Welcome to Transylvania, Charles Bliss. This is what happens when you create a monster: Rather than obey its creator as intended, it takes on a minds of its own.

I loved hearing about blissful experiences. You were surprised that experiences induced by psychotropic drugs often have lasting effects? I would suggest that once you know something, you can't unknow it. If a realization of the universal connection of all life and all of the universe moves into one's conscious awareness, it is so amazing that I'm not surprised that it is life-changing. I think more research should be done to understand exactly what is happening in the brain and body, even at the cellular and molecular level during these blissful peak moments, however they happen to occur (drugs, meditation, etc). Don't devalue the experience or judge it to be fake because it was drug induced. We humans are a mass of complex chemicals and energy constantly shifting and interacting.

Very intellectually intriguing story. It reminds me of some people using the same kinds of symbols for about 6000 years, Chinese. Somehow they have started writing that way indefinite times very fluently.

Thanks for the fascinating segment on the symbolic system of Charles Bliss and its further development for use as a communication system for the disabled. The system could also provide a helpful approach to two-way interspecies communication. Traditionally, projects working toward communication between humans and other animals strived to prove that project animals can have language, but the bar was high: linguist Charles F. Hockett’s design features of human language. A key criterion was the use of arbitrary or noniconic symbols, i.e., abstract symbols with no relation to the object or concept. If the goal instead is simply true communication, iconic symbols make sense. For instance, a turtle symbol that resembles a turtle can be more easily learned by trainers and animals, resulting in larger vocabularies and more sophisticated understanding. Chelonian Connection cognitive laboratory

* Okrent's chief target is Charles Bliss. Admittedly, Bliss said and did some very kooky things (internment at the Dachau concentration camp would tweak anyone). But Bliss also invented a system for writing concepts as simple, picture-like symbols which proved far more effective than any other system in the world in helping some handicapped kids communicate. His system is still in use today. Bliss got into a tiff with a Canadian centre for kids with cerebral palsy when he wanted dictatorial control over how his language was used, and in 1982 the centre ended up settling for $160,000. Okrent summarizes this exchange as, "There's no other way to put it: Bliss, self-proclaimed savior of humanity, stole $160,000 from crippled children." Wow! I can think of at least one other way to put it: "In 1982 the OCCC *chose* to purchase Blisssymbols, which represented more than 30 years of work, because it dramatically helped handicapped children communicate, thus dramatically improving their lives, better than any other system in the world."

Charles Bliss was a complete a-hole. His system was being used to HELP sick children, so what did he do? He took $160,000 away from those children. What a scumbag.

Way to go Mr. Bliss... really breaking down those stereotypes...

It was such a pleasure to listen to this episode as I work with adults with disabilities who still use the Bliss System today. They were a part of a few children in the 70's who were taught how to use coordinated eye movements that spelled out 4 digit numbers that corresponded with a bliss word. I can't wait to share this episode with them, they would get such a kick out of it!
Thanks!

I loved this episode and couldn't wait to see the video. It made me think if I have ever been that happy - I thought about the birth of my kids, my husband returning healthy and whole from deployment in Iraq, all these things were overwhelmingly emotional, mostly happy but complicated with many other emotions. After lots of thought, I realized the only time I was this purely happy was when the Colts beat the Patriots in the AFC Championship game to finally get to the Super Bowl. I literally screamed, fell to my knees, cried and ran around the house like a lunatic for about ten minutes before I was able to sit contentedly and watch the after game show. It occurred to me that this is why we watch sports. This is what fuels those crazy reactions, this is what makes those "once in a lifetime games", the fuel behind the "Hail Mary" pass. its a chance to focus all your emotional attention on a contest that (usually) has no actual consequences in our lives and when you are a fan of a team that is never a sure thing, it feels like all the disappointments concentrate into that overwhelming feeling when that big win finally comes after a close contest. It may be the nearest most of us ever come to this kind of bliss.

A further commentary to supplement Mr. Kerim Friedman's response concerning Chinese characters. It may be true that most Chinese or Japanese characters are used primarily for their phonetic representations (especially in Mainland China, where characters have been radically simplified to reduce stroke count for a push to improve literacy under the Mao TzeDeng government). However, this statement too is in need of some correction. Chinese characters are at their heart semantic in nature, and even the phonetic usages and substitutions tend to evoke categories of meaning by their phonetic clues. Most of the "90%" that Mr. Friedman mentions contain within them both semantic elements that signify a categorical meaning and phonetic/semantic elements that also carry a meaning in addition to the dominant phonetic value. Furthermore, many of the 10% of characters that are more directly ideographic are themselves the basic elements that comprise the parts of more complex characters. These are the essential building blocks from which many of the the 90% have been constructed. Therefore, I think it would be misleading to look merely at the proportion by character type in order to try to argue that Chinese is a phonetic language. It is a semantic & phonetic language, to the extent that readers of Chinese can encounter a new character and often still be able to guess something about the character's meaning. In English this would be require a deep knowledge of Latin, Greek, and German etymologies.

The blissymbols reminded me of the semagrams used in the science fiction short story Story of your life by Ted Chiang.

Charles Bliss. Went from a truly inspiring man to monster in 20 minutes flat. Being a holocaust doesn't excuse his actions. Wanted world unification on his CV and all he got was helping children in desperate need. Did he really believe that all problems could be solved through semantics? He had had achieved what few can claim then ground it out of existence. Not quite as bad as Nazism, but certainly taking a few helpful hints out of Mein Kampf. Do it my way or be eliminated. Soul-crushingly sad.

On bliss
Denis Leary had it right. People go looking for this ultimate happiness and find disappointment. Happiness comes in small doses. When you learn to recognize those moments for what they are, a.k.a. life, it all makes more sense. Instead of fantasizing how much better things are going to be next year, stop and really look at what and who you have around you now. That's where bliss resides.

Great episode, but I do feel sympathy for Bliss and I disliked how he was characterised as someone who stole money from sick kids. Clearly, the people using the thing he had invented didn't understand the reasons why he invented it, and I think I might feel the same if my own ideals became corrupted, regardless of the benefits.

In regards to the transcendental experiences which are talked about...I call that day dreaming...to a higher degree maybe? I've done it many times. At least my experiences seem to be similar to those on LSD. Never really gave it much thought until my adult life. Maybe Im being too simplistic as I've never done LSD so I cannot compare. However I will say this about people's inability to describe it: You know when you have an epiphany about something, but if you don't write down your thought you lose it? I imagine it's something like that. It's there but you can't quite explain it.
Great show guys.

I just listened to your program on Bliss. In college, back in the late 60's I took a class from W. John Weilgart on aUI or what he called the language of space. It too was based on symbols and meant to be a universal language. I don't think it went very far, but I still find myself using it as a type of shorthand language. there is a web site for it at: http://home.centurytel.net/languageofspace/#The Symbols and Sounds of the Language of Space

I LOVED the story on Aleksander Gamme. I can't stop watching his video! It is wonderful.
Thanks so much for that story, as well as the others included in Bliss.

Loved this episode! We were in Banff for the Film & Book Festival and saw the video of Aleksander Gamme. Thank you so much for tracking him down and talking to him! What an inspiration.

My grandfather Joseph bought a dry cleaning business from Charles Bliss in 1956 in Sydney's Kings Cross called Bliss Dry Cleaning. Joseph came to be known to his customers as Mr Bliss and continued under the name till the mid 90s.

Charles Bliss mentored Joseph and taught him the ropes with regards to running a dry cleaning business. He was always spoken about warmly in our house. I'd like to thank Tim Howard for his impeccably researched piece and especially for sending me an MP3 of Joseph saying some words at Mr Bliss's funeral in 1985. I'm still amazed how Tim uncovered this tiny excerpt from my grandfather's long life and I thank him for bringing Joseph back to life for those brief minutes.

Finally while Bliss's actions towards the end of his life appear to be such selfish acts, I believe they should be viewed in light of the fact that he saw his language as a means to reverse the horrors he had witnessed during the holocaust. This perhaps explains why he could not accept the changes made to the language by these wonderful teachers. To him they threatened to derail his universalist vision of a world cured of the moral failures the holocaust presented. This extreme idealism prevented him from accepting the good that his language was doing for some - in this case he couldn't see the trees for the forest...

I loved this episode; however, there were two errors in the segment on Bliss which need to be corrected.

The first was in the discussion of the Chinese language. While it is clear that the views presented relate to Mr. Bliss' understanding of Chinese rather than being factual statements about Chinese writing, his views closely mirror common misconceptions about the Chinese language and the producers should have taken the time to correct these misperceptions. The first is the ideographic myth. Most Chinese characters (an estimated 90%) do not represent ideas but sounds. The second is the claim that one Chinese character = one word. In fact, most "words" are written with a combination of two or more characters, each character representing a syllable.

The second was a claim by the producer that no language or system he "knows of" (again bad science being reported under the cover of personal opinion) represents whether something is a fact or an opinion. I refer you to the Wikipedia page on "evidentiality."

While I understand the need to stay focused on the story (and it was a delightful story), I believe the story would have been improved if it had avoiding these obvious errors.

So, having never heard of Charles Bliss, and now only partway though the podcast, I come across another mention of him in The New Yorker in an article by Joshua Foer (Utopian For Beginners) about John Quijada, an amateur linguist with a not dissimilar experience. Fascinating! Thanks, as always for a marvelous show.

Love that video of Aleksander Gamme, I can honestly say that I don't think I have ever felt that happy, and that makes me sad.

The truth is that I have it so good that I don't think anything beyond winning the lottery could make me feel like that. Don't get me wrong, my life isn't a perfect fairytale, but it lacks a certain hardship which I think if experienced every once in a while would make the good things in life that much sweeter.