The Case of The Missing Gorilla

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I'm Dr.

Adam Rutherford.

And I'm Dr.

Hannah Frye.

And you are going to send us your everyday mysteries.

And we are going to investigate them using the power of science.

Scion.

Science.

I like it.

It's the new series of the Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry.

You're a bit croaky there.

I am a bit croaky there.

It's a croaky and a bit high-pitched.

Yesterday, I was coaching my son's rugby team, which involves shouting a lot.

And so, yes, I am now a bit paste.

So you've been shouting at teenage boys?

It's something I do every week.

It's like therapy.

Good.

Okay.

Well, enjoy this episode with Adam's croaky and occasionally high-pitched voice.

Hi!

Welcome back to the new series of Curious Cases, where we are here to address your everyday scientific questions.

Aren't we, Adam?

Adam?

What's up?

We're making a programme?

Yeah, sorry, I was looking at a really funny cat video on Twitter.

Can we have your attention?

You have my full attention.

Okay, focus.

All right, because today's question came in from Charlotte Mitchell, who asked, during the morning register, I am reading my book while ignoring all the other names, but would automatically listen to mine.

Why is this?

Now, that's about something pulling your attention away, Charlotte's question there.

But we're also going to explore what happens when we try to pay attention to different things at the same time.

Now, Hannah, how good is your attention specifically?

Actually, you know what?

I kind of consider this to be one of my superpowers because I can get into a state of real hyper-focus where nothing.

What's the new phone?

Oh, it's that got the new megaprocessor.

Exactly.

Right, well, there are actually scientific uh attention and distraction tests.

You want to do one?

Go on then.

Okay, so this is a test about attention focus in a noisy environment.

So I'm going to play you a clip where several conversations are going on at once, but one of them is between two women.

And I want you to focus on that, that conversation between the two women, and I want you to listen out for details on what they're doing, what they're talking about, and what they're arranging.

And I'm going to quiz you afterwards.

Now, listeners at home, you can also participate in this, but it does work best if you're wearing headphones that are stereophonic, Okay?

Have you got it?

Okay.

You know exactly what you're going to do.

I'm feeling quite competitive.

Yes, let's do it.

Okay.

Hey.

Oh hi Jackie.

Hi Charlie.

Hi Jackie.

Hi Charlie.

I didn't know you actually.

Yeah not too good.

They didn't have it red so we had to get it in blue.

But it looks nice doesn't it?

We've got a bit of a wrap because I think she wants to come in actually.

Yeah,

we have got wrapping paper.

Yeah we've got wrapping paper.

What colour do you think actually?

We've got silver in the colours.

I'll come over and give you out of the flash.

Okay, we'll go with the silver.

I'm surprised it got pots and

pots.

Fantastic.

Okay, so that was the test, Hannah, and listeners.

What were they doing?

Wrapping a present.

They were.

And what colour?

They used silver wrapping paper.

They were just trying to decide whether they were going to do red or blue.

Yes.

There were some scissors.

They were talking about parking.

Yeah, lots of rusting of the paper.

That was quite hard to

really listen.

And did you notice the gorilla?

What gorilla?

You didn't notice the gorilla?

No, what gorilla?

What do you mean, gorilla?

There was another conversation.

Were they saying gorilla?

Right, well, so this is a

brilliant.

What were they saying when you posted it?

So this is an experiment.

No, you need to play it back.

Tell me.

This is an experiment by a psychologist called Professor Polly Dalton, who we spoke to, and she leads the attention lab at Royal Holloway, University of London.

And she found that 70% of participants, including your good self, Professor Fry,

didn't hear the man repeatedly saying all the way through that clip, I'm a gorilla.

Here's Polly to explain.

About halfway through the recording, another male character walked through the scene, who we called the gorilla man, repeating the phrase, I'm a gorilla, I'm a gorilla, for 19 seconds.

Most of the people listening to the women's conversation, around 70% of the people, completely failed to notice him.

So, what this showed to us is that people can fail to notice surprising and distinctive stimuli in the world around them if they're paying attention to something else.

Was it that loud?

That was exactly the same volume that was played at all the way through.

And once you notice it, because I know that I need to test before we went in, I could hear it.

I can only focus on that, and I wasn't even listening to the rest of the conversation.

I mean, it wasn't a great conversation, if I'm honest, but you were laser-focused on it.

I thought that there were going to be points.

I thought that maybe there was something to win at the end of it.

I really was.

I tricked you.

You know, it's a sort of riff on the famous invisible gorilla video.

You know, the one where participants are asked to watch a video of some people throwing a basketball back and forth and they're asked to count how many times the pass has happened and they don't notice that.

a man in a full gorilla costume walks through the shot, stands around for a bit,

and it's again, it's the same thing.

It's just an absolute focus.

There's a really fun fact about this.

You remember Diane Fossey, the famous guerrilla researcher who worked in Rwanda?

Sure.

And her book and her film was called Gorillas in the Mist.

The researchers who did the invisible gorilla study, they titled their original paper Gorillas in Our Midst.

But Polly Dalton went one step further.

She was the one who did the audio one that you just took.

She called it Gorillas We Have Missed.

There's another version of this actually in radiologists.

So they gave them some scans of lungs, right?

And they told them to look for tumours.

And then it turned out that 83%

of these totally professional radiologists failed to notice that there was a gorilla hiding in the lung scan.

That's slightly troubling.

I'm slightly bothered as well that they're continuing to use gorillas as part of their distraction technique.

Missed opportunity though, they should have called the paper gorillas in the chest.

Yeah, no.

The thing is, is that there is actually a whole wealth wealth of literature on this idea of inattentional blindness, as it's known.

Some of them are slightly more playful than others.

There's one study which looked at how people were distracted while they were walking down the street.

So it had some people on their phones, some people not on their phones, and rather than using a gorilla, they had

a unicycling clown just passing people.

People on the phones didn't notice.

Just to mix it up a bit.

Just to mix it up a little bit.

But you know, places in East London, when seeing a unicycling clown, that's just

normal.

Sure, Tuesday afternoon.

Yep.

Yeah.

There are, of course, though, much more serious stories around this, too.

One dramatic example is Flight 173,

where a flight had a problem with landing gear and decided to abort their landing while they tried to diagnose the problem.

And were so focused on trying to fix the failed landing gear that they also failed to notice that the fuel in their tank was running out and so it crashed when they ran out of fuel and several people died after that.

Yeah, that is much more serious.

I suppose there are other examples where stuff like that really matters, not just flying planes.

We spoke to Dr.

Gemma Briggs, who's a cognitive psychologist at the Open University, and she told us about how she's found inattentional blindness in more dangerous everyday situations.

We've been able to demonstrate that drivers who talk on their hands-free mobile phone demonstrate inattentional blindness in the sense that they can look directly at hazards yet not see them.

We know they're looking directly at them because we're tracking their eye movements but they're not reacting to them because they haven't had the perceptual experience of seeing them.

So they're looking but they're failing to see.

Is that even when people are on hands-free?

Yes, exactly.

Compared to having a conversation with a passenger.

This is what Gem has said about that.

Regardless of whether you use a handheld or a hands-free mobile phone, you're around four times more likely to be involved in a collision and you're far less likely to notice hazards, even if they appear right in front of your eyes.

And this effect persists, this increased crash risk persists for around five minutes after your mobile phone conversation has ended.

Many people will say, well, hang on, what's the difference between a hands-free mobile phone conversation and talking with a passenger within the vehicle?

So it seems to come down to a shared environment.

If you're in a taxi or you're a passenger in someone's vehicle, you are in the same environment as them.

You can see what they're seeing.

When you talk on the phone with someone, what you tend to do is create images in your mind mind about where they are, what they're up to, what they're describing.

And the cognitive resources that are needed for these mental images that you create in your brain are the same cognitive resources that are needed for accurate visual perception of that driving situation.

And as with most competitions, one task is going to win those resources.

And that, Beatrice, is why you need to hush while I'm trying to reverse park.

That's Beatrice being your daughter.

Exactly.

Okay, good.

Well, we are lucky to be joined in the studio today by Dr.

Tom Manley, programme leader at the University of Cambridge MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit.

And Tom, I want to ask you about this.

When it comes to driving and talking in conversations or on the phone, are we just talking about multitasking here?

Aren't some people just better at this than others?

Well, I think the idea is that we're not really multitasking, that we are focused on one thing and then we move our focus to something else.

So clearly there's part of the brain which has got an overview of where it should be at various times, otherwise we'd only start one thing and we'd never move move away from it.

But yeah, I think

the notion that one is capable of doing multiple things at exactly the same time is slightly dangerous.

Is that always the case, though?

I mean, I regularly will listen to an audiobook while doing the laundry.

I think there's going to be a nuanced balance between how much you're giving to various things and what the demands are.

So if you're doing something incredibly routine, you can sort of let yourself get on with that whilst your mind is on the radio programme.

Whereas if you did two new challenging tasks, it's very likely that your performance on one would break down.

And what about the oft-repeated, including by Hannah and my wife, idea that women are better at multitasking, which you've just said doesn't exist?

Well,

people are going to write in.

I look forward to their letters.

But

I think we haven't been able to find reliable differences between men and women on the types of experimental tasks that we do or the tests we give to children.

But as I said, it's often about what you're used to what you've you've learned to do so when people are in I mean you're driving you're adjusting things it's an incredible amount you're doing but there's a sort of driving bit that has become relatively automatic so you can give some attention to to other things so it depends on your experience I guess of that particular but no real difference between men and women well not that we've been able to find that's an incredibly diplomatic answer

well I'm going to move this on I'm going to count that as a victory we've talked about inattentional deafness when you can't hear I'm a gorilla said repeatedly.

Inattentional blindness when you can't see the gorilla, it's always a gorilla.

I want to bring back Polly Dalton in because the third one we want to talk about is called inattentional numbness.

So we were looking here at people's detection of very brief tactile stimuli that were presented as a buzz to their hands.

So people were doing a letter search task on screen.

So this was the visual task.

And this could either be fairly simple or it could be more difficult.

And what we found was that people were less good at detecting the the short tactile stimulus when they were doing the more demanding visual task.

I'd been thinking about this in terms of pickpocketing

whereby if you were looking at a complicated railway station display looking for your train, what time it's going to leave, that might leave you less likely to notice the tactile stimuli that would be associated with being pickpocketed.

But at the same time someone suggested that if you think about it the other other way around,

what the research also shows is that reducing the visual demand increases people's ability to notice tactile stimuli.

And so they asked whether this might be one of the reasons why we close our eyes when we kiss somebody.

And I thought long and hard about it.

And I think it is a fair interpretation.

So is that why people close their eyes when they're snogging?

to pay more attention to sort of the tactile sensation,

shutting off their vision.

Well, not me.

I always keep my eyes wide open.

Your lucky wife.

Yep.

Anyway, Polly was talking about pickpocketing there.

In psychology, the dominant explanation is called perceptual load theory, and it goes like this.

The more demanding the task that you're focusing on is,

the less perceptual capacity you have left over to process the background information.

So, for example, if you're focusing on a very complicated and demanding task, then you're likely to have less perceptual capacity left over for processing everything else that's going on around you.

And under this circumstance, you're then less likely to notice these unexpected changes in the environment.

Okay, let's go back to Charlotte's question because she was noticing her name despite being focused on her book.

And that's in many ways the opposite of all the examples that we've looked at so far.

How does that work?

Well, I think it's a little bit like the cocktail party affair.

We talked about it a little bit on the programme before.

It was first described by Colin Colin Cherry back in 1953.

So you imagine you're having a conversation with someone at a cocktail party and you're totally immersed in this conversation.

You're shutting out all the other voices in this busy bar or the busy room, whatever you're in, and but you suddenly hear your own name, Hana.

And it's because you're still picking up sounds and they're getting some processing, but not making it to full awareness.

But people are more sensitive to certain words and ideas, and that includes your name.

It definitely does does seem to be the case that people are more likely to notice their own name.

Swear words have been shown to capture attention quite effectively.

So, this is a really good example of the way in which the background information is receiving some level of processing to the extent that information that's important to us is sometimes able to capture our attention.

So, even though we don't pay attention to some things, they are being received by our senses, by our brains, and processed at some level outside sort of direct conscious awareness.

So there are a number of forms of selective inattention through hearing, touch and sight.

But we do know that those signals, sights, sounds and sensations are getting in, but most stuff gets chucked away.

The brain is selective about which bits of information get its full attention.

But there is also a more extreme form of inattention.

In 2014, Thomas Canning survived a major stroke at the age of 32.

After being in a coma for several weeks, he made a remarkable recovery and he told us he was left with some curious symptoms.

I drew the circle of the clock.

So I started writing the numbers around the clock.

And and I said I was finished.

And they had to point out to me that I'd only gone halfway around the clock, I'd only done the numbers from 12 to 6.

I used to love art and drawing, so I decided one day to start, I started sketching my wife's face.

So I drew the face.

I thought I'd done actually quite a good job of it, especially as I was recovering from a stroke.

I said to my mum, can you put that up in the hospital to display it?

And she said, are you definitely done?

I said, no, I'm done.

But then my mum pointed out to me that the whole left side of the image was missing.

So effectively my wife only had one eye on the right.

She had hair on the right, shoulder on the right, neck and shoulder on the right but then no shoulder on the left, no hair on the left, no eye on the left and no ear on the left.

Like with a lot of the things that spatial neglect, when it's pointed out to you you can sort of see it and you think oh how have I done that?

You can see it's missing but you just can't explain why you've done it like that.

Another example would be at work and I was sitting at my desk working away and my manager would offer to to make me a cup of tea.

So, yes, thank you very much.

And it won't be until 20 minutes later, I kind of think, well, my manager was going to make me a cup of tea, where is it?

And it's not till I remember one of my techniques is to scan.

I scanned left to think, oh, there's a problem here.

And then I saw my cup of tea on the left, and it's been sat there for 20 minutes, half an hour, it's just really cold.

They've actually walked up to my desk and put the tea on my desk next to me on my left side, but I just haven't seen them come up and I haven't seen them put the tea there.

It's a thing that's quite difficult to explain if you don't experience it yourself.

A lot of people would say, well, why don't you just look further left?

Why don't you just remember to look left?

But it's not as simple as that.

It's very much

my brain forgets I've got a left side.

Even someone could be standing next to me and I wouldn't even notice them.

Now, Tom, I know that this is your specialty, the neuroscience of this fascinating condition.

And I know that you work with a lot of patients like Thomas.

What on earth is going on here?

Well, as you're aware, the brain's got two halves, two hemispheres.

And when you have a stroke, that tends to affect one hemisphere more than another because of the way the brain's plumbing works.

And one's very strong idea from the existence of neglect is that the right side of your brain is really interested in what's going on on the left side of space.

It's looking at what's from the left, it's controlling your left limbs and so on.

And the left hemisphere of the brain is doing the same thing on the other side.

It's like crossed over your body.

Exactly, crossed over your body.

So you've got these sort of two hemispheres at war, almost trying to push and control things from each side of space.

So if you have damage to one side, what tends to happen is the unaffected hemisphere starts to win and push out function from the residual function from the intact side.

So, you get this imbalance in this case in attention and awareness in Thomas's case, and in most cases, actually, away from the left.

Are those typical symptoms then, the ones that Thomas described?

Exactly.

I mean, the clock test is something that's classically given to patients to see whether they've got this type of problem.

But there's quite a degree of variability in the problems that people experience.

So some people might not feel that they've got control over their left limbs, although they're able to move them.

If they're prompted to do it, they just sort of forget that they've got them, or in navigation, bumping into things, or indeed in hearing,

tending to, as with Thomas's example of the tea coming in, it's that he can't see it, but also he's not really expecting anything from that side of space, like that one half of the world has ceased to exist.

So, just to get into the nuts and bolts of this, because it's very, very hard to imagine what you've just described if you haven't experienced it.

It's not that can you not see it?

The left eye works and there is visual perception happening, but what the brain just

ignores it.

Yeah, so if you, and I know you're a visual scientist, so this will probably make you feel a bit ill, what I'm about to say, but we can think about vision as happening at various levels.

So, we start with the eyes, and then we move into the back of the brain, the basic visual processing areas, and then slightly more forward in the brain, this information is flowing, and that's where attention really comes into play.

As Thomas was saying, if people remind him to be aware of the left, suddenly it comes back.

It's much more malleable, volatile type of condition, as you would expect from something which is more attentional.

We all know our attention comes and goes different times of the day, different tasks and activities.

Is it only when people have strokes that they end up with this?

Because strokes tend to have this unilateral, one-sided effect.

It is the major cause, but you can see neglect syndromes following traumatic brain injury, for example, in a car accident or in Alzheimer's or other more general dementia-type conditions.

And does it always end up being the left-hand side that gets neglected?

If you look right early on following a stroke, about 85% of people who have damage to the right side of their brain from the stroke show some evidence of ignoring information on the left.

But about 65% of people with damage to the left side of their brain show some similar problems in noticing things on the right.

But what happens, fortunately, is a lot of the people with damage to the left of their brain seem to recover in this respect very quickly.

And the good news is most people with right hemisphere damage also recover, but the people who are left with persistent neglect almost always tend to have right hemisphere damage and ignore information from the left.

How strange.

That is strange.

Is that because there are different centres on the right and the left and they're actually processing different bits of cognition?

Any ideas as to how to explain that?

Well, it's not going to astonish you to learn that there are some controversies about the exact situation.

So, one broad argument has been that the right hemisphere is a sort of super spatial hemisphere, just like the left is good for language, the right hemisphere is specialised in spatial awareness.

So, if you've got damage to the left, and I'm terrible at confusing left and right, so forgive me, it's the worst area to work in for that.

If you've got damage to the left, your super right hemisphere can sort of compensate and move attention wherever it wants.

Whereas if you damage the right hemisphere, the left isn't very good at it.

And so you're left

with just a very deviated attention to the right.

So that's one sort of argument.

I remember hearing something about doctors who were very, very tired exhibiting this.

Was that your study?

It is indeed.

So we did one study in Addenbrook's Hospital where,

and don't panic about this, but as a result of shift patterns, people are sometimes quite sleep deprived.

We compared them with themselves under conditions where they were had before they'd done a shift.

So the same person under two conditions.

And the sleep-deprived people showed this tendency over time to become more unaware of the left.

Now, don't panic because it wasn't to a dangerous level.

But we've more recently invited healthy young people to come into the MRC unit in Cambridge and relax in a nice deck chair and they put headphones on and they close their eyes and they listen to tones.

And they have to say whether the tone came from the left or the right.

But as people drift into sleep, what they tend to do is they start to report about a quarter of tones that were played on the left as having occurred on the right.

So, you get this attentional drift in the perception of where the stimulus occurred.

So, what we were hoping to do was sort of create

like a healthy model of a neglect-like situation, because then we can look and see what modulates its severity.

The way that you're describing this, particularly on this attentional issue, is as though the left side of your brain is like this sort of slightly weaker younger brother who during the daytime desperately wants to be seen as equal, but then anything happens and they just kind of fall apart.

Yes, although it has got language going on to be there, which is a big thing,

it's the clever younger brother.

Yeah, it does.

Are there specific brain areas which you think are involved in this?

Well, again, it won't surprise you to learn that there are some controversies about this.

So in the textbooks, the argument has been that the parietal cortex, particularly the right parietal cortex,

is critical, so that you will most likely see neglect following damage there.

But other researchers have said no, it's more temporal lobe or it's more frontal lobe.

So temporal lobe, that's sort of above your jaw, on the side of your head, the parietal is a bit further around.

Yes, yes.

I'm waving at the back of my head, it's not very useful for radio.

Frontal, that's the easy one.

I can guess this argument.

It's amazing, isn't it?

It's so fascinating because we think of I mean the brain is a symmetrical structure but the distribution of tasks and perception and cognition is not symmetrical at all.

It's all distributed, but there are centres.

Yes.

How on earth do you go about treating somebody who has this?

And this opens up the weird and wonderful world of spatial neglect rehabilitation, which includes things like putting hot and cold water into one or other ear, or both.

Why?

Why?

Wearing prison goggles or listening to Kenny Rogers.

Okay.

Okay, I mean, we've both got questions here.

Two of those sounded very Victorian.

One of them sounded like punishment.

Well, in this case, it wasn't punishment.

It was that the, this is work by David Soto.

The patient liked the music of Kenny Rogers.

And when he played it, whilst he was doing spatial tasks, he showed less inattention to the left.

So we'll come back to that idea of...

things that cheer people up or make them more alert tend to reduce it.

The hot and cold water, so-called caloric vestibular stimulation,

actually

An important name for something that's actually quite simple.

That just means putting hot stuff in your ear.

Yeah, so hot stuff in one ear, cold stuff in the other ear, typically water.

But it did win a Nobel Prize in 1914.

So what this does is it causes currents in the vestibular system, our balance system, in the opposite direction, but it makes people flick their eyes in one direction.

So patients, people showing neglect, tend not to look, let's say, to the left, but if you can make these eye movements, the idea was into the left, then people would

get better and they did show reduced neglect as well as wet shoulders but it's it's not a terribly practical

this is a don't try this at home moment isn't it not a terribly practical thing so

another example of that is vibrating the neck muscle using what I can only describe as a vibrator for other I can't think of

can induce the illusion that you're rotated and you get eye movements in the opposite direction.

And that actually has has more evidence of lasting effects.

This idea of neglect, is it an extreme form of the inattentional blindness examples that we were talking about earlier?

I think one of the leaps you have to make, and we all know it, is that there is nothing out there.

It's all in here.

So what we're perceiving is a reconstruction of the world.

And the brain is like a brilliant CGI visual effects artist that can paint in everything you expect expect to be there.

So it feels to us like we're surrounded by all this stuff

and it works very well, we can pay attention to it, we can move our attention within it.

But demonstrations like from Polly Dalton and Gemma Briggs that you were talking about earlier are you put people in these experimental situations that show how little we are aware of at the point of focusing on something else.

So in that sense, I think we can all imagine how it is that neglect can cause a rather extreme form of that problem.

But the power of attention and its relationship to conscious awareness

comes through in both of those things.

Okay, well, that kind of brings us to the final question, which I suppose is: what is the big takeaway from this whole area of neuroscience and psychology?

You've said very eloquently how we construct the universe inside our heads, and when those processes go wrong, we can find out about how the brain works and how perception works.

But what can we learn about consciousness from this whole field?

Well,

so I work in the cognition and brain sciences unit, and you almost never hear the word spoken.

Let's call it the C word, if you will,

because the word consciousness.

The word consciousness, a word beginning with C.

And that's interesting in itself because I think often it becomes quite paralyzing because it means so many different things from being knocked unconscious to whether or not you're aware of a particular stimulus to this whole sense of there is a me which is a persistent entity which is somehow an agent and responsible for things and that can just freak everybody out so you tend to get down to various sort of operational definitions in this experiment how many times did they report this stimulus and what changed that but it of course is the most interesting question probably in the universe is how material matter produces conscious awareness and what is its nature.

It's just as soon as you start to move away from scientific tractability, you get quite a lot of discussion that doesn't reach a clear point.

But of course, it's interesting in the pub.

Well, we like a conversation that doesn't reach an interesting point, particularly one that you can have in a pub.

So, on that note, I'd like to say thank you to our guests, Polly Dalton, Gemma Briggs, Thomas Canning, and here in the studio, Tom Manley.

So, Dr.

Rutherford, when it comes to why we pay attention to some things and not others, can we say case soul?

Yes, Professor Fry, when we're laser-focused on one task, it means we can easily ignore the noise.

But even when we're focused on one thing, we are receiving other bits of info.

And things like our names or swear words can cut through that noise.

Tiredness, sleepiness, and brain damage can cause spatial neglect on one side or the other.

And we can learn about how the brain processes reality when it goes wrong.

And for some people, they can...

Oh, look, a squirrel.

Ooh, look, a squirrel.

That is, I mean, that should be the title of your autobiography, I think.

What film's that from?

Up.

Yeah.

It's the dog.

It's the Doug?

Is he called Doug, the dog?

I don't know, mate.

You're the film buff.

Yeah, he's called Doug.

In fact, there's a whole series on that channel about him looking at squirrels.

It is from UP.

Anyway, there you go.

We enjoyed Pretended to be Distracted.

Actually, I think we're pretty good at concentrating.

Shall we ask Ilan, our producer, whether he thinks we're good at?

I think we're really good at it.

He's not available.

What we do is we get in at 9:30, right?

And then we know the studio's at 2.

And then promptly at quarter to 1, we start working.

That's right.

And, you know, we haven't seen each other for a couple of weeks, which is quite unusual.

So obviously we had five hours of gossip to catch up on before looking at the script.

Yeah, you know.

Once we get in our stride, though, we will submit a book.

two or three years late.

Yeah, exactly.

And I definitely never say, oh, look, there's a funny comedy sketch from the mid-90s which describes that exact situation and then send it to you and make you watch it.

I have seven tabs open on my computer in front of me of stuff that you've sent me during the day that you insisted that I look at.

Which you have no intention of watching any of them do.

Saving them for later.

Yeah.

Anyway, so we actually got some quite interesting correspondence that I think is important that you know about Adam.

This is notable.

It was a letter that came in from Barbara Zakrosko.

And Barbara says that on a recent work trip to America, I came across something that I thought was worth bothering you with.

During one episode, Adam was describing making pizza using Naan on the base.

Carnival.

Which consequently started a string of ridicule during other episodes from Hannah.

Rightly so.

Thank you, Barbara.

I am in favour of this idea.

Hang on a minute.

I thought you were on my side.

Yes.

Garlic cheesy Naan would be an ideal base for a pizza, she says.

What's not to like here?

During my trip to America, I came across something that might support Adam's culinary adventures as a viable option.

Please see attached.

And in that picture, there is

poster that says naan pizza, globally inspired, locally loved.

Well, you know what?

Barbara, this is from the country that gave us the corn dog and the deep base pizza.

I mean, frankly,

Barbara finished that letter.

This is absolutely awesome.

Yes.

Barbara finishes by saying, sadly, I didn't get to try it as I was being told off by an angry owner for going against the pandemic in force Q direction errors to take this photo, so I promptly left after taking it.

Well, Barbara, let me tell you, as a matter of fact had you tried it you would have been just as disgusted as I am.

I still don't see what the problem with this is.

It's bread.

Naan is bread.

It's just bread.

It's just flat bread.

Every culture has flat bread.

You put flat bread, you put a bit of sauce on it.

It's not curry flavoured.

And there he goes croaking high-pitched.

Just think me and Barbara and the owner of naan pizza in wherever it is in America.

I mean the flavor, there doesn't even the flavour, there's a chicken pesto version.

The three pizzas, you've got pepperoni.

Okay, I'll accept that.

Margarita, I'll accept that.

But chicken pesto, non-pizza.

I mean, how many more different culinary experiences do you want to merge into one?

This is just evolution.

You have to accept change.

Not everything can be evolution, Adam.

It's everything is evolution.

Should we do cure of the week?

I think we better because I'm quite cross about this now.

Thank you, Barbara.

You're my friend.

Fast and curious, occasionally, curious, totally geek chic.

Rutherford and Friars, Curio of the Week.

Okay, we've got another musical number coming in today.

This is,

you know what?

We, over the years, have had people replaying our theme tune in all manner of different devices.

We've had...

There was the Flugelhorn.

The Flugel.

Oh, man.

There was an entire orchestra there, there, wasn't there?

Didn't we have like a little brass band thing?

Well, yes, I think it was a school orchestra, the quality of which was school orchestra quality.

On the last series, we had the amazing uh Norwegian heart surgeon who played it on the classical guitar.

Absolutely, you were not into at all.

I mean, I mean, I'm sure he's a very good heart surgeon.

Yeah, just don't get heart problems in Oslo, or else you're going to be in trouble.

You make a good point.

Um, so now

we bring you Doctors Rutherford and Fry.

Fry.

I know how much you love your theme tune played on various instruments, so here it is on my 40-year-old Sinclair ZX Spectrum computer.

This is from Rumbert Price on Twitter.

I mean, it's just perfect.

It's eight-bit heaven.

I can't tell you how much that appeals to.

a number of different aspects of my character.

ZX Spectrum was my first ever computer learned to program on it.

I mean, just a beautiful array of rainbow goodness.

So I was on Acorn Electron, which was the 32K version of the BBC, but I also

was very familiar with the Spectrum.

Spectrum was your first computer?

Yep.

You describe that in your book, don't you?

Yeah, it's a beautiful, beautiful thing.

Beautiful part of my history to

Spectrum.

Except it had those weird rubbery keys.

Yeah, that's true.

And you definitely couldn't get any crumbs on them.

No, no.

But did you play Horoscope skiing?

No, I didn't.

And also the the other thing is, because it was like, it was secondhand, this is in the 80s, right?

I mean, you young kids, you don't know you're born.

32k is what my computer has.

They're so teeny tiny.

I've got more K on my analogue watch now.

So it would come along, and it was smaller than

a tablet at the moment, right?

How would you get a tablet?

It was very small, and you would plug it into a cassette recorder, ask your mum and dad what that is, kids, and then into a TV.

And because it was sort of secondhand in my house, and my dad set it up with the TV that we weren't using, which was in black and white.

Oh, okay.

So all of the kind of colourful pictures that you would see on the loading sack.

It wasn't colourful because there was only eight colours.

Well, sure.

Sure.

But all of the eight colours.

All of the eight colours were in black and white, yeah.

Yeah.

So, and it also made a noise as well.

When you put the tape in, it did.

It made a noise.

And funnily enough, my croaky voice might help that because it basically made this noise.

It went,

Knew there would be a use for it somewhere.

I think maybe we should just fade Adam out and end the programme there.

Thank you very much for sending in your questions and your entries for Curio of the week.

More from us next week.

Thank you.

And then it would crash and it would say error.

Please check tape.

You have to do it all again.

Sucks.

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be hurt!

Winner, best score!

We demand to be seen!

Winner, best book!

We demand to be quality!

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs!

Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com

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