Wait, you're OK? I. You're listening to Radiolab Radio from WNYC. Hello, hello, hello. Um, how do I want to know this is tape to you? OK, how much of that have you heard this tape?

I have not.

This is actually the first one of my first radio pieces to hear what we're saying as we're in freefall.

And I had two friends who were in love. I would take a picture of the two years set suited up with your helmets, have since fallen out of love and fall in love with other people.

By the time they were very much in love and they had decided they were going to go skydiving together together.

Everything looks good. You're ready for this?

Yeah, I guess so. This is my friend Jordan. He is getting into a plane. Right. Let's check your harness. Got a mini disc strapped to his chest. And I should just say that the piece ended up being really dumb, but it contains the best moment of tape I think I've ever recorded. And you're going to hear it coming up. OK, so as Jordan gets up into the sky. They're like 7000, 8000 feet. I don't remember the number, but they open the door.

Are you ready to skydive? He steps just to the edge. And he's got to go. You'll hear there's going to be a moment. Just listen. OK. OK, he is out of the plane now, he's hurling through space free falling. Within like a few seconds, he's at 100 miles an hour. Up to 150. 175 miles an hour. Maybe two hundred, I don't know. There. How do you like that? It was incredible.

Oh, my God, that's the moment where the parachute opens. I can not. And he is floating, OK.

That's amazing. What happens to the girl, I don't know. You don't know?

Well, her MiniDisc recorder malfunctioned in the way down. But let's rewind that back for a second. That transition right there from falling body to floating body.

Yeah, I love that, because at first he sounds like this dinosaur falling through the air, but then the sound changes and it's just like. And I don't know, it's like this moment of somebody falling out of control. And then falling back in, yeah, seemed like a good way to open the show, because this is going to be a show where we take this idea of falling and we walk it in all kinds of different directions, like comes where you snap.

That's one. I loved him so much.

That's one. It's very dark. It's very hellish.

And that's why I was knitting. And apparently there are fourteen thousand nine hundred and thirty two ways to fall on the radio in this hour, we'll bring you up to date. I'm Jad Abumrad.

I'm Robert Krulwich. This is Radiolab. And we are following. No one. This one. This one is about what would you call terror or just no, it's about time, really time. OK, so this is one. Falling time, how do you. This is David Eagleman. This is David here. He's a neuroscientist. But back when he was a kid, how old were you? Just sort of. I was I was eight years old.

He had an experience which he says changed his life. Yeah. He was playing in his subdivision in Houston and there was a house nearby that was under construction.

And my father told me not to go climbing around on the house under construction. But I was a boy.

So I did. And I was looking at the edge of the roof and I stepped on it. But in fact, it was tarpaper hanging over the edge.

And I and I fell as you stepped onto the air. And in fact, you just went.

Exactly. What happened was the events seemed to take a very long time, I thought about whether I had time to grab for the edge of the roof and I realized it was too late for that. So then I was looking down at the ground as the red brick floor was coming towards me and I was thinking about Alice in Wonderland, how this must be, what it was like for her when she fell down the rabbit hole. How long, by the way, was it from the top of the roof to the ground below point eight, six seconds, that's how long it takes to fall 12 feet?

I calculated that later there'll be one 1000 in this whole experience, left David Eagleman with a question that he could not get out of his mind.

What happens to people when they're in a life or death situation and they have these thoughts that seem to take a long time. So at some point I realized I needed to study this.

How how would you even study that?

Well, the first thing I did, I took my entire laboratory to Astral World, which is the amusement park here in Houston.

And we went on all of the scariest roller coasters. We brought all of our equipment and our stopwatches and had a great time. But it turns out nothing there was scary enough to actually induce this fear for your life that appears to be required for the slow motion effect.

So I searched around and I finally found something called scad diving.

SCAD diving stands for suspended catch er device. Where do you do that? It turns out it's illegal in Houston, but I found one in Dallas, so we made a road trip up to Dallas.

All right, jump number one, we actually found a reporter in Dallas who agreed to give us a try and then I'll put the sign over the horn.

No one's ever died on this thing, right? This is April. Feel like my heart's in my throat. She's very brave.

You ride up to the top of this tower in this very rickety little elevator type of thing and rising up in the elevator right now, 150 foot tall tower confess, climbing up and up and up. It doesn't seem that far when you're down there. It seems really far. It's like a 15 story building that we're having, like, oh, yeah, this is just halfway. I'm already freaking out and my hands are sure to shake the very top.

You're suspended like this. Yes. OK, you're hooked up to a carabiner. How about that? All the way back to. OK, so I want you to imagine this you're up in the sky, you are facing the clouds, not the ground. You're attached to something which is about to be severed and you will fall totally free into the void, unable to see what's about to happen to you, presuming a net. Maycock. Really nervous right now.

And wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. One thing I forgot to mention, April actually wasn't part of David's study, but she had been she would have been wearing around her wrist this little device, new device called the perceptual chronometer.

It's about the size of a watch and it flashes numbers super fast, way too fast to see normally.

But the thought is if April falls and everything starts to smooth down, well, then these numbers should slow to so that if she looks at her wrist as she's falling, she should be able to now read the watch.

That would be impossible under normal circumstances.

Back to April. Really nervous right now. Three, two. And. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

I should probably tell you guys the results of the study, but so do people report that time slowed down enough for them to read the number on the lot?

No, no. Turns out when you're falling, you don't actually see in slow motion. Oh, yeah. It's not equivalent to the way a slow motion camera would work, even though people feel like it's going in slow motion.

It's something more interesting than that, because here's the thing.

Right after people did the jump, he would ask them how long they thought their fall took. Right answer if they'd had a stopwatch just under three seconds.

But what people would say, how long when you were falling, how long? Ten seconds. It felt like time was stopped. So how do you explain that?

Like times not slowing in the moment, but seems to be slowing after the moment?

Well, I came to understand that it's a trick of memory. Normally, our memories are like sieves. We're we're not writing down most of what's passing through our system. But he thinks that when you go.

No life or death moment in that instant, our memories go wide open because that's what memory is for, it's for when everything hits the fan, you want to write it down and remember it. So all of it goes right to your hard drive that clouds the feeling of the air. Oh, look, there's a guy in a blue shirt. So when you read that back out, the experience feels like it must have taken a very long time. It must have.

Normally the trivial stuff gets dumped, but in this situation it gets written and then you realize how much trivial stuff is in there.

So, for example, I just recently interviewed a gentleman who had been in a motorcycle accident, and as his helmet was bouncing along off the asphalt, he was composing a little song to the rhythm of his helmet bouncing.

Was he in his helmet or had the helmet blown off? He was in his helmet. That's he was here before, I guess far too loudly was here.

OK, as a result of this fact, he was OK. Wow, that's amazing. So his head is going thump, thump, thump music. Goodness, it's kind of a good rhythm. What a peculiar place to have a. What makes you larger and one who makes you see what you want and I should go right through the center?

Oh, you go chasing rabbits and. I people falling right through the center. Number two, falling in love from producer Lulu Miller, so set this up for us. Well, this is a love story and in some ways it's a very typical love story. And in other ways, it's just not yet.

The girl is a really good friend of mine. We're going to call her Cerita and the boy. We'll call Simon. When was the first time that you ever saw Simon?

I don't remember the exact moment, but I do remember sitting in the lunch room with the girls at the table and sort of scoping out the boys.

And he was definitely the skinniest.

He just looked like a really nice guy, olive skinned, thick hair.

And he made really good eye contact to the point where it's a little flirty.

There's no break in the eye contact that's like constant to the point where I think it could be uncomfortable for some people, but. I just really I really like the. When was the first time you talked to him? Well, we had a class together our freshman year. We talked a lot in class and after class on the paths around campus. And that's how it went all freshman year, sophomore year, junior year. They're sort of like particles that just kept colliding in the lobby of the dorm on the sidewalk.

And each time it was new. A new topic or a new idea. For instance, one of them would walk by carrying a book, Poisonwood Bible. And the other one would say, oh, I love that book. Yeah, they just clicked.

And again, eye contact, we would talk and be connected with the eyes.

That's what I really was falling for about him.

There was like an attentiveness beyond I want to ask you one thing, which, like you just said, I'm falling for him. Is that the way it felt? I mean, people always say falling in love. Did it feel like falling?

Yeah, it does, because it feels out of control.

And there's a moment where it feels like I let go and allow myself to feel it totally. So there were some moments where she wondered if she should yeah, like sometimes she'd walk by Simon on the path, look up and smile and he'd stop me. But then we run into each other and we talk.

She'd let herself start falling again.

This is really fun in this moment.

And I realized years later that every time we ran into each other, he has no idea that those were me.

Really? Yeah.

Hi. Hello. Can you hear me? Vaguely. Yeah. Um, can we start out talking about your condition? Yeah. What's it called. Prosopagnosia.

Prosopagnosia. Yes. Sounds like a delicious fruit salad.

It could be a cocktail. And what is that? What is that word? Uh, let's see. Well, agnosia is a lack or an inability in proso is the Greek for face.

Oh, face blindness. This, of course, is Simon. There's a little piece of my brain that's missing. And I have a really, really hard time recognizing faces, remembering faces.

And how does that work? Is it just that you forget where you know people from? No. If I passed you in the street, I can't swear that I've ever seen you before.

So he didn't know.

He couldn't string those together as all the same person having the same conversation, right?

No way. Even their first kiss, he didn't realize he was kissing a girl he'd actually known for years.

Yes. Yeah.

So were you, like, totally shocked? I was totally blown away. Who was that person to you?

I knew it was the cheese plate girl. Yeah, not now. It was field house girl. So what did you say? I think I just asked a lot of questions.

You know, she was interesting, like, oh, does this work? Yeah, I probably said if you, you know, went to the park and started looking at trees, the shapes are different. Their sizes are different. But to try to remember a thousand or 2000 of those, how do you pick it up?

It's just hard. It's just computationally difficult. Yeah. What details did you know about her?

And it was good to be with her. The experience of being with her, I think ran ahead of my sense of her biography. So it was a leap. It was a leap. Yeah. Let's try this. So they embark on this relationship, which, you know, has its quirks, right? For instance, if they were meeting up somewhere public, I'm going to need to wave first and backpacks, though, he's got to wear the same one voice really helps.

But I would get a little bit anxious when we'd have to meet each other somewhere.

Yeah, because I knew if another curly haired girl walked there before I did the game, is that her? She would like smile and wave at her. It's just awkward.

It's just kind of embarrassing. Yeah. And somewhere along the line, Sereda found out that that eye contact that drew her in it wasn't really about her.

It was something he did with everyone on the off chance that they're his friend.

Well, that's what I think the eye contact is. Did that did that make you step back at all? No.

By then I had already fell. And plus, I think Cerita at that time was getting really into Buddhism and not just a little bit. She went and lived with Buddhist nuns for a year in Sri Lanka. And so the idea of impermanence and, you know, we think we have a self, but what really is a cell, what it means to know someone, all of that was part of my world. And so this idea that he didn't recognize me didn't seem so as important as the present moment, it it just kept getting better.

And then what happened, you graduate and then did you move in together? Yeah, it was it in Philly was in Philly on Sansom Street, a year and a half goes by.

And then one day I woke up and swear to God, like all the leaves fell off, the trees fall turn into winter, and Simon told Cerita it was over something about a core that I'm lacking.

He said you were lacking a core. Yeah. What does that mean?

I don't know. I'm not sure what it means.

Good God, I knew the car would come up. The car, the core of what I what I was trying to talk about was lingering doubt whether whether this was it wondering could I fall further?

He just wasn't sure that he loved me. And then at that point kind of backtracked and denied having ever really loved me. Yeah.

Um, but that's how it was.

Did you feel like you at a certain point started to actually fall out of love with him?

Like, no, there was no falling. It was just like I was at the bottom of a well, sitting and stewing. I loved him, yeah, so much. And would you see him in the neighborhood because you're still neighbors? Right, right. Yeah, we would see each other around at parties. And he was working at a restaurant that had an outdoor patio. And I walked by there a few times without him knowing it was me where I could see him and look at him.

But you got to just be hidden. Yeah, I got to just walk by. Yeah. So there is comfort in that. Yeah. I didn't know. I didn't know that. Yeah, it's hard somehow. Yeah. But I wouldn't that I would see her. It's actually faded back into the crowd. I had become lost. It's actually haunting to me to hear that. He found you finally. I like you, help me, I think I'm falling.

And we'll be right back. All of that message is still there. Hi, it's Lulu calling with the credit. 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 at w w w Sloan. That board Radiolab is produced by WNYC and its message science reporting on Radiolab is supported in part by Science.

Sandbox is Science Foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science.

Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krulwich. This is Radio Lab, and today, today, we're falling in many different flavors and we're at number three.

So next, we have a story of a different kind of fall. All right. Or Faller comes from science writer David Quammen.

One article in particular that he wrote caught our attention. All right. I'm going to quote you to yourself, OK, nowadays, true enough.

We know quite a bit about cats. They've been dissected in uncountable numbers. Their anatomy, their physiology, their behavior have been minutely studied. But there's so much we still don't know.

Among all the other intractable issues, one in particular interests me, and that is what's the terminal velocity of a plummeting cat.

Why can you give me a little history? Why why did that question interest you?

I mean, when I used to write for Outside magazine, I would browse through journals and I would come across obscure papers. How I happened upon the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, familiarly known as G.V. AMAA.

I don't know.

I don't remember it, but I'm sure that that was the starting point because it was in that journal that David ran across a research paper by two vets, Wayne Whitney and Cheryl Melikhov, who worked in the Midtown Veterinary Hospital.

And they noticed that that in Manhattan there were a lot of cats falling out of windows, high windows falling off ledges, falling off roofs.

And what is what is a lot I mean, how many cats were coming into this place?

We saw one hundred thirty two cats fall in a five month summer period.

That's in her own house. She actually works in the in the veterinary hospital here at the Animal Medical Center. And she's been there since that research paper was written back in 1986.

When I came to New York City, I said, what do you mean cats fall out of buildings? Doesn't make sense. I said, why would the cat fall out? But we'll get back to her.

And we're still about a hundred and thirty two and five months. That's almost a rain of cats. Well, no, not say that because I think people should visit New York without without receiving umbrellas.

You too. What are you doing? I'm doing the math to see how many that is in a week of days.

It's about that's about a cat a day.

It's a it's a shame we can all agree about that. But according to David, it's actually not as much of a shame as you would think.

Twenty two of the cats that they saw had fallen from eight storeys or higher. And out of those twenty two, only one died to twenty one cats survived from eight. Stories are higher. Wow. That's a long way.

And there was one cat that fell 32 stories and the cat had a little bit of sort of thoracic bruising and a chip tooth and that was it.

So I mean, how in the world do cats I mean, we all know cats land on their feet. Yeah, yeah. But how do they do that? Like, these are not magical creatures.

Well, if you go back about a thousand years, know, it was thought that they consorted with witches, with the devil and their reputation got darker and darker. The more people started to distrust and dislike cats, the more they started to do horrible things to them. They would put cats in a barrel and then they wouldn't run the barrel through with sort of also throwing them out of windows. The defenestration of cats. What is a defenestrated mean?

Throwing out the window really? Ancestress the worst d o jatt. Add that to your active vocabulary today.

I'm glad to see what would happen when they would defenestrate these cats.

The cats would land on their feet and walk away.

That make people even crazier. No, of course, we love our cats now, we don't do that to our cats anymore, but when we went to visit ambacher, the veterinary hospital, we were asking her about the Falling Cats research paper, which was called the Feline Hyrule Feline, a high rise syndrome.

Then the mystery of how cats can fall from these amazing heights and survive. Yeah, got a lot deeper.

Yeah, well, cats that fell less than five stories they did find she's not too bad.

Cats have fell over nine stories. They did find two. She's says not so bad, which is weird. But cats that fell between five and nine between five floors and nine floors had really serious injuries and had more injuries per cat.

So cats that fell a little ways were OK. That's still a long ways were OK, weirdly, but this five to nine thing. And so.

Yeah, yeah. So it is so. So we had to get a physicist to help us explain this.

This is where we get back to what Quammen calls the terminal velocity issue or here's how and put it to us.

Well, say you're living on the 30th floor of a building and it's summertime.

You get down at work at five, you go home, get there about six apartments, hot and stuffy, and you open up those windows.

And Fluffy says, I'd like that pigeon out there.

And the next thing you know, a misstep and. As the cat starts to fall, he's all disoriented and almost immediately, probably within the first six feet, the cat's brain says, OK, turn your front half over now, bring your back legs around. That's like the cat can apparently do that move lickety split, but the cat is still speeding up, going faster and faster, three floors, five floors, seven floors. And after falling about nine floors and accelerating the speeds up to about 60 miles an hour, something happens.

You hit an equilibrium between the pull of gravity and wind resistance. What he means is gravity is pulling down on you in the peak pull is between five and nine floors for a cat. But after nine floors, the wind resistance, which all the while has been pushing back up on you, starts to slow you down. You don't speed up anymore.

So that's your cruising speed as your cruising speed. After the cat hit terminal velocity and the sensation of acceleration was gone, they relaxed. And they sort of stretch out like a flying squirrel. And then they hit the ground belly flop, and you're saying that because they hit this cruising speed and then relax into the flying squirrel, the impact is less.

Yes. Yeah. And our record here, it wasn't in this paper, but our record is. Forty two floors in the cat walked away were forty two. Is that a lucky cat or is that just plain Phisit. Should cats everywhere go to the forty second floor before jumping out of the window? No cat should ever jump out of a window.

That's right. Stay indoors. No fluffy back. OK, so the next following, what we can call these falling, falling, falling votes now. Is there an F word you could use features? Yes. Great.

Our next following feature. Oh, boy. OK, now we invited Columbia University physics professor Brian Greene into our studio. I get to play with any buttons. Yeah, we wanted to ask him really one of the most basic questions you could ask a physicist, why do we fall?

You know, we all know that Newton wrote down a law of gravity to calculate how gravity acts from one object to another. Yeah, like if you dropped your pen.

That's right. But there's a difference between being able to predict what will happen and be able to explain why it happens. And Newton could not explain why it happened. So he could only tell you what would happen.

But I mean, how it works is it just puts the pen down. What does that mean, though? Has it pull it? I don't see anything between the table and your pen. So what is the agent responsible for the pole?

Um. This is something even Albert Einstein himself couldn't quite figure out, he was struggling to understand how the force of gravity works, and it was a big, big puzzle.

And the legend goes that Albert Einstein was walking around one day and he found himself imagining a person riding in an elevator. And all of a sudden the cable gets cut and the elevator starts a plunge right down towards the earth.

The version I know is that he was actually sitting at his desk looking out the window and was imagining window washers falling sort of from their scaffolding, but at the same same exact idea.

But anyway, we're going to stick with the elevators. And for now, Einstein, imagine this person standing actually on a bathroom scale in the elevator, in the elevator. This is before the cable gets cut.

If the person is in the elevator standing on a scale, they see that they weigh one hundred and sixty pounds and then snip.

When the elevator cables cut, they look down at the scale and the scale will drop to zero because the scale will be falling away from their feet at exactly the same rate that their feet are falling to their feet won't push on the scale any longer because the scale will be moving downward with them.

I mean, I imagine like a Hollywood movie where it's falling so fast, everybody kind of drifts up. That's right.

So Einstein said to himself, hang on a second. Here's an environment where, in essence, I can turn gravity off.

Another way of saying it, the flip it around, it may make it more clear, just as you can turn gravity off by snapping the cable, you can actually simulate gravity by pulling on the cable that pulls that elevator up really, really quickly, because now the scale is running into your feet.

If you're standing on that scale, I won't read one hundred and sixty and might read 250.

It seems like gravity and being pulled up really fast. There's the same thing. They are looking at that.

Look at you. You just had the inside on your own. That's right. He walked.

He walked us 17 steps and I just made the last BBC did it. You did it. So whenever you're faced with a gravitational problem, this allowed you to ignore gravity and translate it into a problem about motion.

But does that does that solve the what is gravity question?

It just sort of no. He then had to make one more leap. And it's not obvious how he took the final step, but the final step was to realize that the what is gravity is the curvature of space and time.

That's a leap. I don't know what that means. Well, this is a very difficult concept. Do you understand it?

I understand what Einstein tells you when he explained it.

He said, if you imagine the universe as a vast rubber mat, a rubber mat held really, really taut, let's just take a wider and let's take the earth and just plop it on to the mat.

So what just happened? Well, it sunk into the rubber. It stretched the rubber, didn't it?

Yeah. I mean, so the rubber is kind of curved around underneath it. Yeah. In Einstein's mind, he thought maybe this is how to explain gravity.

This is what gravity is, that curved shape of space, he said. And the pin falls because it's following a contour in that curved space time environment. So like if we're living on the curve, then we're constantly falling down.

That going down that curve.

Yeah, yeah. We have no choice. And the reason why right now I feel the chair pushing up on me is again, my body also wants to slide down, but the chair is getting in the way.

So we're all sort of on some kind of slope sliding down unless we're. That's right.

That's right. I like that. Yeah.

I'm not adherent to that theory, not knowing anything else. Now, for number five, should we call it falling fortunes or.

Well, falling fortunes is a good one for this, I think, because someone is seeking fame and fortune and then false.

The idea of the gravity hero to me, one of the things that it goes along with it is that a term that was used gravity heroes.

No, that's my term. I like it, though. It's a really catchy term. Well, thanks. Yeah. This is Garret Soden.

He's an author, author of Defying Gravity original title Falling How Our Greatest Fear Became Our Greatest Thrill A History.

And speaking of history and fears and Thrills, and I would add to that list tragedy. He tells the following story.

It really started with Niagara Falls because up to that point, people had done all kinds of things in Niagara Falls to back up.

It is the 50s and at Niagara Falls, you've got these two guys doing tightrope tricks over the falls. Yeah, a fellow named Charles Blondin, famous French wirewalker and a Canadian guy who called himself the Great Ferrini. And they would duke it out. Right. Blondin came out, strung a rope across Niagara Falls, put a chair down, bounced on two legs and stood Audy well, and one time he carried a guy over. Well, he had to keep upping the ante.

So so for his greatest trick, he carried a small cast iron stove on his back with some firewood. He got out there and he put the stove down and lit a fire, had a couple of eggs in a frying pan and made an omelet right over this churning like rapid.

Yes. Wow.

So the great Ferrini came out with a washing machine. That was his answer. Wanted to watch some clothes out there.

Yeah, but the thing to know about these guys is, is this is basically just a show because, for example, the wire that they walked on was pretty wide about the diameter of a coffee cup.

And really they were just avoiding the big trick.

The most anticipated trick, the one that everybody was waiting for was somebody going over the falls in the barrel.

The guy who did that would be the real gravity here. You were walking wusses, Niagara Falls is one of the great forces of nature, every second 600000 gallons fall over the edge, pound rocks below with such a fury that you can hear it five miles away. Which is why in 1850, when P.T. Barnum saw the fall, he said that if someone could figure out a way to go over that, that would that would be a huge stunt that would give them fame and fortune.

That's Joan Murray.

She's a poet. She's a poet.

She's written a whole book, Converse, about the first person to conquer the falls in a barrel. And it's called Queen of the Mist Queen in the Mist. So it wasn't a guy then?

No, I just said it was a guy to set you up so that you would ask me that question because, in fact, it was a woman. Wow. Props to her. Thank you for acting surprised. What's her name?

That Fanny Taylor. When we first meet any Taylor. This was nineteen oh one. She was down on her luck and she'd been a she'd done a lot of different things. She had run a dancing school. She had been a principal. She had traveled all over the world. Her only child had died, her husband right after that. And she was broke. But then it hit her gravity.

She was sitting at home, sitting in her apartment in Bay City, Michigan, and for some odd reason she read an article about the goings on at Niagara Falls and she decided she would go over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Why do you assume she's looking to save herself from the poor house? She was after money. And when she read about these guys at Niagara Falls.

She thought, this is it. Right. So she called a Cooper to build the barrel. At first, he refused to build it when he heard what her plan was. But finally he did. And not long after, Annie was on a train with her barrel. Headed to the falls, by the way, what day we're talking about. So we have it on October 24th, in 1981, OK.

Word had spread. This was going to be a spectacle. Everyone was there, mobs of people. Thousands were up and down the river, tens of thousands. And Annie shows up, waving to the crowd, wearing a very fancy Victorian dress and a hat with ostrich feathers. She's quite the lady. But then they go on an island where she changes into some gym clothes and now she gets in the barrel.

They take her out to the middle of the river.

Then they knock and cut the rope. And off she goes to the brink. And it's wet at my feet and I'm feeling while I'm in there that this is miserable. Interesting thing is Jones home, she actually becomes a.. I careened and spun. She's in the barrel, getting hurled down the river, tossed and turned my brain tall. And as she gets closer to the edge, it's about a half mile journey. She begins to hallucinate my glimpse through the turbulence.

There was my young husband and his arms are baby trembling and whimpering. And then this moment of weightlessness. She's going. Into the pools, below the great mass of foam and boiling water.

And then she shoots out again through the buoyancy of the barrel, about 15 feet in the air. Now the barrel crash is back.

Back down on the water and then it floats. Over to some rocks and a rescue team paddle out to the barrel right away, they get the barrel and they have to sort open. The crowd, no doubt is thinking that woman is dead. There is nothing but a dead woman in that barrel, but. When they pull her out, she's alive. I am alive. She took on this thing that the world was waiting for, and she did it.

She was the first to ever try in June when she was pulled out of that barrel. And presumably she's going to take the next step into fame and fortune. What happened? More or less nothing. She stepped out of the barrel and she didn't look right.

She didn't look like a hero more than that mean well, I've kept something from you. And what to think I haven't told you is that not only was she wet and soggy and according to newspaper accounts, hysterical. And who wouldn't be? She was 63.

She was your grandmother.

She was an older lady, like Joan said, you know, for the hero consuming public.

She just didn't look right after that exhibition, her manager ran off with the barrel and he took the barrel and he started going on the circuit with a lovely young woman that he claimed was Annie Taylor. Know much better showpiece. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

What happened to him, though? She would drag herself to Niagara each spring and summer.

She would just sit on a street with a barrel. It wasn't the original barrel, but it was a barrel. And do what?

She probably had photographs of herself that she signed. And did she ever make any money off this? No, no. She died in a poor house, which is where she didn't want to wind up, but that is where she wound up in just 10 years later, somebody repeats and feet a man and he tours the world pestered. Yea, bastard. But because the heavens are merciful during this guy's victory lap, is he traveling around the world? He slipped, he's slipped on an orange rind in Australia and New Zealand, got a compound fracture of his leg.

She says that leg got gangrene and he died. Yeah, there is there is cosmic justice. Since a. He. Are you asleep? Hey, hi. Do you even know where you are right now? Did you see, like, with my leg? I kick myself awake. Did you see that?

I heard it. I'm Jad Abumrad. Oh, I'm Robert Krulwich. And our next following feature is Falling Asleep, but with a little kick. This is Radiolab.

Let's do it. Well, tell me your name first and just tell me how you would like to be identified on air.

You can call me Fred. I like it the best. OK, my full title is Professor Frederic L. Coolidge University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.

So just so we get our definitions right, what is a hypnagogic? It appears to be this what seems to be a reflex. Everybody's experience it it's it's you're still semi-conscious. When you start to feel kind of dreamy, you start to feel this loosening of your thoughts, loosening of of your reality.

But just as you're about to go under, he says just that the first onset of sleep found one big jaw.

And then you're awake.

And usually you wake up with this feeling of like, oh, my God, oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, all right.

And, you know, how did you start studying this? I was working at Kentucky Fried Chicken. Can I say that on the air for holler for a dollar an hour? And I just thought, man, I still can't eat coleslaw to this day because I would do a hundred pounds of coleslaw a day. So I saw this ad on campus and it said somebody to work in a sleep lab. So I went in, applied, and I ended up in the beginning cleaning toilets, but I just got in to fall asleep.

I thought it was fascinating.

And I got fascinated by these giant jerks at the beginning of sleep. And I said, what is that? You know, they said, oh, that's a hip, knee jerk. And I said, What is that? And they said, that's a hip, knee jerk. In other words, no one could really explain to him why these things happen. That's right. So we started poking around and there were some theories, you know, having to do with, like physiological changes in your body, you know, a lowering of oxygen content or something like this.

And but that kind of explanation didn't really satisfy.

It really doesn't say, well, why, what was its function?

And as I started to look at the literature, I saw that we had a very long history sleeping in trees.

If we go back to Australopithecus afarensis, this is Lucy, three million years ago, Lucy was bipedal. I mean, walking on two legs, Lucy lived in the trees, but unlike the other primates, she would sometimes go down to the ground.

But on the ground, you've got Big Bird, you've got snakes, tigers and reptiles, all that ground like. Was stressful. But at night, she crawled up the tree for safety, she climbs up in that tree, drops food there for her baby, and she's going to drop off to sleep. Her muscles loosen, her hands curl. She starts to have that relaxation pretty soon. She can't feel the tree under her back or hear the noises down below.

Stay with me, girl. Which she feels like she's floating.

Or falling, falling, falling, that means to be a real good idea, to wake up from that sleep was such a dangerous proposition for so many millions of years that something like the hip knee jerk, if some of those primates had that behavior, they may have been just slightly more likely over millions of years to to adapt and survive.

We haven't gotten rid of it yet, is what he's saying.

So that's my trick is just basically so I don't get eaten by a lion all these many years. Yeah, that's what he's saying. Sort of like a Lusi echo.

Do we know this or we just know how are we going to know this story?

But there is at least one tantalizing bit of evidence to support this idea.

You know, as college students, what are the most common dreams that you have? And falling is number one or number two most common theme. And if you go on a college campus, you know, thanks to OSHA, right.

You have no chance of falling off anything. They'll make sure their first drop is like a foot or six inches even then, and a big yellow and red signs all over it.

But they dream of falling.

What and by the way, the next most common dream after falling to being chased. By an alien. In a blue dress? No, it isn't. Stairway is to don't read. Still ahead. Don't lie down. Oh, poor. Steve. You're walking and you don't always realize it. But you're always falling. Well, actually, I have a random one for you guys about falling. As I was driving over here, I was thinking about it OK, with each step.

Neuroscientist David Eagleman, again, you fall forward slightly and then catch yourself. I started wondering what happened falling. Why is it that elderly people fall down a lot? If you go into any hospital ward, you'll see lots and lots of elderly people who are in there with broken hips and things like that because they've they've fallen. So I started asking my clinician friends and they say, well, they have a poor sense of balance, muscle weakness. And I said, could it have anything to do with timing?

What do you mean? Well, one of the things I study is how the brain sends out signals to the whole body and how these signals come back, because the strange part is the brain is situated all the way at one end of the body, all the way at the top end. And it's controlling this huge amount of machinery. You have to send signals all the way out to the toes and all the way back. And they're surprisingly slow in the brain.

It's about 300000 times slower than signals move around in a computer.

So it would be like if you were a NASA operator controlling the Mars rover, there's a delay between when you send the signals signal and when you get the feedback, when you get the feedback.

And so what happens is the brain is very puts a lot of effort into making sure that it knows exactly the timing of sending signals out and when it's getting signals back.

And that's how you walk, for example, you want to get the camera. So this is like what toddlers learn in reverse, aren't they learning the timings to get the left foot out in front of the head? That's exactly what they're doing.

They're calibrating the timing of their whole nervous system.

That's interesting because my kids 10 months old and I think he's in this calibrating period. So what's happening with him now is he's standing, but then it looks like he's about to start.

But then about, oh, there's a little spill. Yes, it's good.

So basically, you're saying his little brain is trying to figure out the timing. Let me see. It's of electricity racing from brain to foot and foot back to bring. Yes. Mission control is going OK.

Sending that message to the feet. We expect it back in 300 million miles.

Oh, Tom will take three. OK, we're going to try now to eighty milliseconds OK to eighty go went down to tumble.

Fall.

That's exactly right. Lot of trial and error until you get the timing right. But get it right now you're a walker right.

Right now you running now something that happens in let's say multiple sclerosis and maybe also when you get old, says David, is that the timing starts to change because there's damage to the sheathing around the nerves and that slows down certain signals.

Then the brain says, oh, I thought my foot should have hit the ground by now, but it hasn't. So I'm going to send out a corrective motor command. And then finally, the signal does come back and you've sent out this corrective motor command and you'll stumble with each step.

You fall forward slightly. And then catch yourself from falling. Now we're going to fall far from home, we're going have to travel a good many light years off the planet to fall in this particularly special and gruesome way. Our father is Neil deGrasse Tyson. He's a astronomical physicist.

Yeah. Here he is at the Herbst Theater. I like saying that. Herbst Theater in San Francisco in front of an audience talking about falling apart, minding my own business on the airplane, and someone looks and sees what I'm doing.

They find out I do astrophysics. The outcome to questions, when will life end? Will the asteroid come? Will the Aztec calendar destroy the earth?

There's all there's it goes on and on. So I figured people like death and mayhem. So I might as well title the book with that because there's a whole chapter on how to die as you fall into a black hole, which I personally think is kind of cool way to die, because what happens is the gravity of the black hole is extreme. As you can imagine, light doesn't even escape. Its gravity is so extreme light traveling at the speed of light.

All right. So if light doesn't come out, nothing's coming out. It's black. You fall in, you're not coming out. It's a one way trip, OK? So you don't just die because you disappear. You die long before you disappear. As you fall in, the gravity at your feet becomes rapidly greater than the gravity at your head.

So your feet start falling faster than your head does. That's a bad situation to be in. You don't really know. Initially, you kind of feel good, you know, because it's we all stretch when you wake up in the morning. Initially, it feels like a stretch. But what happens is that stretch continues beyond comfort levels. And you reach a point where and then call the tidal forces tides on your body.

Basically the title force so great that they exceed the intermolecular forces that bind your flesh. And so the point comes where you snap into two pieces likely to happen at the base of your spine. Now you are two pieces now. Now, I know you didn't ask about this, but it turns out you will survive that snap because below your waist, while there are important organs, there are no vital organs below your waist.

So your torso will stay alive for a little while, OK, until you bleed to death.

But this all happens much faster than it would take to bleed to death. So these two pieces then feel tidal forces and then they snap into two pieces and then they snap again into eight and then 16 and then you're bifurcating your way down. And so eventually it's your head and multiple other parts. And so that will continue until you are a stream of atoms descending toward the abyss. And it turns out that's not the worst of it.

OK, the worst. It turns out the fabric of space and time funnels down towards a black hole. So the space that you occupy up here is larger than a space you occupied down here. So in fact, you're getting while you're getting stretched, you're getting squeezed, extruded through the fabric of space like toothpaste through a tube.

All the pieces falling apart. Well, we're we're about to fall away, I think we yes. Nice one. Nice one is falling apart. Before we do, though, I know that we have a podcast. It's a Radiolab dot org. I'm Jad Abumrad.

I'm Robert Krulwich by this John Murray Radio Lab is produced by Jad Abumrad and Tim Howard. Their staff include Ellen Ward, Sean Wheeler, Lulu Miller, Rita feral cat Walter and Lynn Levy with help from Sharon, shotput Freeman, tons of car somewhere else. And and the Coke special thanks to Ari Daniel Shapiro and Emily Corwin, April Kinzler and The New Yorker. Lecture's in San Francisco. How is that guy? This is Fred Coolidge, all about the hypnagogic by.