JAD ABUMRAD: Jad here with Robert Krulwich. Today on Radiolab, a hour on the self. How it is that out of a trillion chattering neurons in your brain arrives the greatest illusion of all: that you are one thing, one self.

ROBERT KRULWICH: To extend this a little bit, another step, Jad, while we spent the whole time talking about what it is to be a one, or where is our self, there are times when you learn that the self has not got a Berlin Wall around it. We are porous, our borders are full of leaks. Robert Sapolsky's a biologist. He studies baboons in East Africa. He wrote an essay which I read, and the essay is the story of his dad—Robert has a dad like we all do. This dad suffered from a condition that resembles Alzheimer's, so his father was forgetting things, what decade it was, where he was, but he was also beginning to melt into the son. Dad was beginning to tell stories that were really the son's stories. It was all kinds of things.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: Things like I had moved from New York to the Bay Area at that point, and suddenly his stories of his immigration changed from when we left Europe and came to Ellis Island to when we left Europe and entered the United States through San Francisco Bay, including his describing the first sighting of the Golden Gate Bridge—Golden Gate Bridge, which was built decades after he came to the United States. Completely confabulated, but ...

ROBERT: San Diego was involved, too?

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: San Diego. I was in San Diego for a period, and he suddenly had spent long periods of time in San Diego in the Navy in World War II, so that he was able to have the same opinion and share the same just kind of the edges of him spilling over into me.

ROBERT: Did that make you feel a little claustrophobic?

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: A little claustrophobic. And being a good scientist, of course what I did instantly was try to label it and come up with diagnostic categories and pathologize it and sort of keep it at a safe distance. And it was all fairly unnerving, and what this particular essay was about that I had written was amid all of that sort of confident pathologizing, it was only after he died that I suddenly found myself doing the same in return.

ROBERT: Let me read you some of what Robert Sapolsky wrote about this experience: "It started manageably enough. I arranged the utensils as he did, hummed a favorite Yiddish tune of his throughout the day. Soon, I had forsaken wearing my blue flannel shirts in order to wear the blue flannel ones of his."

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: I took a shirt of his, a flannel shirt and I—back before global warming would always wear flannel shirts, and for a while I had to wear his flannel shirt instead. Or he had heart disease, and the little bottles of nitroglycerine all over the house. And there was this period where, in the immediate aftermath of his dying, I took a bottle of this nitroglycerine back with me and found I had to keep it with me physically all the time.

ROBERT: Now you didn't have heart trouble.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: I had no heart trouble, and I was a 30 year old.

ROBERT: And you're walking around with this nitroglycerine like it's your blankie? Like you didn't want to give it up?

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: No, on some level I needed to have nitroglycerine with me handy in case, like, I had one of his angina attacks.

ROBERT: He writes, "I would make love to my wife, work out in the gym, attend a lecture, and always the bottle would be nearby—on a nightstand, in a sweat jacket pocket, amid my papers. There was a day when I briefly misplaced it and everything stopped for an anxious search. It was not that I'd lost a holy relic of his suffering, an object to show my children someday to teach them about a man they hadn't known, this was urgent! I felt vulnerable."

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: You know, very hard to articulate, but during that period also I had a large class I was doing, and on the last day of the lecture, I found I gave this weird lecture where essentially I was talking to them like an octogenarian. "You don't believe it now because you're 20. You're gonna get tired, and ..."

ROBERT: You're gonna get tired.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: "You're gonna get tired, and it's just gonna get harder and harder."

ROBERT: This from the tired old 30 year old. [laughs]

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: Yeah, exactly. I was talking to them as an 80 year old. And talking to them ...

ROBERT: Did you wake up to that notion in the middle of it? Did you suddenly say, "Hey, what am I doing?" Or did it just happen, it just came through you?

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: No, only after that evening, trying to figure out what the hell was that about, instead of telling them about what's gonna be on the final.

ROBERT: [laughs]

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: Telling them you should be happy, you know what I mean? Call your mother.

ROBERT: [laughs]

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: And wait a second, call me as long as you're at it. Would it hurt you to call now and then?

ROBERT: And when you had finished the lecture to the kids and had been speaking through the voice of your dad, how did you unwind this connection, or did it just fade away?

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: Interestingly, I actually gave that lecture wearing his shirt.

ROBERT: Oh, really?

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: And this was a very challenged period with the bottle of nitroglycerin in my pocket—because I had it in my pocket at all times—and it was that night that I was able to put away the bottle, and haven't worn the shirt since. And on some level, I was saying goodbye for him. And particularly appropriately to, you know, an auditorium awash in 500 20 year olds with their world ahead of them and sort of saying goodbye for him.

ROBERT: "A year later, that time has begun to make sense. I feel sure that what I went through need not merit a diagnosis. It's a measure of my training as a scientist that I saw pathology that wasn't there."

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: And essentially what that whole period was about was learning it is, you know, a perfectly normal non-pathological state to feel at times of extreme emotional challenge that interconnected with another person, that in some ways the boundaries slip a little bit.

ROBERT: "It can only come as an echo, a hint in our armored, individuated world, that a bit of confusion as to ego boundaries can be an act of health, of homage and love. It can be a whisper of what it feels like to be swaddled in continuity. It is a lesson amid our ever-expanding array of scientific labels on the risks of over-pathologizing. Most of all, it is a lesson that it wouldn't be so bad, in fact, it would even be a point of pride if in the end someone mistakes you for him."

ROBERT: My just postscript question is did you ever say to your dad when he was ill, "You didn't come to San Francisco"? Did you ever correct him?

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: Yeah. Not a chance.

ROBERT: Robert Sapolsky is a biologist at Stanford University in California. He's written several collections of essays, but the one we're quoting here is from The Trouble with Testosterone. That's where you'll find this story of his dad.

JAD: For more information on that, or anything else you heard tonight, check our website, Radiolab.org. And while you're there, communicate with us: Radiolab at wnyc dot org is the address. Jad here. Robert and I are signing off now, but we will catch you next time.

[LISTENER: This show was produced by Jad Abumrad and Ellen Horne, with help from Brenna Farrell, Sally Herships, Rob Krieger, Amy O'Leary, David Martin, Michael Shelley and Robert Krulwich. Special thanks to Kara McCormick, Paul Broks and Elena Parke, and special thanks to me too, Nicky Palin. Thanks for listening. Okay, bye bye.]

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New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of programming is the audio record.

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