Transcripts For KQED Charlie Rose 20140130

Doctorow. His new book is called andrews brain a novel. Andrew came to me as a figure standing in the snow and holding a an infant swaddled infant in his arms in front of a door with the snow coming down on his yankee ball cap. And thats the image that came to me and it was some urgency to it as he was waiting for this door to open. And i found myself writing that and then i had to figure out what was going on and thats how the book developed. Rose we conclude this evening with a conversation with billy joel at the piano recorded as he was preparing for a new years eve performance. Piano man is pretty simple. Its mostly the melody doing the work, which im singing. The hands just do playing piano man which is why the sheet music isnt really all that interesting. Its just an accompaniment. Rose Scott Stossel, e. L. Doctorow, and billy joel when we continue. Captioning sponsored by Rose Communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. The Behavioral Treatment Program we have here is based on whats known as extinction. Extinction is a scientific process by which people can get over their fears. Rose an estimated 40 Million People in the United States suffer from an anxiety disorder. The aflexion has affected everyone from Charles Darwin and Emily Dickinson to bill russell and barbra streisand. Anxietys prevalence is matched by its tendency to be misunderstood. Journalist and author Scott Stossel has struggled with anxiety for most of his life. His new book tells his personal story and offers a history of anxiety from medical, cultural, philosophical and experiential perspectives. Its called my age of anxiety fear, hope, dread and the search for peace of mind. Im pleased to have Scott Stossel at this table. Welcome. Thank you for having me. Rose heres what david brooks said about you, because you were one of the recipients of the sidney award which he gives every year to the best magazine pieces that he sees. Does that describe you . In some ways i think it does. A lot of my colleagues im 44 years old. So for most of my life ive endeavored with great intensity to try to hide my anxiety because i thought it was either shameful or that somehow admitting it would compromise my professional standing and one of the things i wrestled with in the book and i talk about this in the book and in talking to my therapist, you know, i wanted to try to explore the nature of anxiety and look at all of the possible causes that might have led to my own, in effect trying on different theories of anxiety. In doing so im in in effect, coming out as anxious after having hidden it for many years. Its actually sort of a signature khark wrist i can of people who many people who suffer from anxiety, particularly panic disorder, that there is a vast gap between the outwardly projected and often to the individual sufferer false feeling outward veneer of confidence and competence and the inward fear, the inward feeling of terror, sang tiety, dread, incompetence and so one of the characters in the book is a therapist named dr. W. Talks about how a symptomut also a cause of anxiety is something called impression management. For those of us and there are 40 million of us who suffer with it the act of trying to conceal your anxiety from friends, family, colleagues, actually that is itself a symptom but its also a cause because it takes effort to hide rose so therefore is this cathartic for you . We will see. I always thought i was pretty good at concealing the anxiety but i didnt really know to what degree i succeeded. My family, my wife, people close to me, my parents knew about it. But when advanced galleys of the book started circulating around the office of the atlantic where im the editor, i had a whole series of people lining up to come into my office to say, a, i had no idea and, can i just give you a hug . Which was very nice but also uncomfortable but also made me realize that i had done a better job of concealing it. Rose the most important question is what conclusions did you come for you in terms of how you became and how youd begun to have to live with anxiety . I spent a lot of time and i have a whole series of chapters where i try on each of a number of theories for why this might be the case. So, for instance i mean, fundamentally anxiety is a normal Human Emotion that is part of the human condition and when it functions appropriately it functions to keep us alive. Its effectively the fight or flight response and in a state of nature if youre being chased by a saber tooth tiger or confronted by a member of an enemy tribe it is in your interest to have that physiological response that, you know, the blood flows to your muscles. Rose adrenaline. Adrenaline and cortisol. But when you those of us who suffer from anxiety disorders, even people who dont, when you were in situations where thats not appropriate its or where its disproportionate to the threat it can feel like this horrific almost like your bodys been hijacked by this your thought processes and your physiology. You feel shaking, sweating, gastric distress, tingling in your fingers. But in terms of what actually causes it i spend one whole chapter looking at the traditional freudian idea of that its all about your mother, you know . That and actually also talking about the work of a midcentury british psychoanalyst named john bobly who developed attachment theory and he had compelling evidence that ones early experience with your caregiver and the nature of that relationship goes a long way to determining how secure and safe in the world youll feel as an adult. So i read this whole chapter and theres evidence from displaced world war ii victims who were separated from their parents to he did this thing called he did these experiments where he would watch kids in a Laboratory Setting and see what happens, how they related to their children, he developed this whole typology of attachment styles and people who had insecure attachment styles with their mother were much more likely to develop anxiety. Then he looks at and subsequent people looked at rats and they would show that rats whose mothers rat pups whose mothers engaged in a sufficient amount of licking and grooming actually would reduce the reactivity of their h. P. A. Access, the hope thalamus, pituitary adrenal access and calm them down. So i finished this chapter and i think i had a very loving overprotective mother, she tried her best but she was astonishly overprotective. And i thought this is clear proof my mother cause midanxiety. Then i look at Genetics Research piling up at an astonishing degree. There are hubs if not thousands of studies that come out looking at various candidate genes that contribute to this or that aspect of anxiety or depression and my own view is that ones general predisposition to have an anxious temperament is largely woven into your genome. And now thats not wholly determinative overlaid on top of that can be how v you experienced trauma, what was your upbringing, whats the Life Experience . Whats the culture you living consist in and theres a good argument that the culture we inhabit is anxiety producing. But my own view shared by jerome kaeugen whos a psychologist is that it is largely woven into the genes. Rose that would be my theory just based on, as i said to you earlier, the whole range of connections to the brain. The mo molecular contribution ta lot of brain diseases. So, for instance, theyre now looking at theyre studying for many years what psychiatrists and researchers tried to study is what makes clinically psychopathological people ill . Now theyre looking at well, maybe its more productive to look at what are people who are unusually resilient against these things, what makes them . And so they studied this trait called resilience and one of the most fascinating studies is that theyve identified a neurotransmitter called neuropeptide y. N. P. Y. So army rangers and navy seals go through this sere test where youre subjected to, in effect, all but torture. Rose sleep deprivation. Cold and all that. And this one researcher has looked and he can determine in advance who will pass and who will not by taking blood assays of their level of neuropeptide y. And if you are high in neuropeptide y youre almost immune to developing posttraumatic stress disorder and youre much more likely to thrive in these situations. Now, that said, the armys also studying, you know, you can learn resilience and cultivate understanding ways for how can you develop this as a psychological trait. Rose its interesting. Im literally on chapter one the first page and you quote freud saying theres no question that the problem of anxiety in a today inial point is a today inial point at which the most various and important questions converge. A riddle whose solution will be bound to throw a flood of light on our whole mental existence. That from freud in 1933. This is what you start with and i caught this and i just thought wow. Thats anxiety. This is anxiety. Rose a great moment in your life, nothing to worry about. Well, there shouldnt have been anything to worry about and this is what happens, as i said earlier. You get hijacked and, you know, i was not, as they say and i they in the book present in the moment because and i had been very excited about the wedding, thrilled to be marrying my wife and here she comes down the aisle and by the time she actually gets up to the alter im not only sweating profusely, my best man is handing me handkerchiefs to mop my brow but ive also begun to shake and so she who is aware of my anxiety is trying to hold me up and im trying to conceal it. And this is the nature of anxious thinking so im having this panoply of physiological responses. Im afraid im going to faint or vomit or die and ive got our wedding readers are facing me in the church and im looking at them and i can see them looking at me with what i believe to be growing alarm and i think oh, my god, they think im going to pass out. And im thinking this is going to prove to everyone im not worthy of marrying my wife. And the minister can see ive got this sheen of flop sweat on me and hes halfway through the ceremony and he mouths to me privately are you okay . And, you know, the truth was i was not at all okay but i would have felt mortified if we had to, like, call off the proceedings so i somehow muscled through it. My wife is physically holding me up. I get through the wedding and i survive and then as i say in the book, i sort of am consumed for the next three days by this selflacerating despair because here is one of these epic moments in your life and i was not present, not able to focus. And this is a signature quality of anxiety, too, instead of focusing on the task at hand you its you narcissistally turn inward and focus on the symptoms of anxiety and how other people are perceiving it. It can be quite debilitating and detracting. Rose how many years somethat that. 14 years ago this coming july. Rose 14 years later how are you different . Well, as we were saying earlier, i mean, in some fundamental way im not different in that, you know, my genome, which was i talk in the book about my great grandfather who was dean of Harvard College in the 1940s and was to all outward appearances and in fact in actual fact an extremely effective administrator and professor and somewhere around his 40s and 50s he sort of had a series of mental breakdowns, seized by acute anxiety, ended up being institutionalized multiple times, underwent electroshock therapy. The idea being that obviously i am not him, im four generations removed from him but you see when you look at families once there is one or two members of a family with an anxiety disorder youll start to see the entire family tree stippled with this. So at some fundamental level i am exactly the same. I have the same genetic predisposition to what jerome kagan and Harvard College would say. High reactive temperament. Little things. I have a highreactive physiology and but having spent years in therapy and nearly ten years researching and writing this book i have much better understanding not only of the neuromechanics of what it is that is causing these horribly unpleasant emotions and some perspective, too. I think you know, i have a phobia of flying and ill be flying across a couple years ago i was flying across the rockies and i was reading a book about the neuroscience of anxiety and i thought oh, so this is really just bubblings of neurotransmitters in my brain. This gives me perspective, i shouldnt worry about this. Then we hit turbulence heading over the rockies and at that point any perspective i have that is immediately my fight or flight response overrides everything and my body takes over. But i do think that rose and how did it affect you . In that moment . Rose yes. Its terrifying. I sit there popping dramamine and, you know, paging the Flight Attendant to bring me another scotch and if i have enough of them im okay but thats not actually an adaptive way of dealing with it. And its quite grueling and tiring to have to be worrying about these things all the time. But i will say that one of the other things researching this book is that i look deep into the history and i was really it was really striking. I had some sense of this before i began the research but not complete understanding of to what degree the most famous researchers into human psychology were themselves motivated by their own anxiety. So dig Sigmund Freud had this horrific train phobia as a young boy and this motivated him to look into this. William james suffered the what we would today call panic attacks. Charles darwin embarked on his journey on the beagle around the world and wanted to be a naturalist. By the time he got back many people believed he was afflicted by acute anxiety and its unclear that actually his anxiety may have been a service because it enabled him by keeping him cop fined to his house for years at a time focused on working on this book. Not just these famous people but you read back and you begin to see that hypocrisies in 4th century b. C. Or galen the roman physician or the most prominent british physician of the 1700s, they all of them are contending with dozens if not hundreds of these patients and dealing with this themselves. And this is woven into the human condition and maybe not so much a source for shame. Thats something i wrestle a lot with in the book, too. That today the stigma attached to Mental Illness has diminished but its not gone. Particularly for men. There was an incredibly striking quote i came across posted on the gun sights in allied gun sights in malta during world war ii were these signs and it said if you are a man you will have the selfrespect not to allow yourself to display an anxiety neurosis or show any fear. And this is sort of this i think a basic societal norm that for a man to show vulnerability or weakness or cowardice is a moral failing. And to some degree i agree with that myself which is why i feel these aspects of shame. And yet at the same time what we now know about the neuroscience of this stuff and the genetics of this stuff is not so different from diabetes. We dont say or gout. You dont judge someone as a moral failure for suffering from diabetes or parkinsons or other things like that. Rose which has both genetic and environmental influences. As does anxiety, yeah. Rose as does anxiety. Exactly right. So how many people have come up to you because they you have written this book and have been these magazine excerpts and there have been articles written about you to say almost quietly and softly, me, too. At this point i would say well over a thousand. And that it ranges from friends and colleagues of mine who one of my colleagues came up to me after she read the excerpt in the magazine, she shared her history and Family History and she said everyone is going to come up with you and share their secret crazy. So i had that from colleagues. Plenty of random people. And to me i thought there might be some of that effect but i didnt realize ive had just via facebook and email and twitter and people sending me letters just saying in effect thank you, either, a, i had no idea that what i was feeling was something that other people suffered and that im not alone or that you have put into words what ive been feeling my whole life or my son heard you on the radio and said please write down the names of these phobias because ive been trying to explain to you this is what ive been suffering. Including some celebrities who i wont name who have said that they suffered the whether its public speaking phobia or various other anxieties that i talk about. So i will say one story. She said this on twit sore its Public Record but remember paw lena pour sko ef have. Ive done an interview with her. Rose in the 1980s i would subscribe to Sports Illustrated and a couple weeks ago i was looking through twitter and i saw that she followed me on twitter and i thought that cant be her. So she tweeted and said scott, if only youd written this book 30 years earlier, better late than never but this is so helpful. And i wrote back to her and said if youd written me 30 years earlier i think you would have cured me of my anxiety forever. She said no, no, no, because were twins emotionally. So even being a supermodel having supermodel good looks and millions of dollars is no protection against anxiety. Rose so wheres the hope . The hope is in, a i mean, for me what i was trying to do with this book is i set out trying to find a cure and i had this idea that i would have this dramatic arc and that i would ive tried every therapy under the sun and i thought ill come out the other end cured and what a great dramatic arc that would be. And yet i sort of undertook the book and year one im anxious, year two, im anxious, year three, im still anxious. Thats not an arc, thats a flat line. But then i started to think, you know, actually there are ways i can come to terms with this by coming out with it and not having it be a mark of shame. But also starting to recognize that there are things that copresent with anxiety that are quite adaptive. And that as i was saying earlier, anxiety itself is adaptive. There were these two harvard psychologists in 1908 who developed this theory where they looked at animals and humans and said if you look at a bell curve and anxiety runs from here to here and optimum performance runs from low performance here to High Performance here, if youre too anxious and youre way over here youll not perform effectively. If, on the other hand, youre way over here and you are not sufficiently anxious, that is to say your adrenaline isnt pumping, youre not engaged, you will also not perform. You need the goldilocks just right level of a little bit of anxiety. So its learning to trying to manage the anxiety, try to have the optimum level of anxiety. I will say, too, that there is so much the head of the National Institute of Mental Health talks about how anxiety is one of the areas where a lot of the most exciting cuttingedge research about tying brain to mind and molecule to emotion and gene to temperament is most cutting edge. And one of the things i was struck by in the book was the history of psychofarm kolg and a lot of the drugs that are now common antidepressants were developed as insecticides or rocket fuel or penicillin preservatives and nobody knew how they worked. Were developing a better understanding of the mechanism by which those work and further more the combination of Genetic Research and psychofarm khropblg cal research is determining that if you suffer from anxiety and you dont but if i did they could look at my genome and say this drug will be more effective than this other drug. And one hopes that down the road there will be more and better effective treatments. Its interesting, i dont suffer from anxiety. Ive suffered the a lot of other problems but not that. But its interesting that in times of stress i saoepl to be calmer and i dont know what that is. I begin by saying i have an unfortunate tendency to faulter in crucial situations and that is true. And the clinical literature shows that people who are on the anxious neurotic side of the spectrum do tend to break down more easily under stress and there are fascinating studies from world war ii showing that in any troop onethird will break down even before you get to the front, onethird is completely immune to any breakdown and some of them are psychopaths which is not necessarily a good thing and in the middle theres a certain level of but i will say in my own life and this is again my people being so surprised at my coming out as being angst that i am so constantly kind of internally flapped and dealing with i talk in the book about how exhausting it is to deal with these irrational phobias and anxieties that im confronted with a real problem and other people are being angst around me i feel calmer and more able to deal. And there are interesting studies, for instance, from world war ii during the blitz that patients who had been diagnosed as neurotics became less neurotic and felt better during the blitz and that may be because, a, they had Something Real to be afraid of as bombs were raining down on their head. Maybe because they felt less ashamed because everyone else was running around looking as scared as they were. So there may be something to that. Rose but at the same time, in moments of crisis i can sometimes in different circumstances there will be some kind of physiological change so you feel you feel a sense of i dont want to use the word anxiety but you feel in a sense that your body is more alert. Its the fighter flight response. Youre ready to go. And when that happens youve got certain hormones and neurotransmitters flow flowing through your blood. Blood flows through your strong muscles so youre ready to fight or flight. Your blood flows from your brain away from your stomach. Your pupils widen, you can see things more acutely. For people who are overwhelmed by this it becomes panic and distress. And i talk in the book about there are people who are particularly gifted at thriving under stress. I know you recently were doing a segment about football and i tend to think Peyton Manning or tom brady or russell wilson, these are people who are unusually gifted at and theyve done this eric goldman whos head of neurogenetics at i think the National Institute of Mental Health talks about theres one gene that has two variants, the worrier gene and the warrior gene. And both are adaptive. If they werent they would have died out. But the worrier gene is good at worrying about things and keeping you away from danger. Rose thank you for coming. Thank you for having me. Rose pleasure to have you here. Back in a moment. Stay with us. The worldwide weapon was conceived as an a somewhat academic thing some years ago but its years of realization and Development Since the 80s have saoepled to me the work of a moment. Coming into being as an astronomical event. Rose e. L. Doctorow is here. He is without questioning one of our greatest level authors. He writes about reach of american possibility in which plain lives take on the cadence of history. He was awarded the American Academy of arts and letters for fiction. His new novel is called andrews brain. Im pleased to have e. L. Doctorow back at this table. This is the first front page book review of the New York Times says ive always responded to the history of my times says the beleaguered narrator of andrews brain. Almost ruefully as if he wished it werent so. He has no choice, responding to the history of ones times is the sworn duty of a character in a novel by e. L. Doctorow. Who has in his half century of writing fiction placed a remarkable number of people both real and imagined in their history just to watch them respond. Thats interesting. Rose do you agree with that . Not entirely. laughs . Rose okay, what do you disagree with . I dont want to be ungracious but the label of historical novelist is not one i welcome. Rose whats wrong with it other than its accuracy . All novels are set in the past, if you think about it. And even h. G. Wells is Science Fiction is very victorian some to novels have a wider focus and include public figures and major historical events. Some have a narrow focus about family, about personal relationships and so on, but theyre all about the past. Theres no ontological difference between the two. So and also my novels are set in different parts of the country. Theyre set in the dakotas, down south in georgia and carolina and the adirondacks, in new york city. So i feel you might as well call me a geographical novelist as a historical novelist. I just like the word novelist without any modifications. Rose okay. I mean, responding to the history of ones times is sworn duty of a character in a novel by e. L. Doctorow. Im looking for the word historical novelist but i dont see it. Well, maybe i overanticipated the laughs . Rose maybe he says it later. So what you do say in this book is that the book judges the reader somehow. Yeah. I think this is a this is not form lake fiction after you do this kind of work for a while rose this kind of work is writing novels . Well, what you want to do is find new ways to do it. And thats equivalent to i mean writers have been doing that for a long time. James joyce was a beautiful writer of realistic sense of fiction and he went off and then did ulysses and then ended up with finnegans wake. Rose laughs they seemed to have done all right, didnt they . Virginia woolf decided she wanted to write a novel without a plot to fore forgo that device. That convention and she did a couple of times, the one i liked best is mrs. Dalloway. So writers have a feeling that form lake fiction is unsatisfactory and the way this book has turned out i think i do break a few rules and that pleases me. Rose who is andrew . Andrew is a came to me as a figure standing in the snow and holding a a swaddled infant in his arms in front of a door with the snow coming down on his yankee ball cap. And thats the image that came to me and it was it was some urgency to it as he was waiting for this door to open. And i found myself writing that and then i had to figure out what was going on and thats how the book developed. Rose he is a neuroscientist . Hes a cognitive scientist, yes, of in his own opinion, no great distinction. Rose uhhuh. And he also suffers from the fact that all his life hes been what i call an inadvertent agent of disaster. An earlier infant it turns out that he administered medicine to and the it was the wrong medicine and the infant died. As a child he was responsible for a car crash that killed the driver and so on and so forth. So all his life hes had this he has this trail of awful things have happened. So he imagines that he is now unable to feel anything which, of course, is a selfdelusion because hes very feeling. Rose but you make no distinction between real and imagined. That is correct. Thats one of the rules ive happily broken. You dont know when hes imagining what hes saying or whether hes reporting on what actually happened. The convention of the unreliable narrator, of course, but this really takes it to extremes in that way the book does test the reader, does judge the reader. And i i just think that fiction can be too comfortable. You know, it is the most conservative of the arts. If you think whats happened historically in music like in 1900, stravinskys rites of spring in art, the impressionists began and then picasso and the cubists and then abstract expressionism and conceptual art. There are always these enormous changes. Revolutionary and evolution. But fiction hasnt moved that much. Of course weve gone through a period of postmodern writing but thats rather timid in terms of finding a new way to rose but arent you partly responsible for that . Well, not i came along a little later than the first postmodernist, i believe. Rose but youre a novelist and youre, as i said, one of our great living novelists. I appreciate that, yes. So therefore arent you responsible for the quality of novels in our life . Well, im certainly know. Rate but have you been experimental enough . Have you been revolutionary enough . Have you tried to break the mold . Well, its a matter of personal dissatisfaction you always want to top what youve done in the past. Thats the prime motivation. And when somethings done, you cant do anything about it anymore, youve got to move forward. Rose were you in search of a to have a conversation about neuroscience and philosophers of the mind and show their in conflict . Well, i commit this from the point of view of philosophers of mind. Its fascinating subject area of philosophical concern and its the subject of all very mysterious. What has happened historically is that the materialist conception of thinking has taken over from the old corps taoegs dualism. Modern neuroscience theres no soul. The soul is a fiction. Theres just the brain. But the problem that creates is to figure out how the brain creates feeling, thought, wishing, longing, falling in love and all these subjective state of minds that we think of as consciousness. How does that happen . Nobody knows. And theres all sorts of immense amount of activity going on to map brains and figure out these rose theres a huge story about in the the New York Times this last couple weeks. So i have a separate thought about that. Its wonderful work and if it can figure out what to do about parkinsons disease or alzehimers disease, thats terrific. Rose thats primarily what the motivation is. I understand and its noble and its necessary. But ive just projected in this book to the point where andrew suggestses supposing we do figure out how the brain works . If that happens then we can build a computer that has consciousness. Movie stuff but there are actually some serious people in this field who believe that theoretically thats possible. Well, if that ever happens and i wont for a long, long time if that ever happened all the stories weve been living by are finished. The bible, all those bronze age mythological senses we have of ourselves as human beings are gone. Finished. That could be as disastrous as an asteroid hitting the planet. Rose ive dealt with this scientifically at this table with brain scientists and neuroscientists talking about consciousness and also talking about Artificial Intelligence and all of that. Well, im giving you andrews read on this. Rose oh, i know. That he worries about what happens. Hes a bit of an his staeurbg. Rose youve also got some politics in here, dont you . Well, i suppose you could call it that. I dont see it that way. Its a very intricate book. Things lock into other things. For instance, andrew, his first wife whom hes bringing the baby of this rose thats the opening scene, isnt it . To the door of his exwife. To the door of his exwife, the baby hes made with his lately deceased young second wife and his exwifes husband is an opera singer who has performed in boris tkpwaoud november and at one point he calls andrew a pretender because in the history of boris gudinov boris was terrified by someone coming along pretending to be the rightful czar and since hes been since hes killed children in order to take them he has some sort of posttraumatic stress disorder. So andrew is the pretender and then andrew becomes that other character in the great russian opera the holy fool. And in that opera boris begs the holy fool for forgiveness and the wholly fool stands for russia and the holy fool walks away. Now when andrew gets to the white house, which he does and i dont want to go too much into detail. Rose theres a george bush like character there. Oh, im sorry you said that. laughs but the point is im under the if someone reads this book 25 or 50 years from now, it wont matter who the model for this character is, it will just be a portrait of moral ininadequacy attached to power. Rose the other night you were recently awarded the National Book award lifetime achievements award medal for distinguished contribution to american letters. Thats a mouthful. As well as the gold medal for the arts by the American Academy of arts and letters. You have a lot of awards. Does that mean a lot to you . Well, its gratifying to get them but you dont think about them very much. If you get an award from your peers thats quite nice. Thats great honor. Rose john updike, who was on this show 20 something times in response to receiving his old gold medal in which he said he was almost paralyzed by thinking of the great numbers of contemporary writers who know things i cant. Yeah, he told me that, too and i had told him that it was a well deserved reward. It was a just reward. An award. And he expressed these sentiments to me and isnt it amazing how we all live with such selfdoubt. Uupdike was a fantastic writer and yet had these doubts about himself and thats almost a necessary part of the process of the profession that if youre too confident, too cocky about what youre doing and what youve done youre going to go down. But if your anxieties remain undaunted youll be okay. Rose does it get more difficult or easier . It just takes longer as you get older. Get a little more thoughtful, maybe. Rose debra truesman of the new yorker once said about you hes the worlds literary historian. Do you feel like the worlds literary historian . No, no, i dont. Rose you knew she said it. Its very nice of her to say that but i see all these books aswmjux÷h u selfcontained. Its possible to string them out in some sort of Chronological Order and cover 150 years of american life. Rose speaking of that welcome to hard times big as life ragtime drinks before dinner worlds fair. City of god reporting the universe creationist, homer and langley. All the time in the world and now andrews brain. Which makes me realize, it might be a good point to make. Ive been thinking about cognition for several books. City of god was published in 2000 and its in there and its in the march a soldier gets a spike in his head as a result of an explosion and he cant remember anything anymore and he keeps saying its all now, its all now. And then he forgets he said that. And he said what did i say . Rose but thats how advances in Brain Science have taken place. Through injury. Through injury, exactly, yeah. So theres been a preoccupation of mine for a few books. This is remarkable. Thinking about somethat that is on the cutting edge of the frontier of the future. Well, what happens is for some reason i assigned him this profession at the beginning of the book so i had to deliver on that. Rose do you know go ahead, deliver on that and well, he has grave misgivings in the sense of feeling that the brain is his enemy or his jailer. And he says at one point how can i think about my brain if its my brain doing the thinking. Theres the immediate selfalienation in the remark like that. And thats because he cannot accept the romance and the comfort of the idea of the soul. Rose can you pinpoint a moment when this book began . Not the writing of it, when the idea even though you might have have recognized it at the time . Well, you have these ideas and you carry them around with you sometimes for years and every once in a while one of them comes up to the fore and its the only thing you can do and what happened is i remembered a man i knew who had this kind of terrible history that i gave to andrew that he had, in fact, inadvertently murdered his infant child by feeding it the wrong medicine and that he was a good, kind, decent man but it turned out he had this whole trail of disaster. So i wondered about that. How someone whos not evil and not violent and not nasty and not mean and generally negative but disposed kindly toward the world and amiable in his nature and how could achieve this awful record in his life . And thats the thought that got me started on this book. Rose how long ago was that . That was just before i wrote the first line, actually. laughs rose the one i just read. Thank you. Thank you for coming. Pleasure to have you here. My pleasure. Rose as always. Thank you. Rose back in a moment. Stay with us. Its 9 00 on a saturday, the regular crowd shuffles in theres an old man sitting next to me making love to his tonic and gin cheers and applause rose this is european know. This piano in particular . Any particular thing about this piano . This piano ive had with me for years. Im used to the action. Its easy to maintain. And its the guys know how to work with it and get the sound out of it so steinway. Rose if you can get a piano, steinway is a good place to go, isnt it . Steinways are good. Rose when you touch the keys i once talked to a World Champion chess player and he literally could feel the keys. Feel the pieces . Rose yeah, could feel them. Do these keys just once you put your hands on a piano key. A touch technique is important. The feel of a piano is important. You want some resonance out of it. You want to get a little feedback out of the thing. They used to make pianos with ivory keys. They dont do that anymore, thank goodness, but there was a reason for that. Your fingers sweat when you play. And the ivory actually absorbs the moisture. So you dont get slippery on the thing. Now days theyre made out of a Synthetic Material so it can get a little slippery. But this babys good. Rose play me something just to watch the process. Note . Rose thats beethoven, thats not me. Rose i got that. That was not a billy joel composition. I wish it was but it aint. Rose piano man . Piano man is pretty simple. Its mostly the melody thats doing the work, which im singing. The hands just do rose which is why the sheet music isnt really all that interesting. Its just an accompaniment. Rose do you still read music . No. I dont read music anymore. Rose is it like a Foreign Language . If you dont use it, if you dont do it you lose it. Looking at music to me is looking at kuehne form. I dont know what im looking at. I can sit down and break it apart slowly, but i never learned how the sight read all that well which is a good tool to have in your tool box. Rose yes, indeed. How about my life . Left hand for me, its easy, its all octaves. See im playing october w eufs the left hand. Its only two notes. Rose and you favor your right hand simply because that was the way it well, im a righty. Rose so if youre righthanded you play more with your right hand. People tend to favor one hand or the other. Its weird, i bat lefty but im a righthanded guy. Rose new york state of mind . Note . 6 some folks like to get away rose oh, man. Yeah. If i had within the sound of my voice a hundred thousand of the most intense billy joel fans whawhat would they most want to hear you play . Probably want to hear piano man. Rose yeah. When we were in the u. K. They wanted to hear up town girl that was a big hit there. It was princess dianas theme song. I dont normally do it in other places because it shreds my throat. Im trying to sing like frankie vali and the four seasons. It just kills me but in england we did it all the time. Well probably do it again in the states. Rose just give me a little bit of it. Ahh up town girl, shes been living in an white bread world as long as than anyone with hot blood can and now shes looking for a downtown man thats what i am and i wrote that, i was in my 30s and now im in my 60s and trying to hit those same notes at this age, not the same. Rose river of dreams. River of dreams. In middle of the night i go walking in my sleep, through the valley of fear to a river so deep, i must be searching for something something so someone can find and it can only be seen by the eyes of the blind in the middle of the night one of those songs i couldnt shake. I woke up, i had this idea. In the middle of the i said im not a gospel singer, i cant write this, go away. And im in the shower rose wouldnt let you go. Would not let me go so i said ive got to write this. Rose how about an innocent man. Rose how abouman. An innocent man. I was thinking of ben e. King who did there is a rose in spanish harlem or oh, when the night, has come stand by me me and the moon and i wanted to write a song like that from the early 60s late 50s. Some people stay far aaway from the door if theres a chance of it opening up they hear a voice in the hall outside, hope that it just passes by like a ben e. King song. Rose for so many people to be able to do what you can do, i mean its just incredible. To sit at a piano and not only cover those things that you have written but you can think and put yourself into the head of the great ones, you know . Whether its beethoven or mahler or bach. I like the good stuff. No matter what it is. Soul, rock and roll, pop, broadway, classical, jazz if its good i like it. Rose thank you for this. Letting me come here and visit you. Pleasure. Thanks a lot. Captioning sponsored by Rose Communications captioned by Media Access Group at wgbh access. Wgbh. Org this is nightly Business Report with Tyler Mathisen and susie gharib. Brought to you in part by the street. Com. Founded by jim cramer, the street. Com is an independent source for stock market analysis. Cramers action alerts plus service is home to his multimillion dollar portfolio. You can learn more at the street. Com nbr. Stocks skid. The market goes from bad to worse after the Federal Reserve decides to stick with its strategy to wind down its stimulus. Despite the recent emerging market turmoil. Strong medicine but not Strong Enough as turkeys massive rate hike fails to stabilize its currency. Now the Business Community in istanbul is frustrated and looking for answers. Losing altitude. Boeing t