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This hour of Radiolab, a look behind the curtain of how memories are made...and forgotten. Remembering is an unstable and profoundly unreliable process--it’s easy come, easy go as we learn how true memories can be obliterated, and false ones added. And Oliver Sacks joins us to tell the story of an amnesiac whose love for his wife and music transcend his 7-second memory.

Susan Schaller believes that the best idea she ever had in her life had to do with an isolated young man she met one day at a community college. He was 27-years-old at the time, and though he had been born deaf, no one had ever taught him to sign. He had lived his entire life without language--until Susan found a way to reach out to him. Charles Fernyhough doesn't think that very young children think--at least not in a way he'd recognize as thinking. Charles explains what he means by walking us through an experiment in a white room. And Elizabeth Spelke weighs in with research from her baby lab--which suggests a child's brain begins as a series of islands, until it can find the right words and phrases to bridge the gaps. James Shapiro, a Shakespeare scholar at Columbia, argues that Shakespeare behaved more like a chemist than a writer: by smashing words together--words like eye and ball--he created new words, and new ways of seeing the world.

In the late 1970s, a new language was born. And Ann Senghas, Associate Professor of Psychology at Barnard, has spent the last 30 years helping to decode it. In 1978, 50 deaf children entered a newly formed school--a school in which the teachers (who didn't sign) taught in Spanish. No one knows exactly how it happened, but in the next few years--on school buses and in the playground--these kids invented a set of common words and grammar that opened up a whole new way of communicating, and even thinking.

It’s almost impossible to imagine a world without words. But in this hour of Radiolab, we try to do just that. We meet a woman who taught a 27-year-old man the first words of his life, hear a firsthand account of what it feels like to have the language center of your brain wiped out by a stroke, and retrace the birth of a brand new language 30 years ago.

• (tee-dot/flickr)

In "25 Minutes to Go," Johnny Cash counts down the minutes to his hanging. This precipitates an argument between Robert and Jad about whether you could live without numbers. Jad introduces his newborn son, Amil, and insists that he has no concept of numbers whatsoever. Like father, like son? Producer Lulu Miller talks to Stanislas Dehaene, whose work in neuroimaging suggests that Amil probably does have a number sense. You and I might not even know what logarithmic counting is, but apparently we used it as babies. Susan Carey explains why counting pennies is no small feat. Using an experiment designed by Karen Wynn, Susan breaks down the trick that separates us from the animal world: the counting song. Producer Amanda Aronczyk's daughter Mina demonstrates how complicated this whole penny business really is.

• Johnny Cash, "25 Minutes to Go"
• photo: flickr/danesparza
• The Pi Song, by Hard N Phirm

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This hour, Radiolab goes to the front lines with men and women who are battling against time -- or at least the common-sense view of time. Einstein's Theory of Relativity may have implications on the concept of choice. Namely, that there is none. Do we choose what movie to see tonight? No. (It's already been chosen, some say.) Do we choose to wiggle our finger? No. (Already wiggled.) We'll visit a particle accelerator where scientists recreate the moment just after the beginning of time, and a Dublin artist whose life is a 19th-century time experiment. We end in the Mojave desert, where geologic time flows like a frozen hourglass. Guests: Brian Greene, Dr. Michio Kaku, David McDermott, Dr. V.S. Ramachandran, Lisa Randall and Terry Wilcox