Why do some people think that the Northern Lights make noise, and other people say that

that's impossible?

And why did Pythagoras think that numbers had colors and personality?

And what does any of that have to do with creators like Vladimir Nabokov and Billy Eilish?

And why do you think that a high note on the piano is brighter than a low note?

Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman.

I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford University,

and I've spent my whole career studying the intersection between how the brain works and how we

experience life. On today's episode, we're going to talk about how we can all experience reality a little bit differently.

Okay, so this story begins in the early 1930s.

You've heard about the northern lights, or maybe you've even seen them in person.

They're these rippling rivers

of green blue light in the sky. But here's the really strange part. About 100 years ago,

some people started to make the claim that the northern lights make noise. In 1931, in the journal

Nature, a scientist named Harold's Fairdrop wrote a short paper

that he called Audability of the Aurora Polaris. And he wrote, quote,

It cannot be doubted that many persons have heard a distinct sound when watching a brilliant

display of Aurora.

Communications regarding the auroral sound appear now and then,

and recently Mr. J.H. Johnson has collected a great number of reports on the auroral sound

in his pamphlet concerning the Aurora Borealis. Then in 1933, in the journal Science,

someone named Clark Garber wrote another letter on the audibility of the Aurora Borealis. And Garber wrote,

...