And you, if you want to be soiled, sure, come and soil yourself. You can go to this URL radiolab.org theuglytruth don't click this.

[Robert Krulwich]

Radiolab.org theugglytruth don't no apostrophe.

[Soren Wheeler]

Click this and we just leave it to you. You can go there or you cannot.

[Penn Jillette]

All I have said to you is that it's a trick.

[Soren Wheeler]

Yeah.

[Penn Jillette]

And you knew that the fact that it wasn't the trick you wanted it to be.

[Soren Wheeler]

You know, he did turn sweet. At one moment we were talking about the grandma. The grandma tells the grandson in the conversation at the end, she's not sure she could explain to him how it went.

[Penn Jillette]

Well, that's beautiful. That is the most beautiful thing that happens in the whole thing because I think she's telling the truth. She may not know how the trick

[Soren Wheeler]

was done, and yet she was a party to it. She's the one. He says, you know, oftentimes when you're doing tricks, somebody knows everything and the other person is in the dark.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah. You mean like one of the partners intentionally not knows what's happening?

[Penn Jillette]

Yeah, There are tricks in the Penn and Teller show that I don't really know how they're done.

[Soren Wheeler]

It might have happened here. He may have decided that he would be the knowing one, she would be the innocent. And maybe therefore, and this is just a hunch, but just possibly everything she's saying to her grandchild, instead of being a kind of dodge or a little bit of a lie, maybe it was the whole truth.

[Robert Krulwich]

Hey, Abjad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krulwich, this is Radiolab.

[Soren Wheeler]

And today, today we are doing our Black Box hour.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah, and a black box is. It's a thing. It's a box that something goes in. You can see what that is. Something comes out which is different. You can see that, but you do

[Soren Wheeler]

not know what's going on in the middle.

[Robert Krulwich]

It's a mystery.

[Latif Nasser]

I love it. Shall we go inside?

[Jesse Cox]

Of course.

[Robert Krulwich]

And our next and final black box comes from our producer, Molly Webster.

[Jesse Cox]

And it begins into the butterfly rainforest, So that you can see the butterflies that are flying, in fact.

[Latif Nasser]

So a few days ago I was in Gainesville, Florida, at the Florida Museum of Natural History, where they have a rainforest. It's what, about, about three stories tall? It's like got a top that's all wrapped in a net and then it was covered in butterflies. Oh, my gosh.

[Lulu Miller]

There's so many.

[Latif Nasser]

Thousands.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yes.

[Jesse Cox]

So these are Heliconia's butterfly.

[Latif Nasser]

That's Andrei Surkoff.

[Jesse Cox]

I started looking at butterflies when I was 6 years old and I have never grew up.

[Latif Nasser]

He was my guide.

[Jesse Cox]

And here under this leaf, you can see an owl butterfly.

[Latif Nasser]

Wow. One wing is like the size of my palm. So there were red ones, black and

[Jesse Cox]

yellow ones, blue ones, zebra striped ones.

[Latif Nasser]

Is that a monarch?

[Robert Krulwich]

Yes.

[Jesse Cox]

Watch out, don't step on this butterfly.

[Latif Nasser]

It was like a Dr. Seussian land of butterflies. But I was there to look at the moment right before they become butterflies, which remains one of the most mysterious black boxes in nature. What I'm talking about is something called the chrysalis. The chrysalis, just to back up, at a certain point in all caterpillars lives after they've eaten a lot of leaves, they hit a certain weight that is

[Jesse Cox]

coded in their gene as their final weight.

[Latif Nasser]

Some hormones start pumping, some genetics turn on, and it starts growing a little shell. That's the chrysalis. And inside that chrysalis, as we know,

[Jesse Cox]

a caterpillar becomes a butterfly or moth.

[Robert Krulwich]

And this is a mystery.

[Latif Nasser]

What do you think happens inside the chrysalis?

[Robert Krulwich]

I think that actually, I've never thought about it, to be honest.

[Latif Nasser]

I don't know.

[Lulu Miller]

I don't understand how it works.

[Latif Nasser]

Not many people have. Are you, like, surprised that you actually don't know? Yeah, I'm surprised. I thought, like, I knew, and I don't. Those are folks I met at the museum.

[Robert Krulwich]

Hey, hold up. Now that I've thought about it for a second, isn't it simply that the caterpillar is inside the shell, it sort of snuggles up, and then it grows a wing off of its right side and then off of its left side, and it just pops wings out?

[Latif Nasser]

No, that is actually what I thought, but that's not right at all.

[Jesse Cox]

So the Maguire center is located on

[Latif Nasser]

three floors because here's the thing. So now we're going into the bowels of the building. When you take one of those little black boxes and you slice it open.

[Jesse Cox]

Shall we do it?

[Robert Krulwich]

Yes.

[Latif Nasser]

Which Andre was nice enough to do for me.

[Jesse Cox]

Sorry.

[Latif Nasser]

Even though he loves these guys, he took a tiny little chrysalis that's about an inch long, which a caterpillar had just gotten into one day ago, and he slowly began to cut. So we're taking our tweezer, like scissors through the outer layer of the chrysalis

[Jesse Cox]

until you can see pupil. Oh.

[Soren Wheeler]

What?

[Latif Nasser]

Oh, my gosh.

[Robert Krulwich]

What?

[Latif Nasser]

No, it was like. There was no caterpillar there.

[Robert Krulwich]

What do you mean?

[Latif Nasser]

There was no head. There were no legs. There was no antenna, no spiky spine. It's like a pale white yellow. It's very liquidy.

[Robert Krulwich]

What was there then?

[Latif Nasser]

Basically, just goo. Just like a runny, goopy goo. It looks like snot. All you had to do is give it, like, a little squeeze and then just went, oh.

[Jesse Cox]

Oh.

[Lulu Miller]

It just boosh.

[Latif Nasser]

Exploded it. He exploded it. I think he looks shocked, too.

[Robert Krulwich]

Wait, I don't understand. Where did the caterpillar go?

[Latif Nasser]

It seems like once the caterpillar gets into its shell, it Sort of just melts

[Jesse Cox]

its head, legs, antenna, abdomen.

[Latif Nasser]

They all just dissolve. Muscles themselves just sort of like dissolve away into individual muscle cells. And some of the cells rupture, and so they're inside the amino acids, the proteins, those all go floating out into space.

[Robert Krulwich]

Wait, you're saying the caterpillar just becomes like a soup of cells?

[Latif Nasser]

Yeah.

[Jesse Cox]

And yet somehow this soup will magically be transformed into a butterfly moth.

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, how does that happen?

[Latif Nasser]

That question. That question is the big question. Fat, metaphysical, quasi religious, semi mystical, philosophical question that people have been asking forever.

[Jesse Cox]

Yeah. So one of the big arguments that was taking place.

[Latif Nasser]

This is Matthew Cobb. He's a biologist and historian, and he says back in the 1600s, when naturalists saw that goo, they just thought, oh, well, clearly what's happening is that the caterpillar goes into the chrysalis and then

[Jesse Cox]

it actually dies, totally dies. And out of its burial cloth is going to come the new life, this

[Latif Nasser]

beautiful and completely new creature, death, as

[Patrick Purdon]

it were, and then a kind of resurrection.

[Latif Nasser]

That's Philip Clayton. He's a philosopher from the Claremont School of Theology. And he says from the beginning, people thought about and wrote about metamorphosis as

[Tim Howard]

a kind of spiritual ascent.

[Patrick Purdon]

Says somewhere in the New Testament, behold, the old has passed away, the new has surely come.

[Latif Nasser]

Basically, people saw the caterpillar as a symbol of our lowly, earthbound, lazy bodies. Right. And then the butterfly was sort of casting away all of that, and it represented our soul up in heaven, sort of in its most perfect form. Never mind that butterflies actually like to

[Jesse Cox]

eat feces and urine and other unappetizing

[Latif Nasser]

substances, according to Andre. Sounds tasty. Never mind that the metaphor is, like, inspiring at some level. Right. Because you think, oh, I've got all. I'm going to just become more. A more perfect version of myself. Right. But then the converse side of that is you cut open a chrysalis and it looks like a. A whole bunch of goo, and you think that is a hell of a lot of change. So the thing is, is that this transformation, either of the butterfly or of my soul, seems so dramatic, so miraculous, that it made some people think, like, geez, if you're gonna go to heaven, in the process, transform that much, is it even you up there, it still

[Patrick Purdon]

has to be you that makes it to heaven.

[Latif Nasser]

You can't change too much otherwise, like, someone else will be up there enjoying your afterlife.

[Patrick Purdon]

So certain memories and elements of your

[Soren Wheeler]

identity have to continue, just not all the elements.

[Latif Nasser]

Yeah, I'm so intrigued by that because I also think, like, When you undergo such a transformation, what do they think carries through?

[Tim Howard]

That's a really interesting question.

[Lulu Miller]

Cleaning out the poop and throwing away the moldy leaves, you have a lot of time to think.

[Latif Nasser]

Which brings us to Martha Weiss.

[Lulu Miller]

I am an associate professor of biology at Georgetown University.

[Latif Nasser]

She got to thinking about this question in more concrete terms.

[Lulu Miller]

Okay.

[Latif Nasser]

So she did an experiment.

[Lulu Miller]

What we did was we took a big green caterpillar and we did something that was not entirely nice.

[Latif Nasser]

She put them in a box, filled it with a nasty odor. And is the odor like an odor of a plant or.

[Lulu Miller]

It's actually a plant based odor, but it smells kind of like nail polish remains.

[Latif Nasser]

In any case, she gassed them with this nasty smell.

[Lulu Miller]

And then once they could smell the odor, then we gave them a zap.

[Latif Nasser]

Is that just like a zap? Just a zoop? A zap?

[Lulu Miller]

I think 10 seconds of zap.

[Latif Nasser]

10 seconds. And they did this over and over.

[Lulu Miller]

Odor, zap, odor, zap, odor.

[Latif Nasser]

Until eventually, most of these caterpillars learn to hate the smell. Every time they get a whiff, they head in the opposite direction.

[Lulu Miller]

Okay. So then we let them pupate, meaning

[Latif Nasser]

the caterpillar changes into its shell and organs dissolve, muscles melt.

[Lulu Miller]

You get this cataclysmic, catastrophic, chaotic change. And then one month later, the moth emerges. And now the drum roll. We're ready for the drum roll.

[Latif Nasser]

They give the moths a whiff.

[Robert Krulwich]

Okay.

[Latif Nasser]

And the moths hate the smell.

[Tim Howard]

Hmm.

[Latif Nasser]

I mean, normally moths don't care about the smell at all. It's like 50, 50. But these moths hated it somehow.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm confused. What does that mean?

[Latif Nasser]

That means a memory made it through the goo.

[Soren Wheeler]

Oh.

[Latif Nasser]

And it came out the other side.

[Lulu Miller]

Oh.

[Latif Nasser]

What's your. What's your feeling like coming out of this?

[Lulu Miller]

My feeling is, wow. I think it's amazing that a caterpillar can have an experience, go into its chrysalis, five weeks pass, emerge as a seemingly different organism, and that it still can recall experiences that happened to it when it was a caterpillar.

[Robert Krulwich]

And how does that happen?

[Lulu Miller]

The answer to this question is we do not know.

[Latif Nasser]

But. But out there, floating in that sea of goo is actually a tiny little speck of brain. Some of the brain is dissolved away, but there's this, like, microscopic fragment that has made it through. And Martha suspects that nestled into that fragment is this memory.

[Robert Krulwich]

Oh, it's like a little boop. It's like a little beacon.

[Lulu Miller]

Boop.

[Latif Nasser]

And it turns out there are others, too. There's a speck of gut, some nerves Some muscle. It's not as gooey as it seems.

[Robert Krulwich]

God, it's like, it's like I can't help wondering what does the butterfly know about its caterpillar life? Like it knows this one tiny thing, but how much else does it know it crawled, that it had?

[Latif Nasser]

There's no answer to that question. But Martha says that these types of questions, like, come up all the time. In fact, one of her colleagues and

[Lulu Miller]

I was talking to Doug the other day and he said that he had gotten an email from a guy who was, I'm not exactly sure what flavor of Christian, but had, but he had gone into the whole resurrection thing and he felt like this was, you know, when he ascended, that he wondered if he would then be able to, to remember his life on Earth.

[Latif Nasser]

Well, here's the answer.

[Robert Krulwich]

What answer?

[Latif Nasser]

Well, the answer to the question about what carries through the continuity question.

[Robert Krulwich]

Oh, right, yes.

[Latif Nasser]

And memory carries through, which is freaking

[Robert Krulwich]

cool, I gotta say.

[Latif Nasser]

It is freaking cool, but there's a little more freaking cool, all right? And that is that there's actually a continuity, but it goes in the reverse direction.

[Robert Krulwich]

What does that even mean?

[Latif Nasser]

Well, Matthew Cobb told me this story

[Jesse Cox]

about this guy, this 17th century man who I never had, never heard of. Jean. His name's written Swammerdam, but is probably more pronounced Swammerdam.

[Latif Nasser]

Schwammerdam.

[Jesse Cox]

Schwammerdam, Schwammerdamm.

[Latif Nasser]

Okay, that's Jan Swammerdam, a Dutch microscopist from the 1600s.

[Jesse Cox]

He was definitely the first to do some very clear dissections of the chrysalis and the caterpillar. And one day in Paris, in front of this crowd of assembled worthies, bewigged and bestocking, he gets a fat white caterpillar, gets a scalpel or a tiny little thin bit of glass, and he dissects it. He just opens it up at the back, along its back, a long line. And what he sees inside, or what he can show them, is that in fact there are some of the structures of the future butterfly. Its wings, its antennae, and even its legs that are actually already formed, even before pupation takes place.

[Latif Nasser]

So you peel back the skin of a caterpillar and beneath it you see the new creature hidden.

[Jesse Cox]

Absolutely. There's no decay.

[Latif Nasser]

It's so bizarre. It's like if you were to skin me and there's my 70 year old self is inside of me or something.

[Robert Krulwich]

Wait, and the wings also survive the goo?

[Latif Nasser]

Yeah, so it's like the caterpillar will actually start to grow little tiny adult parts that are super thin and transparent, and it just keeps them tightly rolled up and hidden up against the edges of the chrysalis. But they don't actually ever go through the goofy or become the goo.

[Jesse Cox]

What he'd then shown was, you know what? This isn't about death. This isn't about decay. This is actually about transformation.

[Latif Nasser]

I don't know, it's kind of eerie, like. It's not just what of me carries forward into the future. It's like what of my future self is in me right now.

[Robert Krulwich]

Thanks to our producers this hour. Tim Howard, Molly Webster, Jesse Cox, and thanks to you guys for Living Listening.

[Soren Wheeler]

Yeah,

[Lulu Miller]

Real quick, before I let you go, I wanted to tell you that we shared an amazing story on our feed about the butterfly researcher you just heard, Dr. Martha Weiss, and how she later befriended a little boy on the other side of the world who wanted to do his own caterpillar memory study. Martha's daughter is actually an audio reporter and she captured the whole adventure of on tape, which was first published in the audio magazine Signal Hill. And it was so beautiful we featured it on our feed last year. The episode is called Caterpillar Roadshow, and you can find it on Radiolab or on Signalhill fm. Sam? Hi, I'm gabby. I'm from san francisco and here are the staff credits. Radiolab is hosted by lula miller and latif nasser. Soren wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah sandbach is our executive director. Our managing editor is pat walters. Dylan keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes jeremy bloom, w. Harry fortuna, david gable, maria paz, gutierrez, sindhu nainasembandan, matt kielty, mona mcgacher, annie mckeown, alex neeson, sara kari, rebecca rand, anisa vitze, arian wack, molly webster and jessica young, with help from gabby santis. Our fact checkers are diane kelly, emily krieger, natalie middleton, angeli mercado and sophie semey. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Simons foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.