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Bliss
01:12:05
Moments of total, world-shaking bliss are not easy to come by. Maybe that's what makes them feel so life-altering when they strike. And so worth chasing. This hour: stories of striving, grasping, tripping, and falling for happiness, perfection, and ideals.
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Parents. When you visit California, childhood rules. If you don't remember how awesome childhood is, just ask yourself, what would kids do? Dance to a giant organ played by ocean waves? Yep. Camp in floating tree houses hundreds of feet off the ground. Check. Jump in a big tub of mud. On purpose. Call it rejuvenation. We don't care. Just pack your fun pants and let childhood rule your family vacation. Discover why California is the ultimate playground@VisitCalifornia.com. Listener supported WNYC Studios. Oh, wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. You're listening. Listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab from wnyc. Yeah, and npr. Okay. Hello, hello, hello, hello. Hi. How are you? We are super, super excited to talk with you. Oh, same with me. I'm sorry about the delay and so. Oh, it's fine. No, it's a busy day. Life is crazy. Life is crazy. Yeah, I know, but you were so enthusiastic. So I like, just. I need to talk to these guys. They really mean it. This is Alex. Alexander Gamma. Are you Norwegian? All the way back. Yeah, typical Norwegian. You know, if typical includes things like biking in Sahara and climbing Everest and things like that. He's kind of a professional adventurer and we got him into the studio because he made a video last year on one of his trips. Gotta tell you, this video, it's maybe the most amazing Internet video I have ever seen. I think so, too. So let me just set the scene for you. Okay. What you see in the video is this guy, Alex, kind of moving along. He's on skis, this snowy snowscape. He's filming himself. He's got the camera in his right hand. Where is he exactly? Antarctica. He's on a three month trek to the South Pole and back by himself. And what he'd been doing is every couple of days on his trip, you know, every 200 kilometers or so, he would bury stuff in the snow, some fuel and sometimes a little bit of gear that I didn't use. Was that just to lighten your load? Yeah, you know, because every ounce of unneeded weight has to go. So in this video, it's day 86. Almost three months since I left. That's three months of walking ten hours a day. Then I lost almost 25 kilos, 55 pounds. He's exhausted. He's come upon his last cash. So on the last cache where this video is captured, what you see is Alex kneel in the snow, start to dig. I'm telling that I'm quite hungry. Whatever's in this last cache in the snow. It's been three months since he buried it, so I didn't really recall what was there. He hopes it's something good. So he digs up this bag of stuff, starts rifling through it. Some Vaseline, some zinc ointment. It's just a mess. Nothing. It's. It's pretty much all trash. But then. Yeah. Yeah. What? What is it? He holds up a double pack of Cheese Doodles. Then he throws it up in the air. Yeah. And then this is. This is my favorite part. He just freezes. And he's staring off into the distance, almost like, did that happen? Is it real? So he starts to dig some more. And then. Was it this time? Huge chocolate bar? It's milk chocolate. And then it's just like he finds cementos. I find more and more and more. Have you ever been that happy in your life? Well, I've been thinking about that. When did you shout last time you were so happy. I think that's why we've been watching this video over and over again, because none of us can remember. It's like, what stands between you and that feeling is a really interesting question. Yeah, it's three months with hunger. Actually. I think the reason I like this video so much is not just because he's happy. It's that he somehow stumbled into this moment of perfection. It's just like a perfect situation. By being so tired and so hungry and finding such a stash of candy that he had forgotten that he left, he created a moment of just absolute, complete bliss. In this hour on Radiolab, we're going to be searching for moments like Alex had up in Antarctica. We're going to be searching for bliss. Bliss of all different sorts. Perfect moments, perfect worlds. The kind of bliss that slips right through your fingers. And the kind of bliss that just might last and last and last. All right, we're gonna begin with a story that kind of inspired this show. We would have never done a show about the word bliss were it not for the following story, which is about a bliss. A. What do you mean? A bliss that'll make sense in just a second. Story comes from our producer, Tim Howard, and it begins with a box of tapes. Alright, so check it out. This is. We're in my office and you've got a rectangular package here. It is a very old looking box. Doesn't look like much. It's just about like 15 cassettes. Tape number six. Singing and playing to friends in America to the yo of I narrative. Okay, so this is Charles. Charles Casio. Bliss an amazing character. And that's Richard. Richard Ure. He's the fellow who gave me the cassettes. He was a friend of Charles. Yeah. So these were just like sitting in his attic or something. Garage, I think. He looked like, I suppose, a little gnome, a little leprechaun, almost to life. To life like I am. He was short, bald and laughter the whole time. He was a lovable character. Simple as that. This is my favorite one. Wait a second. Just explain why we're talking about this guy. Sure. Because these tapes tell an amazing story about a guy who really embodied his name. And he tried to save the world, but ultimately just tried too hard. The turning point in my life came in 1908. We can start the story here. This is from a lecture that he gave decades later. So the story goes, it's 1908 and he's a little kid living in what's now the Ukraine. Okay. And his name is Carl Blitz. Not Charles Bliss? Not Charles Bliss. Karl Blitz. B, L, I, T Z, that's his original name. And little Carl was fascinated by tales of discovery and adventure. My name is Erica Okrent. Erica wrote about Charles Bliss in this great book called in the Land of Invented Languages. Getting back to the story. One day, she says, When Carl was 11, a lecture came through town about some Austin polar expeditions, polar expedition to explorers, talking about their trek across the North Pole. And he was so inspired by what he saw and heard at that lecture that even decades later, he couldn't talk about it. And my father took me to this. Excuse me. Without getting choked up. My Moshe ordained me. My father took me to this lecture. And there I saw men who left their warm homes to secure existence and went out into the Arctic, into the ice and snow, in almost certain deaths. For what? For what? For in search of knowledge. For an idea as he tells it on those tapes. That was the beginning of his big idea that was going to change the world. Fast forward a few years. I came to Vienna after the First World War. He did end up going to the Technical University of Vienna. I was suddenly discovered to be the best mandolin player Austria. And one time I played with a full opera orchestra under the direction of the composer Franz Schrecker. Ah, those were the days. And then everything changed. In 1938, German troops swarm across the Austrian border. The Nazis came to town. Nazis came to town. He was sent to Dachau and then Buchenwald, you know, the concentration camps. One feeling, one wish, one desire to end my life. All around him, people were being worked to death or outright Exterminated. But his wife Claire, was a German Catholic with connections. And Claire, my good wife, smuggled my mandoline and my guitar into the concentration camp. I became so famous among artists that, for instance, our Blockfida would come into our barrack and say. And you could say that it was here in Buchenwald that Carl started to develop his ideas about language, about the ways that you can manipulate words. For instance, there was this one song that all the prisoners sang, the Bogenwald Lied, one of the saddest songs I can ever make. Had the saddest lyrics in the world. At a certain point, Carl started to play around with the song. You know, he'd swap out some of the sad lyrics for some jokes, saying it for his fellow prisoners. And they laughed and laughed and laughed and forgot for a few minutes that they are in the darkest and the most terrible holes on earth. And on the flip side, every evening, the guards would march all the prisoners outside, force them to stand there in the cold in front of these loudspeakers, make them listen to these speeches, speeches of Hitler and Goebbels screaming Nazi slogans like, which means Germany above all. There are certain words which make you mad, which drives you mad. But after about a year, his wife somehow wrangled a British visa for him, and he gets out. Thank heavens those dreadful times are gone. And now I can play here for you an improvisation as it comes into my mind. In 1939, he went to Britain and got a job as a manager of a factory. But he arrived in England just as. The Blitz begins. The Germans start to bomb every major city in England. The noise that you hear at the moment is the sound of the air raid siren. And every time he'd introduce himself to somebody new, they'd shudder. That can't be your name because of Blitzkrieg. It had that association, yes. You can't go around here in Great Britain with a name like Blitz. And so I changed from the warlike Blitz to the peaceful Bliss. That was how he became Charles Bliss. Bliss has all the right associations. So he went forward with the feeling of that he was now Bliss and would bring happiness to the world. And a year later, he and his wife end up in China, in Shanghai, where there was a big population of exiled Jews. Shanghai was the only place that would take them at that time. And there in China. And there in China, I got the opportunity of my lifetime. And now we come to his big idea. I realized what I did not know, that the Chinese have a different way of writing. He became enraptured by the Chinese writing that he saw. The Chinese use symbols, and each symbol is. And he writes about having this epiphany. When he saw the Chinese symbol for man, he saw that the Chinese written form of man sort of looks like a man. It looks like a sik figure, man, and it means man. He doesn't even know what the Chinese word for man is. He doesn't know how to say man, but that doesn't matter. He is skipping the word and going directly into the meaning. So here was a way of getting beyond language. You could think the word in any language if you see it in the symbol. And that was a revelation. Why? Well, I mean, think back to the concentration camps when they were outside in front of those loudspeakers listening to Hitler, saying stuff like Deutschland uber alles. You know, Germany above all, that phrase. Charles knew that it actually predated the Nazis. That was coined a hundred years earlier than in 1848. And originally, it was meant as a rallying cry to bring together all of these separate principalities. The Kingdom of Bavaria, the Kingdom of Saxonia, that spoke German. But these were not one country. So when they said Deutschland uber alles, it meant unification, the nation above the states. Oh, so it wasn't necessarily an aggressive thing. No. But. But Hitler. Hitler changed the meaning. Instead of the nation above all states, he changed it to the nation. Everything about all the countries of the world above all other nations. So you see what happened. This phrase that started meaning one thing, Unification. Yeah. Became the opposite. Yeah. This is what the Nazis did. False words, lies. They would bend words to obscure the truth of what they were doing. Extermination, they call it solution. By doing that, as he saw it, they were able to convince good, sane people, his neighbors, to go along with the genocide. And I realized that something must be done to make language more truer to nature. Words were the problem. Words made people do cruel things to each other. They tear our society apart. Words were dangerous instruments. They cause violence. They cause wars. So when he saw the Chinese symbol for man, he thought this might be the answer. And the idea came up to me that I should invent symbols like the Chinese symbols, but even clearer, which are so simple and pictorial that even children can read them. If he could sit down and work it out, you would look at the symbol and know what it meant instantly, regardless of what language you spoke. You wouldn't even need words which he felt could be manipulated. You could just have the symbol and get straight to the. The truth of the matter and the way he saw it right off the bat. You'd have all of these benefits. Frenchmen and Finns, Englishmen and Estonians. Language barriers would be out the window. Everything from traffic accidents to health problems could be avoided, he thought, if his symbol system would just be adopted. He had this vision that high level political and commercial negotiations would be done in symbols. Did he say anything as grand as, like, war wouldn't happen constantly? And even, of course, he reckoned Hitler wouldn't have happened, basically that if the German people had understood blue symbols, they wouldn't have copped Goebbels propaganda. Now that's a pretty tall order. But it did seem to be what he thought. Everything could be cured by this system. He's the biggest dreamer ever. Yeah. How did he go about doing this? He started working out what the basic lines and shapes would be. He also wanted to make sure you could produce it with a typewriter. So it had to be a limited set of shapes out of which everything could be created. Okay. So he works on it for seven years. Seven years. And he comes up with that. Wow, that is a big one. This massive book called Lysymbolics Semantology, A logical writing for an illogical world that says it all. Where he explains the logic of his system. For example, here. Here's a symbol for sword, which looks exactly like a sword. And. And then the sword plus a forward arrow means attack. I buy it. And then if you see a symbol for sword and another symbol for sword and they're crossed, that means war. So that's the idea that you take these basic elemental symbols and combine them. Exactly. All right, here's another one. This symbol here is like the top half of a circle, like a little rainbow, but just one line that means mind. Mind. It looks like the top of a skull. Ah. Now if I were to take that symbol for mind and I were to go like this, I were to put inside it a question mark that means I don't know or I'm doubt. Doubt. And there are also, you know, ways to indicate verbs and adjectives and first person, second person, the past, the future. But kind of the one thing that it did that no other language or symbol system or anything has attempted to do, at least as far as I know, is that it would make clear when something was what he called a human evaluation. You know, basically an opinion. And what you would do is you put this little. This little V symbol and you put it above this symbol. And why V? Well, because, you know how V is balanced on a point and it's unstable. It wobbles to him. That represents opinions, human evaluations, anything that comes out of the mind. Or take metaphors. If you say something which is a metaphor metaphor, as he says, you must put up the metaphor sign to alert the reader. Do not take this literally. Stop. Metaphor ahead. Not exactly bulletproof, but I can see the thinking there. I actually think it's pretty impressive. Okay, so what happens next? Well, after he finishes this, and he and his wife are living in Australia at the time, they spent all their savings on producing this book and sent it out to professors, government officials, heads of state, something like 6,000 people. And they waited for the orders to start rolling in, and no response from anybody. And then they had nothing. Can't say I didn't see that coming. Yeah. And with great disappointment, Charles went to work as a welder in a factory at General Motors, Holden's. He was working on the production line almost as a robot. And a year later, his wife died. You know, he had fought in World War I. He had been in a concentration camp. He had lived in exile. But he says this was the lowest point of his life until one day, 1971, this, as he said, this letter floated onto his desk with this picture of this beautiful dimpled child proudly using his symbols. Yeah, it was a poster. A poster? A poster. This is Shirley, Shirley McNaughton. And at the time, she was a nurse at a place called the occ, so, the Ontario Crippled Children's Center, a name that we were very happy to leave behind us. They've since changed from the name. I started there in 1968, and Shirley was part of this group of teachers and nurses who worked with these kids who suffered from cerebral palsy. If you have cerebral palsy, it's the motor control from the brain that's been affected, which meant that they had trouble moving their arms or legs. And even in some cases, they couldn't speak. They couldn't form words. And then a film that was made of this class, you see these young kids, children from five to seven, all sitting in wheelchairs, and they're watching the teacher. She talks to them, and you hear them try to talk to her, but they can't. These kids had no way to communicate. Couldn't they learn how to read? They could if you knew what they were understanding. And they have no way to communicate that to you. The only thing all these kids had were pictures that they could point at. They had a picture of a toilet, a picture of food, a picture of a drink, a picture of a bed. They were Limited to that kind of communication. But I knew they were bright. But if they couldn't move and they couldn't speak, how would you know? My insight on that was the twinkle in their eyes. But she says a lot of doctors and nurses at the time thought I was crazy. Thought there really wasn't much going on inside these kids heads. You know, they thought I was projecting into the children. What she needed, she said, was a way to get through to them. So one day she was at the library with a colleague and they come across this dusty old volume that had never been checked out, called, you guessed it, the Symbolics. And what did you first think when you saw it? Oh, boy. Can I get back to the group? How fast can I get back to the group with this? Really, this is exactly what we need. So do you remember what the first symbols were? I think it was I and you. I looks kind of like a standing person. An upright line, small horizontal line at the base. Yep. Next to it, the number one, which means first person, you, is the same symbol but with the number two for second person. And then they had to have a verb, and it was love, heart, with an error through it. So now they've got a sentence, I love you. One of our mothers says the happiest moment she's ever had with her child was when her child came home and said, I love you. You know. So Shirley and her staff started to add more symbols. They caught on, and pretty soon they created this giant laminated chart. It had I and you and he, she, we, and they. Then it had mother, father, grandma, grandpa, doctor, nurse, teacher, therapist, postman, fireman, librarian, dentist. Eventually they added adjectives. Happy, sad and frustrated. All the verbs you had, love and like, and hate, want, need, understand. Pretty soon the kids started to do amazing things with simple combinations. They started to improvise. Shirley remembers asking one kid, Terry Martin, what did he want to be for Halloween? Terry pointed first at the symbol for creature. A creature, not a person. Then he pointed at the symbol for drinks, then blood, then night. A creature who drinks blood at night. Right. He wanted to be a vampire. Ah. He spelt a new word. It sounds like an explosion with these kids. It was. It was for the first time, she says she could actually talk to them, like know who they were. Yeah, you got to know who the leaders were in the classroom. Those who wanted to help others, those who copied others. And it was around then that she and the other teachers decided to send Charles Bliss that letter. We were sharing our excitement for this gift he'd given to the children. You know, he was in Australia. He was an elderly man. We had no thought that he would come and visit us. You know, it didn't enter our mind. But Charles Bliss, he was delighted. He had battled for so long for recognition, and now he had it. He mortgages his house and flies over. I was so happy there. And I played my mandoline and told them jokes. He dances around and kisses everybody effusively. And they laughed and laughed and laughed their head off. He had long conversations with the kids in symbols. He was very happy about the children. Joy. Joy. That's just joy. But somewhere along the way, he notices something. Shirley. Shirley. And the teachers had begun to augment the system. They'd begun to add their own symbols, such as the opposite meaning symbol. This allowed the kids to take one of bliss standard symbols and just invert the meaning. Opposite of happy, sad, opposite of up, down, opposite of in, out seemed to her. This would effectively double the number of adjectives, which would be great for the kids. And we developed rules for how to combine symbols, for how to be more precise with the symbols. She threw in some new pronouns that were missing the difference between he and him and his. In short, I would make the adaptations I needed to make. From the very beginning, we were using it to meet the children's needs, their specific needs. And of course, that is not what he had in his mind. He wanted a system that was universal. Every change that she made created like a separate dialect. He would get very emotional about it. So when he got back to Australia, he started writing all these letters, basically taking issue with her changes and her failure to understand how his system works. Meanwhile, thanks to Shirley, word about bliss symbols had spread way beyond Canada to Hungary, France, Sweden, Israel, Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe, yeah. And then Argentina, Brazil, Finland, Iceland, Italy, Bermuda, Guam, Japan, Portugal, Spain, Netherlands, Hungary, Switzerland, Venezuela, Madagascar, Yugoslavia. It spread to all these places. Yeah. And in each place, the symbols would inevitably get tweaked to suit that country. For example, in Israel, because the writing goes from right to left. Yeah, the bliss symbols went from right to left. But what really pained him the most, what really got him, was that these teachers were using his symbols as a step toward English or French or German or Hebrew or whatever. It was just a way to get the kids to their native languages. The teachers always saw it the way they saw it. You start the kids on bliss, and then you introduce reading and letters, and eventually they're fully literate, at which point you don't need the bliss symbols. This was the ultimate insult to him. They were Using his system to bring these kids back to the very thing that he was trying to get everyone away from. Evil words. Yeah. If I try to explain it to them, they don't want to listen to me. They look through me. What shall I do? What shall I do? I don't know. I don't know. And it's right about this point in the story that you start to hear a different Charles Place. Shirley McNaughton has perverted. My work has perverted and perverted and perverted. Is he saying perverted? Yeah. She smiles, she beguiles, and she lies. He kept sending Shirley and the other teachers letters, and the letters got angrier and angrier. This was not what the language was for. This was a universal language that had nothing to do with spoken language. You are ruining my system. You are abusing it. And eventually, he decided to take matters into his own hands, and he traveled back to Canada, and he started going to the various centers where the kids were using his symbols and saying horrible things about me and getting them very upset. That's when I got upset. I got upset when he got them upset. Not long after, Shirley receives a summons. I have taken to court the OCCC and the BC. Wait, he sued them? Yep. I added two more defendants. Mrs. Shirley McNaughton. On the tapes. He even suggests that he's going to have Shirley put away for her whole life. For life. Wow. Why was he so upset with her in particular? Well, because by this time, she'd started the international organization, bci, Bliss Symbol Communications International. And she felt like this was a totally unique and powerful tool which could and should transform lives around the world. And more teachers needed to adopt it. Definitely. What was he asking for? Did he want. He wanted us to use the symbols in his way. So in 1975, the BCI won a license agreement to use the symbols in the workbooks for the kids. But Charles Bliss. They should all be pulped. Didn't give up. They should all be pulped. He published endless tirades and sent them out to anybody who would listen. Please unite in helping to eradicate all falsifications of the Bliss symbol system. All in all, this went on for over a decade, and the administration of the program where Shirley was working was desperate to make him go away. He had basically destroyed the program. And so in 1982, he and the BCI finally come to an agreement. It was a financial settlement that satisfied him. What was the financial settlement? $160,000. Wow. You know, we were a little program in the basement of The Ontario Cripple Children's Center. We were, you know, just a classroom. Wow. So a guy who wanted to save the world ends up robbing a bunch of disabled kids. I mean, that's kind of putting it crudely, but that's how it feels, basically. That's the. Yeah. Did the symbols ever go anywhere? Well, there was a lot of excitement about it in the beginning, but it never spread very far. It's used now at a few schools in Canada and Sweden, a couple other places, but it never went very far because he was constantly taking it down at every turn. But here's what I find most surprising. When I talked to Shirley, she didn't have any bitterness toward him. Not even in the worst moments when we were having the final legal action. We'd go through that in the morning, and as the lawyers were packing up their papers, Charles Bliss would reach across the table and he'd say, shirley, will you help me? So she'd go to lunch with him, sit with him, and then he asked me if I would come to his hotel that night and put the ear drops in his ears. And I did that every night. He was involved with this thing. That's just the way it was. And it wasn't just that she takes care of people for a living. You know, she. She felt, and still feels that Charles Bliss had created something really new in the world. She even told me that when she uses Bliss symbols, she actually thinks differently. Yes, definitely. Really? Definitely. What's different? Oh, I just think so much more about what a word means, and it's like poetry in its purest form. I've been playing with stained glass down here in my retained retirement, and you can, you know, you can just take the symbols and put them into one composite, and they say things that only art can say. It's beautiful. They transmit a meaning that is beyond any words. Thanks to producer Tim Howard and Erica Okrent, author of in the Land of Invented Languages. We'll be right back. Bliss is having friends and family you can rely on. My name is Libby Graham, and I am calling from the side of the road in Dallas, Texas, awaiting rescue. This is Ginger, a socially awkward introvert from Cabot, Arkansas. Bliss is one day in which I do not have to interact with another human being. Bliss is political ignorance. This is Mahmoud from Moyar. Bliss, is your baby sleeping in your arms? Hi, this is Erica Okrent. Just a minute here. Radiolab is supported in part Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Enhancing public understanding of Science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan can be found at www.radiolab, is produced by WNYC and distributed by NPR. Hope that works for you. Thanks. End of message. Wait, wait, wait. Don't. Let me just hit record. Okay, and what were you saying spontaneously a moment ago? Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krulwitz. This is Radiolab and. And today, Bliss. And in our last segment, we met a guy who dreamt of a perfect world where words could never muck things up. Got a little carried away. Yeah. So let's forget about dreams. Forget about them. Now we're gonna look for perfection right here in the physical world. Okay, so this story, and we're gonna do it with the perfect person. Latif Nasser. It begins with a birthday present. It's February 9, 1880, six miles outside the tiny town of Jericho, Vermont. And we're on a farm, a family farm, the Bentley family farm. And this scrawny 15 year old kid named Wilson gets a microscope from his mother. So it's February and it's Vermont. And so naturally, the first thing this kid does is he grabs a handful of snow, picks out a single flake and he puts it under the microscope. And what he sees is the most beautiful thing he's ever seen. It's ethereal and perfect. He calls them masterpieces. As if they're these, you know, great works of art. He calls them that. In his 15 year old diary, well, looking back, he talked about that moment and what he was thinking when he sort of first saw it. But obviously, you know, within minutes or maybe even seconds, these masterpieces just disappeared without leaving any evidence that they, that they ever existed. They just sort of evaporate. And as he remembers it, he sort of decides then and there that he's gonna dedicate his whole life to documenting these masterpieces. Otherwise no one will ever know they even existed. He's gonna spend his whole life documenting snowflakes? Yeah. It's a good life, Jad. And it pays well, right? That's exactly what his father said. His father thought he was, you know, he was just. Was lazy and didn't want to do the farming chores. His father says, milk the goats. And he goes, no, dad. The beauty, the be. Right, Right. And apparently he was really good at digging potatoes. But he just sort of was so busy futzing around with his microscope that he, you know, I don't like this kid. I don't like him. It offends your work ethic. It does. So what happens next? So he takes his microscope, and he moves it to this unheated woodshed behind the house, and he starts sketching these snowflakes, right? And while he's sketching, he can't even breathe because he was worried that his breath would melt his specimen. So he's sort of holding his breath and drawing these, you know, these extremely complex crystals that can take you maybe, you know, maybe an hour to draw, but depending on the temperature, the humidity, the size of the crystal, he had at most he had five minutes. Right at the end of that, he looks at them all, and. And he's not satisfied. He just felt like he wasn't doing it justice. You know what he calls these, like, miracles of beauty. So Bentley persuades his mother, who persuades his father to buy him a camera. Wait, he's like, wait, wait, wait, wait. 1880. We're in February 1880. Have we entered into. In the era of picture taking? Just. Just barely. And for a farming family, this was, like, a lot of money. But they buy it for him, and he gets it, and he sort of Jerry rigs it to the microscope. And at age 19, Wilson Bentley is the first person ever in history to photograph a snowflake. Okay, I'm gonna cue the snowflake celebration music here right? From then on, basically, for the next 46 winters until he died, every snowfall, every blizzard, this guy Bentley would stand in the doorway of his little shack holding out a wooden tray with thick mittens. Because he would wear these, they were almost like oven mitts, to make sure that none of his body heat would kind of leak out and inadvertently melt any of the snow. So he'd sort of stand there and sort of give it a once over with his eye. If nothing was promising, he basically had a turkey feather. And he would sort of just wipe it clean with this turkey feather until he did find something he liked. And then he would take this tiny little wooden rod, and he would just sort of really delicately tap the center of the crystal and, like, really, really, really gently lift it off and then transfer it onto a glass slide so that he could put it under the microscope and he could photograph it. Over the course of his life, he basically photographed about 5,000 snow crystals. For his whole life, he was just a farmer doing this kind of as a hobby. And. But he sold copies of these photos for 5 cents a pop to places like Harvard and the British Museum and the U.S. weather Bureau, research journals, magazines like Nature and National Geographic. And, I mean, you've already seen the photos like, you've gotten them on a Christmas card. They're on your, like, ugly Christmas sweater in your closet somewhere. Robert's wearing a shirt with them on right now. Yeah, they're everywhere. They're beautiful, symmetrical, really clean and complex. A lot of the greatest scientists who ever lived, like Descartes and Kepler and Hooke, they all tried to sketch and draw and kind of capture the essence of snowflakes, but none of them could do it as well as this one obsessive loner from Jericho, Vermont, whose photos were perceived to be kind of more faithful to nature than anybody else's. But that was until this other guy came on the scene, this German guy. Cue the other guy. Germanic theme music yes, yes. He was a German meteorologist named Gustav Hellmann. Gustav Hellmann, not of the mayonnaise fame, I don't believe. I hadn't even thought of that, actually. So Hellman, is he a contemporary of Bentley? Yeah, he is, and he's working on his own book about weather. And so he hires a kind of a micro photographer who's another German guy named Richard Neuhaus. A micro. He's a very teeny photographer who he kept on his desk. Yeah, he's a microscopic himself and he just takes normal sized photographs. Anyhow, he hires this guy and they take a bunch of photos using basically similar technology, a camera and a microscope, essentially. But what they find is totally different. They do not find the elegant, symmetrical ideal snow crystals that Bentley found. The crystals they found were like flawed, lopsided, usually broken. And the way I think of it, it was like a Martian who had only ever seen, like glossy fashion magazines, had just been given some like, random family photo album. And it was like, oh, wow, this is. They're not so pretty. Like, these are kind of ugly, you know, These humans. These humans, they're not all symmetrical, but these Germans, they. They basically called him out. They basically thought Bentley was a fraud. There was a particular way that Bentley prepared his photographs. What he would do is he would use a penknife to scrape the negative around the snow crystal, which is what gave it that kind of nice black background, because he thought it would kind of put it in maybe stark or relief. And the German guys said that's it's, it's misleading that it kind of mutilates the snowflakes. Huh. Wait, so he's photographing these snowflakes and then significantly messing with the photograph? Exactly right. Exactly right. So here's a quote from the photographer who said, quote. In many images, Bentley did not limit himself to improving the Outlines. He let his knife play deep inside the heart of the crystals so that fully arbitrary figures emerged. Oh, so. Well, I don't know. That doesn't seem so. No longer a candid, is it? Well, that's the question. But then. So they basically lobbed this, and this is kind of going in these journals. Bentley basically launches a counter attack. And what he says is that, in fact, those guys are wrong, that not correcting your photographs was. And he used this word, like perverse to him. Why wouldn't you remove specks of dust or other imperfections? Why photograph a broken snowflake when you could photograph a complete one? So this is a quote from Bentley. He said, a true scientist wishes above all to have his photographs as true to nature as possible. And if retouching will help in this respect, then it is fully justified. So he thought his retouched snowflakes were truer than the normal ones? Yeah, yeah, exactly. The scientist is supposed to be kind of this very experienced, almost like a sage who has seen every different variation on a snowflake, but can sort of bring that all together in one drawing, one sketch, one photograph. And that's the true snowflake. So if I brought him a slightly gloppy snowflake and said, look, this is what fell on my nose, and this is a true snowflake because it actually fell from the sky and it's, you know, it was unenhanced. He would say that. He would say, robert, you're an amateur. Like, this is. This is not good work. You know, this is an aberration. This is an abnormality. Why would you choose to kind of highlight an abnormality as opposed to kind of this true ideal snowflake, you know, and does that one exist? I mean, that's the key question for me. Like, does the ideal snowflake exist in nature? You think there are such things exquisitely beautiful? I would like to think that there are no. So I think if my facts are right, the world snowflake axiom is actually in Pasadena, California. All right, check, check, check, check, check. In sunny Southern California. Yeah. I'm wearing a T shirt. I have sunscreen, lathered. And I am going to talk to the world authority on snow. Hey, how are you? His name is Ken Luck. He's a professor of physics at Caltech. He is, in a way, he's like the modern day Wilson Bentley because he takes a ton of snowflake pictures. I've taken about 10,000 now. And he actually makes snowflakes. Oh, yeah. Artificially. Okay. Wow. So this is a giant tank. This is of nitrogen here. Never mind that. Okay. And to get to your question about the ideal snowflake, a few things. So, number one, there are a bajillion different kinds. Dendritic crystal, stellar dendrites, needles and columns and hollow columns and sectored plates. So that's one thing. The second thing is that snowflakes are never static. They're never one thing. So at every single moment as it falls to the Earth, it's either growing or shrinking, depending on the kind of trajectory through the different pockets of weather as it's moving down. So there is no real platonic ideal form of a snowflake because it's so in flux. I mean, there's no such thing as a perfect snowflake. But that doesn't stop Ken Liebrecht from looking. You know, I tried up in Tahoe and Japan, Vermont, Michigan. He travels all over the world looking for Bentley's perfect flakes. Alaska. I've been to Alaska, Sweden, but my favorite spot is northern Ontario. Little town called Cochrane. Population 5,000, 487. So where do you go in Cochrane? Do you just. Just anywhere. They're just falling all over the place. Mostly it's the. It's the parking lot of my hotel. He says there's a lot of waiting involved. It only really snows well about once a week. Even then, things have to be Goldilocks perfect. If the clouds are too high, then they evaporate a little on the way down. They don't look very pretty. Or if the clouds are too light or too heavy, that's bad, too. And a lot of times the temperature's wrong. If you want those Christmas card supermodel snowflakes, you need to have exactly minus 15, that's 5 degrees Fahrenheit. You need to have high humidity, not so much wind, so that they'll putter down slowly and have more time to grow. But every once in a while, I mean, when the conditions are right, you go outside all, you know, hopeful and anticipating, and it's like, oh, crap, there's nothing garbage out here. So you go back inside and read some more email, and you come back a half an hour later, nope, still lousy. And a half hour later, nope, still lousy. And you do this for hours. And then all of a sudden they'll get really good. And then I'm just out there frantically trying to collect as many as I can. Well, one of the things I like to think about is here I am with my little piece of cardboard in the Middle of a continent, it's snowing all the time. And so I am catching some incredibly small number of these things for a brief period and getting some really cool pictures. And so you kind of wonder what else is out there? What are you missing? I mean, imagine just all the beautiful little works of art that are just falling down totally unnoticed and then they just disappear. I mean, stuff that is far prettier than the pictures I have because they're out there. You know, they're out there. Statistically they're out there. And so, you know, there's just an awful lot of really gorgeous things which just are like you say they're just totally ephemeral and you'll never see them and they're falling constantly. So you sort of want to just stop the world and, you know, go look at them. Yeah. Thanks a lot to Fnasser and to Ken Lee Brick, who wrote the book the Secret Life of a Snowflake. This is Matt and Neely Dawson from Asheville, North Carolina. And bliss is this sound. That's the sound of my 7 month year old daughter reacting to my puppy dog licking her feet. Hi, my name is Igor and I'm calling from Novi Sad, Serbia. Bliss is Indiana Jones, all three parts. Hi, Radiolab, this is Steve Strogatz. Bliss is the taste of hot pastrami at Katz's Deli in the Lower east side of New York City. We live four or five hours away from New York and don't get there very often. And so I spend a lot of time in between visits thinking about that first taste of the hot pastrami. So for me, that's bliss. I get to think about some kind of almost unattainable perfection, except then it is attainable. I just show up and there it is. This is Mary Roach I and I'm in Oakland, California and I have a list of bliss, my bliss list. Number one, laughing uncontrollably. Number two, zero gravity. Number four, the first 10 seconds in a hot, hot bath. Number nine, a raw oyster, very fresh, but no larger than an infant's ear. This is Adrian Stein from New Brunswick, New Jersey. Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan@www.sloan.org. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krulwich. This is Radiolab and we're talking about bliss. So far, I gotta say, we're not doing so great. I mean, we had A fleeting moment, a dream that crumbled. Snowflakes that evaporated in your hand. But in the next story, we're going to shoot for bliss that lasts. Hello, this is Mike Young. Mike, speak up. Andy comes to us from our producer, Andy Mills. Can you hear me? I can hear you. All right, so set this up. Who is this guy? His name's Mike Young. I called him up because of something that happened to him a little over 50 years ago. Let's see, this was 1960. It's something that he still thinks about all these years later. I was in my early 20s, 22, something like that. 21. He was an undergraduate at a theological school in Boston. And one day he received a very different kind of religious education. A very different kind. Uh huh. Good deeds. The event occurred on Good Friday, and it happened at to Boston University, Marsh Chapel. He was sitting not up in the main chapel, but down in the little basement chapel. And he was sitting with about 19 of his fellow classmates. The meditation service was being piped down to us from the chapel above. They have speakers in the front of this little chapel in the basement. Had organ music and an excellent choir. And the voice, voice of the preacher. Our minds have sensed and thought it was this kind of famous guy named Howard Thurman. And we relaxed for all that our hearts have felt. And interesting ideas began going off in my head. Walk beside us in the way that we take. Sometimes it was hard to pay attention to what was going on in the room. The things that resist and divide. And we slid gently right into the psilocybin experience. He said, psilocybin? Yes. What, as in magic mushrooms? Shrooms. You're gonna have to explain that one. This was actually something called the Marsh Chapel Experiment. The Marsh Chapel Experiment. And it was run by this guy, his name was Walter Penke. Very briefly, summarize them. And he was a graduate student at Harvard at this time, and he was studying religious experience, peak experience. This has also been called the cosmic experience, the transcendental experience, or the mystical experience. What exactly was he looking at? You know, like Christians, Muslims, Jews, mystics. Like what kind of things do they all have in common? So he did a bunch of research and interviews and he came up with a basic catalog of the ingredients in a religious experience. And one day he's at Harvard and he bumps into turn on, tune in and drop out that guy, Timothy Leary. He was actually a teacher at Harvard at the time. And he was famously giving psychedelic drugs to undergrads. We're teaching people how to use Their heads. The pointer is that in order to use your head, you have to go out of your mind. And when Pankey got a chance to talk to these students who had tripped, he noticed pretty quick that they used really similar language to the people he'd been studying. And he started to wonder, if you put people into the right situation and you give them this drug, could you induce, actually induce a religious experience? So on that day in 1962, Pankey put 20 theological school students into this church basement. You know, during this Good Friday service, 10 of them got a placebo, and then 10 of them got a hefty dose of psilocybin. Things in the room morphing. Which brings us back to Mike Young. You would move your head and there'd be an after image from the. The lights. At one point, the visual effect was especially powerful. And he had this one moment that has just stuck with him ever since. I was in the middle of Technicolor C, and there were bars of color, and I was floating through them, and they were floating through me, and it was just glorious. And the bars of color then resolved into a wheel. I was at the center, and there was a different color going out from me in every possible direction. At first, this was quite nice. And then I realized that I had to swim out one of those color bars. I had to. And each of those different color bars would be a whole different life experience. And I could choose any one of those life experience color bars that I wanted, but I had to choose one, and I couldn't choose one. It was very painful. It felt like my insides were being ripped out of me. And I died. And at that moment that I died, I heard Howard Thurman say, I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for death. And I stopped dying. Wow. That's. Wow. What are we supposed to make of that, right? It is strange. And in fact, this is actually right around the time that there's this huge cultural backlash against this drug. By the end of 1962, you've got Harvard making the decision that these experiments are not going to be done at their university anymore. 63. That evil. They fire Timothy Leary. Timothy Leary. He's out of there. 1970, Congress outlaws psychedelics. 1971, nearly every country in the world, including the United States, bans them from research. Is a signatory to an international law banning the use, sale, cultivation, and possession of dangerous drugs that have no useful place in medicine. I mean, on some level, I. I get that because, like, what could you learn from a bunch of people tripping scientifically. I mean, I think that there actually is something that we can learn from this. What? Well, if you look at Mike Young, on the day that he walked into that chapel, I was still a theological school student. He was, you know, he was experiencing doubts without any real confidence that ministry was something I was going to stay in. But after this experiment at the chapel, he went home to his wife. And when I walked in, my wife was very much aware that something rather unusual had occurred to this guy she was married to. Did she just. You carry yourself differently. Did you. She's never been that explicit about it. She just said she knew that I had had some kind of a major experience. At first, he just kind of wrote the whole thing off. But as time passed, he couldn't stop thinking about the death and the rebirth experience. And to make a long story short, if you fast forward, I'm a Unitarian Universalist minister. As a result of partly a result of that drug experience, I want to share with you this morning a little exegesis of the New Testament. That's him. Yeah. Story of the Good Samaritan. He has been preaching for 45 years. Here. Here's the thing that I think is really strange. All of the people who took the drug that day, those 10 who got the psilocybin and not the placebo, all but one became ministers. Really? So nine out of ten went into the ministry. Nine out of ten. What about the others? The placebo group? Yeah. None. None, according to Mike. Absolutely none. Wow, that is interesting. That was the first thing I was like, wow, that's crazy. But at the same time, you know, it's a really small sample set. Who knows why anyone becomes a minister? I'm sure it wasn't just the drugs. You know, maybe they didn't even play that big of a role for everyone else. But this did make me, you know, like, more curious, like, what exactly is happening to people when they take this drug? Yeah. And I was surprised to find out that, like, right now there are actually a few laboratories who are starting to experiment with these drugs again. We thought, well, why not? This is Roland, Roland Griffiths, psychopharmacologist. I study the effects of drugs on behavior. He's at Johns Hopkins, Been at Hopkins for 40 years now. He's really well known for studying nicotine and Ritalin. But he tells me that back in 2020, he was reading about the old psilocybin studies from the 60s. And this is right around the time when the Drug Enforcement Administration and the FDA were starting to loosen their rules on experimenting with psychedelics. So he applies and he gets approval. A study of that sort had not been approved for 30 years. And I can tell you that I've never had a protocol that was as rigorously and carefully reviewed and scrutinized from every angle since no one had studied this drug for like three decades. He started with some really basic questions. How does this affect behavior after people have taken this drug? Like, do they feel confused or afraid? Is it habit forming? And how he did his test was he has this lab room at Johns Hopkins that he's made, like, really nice and cozy. It's a, a static living room like environment. There's a couch and the stereo system. And then one at a time, the volunteers brought in, given a hefty dose of psilocybin blindfolded. And then they're asked to lay down and direct their attention inward. We were bringing people in two months after sessions and asking them, so, you know, what was the session like? And they filled out some questionnaires. And the thing that I really wasn't prepared for was how salient and important these experiences were said to be on follow up, you know, they were saying, well, it was really important, you know, And I would say, well, how important? And they would say, oh, well, it was the most important experience of my life. And I'd go, what? And they would say, yeah, you know, it's like, you know, like when my daughter was born, that changed my world forever. I recently lost my father and I'll never forget that. And they'll say, you know, it's kind of like that. And that's totally improbable. So we didn't have any metric that could even assess that. And what made things even weirder for Roland is that when he gave these volunteers a questionnaire, about 75% of people are saying it's in the top five most personally meaningful and spiritually significant experiences of their life. A vast majority we're talking about like, it's a spiritual experience. So Rollin, he went back to look at Panke's studies from the 1960s about the basic ingredients that make up a religious experience. Let me list the characteristics, a very summary list. First, the characteristics of awe and wonder. Everyone would report that they felt like they were in the presence of something great and enormous. The second characteristic is transcendence of time and space. People describe time slowing down or space getting weird. The third characteristic has to do with mood. Very deeply felt, positive mood. Fourth, and I'm skipping over a few here, unity this is a sense of cosmic oneness. This feeling of intense connection to everything around you. A part of everything that is the whole universe and even every blade of grass and grain of sand and so forth. These are words that people use in describing it. Anyway, so based on this one guy's research, and keep in mind, you know, a lot of people have different opinions about this. Roland believes that you can actually take this little drug, and for a majority of people, you can induce a religious experience. But, you know, I don't. As soon as you call it that, then I'm starting to think. I don't know. This is a real. I mean, I don't know, to speak to you guys. But for someone who takes this very seriously, to say that you can pop a pill and then in some shortcut fashion, suddenly get this experience that hitherto had been very rare and had been assigned the values of grace, to say that is to say an enormous thing. Well, it sounds like you're not. I'm guessing how you're taking it, Robert, is to say that it devalues the thing. Yeah, it devalues. It kind of does the opposite for me, really. I mean, when I hear these stories from, like, all the people in these studies, it reminds me like I've had these very meaningful experiences that I didn't think would last on a pill. Did you have them? No, not a pill. No drugs. So what happened? Yeah, what are you talking about? Well, it goes back to when I was a Christian. I used to be an evangelical Christian. And when I was about 15, I was at a church camp, and me and some of my best friends were all gathered around a campfire. It was hot and the stars were all bright and shiny. I remember they were playing this song that I really liked. And you know that feeling that you get when. When you and a crowd of people are all singing, like, really loud some song that you all really love? Yeah, sure. And as we're all singing this song, I remember my friend who wasn't raised in the faith, like, me, leaning over to me and saying that, like, he wanted to accept Jesus and be a Christian. And he asked, what am I supposed to do? And I remember that being, like, great's not even the word for it. In this one moment, I got caught up in something that just felt so enormous. It's hard for me to explain how it felt like. It's hard to describe how I felt like we were all one. Like there was something powerful that was. That was, like, both over us, but also inside of us. And so much has changed since then that sometimes I look back and I think, did that happen? Like, did I hallucinate, like, some dude on drugs? Because that friend who reached over to me, he's dead now. That faith that I was a part of, I left it. Like, all I have is this weird feeling that I can remember. That's good. And even though you're not a Christian anymore, you still have that feeling. Oh, yeah. But what is it about the idea that that feeling, that campfire feeling, could be triggered by a pill and that maybe that's what was happening to those folks in Rollins Study? What is it about that idea that helps you? For me, like, I see something concrete, you know? Like, I see. I see. I see something that's harder to write off. How so? Well, if I can go back into reporter mode, I will introduce you to one more guy who I think is going to help you understand what I'm talking about. Hello, this is Charlie. Charlie Bessant. He's a longtime smoker. Well, I started at 17, smoked for 40 years, pack a day, breakfast, coffee, talking on the phone. Wait, why are we talking about smoking? Well, Roland's new study he's doing right now, his pilot program that he's just started a few years ago, is trying to see if there's something in the transformation that you have in the psilocybin experience that can help smokers quit smoking. What? Really? Stick with me. They gave me a pill, a blue capsule, and he closed his eyes, and like Mike, he says he had a hallucination that changed him. The thing that I found so amazing, the one thing that was more amazing than anything else, was when I was on this mountain. This is a mountain in his head? Yes. When I had traveled to the very top, I was looking out over this greatness, this vista of everything. He says he was just this microscopic thing. He was so small, and it was so big. But my experience at this one place was so exalted because he was struck by this feeling, this deep feeling that we were the same thing. We were. Were the same. This right here is another hallmark of these experiences. You're somehow confronted with this radical shift in scale. And things that formerly felt like, too big for you to deal with, they suddenly. They suddenly look different. We had one person involved in our cigarette smoking study who had had a dose of psilocybin, and in the course of that session, the idea of smoking came up to him, and he said, you know, it was like a fly had landed on his arm, and he just took his finger and he flicked it off and he said he was done with it. Done. Done. Mm. And that's exactly how it was for Charlie. The morning afterwards, he says he just didn't want cigarettes anymore. I just didn't. They just weren't an issue anymore. And how long has he been off of it? Three years. Wow. Now, this is just a tiny pilot program. I don't think that we should make too much out of it yet. But the insight I feel like is like, because. Because, like, Charlie has this real experience. Like, it's not. It's not a question of like something invisible like faith, but it's like a tangible reality for me. It's like the closest thing I can come to having some kind of real evidence that what happened to me was real. With a campfire. Right. To me, the mystery is you've done this occasional thing with an artificial stimulus, had a extraordinary but temporary feeling, and then mysteriously, it isn't temporary. It just goes on and on. Yeah. Do we have any idea why it persists? Well, Roland has a very educated hunch. I asked him about this, and he's looking right now at getting in there and doing research with some new FMRI machines. But his hunch is that the psilocybin drug experience, it somehow rewires the brain. We're talking about rewiring personality at a fundamental machine programming level. Like, he calls this experience a rearranging experience. You know, maybe one day science will figure out what's happening in the brain of a person that's experiencing something like this. But one of the things about this that troubles me, like, as a reporter and then even, like, personally, is that going back to Walter Penke, remember his list of ingredients from earlier, his final characteristic, and the final characteristic that I'd like to mention here, final ingredient, was the characteristic of alleged ineffability. Which means that the people who have such an experience claim that it can't be described in words, that it's non verbal, basically indescribable. And that's one of the main things that I'm going to take away from all this. I mean, talking to Roland and Mike and Charlie is just how hard it is to talk about the thing that I've just spent the last 20 minutes trying to talk about. I understood something. Some. Life, some eternal truth. These words really don't match the thing. I was at the top. I was feeling divine source of. Self awareness. That's. I'm sorry, it's a trick of words. I guess. It's got larger thanks to producer Andy Mills. Thanks to you guys for listening. Start of Message hi, this is Reverend Mike Young and here are the credits. Radiolab is produced by Jad Adam Brads Agency, Abram Rad, Aboomrad. Our staff includes Ellen Horn, Thorin Wheeler, Pat Walters, Tim Howard, Reynolds Farle, Melissa o', Donnell, Dylan Keefe, Andy Mills, Lynn Levy and Sean Cole, with help from Chris Berube and Kelly Slivka. Special thanks to Josteen Newfleet, Thormod Bakken and Susan Gervasi. Special thanks as well to dawn of Midi. For more info, visit dawnofnidi.com Hope you got it. End of message. Radiolab is supported by the National Forest Foundation, a nonprofit transforming America's love of nature into action for our forests. Did you know that national forests provide clean drinking water to 1 in 3Americans? And when forests struggle, so do we. The National Forest foundation creates lasting impact by restoring forests and watersheds, strengthening wildfire resilience and expanding recreation access for all. 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