Brains

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Speaker 2 BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.

Speaker 10 Hello, I'm Brian Cox.

Speaker 1 I'm Robin Ince, and this is The Infinite Monkey Cage.

Speaker 10 Now, last week, we ended the show with a trailer for this week's show, which was going to be about flat earth and conspiracy theories.

Speaker 10 But since then, and this is true, our lead panelist called and he got an illness and had to cancel.

Speaker 11 Yeah, isn't that weird?

Speaker 1 Meant to be doing a show about conspiracy theories. The main guest suddenly gets ill, suddenly says he has food poisoning.
I hear an Illuminati owl out there somewhere.

Speaker 1 So, basically, as we've discovered, yet again, the Illuminati have used a complex system of slightly off-volivants to make sure that they will silence the true sceptics and reinforce the narrative of the mainstream media.

Speaker 10 You mean you didn't check the sell-by date on some pastry?

Speaker 1 Oh, that is very much what the scientists and the experts would say, I would imagine.

Speaker 10 Anyway, we've postponed that show until the autumn.

Speaker 1 Can I just say, actually, though, that because you use the term autumn, as someone who is very interested in Flat Earth, I am also an autumn denier.

Speaker 1 I think the seasons are an illusion created by the leaf blower industry.

Speaker 10 So, today we're asking a different question: Are two brains better than one? And given Robert's introduction, I suppose the answer must be it depends which brain you choose.

Speaker 1 So, how important to the human mind is interaction with other minds? And what have we learned from the strange experiment of two years of living in relative isolation?

Speaker 1 To answer these questions, we're joined by two neuroscientists and a new romantic, and they are.

Speaker 2 My name's Sophie Scott, I'm the director of the Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. And my

Speaker 2 most underestimated aspect of the ability of the human brain is the ability to grow and change.

Speaker 2 You are born with 86 billion neurons, and those are pretty much the ones you're going to have for your whole life.

Speaker 2 So, any change, any development, anything different that happens to you and your experiences over your life, all of it, is because of change in your brain.

Speaker 2 Anything you remember from this evening will be because your brain has changed.

Speaker 1 Good noise.

Speaker 12 So hi, I'm Uta Frith.

Speaker 12 I'm professor of cognitive development. So developing brain, yes, big mystery.

Speaker 12 But my um idea of the most underestimated, amazing ability of the brain is

Speaker 14 learning

Speaker 12 from others just by watching them, not having to make your own mistakes mistakes all the time, but actually letting other people making those mistakes.

Speaker 16 I'm Anna Davis, I'm a comedian and an actor, and sometimes writer.

Speaker 18 And my most underestimated feature of the human brain is I read a thing that said that when the baseball pitcher throws the pitch, the time it takes to get to the hitter, it's so quick, it's impossible for the reflexes of the hitter to hit the ball.

Speaker 18 They just shouldn't be able to move their hands in time, And yet they do frequently.

Speaker 20 It's impossible.

Speaker 18 How do they know where it's going to be?

Speaker 1 And this is our panel.

Speaker 10 You know, I think in the tradition of infinite monkey cage, we should tear up the script at that point.

Speaker 10 And the first question should be to answer Alan's question, because it's an interesting question. So, how can we respond so quickly to something so complex as the flight of a baseball?

Speaker 12 It's such a good question, and the answer is the brain and the mind, both the same thing of course,

Speaker 12 the brain is a prediction engine.

Speaker 12 That's what it's doing all the time. Now I'm not talking about prediction next year or even next week, but from millisecond to millisecond.

Speaker 12 So that's what the brain does all the time. And there have been millions and millions of years of evolution for this to get really refined from the very very simple organisms who didn't have a brain

Speaker 12 onwards till we're talking about our own human brain

Speaker 12 and I think it's pretty much accepted in our circles that yes prediction is what the brain does.

Speaker 2 One of the reasons why we're able to make these predictions is because the ball doesn't just leave the pitcher's hand. They've moved to get to that point.

Speaker 2 And what you're doing is you're tracking everything associated with that movement. And there will be cues there that the brain can use to work out when it's coming and exactly where it's going.

Speaker 2 And that's something that we actually do all the time.

Speaker 2 When you look at people moving, you are working out what they're likely to do next, and you hardly even have to pay any attention to it.

Speaker 2 Your brain is always trying to predict people's intentions by themselves.

Speaker 22 Isn't it true that to be able to hit that baseball, you have to have, whether it's 10,000 hours of practice or not, you have to have been able to be on the receiving end of that pitch a certain number of times.

Speaker 18 You're sort of talking about the brain learning and changing and growing.

Speaker 2 Absolutely. So, part of your skill.

Speaker 2 So, I remember I haven't played baseball, I've played rounders, and I've had enough kind of rounders balls bounce off my forehead to know that there is a certain degree of skill involved in actually being able to not just predict where that's coming from and how it's moving, but of course, coordinate your own reactions to that.

Speaker 2 There might be one brief action, but actually, everything that's led up to that is highly coordinated and highly skilled.

Speaker 12 So, I would also like to add something about my pet theory about how good we are learning from others. Well, one of the things we do is copying others.

Speaker 12 Not necessarily consciously copying, not visibly copying, but when you observe somebody making a movement, you kind of make it internally yourself. We almost can't help doing that.

Speaker 12 Copying is absolutely pervasive.

Speaker 12 Sometimes we notice it, we catch ourselves, we might copy somebody's accent or the way they walk, but most of the time

Speaker 12 it's entirely inside that the brain is just preparing these things, these actions, in case it has to make them. And here you see the example.
It's called upon to catch.

Speaker 12 And it does that.

Speaker 10 And it's almost, well, it is unconscious in a sense, isn't it? We're not aware of the fact that we're making these predictions and preparing to hit the ball. I mean, it's almost a reflex.

Speaker 12 It's too fast to have to think about it. But the interesting thing is that we also have another gear where we can be conscious.
But that takes quite a lot of time. We have to really think about it.

Speaker 12 Now the thing about copying, if you do it very, very fast and very subtly,

Speaker 12 what the effect is

Speaker 12 that the other person likes you more.

Speaker 12 Very interesting. It sort of gives a bond.
But if you do it in such a way that the other person actually

Speaker 12 notices that you're copying, that's disaster, that's mocking, and you get very, very upset. And that gets into the conscious bit, which is always,

Speaker 12 always the arena for possible deception, manipulation, and a lot of not-so-good things.

Speaker 10 Well, it's interesting when I remember when Patrick Stewart was on the show, and I asked him afterwards about act we were in a a conversation about acting, and I was going to ask you, and I said, How do you do this?

Speaker 10 You know, these Shakespearean plays.

Speaker 10 And he said, You have to learn it to the point where you are not trying to remember what you're going to say next because then you look like you're acting.

Speaker 10 And it terrified me, the idea that you would stand up and do Hamlet or something and had no idea what you were going to say.

Speaker 10 But then he said to me, Well, you have no idea what you're going to say next now.

Speaker 11 I wondered whether you had to rehearse hugely, but what the other thing interesting about performers and sports people too too is all the in the motor skills or the rehearsal, it's the moment of pressure, the moment of opening night or the cup final, and you have to perform there and then everyone knows that there are emotional pressures that begin to impact on the brain's ability to put your hands in the right place at the right moment.

Speaker 18 And that's quite an interesting

Speaker 18 both of these things appear to be unconscious, both moving your arm and the emote your emotions moving it slightly wrongly.

Speaker 10 Do you do that when you're acting? Do you forget the lines essentially? So when when you act? Do you not know what you're going to say next?

Speaker 18 I think once you if you've been doing something for a while, it's what's really odd is if you are doing a play and you do you have done it over and over and over and over again, and then one night something happens in the corner of your eye in row H

Speaker 19 and the next line's gone.

Speaker 19 And it is absolutely not retrievable.

Speaker 19 You look at the person opposite you and they think, oh, it's gone, isn't it?

Speaker 9 Yeah.

Speaker 17 Don't worry, I'm going to say something.

Speaker 11 I don't, between you and your eyes,

Speaker 20 you're saying, you say something now because it will come back if you say something.

Speaker 4 And then they'll say something like, did you mean to talk about the taps? Yes, the taps.

Speaker 10 Language is like that, isn't it? It's sensitive. It's an unconscious.

Speaker 12 Yeah, it's a wonderful example, actually, that you've just given about an interaction where we can throw balls literally to each other, except it's in words.

Speaker 12 And I would have thought, Robin, if you're complaining about not being a sports hero, you really are a verbal hero, aren't you? You can basically

Speaker 12 never run out of words, never run out of things you say.

Speaker 1 Which is not actually for many people who know me a heroic position.

Speaker 12 But you can also take turns at the right moment. You don't interrupt.

Speaker 12 people,

Speaker 12 or you interrupt them when they're boring, which is a very good thing. But this kind of interplay also depends a lot on this secret copying.

Speaker 12 And I don't think that you need necessarily a lot of practice for it. But that's what we do.
That's just there from even from birth, from hours after birth.

Speaker 12 So something like that already puts us into the world, into the social world.

Speaker 12 We are interested in what other people are doing or saying, where they're looking, because that is really our world, you know, our habitat.

Speaker 11 So So what's interesting, you know, going back to your point about acting and what Patrick Stewart said, is if you rehearse enough, enough, enough, enough, that it's so, you really aren't thinking about the next thing, what begins to emerge is you and your confidence in your skill, your person, you, the person.

Speaker 15 And then the audience may connect with you, the actor, through and behind it.

Speaker 25 I watched Keir Starmer, who I respect a lot, give a speech at the Labour Conference last year, and he was under-rehearsed.

Speaker 15 He didn't sound like Keir Starmer.

Speaker 24 He sounded like someone who was giving a speech that had been written, perhaps been worked on even late the night before.

Speaker 18 And I called up a friend of mine who's a theatre director and said, you need to get a hold of Keir Starmer.

Speaker 15 He said, he needs to rehearse.

Speaker 4 He needs to practice this and rehearse and rehearse and rehearse.

Speaker 11 And once he's got it, who he is, he's a greatly respected former Crown Prosecution Surface Head.

Speaker 18 It will come through.

Speaker 24 But at the moment, he's trying to be something he's not and he's not practiced enough and it's not working.

Speaker 25 It's an interesting thing.

Speaker 10 What's happening there, Sophie? Is the brain, it seems as though it's sort of the skill is sinking into your unconscious in some sense.

Speaker 10 So you're becoming less aware of what you're doing when you're practiced and you're getting better at it. What's actually happening?

Speaker 2 Well, it's interesting if you look at something like talking because

Speaker 2 it's always a performance to some degree, and that literally comes down to the brain system. So humans have a strip of control, brain areas that control motor actions in a voluntary way.

Speaker 2 And we can do things in a sort of, we have control over our body, other primates and other mammals don't have.

Speaker 2 So our bodies and our brains have kind of evolved together to make us these terrifying little machines that we are.

Speaker 2 But that means that when we do a voluntary action, it's always a bit of a performance. So I'm talking to you now, and I'm thinking, well, I'm just sounding like Sophie.
And actually, I'm not.

Speaker 2 I would sound different if I was back in Blackburn. I would sound different if I was on Chapel Market trying to buy fruit.

Speaker 2 Or if I'd just been arrested, or all sorts of situations where you might, perhaps all three at once,

Speaker 9 be

Speaker 2 but you're so that there is an element of performance there, and I think often what we resonate to when we listen to people talking is a degree of their comfort in that performance.

Speaker 2 So, if you are unsure or uncertain,

Speaker 2 you've got a speech that you don't know well, so you're concentrating on reading it, and your attention will be there.

Speaker 2 And we're very good at telling if someone's reading versus speaking spontaneously. It's one of the secrets of acting is to sort of get to that point.
So,

Speaker 2 there are these two things always going on. There's always a performance, and we, as listeners, are very, very good at picking up when there's something a bit inauthentic in that performance.

Speaker 2 Someone's trying to do something that's not quite working. They might be

Speaker 2 trying to make their voice sound different. Margaret Thatcher was famously instructed to lower the pitch of her voice.
And often, when you listen to her now, you can kind of hear the effort.

Speaker 2 She's trying really hard to stay down here. And actually, women in the West have generally done that.

Speaker 2 They've lowered the pitches of their voices as they've moved into the workplace and most of the time it doesn't sound quite as inauthentic because she was trying really hard and you're hearing that effort you're hearing that you don't necessarily know why it's happening but you're hearing that something's not quite right something's not someone's not totally confident in that performance brilliant now we're going to use that as one show now let's move to show two which is i want it because as as you said at the beginning you were saying that the mind and brain are the uh pretty much the same thing but i wondered what it is there a divide though there's a line which brian always tells me of because it's a line i use over and over again.

Speaker 1 But Ken Campbell, the great theatre director and writer, used to say, you is just one of the things your brain does.

Speaker 1 So is the mind something in the brain rather than saying the mind is the whole brain? How do we define the difference between mind and brain if we wish to try?

Speaker 2 Well, you can kind of take an analogy which doesn't entirely work with computers and say that the brain is

Speaker 2 the hardware and the mind is the software and how it runs. It's probably not quite as simple as that because

Speaker 2 you can imagine, you can think of the mind as being some of the things that the brain does, but the brain does a lot more than the things that we tend to think of as mind.

Speaker 2 So, right now, we're all sitting in chairs, we're not sliding down onto the floor because actually, our brain's doing a huge amount of work to maintain the muscle control that keeps us upright and sitting in a chair.

Speaker 2 And again, you have no way of accessing that information. It's very hard to make yourself relax so much you'd slide onto the floor.
Don't try. I'm so disappointed.

Speaker 1 I I thought, but like when you were talking about walking and going down steps, I thought the whole audience would forget how to do it and we just whoo, they'd slide down together.

Speaker 2 So we don't normally think of that as a function of the mind.

Speaker 12 This, I think, is

Speaker 12 beautifully put, Sophie.

Speaker 12 I would mention, I think whenever we talk about the brain, we should really also talk about the body. The brain and the body, I mean, you know, they're they're there.

Speaker 12 And we quite often think of the mind generally as sort of outside, you know, outside everything, just sort of floating above. And

Speaker 14 it's all wrong.

Speaker 12 We really are totally sold on this idea that

Speaker 12 we are our conscious selves. Everything else is going on behind our back, you know.
The brain does it, and we have nothing to do with it, kind of.

Speaker 12 But that's all a very strange illusion, because that conscious bit is a tiny, tiny percentage of what really goes on, not just in brain and body, but also in the mind itself, because we have ways in the lab to probe and find out these things that normally don't never see the light of day, these unconscious processes that are always going on.

Speaker 12 And we do know that there is a there is a conversation, there is a dialogue between the unconscious automatic bits doing all their different jobs in an amazing way.

Speaker 12 And they have ways of communicating. Something goes slightly wrong, and then control comes and says, well, maybe slow down, maybe, oh, careful, do something else.

Speaker 12 And this conscious bit right on top is an amazing interface to other minds. This is really very, very useful because, as I keep saying, we learn from others.

Speaker 12 Others have so much more experience than one person on their own and we can take advantage and we can sort of

Speaker 12 use

Speaker 12 a lot of information that they've already filtered out as really important, really valuable. We just get it immediately.

Speaker 10 Yeah, there's so much in there to I sort of can't let you go. You said we have ways in the lab.
And it sounded quite sinister.

Speaker 6 Could you give us just one example of the ways you have in the lab?

Speaker 19 Deep underground is a silent lab.

Speaker 12 Underground, deep underground in Queen Square, where Sophie resides, there are these scanners

Speaker 12 and there are EEG machines and magnetocephalograms and all sorts of devices. And they have to be deep underground because they have to be completely shielded.

Speaker 5 She used one of those magnetic devices on me.

Speaker 5 Didn't you?

Speaker 2 Yeah, so there's a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation, and everything that Uta's just described,

Speaker 2 these are all amazing techniques for taking pictures effectively of the brain in doing things.

Speaker 2 So we can either look at the brain's electrical discharges or look at where the brain's doing neural activity, and we can get phenomenal amounts of information about that.

Speaker 2 And I'm sure we'll come back to it. But you can also try and directly disrupt the functions of the brain by using transcranial magnetic stimulation.
And that's basically involves just physics.

Speaker 6 You have a coil which you place over the salt. It's only physics, it's not physical.

Speaker 9 No, no, no, I'm just

Speaker 2 as the most as the most kind of important part of it.

Speaker 2 You have to, you basically have a an H-shaped coil that you place over somebody's head, Robin's head, or my head, as we've both done it, and then you send a very large electrical signal through that coil, and then that generates a magnetic field strong enough to penetrate through the scalp and actually have an effect on the brain cells which sit underneath.

Speaker 2 Because your brain cells are driven by electrical charge,

Speaker 2 they send information in this way. So you can get

Speaker 2 these brain cells to send messages all at once because you suddenly set off this discharge.

Speaker 2 And you can either use that to stop bits of the brain from working or to make them stimulate parts of the brain.

Speaker 2 So if you move down somebody's motor strip, that brain area that I said controls voluntary action, you can move fingers and legs and things. I can't recommend it, it's not very nice.

Speaker 6 I loved it.

Speaker 5 I think it's great.

Speaker 1 I was really annoyed when you couldn't find the bit that made my role do that.

Speaker 2 But then you, if you get someone really fancy, there's a little wrinkle in the motor strip called the hand knob.

Speaker 2 Neuroscientists have a sense of humour.

Speaker 2 And you can move the fingers individually, it's very striking. But then you move very slightly forward from there on the left-hand side of the brain down here,

Speaker 2 and you can turn off somebody's ability to talk. Robin, we did this.

Speaker 1 I think I did a jab walk it was something like that. Twas Brillig and the Slythy Tove did Gar and Gimbal in the wave.
All Mimsy were the boo.

Speaker 1 And then, and it was just, and you got this, like, you did it about five or six times, didn't you? Yeah.

Speaker 1 And it was, and it was such an intriguing thing because sometimes you could see the words and you couldn't quite understand why you couldn't get. And then sometimes there was like a blank.

Speaker 1 Each time he was moving very slightly, wasn't he?

Speaker 2 I really wish that we'd been able to get more information from you at the time because you could see him moving around very slightly around this area of the brain.

Speaker 2 It's called Broca's area because it was discovered by a neuroscientist, neurologist called Paul Broca.

Speaker 2 But as you're just moving around that, and it's a very complex bit of brain, you could see the very slightly different experiences that you were having as you were trying to talk.

Speaker 2 So there's so much more going on inside there. We're going with a pretty blunt tool, but it was very dramatic.

Speaker 1 I recommend it to you all. All of you get no, don't you.

Speaker 10 You did suggest he was unusual there, actually.

Speaker 10 Did you give the suggestion that there was was something complex about Robin's response?

Speaker 4 I just wanted to.

Speaker 2 What we generally do is we say, we're going in at that bit of the brain, and we give someone a task to do, and we, you know, look, you can't move your eyes anymore, you can't speak aloud anymore, you're slower trying to name things.

Speaker 2 What we don't generally do is just say, what does that feel like? And it made me think

Speaker 2 we should do that more, particularly with someone who's got a lot of insight into their ability to speak. Because you were reporting very different

Speaker 2 aspects. Like you just said, sometimes you knew exactly what word you wanted to say, but you couldn't say it, and other times it was all just gone.
And there were tiny, tiny movements involved.

Speaker 2 So it would have been very interesting to actually spend more time mapping around rather than saying, Oh, we've got 40 people and we've got this effect, just do a journey into your brain.

Speaker 1 I'm available. I'm happy.
I don't care.

Speaker 6 I don't care if it ruins me.

Speaker 1 I would like to be, I'd like, at the very least, I'd like to be a footnote. You know what? That's because it was also the inner voices stopped, which was even better, because they don't normally stop.

Speaker 6 them, you know, Alan, as a stand-up, that yap, yap, yap, yap, yap.

Speaker 10 Would you offer yourself up for these kind of experiments, Alan? Because I find it quite, I don't know.

Speaker 24 I find it quite.

Speaker 1 You've got more to lose than I have. I mean, you're known for your brain, right?

Speaker 1 I'm just this kind of rambling hobo, so it wouldn't make that much difference. As long as I've got a duffel coat, it's fine, you know.

Speaker 20 I feel like I've never, for example, wanted to be hypnotised.

Speaker 22 And I would feel like anything where control was taken away would alarm me.

Speaker 14 I don't know.

Speaker 22 Are you alarmed by the idea that because it strikes me the fact that the ways people, for example, the way people in London speak now is different from the way people in London spoke 40 years ago, that actually evolution might be happening a bit more quickly than we think.

Speaker 11 People now, kids are going to come out of wombs in the future and start looking for a phone

Speaker 6 immediately because

Speaker 15 everyone's brains evolved to stare at a screen all day long.

Speaker 2 It's completely terrifying, but there is absolutely no evidence for evolution processes having influenced the modern human brain since we appeared sort of 2008.

Speaker 12 So you're talking about cultural change.

Speaker 12 You're talking about culture, which is the medium that we're all living in. And of course that is what affects the changes in conversations in language and in our

Speaker 12 love of social media at the moment. As soon as we can get hold of that, that's just what we always wanted.

Speaker 12 Gossip.

Speaker 12 We had only a few people to gossip with, now we have millions of people if you need to. And it's the same desires and the same interests, but you know, multiplied.
So, obviously, we go for it.

Speaker 12 It's just like having, you know, cream cakes rather than black bread.

Speaker 26 If you have all these people to communicate with, do you have an anxiety about who they all are?

Speaker 25 Yes. Are they nice and do I like them?

Speaker 12 Critical.

Speaker 22 And how do you decide which of them are okay or not okay?

Speaker 12 That is absolutely what we have to do all the time. That's what we are in the background, you know, busy sort of evaluating.
Is this going to be somebody I can collaborate with?

Speaker 12 Is this going to be somebody who will take advantage of me? So we actually, again,

Speaker 12 are very,

Speaker 12 very alert to what we hear other people say about these potential collaborators.

Speaker 12 So if somebody this is a gossip thing or a tweet gives you the impression that that's not quite a trustworthy person, that has enormous weight.

Speaker 12 And actually experiments have shown that that can trump your own experience with that person. That person might be completely trustworthy, but you heard that bit of bad stuff.

Speaker 4 about

Speaker 15 that's fascinating because you've all heard someone say how could you believe that of me yes you know me and someone told you something about me

Speaker 15 but you've known me 20 years you know I would never do that or say that.

Speaker 24 But they do.

Speaker 12 Indeed, we all collect this information. It's really very, very important, of course, that we realize that we should be suspicious and skeptical of some information.
But, you know, it's hard work.

Speaker 12 The information that we get, good or bad, from other people, is very often much better than the information that we can get from first-hand experience, because we can make lots of errors.

Speaker 12 We can misjudge the person just by having us, you know.

Speaker 19 Do we not trust ourselves?

Speaker 12 Should we trust ourselves? We might be in a bad mood. We might have provoked that person.
Who knows?

Speaker 12 We are bound to make mistakes unless we have a very, very long time with that other person. Then we know.
You know, the consistency of their behavior will give us really very good information.

Speaker 12 But you don't usually have such a long period of time. You need pretty quickly.

Speaker 18 Uzza, tell me why people tell so many lies.

Speaker 25 Is there some

Speaker 4 does it give pleasure?

Speaker 25 Is it something that's fun and nice? Some people seem to take more pleasure in lying than almost any other active.

Speaker 12 Well, there are, of course,

Speaker 12 white lies, which we can't do without entirely, otherwise there would be a lot of friction.

Speaker 12 And there are embellishments and exaggerations and omissions. So there are an enormous amount of different kinds of lies.
And of course, there are the outright manipulations and frauds and so on.

Speaker 12 Yes, because

Speaker 12 we are human beings who are

Speaker 12 not just collaborative, we are a lot of the time collaborative, we are also very competitive. We do want to get advantages over others and somehow we need to be aware of both these sides.

Speaker 10 You mentioned that we can't understand the brain without reference to the body, so you consider it as a single system.

Speaker 10 But but also you you're suggesting that you can't understand the brain without the interaction between your brain and other brains. So, I want to really see this human network.

Speaker 10 If we're going to understand our individual brains, we have to understand very well the interaction.

Speaker 12 And people very often talk about culture as the medium for the human brain, in particular. People now also talk about animal culture, and that's quite interesting, but there is a very big difference.

Speaker 12 You know, you get different kinds of tool use in different tribes of chimpanzees, for example. And that's known as kind of cultural learning.
They imitate each other.

Speaker 12 But in humans, there is something else. There is, well, it's called cumulative culture.
It sort of seems to build on other things.

Speaker 12 So we are not just influenced by the people who are present here and now. We also can be influenced by people in the past through reading.

Speaker 12 So literacy is one of those major cultural inventions that is sort of suddenly you know sped up all the changes that can occur, the accumulation of knowledge and you know giving rise to technology which then again pushes ahead.

Speaker 12 But it is our human nature to be like that. By the way lying and deception is

Speaker 12 dependent on one of those amazing brain abilities that have not

Speaker 12 been talked about, they've been totally taken for granted until about 50 years ago.

Speaker 12 And that's sort of known as theory of mind. So the idea that you track what other people

Speaker 13 might believe or know or not know, what they think.

Speaker 12 And again, that sort of tracking goes on below consciousness.

Speaker 10 We've talked about, you started talking about the brain as a... partly mechanical, you said 80 billion neurons.
And so you could imagine, we can imagine constructing that or a simulation of it.

Speaker 10 You can imagine, in principle, measuring everything and every molecule and every neuron and making a construction.

Speaker 10 But also we've talked about this immense complexity because we have to take account not only of our bodies and everything else that goes with a human, but also the other humans and the culture in which we live.

Speaker 10 So do you think, you know, when we talk about

Speaker 10 artificial intelligence and we think, well, it's okay, we could simulate a brain. I mean, there are projects to simulate brains now.
There's a human brain project, isn't there?

Speaker 10 How much more complex is the human condition than just the physicality and the structure of the brain?

Speaker 2 Well, partly it's got to acknowledge the fact that brains don't work out of the box, they are shaped and molded by your development.

Speaker 2 So if I could simulate a brain tomorrow, I'd still have to grow that brain for sort of 25 years to get to an adult-ish brain.

Speaker 2 And it's not that you kind of grow your brain up to 25 years and then amble along happily until everything rots.

Speaker 2 Your brain, it makes sense to think of the adult human brain as actually continuously in a state of change because you're affected by minute to minute by emotions and by context, but also over a longer time scale by experience and things you learn.

Speaker 2 And you'd also need to think about, well, what culture is it growing up in? What is it learning about? Because actually, where you grow up does affect how your brain works.

Speaker 2 People growing up in the Himba community in northern Namibia have very different attentional systems from us, and we have no idea why.

Speaker 2 And in all sorts of directions, you find these cultural differences on how the brain works. And then, of course, it's never only happened, never happening in isolation.

Speaker 2 And I can't emphasise Utah's point enough. We don't grow up in test tubes.

Speaker 2 We're intensely social primates from the minute that we're born, fully embedded as brains developing in the world in these worlds created by the other brains around us.

Speaker 2 You'd want that in your simulation as well, which would probably only make things harder.

Speaker 10 Do we know? Do we have a number? You know, if you talk about

Speaker 10 gigabytes of memory, or have we tried to estimate

Speaker 10 how many bits are contained in a human brain?

Speaker 2 It's a very, very interesting question.

Speaker 2 And it is really interesting that because of this plasticity of the human brain, and this ability just can to continue forming new connections, there actually is no known limit to the memory capacity of the human brain.

Speaker 2 We've never got to the end of it. Now, what you can do is find it difficult to retrieve information, but it doesn't seem to be.
You can forget, right?

Speaker 2 Well, you can.

Speaker 6 I mean, incredible. You can forget, but

Speaker 2 forgetting is often because you didn't actually fully learn it in the first place. How your brain encodes information is quite complex.
So, everything that's happened to you over today,

Speaker 2 when you go to sleep tonight, a lot of what you experience as dreams is in fact your hippocampus teaching the rest of your brain about your day.

Speaker 2 That's why things that happen during your days have turned up in your dreams.

Speaker 2 And that's getting integrated with and consolidated with the other stuff that you know, such that tomorrow you will actually have learnt better about the things that you did today than you do today.

Speaker 2 It's why you should always revise the day before an exam, guys. This is informative, helpful information as we move towards GCSEs because of these consolidation processes.

Speaker 2 So, when you don't remember something, it's often because it didn't make it through that consolidation process, and that means it was never part of a memory.

Speaker 18 One of my favorite things about memory is if you meet somebody, if you've known someone for a long time, if if you have friends for 30 years, and then you meet someone, what about that time when we went to such and such a place?

Speaker 19 And you did this and you did that, and we did, you know, it's a bit like the song, I was wearing blue, no, I was wearing green.

Speaker 25 The memories that they have are things that you have no memory of. The memories that you have, they have no memory of.

Speaker 24 You each have your own individual package.

Speaker 25 It makes writing history entirely points because

Speaker 25 everybody's memories of the same day, the same shared experience, are different.

Speaker 2 I even had, I found my diary from when I was a teenager and made myself read it, although a lot of it was miserable.

Speaker 6 And it was really striking.

Speaker 2 It was like it had been written by somebody else. Like a complete stranger had come in who had a general knowledge of some of the people in my family and some of the things that happened in my school.

Speaker 2 Most of the, if you asked me what happened when I was at school, I would have mentioned almost none of the things that were in the diary. I have to say, a lot of it was also in code.

Speaker 2 I think maybe strange sex stuff, I don't know.

Speaker 9 But that was.

Speaker 2 But what's different about me now and me when I was 16 is I want to remember that differently. I've got different aims.
I'm fond now of being 16. 16 at the time was a bit more hard-going.

Speaker 2 So, and what mattered to me was different. So, I'm remembering the same thing completely differently.

Speaker 19 I love that.

Speaker 1 I don't know if anyone here has read the Tracy Thorne's book, Tracy Thorne from Everything But the Girl,

Speaker 1 where she went through her teenage diaries and went, I don't understand why I put this down and not a real event.

Speaker 1 She said, This was a day where some incredible things happened to me, but all I wrote down was I couldn't find the scarf I wanted in Brent Cross.

Speaker 1 Now we've not got to question two, but let's not worry because we've run out of time. So, well done, by the way, for going straight to the last question after we got because that was good.

Speaker 10 Well, it makes me feel that we actually

Speaker 4 creates the illusion of a narrative art, and that's the way brains create patterns.

Speaker 1 So, the audience listening will eventually create the pattern of this appearing to be a cohesive show, he hopes.

Speaker 6 But I

Speaker 1 very quickly wanted to just talk about this period of isolation and solitude that we've had.

Speaker 1 I wondered from both Utta, sorry, and Sophie, this sense of

Speaker 1 what we have been able to learn, or have we been able to set up experiments within this period of time during the pandemic to see in this very unusual social situation, to learn more?

Speaker 12 Utta? Yes, I think psychologists have been very busy already studying what happens to people, and I think there will be much more research to come. So we find it,

Speaker 12 I think to begin with, it was very strange to have these Zoom calls, but now it's an everyday event, and I'm sure we will continue to use this

Speaker 12 instead of traveling long distances just to give a talk or to listen to some speaker. So the question is: what is different when you see people on Zoom?

Speaker 12 Well, one funny thing is that you see yourself as well, which is not the case when we speak and we're there. The other thing is that we can't really make eye contact.

Speaker 12 And that is very disturbing. But I suppose we sort of got used to this, or we can have a slight distance from it, we have a little more idea.

Speaker 12 But I think it took us a bit of learning to get on with this remote interaction.

Speaker 10 That's interesting. So you can't use those things that have been, we've evolved over hundreds of thousands of years.
Those things are not easy.

Speaker 12 Especially the eyes. The eye contact is such a crucial thing for us.
And I would guess that there will be techniques developed, a technology developed that enables you to have proper eye contact.

Speaker 1 If I'm having a conversation with someone on Zoom and I notice there's a biscuit crumb on my screen, I can't wipe it off.

Speaker 1 Because it feels too, it feels like I'm actually, you know, I feel like they almost feel that my face. What are you doing?

Speaker 23 What are you doing?

Speaker 2 Right at the start of the first lockdown, my partner's also a neuroscientist, and we said we really should be scanning everybody, shouldn't we?

Speaker 2 We should be somehow we should be allowed to drive around the country with an MRI machine.

Speaker 1 I like the way you pretend that's only during lockdown.

Speaker 6 That's true, that's true.

Speaker 2 I think one of the things that really made me miss

Speaker 2 physical space with people, because having an interaction with somebody isn't just talking to them.

Speaker 2 So, for example, where you sit relative to somebody is quite a strong marker of how affiliative you feel. So, Zoom is giving you this straight face-to-face thing, which is actually quite aggressive.

Speaker 2 The most affiliative position is side-by-side.

Speaker 6 Apparently,

Speaker 2 that's also true for sheep.

Speaker 23 So,

Speaker 2 in case you need to ever know this, you can tell how friendly theyep are

Speaker 23 by how sort of side-by-side they stand.

Speaker 2 Just don't say I'm not giving you very useful information for life. But when I go into a meeting at work, actually, it matters who I sit next to.
And that's part of the sort of the experience there.

Speaker 2 And you're stripping all of that away. Laughter, Zoom is great for having a conversation.

Speaker 2 It's terrible for laughter because it only lets one person make a sound at a time, and you can't, you start laughing together, and then you all only hear yourself.

Speaker 2 And it's so there's a lot of the kind of the physicality of interactions were harder to manage, and it's made me so much more enjoy being back in the room.

Speaker 2 So, one concrete example in my life is it's made me realize how good lectures are

Speaker 2 for actually not just sharing information with students, but having conversations with students and knowing what students look like and knowing what their voices sound like.

Speaker 2 And I'd imagine it's fantastic for them to see me.

Speaker 12 So this is one of the positives that has come out of it, that we can actually appreciate more

Speaker 12 how important it is to get all of these extra stimuli, this extra feedback. I mean, for example, I really think that when you give a talk

Speaker 12 on Zoom, it is absolutely terrifying that you have no idea how this is received, do you? Clearly, I mean, you're all in the dark here, and I can't really see individual faces. But

Speaker 12 I still get a sense that there could be some feedback. It could tell me, stop now talking.
That's obviously, you know, don't do that.

Speaker 12 Or encourage me

Speaker 12 just by being with other people in the same space.

Speaker 1 That sounds like one of those really awful moments you get in a gig, you know, when you're playing a town and it's not going well, and half an hour in, you're just there going, I still get a sense there could be some feedback.

Speaker 6 Not entirely sure.

Speaker 1 So, Brian, we also asked the audience a question, didn't we?

Speaker 10 We did, which was: if I could change one thing about my brain, what would it be? So, Kate said, a better long-term memory, so

Speaker 10 I can remember where I put that Kit Kat bar in 1972.

Speaker 10 Which has been bothering you, presumably, for 50 years.

Speaker 1 Carly says, the ability to remember what I went into a room for.

Speaker 10 Here it is. Here you see, Philip, to swap with Einstein.
But then, comma, obviously, when he was alive.

Speaker 1 Carol says,

Speaker 1 the ability to allow me to understand a Brian Cox lecture.

Speaker 10 This is excellent, Chris. This is a very practical suggestion.
A removable brain, so I could take it out before I get a hangover.

Speaker 1 Chris has said, it's location. I've always wanted Brian Cox's body.

Speaker 1 And the good thing about that is at the end of every series, we always auction off the old Brian Cox that we've used before we get the updated model. So keep an eye on eBay.

Speaker 25 There's one for you here, though.

Speaker 10 Kimberly said, to be more like Robin Ince with his infinite knowledge of books.

Speaker 5 That's it there.

Speaker 1 To have the ability to know the answer my wife really wants because then things can only get better.

Speaker 1 So thank you very much for those. And thank you very much to our panel, who have been Utafrith, Sophie Scott, and Alan Davis.

Speaker 6 Next week.

Speaker 1 Next week, we are asking: if one mathematician is travelling from Leeds at 40 miles per hour and another mathematician is travelling from Exeter at 60 miles an hour and a statistician is having to use a bus replacement service from Port Talbot at 17 miles an hour, what is the probability that they will all arrive in time to appear on our show about mathematics?

Speaker 1 You'll find out next week. Bye-bye.

Speaker 14 Hello.

Speaker 2 I'm Vanessa Casile, and there is nothing I love more than a great documentary.

Speaker 10 I'm woken by the sound of Dunfire.

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Speaker 27 A film showing bright pink bottoms sitting on Victoria's sponge cakes is projected onto a screen over the stage.

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Speaker 2 Suffs! The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway. We demand to be home! Winner, best score!

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Speaker 2 Winner best book!

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Speaker 2 Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th. Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.