"There is one thing that everyone on Earth has in common." "We all live, eat and breathe within the human body." "For two years, I have been exploring this unique dwelling place." "I want to show you what I have seen." "To come with me, you'll have to cross the globe, from Australia, through Africa," "to America." "You'll have to journey into space, and into a place as mysterious but much closer to home." "We've developed new techniques to help you get there." "New cameras to show you the way." "And we'll look at familiar things with a fresh eye." "You'll journey with me on the road that your body takes." "Through dangers." "Through miracles." "And through time." "We'll see the human body in all its forms, fom our beginning" "to all our ends." "I'm a doctor and a scientist." "I've spent my working life looking at the human body." "Now I'm going to see it in a new light." "Come with me." "This is Charlotte." "She was born just a few hours ago." "Like most of us at birth, there's really nothing to her." "A bit of fat, a little sugar." "A bit of protein." "She's really just a collection of chemicals." "And yet she's the most complicated thing on Earth." "During her lifetime, she'll achieve the most amazing things." "She'll eat for nearly three and a half years, consuming 7,300 eggs" "and 160 kg of chocolate." "She'll produce 40,000 litres of urine and spend over six months on the loo." "She'll dribble 145 litres of saliva before her first birthday." "She'll crawl 150 km before she's two." "Then she'll learn a new word every two hours for the next 10 years." "By the time she's ten, her heart will have beaten 368 million times." "She'll spend a little over 12 years watching TV." "And two and a half years on the telephone." "She'll spend two weeks kissing." "She'll grow 28 metres of fingernails, and 950 km of hair on her head... and more than two metres up her nose." "By the age of twenty one, she'll have breathed over 31/2 million balloons of air." "She'll work for a total of just over eight years." "She'll produce 200 billion new red blood cells each and every day." "She'll be able to put a name to 2,000 people." "150 of them she'll call her friends." "She'll shed 19 kg of dead skin." "She'll have sex 2,580 times.." "with five different people." "She'll fall in love twice." "She'll blink 415 million times." "Her eyes will be able to distinguish over a million colours." "If she gets married, she'll spend £6,809 on her wedding day." "to the same person for the rest of her life." "She'll have two children and four grandchildren." "When they grow up, only two of her eight great-grandchildren will remember what her name was." "In Britain, she's likely to live for 79 years;" "in France, 82 years; in the USA, 80 years;" "and in Africa, only 55 years." "By that time, she'll have walked over 22,000 km and talked for 12 years." "It's an amazing list." "In fact, no life is an ordinary story." "We will each in our time do an incredible amount." "And the driving force behind everything we do is the most complicated and mysterious organ in our bodies - it's our brain." "This is something I've never done before in my life, and I never thought I would." "Despite my brief experience, I can do a bit of it on auto-pilot." "A little bit anyway!" "(INSTRUCT0R) Braking." "Braking." "Braking..." "No, no!" "You were going too fast." "This kind of driving takes a whole new range of skills." "And you need to be able to use them almost automatically." "It's my brain that lets me do that." "My brain is now doing half a dozen tricky new jobs all at once, without my even thinking about it." "So much so that I can devote some of my attention speaking to you." "(INSTRUCT0R) Lift off." "Get your brain into gear!" "And that's what brains are so good at." "They manage things without us being conscious of them." "Your brains are doing it right now, because whilst I've been doing six new things, your brains have been doing tens of millions of tasks, just while you're watching television." "Put another way, it's as if you're not just driving this car, but driving every car, bus, bike, taxi, lorry in the country at the same time." "And you just thought you were putting your feet up!" "To see how busy your brain really is, you have to look at the world differently." "Everything that's alive, and some things that aren't, gives off heat." "That's what you're looking at now." "All your body is burning up energy and creating heat as it goes about the business of being you." "But the hottest bit of you is up here." "Your brain burns up the most energy in your body, almost a fifth of all the calories you consume." "And it uses up almost the same amount whether you're concentrating on something difficult or just wondering whether to put the cat out." "Your brain is constantly challenged with its most difficult task:" "keeping you alive." "Right now, there are a few things on your mind." "Tonight's dinner, for example." "For starters, your brain is coordinating a major haulage operation." "Though the route is usually downhill, food doesn't fall to your stomach." "When you swallow, your brain triggers muscle contractions." "They squeeze things along in your oesophagus at 4 cm per second." "The first scheduled stop is the stomach." "It's essentially a biological liquidiser." "Its lining is covered in delicate folds which allow it to expand with each mouthful." "Inside, a mixture of enzymes and hydrochloric acid start to digest your food." "Your dinner's probably still inside." "It churns away for about four hours." "Soon it will be released into your small intestine, and, at a cue from your brain, bile will be added." "This will help you break down fats." "You'll be carrying tonight's dinner for about 24 hours." "So I hope you liked it." "When it does leave you, it will take about 25 grammes of dead cells from your gut with it." "But don't worry." "You're constantly replacing cells from head to toe." "Your brain is managing the body's workforce of 50,000 billion cells." "And most of them don't last more than a few years." "Cells are constantly dying... and being replaced by new ones, up to a billion new cells for old every hour." "This means that most of your body is a good deal younger than you are!" "But these cells aren't replaced and they're particularly special." "Each one has a natural tendency to twitch." "They're heart cells, and millions working at once is a heartbeat." "It's your head that rules your heart, as it's your brain that decides what rate your heart should beat at." "The part of the brain controlling your heart is looking after the outside of you, too." "Your body must maintain a temperature of 37 degrees Centigrade." "And your brain has a range of tricks up its sleeve to do it." "This is skin magnified a thousand times." "If you look closely, it's covered in holes." "They're the openings of tiny ducts, tubes through which sweat can flow." "There are about 65,000 of them on the palm of your hand alone." "If you're getting too hot, your brain switches on your sweat glands." "As the sweat evaporates, it will help cool you down." "Should your brain decide that warmth is needed, it has another plan." "Goose pimples." "They trap warm air near to the skin and so keep vital heat in." "So, all that is being controlled from here, inside your head." "And don't think you'll get out of all the hard work by nodding off." "Even when we're relaxed or asleep, our brains don't let up." "This contraption is covered in electrodes, picking up part of my own brain's activity." "128 sensors detect tiny signals emitted as my brain cells fire." "This is the pattern produced when I am relaxed." "Even without a thought in my head, my brainwaves show I'm busy." "The truth is our bodies are always busy." "They just don't tell us about it." "What we see as the monotony of our daily lives, when it seems that nothing happens, is actually the result of much activity inside our bodies." "We're performing thousands of tasks every second of every day." "Simply being is part of a complicated balancing act, the mechanics of which are completely hidden from us." "Just as our bodies hide the miracle of everyday life, so they hide from us an even bigger surprise." "It's the story of how we came to be the way we are." "And it is an amazing story." "It will change how you think about your body." "The way we live, the shape we are, even the way we think, was decided for us thousands, millions, even billions of years ago, when the human body didn't even exist and planet Earth was unrecognisable." "Here we are, 8,000 feet above sea level in America's Yellowstone National Park." "If you'd been on the planet 3 billion years ago, it would have looked something like this." "The Earth was covered in volcanoes, billowing steam and sulphurous water." "Had you been standing here, you'd have been present as the story of life was unfolding." "Had you been standing here, you'd have been standing by the planet's most advanced life form." "In this almost boiling water there are thousands of long, thin strands." "They are colonies of tiny, heat-loving creatures: bacteria." "0nce, long ago, this was the most complex life form on Earth." "What's surprising is it's still here today, just like 3 billion years ago." "Whilst dinosaurs came and went, and many other species died out, this has survived practically unchanged." "This is because their environment has stayed the same." "The water comes from deep in the Earth and so is always the same temperature." "Just metres away, the environment is very different." "Away from the thermal vents, the temperature fluctuates." "Billions of years ago, bacteria were living here, too." "But as the conditions changed, they changed as well." "From one generation to the next, there were alterations." "They were almost insignificant, but these tiny changes started an amazing process." "Because if you add up enough tiny changes through generations, you get a revolutionary transformation." "From being simple bacteria, they became more complicated." "Single cells became groups of cells and then early plants and animals." "And the changes continued." "Dozens of species became hundreds, hundreds into tens of thousands." "Parts of bodies were adapted to meet new challenges." "Great leaps were made." "A fish's fins, over countless generations, developed into legs, and it became a reptile." "Some reptiles developed feathers and became birds." "0thers became mammals in every shape and size from blue whale to baboon, every creature we see on the Earth today, including ourselves." "All this happened." "It's the miracle of evolution." "The human body is just one branch in the huge, spreading tree of life that grew from those simple bacteria." "Yet we carry with us the remnants of what has gone before us in our strange past." "And there is a place we can go to see just one of those remnants, shaped by one of evolution's truly incredible transformations." "It's inside my own head." "All we need to do is go and find it." "This is my ear drum, a thin skin stretched tight across my ear canal." "But what I want to show you lies on the other side of my ear drum." "This device can take me there." "I'm inside a huge magnet with a field strong enough to lift a car clean off the ground." "It's a Magnetic Resonance Scanner" "It can reveal layer by layer what's inside my head." "Up until now this has been the forefront of medical imaging." "But we're about to take it one step further." "By putting the medical scans together, we've created a 3-D picture of my own head, and I can look at any part of it I want to." "I can see the muscles that make up my face." "My skull." "And my own brain." "So now I can take you on that journey into my ear in a way that's never been possible before." "This time we can fly straight through my ear drum." "We're inside my head and at last I can show you what we've come here to see." "0n the right it's my ear drum again." "But now we're looking at it from the back." "Attached to the middle of it is what I want to show you." "It's a bone." "Though it's towering above us, it's actually tiny, about the size of a grain of rice." "It's the first in a chain of three bones which transfer the vibrations of my ear drum to receptors in my cochlea." "They are the smallest bones in my body and they're perfectly engineered to perform their task." "Yet these bones will reveal how evolution has transformed us, because they were once something completely different." "Let me take you back, even before birth, and the bones will tell us their story." "A foetus in the womb, just twelve weeks old, and it's only a few centimetres long." "It would fit in an eggcup." "Deep inside its head, its ear bones are forming." "Now let's look at younger and younger foetuses." "Eight weeks." "Seven weeks." "Six weeks." "We are actually witnessing something amazing, because at certain times in this early development, our human embryo portrays the shapes of the embryos of some of our distant pre-human ancestors." "In other words, what we're looking at now is like the embryo of a creature which we evolved from millions of years ago." "It's just as if we are journeying back in time, virtually rewinding evolution to show episodes in the history of life." "If we use the magnetic scanner, incredible detail is revealed." "We can see right through the skin at the brain and the spinal chord beginning to form." "And the beginnings of an eye behind the emerging hand." "Like some of the creatures that preceded us on the evolutionary tree, it has a curved spine" "and what might be a tail." "And those amazing ear bones we saw earlier are taking shape on the outside of the head." "The cells that will make them are located here - tiny grooves almost hidden behind that hand." "Millions of years ago, the embryo of a distant ancestor of ours would have shared with us many of these features." "As well as giving rise to us, it gave rise to all sorts of other creatures." "In those creatures, these features that we're looking at here have evolved quite differently." "We can actually see it happening with the ear bones, because those very same grooves that in us will become our ear bones in this creature become something else entirely." "This is the embryo of a fish." "Here is its heart and it, too, has a curved spine." "And the tiny grooves here, just a fraction of a millimetre long, have evolved to become not ear bones but supports for its gills." "So, some time long, long ago, this lot and I shared a common ancestor." "And like them, it, too, had little bones around its gills which helped it to breathe." "But as we evolved, these little bones were adapted for an entirely different job:" "to become the intricate mechanism of our ears." "And our ear bones are not the only things to have been transformed in this way." "Such apparent miracles are in fact all around us." "The rest of our ears, that allow us to balance and walk upright as well as hear, our limbs and hands, our whole body has been shaped by the process of evolution." "Everything about the human body has been inherited and adapted from something our ancestors had a long time ago, though they may have used it for something different." "We are recycled from the past." "0nce we begin to understand the source from which our bodies are derived, the way we look at ourselves can never be quite the same again." "So every part of the human body bears a shadow from our distant past." "Evolution has adapted our bodies from those of our ancestors, all the way back since life was as simple as that in the steaming pools of 3 billion years ago." "It is incredible, and it's incredibly hard to believe, too, because although we've changed so much, we don't actually see any of those changes happening." "Generation after generation, we just look the same." "The problem is one of time." "The periods over which even tiny changes happen are so long they're almost beyond our imagination." "But to make sense of those time periods and to see them in perspective," "I've brought you here, to a cave deep in the French Pyrenees." "In the middle of the last century, a bookseller from the nearby town of Toulouse used to visit this cave, and as a hobby he dug around for bones and evidence of prehistoric remains." "And he did this for some forty years." "And then, late in the afternoon, on June 11th, 1905, having been digging all day, he prepared to go but chose to go by a different route." "As he left, he was passing this wall and something caught his eye." "He lifted up his lamp and this is what he saw." "Stencils of human hands from merely 30,000 years ago." "They are amongst the oldest images made by human beings on the planet." "They are six times older than the pyramids in Egypt and eight times older than Stonehenge." "Quite what they signified to the people who made them, no one knows." "They were a Stone Age people, and they came here at the coldest part of the last Ice Age." "And over here are the most interesting images of all." "It is thought that these stencils here were made by someone no bigger than a toddler:" "a child in a primitive world, the son or daughter of somebody who we would think of as a caveman." "And yet if I had taken such a child and brought it up as a baby in my own house, it would be indistinguishable from my own children." "Because by the time these people pressed their hands against these walls, all the changes which make us what we are had already happened." "The evolution of the human body was, to all intents and purposes, complete." "If this child were to be raised with my own children, it would look the same, it would talk the same, it would play the same computer games, and it would grow up wanting to be a doctor," "a footballer or maybe even an astronaut." "What amazes me more is that, although we've changed so little in so many thousands of years, each of us changes so much in just one lifetime." "We tend to think of growing up as just getting older and bigger." "But as we make our way through life, our bodies change much more significantly than we realise." "In fact, we change just as dramatically as a caterpillar." "A caterpillar is an eating machine and that's just what it needs to be, to stockpile the energy it will need to reproduce." "Yet, to meet a suitable mate, it may have to travel many miles and it's hardly equipped for that!" "But evolution has provided the caterpillar with a solution." "0ne creature is recycled into another." "A new challenge has been met with a new answer." "0ur bodies, too, face different challenges in life and we are reworked to cope with each of them." "From the moment we are born, we are changing... and adapting to life's demands." "And every change we make follows a plan drawn up for us by the millions of generations that have gone before." "In this series, I'm going to show you the science of these changes throughout life." "How our brain cells are wired up when we are children." "How hormones transform us at puberty." "What changes happen inside our bodies." "How our muscles become stronger." "How our brains mature as adults." "And how our bodies continue to alter throughout our lives." "But if I were to tell you just the science of these changes," "I'd be missing the most important thing of all." "Let me show you what I mean." "This is the amount of tears that an average person cries during a lifetime." "Just a fraction under sixty-five litres." "0r, to put it another way, about one million, eight hundred and fifty thousand drops." "So what do we know about them?" "Well, each tear weighs 35 thousandths of a gramme and is about as salty as this part of the River Thames at Greenwich." "Tears are produced by a gland above the eye which is literally squeezed when we cry, and the tears come down six tiny tubes about the thinness of a human hair." "As far as we can tell, of all the animals in the world only humans actually cry when we're hurt or upset." "About twenty-eight drops each time." "including sugar and antiseptics." "But what's the most important thing to know if all these were your tears?" "0f course, it's why you cried them." "How many of these thousands of droplets were shed in fits of anger?" "How many in pain?" "How many in love?" "In grief?" "How many in sorrow?" "How many were shed by a baby?" "And how many by an old man facing the end of life?" "The truth is a knowledge of the science of life is only made complete by a knowledge of those living it." "The human body is not just a biological machine, it's much more than that - it's a person." "In this series, it's people that will tell us what the body's ever-changing story means." "Take Zak, for example." "Having already mastered the complexities of crawling, he'll be taking his first steps." "When it comes to growing up, 12-year-old Beatrice will ride the rollercoaster of puberty." "(BEATRICE) When you're a teenager, apparently you go bolshie." "You get your periods, you get pubic hair, you get taller, you get...sort of..." "wider at the hips, I think." "I can't remember." "(BEATRICE) It's painful to run, I can tell you that, because what happens up above, you have to start wearing a bra." "Sorry, had to mention it!" "It gets really painful to run." "Month by month, Jeff and Phillippa will share with us perhaps the body's greatest miracle." "(PHILLIPPA) I marvel at the fact that this is going on with no intervention from me." "It's just my body taking over and doing it all." "And I'm not in control of it at all really." "It just all happens." "In adulthood, we reach the peak of human achievement." "Marcia, an astronaut, has scaled the heights." "(MARCIA) There is nothing in our experience, genetic, metaphysical, emotional, psychological experience, that prepares us for being off the planet." "(MARCIA) You can look at all of the pictures from space, and there is something about looking out the window that is not describable." "And we'll be living through the ravages of ageing with 76-year-old Bud and his wife Viola." "They live and work on a farm in the mid-west of America." "What I remember about Bud, he had the prettiest, waviest hair." " That's different now." " Yes, it is!" "And his skin was smooth, no wrinkles." "And he didn't have a little pot here." "And in our last chapter, as his body slowly succumbs to cancer," "Herbie will take us on his final journey." "(HERBIE) I know I'll never see this film in my lifetime." "I like this because everybody sees that a human can manage an illness like mine." "Everybody can see in this film there is a way to make the best from the end of your life." "So this is the story of the human body, a tale of fantastic changes and amazing achievements, written over millions of years of evolution and told afresh by each of us during our lifetime." "It surely is the greatest story ever told." "And every one of us has a part in it." "From new-born baby upwards, this line follows the journey we will all make through life." "Each person is one year older than the last." "All of us have a place somewhere along this line, looking forward, looking back, or perhaps a bit of both." "Seen like this, stripped of the trappings of wealth and status, we have one thing in common, the one place we all inhabit, the one vehicle we all travel in:" "it's the human body." "Seeing your body in ways you've never seen before, perhaps you'll share my sense of wonder at how it shapes us all into who we are." "(FAST HEARTBEAT)" "You're looking at a baby's heart." "It's beating 120 times a minute." "But, amazingly, it's not the only thing keeping this human being alive." "That's done by the most sophisticated life-support machine on Earth." "To find that machine, we have to leave the heart and travel through an artery the thickness of a drinking straw." "(L0UD SW00SHING)" "Every one of us has an almost identical network of arteries and veins." "Identical, that is, except for this one." "No one watching has a blood vessel like this." "It's a spiralling link between this body and its life-support." "And at its end, a mass of tubes so tiny even blood cells appear huge." "Through a wall comes the sound of the engine room." "(MUFFLED SW00SHING)" "It's a mother's heart, and we've just made the journey from inside the heart of her unborn baby." "This film is the story of the unique relationship between mother and baby which is at the start of every new life." "(CHURCH BELLS)" "0ver a hundred million acts of sexual intercourse take place each day in the world." "These result in around 910,000 conceptions and, nine months later, 400,000 babies." "Many of those babies will be first glimpsed like this, with ultrasound." "But we can see them differently." "Stack a hundred ultrasound pictures together and a new image emerges:" "a remarkable three-dimensional picture of a child yet to be born." "Today, new technology is letting us see the world of the unborn in a completely new way." "It also lets us retrace its past from a baby just before birth to a foetus of thirteen weeks." "And further back, unravelling the dazzling complexity of the embryo at six weeks... and four... and three..." "..until we're back at the beginning, with the cells that start the whole thing off." "An egg, and a hundred times smaller, a single sperm." "The process looks so elegant you'd think it was simple." "But you'd be wrong." "These are my sperm, amazingly about 500 million of them from a single ejaculation." "With just this one ejaculation it should be possible to impregnate all the fertile women of Western Europe." "And I'm nothing special." "In actual fact, we need all these millions of sperm to have any realistic chance of achieving just one pregnancy." "Why?" "Because pregnancy is difficult." "It's a struggle to get pregnant, it's a struggle to stay pregnant, it's a struggle to give birth and it's a struggle to be born." "By filming every two weeks, we squeezed the nine months it takes to create a new life into less than a minute." "Having a baby is a common enough experience and we feel we know a lot about it." "But more than half of what's actually going on inside our bodies is a mystery even to doctors." "It's our greatest achievement and yet it's cloaked in secrecy." "And even when we live through it, experiencing the months of pregnancy first hand, our bodies still conceal the marvel that's going on within." "In this film I want to look at that time afresh, over a single day... and over 300 days." "We'll follow the complexities and difficulties of the beginning of life." "We'll condense a year into just a few minutes and reveal how, moment by moment, month by month, a struggle to be born unfolds." "And we'll show how, time after time, the human body has to overcome the most daunting of obstacles to complete the everyday miracle of new life." "I think we talked fairly quickly about having children." "I think we decided fairly quickly not to have them straight away." "Yeah, but it was never an issue as to whether we would or wouldn't, I think." "We just both assumed we would." "It was something that didn't have to be discussed as a possibility or a definite no-no." "It was more a question of when." "Phillippa and Jeff Watson live in Bath." "They're both in their thirties." "Five months ago, they started trying for a baby." "(JEFF) I assumed very much that as soon as Phillippa came off the Pill that getting pregnant would be a piece of cake, but I'm not sure that's the case." "Well, I definitely thought, because all my previous experience has been about contraception and how important it is," "I thought it would be very easy to get pregnant." "There would be no problem at all, but, in fact, that's not the case." "The more you read, the more you talk to other people, you discover that it's actually not that easy." "And, er, my opinion at the moment is that I wonder how people actually do get pregnant." "Seems very, very difficult." "And Phillippa is right, it is difficult." "There are only about 30 days a year when a woman has a chance of becoming pregnant." "And even on one of those days a whole chain of unrelated events needs to click into place." "Success depends on a cycle that's been part of a woman's life since puberty." "With a new medical imaging technique developed especially for this series, we can see inside Phillippa." "Nestling deep in her pelvis lies Phillippa's uterus - her womb." "It's a mass of muscle in which a baby could one day grow." "From the top of the uterus on either side comes a Fallopian tube, reaching out towards one of her ovaries, here coloured white." "This is where her lifetime store of eggs is waiting." "They were all formed when Phillippa was just an eight-week-old embryo." "At puberty something remarkable happened." "Inside Phillippa's brain a tiny gland, her pituitary, signalled to her ovaries to start to release some of those eggs." "Since then, month after month, that's what's happened." "And though it's never been shown on television before, you're about to see what ovulation looks like." "We're inside one of the Fallopian tubes, heading towards the ovary." "And at the end of the tube, there it is." "That huge white moon is her ovary." "Inside it is an egg about to be released." "Suddenly, the surface of the ovary breaks, revealing a red wound." "It looks enormous, but it's actually only a couple of millimetres across." "The end of the Fallopian tube rubs against it in time with the woman's pulse." "Then, at the bottom of the wound, a tiny hole appears." "And hidden within is the egg." "A strand of sticky, almost see-through cells is pulled away by the rubbing Fallopian tubes." "They're nurse cells, up to five million of them, ready to feed and nurture the egg." "The egg itself is deep within them." "This is ovulation." "It will happen just 400 times in a woman's life." "It is the beginning of the possibility of new life." "As the egg is pulled from the ovary into the Fallopian tube, the race to pregnancy has begun." "Inside the folds of the Fallopian tube, the egg and its sticky entourage are squeezed along." "But time is already running out." "The egg has perhaps just 24 hours to be fertilized." "After that it'll die." "And to be fertilized it needs to meet a vital ingredient:" "sperm." "I'm sometimes asked what's the best way to make sure a sperm meets an egg in those vital 24 hours." "The answer's rather technical:" "have sex and have it often." "As our bodies come nearer and nearer to orgasm, every part gears up in anticipation." "(DULL RUMBLING)" "Sperm have to travel through the tangle of tubing in the testicle to the end of the erect penis." "It's a distance of nearly a metre." "The white fluid they're in is mainly nutrients for their long journey ahead." "At orgasm, huge muscular contractions propel the fluid on its final ride through the man's body and into the woman's." "(L0UD SW00SHING)" "And now, inside the vagina, sperm face the first of many mortal dangers." "The walls of a woman's vagina are coated in acid to protect her from infection by bacteria." "But it's lethal to sperm." "Within minutes, the walls are littered with the corpses of millions." "And within an hour most of the 500 million sperm that set off are dead." "Yet the woman's body can help, as well as hinder the sperm's progress." "It's possible the contractions of her orgasm help to draw sperm into her uterus." "0r even that the junction between the vagina and the uterus, her cervix, is dipped time and time again into a pool of waiting sperm." "It's also likely that in the hours after sex the uterus itself contracts, helping to carry the sperm on their way." "Even so, the sperm have been all but annihilated." "0nly a few thousand will complete the journey across her uterus and into her Fallopian tubes." "Then, minutes, hours or even days after they started out, the sperm that have struggled so far will find what they set out for." "Deep in the folds of the Fallopian tube, here magnified a thousand times - an egg." "As they get near, the sperm are lured towards their goal by a chemical signal sent out from the egg." "Each sperm carries in its head all the genetic information the man will contribute, and this now needs to meet with the mother's genetic information waiting inside the egg." "Suddenly one of the sperm, which has been burrowing into the wall of the egg, breaks right through." "Inside the egg, the genetic information is gathered in two tiny balls." "Details from Phillippa are in one and from Jeff in the other." "In a moment the information will fuse together." "And the instant that happens the unique inherited characteristics of a new life will be fixed." "All the information from Phillippa and Jeff is now there to determine whether their baby will be a boy or a girl, tall or short, have blue eyes or brown." "Even whether it's predisposed to heart disease or certain kinds of cancer." "But, as yet, the baby itself does not exist." "In fact, the chances of the fertilized egg surviving are far from certain." "Some will do nothing." "But just over half will do this." "It makes a copy of itself and divides, again and again." "Seen down the lens of a laser microscope, the dividing egg looks like a strange berry." "It's a cluster of eight identical cells." "But they won't be identical for long." "As Phillippa and Jeff continue life as usual, they're completely unaware of the changes going on inside Phillippa's body." "Hour after hour, the fertilized egg continues to change, and all the time it's journeying along her Fallopian tube towards her uterus." "Her uterus, too, is transforming." "Its lining has swollen and thickened." "We're seeing a part of the lining magnified almost ten thousand times." "It's the landing ground for the fertilized egg." "But the egg establishes itself in the womb in a very unexpected manner that will set the tone for the next nine months." "This is Hirudo medicinalis, better known to you and me as a leech." "It's a parasite." "It takes whatever it needs to live by sucking the blood of whatever it can latch on to." "In this case, that's me." "As it sucks my blood, it takes from it all that it needs to live." "It literally lives off me." "And the whole of pregnancy is shaped by a similar kind of parasitic relationship." "Unlike the leech, the developing embryo doesn't suck the mother's blood." "But it does raid her blood for the raw materials it needs to grow." "From the word go, both leech and embryo are out for themselves." "The cells of the embryo spread out as they divide and invade the mother's uterus." "It's almost an aggressive attack." "But, surprisingly, the army of foreign cells does not meet any resistance from the mother's own defence systems." "If anything else grew inside her at the same tireless rate, it would either be killed or eventually it would kill her." "Quite how the embryo pulls off this life-saving trick remains a mystery." "It's around now that a woman may for the first time sense there's something going on in her body." "I tend to get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom anyway." "And I woke up and I suddenly had this urge to try out the pregnancy test kit." "So I was rattling around in the dark, opening drawers and bashing away, and I'm not quite sure what Jeff thought was going on." "Then I disappeared into the bathroom for ten minutes and, I mean, this was all at four o'clock in the morning and I crawled back into bed, sort of said," "And we did wander around for a couple of days after that, grinning at each other like Cheshire cats." "But the struggle of pregnancy is by no means over." "It's really only just starting." "This is what's growing inside Phillippa's womb just three weeks after fertilization." "The round ball is the yolk sac, a temporary food store." "Stretched across the top is the embryo itself." "Within it, thousands of new cells are created every second." "And somehow they are given instructions to where they fit in." "This long column is the foundation of the nervous system and the brain." "The basic layout of the body is from a very early stage quite familiar." "At six weeks, the developing spine is bent double." "A bud of an arm is beginning to form near the top." "This is the head." "But the exact details of each embryo are unique." "It's being built to a genetic blueprint which is a one-off, never tried before." "Work starts at the head and progresses down." "By six and a half weeks, that makes the head, on the left, disproportionately large." "All four limbs have sprouted, though the right arm is hidden behind the umbilical cord." "But as the embryo's genetic blueprint is brand-new, it's never actually been tested." "Each new step could reveal a fatal mistake." "And they're much more common than you might think." "It's a harsh reality, but what you see here will not inevitably become a baby." "Five out of six embryos will not have survived up to eight weeks in the womb." "It's almost impossible to see a developing feature and not imagine it finished." "But the truth is this will only become an eye if luck stays on its side." "Every moment we watch, this embryo is taking another step into uncharted territory." "The embryo has reached eight weeks." "It looks like it may become a boy." "But, in fact, what you're looking at could develop not into a penis, but a clitoris." "The embryo's sex is hidden." "For now, both male and female look the same." "Also hidden is the construction work inside the body." "Millions of cells are becoming bone, lungs and brain." "At this stage, nine weeks, the stomach is producing its own digestive juices, and the heart has started its vigorous pumping." "We now call it not an embryo, but a foetus." "But the name-change doesn't mean its future is any more assured." "The risk of failure still accompanies each new development." "Footprints and palmprints are engraved." "All the time, the work is fuelled by the supply line, the umbilical cord, linking the foetus to the mother." "Now a crucial stage of pregnancy is over." "The foetus has managed to complete the basic structures of its body." "It has taken twelve weeks." "The rest of pregnancy will be chiefly devoted to getting bigger." "And it must get a very great deal bigger, because the scale of these pictures is deceptive." "All that we've seen so far is in a foetus no bigger than this." "This is a model of a twelve-week foetus and it's tiny." "It weighs about 14 grammes." "That's roughly the weight of a one-pound coin." "What's so remarkable is that something this small can cause such an upheaval in its mother's body." "My breasts got a lot bigger very quickly and that was the first thing I noticed, which I wasn't prepared for." "Because, obviously, you look at all the pictures of the week-by-week guide and it's always the tummy growing bigger, and they really don't concentrate on that part of the anatomy at all." "So I got a bit, not worried, but a bit sort of surprised that it was so immediate, because you know that they would get large, but I didn't think it would be at the beginning." "With a camera that shows up heat as colour, you can see that process happening." "Hot areas of Phillippa show up as yellow or red." "Before she was pregnant, her breasts were actually colder than most of the rest of her body." "In the first three months of pregnancy, a surge of hormones causes the blood vessels around the breasts to expand." "Extra blood flow in these hot, red areas feeds the breast tissue as it gears up to provide milk." "The breast is made up of a mass of tiny glands." "It's these that mature and swell." "A maze of passages connects the glands to milk reservoirs behind the nipples." "From very early on, the glands can begin to produce milk, filling the tubes and making the breasts very sore." "That's why painful breasts are often a problem in early pregnancy." "(SEAGULLS CRY)" "But by far the most common complaint is feeling sick." "This is truly miserable." "It's maybe the closest I can get to what three quarters of all women feel during early pregnancy:" "morning sickness." "It's rather unpleasantly like being seasick." "First you're worried you're gonna die, then you're worried you're not." "Early in pregnancy the mother's body seems to become much more sensitive to the waves of chemicals flowing through it." "Many mildly toxic things, which we normally eat and drink quite happily, can throw the pregnant body into fits of nausea." "But the good news is that most women feel better by about twelve weeks." "Although you're not exactly home and dry, after that things are much more stable for both mother and foetus." "So, if the world of the mother can be horribly uncomfortable, what about the world of the foetus?" "In the past, we thought of it as a calm, relaxing place." "But how realistic is that?" "If you or I were in the womb, what would it be like?" "You'd be in the middle of someone else's body." "Their heart, which is bigger than you, would be thundering away." "Around you would be metres and metres of arteries and veins, filled with someone else's blood." "(W0MAN C0UGHING)" "And how would you get any peace, when above you, two cavernous lungs work day and night?" "(L0UD BL0WING)" "And worse still, right next to you would be the biggest distraction of all." "(WOMAN) Excuse me." "Three meals a day and who knows how many ice cream and gherkin sandwiches have to go somewhere." "And to top it all, you'd be growing all the time." "The real world inside the womb is dynamic and bustling." "And in the last twenty years the tool that's done most to show us that is ultrasound." "Developed to help doctors screen for potential problems, it allows parents-to-be to see what their baby is up to." "Instead of lying quietly, it's having a go at a kick or even a somersault." "It gulps and swallows up to half a cup of amniotic fluid every day." "From quite early on, it sucks its thumb, a habit which may take years to break." "As it gets bigger, we can see what little room it actually has." "Ultrasound is so sensitive that it will even, if you watch carefully, capture a blink." "There." "Phillippa is now nineteen weeks pregnant and going for her scan." "(SCAN 0PERAT0R) OK, let's show your baby before I do anything else." "So, you can see this is his head, body, heart beating away there in the middle of the chest." "(PHILLIPPA) The legs curled... (JEFF) All right, now I can see which way round it is." "(SCAN 0PERAT0R) There you go." "There's a hand." "See the fingers there?" "(JEFF) Piano player's hands." "(SCAN 0PERAT0R) Baby's just having a yawn." "(PHILLIPPA) Told you it would always be tired like me!" "(SCAN 0PERAT0R) Plenty of time to rest while it's in here." "It's really the first time it's really brought home to me that you're actually pregnant." "It's absolutely amazing that suddenly I've got to realise that, yes, there is actually something in there." "It was just so moving as well, I was..." "I mean, it was very, very emotional, I..." "I did shed a quiet tear when nobody was looking, but..." "I could've cried a lot more." "And obviously, I mean, afterwards, when they explain what they've checked, it's a great relief to know that everything is all right." "It's gonna be incredible to show this to my mum." "I can't wait to show her, because the technology is incredible, she never had an opportunity to see this." "But here we've got pictures of our future child." "So this is what we know of the foetus' world." "But what, if anything, does it know?" "By mid-pregnancy, the foetus will have started to develop all five senses, but they're still totally blurred." "Instead of having separate senses, we think a foetus' senses are much less distinct." "Sounds, for instance, may be felt through the skin, as well as heard by the ears." "Likewise, changes in the fluid that surrounds the foetus will be as much smelled as tasted." "Sounds from the outside world will be filtered through the mother's body." "My voice would sound totally different." "(MUFFLED AND DIST0RTED) Perhaps something like this." "(MUFFLED) My own mother wouldn't know it was me." "Whatever sounds can penetrate into the womb, what does a baby actually perceive?" "That's a hard question to answer, because when we hear or see or feel, we don't just do it with our ears, eyes or hands, but with our fully-developed brain." "0ur ears and eyes, mouth and nose are just sensors." "It's here, deep inside our brain, that we translate the signals they give." "It's our brain that makes sense of our senses." "And in the foetus the brain is still developing." "So, concepts like hearing, seeing or feeling are meaningless." "The brain doesn't just switch on one day." "Rather, it comes on like a dimmer switch, going gradually over many, many months from nothing to being fully on." "I think the next time I go to the midwife I'll have to ask about which position the baby is in." " Which way round it is?" " Well, yeah." "I can't work out whether it's a bottom or what it is that keeps poking out." " The thing I was feeling earlier on?" " Yeah." "Phillippa is now five months pregnant." "Like most women just past the halfway stage, she's blooming." "And that's rather surprising, because inside the baby is starting to dominate." "It's competing with her for the same limited resources, yet they co-exist quite comfortably." "Sometimes the movements are very separate." "And other times it's little, little kicks." "Actually, I might have a little rest now." "The broker of this remarkable peace is perhaps the most amazing organ in Phillippa's body." "It's the placenta." "This is some of the most sophisticated life-support machinery available to doctors anywhere in the world." "Yet this room full of technology cannot begin to compare with the capabilities of this." "For this is a placenta." "It's a kidney dialysis unit, a heart-lung machine, an artificial liver all rolled into one." "It's the go-between." "It's what allows mother and foetus to live together, and for me, it's the most fantastic thing about pregnancy." "Yet all of us, even doctors, tend to take it completely for granted." "Wonderful though it is, I can see why not everyone might share my enthusiasm for it." "But I think it's the great unsung hero of all our lives." "So far in Phillippa's pregnancy, it's been the foetus which has faced the biggest threat." "But, in the final three months, her own body will be pushed to its limits." "Her uterus will increase massively, up to twenty times its normal size." "Her blood supply will increase by more than a third." "And there's a whole lot more weight to go on." "And all the time, the message Phillippa hears from her body is just," ""Carry on as normal."" "Eventually, the reality of what's going on inside her must start to take its toll." "And what is going on is quite extraordinary." "We're taking a unique view inside Phillippa's body, now that she's seven months pregnant." "Look how big her uterus has grown to house the baby." "It takes up a huge space inside her." "And see how her spine has curved with all the extra weight." "No wonder she gets backache." "Her organs have all been squashed upwards as her uterus has expanded, her stomach, her liver, her lungs." "That's why she feels breathless." "Her large intestine, her colon, is now up near her ribcage." "It used to be much lower." "But the most dramatic change is to Phillippa's heart." "It has to work much harder and to do that it gets bigger." "As it does, it's pushed out of its usual position and it's tilted over to one side." "Hello, baby, how are you today?" "You've been quite quiet." "Not been a busy day." "Oops, that was a little movement." "Which bit was that, then?" "What are you doing?" "Where are you trying to get to?" "Eh?" "You're soon gonna run out of space, you won't be able to do that." "I'm not sure your daddy likes watching this." "I think he thinks it's a bit funny." "And probably worries that it hurts, but actually it's quite comforting." "Phillippa and Jeff's baby is due in just six weeks time." "All men must go through the same thing, because you feel fairly helpless." "While all the changes are going on to Phillippa, physically, mentally, emotionally, the same sort of thing is happening to me, but I'm only looking very much from the outside." "There are times that I wish that I could feel the physical side of things, so that I could understand it a little more." "It can be quite difficult when there's not an awful lot you can do, other than carry the shopping or something." "It seems fairly menial by comparison with what's going on to the mother." "I just marvel at the fact that all of this is going on with no real intervention from me." "It's just my body taking over and doing it all." "I'm not in control of it at all, really." "It just all happens." "The birth itself is the most difficult yet of the tasks the body has had to tackle." "So, why has it been so tough to get this far?" "The easy answer is that our bodies are riddled with imperfections, right from the start." "Sperm so weak they're all but annihilated." "Eggs so fragile they only live for a day." "But the bigger question is, why are we like that?" "Why are our bodies designed to make each stage of pregnancy so difficult and so dangerous?" "And of course that's the whole point, our bodies aren't designed at all." "Instead we have evolved." "0ur imperfections are simply problems inherited from our ancestors." "The great triumph, though, is that we have also inherited solutions." "So although the human body makes pregnancy the most complicated task it ever faces, at the same time it makes it look so very easy." "Glimpsed inside the womb with three-dimensional ultrasound, this is a baby about to be born." "It looks fully formed, but in one crucial way it's not yet ready for the world." "Its brain is still nowhere near fully developed." "If it were to wait until it was, it could be in the womb an extra twelve months." "But there's a very simple reason why it can't stay there that long." "To get out, the baby has to travel through the middle of the pelvis." "Any longer in the womb and its head would be too big to fit through." "0ur pelvises have evolved to reach their widest limit." "Any wider and walking would be impossible." "We would have to crawl on all fours." "So if the baby is to come into the world at all, it must do it now, whether its brain is ready or not." "And it's a tight squeeze." "Ten days before it's due, Phillippa's baby is beginning to make its way into the world." "Most unusually for a first-time mother, Phillippa has decided on a home birth." "(MIDWIFE) I'm listening all the way through this one and then afterwards as well." "The muscles that have held the baby enclosed for months now have to be stretched apart to let it out." "With the heat-sensitive camera, you can see the waves of hot muscle action sweeping across Phillippa's tummy during a contraction." "Hour after hour, the walls of the uterus press in upon the baby in powerful, regular contractions." "(MIDWIFE) Now Phillippa's contracting about one every three or four minutes, and they seem to be fairly strong." "I think she's coping really well with the contractions, although she doesn't always think she is." "I think she is doing extremely well." "And we're just hoping that the contractions are making the cervix dilate." "At first the contractions aren't moving the baby." "They are painfully forcing open the neck of Phillippa's womb, her cervix." "It will have to go from closed to ten centimetres wide open." "For a first-time mother, this takes an average of ten hours." "0nce the cervix has been opened, the baby's exit route is clear." "The head acts as a battering ram, forging a way for the rest of the body." "To see more clearly what's happening, let's look beneath the skin at the baby preparing for its exit." "It has to perform a difficult manoeuvre." "It's facing us here, but as it enters the pelvis its head gets turned round to face Phillippa's spine, and then its head and neck are bent right back through an angle of ninety degrees." "It's rather like forcing your foot into a Wellington boot." "(PHILLIPPA GR0ANS) (MIDWIFE) Well done." "(MIDWIFE) Well done, the contraction's gone, Phillippa." "(PHILLIPPA) I can't..." "(MIDWIFE) OK." "If you sit..." "Phillippa, if you sit on the edge of the bed." " And then just put your fingers down." " I don't think I can." "Just lean back like that, just as you are." "Just reach down and touch the baby's head." "Just inside now, when you're pushing, it comes out quite a lot." " Oh, no." " OK, you don't have to." "Big long push again, Phillippa." "That's excellent." "Well done, that's it, keep it there." "(MIDWIFE) Right, let's have a really good push." "(W0MAN) Put your chin down." "(MIDWIFE) That's it." "(MIDWIFE) Take a breath." "(MIDWIFE) One more push, Phillippa, if you can, it's so close." "(W0MAN) That's it, you're doing it now." "(PHILLIPPA SCREAMS)" "(MIDWIFE) Pant, pant, pant." "Well done." "(PHILLIPPA PANTING)" "(MIDWIFE) That's the baby's head." "(PHILLIPPA M0ANS) (W0MAN) That's all right." "(MIDWIFE) Big push." "(JEFF) Come on, come on." "(JEFF) Look, look, look." "(JEFF) Look, look." "(PHILLIPPA PANTS L0UDLY)" "(BABY CRIES)" "Oh, well done, wee baby." "Perhaps birth should be viewed not so much as an occasion when things can go wrong, but more as a miracle that things can go right, which they do most of the time." "Phillippa gave birth to a healthy baby girl, just one of almost a million babies that share her birth date, all around the world." "Childhood - from newborn baby to infant." "From toddler to the first day at school." "To crawl, to walk, to talk, to become an individual, it is four years of miraculous achievement." "Never again will the human body change so fast or learn so much." "This is the story of that remarkable time." "It all begins with the most treacherous journey of our lives, from our mother's womb to the outside world." "As recently as Victorian times, one in 20 babies died during birth." "Death affected everybody, including royalty." "Here in Windsor Castle is a memorial to Princess Charlotte and her son." "Just one year after her marriage in 1816, she was expecting a baby." "Tragically, the birth was a disaster." "The baby boy became stuck inside his mother." "After two days and two nights of labour, the unborn prince was dead, and a few hours later, Charlotte died as well." "Their deaths meant the crown eventually passed to Queen Victoria, and the rest is history." "With modern medicine, Princess Charlotte almost certainly would have survived, and her little boy would have become king." "Today in Britain, very few babies will die." "But that journey, just ten centimetres in length, remains as fraught with danger as ever." "(HEART BEATING)" "(W0MAN) Go on, Jane." "For nine months, the baby's been fully equipped for life in the warm liquid world of the womb, relying on its mother for food and oxygen." "It's in for a rude shock." "As the baby is squeezed down the birth canal, dramatic changes have to happen." "The key to success is the trauma of the birth itself." "It's so severe, the baby has adrenalin levels even higher than that of a person suffering a heart attack." "This rush of adrenalin will kick-start the baby's breathing." "(W0MAN) Well done, that's brilliant." "Here he comes." "Yet even now during birth, the baby's windpipe and lungs are still full of liquid from the womb." "If they aren't quickly emptied, it will drown." "The fluid drains away as it's absorbed into the lung walls." "Air rushes in." "Life-giving oxygen can enter the blood vessels of the lungs." "The first breath triggers further upheavals inside the tiny body." "(W0MAN) That's it, Jane." "Well done, sweetheart." "Well done." "(MAN) Excellent!" "Well done!" "(W0MAN) Well done." "Remarkably, even at this late stage, the heart of the baby is not yet ready for life outside the womb." "In one of the interior walls of the heart there is a hole." "This opening was vital when the baby had to pump blood to the placenta." "Now it's a liability." "Blood flowing through a newly-opened vessel will slam shut a flap of tissue to seal the vulnerable hole." "It forms a solid wall, and the four chambers of the heart are finally complete." "In an adult, such major changes would require open-heart surgery, but here they are happening instantaneously and unseen inside the baby." "This is the miracle of birth." "(W0MAN) Now we'll cut his cord." "Can Richard cut the cord?" "It's a boy" " Bob." "The umbilical cord, the last link to his mother, is cut." "Bob's first challenge is to keep warm." "A heat-sensitive camera reveals the coldest parts as blue." "Bob's toes and nose suffer most." "The delivery room is 15 degrees colder than his mother's womb." "(W0MAN) He looks fine." "Yes!" "A special type of fat is concentrated on his back and around his chest." "This baby fat can be broken down to release emergency heat." "But for the first six months of life, Bob's ability to control his temperature is very limited." "For the moment, he relies on blankets and cuddles." "(MAN) He's shivering a bit." "(W0MAN) You see his little lips going." "(M0THER) He's cold." "A little bit cold." "He looks...dark hair, yeah." "(W0MAN) Those little marks will be gone by tomorrow." "(MAN) It'll take no time at all." "(W0MAN) It was all a bit of a push." "Bob's tight squeeze through the birth canal has left his head an odd, pointed shape." "His skull is so pliable because the 22 different bones that make it up haven't yet fused together, leaving holes between the bone plates." "Bob would never have made it out of the womb if his skull hadn't evolved to be this way." "From now on Bob will live under the watchful eye of his proud parents, Jane and Richard Jeffers." "His hazardous journey into the world is over." " Thanks, Richard." "That's brilliant." " There we are." "Just pop him down here." "(JANE) It's just amazing to see that he's perfectly formed in absolutely every way, his arms, his legs." "He's got quite a tidy little nose." "He's got a nice mouth." "He's got quite a wide mouth." "Everything is just perfect." "It's just a miracle." "You don't see that they're wrinkled up and all those other things." "His face looks really quite well established for a small baby." "He's got a lot of character." "In a strange sort of way, he looks like a little old man." "Although Bob is helpless, he has a fantastic survival strategy." "Parents find their new baby irresistible." "(JANE) Oh, Bob." "Is that nappy bothering you?" "They do control you to a point." "Their demands are paramount." "If they cry and want feeding, you've got to do that." "If they need changing..." "You can't ignore their needs, because they're dependant on you." "This is the best bit, isn't it?" "A bit of fresh air to that bottom." "It's almost as if Bob has put his parents under a spell." "# You're just too good to be true" "# Can't take my eyes off of you" "# You'll be like heaven to touch" "# And I want to hold you so much" "# At long last love has arrived... #" "(RICHARD) Bob's...first...picture." "# You're just too good to be true" "# Can't take my eyes off of you #" "0ver a period of six months, we followed Bob's rapid development." "Just a few weeks after birth he was a bundle of reflexes, a handy set of automatic responses that help him survive." "Can he hear you?" "Yes, he's startled by loud noises, and he can definitely hear me." "A young baby will try to grip with his hands anything he touches." "Young apes grasp on to their mother's fur." "But even in hairless humans this grasping reflex can be useful for holding on." "I'm just going to check his reflexes." "A reflex is activated by any touch to the palm." "Here, the baby's hand has grasped a finger." "Inside the hand, you can see the muscles that even just after birth can support the weight of the baby." "Ironically, the hardest thing for babies to learn is to let go." "Their fingers have to be prised open." "And Bob's toes will try to grip as well, a throwback to our ape-like ancestors who held on to things with their feet." "These reflexes are completely involuntary." "They require no more conscious control than the contraction of the eye's pupil to light." "Are you ready?" "Ready for your milk?" "Another reflex helps Bob find food." "Although he doesn't know where food comes from, whenever something brushes his cheek he automatically turns his head from side to side and parts his lips." "This is the rooting reflex." "He just finds it himself." "He'll find it." "You just need to put his head somewhere remotely near, and he's there." "And that's not all." "The milk that's produced in the mother's breast can be activated merely by the sound of the baby crying." "That's a lovely boy." "Bob not only manipulates his mother's behaviour but also her body." "What a face." "Got a full tummy there." "Newborn babies have another reflex which is much more mysterious." "In fact, it's an ability so odd that until recently we didn't even realise it existed." "Actually, it's a reflex we all had in the first six months of life." "Watch this." "It's called the diving reflex, because it stops the baby from breathing under water." "Wow." "She's more comfortable than I am, I think." "The mouth can be wide open, but inside the baby the top of her lungs is sealed off, and any water is diverted down the oesophagus into the stomach." "Perhaps more amazing are the baby's movements." "Not only do the arms and legs move in a coordinated stroke, but the torso flexes enough to propel him through the water for over a metre." "However, after a few seconds they all need adult help to regain the surface and the vital next breath." "Hey, up you go." "Some people believe these abilities come from a long-lost ancestor who spent most of its time in the sea." "0thers think it is a hangover from our life in the liquid-filled womb." "The truth is we don't even understand the origins of this remarkable ability." "For the moment at least, it remains a delightful mystery." "As the baby's mind matures, these involuntary reflexes are suppressed by conscious thoughts and movements." "This has already happened with Max, Bob's three-year-old brother." "The reflexes are no longer needed, so they eventually disappear." "In the buzzing, booming world, both reflexes and conscious thoughts depend on the senses." "But at first Bob can see little." "Contrast is poor." "Anything beyond half a metre is out of focus and blurred, and he may even see double." "0ne of the reasons Bob is so bad at focusing is hidden inside the eyes." "A very young baby does not have proper control of the muscles that change the shape of the lens." "The lens, here coloured white, is fixed at one set shape." "To focus on objects far away, the tiny muscles around the lens need to stretch it into a thinner shape." "It'll be a while before Bob learns to do this." "Are you gonna try?" "Yes!" "Clever boy!" "By two months, his vision will have improved." "He seems to like looking at faces best, and it's at this time he will first smile, a magic moment for any parent." "He still was only about three weeks." "Then I realised that he was actually smiling back at me." "Smiling and recognising a smile are crucial milestones." "So a team in London are finding out what's going on inside the head of this baby girl to see how she does it." "You're a very good baby." "Very smiley." "They measure the electrical activity in the brain when she looks at different faces." "A scowling face." "A smiling face." "And an upside-down face." "The patterns of brain waves prove that the baby first sees it as a face, right way up or not." "And then, a fraction of a second later, she checks out what emotion is showing." "And these two tasks actually happen in different parts of the brain." "You might assume a baby's brain is just the same as an adult's, only smaller." "But it's not." "A baby's brain is nowhere near finished." "New connections between the hundred billion brain cells are being made all the time." "Throughout babyhood, the brain is sculpted." "So our experiences in our first few years will determine the brain we have as adults." "This developing brain is so demanding that over half of all the food Bob eats goes to driving it." "To supply this much energy, it is essential that he moves on from milk." "To deal with solid food, things are stirring underneath his gums." "His first teeth will grow up from tiny tooth buds that have been hidden in his jaw since long before he was born." "But they won't start to burst through his gums until he's around six months old." "For the first time, over 40 days, this dramatic event has been filmed." "No wonder babies cry when their teeth come through." "At birth, Bob was a tiny bundle of reflexes and flailing limbs." "0ver the following six months, he has grown quicker than he ever will again." "He has more than doubled in size." "But he hasn't just been putting on weight." "What is less obvious is that his mind has matured." "For the first time, he can control his hands and reach out to grab objects." "He is turning his desires into actions, a sign of his burgeoning personality." "A baby at this age is soon ready for the next key advance: mobility." "0ne stage ahead of Bob is Zak Troullous." "Zak is already seven months old and lives in London." "0ver the next few months, he'll take his first steps and speak his first words." "But for now that's all in the future." "He seems to be developing very normally." "And that's great." "Has he tried to pull himself to stand or anything like that?" "When he's sitting down, he goes forward or falls on his face." "So he's a bit scared." "Right, it's a good time now while he's sitting to think about making sure that the environment is safe for him." "Because everything tends to go straight from hand to mouth." "He's trying to chew his shoe." "Zak's mouth is the most sensitive part of his body." "The tongue is teaming with nerve endings." "That's why babies are so keen to use their mouths to explore the world." "But Zak's scope for exploration is limited." "He still relies on his parents to get around." "Things will have to change." "We normally associate crawling with reptiles." "Think of the sprawling waddle of a lizard." "But it's actually a powerful way of getting around." "All movement of the human body is surprisingly complicated and difficult to analyse." "But in order to understand motion, analysis is what you need." "That's what these little markers are all about." "They can be tracked on a computer to reveal the underlying motion of my skeleton." "It's the only way you can follow something even as seemingly simple as the movement of a limb." "Dozens of joints and bones moving in harmony." "Even a clapping stick man is characteristically human." "This baby is doing the diagonal crawl, moving opposite limbs together, right arm, left leg, then left arm, right leg." "The arms absorb the shock of impact, while the power is provided by the legs." "The top speed of a crawling baby is about two kilometres an hour, and the average baby crawls perhaps 200 metres a day." "If you look carefully, motion capture can identify seven different types of crawling." "The elephant crawl is where just one limb is moved at a time." "But the diagonal crawl is the most popular." "It's extremely efficient, combining stability with speed." "This crawl takes a while to perfect, as Zak is finding out." "(W0MAN) He's crawling slowly." "(MAN) But he's still got that wobble." " As each day goes by, he gets better." " Bad coordination." "Once he gets that... (W0MAN) He needs a bit more confidence." "Before I put him down, I gather a few toys, and I go into the kitchen for a few minutes." "I know he won't move." "But now, because he's crawling, he's going to the stairs." "You've got to keep an eye on him every second of the day." "Until he started crawling, Zak had no fear of heights." "Now he is increasingly wary." "We're gonna put your weights on." "At a university in America, Karen Adolph experiments with crawling babies to discover how they deal with treacherous slopes." "As a further challenge, the babies are weighed down with two kilograms of lead." "They then meet the apparatus." "Mother tempts her daughter from the other end of the ramp." "Come on, Natalie!" "0nce she's scoped her target, the baby visually assesses the slope." "She confirms the severity of it with careful touches of her hands." "Karen has discovered that they can gauge the angle of a safe slope to within just two degrees, a tiny fraction of the slope overall." "If they decide it's a bit too steep, they'll adjust their crawl, maybe even coming down backwards." "Crawling is not just about how to crawl, but what's sensible to crawl down." "If it's way too steep, the baby will wisely avoid the drop altogether." "However, the real revolution in getting around is still to come." "Zak, are you gonna walk over to Daddy?" "Are you gonna make it?" "Zak is 11 months old." "He's about to express what human beings have felt throughout 3,500,000 years of evolution:" "an overwhelming desire to rise up on two feet and free the hands." "Can you walk to Daddy?" "Zak already has the strength to stand up with a bit of support." "But his ability to walk comes not just from his legs, but also from deep inside his ear of all places." "At the end of the ear canal are the bones we use for hearing." "Behind these is the balance organ." "The balance organ is a miracle of engineering, made up of three circular tubes full of liquid." "Anchored to the inside walls of these tubes are tiny hairs." "As Zak moves, the hairs also move, telling him the position of his head." "The three tubes each have their own orientation, which detect the three basic types of movement in space:" "roll, pitch and yaw." "This device will allow him to take his first independent steps." "(MUSIC: "WALK LIKE A MAN")" "# Walk, walk, walk, walk" "# Walk like a man...#" "When he realises he's let go of something and he's standing on his own two feet, he realises what he's doing." "He gets scared." "He loses his balance completely." "But he tries." "He's a hard trier, keeps going for it." "It's been a long 12 months for Zak." "Learning to crawl and then get up on two feet have been key achievements." "Zak can now walk tall on his own." "# Happy birthday to you" "# Happy birthday to you... #" "Zak is a new-experience junkie." "As eating is food for physical growth, so experience is food for brain development." "(MAN) Oh, where's it gone?" "It's gone!" "Zak may be walking, but he faces another barrier to further progress." "Imagine what it's like for an infant to understand so very little of what's going on around it... ..to feel lost and excluded from the social world." "The closest we get to it is a holiday abroad." " These are too old." "I want something new." " (IN ARABIC)" "Trouble is you can only get so far with mime and pointing." "Can you take me to the pyramids, where the kings are buried?" "As a child, one thing you lack is an accurate way of explaining your desires, exactly what you feel, what you really want, or any way, really, of telling your parents what to get for you." "What you need, of course, are words." "Every human culture has depended on them, be they spoken or written, like these hieroglyphics." "Words and language are the most important thing a child will ever learn." "Not just words to describe things you can point at, like sand or rock, but words to describe abstract things:" "your past, your future, your fears, your hopes;" "words to describe discoveries and ideas, to communicate them to other people down the generations, ever expanding the wealth of human knowledge and experience." "The whole world we have built is built upon language, and yet it all begins so simply." "Mama." "It seems a miracle, but 15-month-old Zak can begin to master the complex power of language, an infinitely flexible symbolic system, and yet still needs nappies." "Bravo!" "(IN GREEK)" "Even more impressively, Zak is learning English and his parents' other language, Greek." "When babies first learn to speak, they use a completely different part of the brain from adults trying to learn a foreign language." "That's why it's so natural for babies and such an effort for adults." "(IN GREEK)" "But it's not just Zak's brain that gives him his power." "A newborn baby has a vocal tract just like any other animal." "The larynx, a pipe at the top of the lungs, is positioned high up, right at the back of the throat." "It sticks up like a snorkel above the flow of milk to the stomach." "This ingenious arrangement allows the baby to breathe and suckle at the same time." "But with the larynx so high it can't perform its major function in life - speech." "By the time Zak is a year old, the larynx needs to have dropped a whole three centimetres lower." "Where's Mummy?" "The lowered larynx now lives up to its other name, the voice box." "With more space at the back of the throat, the voice box can make an extraordinary variety of sounds." "As air passes through the gap between the vocal chords, it causes them to vibrate." "The tighter the chords are, the higher the pitch." "And the final sounds are shaped by subtle movements of the tongue." "To create just one recognisable word," "Zak has to coordinate over 30 different muscles." "Mummy, Mummy!" " Daddy!" " Yeah, you're in the water." "Cold." "Unfortunately, this lowered voice box makes humans especially vulnerable to choking on food." "As a species, however, this occasional problem is outweighed by the power of language." "The human larynx has evolved so that the way it changes suits each stage in life." "Zak can finally communicate." " (IN GREEK)" " Mummy, vroom vroom." "We'll go later on the vroom vroom." "Later." " Uh-oh." " Uh-oh." "0ver the previous year, Zak has progressed from baby to toddler." "But the pace of change does not let up." "Look ahead another year and the child will have raced ahead again." "Boom, boom." "My name is Moira." "Oh, lovely!" "Look at that!" "We're good at this!" "High five to both of us." "Yeah!" "# Now I know my ABC... #" "This little girl is two-and-a-half years old." "Moira lives in a peaceful suburb in New Jersey." "I'm gonna go water." "Like all toddlers, she's learning a staggering ten new words a day." "It did seem quite quick that she was able to communicate or to describe things in detail." "It seemed really fast." "Uhm...thank you." "At one point, you think she's able to just sort of react with words, and then it's amazing when she's able to take words and think about the future and what could be possible." "You know what this is over here?" "What do you think it is?" "(B0Y) Turkey." "(W0MAN) Very good." "You like turkeys?" " Can you make the noise?" " Gobble, gobble." " Gobble..." " Gobble..." "Moira has never seen a baby deer before and doesn't know the word for it." "This is the first time she will ever say it." "(W0MAN) Do you know what to call one of these things?" "Well, some people call them Bambi, but that's after the movie." "They're called a fawn." " Can you say that word?" " Fawn." "Not only is Moira an enormous sponge soaking up new words, she knows automatically how to construct them into proper sentences." "Children have an instinctive knack for language and get the grammar right virtually all the time." "But their occasional mistakes are telling." "It's almost always when the grammar is irregular." "What if I had one mouse and I had another mouse, I'd have two what?" " Two mouses." " Two mouses?" "There's another word for plural for mouse." "What is it?" "Do you remember?" "It'd be two...?" " Mi..." " Mice." "Two mice, that's right." "Very good." "Good job." "Moira created the word "mouses" herself by just adding an S." "It's impossible for her to have imitated the word from an adult, because they never use it." "Instead she applied the logical rule for making a plural and has to be taught the exception." "So why is it that toddlers can learn language so rapidly?" "The theory is that throughout evolution little children have always faced grave dangers." "The quicker they learnt language, and the better they understood the warnings, the more likely they were to survive." "In just the same way that a clam has evolved a tough shell to protect it, we have evolved language as our defence." "(W0MAN) Guys, you need to be careful of the water!" "Come back up here!" "But language is not just a simple one-off trick like the clam shell." "Its power and flexibility are unique." "It's given rise to our rich social world, delivering us a decisive advantage over other animals." "Alongside language, children learn another skill, a skill adults rarely give much thought to." "You and I know that this is me, but we also know that this is me, too." "It's so simple it sounds silly." "But, in fact, though we take our ability to understand mirrors completely for granted, we're one of very few animal species that has the slightest idea what's going on with them." "A monkey can't recognise itself in a mirror." "But a chimp can." "Interestingly, it's a skill humans are not born with." "14-month-old Julia ignores the red dye painted on her nose." "She fails to recognise the reflection is her, because she doesn't yet have a proper sense of herself." "Julia lacks self-awareness." "Unlike Moira, who's over a year older." "Yeah!" "Look at those pretty things!" "Moira also uses words like "I", "me", "mine", proving she is now aware she is a separate person from everyone else." "Got you." " Who's that?" " You and me." " You?" " And you." " And me?" " Yes." "Unfortunately, there's a dark side to self-awareness, too." " Liam, I want Sharky!" " Liam, bring the shark back, please." " Liam, bring the shark back, please." " I want Sharky!" " I want Sharky!" " Look, the shark's going through the sand." "Thank you." "Moira sometimes uses tantrums to get her way." "This is the Terrible Twos, when she has the self-awareness to recognise her needs and the language to express them all too clearly." "All the changes in Moira's view of the world are taking place because of alterations inside her maturing brain." "Different skills, such as language and self-awareness, are clamouring for space in particular parts of the brain." "But there's still something missing." "It's a series of developments that will take two years to perfect, and it's all about getting on with other people." "James is an active four-year-old who lives near Philadelphia." "But he's unusual in that he has two brothers exactly the same age," "Sean and Evan." "(B0Y) I will give it back." "(W0MAN) James." "We call him our athlete." "He's very athletic and pretty strong." "Sort of acts like the older brother, because he is so much more advanced." " Wow!" " A big one." "Look at that bubble Evan has!" "Evan is different." "He's very moody." "We call him our moody artist type." "Sean is the smallest of the three." "And because of that, he learns to compensate a little bit." "And so we call him our politician, because he's used to trying to negotiate for things and is a little more tolerant of things in general." "Part of getting on with one another and dealing with the social world is learning and complying with rules." "We got a set of rules based on their interaction." "Mostly like, you know, no-fighting rules, no playing on the stairs." "(W0MAN) No hitting, pulling hair." "No hitting, no fighting, no biting, no scratching." "No throwing, no throwing suitcases, no throwing bottles, no throwing houses." "If somebody does get out of hand they do end up in their room by themselves for some quiet sort of time-out-themselves time." "James!" "Are you supposed to be taking those cookies now?" " Mom, just a little." " No, that's not OK." "Are those cookies for now?" "No, those are special cookies." "Those are for later." "No, that's not OK." "Now put the cookies back." "Breaking the rules leads to shame." "Look at the classic hunched shoulders and the drooped head." "James knows he's done wrong." "He's starting to acquire a conscience." "But no sooner are children taught the rules than they discover a way to get around them." "Lying starts surprisingly early." "But until recently it's been considered well nigh impossible to study." "Child psychologist Michael Lewis has created an ingenious test to reveal more about lying." "He and the mother of the child he's studying hide behind a one-way mirror." "I have a toy under here." "I'm gonna uncover it, but don't look." "I want you to keep looking straight ahead." "Don't turn around, don't peek." "I'm gonna uncover it and turn it on, but don't look." "I have to get something I left in the hall, so I'll be back in a minute." "But don't look at the toy while I'm gone." "Keep looking straight ahead." "When I come back we can play with it, but don't look at it, OK?" "Don't peek." "So, what do you think he's gonna do?" " I think he'll lie." "I think he'll look." " He'll look and lie." "OK." "Let's look and see." "He's holding out." "He's holding out." "His eyes are starting to..." "He's gonna peek." "OK." "You know, I have to tell you that three-year-old children, about 70 percent of them peek." "And when they peek, almost all of them lie." "Jerry, did you peek?" "No?" "Good for you." "You wanna turn around and play?" "All right, go ahead and play." "Well, you were right." "They peek and then they lie about peeking." "And they lie because they don't want to get into trouble." "And if you think about it, it makes sense." "Not only didn't they do something right, but they may get punished for it." "And so it turns out that the smartest kids are not the ones who tell the truth, but, in fact, the ones who lie about it." "And it's true." "At this age, the higher your IQ, the more likely you are to lie." "To lie deliberately, these children have to be aware that the experimenter doesn't know whether or not they've peeked." " Did you peek at it behind you?" " No." "This awareness that other people can have different beliefs and thoughts from your own is not just useful for the occasional fib." "It's a crucial stage." "All children need to pass it before they are ready for the adult world." "Scientists call it "theory of mind"." "But it's not as difficult as it sounds." "It's our human skill of working out what another person might be thinking." "To do it, we need to realise that each of us has different wishes and intentions, likes and dislikes." "My thoughts and desires are not necessarily the same as yours." "We do it all the time without even being aware of it." "Yet theory of mind is the very cornerstone of all our relationships with other people." "But at three years old these children are too young to have learnt it." "# Jack and Jill went up a hill... #" "The triplets are just four, and HAVE developed theory of mind." "Take hide-and-seek." "If you think about it, it's quite a sophisticated game." "The boys know their dad won't be able to see them if they hide themselves properly." "Roar, roar!" "Sweet, look at the hiding guys." "They realise his view of the world can be different from their own." "I see a hip-hop." "There is the James-boy." "Theory of mind is even more essential in making sense of stories." "To follow what's going on in Snow White, the triplets need to grasp that different people will see the world differently." "Most children younger than three will assume Snow White has the same knowledge they do:" "that the apple is poisoned and Snow White shouldn't eat it." "This makes a nonsense of the story." "The triplets, though, know better." " What was the old woman giving her?" " An apple." " But what was it really?" " A poisoned apple." " But what did Snow White think it was?" " A present." "A present." "Who was that?" "A mean queen." " And what was she trying to do?" " Hurt Snow White." "Was it a nice thing to do?" "It was a BAD thing to do." "Understanding what motivates others, in fairy tales or real life, seems obvious to us." "But it's a key turning point in every child's development." "By scanning people's brain activity, it's been possible to identify the part of the brain where theory of mind develops." "Tell stories that require it, and this important section right at the front of the brain literally lights up." "In the triplets, the brain connections of this area are now almost complete." "Theory of mind is the final piece of the jigsaw." "It marks the transition from babyhood to childhood." "0nce a child has made it, the world will never seem the same again." "# La cucaracha, la cucaracha" "# La, la, la, la, la, la... #" "(W0MAN) We'll miss them when they go off to school, because pretty much all of our time and energy goes into managing them." "This is our favourite song again." "Can you guys sing along to the song?" "We have mixed feelings." "It would be great to have some time, but then it'll be scary to send them out into the world, just to be so independent." "Do you have your backpacks ready?" "# La, la, la, la, la, la, la # 0le #" "OK, hold on." "And you're next, big guy." " Have a good day, OK?" " Bye." "I wanna see you climb those big steps." "Yeah." "Hold on to the railing, and have a good day at school." "0ver just four years the triplets have met all the challenges this new and exciting world has thrown at them:" "to walk, to talk, to understand the thoughts of others." "They are ready for the next stage of their lives." "What you are about to see is one of the miracles of nature, the extraordinary transformation that will turn this caterpillar into a butterfly." "But we human beings go through a transformation that is just as dramatic." "0ver four agonising years, our bodies and minds are transformed." "At the end of it, like the butterfly, we'll be sexually mature." "This incredible change is called puberty." "Best thing about puberty?" "That would be my voice getting deeper." "Girls start liking you and you start liking girls." "It's very interesting." "I like it a lot." "Worse thing?" "God!" "The worst thing for me is the ups and downs of life:" "having to deal with acne and hair and stuff like that." "I don't have any facial hair, so people start to compare me with those who do." "It's like a rollercoaster." "You don't know where it's going to turn." "You could go a good way, a bad way." "Just dealing with it is a drag." "# Let's talk about sex, baby," "# Let's talk about you and me," "# Let's talk about all the good things... #" "Unlike caterpillars, these teenage boys have no cocoon to hide in while they travel from childhood to adulthood." "We all make the journey, and it can be a bumpy ride." "We often have the illusion that we're in control of our bodies." "The reality is that it's usually our biology which controls us." "That's particularly obvious during the great rollercoaster ride of puberty." "We don't precisely know when it's going to start, we don't even know how long it's going to take, and although we think we know what's going to happen, nothing can quite prepare us" "for exactly how we're going to feel." "It feels exciting and dangerous and you don't know where the next shock's coming from." "And the worst thing is that just as you think you've mastered it, suddenly something else happens" "and your body changes again." "If living through puberty feels like a horror story, the villains of the piece are hormones." "These tiny chemical messengers are beyond our control." "Suddenly hordes of them start racing through our bloodstream, ordering our bodies to change." "They tell us to switch on to sex, getting us ready to make babies." "They tell our muscles and bones to get bigger and stronger." "They make hair sprout in unusual places." "Sometimes they really let us down." "Amazing though it seems, hormones will affect our brains, too." "They'll make us think about new things." "We'll think about them in a new way." "The result in the emerging adult is confusion and defiance." "But eventually as physical, emotional and sexual maturity." "Go on!" "This programme tells the story of the human body's enormous changes during puberty." "It's also about what it feels like to experience puberty." " All right now." " Is that with Doris Day?" "We followed a group of teenage boys in California, and we've done something unique." "For a crucial eighteen months of her life, we've watched and listened as a British girl goes through the ups and downs of adolescence." "Now, she's on the threshold of adulthood." "But when we first met she looked and felt very different." "My name's Beatrice." "I'm twelve years old." "My birthday's in November." "My parents are divorced and I live with my mother and stepfather." "My mum's a councillor and my stepfather is a solicitor." "Sean, shut up." "At twelve years old, Beatrice is a success." "It's not just that she's bright and likeable." "In terms of biology, she's done everything a child should do." "She's survived her most dangerous moment, her birth." "From being a helpless baby, she's gained control." "She's learnt to walk and talk and to cope with the complex social world around her." "Thanks a lot." "But she's all too aware of what her future holds in store." "When you're a teenager, apparently you go bolshie." "You get periods, you get pubic hair, you get taller." "You get sort of...you get wider at the hips, I think it is, I can't remember." "And you get breasts and all this." "And I don't know, I just..." "I just don't want it to happen, really." "(TEACHER) Remembering back to your achievements last year, when you won the, was it cross country?" "(BEATRICE) I'm quite happy with myself the way I am." "And I don't know, I mean, I'm quite happy being a kid." "But however unattractive the prospect of leaving childhood is, in one way, Beatrice is very lucky to have had one at all." "Human beings are unique in the way they linger as children for an extraordinary long time." "If Beatrice was any other animal, she'd have stopped being a kid a long time ago." "It's a bit of a puzzle, because other animals mature very differently." "This is Nica." "She's a Bengal tiger and she's just 13 weeks old." "For her, like most animals, the journey from babyhood to full-grown happens as one continuous process." "In about three years time, she'll be able to have cubs of her own." "If I'd grown in the same way," "I could have fathered a child at the age of four, and would be completely grown at the age of six." "The reason I didn't do that is because the human body does something very unusual." "It breaks the journey from baby to sexual maturity when we're tiny, just six months old." "And though we keep growing, we wait more than a decade to gear up to have children." "For Nica's ancient ancestors, spending ten tiger years without getting ready to have sex and make cubs would simply be a dangerous waste of time." "But for our ancestors, things must have been quite different." "They needed time for something so vital to their survival that even sex could wait." "That something is quite surprising." "It's learning." "Nought times six is nought." "One times six is six." "Two times six is twelve." "Wherever you look in the world, all children have to learn the skills they need for survival." "Not just the obvious ones, like making yourself understood, but the things we don't even think of as learning at all, like walking and controlling our bodies." "As children, we can learn faster than we'll ever be able to again." "Magnified ten thousand times, this is a single human brain cell." "Your brain has a hundred billion of them." "Every one is connected to thousands of others through their tiny branches." "Each join adds a little bit more to the intricate picture of who we are." "As children, the connections are still being made." "Like a plant exploring its surroundings, brain cells like these are growing their branches, constantly reaching out to each other." "Learn to ride a bike and you wire up a tiny part of the brain." "Learn a new word or how to catch a ball, and you forge new links." "And with difficult tasks, like writing, it's only by doing the same thing over and over again that the connections are made strong." "In the end, they take root and stay with us for the rest of our lives." "But though learning is so vitally important, there comes a time when our bodies have to move on, and the rollercoaster of puberty lurches into action." "We don't know what exactly decides when that should be, but we do know that when it starts it's the brain that's in control." "Peering deep inside the head, you can see where it all happens." "Shaded white, it's the body's autopilot, a tiny gland that constantly adjusts things like temperature, blood pressure, thirst and hunger." "It's called the hypothalamus and it's the driving force behind puberty." "From its position in the centre of the head, it can control parts of the body far away and it does so with a remarkable trick - by dispatching highly efficient chemicals into the blood." "These chemicals are called hormones, and each carries a different message." "For example, adrenalin makes you run faster just for a moment, but the hormones of puberty change your life forever." "This system is so sensitive that even minute amounts of hormones make massive changes." "If my taste buds were as sensitive," "I'd be able to detect a pinch of salt in a swimming pool." "You can't see hormones in the blood, but take them out of the body and they're suddenly revealed." "Each one is a uniquely-shaped molecule which, like a key in a lock, can fit into specific receptors all over the body." "They're subtle and they're in control... and at the start of puberty they come out at night." "In the restless nights of early puberty," "Beatrice's brain dispatches its chemical messages every ninety minutes... and her body listens to the signals carried in her blood." "Not just to the amount of hormones, but to the patterns of their release." "In a boy, it will be the testes that pick up the signals." "In Beatrice, it's her ovaries." "The ovaries and testes spike the blood with two potent ingredients, oestrogen and testosterone." "Circulating everywhere, from head to toe, these are the real heavyweights of puberty." "They make the rollercoaster an unpredictable and emotional ride." "Some days you feel like you're the bomb, like everything in your life is going great, you can't expect anything more." "And then it feels like you're nothing, like you've made mistakes, that it's over and stuff, that you might as well give up, and then it goes back up and then it goes back down." "It's always up and down, up and down." "It's never a straight line or inclining up, it's always bumpy." "Beatrice, too, can't control the journey she's on." "Biology has taken over, and the hormones inside her have reached critical levels." "Her body is now being rebuilt around her." "I don't like the physical side of it." "I just wish it appeared one morning, but then that would be a bit awkward." "Your upper body begins to..." "You get pubic hairs and that's a right bummer." "And then you, I don't know, you get larger in different places and smaller and whatever." "(D0CT0R) Big breaths in and out." "There you go." "Lovely, right." "Let me swivel round and I'll sit in front." " How old are you now, Beatrice?" " Thirteen." "Thirteen?" "Right." "Can I listen here?" "I haven't got hips yet, but I'm supposed to get hips." "I don't know whether I want hips or not." "That's lovely, well done." "And just pop it round here." "Have you put much weight on recently?" " No." " No?" "I don't know, I don't think so." "0ne of the remarkable things about puberty is how different the changes are in boys from girls." "Take this perfectly ordinary family." "There's a vast and pretty obvious difference between Mum's and Dad's bodies." "Yet the two children are surprisingly similar." "Christopher and his sister Kerry are seven and nine." "Until they reach puberty, their chests are biologically identical." "So what makes them change in such different ways?" "It's those hormones again, which arrive in very different combinations." "Girls' bodies are flooded with oestrogen and their chests respond." "Across the world, there's a huge variety of size and shape, but every woman's breasts go through the same stages of development." "First, the cells which will eventually make milk ducts start dividing." "The dark area around the nipple begins to grow." "Within months, the breasts start expanding." "Fat is laid down as the adult shape forms." "It'll be around four years before the skin around the nipples lies flat, forming the smooth contour of the adult breast." "It's painful to run, let me tell you that." "Because what happens up above, you have to start wearing a bra." "Sorry, had to mention it." "It gets really painful to run." "Bras are really, really uncomfortable." "It's just like having a strap put across your chest, permanently." "But just getting breasts is not the end of the story." "They will grow again during pregnancy and only after a woman gives birth will they be fully mature, when in most cases they start producing milk." "While a girl's body begins to change shape, a less obvious, but more important transition is taking place deep inside her," "in her ovaries." "The size and shape of a walnut, these two off-white organs rest either side of the pelvis." "Not only do they produce the hormones that drive puberty, but they contain the raw material of new life - a woman's eggs." "More than a hundred thousand in each one." "From puberty, once a month, one of these eggs will be set free." "Carried inside the Fallopian tube, it takes the egg three days to make the 15 cm journey from ovary to womb." "Meanwhile, the womb prepares for a possible pregnancy." "Its lining thickens, ready to be home for a fertilised egg." "This is it, ten thousand times larger than real life." "A strange and dramatic landscape." "A food-rich bed, up to a centimetre thick." "Its only purpose is to nurture new life." "But if the egg is not fertilised, the bed is not needed." "These remarkable pictures reveal the cervix, the opening of the womb." "They show the lining, unused, beginning to flow away." "In her period which follows, the average woman will lose an eggcup-full of blood." "I don't want to get periods." "I'll tell you why, because people tend to get moody." "One of my friends has got her periods and she gets really, really moody." "And some people get pains and I don't know if I will." "I hope not." "I don't like the idea of getting my periods or whatever." "Like it or not, once the rollercoaster starts, there's no stopping it." "With hormones pulsing through her every day, Beatrice's body races ahead out of control." "Yet it can all seem painfully slow." "You know, I wish, I just really wish that it just appeared one morning, that you went into a little cocoon and woke up and it was all there." "And you were used to it." "Not it happening over three years." "Or four or five or whatever it is." "One of the things I like, everyone used to be taller than me." "Now, lots of my friends are still taller than me, but mostly adults are really short." "I like the fact I'm taller than a lot of people, and being bulky and big, too." "Boys' bodies too, are growing faster than at any time since they were toddlers." "It's easier to develop your body, too, when you're in puberty." "When you're little and you work out, it doesn't show up so much." " It takes less." " Yeah, yeah." "You start eating a lot, you eat a lot." "Then you start getting bigger and you feel other things getting bigger, so you feel manly." "All the changes they experience are driven by their own sex hormone, testosterone." "And it's made in the testes." "As puberty starts, the testes begin to grow." "It's the first outward sign that anything is happening." "The skin of the scrotum gets rougher and there's a wispy growth of pubic hair." "Inside, the testes are a tangle of tiny tubes, miniature factories that will soon start to churn out sperm." "And they'll do it on a massive scale." "A thousand every second." "Shortly after the testes start growing, the penis itself starts catching up." "The skin gets darker, and in four years the machinery of reproduction is complete." "With a special camera that shows heat as colour, we can see why the testicles are where they are." "The red and yellow of the tummy show that it's hotter than the bits coloured green and blue." "Sperm factories work best when slightly cooler than the bulk of a man's body." "Hanging low keeps them cool." "And it's now, of course, that the penis starts getting up to some new tricks." "I had one first erection when I didn't know what it was." "Then I had a first erection where I knew what it was." " One that I didn't know what it was..." " That's the first one." "The first one, you didn't know what it was?" " Right, right." " The second one, you knew what it was." " Exactly." " The first one..." "(LAUGHTER)" "It was, like, pulsating." "Bedong!" "Bedong!" "Bedong!" "I'm sitting and I have to use the bathroom." "I really had to piss, 'cause I didn't know what it was." "Inside, the penis is made of a spongy tissue filled with thousands of tiny blood vessels." "Normally, blood flows in and out at a constant rate." "During an erection, blood flow increases dramatically." "Blood vessels at the base of the penis are squeezed." "Blood still flows in, but it can't get out." "Pressure builds up." "The thermal camera shows the heat produced by all that extra blood." "And, to the horror of its owner, the penis seems to have a mind of its own." "I don't like it when you get an erection in class." "You're sitting like..." " So you try and hide it." " I try and tuck it under my belt." " Yeah?" " I fix it up and try to hold it down." "These involuntary stirrings happen as the body learns to control its functions." "But there's still one more surprise in store." "It was in sixth grade, I was watching TV one night and I saw this foreign girl, and it was some movie where there was this really nice-looking girl, and I thought she looked good." "I dreamed about her and I woke up in the middle of the night, and something was wet on my pants, on my boxers." "I had Sex Ed a little before that so I knew then I was OK." " I'm ready to be a man!" " Now I gotta clean it up." " And change my boxers." " That shit's sticky!" " Not on my bed, just my boxers." " That's horrible!" "This is a view inside the sperm ducts." "It's unlikely that the boys' first wet dreams contained any sperm at all." "It takes time for the machinery of production to crank up." "And the first few times, it's firing blanks." "Even when the system kicks in, most of the fluid isn't sperm at all." "It's a liquid which both protects sperm from the acid of a woman's vagina and gives them energy for their long swim ahead." "But once the sperm factory is up and running, there's no going back." "A man will go on producing sperm for the rest of his life." "Quite apart from the physical transformation they bring, hormones trigger a much wider change." "They influence teenagers' whole outlook on life." "(BEATRICE) My mum says that I wear too much black." "(GIRL) How can you wear too much black?" "I think the tie-dyed, try on the smallest one." "For Beatrice and her friends, this means experimenting, learning to take charge of their lives, trying out attitudes and opinions to see if they fit." "You might as well wear a couple of wires joined up." " Might as well wear a bikini." " It's basically see-through." "(GIRL) I don't know why they have so much decoration." "(BEATRICE) Who'll see them?" "Your husband?" "Your...?" " What d'you think?" " Yeah, I like the top." " Wonderful, yeah." " Ooh, nice, Kerry." "I quite like that, I'm sorry." "This might seem extremely sad, but I like that." "Just as the body is test-driving its systems, the brain is beginning to explore its new world." "She's become, since the summer, significantly more independent, but still likes to have us around, I think, in the background so we're there, but she's doing her own thing, so she's got some safety, I suppose." "OK!" "What d'you think?" "The top, not the skirt, the top, not the skirt?" "She was very proud of me because I caught the train by myself to Southampton." "And it was a big achievement." "She's quite testing in the sort of questions she asks and her opinions." "She's got lots and lots of opinions about things that all come from outside or come from school, and that's all quite different." "Teenagers, notoriously, want to break free from their parents." "Their rebellion can cause pain all around." " Uhh!" " OK?" "Oh, my ear!" "I can't hear!" " OK?" " OK." "Not too bad, was it?" "But children are only doing what's needed to maintain the next generation:" "learning to become effective parents." "They're beginning to look after themselves and recognise the responsibilities of adulthood." "Emotionally, you get down on yourself more as a teenager when you're sixteen, than when I was eleven." "Usually, I didn't have anything to worry about when I was eleven." "But now I have a lot of stuff to worry about in life and stuff - girls, parents, teachers, school." "So that's a lot of difference." "When I was eleven, I had more people watching me and making choices for me or with me." "Now it's more by myself, with a little help." "In future it'll be by myself." "Many of the changes in puberty are quite subtle." "But one is blindingly obvious." "We just grow much bigger." "And how that happens is really rather surprising." "To reveal the secret of how we grow, we need to look at my own bones." "This scanner produces a magnetic field ten thousand times greater than the Earth's." "Enough to see right through me." "My hand and wrist are an intricate mesh of tightly-packed bones." "If you could have seen them when I was a child, they would have been very different." "This X-ray study is unique." "And going backwards over twenty years reveals a remarkable thing." "The hands of children are not all bone." "There, for instance, no knuckles." "And there, look at the gaps in the wrist." "Instead of bone, there's cartilage, something the machine can't see." "0nly when cartilage turns into bone can the the hand grow." "And how does this happen?" "It's hormones again." "Puberty pumps them out and joints get bigger and limbs get longer." "By the end of our teens, there is no more cartilage and there can be no more growth." "Boys and girls have two distinct periods of growth." "When we are children, our bodies grow in a more or less constant way." "Boys are generally no taller or stronger than girls." "But at puberty all that changes." "James and Annie are brother and sister, but James, a year and a half older than Annie, is a good ten centimetres shorter." "A lot of my friends are shorter than me, but a lot are the same height." "So, I'm not exceptionally tall, and he's not tall." "He just don't grow." " Shut up!" " You don't, you look freaky." "You've been that height for about a year." "What makes Annie taller at the moment is that girls get their growth spurt at the start of puberty, while boys get theirs at the end, which could be as much as three years later." "But James needn't worry." "Starting late means starting from a taller base." "So, like most boys, he'll end up bigger than most girls, and that probably includes Annie." "From having very similar body shapes, boys and girls now follow very different paths." "A girl's shape changes to get ready for bearing children." "The hip bones spread outwards and become flatter." "But more important is what happens to the space in the middle." "It opens, ending four centimetres wider than in men, just enough for a baby's head to squeeze through." "The changes in a boy's body stem from his need, in times gone by, to be strong." "The testosterone in his system has dramatic effects." "His heart and lungs get bigger." "With each breath, more air travels down his windpipe." "Through a mass of tubes, it ends here, in the three hundred million air sacs that make up his lungs." "0xygen passes through the membranes and into his blood." "The more that gets to his muscles, the faster he can run." "At the same time, the mechanical parts of his body are adding to his power." "Here we can see the complex array of muscles and tendons that hold the knee together." "Watching how they move reveals how impressive the human body is." "The two bones don't actually touch." "The soft tissue between them allows them to move in a smooth and precise way." "This whole physical system gets better as muscles and tendons grow larger and stronger." "There's another change at puberty that you can hear easier than you can see." "But I'm going to try and show you with this." "Looking across the tongue and down the throat, these are vocal chords." "The whiter bits in the middle make sound, vibrating furiously when air flows past." "I can alter pitch just by changing the tension of the chords." "Tight for high notes." "0oohhh." "Slack for low." "In boys, the whole set-up grows." "You can see it from outside." "Vocal chords get longer, voice chamber bigger, sending a man's voice an octave lower than a woman's." "Most of the time, this change happens gradually." "But the transition is huge." "The brain is having to re-learn all the intricate muscle controls it uses to make our voices work." "It's like having to learn a new musical instrument, but sometimes even the brain can hit a bum note." "I hate it when your voice starts getting lower," " and you start cracking all the time." " Yeah, yeah, yeah." "I say something to my mom or something," "I'll say it all squeaky and then it turns back deep." " And...um..." " It echoes." "Sometimes I can't control it." "It just happens." "With all those hormones wreaking havoc inside us, the body chooses now to confront us with one of life's trickiest challenges." "Sex!" "I want you to tell me the first thing you think of when you hear that word, sex." " Just shout it out." "Steve?" " Boys and girls." "Boys and girls." "Nice and loud, shout 'em out." " Orgasm!" " Pregnancy!" " Pregnancy." " Positions!" " Diseases!" " STDs!" "It's no accident that teenagers seem to wake up one morning thinking of nothing but sex." "What else do you think of when you hear the word sex?" " Lust!" " Lust." " Trust!" " Erection!" "When we're children, sex, for the most part, passes us by." "But in puberty the amount of oestrogen and testosterone pumping through the blood rise month by month." "When they reach a critical level, they seem to affect the central part of our brain." "This is the part responsible for our feelings and desires." "Sex on the brain, one-track minds, that'll be our hormones." "You know a word that I don't see up here?" " What?" " What?" "(WH0LE CLASS) Love!" "Why is that the last thing some people think of, instead of the first thing?" "Good question." "The answer seems to be that teenagers' physical development runs ahead of emotional maturity." "The body has sexual urges that the mind can't deal with." "And while it's catching up, there's plenty of scope for turmoil." "Guys shouldn't be as nervous as some are towards girls, because girls in the long run want the same thing." "And so they should be more outspoken, and should just come forward and say what they feel and say what they mean." "I think first of all, it's physical." "I think that's what you notice first." "You don't look inside a girl and say," "You'll look at her because you like what you see." "I think after you go out with them for a couple of times, and you get to see what they're really thinking, that's when you decide that's the girl you want." "(UPBEAT S0UL MUSIC)" "Perhaps it's one of nature's little jokes." "Just as we're really growing up, and how we look is as important as life itself, our body starts playing tricks on us." "(B0Y MAKES D0G N0ISES)" "Are you guys gonna dance at the party?" "No sooner have we begun to take an interest in the opposite sex than we're hit with strange growths that do nothing at all to help romance." "Zits, two of 'em...three of 'em." "They're a teenager's worst nightmare, and they serve no useful purpose." "The upper body is covered in oil glands." "They're a leftover from our hairy past when they kept our hair sleek and waterproof." "I hate my spots, I really wish I didn't have them." "During the onslaught of puberty, these glands go crazy." "They produce a sudden rush of oil with which our skin can't cope." "The oil blocks the ducts, trapping bacteria and provoking those nasty but irresistible spots." "And at puberty something else grows." "The sudden appearance of hair is one of the more visible signs of maturity." "Quite why it sprouts, in just a few small patches, is something of a mystery." "Bizarrely, the answer is probably sweat." "0n most of our body sweat is water-based." "It helps cool us down when we overheat." "But where we have our hair, sweat is different." "It's thicker and milky." "It contains fat and gives off its own smell, which some people believe makes us attractive to each other." "You smell more." "Like musk." " Body odour." " Yeah." "Y'all funktify." "Body odour is one stage further." "Bacteria love fatty sweat." "If it stays around for long, they'll happily rot it away with alarming results." "I reckon we should tell her about her BO problem." "0ddly, while the rest of our hair varies from person to person, pubic hair is nearly always the same, thick-stranded, short and curly." "It's like a forest, like a wilderness." "This hair, magnified 400 times, shows you why." "The hairs aren't round, but flattened." "They've been squeezed by the hair follicle so as they grow, they spiral." "But why aren't pubic hairs much longer?" "They grow for just six months." "So when they die and drop out, they're still quite short." "If they were like head hairs, they'd grow for seven years and we'd all be in trouble." "It's a bit irritating sometimes." "Especially when you have to do that first bikini line." "It's now almost a year since we first filmed Beatrice." "In that time, the hormonal cycles driving her body towards maturity have been getting stronger." "Now, the one change Beatrice has been dreading has arrived." "Yeah, I started my period, and it caught me completely off-guard." "But I was all right." "She was very matter-of-fact about it, more so than I was." "She let me know by ringing me at work, and she said," "The good news was that she was going to be in a top stream." "And then she decided to go out and celebrate, but we didn't go out." "She baked a cake and bought me some chocolate eclairs, which was very nice of her." "Quite a lot of people I know celebrated when they got their period." "It seems strange, but, hey!" "(BEATRICE'S M0THER) She's sort of ambivalent about it." "I think she's rather proud to have her periods." "At the time, I felt quite tearful, quite sad about it." "I didn't talk to her about that because I felt it was really the end of my little girl, even though she's not little any more." "But it was an absolute, this is it now." "The good part of it is I know I'm perfectly normal." "I know I'm a girl, I'm a female." "Then, it's the fact that I get a period and, until I get the menopause, it'll still be that." "Physically, Beatrice has nearly finished her journey." "But there is more to being an adult than having an adult body." "The boys will soon be men, but that means accepting adult responsibility, something 0lof is finding hard to do." "He's in trouble with his dad." "He's desperate to go to a party, but he's failed to finish his chores and he's been grounded." "I've just been told I can't attend the party, under my dad's decision." "He said I can't go." "We had asked him to do a certain thing and he had not done it." "More so than not doing the task, it was not accepting responsibility for not doing it." "It's just a party and I..." "This is just a small example of a much bigger part of development, learning to use our reasoning to cope with complex situations." "(TEACHER) These are four digits, you know." "Young children tend to see life in black and white." "Pose them a problem that has no clear right or wrong answer, and they'll have a very simplistic view." "Take this story, for example." "0nce upon a time, there was a man called George." "His wife was dying." "The chemist had a medicine that could save her life, but the medicine cost £1,000." "George didn't have £1,000 and, however hard he tried, he couldn't find the money." "So he stole the medicine." "(TEACHER) Do you think George should have done that?" "No, 'cause he could have gone to the police." "They could have arrested him." "And that's illegal." "(TEACHER) Illegal?" "What's illegal?" "To steal." "He has got a right, but he has got a wrong to it." "What's right?" "The right is that..." "Well, he did ask nicely to get the medicine and the wrong is he stole it." "He shouldn't have done that." " It's bad to steal." " Why is it bad to steal?" "He can get into big trouble." "You wouldn't like it if somebody stole from you." "Three years on, the certainty has all but gone and the response is dramatically different." "Was there no other way that he'd find the money?" " He tried everything." " He tried everything." "In that case, he should break into the lab and get the medicine for his wife." "Why do you think he should have done that?" "Because a life is more important than stealing something." "It's a difficult thing." "It's a moral subject." "Why is it difficult?" "Because you're doing wrong and we've always been told not to steal things." " But he's stealing." " Yes?" " So, it's a problem?" " Yeah." "This ability to make complex moral judgements, to see grey where before there was only black and white, may well come from changes in the brain." "In childhood, the brain is constantly evolving, as slowly an insulating coat grows around the nerves in the brain." "This helps information travel faster." "0ne theory is that at puberty the front part of the brain, the area responsible for complex reasoning, gets its coating." "It may be this that opens the door to mature judgement." "The rollercoaster ride is almost over." "0ur hormones have done their worst." "Girl has become woman, boy has become man." "And if the human body were to make a sound as it neared the end of this turbulent transition, it would probably be a sigh of relief." "For us, there is also relief." "Having spent the last few years on the great ride of puberty, we now regain at least the illusion of being in control." "0f course, there will be fine tuning, and emotional turmoil will no doubt visit us throughout life." "Biologically, we are, at last, the finished article." "We are equipped for adulthood and, ready or not, we face the future." "I don't mind the physical changes at all." "They were meant to happen anyway." "I don't think I'd like to go round looking twelve for the rest of my life." "I don't think I'd be too happy about that." "I'm glad it's happened." "My biggest fear is taking responsibility for myself." "I can't rely on anybody else, once I've got full responsibility over myself." "It's my problem and I can't always rely on everybody else to take care of me." "I stick by my statement that I wish you woke up one morning and you were an adult." "I don't mind the growing, the growing in height, but any other way is just a curse, the curse of puberty." "Between the turmoil of puberty and the decline of old age, the human body reaches its peak." "In biological terms, as adults, we are the finished article." "Now is the time when we begin to live our life, rather than prepare for life." "There's something unique about the adult body which has made us the most powerful animal species on Earth." "It has enabled us to rule the natural world." "It has given us the flexibility to escape the confines of our planet, to venture out into space." "We've even managed to explore inside our own bodies." "Every day, doctors make repairs to our internal world." "So, all the triumphs of human endeavour stem from one thing." "It's the most mysterious part of the human body, and yet it dominates the way we live our adult lives." "It is the brain." "The human brain is a miracle of evolution." "It's the most complicated object in the known universe." "But to understand how it works, we really need to know how it evolved and where it came from." "The brain of our ape-like ancestors was pretty small." "Its volume was about half a litre." "That's the size of the engine capacity of a Fiat 500, or a modern-day chimp's brain." "The human brain is about three times bigger, about the size of a sports car engine." "As our ancient ancestors evolved, they had to learn ever more complicated skills." "They needed bigger, better brains, brains that would be more powerful and more adaptable." "It's difficult to get across how rapidly the human brain enlarged." "From our ape-like ancestors to the bigger-brained humans was two and a half million years." "That may seem a long time, but in evolutionary terms, it's remarkably quick." "The human brain was increasing by the equivalent of 150,000 nerve cells at each generation." "But in nature, there's no such thing as a free lunch." "Everything has its cost, and a bigger brain, like a bigger engine, is more expensive to run." "The human brain uses up more energy to run than any other organ in the body, burning a whopping one fifth of the food that we consume." "This makes the head hotter than the rest of the body, shown here by a heat-sensitive camera." "We invest so much in the brain because of its importance." "It's what makes each one of us who we are." "It's amazing to consider that I'm holding in my hands the place where someone once felt, thought and loved." "From just looking at it, there's nothing to suggest very much ability at all." "It appears rather gruesome - wrinkled like a walnut and with the consistency of mushroom." "For centuries, scientists have been battling to understand what this unappealing object is all about." "The philosopher Aristotle, of ancient Greece, believed that the brain helped regulate the body's temperature." "A runny nose was the cooling fluid leaking out of the brain." "He reasoned that since the heart beat faster when you were excited, it must be responsible for our feelings and thoughts." "It's easy to laugh at him now, but Aristotle was the first person to think seriously about how the human body worked." "We've come a long way since the fourth century BC." "Now we can actually see inside a living brain." "Medical scanners prove the brain is indeed where we think and feel." "When a particular area of my brain is working hard, extra blood flows there, through my arteries, to provide energy for the active nerve cells." "The scanner can detect these changes in blood flow, giving us a completely new window into the fascinating world of the mind." "Using this technique, we can actually watch the brain at work." "Here I'm listening to music." "Not one, but several areas light up." "This part of the brain is where we process all sounds, and this is where we appreciate music." "Amazingly, there are even separate bits for melody... for rhythm... and for pitch." "But what's actually happening deep inside the brain?" "It's a fascinating story, but it's complicated." "It all starts with this tree-like structure:" "a single brain cell or neurone." "Here is an actual neurone, magnified 10,000 times." "Neurones are the tiny building blocks of the brain." "They do something remarkable, which prompts all our thoughts." "They fire an electrical impulse." "Amazingly, we can now see one firing." "This is the first time it's been shown on television." "The electricity is bursting along the neurone at 400 kilometres an hour." "Here we're seeing it in slow motion." "Within a tiny fraction of a second, it's ready to fire again." "Your brain has a staggering 100 billion of these neurones." "Together they could generate enough electricity to illuminate a light bulb." "To make things more complicated still, the branches of each neurone are connected to thousands of other neurones." "It's hard to grasp the sheer scale of all these connections." "Imagine a bustling city the size of New York." "Give every person in that city 10,000 pieces of string." "Tell each person to attach each piece of string to a different person." "Now make the city a thousand times bigger." "This is the incredible tangle we call the brain." "And there's more." "Go deeper into this tangle, travel along a single neurone and take a close look at the junction with its neighbour." "0ddly, the neurones are not physically joined together at all." "There's a tiny gap." "To bridge this gap, the neurones release minute quantities of chemicals every time they fire, chemical go-betweens that influence our thoughts." "This cocktail of chemicals swirling about the brain is finely balanced." "It needs to be to control the activity of the brain." "Because it's so much on a knife-edge, it's very easy to disrupt." "People do it every day." "I like to do it, just occasionally, with some Cabernet Sauvignon." "People have been drinking alcohol for thousands of years." "But surprisingly, it's only in the last couple of years that scientists have discovered precisely how it works." "So, in the interests of science, I've put myself forward as a guinea pig." "Before I start, I need to test my reaction time." "This little red light will come on, and I'll press the red button." "That's fifteen hundredths of a second, just under one fifth of a second." "That's about average." "Well, I've now had three glasses." "Unlike what most people think, it isn't actually the alcohol itself which makes you drunk." "Rather, as soon as the alcohol enters your body, there are a series, a cascade of chemical reactions." "It's the by-product of one of these reactions, the fatty acid compounds, which make you drunk." "Well, I've had well over a bottle of wine now, and although I feel pretty good, my ac... ..reaction time isn't what it should be." "We'll try testing it." "It's about quarter of a second." "Slower than before." "There's a good reason why my reactions are sluggish." "The normal chemical balance in my brain is being disrupted, as those fatty acids clog up the surface of the neurones." "The fatty acids attack only parts of my brain, including those that control my speech, my mood and my memory." "What was I saying?" "Well, what was I saying?" "Alcohol just influences behaviour." "Some people... ..just get belliru...belligerent." "0thers..." "No, wait a minute." "Actually, I can't remember terribly what I'm supposed to say." "(MAN) Action." "What was I saying?" "Alcohol also influences behaviour." "Where's the coffee?" "Sorry?" "Well, I..." "Just say "action" and I'll be on the ball." "Action." "I'm not sure I can get my head round this completely now." "Actually." "How can all my thoughts and behaviour come from chemicals and little neurones?" "Some people compare the brain to a computer, but I think it's much more like a termite mound." "It's all to do with the whole thing being greater than the sum of its parts." "A termite colony is extraordinary." "It is as intricate and as complex as a city." "It can dominate whole areas of the bush and wage war against other insects." "Above all, it can build these stupendous structures, with columns and buttresses and air-conditioning ducts." "So where is the knowledge for this incredible organisation kept?" "Not in an individual worker termite." "They are supremely dim, with a brain the size of a pinhead." "Nor in the enormous, squirming, egg-producing queen." "Her brain is even smaller than a worker's." "No." "The intricate behaviour of the termite colony emerges from the collective effort of all the termites." "Here, a group of worker termites are constructing a new wall." "Not a single one of them carries a blueprint for the wall, but working together, it gets built." "Termites send out chemical signals, and between them they pile up their tiny mouthfuls of mud." "Clearly the human brain is totally different from the termite mound." "Both, though, are composed of numerous building blocks; either neurones or termites." "Each, when acting in harmony, is capable of extraordinary feats." "It makes no sense to search for the root of knowledge in single neurones in the brain, or, for that matter, in one termite in a colony." "The success of both depends on many millions of simple units working together." "So it's teams of neurones acting in unison that give us all our skills." "Each team, based in a particular region of the brain, takes on a different responsibility, from our most advanced human abilities, such as language and memory, to the more basic ones, like movement." "Because we walk, run and reach without thinking, we forget how such incredible precision is possible." "To see how much brain effort is required, look what happens when we're plunged into a totally new environment." " OK." " OK, there we go." "Astronauts have to learn to move from scratch when they enter a world without gravity." "The reason why we're able to learn new tasks and carry them out automatically lies here." "It's a part of the brain called the cerebellum, or little brain, because it sticks out right at the base of the brain proper." "Here are stored the practised movements we all learn, be it riding a bike, playing the piano, or even fixing a satellite." "The astronauts are in the cargo bay of the shuttle, but they're not out in space." "This is the closest they can get to space back on Earth, an enormous swimming pool - a pool so large that four space shuttles can fit inside it." "Here astronauts can practise their tasks over and over again, until they can move automatically without thinking." "(ASTR0NAUT) I had to jig it a little to lock." "Yeah, it is finicky about being directly perpendicular to the rail, so try to wriggle it back and forth, from starboard to port, and from forward to aft." "OK." " We're assuming the latches didn't work." " So they're manually..." "Marsha Ivens is one such astronaut." "Talk about seeing the world." "She's been on four shuttle missions and orbited the planet 683 times." "(MARSHA IVENS) Learning to deal with the absence of gravity takes a little getting used to." "We are used to walking from place to place, and you don't walk, you float or fly." "So when I want to cross the room or the cabin, I push off with my hand or feet." "If I push too hard, I smash into the wall." "If I push in the wrong direction, I miss it." "If I don't push off hard enough, I don't get to the wall." "It takes a bit of getting used to." "0nce we've practised a skill enough, the cerebellum can take over automatically." "A thought starts it off, and then the cerebellum does the work, sending out instructions to the rest of the body." "This happens without us even being aware of it." "In fact, the unconscious part of the brain is often more skilful than the conscious part." "0n the space shuttle is a robot arm." "The astronauts have to train hard to operate it, using a joystick." "But the secret with moving a robot arm smoothly is not to think too much about it." "Let the cerebellum take over." "(MARSHA IVENS) For me it was difficult to think about moving each joint as I moved it." "And I just did it, and it got there." "The more experienced you get, the more rotations you can make at the same time." "That's probably true of learning to use your hand." "When you reach for something, you make complex motions with your arm, and that's probably as learned a response as it is learning to control the robot arm." "The astronauts use the same mental equipment to control the robot arm as we first use as babies to control our flesh and blood arms." "People have a fantastic ability to make almost any tool an extension of their bodies." "As an infertility doctor, I make full use of my cerebellum to perform keyhole surgery." "Here, I'm investigating why a woman is unable to conceive." "Surgical tools allow me to examine inside her, without resorting to major surgery." "After enough training, it is relatively simple for me to co-ordinate what I do with my hands with what I see on the screen." "Truth is, that this surgical manipulation, like all surgical manipulation, looks incredibly skilled and very intricate." "But actually, most of the time you're doing it totally on autopilot, and you can do quite involved procedures without really thinking about it." "It's only when there's something untoward, or the surgeon hits an emergency, that you suddenly need to concentrate much harder and the conscious brain takes over." "Most mammals have a cerebellum just as developed as ours." "A rat's primitive brain is largely cerebellum." "They don't need much more for their relatively simple lives." "And in humans, the basic design of this rudimentary part of the brain has changed little as we've evolved." "It is the rest of our brain that has enlarged so massively." "Why did it get so big?" "Well, surprisingly, a whole quarter of our oversized brain is devoted to vision, much more than for any of our other senses." "What you see when you peer into the back of the eye is the only part of the brain which is visible from the outside world." "The optic nerve at the back of the eye is a direct extension of the brain." "Travelling along the optic nerve, we pass right through the brain." "Here, at the back of the head, is where the visual information arrives." "0ur eyes are just a window." "We actually see with our brain." "It's difficult to grasp how complicated vision is, until you try to programme a computer to see." "It's staggeringly difficult." "What the scientists hadn't realised was that the eye is merely the first step." "The brain does most of the real work." "These robots have excellent cameras on board, but they lack the clout of the brain to make sense of what they see." "This can be a handicap." "0ur brains are so powerful that we very much take our visual skills for granted." "To fly this 1940s biplane," "Marsha Ivens relies more on the view from the cockpit than the instrument panel." "(MARSHA IVENS) In an airplane like this, vision is your primary means of knowing where you are, relative to the world, in the airplane." "My brand of flying doesn't really require a whole lot of dials." "I can tell what my rate of descent is." "You learn with experience." "I make periodic checks of the altimeter and the airspeed and the vertical speed indicator for that information, but mostly I do that by looking outside." "Whenever we look around us, we see the world instantly." "The shape of a plane, its movement, its colour." "But what's surprising is that all these aspects of the image have to be processed by the brain separately." "We know these various elements of vision are distinct, because certain people with brain damage are missing one of them." "Some cannot discriminate colour... ..while, more bizarrely, others are unable to perceive motion." "It's as if they're seeing a stationary snapshot of the world every couple of seconds." "But in normal vision, our powerful brain combines all these disparate elements into one coherent view of the world." "As the brainpower of our ancestors increased, they not only observed the world but also invented ways of shaping it." "We can see this in action by looking at the tools that chimps make." "The chimps from this group use an impressive 19 types of tool." "Most of them are to get at food." "Thin sticks help them catch ants and termites." "Chimps even use stone anvils and wooden hammers to crush the shells of nuts." "It's jolly difficult making a stone tool." "So, here's one that was prepared earlier." "About two million years earlier." "The creature that made it chipped away slivers of stone to give it a sharp edge, and it was probably used as a kind of axe." "Archaeologists here in the Great Rift Valley of Africa are really excited about this and the other tools they've found, because it wasn't apes that made them, it was people." "Louise, what's so interesting about this area?" "All this site is special because there're such vast concentrations of stone tools here, and this is because it was a lake basin." "The early humans were coming down to catch their animals, kill them and use the stone tools on the carcasses." "I found it quite difficult making a stone tool." "What's the trick?" "You need a big brain, and to be quite well practised to manipulate your hands to strike a flake off a piece of rock and come up with a result like this." "I'll forgive the slur on my brain, but how do you know that these were used to butcher meat?" "That seems a bit far-fetched." "We've found stone tools with a carcass, say of an early elephant, where you've got stone tools and bones which show cut marks, so you're pretty sure those stone tools were used to butcher that animal." "A chimp cannot make a stone hand axe." "It's not just the lack of brains." "A chimp's thumb is very short compared to its other fingers, making it awkward to use all but the simplest tools." "But over hundreds of thousands of years, our human thumb lengthened." "This gave us an enormous advantage." "We could make a precise finger pinch between thumb and forefinger." "It's called "the opposable thumb,"" "and it allowed us to manipulate objects with great dexterity." "Marsha harnesses this precision control of her fingers to do safety checks on her plane." "I pluck the wires on the tail and should hear them ring the same tone." "and the pilot." "As I walk around the airplane, sometimes your hand will feel something your eye doesn't see." "If I run my fingers along the propeller," "I can feel a nick that I wouldn't necessarily see." "I don't want nicks, as that disrupts the airflow." "The sensitivity of our fingers comes from the ridges and grooves of our fingerprints." "These ridges also give us better grip, especially in wet conditions, just like the tread of a car tyre, cornering in the rain." "But what have fingers got to do with the brain?" "Well, throughout our evolution, developments of the brain and the body were constantly bouncing off one another." "As one advanced, it drove the other forward." "This feedback relied on a key turning point, one that other animals failed to make." "Chimp hands aren't very dextrous, because they do two contradictory jobs with them." "They hold things, but they also walk on their hands." "So their hands are a compromise." "Not bad for knuckle walking, but not so good for creating tools." "Human hands excelled at creating tools and manipulating objects because they were largely dedicated to just one activity." "Unlike chimps, we did this." "We stood up on our hind limbs." "This crucial advance happened over 3.5 million years ago." "Standing up gave our hands enormous freedom and boosted our brainpower dramatically." "We never looked back." "Standing tall on two legs happened very early on in the development of the human body, before we had opposable thumbs, before we had stone tools, before we had language." "Indeed, standing helped these developments." "Early humans literally had time on their hands - time to challenge their tiny Fiat 500 brain, jump-starting it into further evolution." "As our brain got bigger, so it perfected one rather special trick." "It learned to make order out of chaos, putting things into categories." "Coffee with caffeine and coffee without?" "Kenyan or Colombian?" "It's no accident that this is how we organise our daily life." "I'll take a couple of those." "Thank you." "We came to classify things this way so that we could cope with the complexity of nature." "To survive, we had to learn which plants were poisonous and which we could eat;" "to know which animals would make a good meal and which were likely to make a meal of us." "Animals do this to some extent, but the human brain excelled at it." "We still use this skill in city life, but in the natural world, you can witness it the way it was originally deployed." "Philip Alderson is a park ranger in north Australia." "Forest fires sweep the park in the dry season, and Philip lights small control fires to burn up dry tinder and stop the spread of a bigger fire that's approaching." "It's called "back burning," and has been used by Aboriginal people for thousands of years." "You can see the big cloud of smoke over there, and it's roaring through." "When the main fire front comes along, it gets really windy, with little whirly winds everywhere." "The back burning stops it from coming any further with the wind." "It would carry it across the other side of the road, all that debris and sparks." "The ability to understand and control the natural world was crucial to survival throughout our past." "This river is teeming with crocodiles." "The same skills that Philip's ancestors used to kill them, Philip now uses to count them." "He tracks them down by knowing their habits." "(PHILIP ALDERS0N) They live underneath the bank where there's tree roots." "They dig a hole underneath the tree root." "If you see this hole, you know it's a breathing hole." "They pick out an area for their hunting." "If another crocodile goes in there, they soon have a go at him, because they get very territorial." "To outwit nature, we needed our brains above all." "Most important was powerful memory." "Working memory, usually lasting only a few minutes, is like a mental blackboard, storing just seven items or so." "Working memory is remembering if that's the same crocodile you saw before or where you just put your notebook down." "The vast majority of these memories quickly disappear." "But there's a part of the brain that ensures memories can be stored for much longer." "As certain thoughts are remembered, over and over, they are passed to the cortex, the folded part enveloping the front of the brain." "This is where our long-term memory resides." "How these memories persist is not yet fully understood, but the best explanation is that memories are shared across many different neurones." "0ver time, the branching connections between these neurones are strengthened." "This is how we remember our family and friends, the important events of our life." "0ne estimate is that an average person store in their brain a million different items." "This powerful memory originally evolved to help us navigate our way around our environment." "(PHILIP ALDERS0N) If you come back at night, you can pick out certain points or channels." "You know where you are then, you know." " It is quiet, isn't it?" " Yeah, it's quiet." " You'd reckon we'd pick one up by now." " Yeah..." "Look straight up there, mate." "The crocodiles prefer to come out at night." "In the dark, Philip can still spot them." "Their eyes reflect the torchlight." "(PHILIP ALDERS0N) There's one there, straight up, near the bank." "Every time Philip revisits the river, he gets to know it that little bit better, as it's etched on his mind." "Turn to the left." "Guess what?" "Got a fish." "A few people have memory skills well beyond the ordinary, and most of the best are collected here, at the 13th Mind 0lympiad in London." "They've come to flex their powers of recall." "so you get 15 minutes to commit to memory, starting now." "The contenders come from a surprising range of backgrounds." "There's a DJ, a fireman, a naval officer, and the usual contingent of students." "They all share the staggering ability to memorise thousands of numbers off by heart." "Andy Bell has been coming here for three years." "I'm here is to try and win." "It's very competitive." "I've broken some records, but the main thing is to try to win the championship." "There's little chance of that today." "(ADJUDICAT0R) Ready, steady, go." "This man has won the memory championships four times." "This man has learnt the answer to every single Trivial Pursuit question." "The only thing that stands between him and victory today is a full deck of cards, he has to view in under 40 seconds and memorise in just three minutes." "He is Dominic 0'Brien." "How do they do it?" "(ADJUDICAT0R) Stop memorisation, start recall." "The National Institutes of Health in America has spent three years and a quarter of a million dollars to find out what was different about these people's brains." "Six of spades, eight of spades." "Their conclusion:" "these people are completely normal." "Three of spades." "They don't have photographic memory, which most scientists believe is a myth." "In fact, the only difference between them and you is that they have trained the memory that we all share." "Queen of diamonds." "Is that right?" "(ADJUDICAT0R) One minute." "That's the one I got wrong." "Another victory for Dominic 0'Brien." "So what's Dominic's secret?" "(D0MINIC 0'BRIEN) If I'm presented with a hundred-digit number, it doesn't mean anything unless I break it up." "So I break up a long number, sequence it into pairs of digits, and give each pair of digits a character." "For instance, the number 10 is Dudley Moore and the number 07 is Roger Moore." "99 would be Mr Whippy." "Then I have something I can work with." "To remember those numbers in sequence," "I imagine them on a journey." "It's a bit like making up a story involving those characters." "That means the story for the number 1-0-0-7-9-9 would be" "Dudley Moore meets Roger Moore for an ice cream." "Easy." "(D0MINIC 0'BRIEN) We're born to hunt and gather, so that's why I use journeys." "I have to translate the abstract thousands of meaningless numbers to something my primitive - if you like, caveman-like brain - can understand." "You look very serious." "A little bit happier." "Dominic turns random information into stories because his brain has evolved to absorb stories easily." "Stories have played a key role in retaining other much longer memories." "The Aboriginal animals and gods on this wall tell their own tales from long ago." "Rock art is really just an extension of memory, a more lasting way of storing traditions." "The big red kangaroo on the top there." "There's some barramundi." "Perch, another one." "If you'd hunted your first fish, they'd paint it up on the wall, so everyone can have a look at what type of fish it was." "A lot of these paintings are 20,000- to 40,000-year-old paintings, and you can see it was almost like painted yesterday." "You find them down there sinking the hole." "Parents teaching their children is another way of passing on information." "Philip shows his son how to find the turtles that live in the mud." "They're in the hollow, Sam." "Hollow one, like rock." "That's the one." "Big one." "Dig him up." "They're learning a lot." "Teaching a kid from a young age is important, because it helps you keep your culture, and understand the grassroots of where you come from." "Through our parents, through art, through education, we learn about the world." "All this knowledge is absorbed by the powerful human brain." "I mean, in many parts of Islam, if a woman can't reproduce, she is very badly damaged." "Sometimes we look at Islam and think "How bizarre," but it's the same in all religions." "I'm a Jew." "It's the same, to some extent, in Judaism." "It's the same in Christian society." "The brain's hardest task is how to deal with human society." "Perhaps the ability to cope with other people and get on in society has been the main force behind the growth of the human brain." "If you think about it, the most complicated thing that an ancient human would meet in their lives would not be food, nor a tool." "Not a predator, but another person." "It's other people, not the world itself, that's difficult to deal with." "To work out the motives of others, to persuade, to charm, to make friends and not enemies, all this takes brains." "We can see it in action with our closest relatives." "Chimps are constantly vying with one another to be leader of the troop." "Here, a young male chimp is attempting to usurp the older male." "And while fights are certainly dramatic, often more important than just brute strength is the ability to forge alliances with other chimps." "Brain over brawn." "Chimps spend hours picking through the hair of their colleagues." "It's called grooming, and it's the key to social climbing." "The better chimps are at these social niceties, the more likely they are to rise through the ranks." "Scientists have discovered that the more complex the social group an animal belongs to, the bigger its brain." "An ability to deceive, to make allies, to win others over, must have been vital in the development of the chimp mind." "Sound familiar?" "Human societies are the most complicated of all animal societies." "There's continual pressure to be number one." "And where better to look for it but in the corridors of power?" "While the ceremony of parliamentary life looks rather splendid, it's the jostling that goes on behind the scenes that is often more important." "Politicians huddle together in conspiratorial whispers." "Deals are made and broken." "The MPs, the lords and ladies, are demonstrating skills that haven't changed for millions of years." "I should know, I work in the place." "We're not chimps, but it's a jungle out there." "And you don't have to go to the Houses of Parliament to come across politics." "All the time our brains are dealing with politics with a small "p"." "Gossip, flattery, backbiting." "At home or in the office, it's really just our way of getting along with people." "0ver millions of years, the human brain and body have evolved to meet ever more complicated challenges." "We learned to manipulate tools, we made full use of our visual sense, and we developed a powerful memory." "More recently, we mastered language, a highly efficient form of social grooming." "We can now build up a detailed picture of the brain we've evolved:" "the cerebellum, responsible for automatic movements;" "the back of the brain for vision;" "the frontal cortex for memory." "There's even a particular site for language." "But there's still something missing from this map." "It's the mysterious thing that makes you who you are and me who I am." "Scientists call it consciousness." "Consciousness is the greatest of the brain's qualities." "It's actually very difficult to define, but essentially it's our ability to be aware of our own thoughts and feelings, for each of us to have our own personality." "Without consciousness, we'd be little more than robots, trundling through the motions of life." "Consciousness allows us to appreciate the greater things in life:" "love, art, science, and religion." "Consciousness makes our brain more than just a collection of little grey cells and electricity." "It's what makes us truly human." "As a subject, consciousness is extremely difficult to study." "But a series of extraordinary surgical operations have revealed some startling new facts." "This rather sad story began in the 1960s." "Brain surgeons, desperate to treat their severely epileptic patients, pioneered an operation to try and control epileptic fits." "OK, Dave, I'm going to start to divide the corpus callosum." "This dramatic surgery involved slicing the brain right down the middle." "They hoped to restrict future fits to one side of the brain only." "It was a radical approach." "But the patients had such severe epilepsy that this was their last hope." "The operation usually worked, but it had unfortunate side-effects in a few patients." "Vicky is one such patient." "Afterwards, scientists discovered the surgery gave her two independent minds, each controlling one half of her body." "It became apparent even when Vicky got dressed." "(VICKY) I knew what I wanted to wear, and I would open up my closet, and one hand would get ready to take it out, but my other hand would just take control." "A couple of times I had a pair of shorts on, and I found myself putting another pair on, on top of the pair I had on, which I knew was wrong." "I wouldn't go out the house that way." "Each of her hands is obeying one half of her brain." "It's as if her consciousness has been split in half, two minds in her one brain." "This is extraordinary." "If our consciousness is located in just one side of the brain, it can never be separated into two, in the way that it is for Vicky." "So I cannot point at one part of my brain and say that is where "I" reside." "Put simply, consciousness is part of the whole brain." "Perhaps, in the same mysterious way that the termites work together in the colony, so the many elements which make up our consciousness work in harmony." "It looks like the higher abilities of the brain - memory, perception and emotions - are seamlessly bound into one wonderful whole." "But is there more to it than this?" "As a scientist, I believe that science is the most powerful way of finding out about the human body." "Even so, there will always be some questions that it just cannot answer." "As a religious person, I believe that much of what makes us human will forever remain mysterious, even spiritual." "I call it the soul." "If we take a line of people, one from each year of life from birth to a hundred, what we see is the remarkable development of human ageing." "As we journey through the first stages of our lives, our bodies develop to meet the challenges of each new age." "Year by year, we're continually developing, growing stronger, becoming more intellectually alert and more sexually mature." "All these changes bring us to the point where we can reproduce, and so pass on our genes to the next generation." "But what's particularly remarkable is that we go on." "0n beyond the child-bearing years and the years it takes to raise our children." "0n into the later years." "It's remarkable because in this respect we're unlike any other animals." "In the wild, animals don't grow old, but we humans have evolved to live long lives - longer than any other mammal, in fact." "Why is something of a mystery, but for humans at least, there might be something more to growing old than a slow decline." "(HEARTBEATS)" "Believe it or not, that's my heart beating there." "I'm wired up to a cardiac monitor." "At the beginning of the century, there was a theory about ageing which was very popular." "It was called the "Rate of Living" theory." "It argued that each animal had a finite number of heartbeats, about one to two billion." "So, for example, a hare, whose heart beats very fast, might live from three to five years, a victim of live fast die young." "A tortoise, whose heart beats very slowly, might live for over a century." "I'm not quite sure where that leaves me." "Anyway, the theory was wrong." "The truth is we don't really understand very much about the ageing process." "But what we do know is very interesting." "We'll see why a great French painter gradually altered the way he painted his garden, and how an eighty-year-old cowboy can still ride a horse." "How sex hormones affect the way we age." "What we have in common with Voyager." "Why very familiar sounds are heard differently as time goes by." "And why I don't look the way I did when I first heard this music." "(LIVELY MUSIC)" "But science can only give us part of the picture." "So we'll be following the story of two people who are actually living through the experience of growing older." "They are an elderly couple living in a farming community in mid-west America." "Bud Mather is still herding cattle at the age of almost eighty." "He and his wife Viola have grown old together on their farm in Kansas." "We've been here ever since we married, 45 years ago." "And we've never been gone more than 20 days, I guess." "This place when we got married was just a little four-room side house." "It didn't have any water in it, it didn't have any bathroom." "We just had to carry all the water in and out, and er, that's why you married me, so I'd cook for you because you couldn't cook." "And you didn't want to haul the water." "You married me so I'd take care of you, didn't ya?" "Yeah." "I'll be 78 in November, and Vi, she was 63 in August." "That's about 14 years difference in us." "When we was going together, they always kid me about it:" "(C0UNTRY AND WESTERN MUSIC)" "Ageing is a process they've shared since they first met each other at a dance at the old schoolhouse almost half a century ago." "Boy, this place is a mess now, ain't it?" "I can't believe..." "look at the terrible shape it's in." "All the windows are gone." "Wasn't like this when we met 50..." " Yeah." " Seems like 50, doesn't it?" " 46 years ago." " 46 years ago, yeah." " We met here at a dance, remember that?" " Oh, yeah." "On the night of the dance that we met, this place was full of people." "Music, laughter, and people having a good time." "And he came over and asked me to dance." "I thought he had the bluest eyes I had ever seen." "And I fell in love with those blue eyes." "She sure looked wonderful to me." "Her skin was real fair and smooth." "And I guess I fell in love with her then." "As we grow on through the years, we get a little more here and a little more there, and a little less here and a little less there." "But I don't think our love has got any less." "If anything, it's got deeper, more understanding of one another." "Naturally, over the years, Bud and Viola have experienced some of the changes that tend to happen to us as we grow older." "The first time I realised I needed glasses, we were driving in the car." "Bud was driving and it was late in the evening." "Well, I got the glasses, I put them on, and I have never taken them off again." "Eyesight is so remarkably and wonderfully complex that it's arguably our most important sense." "Using a special camera, it's possible to look directly into the eye." "The pupil has been enlarged so that we're looking straight through the lens of the eye, at the pink retina at the back - pink because of the blood vessels immediately behind it." "This is what produces the familiar red eye in flash photos." "It's the retina that carries the receptors that register the light from the scene in front of us." "For such a complex system, it's remarkable how much our brains have to compensate for what we actually see." "The lens in our eye produces an image on the retina which is actually upside down." "0ur brains correct this by telling us that what we're seeing is the right way up." "The lens itself is pretty basic." "It tends to produce an image which is blurred, particularly around the edges." "But when it comes to focusing, it's not just the lens that matters, it's the retina." "0n the retina, the white spot with blood vessels emerging is the optic nerve." "This carries the visual signals to the brain." "But the part that does the most work is the small dark circular area in the centre of the picture." "It's called the macula and it's only about one to two millimetres across." "Right in the middle of that area, best seen in a green light, is a small pit with a yellow spot in the middle." "It's called the fovea - this is what gives us a focused image." "Every time we look at something and see it in sharp focus, it's not the rest of the retina that's doing it, it's just that small spot, only a fifth of a millimetre across, that gives us that focused image." "But because it's so small, what it sees in focus is only a small part of the scene in front of us." "So the way we view something like this is to move the eyes around, seeing one small focused area after another." "The brain receives these images and persuades us that everything in front of us is in focus." "But it's an illusion." "As we get older, our brain has to do more and more work." "When we're children, the lens in our eye has a very pale blue colour." "By middle age, in many people the coloration is getting stronger." "It's going yellow, and by old age it can even be brown." "But at all stages, the brain corrects and takes out that coloration, so that we're totally unaware of it." "And there's something else going on." "At the front of the eye is the coloured iris, and immediately behind it is the lens." "In the eye of a small child, the lens is almost completely clear." "But it's at the start of an extremely gradual process that affects us all." "An eye at the age of eleven." "By twenty it's become a little bit cloudy." "At 45, more so." "At 80, definitely." "As we get older, we don't notice this cloudiness developing, because we simply can't remember how clearly we could once see things." "But if it gets too cloudy, there's a limit to what the brain can adjust for." "It doesn't happen to most people, but the lens in an extremely cloudy condition is called a cataract." "It's so cloudy, other people can see it." "The effects of cataracts were particularly important for what happened in this garden some years ago." "Earlier this century, the man who lived here at Giverny in Northern France experienced many of these changes to his eyesight." "In his case it was particularly important, because he was one of the greatest French painters of all time, Claude Monet." "0ver the years, he painted many scenes in these gardens." "Not only are they masterpieces, but they provide a remarkable record of what was happening as age affects eyesight." "What is noticeable is that his paintings mysteriously began to change." "They became redder and redder." "The reason - he was developing cataracts in both his eyes." "These not only affected the sharpness of what he could see, but the way he saw the colours." "In 1923, Monet had an operation to remove the cloudy lens from his right eye." "It instantly changed the way he saw things." "Shortly afterwards, he painted this scene with the eye that still had the cataract in it, and then again, the same scene with the other eye where the cataract had been removed." "What he saw with the cataract eye was this." "And what he saw with the other eye where the cataract had been removed was this." "It has much more blue in it." "A close-up of the tree makes it obvious." "The left eye with the cataract still in, and the right eye with it removed." "Monet was so horrified by the colours he had used when his vision was affected by the cataracts, he wanted to alter many of his paintings, and even destroyed some of them." "Coping with the changes that accompany ageing needn't be depressing." "The effects of growing older certainly don't bother these people too much." "They're Bud and Viola's friends, and they all go back to that same dance at the school hall, where Bud and Viola met nearly fifty years ago." "It's been really nice to get together." "It's about like it was back at the old schoolhouse." "Same bunch." "Well, we had a lot of fun then." "A lot of things we can't talk about." "There are people who hate to turn 40, 50 and 60, because they think that they're getting old." "Look at Bud Mather." "Now, he isn't old." "I mean the years might say that he's old, but he's got a lot in him yet." "You know what I remember about Bud?" "He had the prettiest, waviest hair." " And that's different now, isn't it?" " Yes, it is." "And his skin was smooth, no wrinkles." "And he didn't have any little pot here." "And he didn't have any false teeth." "Bud's skin might not be as soft as it once was, but he's still not doing that badly considering his job." "As a cattle rancher, his occupational hazard is the sun." "It can be extremely damaging to skin, because it gradually destroys what supports it." "Even those who tan easily will have skins prematurely wrinkled." "Regardless of any damage caused by the sun, normal ageing produces changes in the skin." "This ultrasound probe sends out high-frequency sound that bounces back from the layers just under the surface." "A young person will, on average, have skin about half a millimetre thick." "An older person tends to have thinner skin." "A young person's skin is on the left of the screen, and an old person on the right." "Typically, it's about twenty five percent thinner." "The reason is the older skin has lost substances known as collagen and elastin." "These are proteins which provide the underlying framework of a young, healthy skin." "Sunlight accelerates the loss of these proteins, and it's thought smoking has a similar effect." "The skin becomes less elastic, and the continual flexing of facial muscles gradually produces wrinkles." "It's been estimated that two hundred thousand frowns are enough to etch in one brow line." "0ne way to test the age of the skin is to pinch the back of the hand and watch what happens." "Young skin springs back quickly." "By the time we've reached our thirties and forties, it's getting a little slower." "And old skin definitely takes its time." "0ne thing's certain, though - they may not be very popular with some people, but nobody's ever died simply because they've got a few wrinkles." " Morning." " Morning." " Seems kind of windy and cold today." " Yes, it is." " Well, Bud, how are you?" " Oh, I'm doing all right." " How are you, Gerald?" " Good, Bud." "Hope we don't get any more rain." "Like many older men, Bud doesn't overwork his barber." "While his friend Gerald still has a full head of hair," "Bud has been both bald and grey for some time now." "("WHEN I'M SIXTY F0UR" PLAYS)" "Baldness is caused by the male sex hormone testosterone, but it's nothing to do with virility." "It might be that a bald man has hair follicles which are just very sensitive to the hormone." "In other words, even small amounts of testosterone can make the hair fall out." "So, unfortunately, the only way to guarantee you don't go bald is to choose your parents with great care or get castrated before reaching puberty." "Women don't usually lose their hair until after the menopause." "They make small amounts of the male hormone, testosterone, and with the reduction of female hormones at the menopause, the effect of their testosterone becomes more marked, and this could be the cause of hair loss." "For the same reason, some women grow a light beard at that time." "A hair grows at the rate of a centimetre a month, so for those of us who have a full head of hair, what that means is that during this programme, we will grow a metre and a half on our scalp." "Around one thousand kilometres over a lifetime." "Whether your hair curls or not depends to some extent on where you're from." "Asian hair is circular in cross section, so it tends to hang straight." "Black people have hair which is a flat oval, so it naturally tends to form tight curls." "Caucasians or white Europeans have hair halfway between the two, so they tend to have slightly wavy hair." "White Europeans tend to go grey earlier in life than black or Asian people." "Again, it's down to genetics." "Despite all the stories about people going completely grey overnight, it's impossible." "However, it can happen over a few days, as long as you're partly grey to start with." "It's thought a sudden shock can sometimes make the coloured hair fall out, leaving the grey behind." " Think that'll be good enough for you, Gerald?" " Yeah, looks good." "Well, I hope so, I'm running out of hair." "That's the time to quit, when you run out of hair." "When you get to Bud, you're gonna have to find his to cut it." "Just about as long as it takes on mine." "But while testosterone makes men lose hair from their head, it produces more vigorous growth in other places." "Though it's not always welcome, it tends to be in their ears and noses." "Why testosterone has such differing effects on hair growth is a total mystery." "And body hair is not the only thing." "0ur noses appear to go on growing after we've reached maturity." "But it's not clear if it's real growth or a kind of stretching and sagging." "And the same thing happens to our ears." "All in all, these gradual changes mean that, eventually, we just have to accept the loss of our youthful looks." "I'm making this cake for my forty-fifth wedding anniversary." "I'm going to put some pink roses on it, and little green leaves, and I'm going to put this wedding ornament on it that was on my original cake, when Bud and I got married 45 years ago." "Now, the ribbon's a little tattered and torn, but Bud and I are a little tattered and torn, too, so we'll use that on there, I think." "0n the whole, both Bud and Viola enjoy robust good health." "But as they've got older, they've occasionally had to deal with something serious." "I have always had wonderful health, all of my life, until I was 58 years old, and at that time I came down with spinal meningitis." "In fact, I was doing a big wedding cake for some people, four hundred guests, and I became very ill that day." "So ill in fact that Viola became unconscious." "She was rushed to hospital and, apart from anything else, it looked as if she and Bud would miss a holiday together." "Then, whilst she was in the coma, one of the children came up with a bright idea." "and she opened her eyes and that brought her to." "My eyes flew open and I came out of the coma." "I couldn't believe it." "I couldn't let Bud take another woman on a beautiful trip." "I wanted to go on that trip myself." "0ne trip Bud and Viola are about to make will involve taking that cake to the family reunion for their forty-fifth wedding anniversary." "They're off to meet children they haven't seen for years and grandchildren they've never met." "But it's going to be the trip of a lifetime, because they're also going to visit Alaska." "We've packed enough stuff we can homestead up there." "For years they've longed to see the place, and plan to do it now before it's too late." "But before that, they've decided to stop over to see the big city." "They've heard and read about it all their lives, but have never seen it." "They're going to visit New York for the first time." " Look at that skyline." " Look at that big tower on top there." "Look at that, two of them, see." "Oh, my gosh." " Isn't that marvellous?" " Well, I don't know." "I wouldn't care how marvellous it is, I'd rather go watch the pasture." "Oh, but we never saw anything like this." " No." " Never." " I don't suppose we will again here." " Such tall buildings." " Isn't this bridge something?" " All the cars." " Glad you're not driving today?" " Yes, I am." "I'm glad you aren't driving today, too." " I'd be a nervous wreck by the time we got..." " Well, I'd be more nervous." "And the Waldorf Astoria." "We've heard of that all our lives," " that famous building." " That's a big hotel, ain't it?" "Although being in the big city is both fascinating and exciting, for an elderly couple, it can also be a little bewildering, partly because, in contrast to the relative quiet of the plains of Kansas, here it's noisy." "Very noisy." "And as we get older, our hearing starts to fade a little." "Like all our senses, hearing is both wonderful and extraordinary in the way it works." "The fleshy outer ear collects the sounds that surround us, and channels them down the ear canal to vibrate the ear drum." "0n the other side of the drum, the vibrations are transmitted via the middle ear by minute bones." "These are the only bones that stop growing soon after birth." "An adult has ear bones the same size as a new-born baby." "0ne of them is the smallest bone in the body." "Known as the stirrup, it's about the size of a grain of rice." "The stirrup rests on the oval window of the inner ear and passes vibrations through it." "0n the other side is something rather intriguing." "Called the cochlea, it's a small bony spiral tube." "It's the key to how we hear the vast range of sounds we do." "If we zoom right the way in with an electron microscope, we should see something remarkable:" "the secret of how sound is transmitted to the brain." "There are rows of minute hairs only a few thousandths of a millimetre high." "As noise vibrates them, they send electrical signals to the brain which we experience as sound." "It's fascinating to watch and we're about to see it happen." "Take a closer look at these V shapes." "They are in fact clusters of three lines of hairs which are part of a built-in amplifying system." "Now, if we take a look below, we should see the rest of the amplifier." "There we are." "The hairs are sticking out of a cell underneath shaped like a sausage." "It's actually been possible to isolate one of these hair cells, so let's see what it does when we play it some music." "You might recognise the tune." "("R0CK AR0UND THE CL0CK" PLAYS)" "The joint's jumping, literally." "The excited response of these hair cells amplifies the faint vibrations that arrive from outside." "And they do it so well that we can actually hear the sound of a pin drop." "Unfortunately, from the moment we are born, one by one hair cells start to die." "And those that register high frequenices die off first." "The damage here is where hair cells have failed." "Because of the loss of these hair cells, by the age of ten we've heard a greater range of sound than we'll ever hear in the rest of our lives." "As we get older, some people continue to hear relatively well, but in others, so many of the amplifying hair cells have gone that they can only hear loud noises." "Most cannot hear high frequencies any more." "So the sound of the New York subway which younger people might hear as something like this... (L0UD METALLIC WH00SHING)" "..would instead be heard like this." "(DULLER, MUFFLED WH00SHING)" "I'd like to get off this." "Oh, no, I could ride this all day." "0bviously, if older people's hearing is fading a little and their eyes are not as good as they were, their brains just have to cope as best they can." "And some think this is why older people can sometimes appear easily confused and bewildered." "It's not so much that their intelligence is waning, although some brain cells will have been lost." "The brain has to work harder to make sense of the limited information it gets from the outside world." "This leaves fewer brain cells for memory and decision-making, and might account for the confusion, especially in strange and noisy places." "I never thought I'd see New York." "So many people, cars, and so much noise and everything, that you just can't quite sort it all out." "Well, I can't." "My neck's almost sore from looking up all the time, they're so tall in the big city." "But I really enjoyed seeing it." "Couldn't have dreamed of coming to some place like this when I was a child." "It was a faraway, distant place." "It's wonderful to be able to do this in our lifetime." "Later on the trip, Bud and Viola meet up with some of their children and grandchildren." "By the age of 70, we'll have lost about a third of our muscle strength." "But we needn't have." "Regular exercise will help us retain it." "So, as a physically active cattle rancher, it's perhaps not surprising that Bud does as well as his grandchildren." "But there's something else that can happen, and we can see it with the help of a special camera." "A thermal camera can detect differences in the heat emerging from various parts of the body." "And it's used by doctors to detect something that's different, something that's wrong." "Margaret was out walking one day, when she felt a sudden sharp pain in her leg." "To the naked eye, there's not much difference between her two knees, but, to the thermal camera, there definitely is." "0ne knee has a cool blue and green colour." "But the other knee has a different colour." "It has a hotspot in red." "Let's take a more detailed look at that knee joint." "Where the thigh bone and the shin bone meet, they're protected by a membrane of cartilage." "Take away the bones for a moment, and we're left with that cup-shaped membrane." "If we take a look inside, yes, with wear and tear, a small hole has developed in the membrane, and the two bones have come in contact." "As they touch each other and grind together, the surfaces are damaged, and without treatment the joint can become extremely painful." "It's called osteo-arthritis, and affects many elderly people." "Although physically very fit, Bud has osteo-arthritis in both knees." " No more chocolate." " No more chocolate for you." "Although they're joking, Viola's distorted image in the mirror is very similar to what happens to women when they put on weight." "Fat tends to settle around the hips and bottom, and there's a difference between the sexes." "When a rather plump man is scanned in a special X-ray machine, it's possible to see the outline of the layers of fat." "Men tend to put it on around the waist, so they become apple-shaped." "Some believe this happens because of a drop in the sex hormone testosterone." "It's thought it can reduce as a result of age and stress." "Fat around the waist tends to get into the bloodstream easily, increasing the risk of diabetes and heart disease in men." "The inside walls of young arteries are smooth and clean." "But after years of a diet high in saturated fat, old arteries can start to look clogged." "This can trigger blood clots and block the vital circulation to the heart." "Female sex hormones tend to make fat accumulate around the bottom, as it did at puberty when a woman first developed her adult shape." "This is a safer place, in that the fat here is inclined to stay put and not circulate in the blood." "Women become pear-shaped in comparison to men." "Bud and Viola journey on to the family reunion and Alaska." "All in all, ageing means lots of changes as we go through our lives, but perhaps the more interesting question is not so much how we change, but rather why do we change at all?" "Ageing is one of the greatest paradoxes of human biology." "It turns out that our bodies are constantly renewing themselves." "0ur skin is continuously being replaced." "Most of the dust we find at home is dead skin that's fallen off us as new cells are substituted." "Just rubbing your arm produces a minor dust storm of dead skin cells." "Likewise, the lining of the gut is continuously replaced, so that there is in effect a total change every three days." "All this is done by making copies of cells." "The new cells then take the place of the old cells." "It's going on all the time." "The blood is replaced three times a year, parts of the skeleton every four years." "So extraordinary is this process of copying and renewal that very little of our bodies is actually more than ten years old." "But if our bodies are perpetually being renewed in this way, why do we gradually start to look old?" "Why don't we all look the way we did when we were young and in our prime?" "You can understand why we don't look the way we did as a child, after all we were still growing." "But having reached maturity, why don't we continue to look that way for the rest of our lives?" "Well, one possible explanation as to why I no longer look as I did when I was a medical student may be due to faults in the renewal process itself." "Renewal involves making copies:" "copies of skin cells, blood cells, bone cells, all sorts of cells." "And copying can have its problems." "Suppose we recorded this programme onto this cassette and then copied from this one onto this, and did so backwards and forwards maybe half a dozen times." "What would be the effect of all that copying?" "Well, we've done it, so let me show you." "You'd get an image which looks something like this." "The copying process is not perfect." "Mistakes are made." "And although I'm still recognisable, the picture's starting to look the worse for wear." "In terms of the human body, we call these mistakes ageing." "Moreover, the older the person, i.e. the copying machine, the more frequent are the mistakes." "And of course, if we carry on copying for too long, we'll eventually reach the point where we disappear altogether." "That's one theory why we age." "But another has it that we grow old because of something that is actually vital for life - oxygen." "We tend to think of oxygen as healthy and essential for life." "But this is the other side of it." "This blazing inferno, like all fires, requires oxygen for its power." "And despite this protective suit, I'm well aware of the power." "It's getting hotter every minute." "Just like all fires, we too require oxygen." "0ur bodies need it every second of our lives." "Yet it turns out that over years, oxygen can be as damaging and dangerous as these flames." "Steel can resist fire, but not the effects of oxygen, because that leads to rust." "Rust is caused by a highly reactive type of oxygen called free radicals." "0ver time, free radicals have the power to corrode and destroy even the largest steel structures." "Some of the oxygen we breathe in turns into the dangerous free radical form." "This type of oxygen has a habit of ripping bits out of molecules, damaging them in the process." "As these loose cannon roam around our bodies, they can play havoc as they start to damage our cells and tissues." "Many now believe years of accumulated damage by free radicals are an important cause of ageing." "And what's more, it's not just breathing oxygen that puts us at risk." "We can get free radicals into our bodies in all sorts of ways." "Too much sun increases them, and we can pick them up from tobacco smoke and air pollution, and eating things like barbecued meat." "But some foods are rich in anti-oxidents, and these can destroy free radicals." "These foods include fresh fruit and vegetables, and, I'm glad to say, a glass of red wine." "Free radical damage is one theory." "There are many more." "With the onslaught of free radicals and the like, the question inevitably arises, how do we manage to live for so long?" "The answer might be out in space." "0ne possible reason is because we're built rather like the thing that all this is listening to." "Right now, this satelitte dish is peering at the far edge of our own solar system." "It's listening to the faint signals of the most distant object ever made by humans, about six and a half billion miles away." "It's the Voyager space probe, and it started its journey twenty years ago on a voyage of discovery." "Two of them were launched, and their original mission was to relay information about the planets" "Jupiter and Saturn." "By 1981, they'd achieved that original goal." "But they were built so well that they went on to do much more." "Amazingly, they're still sending back information as they head out into interstellar space." "But the point is, to be doubly sure they achieved their original goal, they were over-engineered, built so robustly that they're capable of surviving into very old age." "Just like us, in fact, though our original goal was to make sure we have children." "But can over-engineering really explain why we live so very long?" "After all, we have by far the longest lifespan of any other mammal, and we live way beyond an age when we can first have children." "Well, it could, but first we need to think about what we've been over-engineered to do." "Perhaps it's not just to have children and become parents, but to become grandparents." "Arriving at the family reunion for their forty-fifth anniversary, Bud and Viola encounter something that would be very puzzling in other animals - grandchildren." "Arguably, in evolutionary terms, all we have to do is live long enough to have children, and rear them successfully so that they carry on our genes." "That's what other animals do." "Yet Bud and Viola's children have had children of their own, and Bud and Viola are still around." "So if we're capable of living long enough to become grandparents, how has this affected our bodies and the way we age?" "Well, one thing, and it seems rather strange, happens to women as they get older." "It's the menopause, and it's virtually unique in the animal world." "For women, it marks the end of their child-bearing years, and it's a bit of a mystery." "Men can often produce fertile sperm throughout their lifetime." "At the age of a hundred, a man is, in theory at least, capable of siring a child." "But that's definitely not the case for a woman." "At birth, she has about two million eggs in her two ovaries." "From puberty, they start to be released." "At the rate of one per month, there should be enough to last a lifetime and longer, but there aren't." "Most of the eggs die, until, around the age of fifty, the body stops releasing eggs altogether." "In effect, the store has been used up." "Some scientists believe that the menopause has evolved as we've come to live so long." "The menopause helps us make the most of our long lives by becoming effective grandparents." "The reason is, to continue to give birth to children in an ageing body is dangerous for both mother and child." "Better for her to stop having her own children, and instead to concentrate on taking care of her grandchildren." "After all, they are carrying her genes." "So the menopause helps us make the most of old age." "I said humans are almost unique in this, but not quite, because interestingly there's one other animal where the female has a menopause, and that's the pilot whale." "Many elderly female whales spend many years caring for the offspring of their offspring - being grannies, in fact." "It's controversial, but some feel this supports the idea that there's a similar purpose for the human menopause." "At the end of their trip, Bud and Viola have reached Alaska." "The natural cycle of life is birth and then eventually death." "I guess I sit here around this beautiful surrounding here in Alaska..." "I can see before my eyes the creation going on." "The small trees that are coming on, the tall trees that are a symbol of middle life, and then I can see the dead trees," " all within a few feet of me." " That's the process we go through." "There's no other way of getting around it." "They've never found a youth pill that'll keep you going." "(VI0LA) I don't worry about dying, I think it's just the next step in life, and life goes on after that, so it's out of my hands, and when that happens," "whichever one of us is left, the other one will find the strength to cope." "(BUD) When my time comes, there's nothing I can do about it but go." "And I want to stick around as long as I can." "We tend to think that the human capacity for art, science and technology is what marks us out." "But though we don't often see it this way, perhaps our ability to live to a ripe old age is the human body's greatest achievement." " Happy anniversary!" " Happy anniversary!" "(T0GETHER) One...two...three..." "We go about our daily lives hardly ever considering our final fate." "Yet at every moment, we are surrounded by death." "Around 60 people will die in the United Kingdom before the end of this programme." "We seldom witness death. 0ften our only experience is from films and television, which can present it as a violent and painful event." "We are reluctant to face up to our own mortality, to confront the truth that in the midst of life, we are in death." "In this final part of the story of the human body, we take a difficult journey to see what happens when this mass of biological activity ceases to be, to see how all the previous ages of our existence are undone in the final act." "The processes of death in the human body are remarkable." "This is what it would look like if you could see the human body cool down over 24 hours." "Death comes not as a single quick event, but a slow winding down." "It is difficult to say when every cell in the body ceases to have life." "Long before we stop breathing, our brain may die, our personality lost for ever." "But the biology of death can seem cold, and distant from the human story." "(MAN, GERMAN ACCENT) I want to die at home because it is not nice to die in a hospital." "There's nothing in there, you're only a number there, you know." "At home you can die in peace." "Herbie and his wife Hannelorre fell in love with Ireland, and decided to move here from Germany in 1981." "We started filming Herbie a year after he learnt he had a fatal cancer." "I was driving in the car to Loch Rae, and on the way to Loch Rae, I collapsed." "I had pain in the stomach, here in this area." "Then we called an ambulance, and they took me to hospital in Galway." "The surgeon told Hannelorre it was very bad." "The tumour was the size of two soccer balls - very big." "It's hard to get it into your head." "When you first hear the news, it's like a shock, and you can't really think about it." "There's only a couple of months, and, all the ideas - it's terrible!" "It's now 0ctober." "As the tumour expands in Herbie's stomach region, it threatens vital organs." "The doctors are amazed that his body has been able to cope for this long." "A couple of months ago, we created this small garden here." "I got from a good friend from Switzerland a couple of roses and planted them here, because when I die and get cremated," "Hannelorre will put the ashes, afterwards, around these roses that you see here." "This is my greatest wish and my will, where I want to be buried forever." "And my spirit is around the land, and the house." "The modern way to die is often hidden from view in the sanitised world of the hospital." "But we have not always been so uneasy about confronting death." "In the Capuchin catacombs in Sicily, 8,000 bodies are preserved." "Here, families would come to visit their loved ones." "To our eyes, this may seem a gruesome spectacle, but to 19th-century Sicilians, death was not something to recoil from in fear and dread." "Walking along these narrow corridors," "I must confess to feeling both fascinated and repulsed by this spectacle of death." "For today it's death, not sex, which is the last taboo." "But an understanding of what happens to us when we die can do much to ease our fears and dispel our anxieties." "The human body has many attributes which are unique, but I think our ability to face our own death is perhaps the most remarkable." " Are you comfortable there, Herbie?" " Yeah, that's OK." "Herbie, together with Hannelorre, has decided to let us film the final moments of his life." "I know I will never see this film in my lifetime." "(D0CT0R) No, it has spilled out a little bit more here, on top," " hasn't it, over the last week?" " Yes, yes." "I like it that everybody can see that a human being can manage an illness like mine." "Everybody can see in this film that there is a way to make the best of the end of your life." "OK, that seems fine." "Your bowel sounds are perfectly normal." "How is your energy at the moment?" "I can walk around, so my energy's good." "I can't lift much any more, I'm not so strong." "Herbie receives regular visits from his local hospice workers." "They look after his pain control and help Herbie and Hannelorre cope with the prospect of his dying." "They're gorgeous." "They've gotten so big, haven't they?" "Oh, they're lovely." "The hospice worker and I, we talk very close together, and we trust each other." "I'm not worried about when I die, tomorrow, today, in a couple of months." "I know what's coming, and I face it." "Death seems an entirely cruel and negative event, bringing loss and bereavement." "Yet, from the very start, there is a fundamental link between life and death in our bodies." "0ur bodies are built from organised colonies of cells." "What we see when we look at ourselves are vast communities of cells, billions of them." "Each one plays a particular role - a heart cell, a muscle cell, a brain cell." "In an incredible act of harmony and organisation, they work together, performing the functions of the organ they belong to." "From the very start of our lives, this tireless dedication to duty often requires our cells to die." "Some cells in the foetus actually receive signals to self-destruct." "Here, the developing hand grows as an enormous bundle of cells." "Then cells are systematically destroyed, sculpting the fingers and the gaps between, in much the same way a sculptor chips away a block of stone." "From the very beginning of the human body's journey, death becomes an essential part of life." "Under the microscope, we can see how cells are destroyed." "This process continues throughout our lives, as cells become damaged, or just worn out." "During the course of this programme, around a billion cells in your body will die." "This programmed cell death keeps us healthy and alive." "In this way we can think of death as part of the creative force of life." "But do our own deaths play a part in the larger human story?" "Are we like cells in some cosmic machine, our deaths serving a greater unseen purpose?" "Well, sadly not." "It seems that death is the price we pay for having sex." "When we have sex, we can create new life." "But we do not just produce copies of ourselves." "Each one of these babies is unique, the result of the particular mix of their parents' genes." "Through evolution, winning combinations of genes get passed on from generation to generation." "This process, which we call natural selection, has speeded up our ability to adapt and evolve." "Without sex, and the mixing of genes, we would never have evolved into such complex organisms." "But as individuals, we do pay a price for such success." "0nce you've had sex and passed on your genes, your job is done." "You hand over the genetic baton and the relay race carries on without you." "Your own fate is unimportant, and death waits to catch you up." "So, it seems that we are just vehicles for our genetic material." "We die. 0nly our genes are immortal." "With the arrival of winter in Ireland, Herbie's health gradually declines." "He has good days and he has bad days." "Hannelorre phoned this morning and said that you had a lot of pain." " Was it during the night or this morning?" " It was the whole night." "When he wake me this morning before 5 o'clock," "I looked at him and said to myself, this is the time that he is dying, or something." " He was so sick?" " Everything was so different." "His face, it was so strange to me." "When I saw you, you were in agony." "And this is only with the pain." "I don't like the pain." "I was so frightened...it's unbelievable." "I was thinking, it's the end, it's the end of...his life, but he was lucky enough." "He's a very strong person, and he fights." " I hope I'll see the springtime." " Oh, but you will." "Why won't you?" " Keep doing what you're doing now." " I had a couple of bad moments." "Very bad." "Very, very bad." "A couple of weeks ago, at that time I thought I was dying, honestly." "Ever since, I've had this syringe driver here, because of the pain." "The syringe driver." "It just runs automatically, 24 hours." "When I have trouble with pain, I can give myself a boost." "Now I get a bit extra." "When I'm in pain, it is very, very bad." "I get in a bad mood, and feel low, you know." "I can't do anything, neither lie down nor sit." "No matter what," "I have to have this medication." "I can't do without it any more." "Modern advances in pain relief mean that we can now control many aspects of dying." "And our modern medicine has also changed many of the causes of death." "Better health care, combined with better nutrition and cleaner water, mean that we now live twice as long as we did a hundred years ago." "We are more likely to die from the diseases of old age, such as cancer, stroke, and the number one killer, heart disease." "Today, heart disease kills a quarter of the population in the western world." "The most violent form is the heart attack." "'He wanders to the outside." "He's gotta look on his backside." "He hit the 40.'" "(AMERICAN ACCENT) I was sitting in this chair watching a football game on television." "I got my first surge of pain from my heart to the right side of my chest." "The pain started to travel in my back, to my back area, and I figured that it was a heart attack." "The human heart pumps 7,500 litres of blood a day." "These small arteries, less than a millimetre wide, supply blood to the heart muscle." "Here, a tiny blockage is hampering the supply to one of the arteries." "They had me on the table at about 12 o'clock, and I watched on a monitor as they went through each of my arteries." "It was one little clot that caused all that problem." "The patient starts to feel a variety of symptoms." "I literally felt the pain start from the centre of my chest, and I felt the whole thing go down both arms." "It was almost like my chest was in a vice and I was being crushed as the vice was being turned, tighter and tighter." "(HIGH-PITCHED BEEP)" "When the cardiologist came in, he had seen my EKG, and he went into the hall with the other doctors and interns and so on," "Severe attacks can lead to cardiac arrest, where the heart stops beating altogether." "Now, the blockage stops the flow of blood." "Starved of oxygen and glucose, it is only minutes before the heart muscle dies." "Time is running out." "Electrical instability causes the heart to beat erratically." "As the heart quivers, it is unable to pump the blood around the body." "This is the critical moment." "Without a supply of blood, the brain fails within five minutes." "Then breathing and respiration stops." "Death is moments away." "In a few moments, this beating human heart will be stopped, this time not by a heart attack, but for an operation." "The patient is no longer breathing." "A machine takes over the task of the heart and lungs." "A small electric current breaks the heart's rhythmic beat, leaving it quivering, as if gripped by a heart attack." "(SURGE0N) OK, that's better." " Now the heart's just twitching?" " Just flickering." "This is a heart bypass operation." "While the heart is not moving, the surgeon can reroute blood vessels to parts of the heart muscle where clogged arteries are restricting the flow." "Another stitch, please..." "The bizarre thing is, that if I saw somebody in this condition outside the operating theatre," "I'd think they were dead." "He's no pulse, he's not breathing, and the heart's not beating at all." "A little bit towards me, please." "Yet, in a short time, this patient will be awake and chatting with his family." "These days, we can't decide that a person is dead just by seeing if their heart has stopped." "Instead, we look to the brain, and to one vital part - the brainstem." "Buried at the back of the head, the brainstem is a relic of our ancient past." "Millions of years ago, this was all the brain our distant ancestors had." "They were primitive creatures;" "in fact, it is still called the reptile brain." "Evolution has buried it under layers of a more complex brain, but it is still the foundation of life." "It controls our most basic functions:" "keeping our heart beating, breathing, regulating blood pressure and the body's temperature." "That's why, when the brainstem dies, doctors can be certain that a patient is clinically dead." "(W0MAN) I had to take them out of the water this morning." "(HERBIE J0KES IN GERMAN)" "Isn't he horrible!" "(HERBIE) Now we're ready for Christmas." "(HANNEL0RRE) Happy Christmas, Herbie." "Christmastime was really nice, as Herbie was feeling so well, and friends came." "We had a lovely dinner, and Herbie had three glasses of champagne." "But when the new year started, he got weak and he got depressed." "I thought that every day he was going downhill." "This was for me very disappointing and sad." "I wanted..." "I decided to get an injection..." "You know, I didn't want to live any more feeling like this." "You know, normally I'm not a man who gives up so quickly, never." "But at that moment I wanted to give up." "So, I asked the nurse," "And I agreed with this." "My feeling is," "I have maybe only a couple of weeks to live, that's my real feeling." "(ALARM S0UNDS)" "Oops-a-daisy." "Now." "Up..." "So." "One moment." " There." " OK?" "First I have to stand up for a moment, for a while, to walk around and get everything settled before I can move around a little bit now." "When someone dies, we miss all the things which make them human:" "their personality, their unique identity, their emotion and warmth." "What is that sense of being, that consciousness which goes?" "Is there a place in our brain where it can be found?" "In this experiment, we will be able to see the brain at work." "A hundred and twenty eight sensors pick up tiny electrical signals emitted as my brain cells fire." "This is the pattern produced when I am relaxed." "All this activity is simply the result of doing nothing." "As soon as I open my eyes, the brain leaps into action." "Even the simple task of watching television involves my brain in millions of actions." "A single second stretched into a thousand steps shows swirls of activity sweeping all over my head." "First, the information travels to the back of my brain." "From there, the activity moves through the short-term memory areas, and then to the front of the brain, the part actually involved in thinking." "The question is, can we find a single part of the brain that gives me my sense of myself, that makes me Robert Winston?" "Well, it seems that the brain is just a bit more complicated than that." "In fact, it appears to work something like an orchestra." "There are areas that do different things:" "the string section, the conductor, the brass players." "But the output - the music, if you like - isn't just about the areas that work, but about the order that they work in." "Just as an orchestra can produce an infinite variety of music, depending on which instruments play, and when, so, too, the brain can produce limitless results, depending on the sequence in which the clusters of brain cells connect." "But the brain has more than a hundred musicians making music." "If you counted the connections between cells, just on the surface, it would take you 32 million years." "This sheer complexity leads scientists to believe it is our brain, taken as a whole, that creates our conscious self, the self we lose when we die." " Hi, Herbie." "Look who's here." " Hello, Dr Murphy." " Hello, Herbie." "How are you?" " Nice to see you." "Good to see you, always." "I come out here to get cheered up." "It keeps me away from ordinary patients." "Any complaints?" "Herbie's tumour presses against vital organs, such as the liver and kidneys." "That's good, Herbie." "That's lovely, no change." "They keep our cells healthy by regulating the delicate chemical balances in the body." "Show me your pulse, Herbie." "It's very important." "If these organs fail, the balance is lost, and the body can no longer sustain life." "Is your brother coming to see you?" " My brother is coming tonight." " So that'll be fun." " Maybe it's the last time I'll see him." " Oh, I don't think so." "I hope not." "I feel it myself, it's coming to the end now." " You think that?" " I feel it, yeah." " And that doesn't worry you unduly?" " No, it doesn't worry me." "I KNOW it." "I think you're extraordinary." " Sunday's his birthday." " It's your birthday?" "I didn't know that." "So what age will you be?" " Sixty-three." " Sixty-three." "Not a bad age." "I'm absolutely delighted that I can see another springtime." "The season has changed." "The weather is a little better, the sun is coming out." "Anyway, I'm a man, I like nature, the flowers and the trees, when they start to bloom." "I never know what will happen tomorrow." "The tumour in my belly is a time bomb." "A real time bomb." "I never know what will happen tomorrow, and I enjoy the moment, every day." "We can never know what it's like to die." "But some people have come very close to death, only to revive at the final moment to tell the tale." "Their near-death experiences might offer some insight into what happens in the dying brain." "I was in a motorcycle accident in which I suffered a fractured skull and numerous broken bones in my head." "It was at that point that I felt myself separating from my body and entering into the near-death experience." "I became aware that I was in a tunnel, there's no other way of describing it." "You couldn't see it, you could sense it." "And then, down in the distance, you could see this little speck of light, which gradually got bigger and bigger, as it would if you were in a tunnel, and there's light at the end of it." "(W0MAN) We travelled at some great speed and distance through the tunnel." "Everything that ever was, is, and will be was contained in this radiance." "Nearly all who have come close to death give the same accounts of out-of-body sensations and tunnels of light." "Similar experiences are also reported by fighter pilots when, subjected to massive acceleration, they lose consciousness." "Video tapes are on, platform and gunwale have been secured." "Flight deck is ready." "This is the world's largest centrifuge." "It is used to investigate the effects of high G forces on pilots." "Subjects can be spun so fast that the blood drains from their brain and they black out." "OK, the run will begin on my mark." "Three, two, one, mark." "We feel that our investigation of loss of consciousness is about as close as you can get to investigating that next state, death." "As the subject enters G-L0C, a gravity-induced loss of consciousness, their experiences are recorded." "I can't get to the damned thing." " Is there a light loss?" " Shit, I don't know where I am." "The sensations that we have associated with blackout nearly always include a tunnelling of the vision down to a central point where you just have light ahead of you." "So why do extreme G forces and near-death experiences produce the effect of seeing tunnels of light?" "While the brain is starved of oxygen, neurones which deal with vision fire at random." "This creates the sensation of bright light." "As there are more neurones devoted to the centre of our visual field, and less at the edges, the light appears to be brightest in the centre, creating a tunnel effect." "Had I had the choice, I would never have wanted to leave." "This was just so perfect, so wonderful." "Can't describe it, it was just total love, happiness, bliss, knowledge." "Three, two, one, pressure." "Just try to relax, you're 100%." "I've had about 35 loss-of-consciousness episodes." "Nearly all of those have been such that they are very pleasant, and almost give you a sense of euphoria." "The sensations of euphoria may be because the brain releases opiate-like substances to relieve the acute distress and pain." "These produce hallucinations in the parts of the brain that deal with memories and emotions." "This research has certainly allowed me to have a much greater understanding and reduction in the fear associated with losing consciousness and then dying." "I believe when I'm dead, I'm dead, and that's it." "There is no other life." "There is nothing." "When you die, you have gone, for ever." "You can say, dust to dust." "Dust, it's what's left - nothing." "A handful of ash is left." "(HANNEL0RRE) Monday." "It was just a normal day." "We had breakfast together." "Just like every day." "When we went to sleep, everything was normal." "On the Tuesday morning, Herbie called me around 5 o'clock." "He said - his breathing was very heavy, and he was feeling very uncomfortable " "When I talk to him now, do you think he can hear me?" "The hearing is the last thing to go, even when they cannot speak." "That's why it's so important never to say anything that you wouldn't say if they were in their full senses." "People who have recovered from being at death's door have told how they heard every single thing that was said." "It's most important never to...you know." "(HANNEL0RRE SPEAKS GERMAN)" "Herbie wants something." "He's reaching there, for the holder." "In the final hours, Herbie receives visits from friends." "Brendan and his young daughter, 0rla, come to see him for the last time." "Just put those into Herbie's hand." "Hold his hand, because he's lovely and warm." "If I was loaded with morphine I think I'd be pretty warm, too." "Herbie hasn't got long for this world, I suppose." "But he can hear you when you speak to him." "(BRENDAN) He's been preparing for this for a long time." "(HANNEL0RRE) Sing him the song about the heather." " Why not?" " Yeah, please." "You know the chorus?" "Will you go, lassie, go?" " Yes." " OK." "Oh, the summertime is comin'," "And the leaves are sweetly blooming'," "And the wild mountain thyme" "Grows around the bloomin' heather." "Will you go, lassie, go?" "And we'll all go together," "To pluck wild mountain thyme" "All around the bloomin' heather." "Will you go, lassie, go?" "The last time I walked in here, I did the same." "I'm not going to be deprived now." "Herbie, take care." "Hello, Doctor Murphy." "It's Peggy, the nurse with the hospice." "I'm with Herbie at the moment." "He's very rattly at the moment." "By morning, Herbie's breathing becomes increasingly noisy." "It's a very common condition." "It doesn't trouble Herbie, and is easily helped by medication." " I don't think he has pain, it's..." " No, no, it's not pain." "It's only this rattling, and this shaking." "It just started." "It just started today, this morning?" "Just before I came in?" "He was shaking like this." " Is this normal?" " It happens." "It does happen." "Hey, love." "(SHE SPEAKS GENTLY IN GERMAN)" "Happy?" "Mmm?" "(SPEAKS GERMAN)" "Now you're in peace." "Now you're in peace." "Mary..." "Herbie's just died." "Yeah." "OK." "Yeah." "(HANNEL0RRE SPEAKS GERMAN)" "Cause of death is this inoperable huge cancer that he had, retroperitoneal liposarcoma." "His heart gave away, then his lungs failed, his liver failed, his kidneys failed." "General failure, due to the effect of the cancer over the last one and a half years." "It's extraordinary that he has lived so long." "(SPEAKS GERMAN)" "(HANNEL0RRE) Afterwards, when they laid him down, he was so peaceful-looking, he was really nice-looking." "I couldn't cry." "I couldn't cry." "It was just... nice." "For me it was a relief that Herbie is now in peace, and everything is over, for him." "Not for me, but for him." "I was happy for him." "We find it hard to contemplate our own deaths, to imagine that one day we will no longer live in this world." "But there is a way in which our bodies continue after we die." "The cells in our bodies are made up of atoms which have existed since the start of the universe." "They are constantly being exchanged and recycled, so what today are our bodies were once parts of plants, animals, trees - indeed, other humans." "And in the future - well, this journey that each of us takes from birth to death is just one tiny step in a much bigger journey, part of an endless repeating cycle, from life to death." "For the summertime is comin'," "And the leaves are sweetly blooming'," "And the wild mountain thyme" "Grows around the bloomin' heather." "Will you go, lassie, go?" "And we'll all go together." "To pluck wild mountain thyme" "All around the bloomin' heather." "Will you go, lassie, go?" "Dear friends, it was Herbie's wish to read his epilogue before we spread the ashes around the roses." "In 1981, my wife Hannelorre and I decided to go to live in peace and harmony in Ireland." "(HANNEL0RRE AND HERBIE) I can look back on many fulfilling years with her." "(HERBIE) And I thank her, deeply, for sharing her life with me." "My wish is that all my friends and neighbours live together in peace, without jealousy and animosity." "May you all hold me in good memory." "(BRENDAN) Will you go, lassie, go?" "Sing it like Herbie would." "And we'll all go together." "To plant wild mountain thyme" "All around the bloomin' heather." "Will you go, lassie, go?"