A 4-Track Mind

October 2, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

A 4-Track Mind

Bob Milne is a ragtime pianist from a tiny town in Michigan, and the Library of Congress once called him a national treasure. But what makes him extraordinary isn't just his playing—it's what happens inside his head. When he casually mentioned to a neurologist named Kirsten Betterman that he could hear an entire symphony in his mind, she was impressed. Then he added: "I always listen to two of them at once." He explained that he only has to focus on the one he wants to hear at a given time, but they're all running simultaneously—every instrument, every note. When Betterman pushed further and asked if he could do three, he said he thought so. Four? He initially laughed and called that impossible. But then he paused and said he'd never tried.

The experiment

Betterman designed a test. She gave Bob and a control subject—Peter Perret, a former conductor of the Winston-Salem Symphony—four symphonies to memorize: Schubert, Beethoven, Brahms, and Mendelssohn. Different keys, different tempos, different instrumentations. The subjects were placed in a brain scanner and told to imagine the music playing in their heads, exactly as they had heard it on CD. Researchers started a real CD and let it play. At an arbitrary moment, they said "stop" and asked the subjects to sing exactly where they were in the piece—the exact phrase, note for note.

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What you'll learn

1 (01:10) **Introduction: A Mind-Bending Archive Classic** - Lulu Miller introduces a Radiolab classic about a man whose brain redefines human capability.
2 (02:21) **Meet Bob Milne: A National Treasure** - Jad and Robert introduce the subject of the story, a piano player with an extraordinary relationship to music.
3 (04:22) **The Neurologist's Discovery** - Neurologist Kirsten Betterman learns about Bob's unusual ability to carry on conversations while playing complex music.
4 (06:51) **The Four-Symphony Challenge** - Bob claims he can handle four symphonies at once, a claim that seems impossible and even painful to imagine.
5 (07:10) **The Experiment is Designed** - Kirsten creates a rigorous test to compare Bob's mental tracking ability against a professional conductor.
6 (08:48) **The Test: Mental Playback** - Inside an fMRI scanner, the subjects must accurately track the music in their heads, timed against the real recordings.
7 (10:01) **Round One: Single Track Success** - Both Bob and the conductor can flawlessly track a single symphony in their heads.

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

In this short episode, first aired in 2011, a neurologist issues a dare to a ragtime piano player and a famous conductor. When the two men face off in an fMRI machine, the challenge is so unimaginably difficult that one man instantly gives up. But the other achieves a musical feat that ought to be impossible.

Reporter Jessica Benko went to Michigan to visit Bob Milne, one of the best ragtime piano players in the world, and a preternaturally talented musician. Usually, Bob sticks to playing piano for small groups of ragtime enthusiasts, but he recently caught the attention of Penn State neuroscientist Kerstin Betterman, who had heard that Bob had a rare talent: He can play technically challenging pieces of music on demand while carrying on a conversation and cracking jokes. According to Kerstin, our brains just aren't wired for that. So she decided to investigate Bob's brain, and along the way she discovered that Bob has an even more amazing ability ... one that we could hardly believe and science can't explain.

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