Brain Science

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Hello, on my right, a man who believes that everything in the universe continues to move from a state of order to increasing disorder, a law that seems to apply to everything in the universe apart from his own gorgeous hair.

It's Professor Brian Cox.

And on your left, Robin Ince, a man who used to be an observational comedian until he realised that an observation in itself is meaningless unless the reference frame is carefully specified.

For example, in the 1970s, everyone thought their mother-in-law was fat, but of course, she was only fat in her own rest frame.

There are observers moving such that she would appear as a Lorentz contracted pancake.

Exactly.

Ultimately, the realization that mother-in-law jokes are frame-dependent destroyed the Northern Working Man's Club circuit.

My mother-in-law's so fat.

Well, what speed is she travelling?

What?

What's your frame of reference?

Never mind, I'll do some blue jokes.

All the jokes are blue.

They're travelling towards us.

If they were travelling away from us,

then they'd be redshifting.

Today we're going to be examining the most complex thing in the known universe, something we all possess, to a greater or lesser extent, our brains.

Are we blasé about our brains?

The mere act of looking in in the mirror and recognising our own reflection has taken billions of years of evolution.

Some say that understanding the human brain is an impenetrable problem, but is anything fundamentally unknowable?

No.

There we go, I thought you might say.

To discuss this, we are joined by approximately 300 billion neurons, give or take the odd million, that make up our three guests.

Firstly, Professor Sophie Scott is a neuroscientist at UCL's Institute of Cognitive Science and studies the complexity of human communication, as well as writing a paper on the science of laughter, I believe.

So, hopefully, she'll be able to give me an equation on why my punchline, oh no, you've collapsed the wrong wave function, went down brilliantly in Tottenham but was a disaster in Cardiff last night.

That's entirely true.

Totten loves it.

Cardiff, nothing.

Brian Butterworth is Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Neuropsychology, also at the Institute of Cognitive Science at UCL, and is the author of The Mathematical Brain.

He also diagnosed Ronald Reagan's Alzheimer's from errors in his 1984 re-election speeches 10 years before it was officially diagnosed.

I've got to say, that is the first time, and I am Hype Brian, never before when we've run out any of the achievements of our guests have we had that proper game show.

You've become a wizard of the mind.

Our final guest spent years preparing for a life of playing in rowdy comedy clubs by being a psychiatric nurse.

She was that for 10 years.

So however imaginative a stag night is, and they rarely are, they are unlikely to top the abuse of a vibrant knight in the psychiatric ward.

She is a keen celebrator of cake and homicide.

It's Jo Brand.

That's our panel.

Sophie, we'll start with you.

In terms of neuroscience, it is quite a new science.

How far have we got?

I mean, how close are we, in your eyes, to understanding the human mind?

I suppose it depends exactly where you take us starting from.

So people have been interested interested in the brain and what it's doing since the time of the ancient Greeks.

They didn't always get it right.

So Aristotle thought your brain was cooling down blood and your heart was where all the really important thoughts were happening.

But up until, you know, not long after that, people got the idea that the brain was important.

It was involved in some way in cognition.

But then that didn't really change very much until electricity became easily available in the 1700s, and people discovered that there was actually electrical impulses that could change not just how muscles moved, but also affect how your brain worked.

There was one splendid Italian who just stuck electrodes in his ears and heard a noise like thick, bubbling soup, which was frying his auditory nerve.

But that was an indication that what happened in your nerves, the way that information was getting passed around your brain, was based on electricity.

And then in the 1800s, we found out that there were cells in the brain, that there were these neurons that were actually making up the matter of the brain.

And then more recently, we've got much better techniques for actually looking at the function of the brain.

So we're not just saying, well, what's in there, but actually, what's it doing?

How does it work?

So we've got things like fMRI and TMS, so these techniques for actually investigating normal, healthy brains.

That was one of the first lessons, though, in neuroscience, was after he went ice.

Oh, this is soup, hang on, it's my own brain.

That's when neuroscientists realised, you know what, I'll use other people for these experiments.

Oh, it doesn't offer in, yes, I think definitely, definitely.

Joe,

psychiatric nursing.

So, did you get into that because of an interest in medicine, an interest in the brain?

Because I suppose you worked at the sharp end of this subject there.

Yeah, I'd say the reason I got into it actually is my dad has had a very severe depressive illness for a long time.

And I think if you know someone who has a mental health problem, you're not frightened of other people with mental health problems.

And it's, you know, it's fascinating as well.

And I think probably that's why I got into it.

I'm not the least bit interested in brains at all.

Thank you, Joe Branch.

But is it

something we were talking about before we came on here, which is just briefly as a sideways thing, which is what you were saying about having worked in psychiatric wards that you were still surprised by the lack of understanding that people who don't know someone or don't know that they know someone who's suffering from some form of mental illness still have in this area.

Well, I think there's such a huge amount of ignorance about mental health issues.

You know, I mean, if you go to comedy gigs, which I'm sure you all do, you'll find so many comics doing these kind of split-mind jokes about schizophrenia.

You know, roses are red, violets are blue, I'm schizophrenic, so am I, those sorts of things.

Ah,

a little ripple there.

Oh, right, it's quite funny.

No, it's not.

So there is a huge amount of ignorance around.

You're nodding there.

It's not really changing very much, is it, Sophie?

It's changing slowly.

I don't think, I mean, it's not something that you get taught in school.

You learn about the natural world in biology, but you don't learn very much about, you know, sort of actually human brains and human mind, and just the simple stuff about what goes wrong.

And given the stats and how frequently things do, it's like one in ten of us will have an episode of some kind of mental health issue.

That's a lot of people.

A lot of people who are experiencing stuff which most people don't understand and are a bit scared of.

And I also, I think, you know, like, for example, when I was a nurse, we would give people ECT, and when people sort of talked about that, they thought that we did it as a punishment.

You know, if someone hadn't eaten their dinner, Right, you're getting 500,000 volts through, yeah.

And I think that was all because of One Flow of the Cuckoo's Nest, because actually, that's what they did do in that film.

And I think most people's knowledge of mental health is One Flow of the Cuckoo's Nest, you know.

And so, you're starting from such a position of ignorance, in a way.

But, Brian, we've heard a little bit about the medicalisation of the brain, essentially, and Sophie described the history of neuroscience.

But when did it really become a science in terms of the, I suppose, the experimental method uh and and the understanding of the brain?

Well, is it a science now?

I mean, that's, I think, an important question.

I mean, when we look at the brain through some of these new techniques like uh fMRI, so we're looking at the way in which blood flow changes when you're thinking about something and it changes different parts of the brain when you're thinking about different sorts of things.

I mean, do we really understand what we're looking at?

So, the analogy that comes to my mind is that we're rather in the position of Galileo looking at the moons of Jupiter.

So, he didn't have a theory of optics.

He didn't really know what he was looking at, but he knew that it was somehow important.

And I sometimes think that some of the fMRI experiments

that are reported are rather like Galileo looking at the moons of Jupiter.

It's important, something's going on there, but we don't know exactly what it is.

And when you think that blood flow is only a very indirect measure of what's going on, you could be looking at electrical activity, as Sophie was talking about, you could look at changes in the magnetic field of the brain, which is another method that people are developing now.

How are all these interrelated in order to understand what's really going on?

So, in one sense, it's a science because we have hypotheses, we test hypotheses.

So, it's not like string theory in that sense, which we can't test.

Sorry about that.

But I mean, we do test it.

So we do use the scientific method and we approach it in a kind of rational way.

But I sometimes do wonder what we're really looking at.

It's interesting, isn't it?

Don't say it like that.

Just because you started your answer by going, is it even a science?

Which worried me when you said that?

Because I thought we might suddenly lead you to some existential angst.

I've reached this point in my career and I've suddenly thought, is it a science?

Oh.

It's interesting, Joe, is is it?

Because I you would a brain, you would think, be because as as we said in the introduction, everybody's got one and they're very that that you would think they were easy to observe in some sense.

But as you said, the behaviour is extremely difficult.

But a as a physical system, you might think I I would have naively thought that we would have high precision measurements of what's going on there.

Well, you might, but like, for example, I mean, I'm thinking, like, what does a thought look like?

And how on earth could you ever tell by looking at the brain what someone was actually thinking about?

Because the combinations are endless, aren't they?

Oh, no, I was going to say that Joe raised a really interesting point.

What does I, Crikey, get me?

What does the thought look like?

Now, in order to know what you're looking for in the brain, you've got to have a theory about what a particular thought looks like.

I mean, it's no good just saying, oh, well, you know, it's a thought.

Well, I'm going to have a look in the brain and see what's going on there.

You can't do that.

You've got to have a precise idea of what you're actually looking for.

So, for example, people have identified thoughts in the brain, and the way you do it is you do it, it's a very, very simple experiment.

Either they're looking at a face or they're looking at a piece of furniture, and then you try and figure out what the difference is in the pattern of brain activity for furniture versus face.

And apparently, you could do that quite reliably.

People have even done it for numbers, which is my favorite area of study.

See, if I

have a piece of furniture and my husband, the brain activity would be exactly the same.

So it would have to be something different.

Shall we put that to the test?

No.

It's interesting, Bray, you mentioned numbers, because

I think I recall reading that mathematicians, if they look at numbers or think of abstract problems, perhaps shape puzzles, you can see different areas of activation in their brain to non-mathematicians trying to address the same problems.

You see both the same areas and some additional areas.

So not an awful lot of research has been done on this, but there's uh a famous German calculating prodigy called Rudiger Gamm.

And people have looked at his brain when he's he's doing uh calculations as compared to normal people's brains when they're doing calculations.

Now there's no point in comparing Gamm

doing, you know, seven plus five.

I mean, that's pointless.

So they look at at ordinary people doing seven plus five and Rudy Gagamon finding the seventh power of a four-digit number.

And what they find is, unsurprisingly, that he actually shows a different pattern of activation.

He shows all the areas that you and I would show, but in addition to that,

he recruits an area which is involved in long-term memory.

And it's like a...

kind of like he recruits part of his hard drive to supplement his RAM in order to hold more numbers in his head at one time, which is what I find difficult.

And he also recruits more of his visual cortex as well.

So it looks as though he's kind of imagining what the numbers look like when he's doing these calculations.

On the whole, typical people don't recruit those areas when they're doing ordinary boring calculations.

They just recruit a bit in the left parietal lobe.

That's about here, just above the left ear.

And is there a suggestion that that's learned behaviour, or is there a suggestion that his brain is hardwired in some sense in a different way to everybody else?

Well, it it is hardwired now, but he wasn't very good at at maths at school.

And he just decided to teach himself to be a terrific calculator because he believed he could win a lot of money on a German TV show by

doing these amazing calculations.

And he did win a lot of money doing it.

So he just trained himself.

He trained himself five or six hours every day for about six months in order to be able to win the money on this show.

It's one of the problems in terms of researching many of these areas that ethically it can be very, very difficult.

I mean, a lot of the advances that have happened have happened by hideous accidents.

I mean, for instance, there, when you're talking about ideas which there has been beforehand, a great deal of debate.

Is it nature?

Is it nurture?

We took two twins and separated them at birth.

And now there's ethics committees which suggest that's not a good thing to do.

And equally, you have stories with ECT where people were, it was believed in the 1950s, I think that actually to give people such enormous shocks, you were creating a blank slate to start again.

People who've had pieces of their brains removed, which meant they could no longer form memories, that sometimes it was accidents, and sometimes it was just really quite horrific experiments.

Now, obviously, things have changed.

Is that one of the hard things?

That there are things you think we could find that out.

All I need to do is this hammer, this nail, and just chip that bit off, and off we go.

I think one of, I mean, essentially, until we had things like, in the last 20 years, we've had things like positron emission tomography and fMRI, which are giving us these pictures of the brain at work.

Up until this point, we've been entirely dependent on nature's accidents.

One of the things I'm very interested in is laughter, and if you look at laughter, it emerges when babies are very small.

It's essentially the first really sort of emitted emotion which is positive, other than screaming all the time, which babies are great at from when they're born.

And then laughter appears.

Now, what you'd really like to know is, because laughter always appears in social interactions, always.

It's generally something like tickling, and of course, you can't tickle yourself.

What would happen if you didn't have that interaction?

What would happen?

We know that rats laugh more if they are being tickled a lot when they're babies.

Is that true of humans?

Now, I'm not going to risk personal and professional disgrace by suggesting that anybody do that experiment, but that's the kind of thing that's unknowable for humans.

Brian's looking absolutely baffled at the rat comments.

Laughing.

I mean, I've never heard of this.

Laughing rats.

Rats laugh.

Rat laughters

basically.

They love Jerry Lewis movies.

That's their main thing.

movies.

It's depressingly similar to us.

They laugh at their tickets.

You know what?

At any time, we're only seven feet from a human.

That's hilarious.

There was a guy in the US called Yang Panksep who was working with rats looking at their fear vocalisations.

Because rats are very small, they make very high-pitched sounds.

We wouldn't normally hear them.

So they're recording the rats all the time and reducing the sound so humans can hear them.

And they noticed that rats made a very different sound when they played with each other.

And they thought, is that laughter?

So they started tickling the rats.

And the rats made the same sound.

And then they noticed, in fact,

the rat tickler for any one particular rat, when that rat tickler came in the room, the rat would start making the sound when they saw them.

It's a pity.

We just had a show a couple of weeks ago on Ig Nobel Prizes, and that seems to be a candidate, isn't it?

Rat tickling.

I think it's rather lovely.

I mean, it's really striking.

In fact, fact, when you start looking for it, you find laughter across mammals.

It's a mammal behaviour.

We think it's all sort of, you know, jokes and amusement, but actually, it's much more to do with bonding, showing affiliation.

And chimpanzees use laughter in exactly the same way as us.

They have a different laugh that they make when they are trying to make play continue than when they are being tickled.

So just like us, we have very different laughs if you are helpless with mirth than if you're laughing politely.

And for us, we do it with play, but also, you know, most of the time, if you ask people when do you laugh, they'll say, I laugh at jokes.

If you look at when they laugh, they laugh in conversation.

So you mostly laugh when you're with your friends.

And most of the time, that's actually you're deliberately laughing.

You're laughing to show your friends you like them.

I love the rat tickler thing though, because when I was anyone who was about my age would know James Herbert's The Rats was one of the most terrifying books ever written.

But now knowing it wasn't really their fault, they weren't tickled enough as children changes the entire story.

Don't blame them.

There are a lot of kind of ideas about the human brain which are very much in the world, which may have truth and may well not, those kind of things that pop up often in pubs and pub quizzes.

Joan, I'm going to start off by asking you your ideas on a small group that we've kind of made up, and then I'm going to throw them over to you.

One of the most famous ones is the idea that we only use 10% of our brain.

I wonder what you think of that.

I think that that is

true for my husband, but

not for me.

I think he uses 3%, and I use about 79%.

So, the 10% of the brain, Sophie?

It isn't true.

It comes about from a self-help book, sort of the idea being you can you're only using ten percent of this amazing organ, you can use a lot more, but essentially all of us right now are sitting here with brains that although they they're about one kilogram in weight, they're using twenty percent of the available oxygen in your body.

They are very, very, very metabolically hungry, and that's because it's working incredibly hard all the time.

Lots of stuff that, you know, it's it's um requiring energy in your brain to understand the words I'm saying, and but also to remain upright into seat and and to breathe and to all these other things that you're not necessarily particularly aware of, but which are requiring your brain to be doing things.

If your brain wasn't there, you'd find it a lot harder.

We're now going to choose two people.

There'll be one control group.

Sophie, can I just ask you a question?

Is it true if you do cryptic crosswords, you won't get Alzheimer's?

It's certainly one of the things that will help.

Immediately,

there is quite a lot of value in this idea of doing mental muscles, you know, actually doing things with your brain.

It is preventative for certain things.

That doesn't mean to say you you need to necessarily charge off and buy proprietary devices that are sold to you under the name of such trainers.

That's not something you what you need to do is things that will involve you using your brain and also, if possible, doing so in a social setting.

So, doing things like playing bridge is brilliant, or you know, something that just gets you meeting other people, talking to them, and doing sort of cognitively demanding work with them is excellent for your brain.

Would it be you're talking about the energy that the brain uses?

I mean, lots of people join gyms kind of the day after New Year's Day.

Would it be better just to join the library?

Because it sounds really boring, the gym, whereas reading is great, there's loads of stuff in it.

Well, unfortunately, it really helps to keep going to the gym as well because your brain is using all this oxygen, it needs a good blood supply.

So, actually, cardiovascular disease is a really big cause of problems with your brain, both in terms of big strokes that leave you with noticeable loss in function, but also there's something called multi-infarct dementia, which is where you just have lots and lots of little strokes and it looks a lot like dementia.

You have a progression of decline.

The good thing about it is, if you treat the cardiovascular disease, you can actually improve the dementia.

So, there's a big interest in exactly how many people out there have got this problem rather than say something like Alzheimer's.

But it does mean that keeping your heart healthy will help your brain.

And then, Joe, you alluded to one of the other myths, which is that there is a difference between the male and the female brain.

By the way, by saying myth, you've rather given away whether it's a myth or not.

Let's take this multitasking thing, for example.

You know, it do you think that's a myth?

Men

can't even talk.

because there's always this implication that women can juggle all these ideas in their head at once.

And some poor bloach, she's got a hammer in a nail going

like that.

I can't possibly talk at the same time.

And do you think it's an affectation?

My wife thinks it's an affectation.

I just claim that I can't multitask in order to avoid washing up.

I think it's quite an intelligent affectation, but yes, no, I I do think it's an affectation.

Why should they be any different?

I think that we're the same, really, aren't we?

Brian, can you the male-female brain in terms of the differences?

Are there any physical differences?

Well, there are physical differences, like the male brain is on average larger than the female brain.

You liar.

Just because men are, well, also because men are bigger than women on the whole.

On the other hand, living in a household that's full of women, I now take the view that the male brain isn't as efficient as as the female.

But I mean, there is, I think, one quite important difference, which is that if you look at neurodevelopmental diseases, you tend to find, or actually, let's make this broader, just the range of abilities.

You find that there's a bigger spread of abilities in men than in women.

So you find more men who are at the bottom end of the scale and more men at the top end of the scale proportionately, even if the the average for both men and women is the same.

And this is at IQ, for example.

What do you mind?

For example, in IQ or i in in math, for example.

But not language.

Language is wh you get more high performing women

still, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Not many not many.

It's it's not a big difference.

So, you know, you find if you took a hundred women and a hundred men and gave them a language task, the top people would be likely to be women, but there wouldn't be a big thing in it.

Joe, and I know you you spent many years working in a psychiatric hospital, and so you would have seen a lot of people whose brains were not working correctly for one reason or another.

Did you feel that that gave you an insight into not necessarily how this complex organ works, but the complexity of it in general?

When you see it, when it's beginning to fail, did you feel that gave you an insight?

Oh, well, very strongly, because I think the brain is such a complex organ that it can fail in so many and varied ways.

It's terrifying, really.

And what I was like doing, I was like, you know, when scientists go, if what we know about the brain now is midday,

how far round will it go before we know everything we need to know about the brain?

So, Brian,

it is

whenever I read about the brain or start kind of trying to understand the brain, my brain stops working.

As if it's going, don't ruin the magic.

I'm not going to let ruin the magic.

Is it a machine?

I mean, at the basic level, is it a machine described by the laws of physics that runs algorithms?

And is that all there is to the brain?

I think physics is not a very good model here.

It's the only possible description of the component parts.

Let me try and explain, all right?

Which is what we're talking about here is not rocket science.

It's actually much more complicated than that.

Rocket science is a matter of getting matter, getting a bunch of atoms from point A to point B.

Okay?

That's what I do when I walk.

Right, exactly.

That's fine.

This is what people do when they send a rocket into space.

Right.

That's why it's rocket science.

Now, imagine that each of those atoms had a mind of its own, and it was actually thinking about what the other atoms were thinking about.

And in particular, there's the problem of what I call the Dostoevsky question.

And the Dostoevsky question goes something like this:

if everybody else thinks I'm going to go from A to B,

and even though going to B would actually be quite good for me, I'm not going to go.

Because what I want to do is I want to show that I'm not constrained by the laws of physics.

I'm not constrained by what's good for me.

I have,

next hard question, I have free will.

And so I'm going to do what

I'm going to do

what I want, even though it might be self-destructive.

The other problem is that every brain's different.

And the reason why the brain's different has got to do with the genes that go to build it, the experiences that it has.

And so we not going to have a theory of the brain, we need to have a theory of brains, and why your brain is different from my brain, and Sophia's brain brain is different from Joe's brain, and everybody in the audience has a different brain.

And that seems to me to be a massively, massively more complex problem than just, say, getting a rocket from point A to point B or figuring out, you know, figuring out, you know, what a black hole is, which seems to be trivial by comparison.

Well,

it's show four, and neuroscience takes the lead.

Sophie, the final question for you.

Joe was talking about where we are on the clock face in terms of understanding the human brain.

I know it's a very difficult question for you to say anything in particular, but where would you say we are on that clock face of understanding the human brain?

Well, I have to say, I mean, I've been doing this for

about 15 years now, and it has changed so much already.

So, it's progressing so quickly.

I think we're probably about two minutes past.

If we're looking at, you know, like the 24-hour clock, it's really, really very early days.

And the fact that we can now take pictures of brains in action and look at them doing things would be if twenty years ago when I was doing my PhD, it would have been unimaginable that you could routinely do this.

It would have been impossible to imagine.

And suddenly now we can.

It's becoming a standard research tool.

Developed by particle physicists.

Absolutely.

Too late.

Too late to fight back.

Too late to fight back.

Well, as usual, we have used the brains of our audience as well and turned them into a think tank to go a little bit further into the subject.

And we've asked our audience assembled here, what power of the human mind do you hope is the next step in mental evolution?

The first one is from Maddie to stop people being wrong on the internet so we can all go to bed on time.

I haven't slept for about a year.

This one says the ability to tell when politicians are telling the truth.

This is a good one here to understand the point of Jeremy Clarkson.

Do you know what?

I'm happy just remaining in the dark to be honest.

I don't want to be.

So thank you very much for your answers there.

And thank you very much to our fantastic guests today, who were Professors Sophie Scott and Brian Butterworth.

And Joe Brown!

Next week, we're joined by Ed Byrne and Philip Ball to discuss scientific attempts to create life.

Are people right to say that man shouldn't play God?

And what does playing God mean anyway?

Does it actually mean she's just been hiding so thoroughly that no one believes you exist?

Thank you very much.

Goodbye.

If you've enjoyed this program, you might like to try other Radio 4 podcasts, including Start the Week, Lively Discussions chaired by Andrew Marr, and a weekly highlight from Radio 4's evening arts program, Front Row.

To find out more, visit bbc.co.uk slash radio 4.

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