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The Current Transcript for September14, 2017

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

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Okay. So, there will put your name and [unintelligible]. Five point zero six six seven degrees north . Seven seven point three three three three degrees west. Give or take 20 square miles.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: An inspirational moment from the movie Hidden Figures when real life character Katherine Johnson upstages the male mathematicians to calculate the return for the first manned orbit of the earth. With the story of African-American women hired for their brilliant minds, mathematics took on a whole new meaning of civil rights empowerment and fun. And yet today math is considered intimidating and threatening. As educators across the country try to revise the teaching of math. We're asking if the problem is calculation or communication. Also today he's a big thinker who makes all of us think again. So when Malcolm Gladwell said he had time to talk I leapt at the opportunity and we ended up discussing everything from his podcast, to his late father, to how we see our individual and collective history.

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If you have a Sir John A. Macdonald school why can't it be this John A. Macdonald and someone else. Everybody who comes by that schools says: “Wait a second. Who is the and? Why was that name added?” And now you're doing what the school's supposed to do, by the way.

AMT: A conversation with Malcolm Gladwell in half an hour. When she heard us talking about delusional disorder last week this woman felt it hit very close to home. Before she was diagnosed and treated for the psychiatric illness, she had become suspicious of everyone in the office.

I just thought everyone that I worked with was involved in corruption. They were linked to organized crime and that I was in danger of being murdered.

AMT: Along with her story we'll hear from a psychiatric expert on a little known illness called delusional disorder. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

How anxiety around math hurts student performance

Guests: Ian Vanderburgh, Daniel Ansari

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VOICE 1: I fell in love with mathematics from the earliest of age. So I explained it to all my friends. Math is beautiful. It's natural. It's everywhere. Numbers other musical notes. With which the symphony of the universe is written in .

VOICE 2 [child]: 90 – 80 equals 70 – 7 equals …

VOICE #: Oh just loved it. It was hard to do but then you got it you got it. There was a visible objective in mathematics. And you knew when you got there.

AMT: Well some lovers of math. They're young and old. First, the voice of Australian comedian and self-proclaimed math ambassador Adam Spencer, then nine year old Luca Watto of Halifax and then the real Katherine J. Johnson, ninety nine years old now, the former NASA mathematician. You may have seen her depicted in the movie hidden figures. And I say it's refreshing to hear mathematics being celebrated because it seems to be a constant source of anxiety in our society for parents, students, even sometimes for teachers. Ontario is the latest province that has announced it will rethink the way math is taught in the classroom, after some disappointing test results. We're starting today by asking whether it's time to rethink the way we all imagine mass. Tim Allen is a long time math teacher in Toronto. He says math teaching has more in common with other subjects than we may think.

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Mathematics is like a language because basically when you've got a math problem in front of you, usually it's written in the English language. What you have to do is you have to translate that from English into him. It's also like learning a musical instrument. When you want to learn how to play a piece on the piano, you'll learn that piece and then you play it over and over and over again. And even when you think you've got it mastered, you're doing a performance or something along those lines. you keep playing it over and over and over again. There has to be repetition and that's how you learn.

AMT: So would more people love math if we could alter our perspective on it? We have two guests standing by to share their thoughts on this. Daniel Ansari is a professor in the department of psychology and neuroscience at Western University. He has worked as the Canada research chair and developmental cognitive neuroscience, using brain imaging to look at how children process numbers. Daniel and Sari is in London, Ontario. And Ian Vanderburgh is the director of the Center for Education in mathematics and computing at the University of Waterloo. He's on sabbatical this year but he joins us from Waterloo, Ontario. Hello good morning to both of you.

IAN VANDERBURGH: Good morning.

DANIEL ANSARI: Good morning.

AMT: We just heard teacher Tim Miller and they're describing math as being like a language. He also talked about a musical instrument. We also heard that that the other Adam Spencer talking about musical notes with which the symphony of the universe is written. So Daniel Ansari, what do you think of that kind of language? How fluid are we in the language of math?

DANIEL ANSARI: So I think the relationship between language and math is actually a complex one and we don't fully understand where the math is really like a language. Many researches think that math is more closely linked to our visual spatial and spatial abilities than it is actually to our language. But that continues to be an area where people are fiercely investigating those particular links. I think the link to music is interesting. Many people will often say that you know there is an intimate link between music and math and that maybe if you train people in music they'll get better at math. The research suggests that exactly what Tim is [indistinct] in order to be good at it you have to do lots of practice.

AMT: Daniel we are losing you. You're cutting out. I'm guessing that's the Skype connection. We might have to get you with some kind of connection there. We'll have to get Daniel back. And as we try to do that Ian Vanderburgh, in our society - I'll just ask you and we'll get him back in the conversation here. How does our math fluency as a society, or a lack of math fluency, shape how we actually look at math experts, people like you? What kind of reaction you get when you tell people you're a mathematician?

IAN VANDERBURGH: I think blessedly these weird reactions are starting to change, but for a long time people who are math teachers or mathematicians, when we have sort of volunteer what we do, it's very common for me to get a reaction like: “Oh gee I was never any good at math” or “I failed grade 10 math”. That's not uncommon and it's unfortunate I think and I it's an interesting question to try to grapple with what's the difference for example between mathematics and literacy. That we as a society have very much invested in the fact that literacy is important, and that we need to get as many people or everybody able to read and do that kind of thing. But mathematics seems to be like [unintelligible]. And I think the conversation has changed and has changed over the last 10 or 15 years. But I think it's an important conversation to think about.

AMT: It's almost socially acceptable to be bad at math, huh? You've made that point.

IAN VANDERBURGH: Exactly. And I think that has changed and I think in 2017 we as a society now see how important mathematics is. I think it is going to take a couple of generations for this to change though, because I think as parents and teachers we all pass our perspectives and biases along to our children and our students. And it's very hard to say hard to change some of these cultural things in a short period of time.

AMT:I think we have Daniel and sorry back. Daniel, how widespread is anxiety around math, in Canada?

DANIEL ANSARI: I think math anxiety is widespread among students worldwide. That's what the Program For International Student Assessment run by the OECD studies showed. And that math anxiety also then explains individual differences in children's math abilities. Certainly math anxiety is widespread. It's widespread also amongst educators. This research showing that elementary educators have relatively high levels of my anxiety and it's widespread among students and of course is the relationship between teaching math anxiety and student math anxiety, as much as there is a relationship between parental math anxiety and student math anxiety.

AMT: Can you talk to us a little bit more about that? Like what do you actually see?

DANIEL ANSARI: So this research from the University of Chicago to suggest that parental math anxiety affects students’ achievement. For parents who have high math anxiety and do homework for example with their students with their children, it results in their children having higher math things and therefore lower achievement. Similarly this research suggests that elementary school teaches math anxiety can rub off on their students and can negatively affect the students’ math achievement. So we need to be very aware of the potential adverse effects of my anxiety and the relationship between student math anxiety, teacher math anxiety, and parental math anxiety as well.

AMT: Ian Vanderburgh, what are you seeing? How confident are our teachers when they're teaching math to Canadian children?

IAN VANDERBURGH: I think we see the whole spectrum of that, be it from elementary schools to secondary schools. There is a there's a pretty broad range of backgrounds and confidence levels and abilities in mathematics. I think that all teachers out there are doing their absolute best to try to convey the subjects that they're teaching. I really believe that elementary school teachers have a really tough job. The most elementary school teachers in Ontario, that I know, are teaching four or five or six or seven different subjects to their classes. They can't possibly be confident experts in all of those. I am quite happy to teach mathematics. But if you asked me to teach English language or social studies I would not be confident in that. I can see it an elementary school level where teachers are not specialists. It's really hard and you've got 25 or 28 kids in front of you who are working at different levels and you're trying to do your absolute best to connect with each of those students. It's a hard job to do, particularly if you're people who often don't have a lot of background on math.

AMT: And I mean Ontario we know you're launched $60 billion program an improving math and much of it geared to how math is taught, you know, for professional development for teachers. So that's what has to change?

IAN VANDERBURGH: I think so. I think that one of the things that I really hope that we. as a province and we as a country, invest more in that we have been doing is helping teachers improve their own mathematics abilities and that will lead to confidence. It's great to help teachers improve their pedagogical abilities and that is of course important. But I think particularly at elementary school, I think we need to help shift the conversation more towards nudging teachers along a little bit in their math abilities. And maybe part of that is helping to try to make sure that the teachers who are more confident in math and have stronger math ability, are able to spend more time teaching math, perhaps less and teaching other subjects and try to balance that. I am not suggesting that grade two kids move from class to class or class all day, but to try to get a little bit more math confidence in front of them I think will be very important.

AMT: I want to keep on exploring this idea of our attitudes towards math. Daniel Ansari, what value do we assign to math in North America compared to other parts of the world?

DANIEL ANSARI: I think, compared to other parts of the world, we assign less of a high value to math. We assign a higher value, I think, generally to literacy, to reading, to language. I just spent the summer in Southeast Asia in Singapore where it's very different. Math is really a very highly valued skill that children are taught from the very early age in mathematics. You can see it in the international comparison that Southeast Asian countries, where parents and the entire society put a lot of emphasis on math, that students’ achievement is very high comparatively.

AMT: And what about math and pop culture? Does that affect our perceptions of the subject?

IAN VANDERBURGH: I think it has to. I think that you know if we look back over the last 10 years, or 15 years what if our children been doing more and more and more of it over the years, more screen time and more time on their devices. And I think that we are starting to see a change and an acceptance that being an academic and being, for lack of a better word, Geeky, is more acceptable now than it was 10 years ago. And I think that's a good change.

AMT: Do you see the media being culpable in our attitudes toward math as well?

IAN VANDERBURGH: Yeah I think so. I think, particularly of course I think lots of media are and lots of us in the country can be unkind towards the teaching profession, too. I think that that's a problem. But certainly we need to promote the value of mathematics for everybody.

AMT: Daniel what happens to our brains when we are anxious about math and numbers?

DANIEL ANSARI: Well when individuals experience math anxiety they have a heightened state of arousal. They get nervous about the subject and importantly that compromises the amount of cognitive resources that they have at their disposal. So say you're doing a complex math problem. You need to carry some numbers. You need to keep some information online while you're still calculating. At the same time you're trying to deal with your intrusive feelings of anxiety. You think: “I am not very good at it. I don't like math” and those intrusive feelings are consuming part of the cognitive resources that you would have otherwise to do the actual math. So some people talk about math anxiety in the context of mathematical problem solving, as having to do two problems at the same time. You have to do the math but you also have to cope with those intrusive feelings with that math anxiety. So it's like doing two tasks at the same time.

AMT: And how can we alleviate that anxiety?

DANIEL ANSARI: Well there has been some really interesting approaches to try and find strategies to alleviate my anxiety. One of them is to engage in so-called expressive writing exercises. What this involves is that you asked students before taking a test for example, to sit down and to actually write about their anxiety, to sort of put on paper how they feel about the upcoming exam. How they feel about math. And that seems to have a very positive effect by having done that. Anxiety is less likely to just fear them with solving the problems that are on the exam. You've almost dealt with the anxiety now you freed up your cognitive resources and you can fully concentrate on doing the math.

AMT: And so Daniel what do you know about how our brains are before we are introduced to that anxiety, when it comes to that sort of perception of numbers and looking at that whole area? What do you see in young children?

DANIEL ANSARI: In young children when it comes to math anxiety, there have been some studies to suggest that even very young children who have high levels of my anxiety, when they do math in an in a brain scanner - for example in a in an MRI scan - and to visualize the brain regions that are activated while they are doing the math. Those with math anxiety show heightened levels of activation in brain regions associated with anxiety such as the amygdala and reduced activation in brain regions associated with problem solving. But I think early in development there are things we can do to prevent the onset of my anxiety which is to make mouth engaging, to help children find a more fun route towards math. So I think there are strategies that we can implement that might lessen the onset of my anxiety. But nevertheless think that my anxiety is still something we're going to deal with later on because math becomes more more cumulative. There more more opportunity to be wrong about something, to become disappointed about your own performance and then to sort of enter this downward spiral.

AMT: Do you see before someone has math anxiety, or they pick it up from others, do you see a curiosity that maybe can be worked with?

DANIEL ANSARI: I do think so. I don't think there have been any studies that have really compared to children before and after they start to experience my anxiety. So we still need to do more research into that. The relationship between how good you are at math and math anxiety is a complex one. It's sort of a chicken and egg problem. Because on the one hand you can say that math anxiety affects how well you do in math but sort of your basic level of ability in math can also lead to my anxiety. So we need to further understand the complex bidirectional relationship between how good somebody is at math and how much of my anxiety they actually experience.

AMT: So Ian as you listen to what he's saying, how would you like to see us make ourselves and children more comfortable with math?

IAN VANDERBURGH: I think that practice, as Tim said in the opening, I think practice is really important to know whether or not we're mathematicians or musicians or hockey players, we need to learn we need to spend the time practicing basic skills. And I'm not suggesting that we throw the baby out with the bathwater and go back to an entirely skills based [unintelligible]. We need to have a balance between practicing skills and working on more interesting and fun problems, as Dan was saying. And try to get that but not all of math can be fun all the time, and not all of any subject can be fun all the time. What we need in schools, and at home, we need to be working on these things that… Our kids spend six or seven hours a day in school which means they're at home for a lot more than that. And as families and parents we need to take responsibility for helping point out math in the world around us and getting our kids to think about numbers, even if there are things that we're not all that comfortable with ourselves. We need to find a way of working together to get past that.

AMT: So can you give me an example of how you might instill sort of a curiosity about numbers at home with someone with a 6 year old?

IAN VANDERBURGH: So I have a 6 year old at home. So it's a good time to think about it. For me, we are certainly at home when we're cooking, where if we had a recipe that we need to cut in half, so instead of two cups of flour, how many cups of flour do we need? We talk about that. Or when we're driving we name the numbers on speed limit signs, or on population size, and think about which numbers are bigger and smaller and just look for those opportunities in the world around us.

AMT: And so are you basically saying it's not - obviously it's the learning and practicing, but is it also the way we communicate with numbers?

IAN VANDERBURGH: I think it is. I think that because of the anxiety that many of us feel when we communicate about it, we will inherently communicate that anxiety. And I think the more we talk about these things and the more resources we can develop for teachers and for families, I think we can get the conversation moving in the right direction.

AMT: And Daniel I was reading a little bit about some of the work you do and you've made the point that that even infants recognize numerical differences.

DANIEL ANSARI: That's right. So we share with other animals the basic propensity towards understanding quantities. So we are born with some sort of foundation for quantitative thinking. However as humans, over the course of cultural history we've developed symbolic representations of numbers, such as number words, the count sequence, Arabic numerals and children need to then learn the relationship between some of these more rudimentary systems and the cultural symbolic systems of number. And that turns out to be quite a difficult thing to do. As you think about a two to three year old learning that counting sequence, initially counting out 1 2 3 4 5 not knowing what that means. It can take them up to two years to then understand that when they've counted one two three four five, that five represents the total number of items that they just counted.

AMT: Okay. And we have to leave it there but thank you for talking about this and talking about the communication involved.

IAN VANDERBURGH: Thank you Maria.

DANIEL ANSARI: Thank you.

AMT: Thank you both. Daniel and sorry professor in the department of psychology and neuroscience at Western university, worked as the Canada Research Chair in developmental cognitive neuroscience using brain imaging to look at how children process numbers. He's in London, Ontario. Ian Vanderburgh is on sabbatical this year but he's the director of the Center for Education in mathematics and computing at the University of Waterloo. We'd like to hear from you. Does math scare you? Do you have anxiety around that? Or are you a math evangelist, who says we all need to learn to love it? Send us your thoughts tweet us. We're @TheCurrentCBC or go to our website, click on the Contact link. And stay with us. The news is next.

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History is 'more than statues and names on buildings': Malcolm Gladwell

Guest: Malcolm Gladwell

AMT: Hello I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

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AMT: Still to come. If you caught my conversation with former CBC reporter Pauline Dakin last week you heard an amazing tale about a childhood spent on the run. You also got a glimpse into the world of delusional disorder, where the minds of sufferers create complicated conspiracy laden realities and they believe in their delusions wholeheartedly. We'll hear what it's like to live this way from someone who's suffered some delusions, in half an hour. But first, revising history.

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[Sound: Crowds cheering]

VOICE 1: But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very very important statue.

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VOICE 2: I'm here to spread ideas, talk, in the hopes that somebody more capable will come along and do that, somebody like Donald Trump who does not give his daughter to a Jew.

[Crowd shouting]

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VOCIE 3: Walking into a building named after somebody who is quite literally responsible for the genocide of indigenous peoples, that's Dark. This is not about erasing history. This isn't about rewriting history. This isn't about revisionist history. This is about the fullness of our history.

AMT: And so much for the end of history. Again and again in recent months it's been made very clear we are living in times of social and political upheaval. And one of the central debates of our times is who gets to tell history and how. It is no longer acceptable for one dominant group to control the historical record when there are so many other people and events that play into our collective history. Which brings us to our ongoing project this season, Adaptation, and the push for a societal shift to recognize a more accurate and reflective history. It is a debate. Sometimes it's really a fight happening on both sides of the border, and it is both recent history and matters from centuries past that are in dispute. Malcolm Gladwell has just wrapped up a second season of his popular podcast Revisionist History. So how could we resist reaching out to him? In addition to his podcast and work with the New Yorker magazine Malcolm Gladwell is the bestselling author of books such as The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers. And he's a Canadian. We reached him in New York City. Hello welcome.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Thank you. I'm delighted to be on the show.

AMT: You're not an academic historian. How does that work to your advantage?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Well one is that I'm not a specialist and so I have the freedom to roam. You know I think if you're not an academic historian and your knowledge is deep, and you have an area that you know - I have a very good friend of mine who's an academic historian. He knows an extraordinary amount about Soviet history. But if he were going to do a podcast he would do it on Soviet history. Because I'm a generalist, I think I have freedom to not just dabble in all kinds of different fields of history but to go into sociology and psychology. So, what I lack in knowledge, I make up for in in freedom. So that's a trade-off.

AMT: And I think curiosity as well [laughs]. I wanted to talk a little bit more about what you think about what's going on right now. What we're seeing on both sides of the border, the tragic events in Charlottesville, President Trump’s failure to criticize neo-Nazis immediately after word, the debate in Canada over Sir John A. Macdonald's name on schools. What's going on in the wider picture?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Part of it is very healthy ,in the sense that I think people are taking history seriously and I don't think that can ever really be a bad thing. To the extent that we have discussions about where we come from and what sort of moral trail has been left by our society. I think that's only good. I'm not sure I think that you can't have – that is funny - In my first season of my podcast, one of the shows dealt with the question of whether Princeton University should name its foreign policy school after Woodrow Wilson, which is this very issue. Woodrow Wilson was someone with an incredibly spotty history on race. Is it healthy and meaningful for this for a college today to have on the side of a building the name of someone who has a dubious past? And my point there was well, why not change it? I mean there's tons of worthy people whose names belong on buildings. This doesn't seem to be much at stake. So in one sense I sort of think this whole issue, our resistance to these naming questions is a little bit overblown. For every one person with a dubious past there are 100 people who we would all welcome be celebrated on the side of a building. Why don't just go with 100 hundred? I mean it's not that hard. And I also am a little bit skeptical of those who say that in taking down statues and changing names you're erasing history. History is an awful lot more than statues and names on buildings. If it was that easy to erase we would all be in trouble, wouldn't we. I think you could have a very meaningful discussion about John A. Macdonald without necessarily naming everything after him. So I mean I sort of feel like there's a little bit too much heat attached to this topic.

AMT: Well and we heard in that last part of the clip, at the top there, the man who said what we're really talking about the fullness of history as opposed to the eraser of history.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Yes. Another way to do this of course is to use statues and names on buildings as opportunities for discussion. So there's nothing stopping us from going to a statue of sir John A. Macdonald and having a big plaque, very big plaque, which goes into all these issues and says this statue was erected, at a certain moment, for a particular reason. Here's the reason. Here's how people felt about his legacy at the time. Here's how we feel about it now. Draw your own conclusion. Statures don't have to be laudatory. They can be opportunities for discussion, but this is an incredible opportunity. I mean how many, to put this in a Canadian context, on how many occasions, in the last 50 years, have ordinary Canadians had reason to think about Sir John A. Macdonald beyond a name on a building, right, or a statue. I mean this is what an incredible opportunity this is to go back and to educate all of us about who this man was and what kinds of things he did and then what was going on in that time. This is a chance to learn something valuable about who we are.

AMT: Something else as we talk about this that I'm thinking about, and that's the whole idea of the naming of the monuments. And you just talked about like as we do these societies that we build, and our societies change over time. But what is it about us says people that we have to put a monument up, that we have to name things after people.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Well it's funny because the reasons why we do this have evolved over the years. If you and I were to walk around the campus of any elite American college, you would notice that every building that has been built over the last 50 years, has been named after a very very very wealthy white male, with staggeringly few exceptions, rich white guys who put their names on buildings of colleges. Why? Because they gave them money to fund the building and much more. Right. So what we do now is we celebrate wealth in educational institutions in the United States and in other countries as well. I mean you could see this to a lesser extent but this is also true of the University of Toronto and in McGill. If you go back a hundred years, you'll see that buildings were often named after people, sometimes named after prominent scholars, or people who were famous in another way. In other areas we named buildings after generals or, you know it changes over time. I'm not convinced the present practice of naming buildings after really really rich white guys, is in any way morally preferable to naming buildings after people who have dubious histories on questions of racism or something else. Each age wants to celebrate its own brand of prominent person. And the important thing is just to understand why they're doing it. Just when you when you walk by Carl Icahn, the Carl Icahn auditorium at Princeton University, I understand that Carl Icahn is a man who made billions of dollars essentially holding companies up for ransom. Right. He's a modern day robber baron. Let's not think that he's got a name on a building because he's some kind of moral hero and he got a tax write off for giving the money. I mean just so long as we're clear about why these things are being done. The people whose names belong - truly belong on buildings are people who did something outstanding, heroic, truly memorable. I don't understand why when rich people give money to build a building they don't give money on and name it after someone. Like if I give $50 million dollars to University of Toronto to build you know the Malcolm Gladwell center, why does it have to be called the Malcolm Gladwell center? Why wouldn't I call it - why wouldn't I give 50 million dollars to build the Northrop Frye center? Why do I not get as much satisfaction after building a building and naming it after a transcendent scholar who changed the way countless people thought about the world? Why is not that as satisfying as naming it after myself? I mean this is what I don't get. The motives of prominent people really so kind of base and transparent and simplistic that they can only be satisfied by putting their own name on a building. I wonder how often the discussion happens when somebody goes out and raises hundred million dollars to build a new wing on Toronto General or some hospital in Winnipeg, why they don't ask the guy: “You know we had a really brilliant surgeon at his hospital who serve for 25 years and pioneered this and that. Would you be willing to put that person's name on the building?” Does that ever happen? I have no idea.

AMT: Well maybe someone will write in and tell us if it has that.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Yes [laughs].

AMT: But it's really interesting because again when those names become prominent, it affects the way we see the place that we think we have come from and then it arguably does leave out all of those little gaps.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: What you know would be interesting with Sir John A. Macdonald statue, to put up a statue next to it. All of a sudden you've turned what looks to the untrained eye like a celebration, into a conversation. There's all kinds of things. Or you know, you can if you have a sir John A. Macdonald school, why can't it be sir John A. Macdonald and someone else school. So all of a sudden it is provocative, right. So you like everyone who comes by the school says: “Wait a second. Why is that called Macdonald? And who's the and? Why was that name added?” And now you've got it. Now you doing what a school supposed to do, by the way, which is to provoke people's curiosity.

AMT: You know that saying history is written by the victors. That's what's being challenged, as well, really isn't it?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: That's part of what's fantastic about evolving societies, is if they're working properly the identity of the victors changes over time. When you have these kinds of turmoil, it's a sign that something's appropriate, something good is happening. If you've seen people are in the victorious position for 500 years, you have a problem. Right. So in one sense, I look at this as a sign of a healthy dynamism in who's in a position of power in the society. It's funny. I had a good friend of mine's daughter just went to college for the first time and I was thinking of writing her a note - I'm going to do it. I haven't sent it yet, about a very condescending paternalistic note about my advice to an 18 year old. And one of the things that I thought I would tell her is that you should change your mind on everything you believe at least once in your college years, on the understanding that you can always change it back. And I think that's really good advice for all of us when it comes to these discussions about our historical legacy. It's fine to listen to another argument and entertain the other side for a while, even if you ultimately decide - you know the end of the day I think sir John A. Macdonald was a great man who's who ought to be celebrated by Canadians everywhere, but it's a very useful exercise to spend a couple of months of your life thinking he's not a great man and see where that leads you. There is no cost to it. No one's going to lose friends saying that I am spending the next four weeks examining the proposition that sir John A. Macdonald might not be the greatest figure in Canadian history. Right. You allowed to do that. I mean it's fine.

AMT: And that's kind of what you're doing with revisionist history, right? You want us to think maybe think differently about something we thought we knew about.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Yes. And I I'm fine if, after listening to half an hour of my show and thinking about it for a couple of days, you change your mind back to where they were was before. That's fine. But I think the habit of forcing yourself to look at something from the other side is incredibly powerful. That is where our ability to be empathetic comes from. Empathy is where I put myself in your shoes and you cannot do that unless you practice. I do not believe we are born with that ability. I think we're born with sympathy but sympathy and empathy are of different things. Empathy is taking one step further it is actually going to the effort of looking at the world through the eyes of someone who is not yourself. That's hard to do. And one of the ways I think about my show is it's practice. It's empathy practice and sometimes you know, when I try to get golfers to think for a moment about the stupidity of their sport, I don't imagine I'm going to get them to quit golf. But I do think it's useful if, for the half an hour they are listening to my attack on golf, they think: “Now wait a minute. It is a kind of bizarre sport and it is weird that huge tracts of land in urban areas are given over to a sport that is played by a tiny fraction of people. That's something we're thinking about.”

AMT: It's interesting because you do want to look at small personal moments in history and how it affects us individually. You know I'm really struck. You talk about a personal moment in your last podcast. You talk about the death of your dad. When did your father die?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: He died. I'm very sorry. [Cries]

AMT: I am very sorry. It's very very recent, huh?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Yes, it was this is spring. No I was not expecting to be very – That is very unpredictable.

AMT: I wasn't meaning to put you on the spot but you did a podcast about someone else and his dad and you talked about the importance of honoring our parents. And you got personal and it is personal. It just got me thinking about memory and grief and our own personal histories and how we look at that.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Yeah it was very - it was not a topic .I thought I was doing a show about something else. I thought I was doing a show about this weird scientific study that changed our understanding of diet and saturated fat. And then I sort of got sidetracked because I was doing it right in the middle of when my father was in the hospital, and it turned into this kind of meditation on our relationship to our parents and to the memory of people we love.

AMT: You and their main guest on that podcast you talked about to keep someone alive in your heart, we do this not by honoring our parents beliefs. We are different. What we are obliged to honor is their principles the rules by which they live their lives. Such a beautiful a beautiful thing to say.

MALCOM GLADWELL: Yes. I mean and it actually bears and what we're talking about because when we talk about these historical figures and our parents eventually become historical figures in our lives right. We can never we're never going to match their beliefs. You know both my dad and John A. Macdonald are people who have born of different times and have different things. All we can hope to honor is something broader, which is like I said their principles, the broader rules by which they live their life. Maybe that's a way to think about problematic figures like Sir John A. Macdonald which is we don't feel the same way about native peoples as he did. We don't feel the same way about any number of things as he did. But can we locate something in his principles that we believe in to this day? That's what I was trying to get at in that. And if we can locate something in his principles that we like then we can keep our honoring of him alive. We can still find a way to understand why he in some way was a great man. But takes a little bit of effort.

AMT: But that allows us also to point up the flaws which is also what your podcast was about because your guest actually was willing to point out where his father had failed, and he knew that his father actually would be okay with that.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: That was an incredibly - the show is really just about this father son pairing, this famous scientist and his son. And his son goes back and discovers helps someone else discover that his father's research had been wrong, quite dramatically flawed. But I went back and I found these tapes of the father, the father had made in the 70s when he was interviewed. I played the tapes in my podcast. And the son called me and said “you know I have never heard those tapes” and it was this really interesting moment where this was a show about how a son proved a father wrong and the son's first response is he sat and - he said he sat with his family and listened to the show and he was just overwhelmed by hearing his father's voice again. The kind of narrative in his head was not about my dad was wrong. The narrative in his head was you know this is a man that I loved, who did incredibly interesting things in his life and I've participated in clarifying his legacy. He wasn't kind of sidetracked or put off by the fact that some of his father's ideas were flawed, to him that was almost irrelevant. It's just it was just so powerful to me. It was a really really beautiful idea.

AMT: Very beautiful. We are talking by the way for our listeners about the basement tapes which is on your podcast second season, Revisionist History, the last episode of the second season. Malcolm Gladwell you're not known for injecting your personal narrative into your writing.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: No. Well I am a man. I'm 50 percent English. I have many reasons for my reticence and my emotional reticence. The problem is a problem of scale. If you are trying to make a career in journalism - So a career is what 40 years. So you need 40 years of material. If you lean too hard on your own experience or establish yourself as someone who writes a lot about your own experience. You very quickly run out of material. No human being is interesting enough to sustain 40 years of journalism. You know so you have a very very limited reservoir of - very shallow reservoir of interesting personal stories. So you have to use them wisely. But also I don't I don't think I'm terribly good at it. I think I'm better at investigating other people's ideas and lives. Memoir should be left to those who are gifted at memoir. And I'm not sure that's where my strengths lie.

AMT: You know we've chosen Adaptation as this year's theme on The Current. The way we adapt to a changing environment, to politics, to technology, to work, culturally, socially. How do you think we are at change and adaptation?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: We're really good. Think about it. When my father retired from the University of Waterloo he wrote this really lovely essay about all of the things, the changes he had seen in his lifetime, in his career lifetime when he started work and he sort of went down the list. He was talking about everything, really prosaic things like you know computers coming out of nowhere and you know telephone and all that kind of stuff, but also more complicated things about his work and such. And you know he was a productive very productive academic at 20 - 22 whenever he started I forget, and a very productive academic when he retired even after his retiring. So here is someone who spanned one of the greatest periods of transformation in the history of the world, and yet was as productive when he began - remained productive over the course of that. He managed to adapt within a very complicated field. He's not alone. Tons of people have seen the same trajectory and have remained incredibly useful contributors to society. That blows me away. It so happens that there are moments when the pace of change outruns even our impressive ability to adapt, but we tend to catch up. My mother who is – I will not give her name on the air - you know she downloads stuff on Netflix. This is you know a woman who grew up in a house without electricity. It is pretty - that's pretty good. I was so pleased. I was so proud of her that I tweeted a picture of my mother being given a Netflix tutorial by my nephew [laughs].

AMT: [Laughs]

MALCOLM GLADWELL: So I mean I don't know. I think that's a little example but it's amazing. We are amazing at it.

AMT: Thank you for sharing your ideas.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Thank you so much for having me. It's always a pleasure to be interviewed by you or by anyone at CBC for that matter.

AMT: Malcolm Gladwell His podcast is called Revisionist History. He's the author of several books of course, including the Tipping Point, Blink. Malcolm Gladwell joined us from New York. Coming up in our next half hour: Trapped in a frightening world your own brain has created. We will hear firsthand what it is like to live with delusional disorder. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. You are listening to The Current on CBC Radio 1, Sirius XM, online on cbc.ca/thecurrent, on podcast and on your radio app.

[Music: Theme]

Delusional disorder: The undiagnosed, understudied mental illness

Guest: Christy, Alistair Munro

AMT: Hello I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and this is The Current.

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They sat me down and they told me that all the odd things that had happened, while I was growing up and while my brother was growing up, was because we had been on the run from the mafia and that's why we had disappeared twice. That's why we would suddenly without notice go on a hiking trip. “Oh but we're missing school”. “Oh it's okay”. So strange things happen.

AMT: Well strange things indeed. That's former CBC journalist Pauline Dakin. Last week she joined me to talk about her new book Run Hide Repeat. It is about the incredible story of her childhood lived on the run. And if you missed it you can head to our website or go to the CBC Radio app and hear it for yourself. Pauline Dakin grew up with a constant sense of fear but of what or whom was never clear. And then finally at the age of 23 her mother and a long-time family friend, named Stan Sears, sat her down and told her something shocking that they had been on the run as targets of organized crime. The story they told her was complicated. It seemed farfetched but at the time it also kind of made sense to Pauline Dakin in so she believed it. Doubts eventually grew until she finally figured out that the whole story was a product of Stan's mind. But why had Stan convinced Pauline and others of this.

SOUNDCLIP

I happened to read an article in a medical journal and all the lights went off and I went: “That's why.” This article talked about an under-diagnosed, under-recognized, understudied condition that's quite rare called delusional disorder.

AMT: Pauline Dakin says she is now certain that that is what Stan had, although there was never a formal diagnosis. And I should mention that both Stan Sears and Pauline’s mother are no longer alive. Today we're taking a closer look at delusional disorder, a mental illness that may have made it possible for Stan to conjure such a complex imaginary universe. In a few minutes, we will talk to one of the leading experts on the disorder. But after we aired our interview with Pauline Dakin, a listener contacted us to say she has suffered from delusional disorder. She has been treated but she wants to speak about her experience to help others understand what it's like. Her name is Christy. We have agreed not to use her last name and we've agreed not to say where she lives. Christy, hello.

CHRISTY: Hello.

AMT: What happened when you got sick?

CHRISTY: Well about nine years ago, looking back, I was during a manic phase of my bipolar condition and I started to feel that everyone was talking against me at the office. I started to feel that people were looking at me funny, judging me funny. And it culminated into one evening where I unplugged the satellites because I believed everyone was spying on me and I believed that they were all linked to organized crime.

AMT: Wow. And what was going on around you at the time? Was there anything specific that started you thinking that way?

CHRISTY: I think it was just like very very busy. I was taking care of my parents and they were both in their 80s and they were living with me and my dad suffered from dementia. I wasn't sleeping very much. So, I was up late hours of the night and I was working probably 15 16 hour days. So, all that culminated into me getting very ill one evening and entering a psychotic phase. The next morning my parents I had told them we had to leave the house because there was a bomb on the House and they left with me. But again they were in their 80s. So they went to see the police and I was brought to the hospital at that point in time.

AMT: Before you go further there, then. So just tell me a little bit more about the kind of delusional thinking you were having. So what would you look at? Like what kinds of things were you seeing around you that you were interpreting to be linked to organized criminals elements after you?

CHRISTY: I just thought everyone that I worked with was involved in doing corruption, and that they were linked to organized crime, and that I was in danger of being murdered. So I was extremely fearful. Again this was just all a figment of my imagination. What was happening was my mind was pulling conversations from 10 years ago where someone might have looked at me funny, and I just remembered that in my mind and I'd say: “Oh that was a sign”.

AMT: You were working when this happened. Correct? You had a job.

CHRISTY: Yes.

AMT: And so when you would go into the office what would you look for? What would that be like to walk by your colleagues?

CHRISTY: Well once I ended up in the psychotic state I didn't work anymore. I was off work. At that point in time but I was still very fearful of them. But it grew from beyond them to me being thinking at a restaurant people were following me because they were part of this network, to where I was in the hospital that I believed I was not in a real hospital because they didn't treat me with compassion. So I figured that this was also part of the network that the hospital wasn't real. These were plots and ploys for me to believe that I was mentally ill but I wasn't. You know I would believe that I was ill.

AMT: So you had no idea that you were delusional.

CHRISTY: Had no idea in my mind. I had no frame of reference because I had never been sick in my life before. Here I was 40 years old, stable doing everything right and all of a sudden out of the blue, wham, all this hits me now. You know what it was, I had no frame of reference and everything I believed no form of logic could change my mind. I just believed I was alone. None of my friends would help me because they didn't believe my story. And I felt alone and very confused and very fearful.

AMT: What would you tell your friends? What stories were you telling them?

CHRISTY: Well I was just telling them that my life is in danger and they need to help me and they were like “no your life's not in danger. It is okay”. But everything would link back to the story in my mind. And like I said no matter how much logic they would give me, it wouldn't matter. I just figured they didn't understand.

AMT: You also mentioned that you had been diagnosed as bipolar. How did that manifest itself?

CHRISTY: Well in the beginning in an early phase in my life I had no idea because I lived kind of in mania but I was always in control of it. Like, sure, I went on shopping sprees and did some crazy things but it was always somewhat within control.

AMT: But this delusional period was very different than that.

CHRISTY: Yes it was very fearful. I was diagnosed with persecutory delusions. Essentially I was just very fearful that my life was in danger. Everywhere I would go I would figure that people were part of the network and they were watching me.

AMT: Hmm. So you were diagnosed after your parents called police and you were hospitalized.

CHRISTY: Correct.

AMT: Okay. And you came to Toronto for that CAMH, am I correct? The Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto.

CHRISTY: Correct.

AMT: But when you got there you thought they were part of the wider organized criminal plot.

CHRISTY: I did. I did. I didn't trust anybody in there including the staff. I didn't I was fearful of all the patients.

AMT: From your point of view that must have been terrifying, then.

CHRISTY: It was terrifying. It was very terrifying. It was very hard. I lived like that for nine months.

AMT: And what changed?

CHRISTY: When I went to CAMH I ended up getting anti-psychotics and after about eight or nine weeks they finally kicked in and it just started to fade away.

AMT: So what do you do today to make sure that doesn't happen again? Are you still being treated?

CHRISTY: Yes I still have my anti-psychotic drugs so I monitor them. So with the current dosage I haven't had any problems and I'm back at work and able to fully function. So one of my key messages is if you do get sick it's not a life sentence. With proper treatment, you can achieve a full life again.

AMT: But I guess it was your loved ones who actually insisted you get treatment, wasn't it? You wouldn't have gotten it without them.

CHRISTY: It was, it was, because I was fearful I would have never believed I was sick.

AMT: So when you heard Pauline Dakin describing what was going on in her life and what Stan was telling her. What did what did you think?

CHRISTY: Well I thought it hit close to home. I'm like geez I know exactly what that feels like. I can just imagine them as children being so fearful because they wouldn't know what was going on until they heard later in life. So I can imagine you know how uprooted your life would be because my decisions during that time were always to keep me alive.

AMT: Hmm. Do your friends, do your colleagues know what you went through?

CHRISTY: Some of them do.

AMT: But it's not something you want everyone to know about you?

N CHRISTY: Not exactly because there is still a stigma against mental illness in society today. So I think people will judge you on that versus what you're capable of doing.

AMT: Well it's important to hear your voice on this. Thank you for speaking with me today.

CHRISTY: Oh you're welcome.

AMT: That is Christy. She's a listener who wrote to us to say she was diagnosed with delusional disorder. We agreed not to use her last name or the place where she lives. Well in Pauline Dakin was researching delusional disorder to figure out the story of her family friends Dan Seer's and her own past, she came across one of the leading experts on the condition. Dr. Alistair Munro is the former head of psychiatry at Dalhousie University Medical School. He's also the author of delusional disorder paranoia and related illnesses. And Dr. Alistair Munro joins us from our Halifax studio. Hello.

ALISTAIR MUNRO: Hello there. Thank you for having me. Well I'm interested to know what you were thinking as you listened to Christy? What did you hear as you listened to her?

ALISTAIR MUNRO: Well she gave a very good account of her rather typical presentation of delusional disorder. She was quite interesting about how it started, that she was overstimulated, over busy know hyper, and that often seems to be a factor in the background of this illness. It's good from her point of view that she's made such a good recovery. And one important thing there is this is a psychiatric illness you don't talk in a way. It needs anti-psychotic medication and she's done very well on that.

AMT: Well, ell us a little bit more about delusional disorder, then, how do you define it?

ALISTAIR MUNRO: Well first of all a delusion is a belief that the person holds to with absolute certainty which can be shared by other people of a similar background. But once the delusion is established, it influences the whole of the person's life and their activities. In many illnesses delusions are present; in schizophrenia, and severe depressive illness. The outstanding thing about delusional disorder is that the delusions form a system which we say is encapsulated from the rest of the personality. You don't get the delusions spreading out and interrupting the thoughts about other things. It's only around the theme. However the delusion and the system around it is so strong, it can totally affect the person's life, as you heard from Christy.

AMT: Okay. So just so I understand it encapsulates, meaning that if they're not talking to you about this they don't seem odd. They can be like functioning on many other levels as this is going on in their mind.

ALISTAIR MUNRO: You know they can be. Sometimes they're quite disabled by the illness but a very typical presentation is where they go on working, living. They may be regarded as rather or difficult cranky that kind of thing. But when you sit down with these people it's fascinating because if you're on a delusional topic they are tense. And they can be very very easily made angry and so on. Switch over to a neutral topic and you just see the tension growing out of them like you're out of a balloon. Then they can begin don't quite normally and show normal emotion.

AMT: That's different from schizophrenia, huh?

ALISTAIR MUNRO: Oh, very much where the illness is spread right throughout the person's personality and behavior.

AMT: Is there a genetic cause for delusional disorder?

ALISTAIR MUNRO: This is an under research topic and the evidence around it is not the best. But in the study that I did I couldn't find a convincing background of delusional disorder in the families of the people, sometimes other forms of psychiatric illness but not delusional disorder.

AMT: And Christie was diagnosed with persecutory delusional disorder.

ALISTAIR MUNRO: Yes.

AMT: Are there different types? Can you take us through what they might be?

ALISTAIR MUNRO: The thing to emphasize here is that the form of the illness is pretty much the same from case to case. But whereas some people are convinced of persecution, others can be convinced that they have some physical complaint like something wrong with their appearance, giving off a bad smell or something like that. Others may develop jealousy delusions and these can be quite dangerous. You can have delusions of Erotomania, of where the person is convinced that somebody they don't know, but perhaps a public figure, is in love with them.

AMT: And so how many people in the regular population would have this illness?

ALISTAIR MUNRO: I have to say I haven't a clue, because the patients themselves like Christy described are so convinced they don't have a psychiatric illness. The last thing they'll do is go see a psychiatrist. And if they're forced to do it, they're usually very angry and very uncooperative. So there are no reliable figures for frequency in the population. However there are some places that you can pick up a fair number of cases, one being in medical clinics. You know I got a lot of cases referred to me by dermatologists or gastroenterologists who recognized that the patient had a complaint which didn't fit with the findings. And it turned out to be delusional.

AMT: Like can you give us an example a specific example?

ALISTAIR MUNRO: Well this wasn't a very successful outcome. I saw a lady who was accompanied by her parents and they all insisted that she had a serious skin condition. She had seen 21 dermatologists before the one who referred her to me. And she wasn't very impressed by him and had dismissed all the others and she dismissed me and said she was going to see another dermatologist. Her parents had a phenomenon that we call shared delusional disorder. They totally believed her confirmed everything she said and backed her up in her complaints.

AMT: What had she said that she was – was it a sensation she was feeling on her skin or something?

ALISTAIR MUNRO: Yes. A very severe itch and skin lesions which everybody thought were probably due to scratching. One clue to this was the only place that didn't have skin lesions was between her shoulder blades where she couldn't reach.

AMT: Interesting. Okay. And so you're saying we don't know how many people have it. But you're also saying that if they do have it they go seeking help for maybe their delusional health problem.

ALISTAIR MUNRO: Yes.

AMT: And so could it be more common than we think?

ALISTAIR MUNRO: I can't say common. But I think it's much more frequent than people realize because if you put together the cases for all the different sources they begin to mount up. And I went to a large general hospital, and for several years I became the focal point for references from other physicians. So cases like this and there was never any shortage of them.

AMT: It's fascinating. I've got some tape I want to play for you as well.

ALISTAIR MUNRO: Sure.

AMT: I've got another clip appalling taken from our interview. She's talking about letters that Stan had given to her, which he said were from her friends and relatives from her childhood, who he said had all been part of the Mafia. Listen to this.

SOUNDCLIP

PAULINE DAKIN: I received letters and lots of them from people who had known me as a small child. And they were writing to ask me to forgive them for the things that they'd been involved in that had harmed my family and sent us running.

AMT: And they knew things about you as a child, huh? They were very familiar letters.

PAULINE DAKIN: Yes. They you know I had letters from people who had been neighbors, my godparents, my half siblings who I was told had been arrested. Yes, people who knew things about me.

AMT: Okay, Dr. Alistair Monroe at the time Pauline Dakin believed those letters were written by friends and relatives as it turns out it seems Stan would have written those letters himself. From what you've seen from patients with delusional disorder, how would stand have viewed those letters?

ALISTAIR MUNRO: You know it's very difficult to know. I'm sure there were the products of his delusional thinking. And he might have had some crazy rationalization as to why he was writing them - Maybe to try to persuade people to stay out of danger or something like that. But I'm sure if you had asked him about these letters he would have claimed they were genuine and that would have been part of his delusional thinking.

AMT: It's a really fascinating idea. So, to do that, to juggle all of those stories, your mind has to be working out at a certain speed. What role does a person's level of intelligence play and how delusional disorder plays out?

ALISTAIR MUNRO: It's really important. I think people with fairly low IQ, if they become deluded, produce very simple delusional ideas. And people with high IQ who've you know kept in touch with world affairs and so on they can produce enormously complex delusional thoughts. And so yeah I think that intelligence is an important part. I don't think maybe in the origin of the illness but in the presentation of the illness.

AMT: How does what you've heard about Stan, compare them to the other cases you've looked at? What kinds of things have you seen?

ALISTAIR MUNRO: I have to be cautious because this is a second hand account. It certainly shows some things that I've seen in quite a few other patients; the clearly persecution, the elaboration of the system that is doing the persecuting. In his case the elaborate precautions to try to protect himself and his family. I have seen all of that before. I have to say I've never seen it quite so sophisticated as he apparently was.

AMT: What kind of told us delusional sort of take on the lives of those who have it?

ALISTAIR MUNRO: It takes a huge toll on the patient's life but they are the last person to realize that. The family around them can fall into two groups. One are the ones who are just about as anguished as the patient and are desperately trying to get him to seek help. They recognize something's very wrong and he or she won't respond to that. The other group are the people that were like the parents of the lady I mentioned, who just totally believe everything and go along with it. And that raises a difficulty when they come to see a physician who doesn't know much about this disorder. Let's say it's a skin lesion and the parents or whoever are absolutely convincing and backing it up. He's going to be driven along doing more and more investigations because he's believing them, which is reasonable. So this this complicates the treatment situation quite a bit.

AMT: And how do family members react when they realize that that they have been deluded?

ALISTAIR MUNRO: Usually they desperately want some kind of help from the authorities, from medical people and so on. Very often they find themselves up against a brick wall and become extremely distressed and frustrated. And you know it's one of the things about publicizing delusional disorder. People just come out of the woodwork. They are so desperate.

AMT: Because they realize that's what they've been living through with their own loved one.

ALISTAIR MUNRO: That is true; they haven't been able to do anything about it.

AMT: You know you made the point at the beginning that this is a psychiatric illness and that therefore it needs to be treated. How do you treat it then?

ALISTAIR MUNRO: Well I think there's a process. You have to when the person's confidence and that means sitting down with them and sometimes accepting a lot of abuse, but trying to bring them into an acceptance that maybe you wouldn't allow you to treat the delusions as such. But you can persuade them perhaps that you can help them to calm down. Then you work your way gradually and you give them appropriate medication in very low doses, because give them something that causes side effects and you've lost them immediately. And you raise the dose very gradually until you've got a good result hopefully. Thereafter, you keep in touch with them because they quite often will stop taking a medication once they feel a little bit better. They say that's it. Stop taking the medication. And there's a very important time to be close to them because if they start to feel unwell again they may be quite open to resuming the treatment.

AMT: And Pauline in her book and in her conversation with us makes the point that her mother really believed Stan until the day she died.

ALISTAIR MUNRO: Yes.

AMT: Why do you think that was?

ALISTAIR MUNRO: Well I think it's part of this phenomenon of sheer delusional disorder. Some people are vulnerable to this. And you'll find in families that are people who simply do not accept a person's illness and others who are totally convinced by it. So it's a study in itself to know why the difference here.

AMT: It's fascinating to hear and to gain some insights from you about this, as you point out it's not well-known at all.

ALISTAIR MUNRO: No.

AMT: Thank you for your time.

ALISTAIR MUNRO: Thank you very much for having me.

AMT: Dr. Alister Monroe former head of psychiatry at Dalhousie University Medical School. Also the author of Delusional Disorder, Paranoia and Related Illnesses. He joined us from our Halifax studio. Once again if you missed our interview last week with Pauline Dakin, you can find it on the website cbc.ca/thecurrent or through the CBC Radio app. We got a word from the team that made the show this week.

[Music]

RAMRAAJH SHARVENDIRAN: Hi. I'm Ramraajh Sharvendiran, one of the producers here at The Current. This week the show was produced by Idella Sturino, Howard Goldenthal, Julian Uzielli, Manusha Janakiram, Ines Colabrese, Lara O'Brien, Kristin Nelson, Liz Hoath, Karin Marley, Samira Moy-yeh-din, Mary-Catherine Mcintosh, Pacinthe Mattar and Willow Smith. Special thanks to our network producer: Katie Parsons in Halifax, Suzanne Dufresne in Winnipeg, Michael O'Halloran in Calgary and Anne Penman in Vancouver.The Current's writer is Peter Mitton. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Ruby Buiza Buiza is our interactive producer.Transcriptions are provided by Rasha Shehata. Our technical producers is Gary Francis. Our documentary editor is Josh Bloch. Our senior producers are Richard Goddard in Toronto and Cathy Simon in Vancouver. The executive producer of The Current is Kathleen Goldhar.

AMT: That's our program for today stay with Radio 1 for Q. Tom powers joined by Ellen Wang, today. The Canadian actress was officially chosen one of this year's rising stars by the Toronto International Film Festival. Now after our conversation today about anxiety around math and the right way to teach it, it's worth remembering that this is a debate that's been going on for a very long time. We're going to leave you with the last word on that, with the comedian musician and mathematician Tom Lehrer with his novelty song from half a century ago New Math. You'll hear him sing about subtracting 173 from 342. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thanks for listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

Here's how they do it now. You can't take three from two. Two is less than three. So you look at the four in the tens place. Now that's really four ten [Music starts] so you make it three tens, regroup and you change the tens to ten ones and you add them to the two and get twelve and you take away three that's nine, is that clear? [Audience laughs] Now instead of four in the tens place you've got three cause you added one that is to say ten to the two but you can't take seven from three. So you look in the hundreds place. From the three you then use one to make ten ones and you know why four plus minus one plus 10 is 14 minus one? Because addition is commutative, right [Audience laughs]. And so you got 13 tens and you take away seven and at least five. Well, six, actually.

September 14, 2017 Full Episode Transcript

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