"Human beings are the most advanced animal on the planet." "We've invented machines which allow us to leave the earth." "We've designed instruments to study the furthest reaches of the universe." "How did our brains come to have this extraordinary capacity for perpetual innovation?" "Although we share nearly 99% of our genes with chimpanzees, there is a gulf separating us from the animal most closely related to us." "There's a fundamental difference between humans and chimpanzees." "However clever they may appear, it seems to me that their agenda is still relatively basic - their main concerns are eating, mating and avoiding danger." "But we are different." "Unlike any other animal on the planet there's something special about our brains that gives us a unique ability to look way beyond mere survival." "Chimpanzees may be highly intelligent and they may have complex social lives, but even the rudiments of human civilisation seem to be missing." "Chimpanzees are capable of fine hand movements but they have no interest in making art or clothing" "They show no ability to invent new technologies, and constantly improve them, the way we do." "So what is the special feature exclusive to our human brains that has lifted us out of the jungle and placed us this side of the glass?" "The average human brain is roughly three times as big as a chimpanzees." "They look very similar but how different is the inner circuitry?" "As our mass of cortex expanded what changes might have taken place inside which could transform our lives so completely?" "One mental skill which seems to lie at the heart of human behaviour is the ability to work towards a goal," "to devise a plan of action, to juggle possibilities, to keep track of changing circumstances as we keep the end goal in mind." "These are essential ingredients of modern life." "We're always working to a mental plan." "How might our brains achieve all this?" "Clues come from looking at people who have lost this fundamental ability." "When I went to Vietnam I got into a recon unit, and I was there two weeks when they promoted me to sergeant" "I followed the rules, I was not a garrison soldier as the word goes." "I was what they called a blood soldier." "We were on patrol and ran into a bloody nosed ambush and a grenade came in, the man in front of me and the man behind me were both killed." "I just came out with a few holes in me." "X rays revealed that shrapnel from the grenade had penetrated the front of Michael's brain." "Michael has undergone a rather dramatic transformation." "Before his injury he was a bright, and very promising and assertive soldier." "And subsequent to his injury Michael became unemployable, made many mistakes in social behaviours and relations and has to live a much more limited life now." "Demoted and eventually discharged from the army," "Michael has been unable to hold down a steady job." "He's now working under supervision as a hospital janitor." "He's a troubled young man, he doesn't know himself what he's doing or where he's going." "He has no rhyme or reason for what he wants to do." "Whereas before he did have" "A lot of times when you see him or he comes to visit, it's, he's lost he's aimless." "And you ask him, what would you do and what would you like to do, and well it depends on his mood that day, he either shrugs his shoulders and "l don't know", or "I'd like to get a real nice car," which has nothing to do with anything." "I'm going to start out by giving you ten chips." "Each chip is worth five cents." "Dr Jordan Grafman is trying to establish why Michael's life has fallen apart." "What aspects of his mental abilities have suffered because of the damage to his frontal lobe?" "This gambling task is designed to testhis ability to weigh up the likely consequences of his actions." "The point of the test, is to see at what stage in the game he decides to stop." "Do you want to stop or do you want to continue?" "Continue." "High cards, Mike wins a chip." "Ten or less and he loses one." "The cards are deliberately arranged to give him a good winning streak." "Followed by a steady run of losses" "Normally, people stop while they're ahead." "Continue." "should have kept it!" "Continue" "That's it, we're at the end." "You gave me back all your chips." "Why didn't you stop earlier?" "I would have stopped on the third low card normally if it was my own money, since it was your chips I was playing with..." "You felt, take a chance." "I'd risk it all." "Despite coming up with what seemed like a rational explanation for his poor performance on this test we know that in real life Michael has a tendency to give away money, so in fact it doesn't hold up under the strains" "and responsibilities of his own daily life." "Michael's personal life has also suffered as a result of his brain damage." "He seems unable to sustain relationships." "He now lives alone, after a series of impulsive marriages." "The first girl I got married to was when I was in the army." "My daughter was raised by my parents, because when the wife and I got divorced my mother thought it would be better if she raised her than me because she didn't think I was fit to raise her." "The second girl that I married, she was a runaway and the reason she ran away from home was because her step mother slapped her." "And I don't even remember asking her to get married." "And the third girl, she was a prostitute." "So she was in a hurry to get married, I don't know why." "The damage to Michael's frontal lobe has destroyed his ability to work towards a long term goal, or to think through the consequences of his actions." "If the situation is well structured and he's given instructions as to what to do," "Michael can perform quite well particularly if the instructions are laid out in a step wise manner." "However as the situation becomes less structured and Michael's forced to rely on his own internal thinking to develop and then execute activities and plans, that's where he begins to have trouble, that's where his distractibility begins to show" "and his difficulty in following ideas and his social problems." "Michael's brain damage also seems to prevent him recognising how much his life has been affected." "I believe it did change me, from what everybody else has told me." "Being on one side of the fence I don't see it, but they see me changed" "So I kind of figure well yeah it changed me, cos I know some things I did I wouldn't have done." "Cases like Michael's strongly suggest that the frontal lobe plays a vital part in allowing us to develop mental action plans for the future, and then to follow them through." "Without this ability, however intelligent Michael may be the opportunities open to him are severely limited" "OK there, I'm going to move you back into the scanner." "At Cambridge University, researchers have developed a series of tests to pinpoint more precisely what special mental skills might arise from our frontal lobes." "Unlike many other areas in the brain that have been pretty well mapped now, we really know very little about the frontal lobe, it remains something of an enigma." "So for example things like seeing, hearing, our ability to move we understand which parts of the brain enable us to do those things, but the frontal lobe we still know very little about what it actually does." "I volunteered to take part in an experiment designed to probe how we think things through in our heads." "The aim is to reorganise the balls at the bottom to match the top pattern." "You can't move a ball if there's another one covering it." "Well done, are you happy with that?" "I am yes." "We'll start the first scan then." "As soon as you see the first problem just start creating solutions." "The task is designed to make me plan the whole sequence of moves in my head, before I start." "Then I have to hold that sequence of moves in mind, as I work through the solution." "A second scan, when I don't have to plan the moves, I just follow instructions, helps filter out any brain activity not directly involved in planning." "We're homing in on which areas of the brain are involved in the higher aspects of planning, over and above the areas that are involved in moving and vision, and all the other components of a normal planning task." "The scans reveal increased activity in a surprisingly small area, so it seems there are specialised regions in the frontal lobe." "Precisely what they're doing, at the nuts and bolts level, we can't yet say." "Fundamentally it seems that our frontal lobe allows us to keep an overall goal in mind, while we simultaneously deal with the here and now." "But how different is that from what chimps can manage?" "For thirty years, scientists at Georgia University outside Atlanta have been studying the mental skills of chimpanzees." "Recently they've been trying to find the limits of their abilities to plan ahead." "OK I'm going to set up the computer right here." "The beauty of the maze task is that it allows us to get a quantitative estimate of the chimpanzee's ability to look ahead in time." "We in our egocentrism have wanted to view that as being a uniquely human characteristic, but indeed there's no reason to believe that the chimpanzee wouldn't have this capability after all they have to forage for food," "they have to deal with defence of themselves and their own kind, they have a lot of yearly planning to do." "So just how good are chimpanzees at planning?" "One of our chimpanzees, Pansy, is essentially a genius at this." "Not only is she excellent in running very complex multiple choice mazes that she's never seen before, but she can do it better than humans in many instances." "This is a remarkable finding." "Not only does Pansy take very few wrong turns, but she can sometimes see the solution to the maze faster than a human." "To be able to look ahead and find that clear way between where she starts and where she ends reflects a very active pre frontal lobe system." "She's a genius." "So the ability to imagine possible solutions, to plan before acting is not a uniquely human skill." "Chimpanzees do plan ahead." "I don't believe that they can plan ahead nearly so far as we can." "I think also that they reflect upon the past, but not to the degree that we do." "I would suggest that chimpanzees are able to plan ahead over the course of several days, whereas we can plan ahead for years or centuries if we wish." "Our modern city life might appear very different to that of any other animals, but it seems in one respect it is very similar." "Our ability to mull over endless possibilities, to deal with distractions and still keep multiple goals in mind, appears mostly to have grown out of a simple expansion in brain size" "But what about the one human ability which for centuries was seen as an absolute divide between us and other animals - language?" "It's language that has triggered the awesome complexity of modern civilisation." "By giving us the means of transmitting knowledge to our children," "language short circuits the need for each generation to start from scratch." "In just a few short years of life each human being will possess thousands of years, of experience." "The rapid development of human culture since the Stone Age would have been impossible without a sophisticated language." "So is there some special physical structure lacking in chimpanzee's brains which accounts for our unique linguistic skills?" "Somewhere in each of our brains the sounds and meanings of thousands of words are stored." "Somewhere there are also mechanisms for stringing words together, to express what we want to say." "A hundred years ago scientists believed that language depended on two key areas in the left hemisphere." "A region behind the ear identified by a German doctor," "Carl Wernicke seemed to be responsible for overall meaning." "It handled word selection and sentence construction." "An area further forward, found by a French doctor Paul Brocka was thought to control the last stage of generating the speech sounds." "Since then a far more complex picture has emerged." ""Ladies and gentlemen," "I'm pleased to participate in this evening's discussion of health considerations in the development of energy sources" ""These considerations have been with us for some time"" "Dr Wilson Talley award winning nuclear physicist, scientific adviser to the American government will never be able to speak like this again, because he suffered a stroke." "Much very nice, it's March 1998, stroke March the 6th sleep... here about 2 pm got up, the bathroom was here," "I went shum and fell down." "This arm very strange." "Wilson has since tried to write an account of what happened in his hotel room, the night he had his stroke." "But the brain damage has affected his ability to express himself, and even to read what he has written." "One two and toilet right here, and we have right all the way and crawled, not sure six minutes, I'm not sure." "Where were you?" "Oh sorry, no..." "New York City." "Wilson took a taxi to catch a flight home to San Francisco" "Only after circling Manhattan did he finally manage to say the name of the airport." "He touched down in San Francisco 1 2 hours after his stroke and was taken to hospital." "You just got your licence again?" "Yeah" "And you've been driving here every day." "A year on he's now able to speak and can even drive himself to the hospital, but his language skills have been badly damaged." "Dr Talley has a great deal of difficulty understanding anything that is said to him or even things that he reads." "And he also has a great deal of difficulty in producing language." "Now what happens when he tries to talk is that the words come out very fluently, but what he says doesn't have a lot of content to it." "He has difficulty in finding the words that he wants, and he has a great deal of difficulty also in producing sentences that are coherent, that really reflect what it is he wants to say." "A brain scan revealed that a haemorrhage had destroyed" "large parts of Wilson's left hemisphere including the whole of Wernicke's area." "But the more stroke patients like Wilson are studied, the more it seems that Wernicke's area cannot be where all comprehension and sentence construction takes place in the brain." "The pattern of brain damage in every stroke patient is different, and measuring precisely how badly someone's linguistic abilities have been affected is also difficult." "Aspirin." "Wilson is constantly trying to use non verbal cues to make sense of things" "In a conversational setting Dr Talley relies very heavily on lots of other kinds of information." "Forget it, you can do it, I can't do it." "He relies on facial expressions, on people's gestures on the way they use the intonation in their voice, and he picks up on all this information to help him understand the situation." "So he gives the impression of understanding almost everything." "Now when we put him in a more controlled testing situation where we remove all of those kinds of cues we find in fact he has unfortunately a very profound language disorder." "Now I'm going to show you a picture, and I'd like you to tell me what's going on in that picture." "OK,... people right here er from here and." "the people right here have come in here very bad and windows right here." "Wilson seems to understand what's going on here, but he's lost the ability to find the right words and then to put them into sentences." "So who do you think broke the window?" "This one here and that one there" "Nina Dronkers has assembled a unique collection of brain scans of stroke patients with language disorders." "It turns out that many have indeed damaged the two classic language areas, but the broader picture reveals a network of many different brain areas which handle specific aspects of language." "We've seen that there are certain patients who have a great deal of trouble really just naming things." "We've found patients who have difficulty understanding the grammatical rules of language." "All of those different kinds of patterns tell us first of all that the process of language is incredibly complex, and also that there must be many different brain areas that sub serve each and every one of those different functions." ""Touch the right circle"" "Patients often seem to recover some of the basic aspects of language." "Like the ability to recognise word sounds, which suggests that these functions don't require their own specialised brain structures." ""Touch the green square"" "Green square." "Unfortunately we rarely see complete total recovery in our aphasic patients" "And the fact is that in most of them, a fairly significant amount of brain has been affected by their injuries, and that it is difficult for other brain areas that have for such a long period of time" "been doing something else to suddenly take on this new function." "And what we think happens is that the remaining brain areas try to take on this task of language, but they do it in their own way." "And unfortunately they're not as good at it as those left hemisphere language mechanisms, because they haven't been doing that all those years." "I'm better, much better but I'm not the same, not here." "But maybe we can do it, maybe." "We're keeping our fingers crossed, and if anybody can do it you can do it." "This one, it's good." "Further evidence that language arises from a network of sites in the brain, comes from the work of Professor George Ojemann." "Here at Washington University in Seattle he has pioneered an impressively direct way to study language in the brain." "His research began as part of a last ditch effort to treat severe epilepsy through surgery." "The challenge is to remove enough of the epileptic brain tissue, without destroying key functions like speech" "To plan exactly what tissue I want to take out there are two pieces of information I want to have." "One is that I want to know where the local epileptic activity is in the brain, and I get that by recording the brain wave activities directly from the cortical surface." "The other is that I want to know where the functionally important things are so I can stay out of them." "Hi, you're in the operating room, can you wake up a bit so we can talk to you, Dr Ojemann's doing his work" "In order to test for language, George Ojemann needs his patients fully awake." "It's a fantastic opportunity to probe the workings of the living brain" "Ojemann stimulates the brain with a tiny electric current" "The patient feels no pain, since there are no pain sensors in the brain" "He maps out the exposed surface with paper numbers, then he stimulates each area in turn." "Please don't move your arm" "I'd like you to count for me now," "I'd like you to start at 1 and just keep counting until I tell you to stop." "Start please 1, 2, 3, 4," "Ojemann has shown that even a basic language function" "like counting relies on a wide spread network of sites." "If he hits one of these essential speech areas, then the electric current will stop the patient in her tracks." "14, 1 5, 1 6, 1 6," "17, 1 8" "He's also found that everyone's network is laid out differently." "Ok, you can stop!" "In any individual subject the sites involved in language are very focal, very localised ones about the size of the end of my thumb nail." "But if you look across the population and you say how are these distributed there's a lot of variance, they're in somewhat different locations in most people." "The team here have mapped over 200 people, and they've never found exactly the same mosaic of language sites twice." "These are just the essential ones, they probably represent key intersections in an even wider network of areas involved in language." "We're going to go to electrode number one." "This is a barn." "When George Ojemann asks his patients to respond to a slide show, then we can really see the awesome sophistication of the brain's language system." "Chicken" "Piano." "This one is..." "This remarkable technique reveals separate networks for many different aspects of language" "What we find is that the cortex is organised in these separate areas for different language functions, so for example in a multilingual patient you'll find one area that's involved in naming in one language, and another that's involved in naming the same items in another language," "at least partly separate." "This is a lion" "The brain mapping has even shown that there are separate areas for different categories of word" "We seem to have a network dedicated to naming fruits, and another for naming tools." "This is a saw." "This is an..." "Screwdriver" "In a general sense Wernicke and Brocka got it right but we've certainly learnt that the details are different in the sense that the areas that are crucial for language function are more focal than we thought, there's more individual variability than we thought between them," "there's more sub divisions than we thought." "For me, the bonobos at Georgia University provide the strongest evidence that" "language doesn't necessarily require special processes unique to the human brain." "They can't speak, so they've been taught to link written symbols with specific words." "Look here it says Panbanisha, that's you." "The cooler, the foot cooler is hiding at the river." "Thank you bunny" "Panbanisha began with a few simple symbols" "We had the names of six different foods, a location outdoors, and a specific activity, grooming" "We added some other things, for example one of the words we added was the word quiet, which is a fairly abstract term." "Panbanisha when she was about three and a half years old she used the word quiet for the first time with me, and it was one night when I was pretty upset with something she was doing, and I was kind of giving her a lecture," "in a very loud tone of voice that we should not be doing that right now, and Panbanbisha went to the keyboard and very quietly just looked at me with a very serious expression and she said quiet." "Perrier, Panbanisha" "That's right Panbanisha, you found Perrier." "Very, very nice." "Oh you're showing me again." "Panbanisha has now learnt the meaning of over 200 symbols." "Panbanisha can you find egg." "Oh good" "Very good" "TV Panbanisha" "Yes, that's right." "Most impressive of all, she even seems to appreciate the importance of word order." "You want juicy juice, all right, would you give a bite of your hot dog to the doggy please" "Would you give him some of your hotdog." "You can have more." "Panbanisha, please give the doggy a bite of your hotdog." "One bite" "Thank you very very much." "Even though you didn't want to do that, that was really nice." "Now if you think about how to teach Panbanisha a sentence like that you find yourself in kind of a quagmire, because dog is used in many different ways - it's used in the word hotdog and it's used in the word dog." "And if you think about the word hot, well the dog could be hot or the hotdog itself could be hot, or the hotdog could be cold but still called a hotdog." "Can you put the toy snake on your hand" "Sue Savage-Rumbaugh is convinced that bonobos can understand spoken English as well as a human child." "Their comprehension is at least between that of a 5 and 7 year old, maybe higher in some cases." "That's the subjective impression that one has in working with them." "Could you put the gorilla mask on" "Go ahead put it on your head." "Can you scare Paula." "They can comprehend entire dialogues, they can comprehend extensive narratives, they can understand stories about things that happened elsewhere, or stories about something that happened the previous day, if they're interested." "You're very tired, your eyes..." "The researchers here believe that we and our ape cousins both have brains which can acquire language as part of a natural upbringing." "I think that the idea that our brain is the only brain capable of language on the planet is now something that's completely open to question." "I can accept that chimpanzees are capable of learning the rudiments of language, but there is a difference between us and them." "We humans have a universal ability to use complex language as a way of life." "So where does the difference lie?" "Are the superior language abilities that we possess purely the result of having bigger brains than chimpanzees?" "Recently the team here in Georgia have begun a series of experiments which may one day answer that question." "Onion" "For half an hour Pansy matched symbols to spoken words." "Then she was taken to a brain scanner to measure which areas of her brain had been most active during the simple language task." "Shoe, where's the shoe?" "Then John was scanned after doing the same thing and the two results were compared." "As expected, in the human, the activity is mainly in the left hemisphere, around the known language regions." "But in the chimpanzee there's a much more symmetric pattern across both halves." "These results are from just one chimp, but there seems to be a fundamental difference in the degree of brain symmetry." "A few miles away, researchers at Yerkees Primate Research Centre have been studying another aspect of brain symmetry in a different colony of chimpanzees." "These food tubes smeared with peanut butter provide a simple way to measure whether a chimp is consistently left or right handed." "The results suggest that our ancestors brains became more and more skewed to favour the right hand." "With humans the most extreme of all." "Offer a human being something to hold and most of us will reach out with our right hand." "In tasks involving manual dexterity we're almost all much better with one hand than the other, and this extreme handedness may reflect something very profound about the organisation of our brains." "Increasingly, we're discovering that many cognitive skills, as well as physical abilities, seem to be handled predominantly by one side of the brain or the other" "Human handedness is an outward sign that somehow our left and right hemispheres have become specialised." "Effectively we're all walking around with two slightly different half brains inside our heads." "And the benefit that this brings to us might ultimately be much more important that mere brain bulk." "Take the remarkable case of Joe known as JW in the scientific literature." "To control crippling epileptic fits, the main connections between the two sides of his brain were severed." "Joe's split brain allows researchers to explore the workings of the left and right hemispheres which are now almost completely separated." "His party trick is to draw two different objects simultaneously." "Susan why don't you try it." "I was dreading that!" "OK as long as Joe promises not to laugh at me." "OK, you ready?" "Draw them simultaneously as fast as you can" "Oh gracious!" "Over 30 years work with split brainers has convinced Mike Gazzaniga that asymmetry is the key to understanding our mental abilities." "To him intelligence comes only from the left" "Take a split brain patient and you measure their pre operative lQ and problem solving skills, and what have you, and then you split the brain, where you've now disconnected the two hemispheres, and you go back and measure the left hemisphere's problem solving," "verbal lQ and it doesn't change a wit." "The right hemisphere on the other hand is sort of dumb." "But when he tested Joe's ability to recognise visual patterns, he was surprised how poorly the left performed." "These are called illusory contours" "The white discs create the illusion of a black shape which either curves inwards or bulges out." "Both sides of the brain can tell the difference." "But add a line inside the disc and the illusion of a shape is harder to see." "Unexpectedly Joe's left hemisphere is totally stumped" "All of a sudden the right hemisphere could do this test, still judge whether the rectangles were thin or fat, but the left hemisphere just fell apart, could not do the test." "It turned out that a similar test had been tried once before - on mice." "Astonishingly the human's giant left hemisphere failed to distinguish two patterns that the tiny mouse brain could tell apart." "Does this failure shed new light on the evolution of advanced human abilities?" "Maybe the left hemisphere begins to mutate in order to develop language, and as language requires more cortex and more cortex, perceptual processes that used to be in the left hemisphere sort of get squeezed out." "Gazzaniga's theory, is that as we evolved our left hemisphere acquired more and more advanced cognitive functions." "While our right changed very little." "And he believes that this half is just an evolutionary relic." "In fact if you look at the great skills we have that the chimp doesn't have there's every reason to believe that they're largely in the left hemisphere, that they're an outgrowth of some changes that" "must have occurred through mutations to the left cortex." "I accept that we're an asymmetric species, but I don't believe that there's a complete division of labour between left and right." "I don't go for the popular cliches about creativity and art coming from the right hemisphere with the left being literal and logical." "Instead I'm sure both our specialised half brains are involved in everything we do." "We're the fusion of two different interpretations of the world inside one head" "But there's one final missing ingredient to complete the transformation from the chimpanzees' range of skills to our own." "Three hundred thousand years ago the first full grown humans appeared with a full sized human brain." "But these neanderthals were not like us, and if evolution had stopped here human civilisation would still be in the Stone Age." "For many years archaeologist Steve Mithen has been studying the tools our ancestors left behind." "Trying to gain insights into how their minds worked." "So this is a small hand axe, as typically made by neanderthals." "You can see some very fine flake scars where a piece of flint had been removed by striking with a hammer stone." "Which are excellent butchery instruments for cutting through hide and sinews and tendons." "So they really are very skilled?" "They are, they're tremendously skilful work, there's nothing really modern humans are making which is more skilful in terms of tool making." "But neanderthals appear to have been astonishingly unimaginative, making the same stone tools for hundreds of thousands of years." "It's a rather little odd sort of behaviour looking at it from a modern human perspective, cos we normally think that the ability to make technically demanding things goes hand and hand with the ability to invent new types of tools," "and to innovate and to create and continue improvements, technology." "Steve believes that the same tunnel vision that held back the neanderthals tool making might also have restricted their linguistic abilities." "I suspect neanderthals had words for flowers and I expect they had words for their children, but I don't think a neanderthal could ever come up with a phrase like my daughter is as pretty as a flower." "I think..." "It's a creative thought." "It is in a way, and what you're doing you're drawing on one type of knowledge about people and children and you're drawing on another type of knowledge about flowers, and somehow you're making a new statement by drawing those two things together." "Suddenly with the arrival of modern humans new kinds of tools appear." "For the first time these humans try using bone and antler, as well as stone." "Neanderthals used bone, but they didn't carve it or manipulate it or change it at all." "Whereas modern humans started working bone and they carved it into harpoons and points and needles, and jewellery, all sorts of things." "And this really shows a big change from that tunnel vision way of thinking." "Because now they're taking technical skills which had been used for working wood and stone alone and applying it to a brand new material" "So they're changing what was part of an animal into something fundamentally different." "This revolution in tool making marked a crucial change in mental abilities, which launched us on an accelerating journey of technological development." "What seemed to happen is it snowballs, so you go from a very traditional hunter gatherer life to a world in which people are making art and clearly have got religious ideologies, making very complex artefacts, using body decoration," "and they go through that in the ice Age and as soon as the ice Age finishes people invent agriculture and we move very rapidly to towns and cities and civilisation" "So all this was the result of our ability to see one thing in terms of another, to think laterally." "It's a fascinating idea, but we'll never know what actual changes in the brain were required to achieve the modern human mind." "It seems that the gradual evolution of the brain over millions of years merely equipped our ancestors with an array of modular mental abilities, then suddenly these distinct functions merged and our lives were transformed." "There was an explosion of creativity and imagination that put us where we are today." "We humans, unique among animals can gaze at the planet we now dominate." "In the next programme we explore the extraordinary way in which your brain is constantly changing as you go through life, how everything you experience shapes your mind." "For six years, Harrison Ward Mullis battled with uncontrollable epilepsy." "His family faced a stark choice, let the fits continue or risk radical surgery." "I was absolutely devastated, absolutely devastated." "I mean I just could not take it in," "When they was talking about surgery I thought they would be taking a piece of the brain out," "I had no idea that they were going to remove a complete half." "Harrison has coped with the loss of an entire hemisphere." "Do all our brains have this amazing flexibility?" "This splendid house has belonged to the same family for almost seven hundred years." "Down the distant line of ancestors, many of the family's physical features have been transmitted in their genes - the familiar shape of the face, the eyes." "Looking at their portraits I can see the likeness clearly." "But I can tell very little about what kind of person each individual was, or how their very different experiences shaped what was going on inside their heads." "The Lords and Ladies of this ancient family," "like all of us, must have been a mixture of the genes they were born with and the environment in which they were raised." "Our surrounding, our memories and everything we learn and experience throughout our lives will all influence who we become." "This sculpting of our individuality takes place in a physical setting, - our brains." "I think it is the differences in our brains, the way the connections are configured and fine tuned throughout our lives, that makes every one of us unique." "I see each of us as an accumulation of experiences, with our brain constantly adapting to the unique world in which we live." "We all like to think that life is about how we might leave our mark upon the world, but the question for me is how does the world leave its mark on each of us?" "The growth anatomy of the brain is laid down in our genes," "Scans of the growing foetus reveal how the convoluted folds of the adult cortex gradually develop." "But what about the brain's internal workings, all the detailed nerve circuits which are necessary for our mental skills to develop properly?" "How much of that is determined by our genes?" "Take a universal skill, like recognising another human face." "You might expect a basic brain function like this to be hard wired from birth, but its not." "At the Birkbeck College Baby Lab in London, researchers are investigating the changes in brain circuitry as a baby gradually learns to distinguish faces from other shapes." "Surprisingly, they're really rather good at it." "Very early on the new born is attracted by anything that has a face like configuration, so two blobs for the eyes and a blob for the nose, mouth is enough to attract the new born's attention and it will follow it," "over other shapes, quite interesting shapes." "And over other scrambled face like shapes." "It wants this special configuration." "Over several months the electrical activity in a baby's brain is monitored when they're shown upright faces compared with upside down ones." "New borns respond exactly the same way to both." "But by eight months old, Jessamine's brain seems to have changed." "When babies are very young, one of the things you see is that they show different patterns of brain activity when shown a face the right way up and a face upside down." "Now those are the same features if you like just turned in a different way, so if they were just responding to features they would show the same brain activity." "The very fact that they show different brain activity, with a special peak when it's the right way up suggests that they really are processing faces in a configural way as a whole face and that the upside down face is just seen as a collection of features." "So how does a baby develop this special response to faces?" "What's guiding the change in nerve circuitry of Jessamine's brain?" "The researchers here believe that we don't develop these skills automatically." "It's only the repeated exposure to faces which trains the brain." "So genes give a child the potential for mental skills, experience determines whether the skills actually develop." "If you want to really understand how a brain emerges rather than is pre programmed you have to look at the child as in a sense structuring their own brain." "And that way the baby's brain is a function of what the baby does, so one could say the baby builds its own brain." "I don't think that's an exaggeration at all." "So how does experience of the world shape the development of a child's brain?" "We're born with almost as many brain cells as we'll ever have." "What changes are the connections between them." "The brain is an ever changing web of billions of cells." "As each brain cell grows it forms thousands of connections with its neighbours" "In the first few years of life there's an explosion of connections between brain cells as the brain wires itself up." "Each experience no matter how small leaves its' mark on the brain by stimulating more connections between brain cells." "With each new experience some connections are strengthened and others are weakened in a constant process of wiring." "Just as we develop connections with the right inputs, so we can also prune them back." "The brain has no use for too many idle connections so it cuts back on those that aren't continuously reinforced with experience." "How our individual brains take shape depends on which connections are reinforced and which fail to stay the course." "The result is a dynamic flexible brain." "Just how flexible we're now beginning to understand through remarkable cases," "like Harrison Ward Mullis" "Harrison is now six." "Soon after he was born a blood vessel burst in his brain, which left him with crippling epilepsy." "Harrison was constantly having seizures, what they called a non convulsive epileptic state, in other words you wouldn't see him having seizures." "And when I said, I used to say to people "My son's got epilepsy"." ""Well he looks all right to me"" "He had the sort of seizures that he would sit and chew, but nothing in the mouth." "He would start rocking, and he would do this for about an hour." "He was aggressive, he would all of a sudden see something in a room and aim it towards anything or anybody and the behaviour gradually got worse over the years." "The full extent of Harrison's epilepsy became clear when he was wired up for observation by Dr Frank Bizak at St Piers Epilepsy Centre in Surrey." "The stream of irregular spikes shows Harrison's brain is in constant turmoil." "He's having small seizures one after another." "It's a situation that has been very frustrating for years" "When we see it so dramatically on the television screen" "It makes it seem real and tangible." "You know I've been in supermarkets where people have said" ""Oh if he was mine I'd thrash him"." "Yes well thrashing isn't a recognised method of correcting brain wave abnormalities of this extent I'm afraid." "I think it's very difficult for us to put ourselves in Harrison's place but looking at these little storms occurring every few seconds, as they are right now" "If we imagine that his brain function for those few seconds is being quite significantly impaired, and yet people are having normal expectations of him." "And he's switching in and out all the time." "A scan revealed massive damage in the left half of Harrison's brain, but the right looked normal." "These seizures were probably all originating from the bad brain on the left side of his head." "So almost certainly the bad brain was sending a storm of abnormal electrical discharges into the good brain, preventing it from working as well as it would have been otherwise." "Harrison's family were offered a radical treatment - surgery to remove the malfunctioning half of his brain." "This would be a risky operation." "The big thing for me in deciding whether to have the surgery was the fact that at any given moment I could have lost him in a seizure any way." "He could have gone into a major seizure where he could have died" "Since it was the only way to tackle his epilepsy," "Harrison's left hemisphere was completely removed." "But normally the left side of the brain is vital for speech, and it controls the movement of the right side of the body." "How badly would it's removal affect him?" "For three days after the operation, Harrison was unconscious." "All of a sudden, he just made a movement to get up and I just grabbed him and he just started talking." "I then knew that he was out of this almost comatised state." "He spoke, when he finally came round for the first time in six years he put four words together as a sentence." "And that was instant." "His speech was so much better." "Here we go Harrison, that's very good." "His control of the right side of his body has been affected by the operation, but with intensive physiotherapy Harrison is improving steadily." "It seems that if part of a child's brain is damaged the rest will automatically rewire itself so that vital functions are taken over by the remaining normal tissue." "Are you going to start us off then?" "Twinkle twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are, up above the clouds so bright, like a diamond in the..." "Harrison's story reveals the amazing dynamism of the nerve circuitry in the developing brain." "How I wonder what you are." "Our brains are at their most flexible in childhood, but throughout our lives our grey matter is endlessly being shaped by experience, and moulding itself to fit new circumstances." "If you lose a large part of your brain as an adult it's unlikely you'll ever fully recover any lost function." "But it would be wrong to think of the brain as a fixed structure, which when it finishes growing sets hard." "At the microscopic level the connections in our brain are constantly changing as we go through life." "That's what learning and memory are all about." "We never lose the ability to learn new skills." "I may be making a hash of this now, but it shouldn't take too many lessons before I get the hang of it." "As I keep trying to get the right pressure on the clay, the nerve circuits in my head are changing." "How are our brains physically shaped by the experience of learning new skills?" "This issue is explored in some remarkable work with children who have difficulty with reading." "So now all the words you're going to see in this game are made up words." "Just read for me the words..." "Cassie is unable to convert an unfamiliar group of letters into the sound of the word." "Instead she just guesses." "Just click the mouse when you're ready." "Gloop." "Wip." "Swag." "Psychologist Bruce McCandliss specialises in helping children like Cassie to learn to read." "Our brains automatically decode the letters that they see into the sounds of the language and blend them together into whole worlds." "If you don't catch onto this skill early on in the reading process often times you might get stuck, trying to compensate with other strategies." "The word on the screen is pen, make a new word by taking away the N and add a T." "Bruce is interested in the changes that occur in his students brains when they finally learn to read properly." "How about down here though?" "What does the end of this word look like." "It's T and S." "How would you say T and S together?" "St..." "Yeah that's it." "Okay lets just run through a couple of them make sure we have that down" "Best." "Ha ha." "You've got to look really carefully at the letters there." "The letters will tell you what word it is." "Bets." "There you go, great." "Reading is a complex skill which involves, hearing, vision, memory and speech." "But Bruce has scanned the brains of good readers and identified one key area which seems to be active specifically during reading." "He believes this area is involved when we're converting letters into word sounds." "...Said Mike." "Grace led Mike to the spider club." "Inside the club were..." "With Bruce's help Mark has just learnt to read in the last few months." "Not me said Grace I like spiders." "Mark came in reading at a very low level and we struggled with a couple of very key letter sound identification concepts with him." "But over the course of the 24 sessions he started to really catch on, and started to very actively, started to decode words on his own, started to correct his own errors and started to realise the role" "that each letter played in a word." "Right come on in here." "Just like last time." "Mark had a brain scan before he did the reading course, and his brain showed no activity in the key area" "Bruce believes is involved in reading." "Now that he can read he's having a second scan to compare the pattern of activity." "Inside the scanner Mark does a reading test." "Those are beautiful great." "The second scan of Mark's brain, when he was reading well, reveals a clear change." "As he learned the new skill of decoding letters into sounds he made new connections in his brain." "I'll show you some of the things we've found." "We did the same exact scan with the same exact words a little while later and look what happened." "What do you see there?" "The red dots." "Yeah that's right." "Do you know what the red dots mean?" "That it was working?" "That's right, that part of your brain was working pretty hard when you were playing the word game." "So we're really excited about that." "It's an example of learning changing the pattern of your brain activity." "So what do you think about that, seeing the inside of your brain and what's going on as you're thinking about stuff?" "Pretty neat." "Yeah" "As we develop into adults our brains gradually acquire a unique individual personality." "I believe that much of who we become is the result of our brains absorbing what's going on around us." "Mostly we're unaware of this process." "But occasionally something is so significant we know it's altered our brains." "It's become a memory." "Memory, like other aspects of brain function develops as we grow." "Our entire system for storing and retrieving memories is evolving in the first few years of life." "None of us remember the events from early in our life, and in fact if you ask most people how old they were for their earliest memory, generally it's between 2 and 4 years of age." "At his lab in Minnesota," "Charles Nelson is testing children of different ages to see how their brains change as their memories develop." "Our data suggests to us that a baby's memory system is present at birth." "It is far from as developed as it will be, but the fact is they show evidence of memory at birth, and the best example of that is they recognise their mother's voice." "This one month old baby is hearing short segments of her mother's voice, alternating with a very similar stranger's voice." ""Mummy's baby, Mummy's baby"" ""Mummy's baby, Mummy's baby"" "Her brain waves are different for the two voices." "Even at this age a baby can store a clear record of the sound of her mother's voice" "Lucas is three." "His brain is capable of storing more complex, visual and emotional information." "Even though these faces are all unfamiliar, he's able to remember whether he's seen the same expression earlier." "The research shows that as our brains develop they respond faster to something familiar and more areas of the brain become involved in storing and retrieving a memory." "The final triumph is that we become aware of what we remember." "By age 9 Andy has a different brain wave for a familiar image, and at the same time he indicates that he has a memory of it." "So babies do one thing and 3 and 4 year olds do another, and children of say 7 or 8 or 9 do yet another, and adults do yet another." "And that's the magic of recording brain activity because we are now able to do the same thing at all these different ages and track the development of how the brain responds to a stimulus that should be recognised as familiar." "In the brain the essence of a memory is always the same." "When we become familiar with something, the connections between a circuit of neurones are reinforced, as they fire in synchrony." "Each time we trigger the memory, the same circuit is activated." "Why is it then, if basic memories are being formed long before we're aware of them, that we can't retrieve them later in life." "One possibility is that that they're erased, that they're formed initially but then they just disappear." "And we know that occurs in the brain and adults do the same thing." "Another possibility is that they still exist but they're transported to some part of the brain and we no longer have the key to unlock the location, akin perhaps to storing something in a filing cabinet and forgetting where in the filing cabinet you stored it." "It's a fascinating idea, that my brain might still carry traces from earliest infancy, in a form that my adult memory can't now access." "These films from my childhood bring back strong memories." "When I recall a birthday party like this, or an outing to the beach," "I'm doing far more than remembering bare facts." "Retrieving a memory of a specific event in the past is an impressive mental achievement." "It means reliving the moment, with all the emotional force and personal connotations attached to it." "How does the brain do this?" "So Clare what is it you want me to do?" "I'm going to ask you to learn some names first." "I'm going to ask you to learn the names of four people - a minister, a doctor, a postman and a paper boy." "This is a very simple test, but it illustrates the intriguing way the brain stores memories." "I'm not going to test your memory for the photograph, the photograph is just there to help you remember the names." "I just want you to concentrate on remembering the fore name and the surname" "This is the doctor, his name is Jim Green." "This is the minister his name is Cuthbert Cattermole." "This is the postman his name is Tom Webster" "And this is the paperboy, his name is Philip Armstrong." "Lets see if you can remember them." "What was the name of the doctor?" "Jim Green." "And what was the minister's name?" "Cuthbert Cattermole." "And what was the postman's name?" "Tom Webster" "And what was the paper boy's name?" "Philip Armstrong." "Well done!" "Very impressive, I don't need to show you them again." "So I'm all right then?" "You're all right, you passed" "Superficially it seems that I've just stored the names as bare facts, but in my mind each memory exists as a combination of their face, clothes and the particular sound of Clare speaking their name." "We could call it a mini event." "Only by pulling together all these fragments can we remember the name." "His name is Cuthbert Cattermole" "John Forbes has been shown these cards many times before." "This is the postman his name is Tom Webster." "OK so one more time, what was the name of the doctor?" "I can't think of his christian name, now, Green." "Er, the doctor,..." "OK." "What was the minister's name?" "...Pass." "John has a very rare kind of brain damage, which has helped reveal how memories are normally stored." "Pass" "And what was the paper boy's name?" "Tim..." "Pass." "OK, well done you're doing really well." "Let's try it one more time." "John's brain was damaged as a baby, but it was only several years later around the time of this video, that he became aware that he had virtually no memory." "Normal people they can just, they've got several things milling around in their head and they can just store something and not forget about it, and do stuff their mind completely on something else and then when they're asked about this other thing," "they can just boom, oh yes that." "Whereas with me, because my memory is so much less it's very difficult for me to remember something." "It's like having a cabinet of memories and losing the back pages every now and again." "Someone just leafing through them, what shall we chuck - lets chuck that, chuck that and being left with like a skeleton of memories." "His family first noticed John's amnesia when they saw that he couldn't cope away from the familiar surroundings of home." "I think we first realised there was a problem with John's memory when we were on holiday one year and he was about nine." "And he would permanently keep getting lost." "We went to a holiday camp when his younger sister who's three years younger would be able to find her way around quite easily." "John would have problems, every time he came in the room, in the dining room he wouldn't know where we were sitting." "If he went out to the toilet mid way through he'd come back in and not be able to find us again." "Even at the end of the first week he was still doing that." "That's how we realised that he couldn't find his way around and he couldn't remember as much as we thought he should be able to." "John still has virtually no ability to navigate his way around even familiar situations" "His memory has no structure to it, so he can't piece together fragments he remembers to see the bigger picture." "Things that come out of the blue are really difficult to handle." "They just throw me completely, whereas most people can adjust it's very difficult for me to adjust." "It's like being a train slam I'm thrown completely and it can be really," "I can really get unbalanced." "John came to us first when he was around 13 or 14 years of age, and at that time he had been seen by a neurologist, and the major complaint really was his memory problem." "John is now 22, and he's been visiting Dr Kadem for several years." "He still needs to follow precise step by step instructions to find his way." "Even though John can function very well, for example the route from his home to here involves a train change and he's been taught how to cope." "But if for example the platform changes for one reason or another on that particular day then that's enough for John to get completely lost." "His system only works if every unit within that system functions in a very repetitious and routine way." "You try and change one element, and then John is completely lost and he has to start all over again, from the very beginning." "What John has lost is the ability to bring together the different components of a memory." "This is because of damage to one particular area of his brain." "And as you can see the structure that we're particularly interested in" "You know the name of it very well." "The hippocampus, yeah." "The hippocampus, and you can see it over here, you see it." "You see it, in this view you can see the full length of the hippocampus right." "You see how full and fleshy it is." "So let's have a look at yours now." "The effects of the damage to John's hippocampus shed light on the workings of the brain's memory systems." "There" "And here, that's right." "It seems that the hippocampus plays an essential role in orchestrating the storage and retrieval of all the emotional and sensory aspects of an experience." "Without a normal hippocampus" "John can't form truly vivid memories with personal meaning for him." "His jumbled storage system won't allow him to travel back in time to relive his past." "Mental time travel allows us to go back and look at the particular episodes that are meaningful to us." "We really do not get any indication from John that he's doing this when he's trying to tell us about events that have happened to him in the past." "They seem to be renditions of stories that he has listened to about himself, that has been told to him and he has learnt those, but there isn't this element that he can recreate the situation, because when he tells you of these events" "and episodes there is very little emotional involvement." "It's almost like he's reading a story." "I'm very cautious personality wise, very defensive and I think that's part of how I've matured with my memory, because I'm missing information a lot of the time." "And all the little things that you pick up and you link into relationships because they're not there, that then puts me at a disadvantage." "It's hard to imagine what it's like to look back at your life as isolated facts, with no sense of ever having been there." "We take lots of photographs and keep showing him them and we go back over his early years" "Because he doesn't remember occasions and incidents, we continually talk about them if they're important to him." "This is our way of being able to give him memories that when he looks back on his life he has something that he can remember" "One of the most remarkable aspects of the brain's memory systems is that they select what we remember." "After all storing everything would be as unhelpful as storing nothing." "Somehow our brains automatically keep the memories which are important to us and discard the rest." "For me the anatomy lab here at Oxford University has a special significance." "It was in this very room that I first dissected a human brain." "I was even sitting at this very bench and I remember it really clearly, for example I had the thought as I held the brain what if I got a bit under my finger nail, would that be the bit that someone would have loved with," "or would that have been a particular memory." "I can remember who was standing next to me and the whole moment is preserved really clearly." "But I can't remember what I'd done the day previously, or indeed what I did subsequently." "My brain had isolated this event and kept it fresh in my memory because it was so important to me." "But our brains don't just accumulate memories of significant events, we're all equipped with a second very different kind of memory system which forms the basis of our knowledge." "We learn from all our experiences, extracting information and developing insights about the world around us." "Our brains build up huge databases about our personal environment." "We can't say how or when we learn these truths but we gradually absorb them, and knowledge of these facts which we call semantic memory is stored in the circuits and neurones in our brains." "Semantic memory is memory for facts, it's how our brains make sense of the world." "It's a living database, our accumulated knowledge of the difference between a flower and a tree, a bike and a car, a dog and a cat." "It's how we cope with the endless stream of new objects and experiences which we encounter as we go through life." "And this wealth of knowledge must somehow be stored in the constantly updating pattern of neurone connections in our heads." "Tragically those very connections are unravelling in lvor's brain." "This long process started 10 years ago." "Physically fortunately he is fine, and quite dextrous and not clumsy." "He still plays some golf and walking, and you know these problems regarding fitness are in tact, all fine." "Ivor has semantic dementia." "He's gradually losing the part of his memory that allows us to distinguish one thing from another" "Dementia is the term we give to any kind of progressive deterioration in mental function" "And one of the big conceptual developments of the last few years in dementia really has been the realisation that different kinds of dementia cause very different types of breakdown." "Ivor's dementia is the result of a specific area of cell death in his left temporal lobe." "The millions of cells here are the core of the brain's physical system for storing knowledge." "As these cells die Ivor's loss of understanding is exactly the reverse of the stages a child's brain goes through as it builds up its network of neurone connections." "If you show patients a picture of an animal for instance, they're quite happy to say it's a dog or it's a cat for any animal, because there is some preservation of knowledge, enough to identify it as an animal, and the most prototypic," "first acquired concept of animals tends to be dog, cat and horse." "This test reveals how Ivor's grasp of the world has regressed to the level of a child." "OK and what about this one." "It looks like a dog as well." "OK what's this called?" "Is that a little cat?" "A little cat?" "OK What's this called." "I don't know, a little cat is it?" "A little cat, all right." "It's not that Ivor has forgotten the words, he's actually lost the knowledge of what each animal is." "Is that a dog?" "A dog, OK." "And have you seen dogs with these bits on?" "Yes" "I saw another one this morning, looking virtually the same as that." "Right, and it had those lines on it?" "That's right." "Well it had it tremendously different when I saw it, that's right yes." "Right." "What's that one called?" "It's not a dog is it really?" "OK if it's not a dog, what would you call it." "A cat." "A cat you think, a cat or a dog." "OK that's well done Ivor, that's lovely." "I think we've learnt a lot about the organisation and the representation of knowledge from how it breaks down, giving us clues as to how it must be built up, in terms of features." "And also how particular categories are organised, because the condition doesn't effect all aspects of knowledge equally." "Ivor's problems are very specific." "His recall of past events is still in tact." "And he can remember the rules of many games." "Cards, cards Ivor was always very good at." "He plays patience by himself a lot and that's not a problem." "We still play bridge with some understanding friends and family" "Though he probably does not get contracts correct always, but as far as memory of the cards, or what has been played, that's OK, that's fine still." "Sadly Ivor's dementia is at the moment untreatable." "But for the time being he's still able to get some pleasure out of life." "Although dementia scars the later years of some people, ageing itself does not need to be a story of relentless decline" "We may be losing brain cells but for most of us there's no reason why we can't make the most of the connections that remain." "Though our ever flexible brain's resources may decline it seems that in old age more than ever we can turn the experience the brain has accumulated to our best advantage." "A study in Berlin reveals just how adaptable older people's brains can be." "The participants, who are all over 60 walk an obstacle course while memorising a list of words they hear through headphones." "The lines on the track and hand rail record how steadily each person walks." "When they have completed the circuit, they must recall the words in the order in which they heard them." "I still remember how I got the idea for this experiment it was watching in the Swiss Alps older people walking up a hill, talking to each other and coming to a corner where there were some stones in the way, some rocks, and they stopped talking." "And why did they stop talking?" "I thought because they needed all their mental resources now to navigate around the rocks and after they had done that they started talking again." "So in this particular instance, in early adulthood our bodies, the way we move does not need much cognitive support, we do it automatically without thinking very much about it." "When we grow older however suddenly these bodily movements take more resources, they take more of our mental bank account." "So we were looking for an experiment where we could look at this in an exemplary fashion - walking and thinking." "Professor Baltes measures the volunteers' ability to walk and memorise at the same time, compared with their abilities simply to memorise." "When they're walking they have much much more trouble remembering the words." "When there's nothing to distract them, their recall is almost perfect." "Younger adults easily do both at the same time." "What that experiment shows basically is that if you want to optimise walking, you've got to allocate the resources to walking and if you want to optimise memorising you've got to allocate the resources to memorising." "The worst you could do is to switch back and forth, to try to here and there optimise walking and then memorising." "In the end you may not produce, or you may not be able to produce either." "So perhaps the much vaunted wisdom of old age comes from our brain's ability to process information in a more selective way." "As it has done throughout our lives, the world is still leaving its mark on our brains but as we grow old the world we choose to deal with becomes more personalised." "In very old age it happens much more frequently that the world becomes smaller and that actually is really what ageing is all about." "You have smaller parts of the world, and the art of life is how do you make smaller parts more beautiful?" "Right until the very end our dynamic brains are changing in response to the world." "The physical matter in our heads reflects the journey on which life has taken us" "Our abilities, our memories, and our knowledge are all built up through the fine tuning of billions of connections between our brain cells" "It is this personalisation of the brain that I call the mind" "Our brains are permanently in dialogue with the outside world, they assemble knowledge and experience and this process lasts a lifetime." "I think we're nearer to understanding the neural processes that take place in our brains as we develop these highly personalised minds." "How every significant moment, everything we learn leaves its biological mark." "The wonder of the brain is that somehow despite all the changing micro circuitry the essence of who we are, our very sense of identity remains." "Within our dynamic adaptable brain a unique individual personality is constantly evolving." "In the final programme of the series, the most intriguing question of all - how does your brain create the conscious experience of being you?" "At the start of each day, a profound change happens in the brain of every human being" "As we wake up, an inner world comes to life." "We become conscious." "From the mass of nerve cellsthat have been ticking over while we were sleeping, a strange, new sensation emerges." "The first hand feeling of being a conscious human being." "Somehow your brain creates the intangible, indescribable experience of being you." "It's not something most of us ever stop to really think about, but the fact that we each have an inner world of feelings and experiences is, to me, even more extraordinary than the fact that living things evolved at all." "As a scientist I cannot accept that consciousness is something mystical, beamed into our heads from outside - it has to come from physical processes within the brain." "But the question is - how?" "The ultimate goal of neuroscience is to interpret all our everyday experiences in terms of measurable changes in brain activity." "So where do we begin with something so elusive as consciousness?" "Something so utterly subjective and unique to each individual?" "The challenge is to explain how a kilo and a half of neurones and blood vessels inside our heads, with the consistency of soft butter can generate an extraordinary rich range of conscious feelings that we experience." "From taste of a good cup of coffee, to the satisfaction of solving a crossword puzzle, to the warm glow of remembering a summers holiday on a cold winter's morning." "We take it for granted the brain makes being alive feel the way it does, yet there's no reasons why it should." "The brain is made of the same biological ingredients as the rest of the body." "Yet somehow, it manages to generate the indescribable phenomenon of consciousness." "Understanding this tantalising paradox, is, I think, the ultimate quest for science." "Let's start as simply as possible." "We're always conscious of something." "What determines what it will be?" "Take driving." "You're going along a route you do every day." "You're changing gear and adjusting your speed and direction and you're not aware of any of it." "You're effectively somewhere else." "Then suddenly something happens and it becomes the focus of your consciousness." "Something switches inside the brain and the actions that were done automatically are now centre stage." "So what is happening inthe brain, when you switch out of auto-pilot and become actively aware of driving?" "Could there be some kind of higher Control Centre in the brain that determines what you're going to be aware of?" "Is there some kind of brain HQ which oversees all the activity in the rest of the brain?" "If so, this centre for consciousness would direct the different processes going on down below." "Whatever it happened to select at that particular moment would be the focus of your consciousness." "So is there any evidence that we have a consciousness control centre in our heads?" "One man's brain has played an important role in answering this question and it can often be found in the Gardener's Arms in Chester." "Graham Young has a very unusual brain and scientists are so keen to study it, that he's regularly flown, expenses paid all over the world." "It's almost a different life." "I live in Chester and I work in Chester and then I go away doing all this stuff and it's almost like - a separate identity's a bit strong - but it's two different existence's." "Graham became a hot property for Neuro-Scientists as a result of being hit by a car when he was a child." "I had a road accident when I was eight, resulting in some brain damage, so I lost all my vision to the right in both eyes." "As far as he was aware he was completely blind on the right hand side." "I mean I literally used to be walking around town, as an eight or nine year old lad and I'd walk into a lamppost or into a bin." "I just didn't see in and I would walk right into it." "I mean that doesn't happen any more;" "I've just got used to having half a field of view." "Twelve years later, while he was having his eyes tested in London, they discovered something extraordinary." "It turned out Graham's brain could actually process visual information on both sides, even though he wasn't aware of it." "Graham is an perfect case of a fascinating condition called Blind Sight." "Most people don't get brain damage in such a way as to satisfy the Research Scientist." "Graham fortunately has damage largely restricted to the visual cortex and not to the rest of the brain." "So that makes it a much more pure case." "Graham's road accident destroyed just a small area at the back of his brain." "If losing this area caused him to lose awareness of seeing, could his damaged area be the seat of consciousness?" "Weiskrantz experimented further." "He showed Graham moving lights on his blind side." "Right unaware, left unaware." "Right" "Bizarrely, although Graham says he can't see them, he can guess correctly what direction the dots are moving in." "I am completely unaware of an event occurring in my blind field and yet in terms of which way it's moved," "I get it right 90% of the time." "That's a bit strange isn't it?" "And I don't know how I do it." "Right unaware." "Blind sight is a condition which one can respond to visual events without being aware of them." "Okay." "Now that means that as you know what the brain damage is, you can start to say something about what areas of the brain are necessary, are critical for awareness." "So what is going on inside Graham's brain?" "Scans suggest that when Graham is responding to the dots, but isn't aware of them, a very primitive visual pathway is active." "But when he is actually seeing them, a whole new range of brain regions lights up." "We need lots of different areas for conscience." "Just to receive the information isn't sufficient." "You have to do something with for it to become aware and the regions of the brain that are important for that lie quite far removed from the Visual Cortex in the frontal lobe," "involving those regions of the brain that allow us to communicate the fact that we are conscious, that we are aware." "Blind Sight has revealed that there is far more to being aware than a single, central Control Centre." "Instead of some special area, devoted to consciousness, somehow the extraordinary feeling of awareness emerges from ordinary brain activity." "It may not feel like it, but changing patterns of nerve cells, firing in the brain are the basis of everything we experience." "Everything we imagine, all our thoughts and feelings." "Conscious awareness then, must somehow arise from this maelstrom of electrical activity in the brain." "So what could explain which of the many networks of cells firing away in our heads is heard above the background chatter?" "Neuro-scientists are now squaring up to the big question, which special property or process in the brain might cause consciousness?" "If there is no special centre in the brain, whose job it is just to generate consciousness, then somehow it must arise directly from the activity of ordinary brain cells, but then we have a problem." "In the brain there are thousands of networks of neurones, all firing away;" "what special property could a network of neurones suddenly acquire that's just for a moment made it responsible for consciousness?" "Imagine that your brain is like the surface of a lake in the rain." "Each new event is like a raindrop which triggers a spreading wave of nerve cell activity which then gradually fades away." "I'm suggesting that we're conscious of whatever happens to have caused the biggest ripple of activity in our brain at any one time." "I think of consciousness as something that grows as a spreading wave grows - the stronger or more significant the stimulus, the more extensive the ripples of activity, the more all your neurones are working together." "So the conscious thoughts and feelings that flit through your head, are a direct reflection of the ever-changing pattern of activity in your brain." "One attraction of this idea is that might help explain one of the great unsolved medical puzzles - what happens to the brain when we lose consciousness through anaesthesia?" "Good Morning Dr. Artousio." "I hope we're on time." "Good Morning." "Yes, we've a few minutes yet." "Dr. Nazir, would you go ahead and prepare this patient and I will join you in the induction Room in a few moments." "No one knows how anaesthesia robs the brain of consciousness, even though they've been used for many years." "Brain scans have shown that there's no obvious single area that's shut down." "Somehow, anaesthetics must affect the whole brain." "Have you listened?" "We have now made the transition into surgical anaesthesia." "Dr Bellrow what is the..." "But the really interesting issue for me is that the effects are gradual." "It's like a sort of dimmer switch." "We usually take the patient through the analgesic stage, through the loss of consciousness and through a delirium phase into surgical anaesthesia." "In some intriguing studies in the 1950s," "Dr Joseph Artousio investigated the semiconscious state." "Edna, are you comfortable now?" "Edna, are you comfortable now?" "Nod your head Edna if you are comfortable." "You see, Edna acknowledged that she was comfortable." "We have now entered the true third plain of the first stage." "Artousio was exploring the possibility of conducting major surgery without the complications of high levels of anaesthetic." "Here, he manages to find a dose which produces an astonishing semi-aware state, where the patient feels no pain, but yet she can still respond to commands." "So what could explain this gradual loss of consciousness?" "All anaesthetics dampen down electrical signals between the brain cells." "According to my theory, this would stop the waves of activity from spreading so far." "As the assemblies of cells become smaller, our consciousness gradually dims." "But anaesthetics also offer a further clue." "At doses too low to rob you of consciousness, they can nonetheless dramatically distort it, producing hallucinations." "In Zurich, Dr Frans Vollenweider is studying how low doses of an anaesthetic called Ketomene can affect the brain." "Ketomene can enhance your mood, it can give you feelings like euphoria." "It changes all the sensory modalities." "You can for instance hear... or you can visualise things that you can't see it." "At first you have illusions, then maybe you have hallucinations, you can see things that do not exist in the real world." "Now it's coming." "It's coming now?" "Yes, definitely, taking off." "Are you able to close your eyes and focus on your inner experience?" "On my what, inner experience?" "The challenge for any theory of consciousness is to explain how minute doses of an anaesthetic can produce such distorted experiences." "Yes, everything is very different than usual." "The visuals effect and the audio effect, they are connected." "They melted?" "Yeah, they melted, so, by..." "Is vision more auditory experience and vice versa?" "Yeah." "One gives the other food - that's it." "As I see it, the inputs from his senses would normally dominate his brain, creating a large, spreading wave of nerve cell activity." "The drug might weaken the signals coming from the senses leaving a hectic jumble of smaller ripples of activity, spontaneously generated in the brain, producing hallucinations." "Moving and moving and moving, a box in a box in a box or whatever, had this experience like I was, space was controlling... no, my brain was controlling, my brain was controlling, my brain... anyway..." "Volunteers have been scanned while they're hallucinating." "Over several minutes a slight change in activity shows up in the front of the brain, but this time frame is too long." "Consciousness is too fleeting for the subtle and transient changes in cell activity to be detected by this kind of approach." "We think that Ketomene directly interferes with the communication between nerve cells and under Ketomene this communication is strange." "Some cell communication is blocked even, and Ketomene may lead to new assemblies between the nerve cells, so that a different kind of network gets established under Ketomene that is normally not working in that way." "And according to your experiences, what do you always see, or...?" "Oh, what I did to today, yeah I travelled through the Galaxy." "Manipulation of conscious experience with drugs is nothing unusual;" "we do it all the time with alcohol, nicotine and caffeine." "But drugs, don't have to be involved." "I've come to the Palladium in Edinburgh to watch a group of performers who claim to have a unique ability to control the degree to which they are conscious of pain." "This is not the sort of thing, I'd normally go for, but I have to say I'm, quite excited by the prospect, because I gather I'm going to see people putting themselves through enormous agonies," "but apparently completely unperturbed." "I'm going to be looking for whether I can apply my theory of consciousness to what I'm actually seeing before my very eyes." "Welcome, brothers and sisters of Edinburgh to the Jim Rose Circus," "Secrets of the Strange." "This is a show dedicated to your brain." "The Circus has gained something of a cult following over the last ten years, with it's extraordinary feats of self-mutilation." "What I want to know is what's going on in their brains." "How can they block out, what to me would be unbearable pain?" "Jim Rose Circus is really dealing a lot with how to use your mind and your brain to empower yourself." "We do it as a warped seminar, it's kind of a comedy - Bibi The Circus Queen," "The Amazing Mr. Lifto and myself." "We basically kind of explain how to circumvent or to overcome what we would call discovery," "I think you might, a lot of people might, call pain." "'Bibi's going to lie on this bed of nails, have a glass plate placed onto her stomach and a cannon ball will come down, crashing and smashing the glass." "A lot of people do the bed of nails and there is discomfort there." "Bibi's real fear is the shattering of that plate, because it's random and that's something that she can't prepare for." "Yes!" "Take a look at her back, take a look watch and register the shock." "Thank you Bibi - you're gonna love it.'" "It seems that the way they control the pain is by preparing their mind for what's to come." "We all, throughout the Circus, use the same way of dealing with discomfort." "For example, if I'm doing the Human Dart Board," "I put myself," "I literally take my mind, which takes it's body, into another place - now where I like to go is into a nice warm watered pool and I like to be right up to my neck, and everything's feeling fine," "everything's all nice and warm and relaxed." "With just a plank of wood to protect my" "Jim deliberately fills his mind with a persistent mental image to block out the pain." "I can take another one Edinburgh, can you?" "My interpretation is that a large assembly of cells in this brain generates Jim's overwhelming feeling of being in a warm pool." "This assembly is so dominant, it shuts out any rival stimulus like pain." "I feel nothing, I feel nothing." "Ow, I just felt something." "I don't feel the pain, but you see it's different now, 'cos I'm expecting what's happening." "If I stub my toe on my bed or something, at night," "I'm going to scream just like you, because I didn't expect it, and I didn't put myself in the warm water." "'What's your name?" "'" "Susan." "Susan, I really screwed that up." "Susan from the BBC, give her a big hand." "There you go Susan." "Now then, this is how I shave." "Of course, we don't actually know what the brain cells are doing inside Jim's head." "My idea is still only a theory." "Thank you Susie, give it up for Susie, she's a star." "We may not know the exact brain process which gives rise to consciousness, but we do know that it must be produced by ordinary brain cells." "In other words, it must arise directly from sub-conscious mental activity and that has profound implications for how we view what it means to be human being." "We know that when we need to, our brains can trigger reflex responses without any conscious thought at all." "When facing a serve of over 100 miles an hour, professional tennis players don't have time to mull things over." "Their complex judgements and tactical decisions are all made automatically in the sub-conscious." "If they,...by what's happened to me I may just take a look at a ball," "I can see what my opponent is," "I just hit the ball and sometimes don't even have the time for thinking, and you just have to hit the ball and that's it." "On the hard court and on grass you won't see any, you won't see many shots." "I mean that's why." "You won't ever think, you just hit the ball, the other side where you see the player, that's it." "If they try to become aware of what they're doing, they will fail." "The great players will serve the ball at about 1 00 miles an hour." "The only thing that..." "the opposing player remembers that he can tell you about is watching the angle of the serve, so they're unconsciously carrying out that fast function." "Neuro-Scientist Professor Benjamin Libet has spent the last 50 years fascinated about the sub-conscious." "My own belief is that all our thoughts and all our actions are initiated unconsciously." "Any thought you have perceived very rapidly unconsciously and finally you become conscious of some result." "in 1958 Benjamin Libet began a series of experiments that challenged one of the basic tenets of human existence - that we are free to think whatever we choose." "Occasionally, brain surgery has to be conducted out on patients while they're awake." "Benjamin Libet realised that this gave him a unique opportunity to experiment on the conscious human brain" "We did not use General Anaesthesia, we used a Local Anaesthetic for cutting open the skin and drilling a whole in the skull and the subjects were very co-operative in general." "He began with a simple query." "How long would the patient's brain have to be stimulated with an electric current before they became aware of it." "We started by stimulating the Sensory Cortex, which is known to produce a sensation in the proper part of the body, usually the hand in our case and to ask the subject if they felt, anything and what they felt and so on." "He discovered that the brain had to be stimulated for at least half a second before the patient reported that they felt anything." "It seems it takes this long for the brain to generate a conscious experience." "That means that you do not experience the environment when it happens." "There's a delay of up to... about half a second before awareness is produced." "This first experiment was proof that fast reactions must all be carried out subconsciously." "If you're driving a car and somebody steps in front of it suddenly, you'll slam on the brake in much less than a second and that's undoubtedly unconsciously performed." "If you had've waited for a second, you're liable to have hit the person." "The idea of living 1 a second//in the past may seem strange, but if consciousness depends on large numbers of cells working together, it makes sense that it takes time to develop." "It was his next set of experiments that that caused the real controversy." "This time he had a different question." "Does the brain start first, or do you start the brain?" "Because the traditional way of looking at voluntary action or free will is that you want to do something and you tell the brain to get going." "The results of his work have been debated for years." "Benjamin Libet may have now retired from the frame but others are continuing his work." "We all have this very strong belief that we have conscious free will and it's a central part of our idea of ourselves as individuals that we can want to do something, we can have an intention to do something and then we can do it," "we can make our intention drive our actions and" "Benjamin Libet's work was one of the few experiments which made a truly innovative and courageous attempt to address that question." "I can't feel it being cold." "Patrick Haggard's team are going to measure my brain activity in the run up to a conscious decision, with electrodes placed on my scalp." "Okay Susan, you're all wired up and ready to go." "Absolutely." "We're going record from your left Motor-Cortex, your right motor Cortex and from the mid line." "I want you to watch the clock hand which is rotating on this small clock in the centre of the screen and then, at any time when you choose, when you intend and will to," "I want you to press either this key, or this key, as the urge?" "As the urge takes you." "Fine, okay." "and then the computer will prompt you to type in the position of the clock hand at which you first felt the conscious will to press the button." "Fine." "Good." "Any questions?" "No." "Off we go." "It's very funny waiting for the urge isn't it?" "So, watching the clock I record the exact time that I make the decision to act, while the electrodes on my head, monitor the activity in my brain," "leading up to this decision." "As I do this over and over again, a clear pattern starts to emerge." "So here are our results, which contain the same basic effect as Libet originally found." "The average time of the intention to move was where this arrow is here and you can see that the motor areas of the brain have begun to build up electrical activity in preparation for this willed action," "2000 milliseconds, at least, before the action actually occurs." "Just as in Libet's original work, this experiment seems to show that my brain appears to prepare for movement long before I felt like I'd consciously decided to move." "So, did I have any real choice about when I moved?" "Could the felling of having made a decision, just be an illusion?" "So, this looks like a real problem for our idea of conscious free-will, because our assumption that we work with every day," "I think is that we decide what we want to do and then, or I should say, I decide what I want to do, and then I am able to get my brain to drive my body to make it happen." "The implications of Libet's findings are far reaching." "That our conscious mind, our free-will is merely an after effect." "The actions and decisions that we take every day, which feel like instant, conscious choices are actually the result of slowly emerging sub-conscious processes in the brain." "If everything really starts in the sub-conscious, do we have any freedom or are we sophisticated machines, our responses determined by the mechanics of our brains?" "There's no question that we are organic machines." "If we think of a machine as any physical system capable of performing certain functions, then of course the brain is a machine and we are, our whole bodies are biological machines, but the point I'm making now is," "that doesn't show that we don't have free will, because this is a, the peculiarity of these machines is that they are conscious machines." "Since the 1960's philosopher," "John Searle has been a passionate campaigner for free speech." "He believes that freedom, whether at the political or the personal level is an absolutely fundamental part of what it means to be human." "Now here's the problem." "There isn't any way we can think our way to freedom, that is, when you make a decision, when you take any action, you have to presuppose freedom." "If you go in a restaurant and they give you the menu and the guy wants to know what you want, you can't say 'oh well, I'm a determinist, que sera, sera, I'll just see what I order'," "cos even that is an exercise of freedom, the refusal to exercise freedom is already an exercise of freedom." "When you think about the things that some people do, there's no getting away from the fact that consciousness seems much more like an act of force than a mere after effect." "Mr Lifto is almost the living embodiment of free will at work," "but do our minds really give us total freedom to control our thoughts and actions?" "It feels as though we've got free will, but how could a brain, made of ordinary matter give rise to a mind which floated totally free from physical reality?" "So here's where we are, at this stage of intellectual history." "We've got this awful problem of free will and people are refusing to look at it, the way they were refusing to look at consciousness," "20 years ago, but if you're looking at consciousness, you've got to look at freewill because it's one and the same set of problems." "All right, there's no way we can think away our own conviction of freewill." "We cannot abandon it." "It's a necessary presupposition of just living on a day to day basis, but we can't square it with the rest of the things we believe." "So we've got a straight contradiction in every intellectual's conception of how the world works - that we got to resolve." "In the back woods of New Hampshire, Joe - known famously as 'the case of JW' has inspired some thought provoking ideas about where the illusion of free will comes from." "Twenty years ago Joe decided to submit himself to a drastic operation to control his epilepsy." "One day You'd have 2 or 3 seizures and when you do that long enough, you're willing to go through anything." "You say, what the heck, if they want to crack your head open and have an operation, what've you got to lose because everything's going wrong anyway, so might as well go for it." "So I just went for it anyway, because I thought I'd try it and see and it turned out it worked good." "The operation was to split his brain in two." "Having exposed his way into the top of the head, the Surgeon works his way into the cleft between the 2 hemispheres, revealing a white bundle of nerve fibres, connecting left and right sides of the brain." "Tearing apart these 50 million fibres in the Corpus Colossum, prevents epileptic seizures from spreading from one side to the other but it also prevents almost all information from your senses travelling across." "The operation has made Joe a valuable research subject for Neuro-Scientists." "After years of studying split-brainer's," "Professor Gazzaniga believes he may have found the source of the illusion of conscious freewill." "He started by examining the linguistic abilities of the left and right sides of the brain." "Words on the right of the screen go to his left hemisphere and he calls them out easily," "but when words are flashed to the other hemisphere he says he didn't see anything, but remarkably, he then draws a picture of the word." "Joe draws the telephone his right hemisphere saw, but strangely he can't tell what it is." "I can't exactly tell what it is." "I can't say what it is." "It looks like a shoe I guess." "What else?" "Coffee, tea..." "I don't know, I can't tell what it is." "Because he thinks that speech comes from the left hemisphere," "Mike Gazzaniga believes that the left must also be dominant in generating consciousness." "If you think about the consciousness differences between the left and the right separated hemisphere, the left hemisphere is an interesting, cognitive machine." "It has all these problem solving capacities, talk and language and speech, as you saw and the right hemisphere, basically, isn't a very interesting entity." "You would not want to have a date with a right hemisphere." "Despite having his brain split in two," "Joe's life has been remarkably unaffected by the operation." "His personality and his interests have remained the same." "I've had them down there since I was a little boy, and I've been building them and saving them." "They've kept right with me all the time." "I feel pretty much like the same person I've always been, just chopped up a little bit I guess." "As far as the operation goes I don't think it really affected me too bad, just helped, but I don't think as far as making me worse, it made me worse or anything, it didn't do anything," "and as far as two brains " "I've only got one brain it's just not quite the same design as everybody else's." "The theory goes that if the conscious feeling of who you are came from both hemispheres, then Joe would feel changed by his operation." "Since he doesn't, Mike Gazzaniga's bold conclusion is that" "Joe's inner voice must come from just one side of his brain and since our inner thoughts are all words, they must come from the linguistic left." "The inner voice in the left hemisphere has got to be huge, robust - it's Pavarotti-like and this right hemisphere probably has a chirp;" "a little bird sound, because the devices that allow for the inner voice to really expand and express itself, are mostly located in the left hemisphere." "Experiments on Joe have lead Mike Gazzaniga to believe that the left hemisphere may also provide an explanation for the sensation of freewill." "Sun dial" "What did you say?" "Dial" "It's not dial." "In this test, Joe is flashed two words simultaneously." "Shown Hour and Glass he draws an Hour-glass." "With his left hemisphere Joe names it immediately," "What's that?" "Hour glass" "but Joe's left only processed the word Glass, so he goes on to invent a reason why he drew a timepiece." "Did you see it?" "What did you see?" "I saw a glass." "Why did you draw that?" "I don't know." "Probably still thinking about the clock one, I don't know!" "It's as if Joe has been fooled by his own left hemisphere." "And so he basically makes up a story to explain the behaviour that he's carried out and he comes to believe that that's the reason why he did a particular act." "And you see those experiments, that kind of phenomenon time and again in these split studies, but the importance of it, is not that it is unique to split brain patients at all, it is a metaphor for what you and I do." "It's that we're constantly trying to figure out, and put a spin on what's coming out of our body." "Gazzaniga believes he's discovered why we think we've got freewill." "The feeling of being consciously in control of our minds, is just an illusion created by the left hemisphere." "Our conscious inner voice is merely a fiction to explain decisions made by the self-conscious." "It's got to be true that a huge amount of what we do in our awake conscious life is governed by unconscious processes." "I'm not conscious about the fact of how that last sentence just came out, it just came out because it's been... some guys are down there with framing hammers putting this stuff together and Bingo out it comes, and it's more or less orderly." "So, so just think about the fact that the major management of your body walking through space, you're responding to auditory, visual, tactile events, all that's being done for you, it's just absolutely been done for you and" "you're not paying any attention to it at all." "You don't even know about it, but it does a wonderful job and it just turns out more and more of your cognitive acts are the same." "The work with split-brainers, like Joe is fascinating, but I'm not convinced that the experiments prove our consciousness emerges from just one half of our brain." "And this research doesn't actually get us any closer to answering the most important question of how brain cells can generate consciousness at all." "I think that the conscious thoughts and feelings that flit through your head is a direct reflection of the ever changing pattern of activity in your brain." "I'm suggesting that we're conscious of whatever happens to cause the biggest ripple of activity in our brains at any one time." "If I'm right, these patterns of activity would account for how the mass of protein and fat in our heads can create the richness of thought and feeling we each experience." "We know there's no such thing as a consciousness centre inside our heads, instead it's a result of the overall state of the whole brain and although it may feel special, consciousness must emerge from exactly the same processes" "as the brain's sub-conscious activity." "We may not yet be able to understand how consciousness is generated, but now that it's accepted as a physical reality and not some mystical phenomenon," "I think we are on the road towards a scientific understanding of this age-old problem." "This new century will bring great advances in our understanding of the brain." "As imaging techniques improve we'll be able to monitor the brain's activity in all it's complexity as it flits from thought to thought." "And when we can match each of the many physical processes inside our brain with all our different thoughts, emotions and memories, the phenomenon itself may eventually be laid bare." "As we find out more about what goes on inside this incredible object, so our lives could be transformed." "If we could discover why, when certain brain cells degenerate, memory and personality fade along with them, then would could combat some of the devastating problems of old age," "and as we gain insights into the brain processes that are necessary for happiness, then we may have powerful new ways to treat depression." "Whatever we learn about how the brain works, each one of us will continue to enjoy our own private world," "locked away inside our heads." "I don't believe that neuro-science will ever undermine what it feels like to be a unique, individual human being."