"Between the turmoil of puberty and the decline of old age... the human body reaches its peak." "In biological terms as adults we are the finished article." "Now is the time when we begin to live our life... rather than prepare for life." "But there is something unique about the adult body... which has made us the most powerful animal species on Earth." "It has enabled us to rule the natural world." "It has given us the flexibility to escape the confines of our planet... to venture out into space." "We´ve even managed to explore inside our own bodies." "Every day doctors make repairs to our internal world." "So, all the triumphs of human endeavour stem from one thing." "It is the most mysterious part of the human body... and yet it dominates the way we live our adult lives." "It is the brain." "The human brain is a miracle of evolution." "It´s the most complicated object in the known universe." "But to understand how it works... we really need to know how it evolved and where it came from." "The brain of our ape-like ancestors was very small." "Its volume was about half a litre." "Equivalent to the engine size of a Fiat 500... or a modern-day chimp brain." "A human brain is about three times larger." "The size of a sports car engine." "It´s difficult to get across how rapidly the human brain enlarged." "From our ape-like ancestors to the big-brained humans... was two and a half million years or so." "It sounds a long time... but in evolutionary terms it´s remarkably quick." "The brain was increasing by the equivalent of... about a hundred and fifty thousand extra nerve cells at each generation." "But in nature there´s no such thing as a free lunch... all things cost, and bigger brains, just like bigger engines... are more expensive to run." "The human brain uses up more energy to run... than any other organ in the body, burning a whopping one fifth of the food that we consume." "This makes the head hotter than the rest of the body... shown here by a heat-sensitive camera." "We invest so much in the brain because of its importance." "It´s what makes each one of us who we are." "Compare this with a little animal called the sea squirt... which throughout its juvenile stage, possesses a brain." "But when it grows older and becomes a sedentary adult... the brain is reabsorbed." "The adult sea squirt doesn´t need to swim around... its brain is no longer needed... so why waste valuable resources in running it?" "But we have a brain throughout life, because we need it." "And what a fantastic thing it is." "It´s amazing to consider that... this is the place where someone once felt, thought and loved." "From looking at it there´s nothing to suggest much ability at all." "It appears rather gruesome." "Wrinkled like a walnut and with the consistency of mushroom." "For centuries, scientists have been battling to understand... what this unappealing object is all about." "The philosopher Aristotle of ancient Greece believed that... the brain helped regulate the body´s temperature." "A runny nose was the cooling fluid leaking out of the brain." "He reasoned that since the heart beat faster when you were excited... it must be responsible for our feelings and thoughts." "It´s easy to laugh at him now... but Aristotle was the first person to think seriously about... how the human body worked." "We´ve come a long way since the fourth century BC." "Now we can actually inside a living brain." "Medical scanners prove the brain is indeed where we think and feel." "When a particular area of the brain is working hard... extra blood flows there through the arteries... to provide energy for the active nerve cells." "The scanner can detect these changes in blood flow... giving us a completely new window into the fascinating world of the mind." "Using this technique, we can actually watch the brain at work." "Here is a subject listening to music." "Not one, but several areas light up." "This part of the brain is where we process all sounds... and this is where we appreciate music." "Amazingly, there are even separate bits for melody... for rhythm... and for pitch." "But what´s actually happening deep inside the brain?" "It´s a fascinating story but it´s complicated." "It all starts with this tree-like structure." "A single brain cell or neuron." "Here is an actual neuron, magnified ten thousand times." "Neurons are the tiny building blocks of the brain." "They do something remarkable which prompts all our thoughts." "They fire an electrical impulse." "Amazingly we can now see one firing." "This is the first time it´s been shown on television." "The electricity is bursting along the neuron... at four hundred kilometres an hour." "Here we´re seeing it in slow motion." "Within a tiny fraction of a second it´s ready to fire again." "Your brain has a staggering one hundred billion of these neurons." "Together, they could generate enough electricity to illuminate a light bulb." "To make things more complicated still, the branches of each neuron... are connected to thousands of other neurons." "It´s hard to grasp the sheer scale of all these connections." "Imagine a bustling city the size of New York." "Give every person in that city ten thousand pieces of string." "Tell each person to attach each piece of string to a different person." "Now make the city a thousand times bigger." "This is the incredible tangle we call the brain." "And there´s more." "Go deeper into this tangle, travel along a single neuron... and take a close look at the junction with its neighbour." "Oddly, the neurons are not physically joined together at all." "There´s a tiny gap." "To bridge this gap the neurons release... minute quantities of chemicals every time they fire." "Chemical go-betweens that influence our thoughts." "This cocktail of chemicals swirling about the brain is finely balanced." "It needs to be to control the activity of the brain." "Because it´s so much on a knife edge it´s quite easy to disrupt." "People do it every day with a range of different drugs." "People have been drinking alcohol for thousands of years." "But surprisingly it´s only in the last couple of years... that scientists have discovered precisely how it works." "Unlike what most people think... it isn´t really the alcohol which affects the brain." "Rather, as soon as the alcohol enters the body... it´s broken down in a cascade of complex chemical reactions." "It´s one of the by-products of these reactions... something called a fatty acid compound... that actually gets people drunk." "As alcohol is consumed, the reaction time of people begins to slow down." "There´s a good reason why reactions become sluggish." "The normal chemical balance in the brain is being disrupted... as those fatty acids clog up the surface of the neurons." "The fatty acids attack only parts of the brain:" "those that control speech, mood, and memory." "How can all the thoughts and behaviour of a person... come from a collection of chemicals and little neurons?" "Some people compare the brain to a computer... but perhaps a better analogy is with a termite mound." "It´s all to do with the whole thing being greater than the sum of the parts." "A termite colony is extraordinary." "It is as intricate and as complex as a small city." "It can dominate whole areas of the bush and wage war against other insects." "But above all, it can build these stupendous structures... complete with columns and buttresses... and sophisticated air conditioning ducts." "So where is the knowledge for this incredible organisation kept?" "Not in an individual worker termite:" "they are supremely dim, with a brain the size of a pinhead." "Nor in the enormous squirming egg-producing queen." "Her brain is even smaller than a worker´s." "No, the intricate behaviour of the termite colony... emerges from the collective effort of all the termites." "Here, a group of worker termites are constructing a new wall." "Not a single one of them carries a blueprint for the wall... but working together it gets built." "Termites send out chemical signals, and between them they pile up their tiny mouthfuls of mud." "Clearly the human brain is totally different from the termite mound." "Yet they both are capable of extraordinary feats... which although based on the building blocks of termites or neurons... are completely beyond each one of them as an individual." "It makes no sense to search for the root of knowledge... in a single neuron or a single termite." "The cleverness of both emerges from.." "the many millions of very simple things working together." "So, it´s teams of neurons acting in unison that give us all our skills." "Each team, based in a particular region of the brain... takes on a different responsibility... from our most advanced human abilities such as language and memory... to the more basic ones like movement." "Because we walk run and reach without thinking... we forget how such incredible precision is possible." "To see just how much brain effort is required... look what happens when we´re plunged into a totally new environment." "Astronauts have to learn to move from scratch... when they enter a world without gravity." "The reason why we´re able to learn new tasks... and carry them out automatically... lies here." "It´s a part of the brain called the cerebellum, or little brain... because it sticks out right at the base of the brain proper." "Here are stored the practised movements we all learn... be it riding a bike, playing the piano, or even fixing a satellite." "The astronauts are in the cargo bay of the shuttle." "But they´re not out in space." "This is the closest they can get to space back on Earth... an enormous swimming pool." "A pool so large that four space shuttles can fit inside it." "Here astronauts can practise their tasks over and over again... until they can move automatically without thinking." "I have to jig a little to be able to lock." "Yeah, it is finicky about being... directly perpendicular to the rail when it goes on." "So try to wriggle it back and forth... from starboard to port and also from forward to aft." "Okay." "I think if you did this in orbit... you´d be very successful about getting this right back... and the latch exactly where it needs to be for entry... so just keep right along the same path there." "All these hours of training in the tank are vital." "The stakes are high, because there are very real dangers out in space." "On a real space walk, the astronauts won´t have the luxury of a rescue diver." "The tasks in orbit are very complex... and we don´t know whether things are going to be easy or difficult... whether they´re going to be impossible up there... so we train, train... we train for contingencies in case something goes wrong,... and frankly we don´t know how things are going to go, we´re testing." "We´re also assuming that the latches on board didn´t work..." "Marsha lvens is one such astronaut." "We talked about seeing the world." "She´s been on four shuttle missions... and orbited the planet six hundred and eighty three times." "Learning to deal with the absence of gravity... takes a little bit of getting used to." "We are, are used to walking from place to place when we go some place... and you don´ walk, you float or fly." "So when I want to go from here to across the room or across the cabin... I will push off with my hand or my feet." "If I push off too hard I smash into the wall... if I don´t push off in the right direction I miss the wall... and if I don´t push off hard enough I don´t quite get to the wall." "So that takes a little bit of getting used to." "Once we´ve practised a skill enough the cerebellum can take over automatically." "A thought starts it off and then the cerebellum does the work... sending out instructions to the rest of the body." "This happens without us even being aware of it." "In fact, the unconscious part of the brain... is often more skilful than the conscious part." "On the space Shuttle is a robot arm." "The astronauts have to train hard to operate it using a joystick." "This mechanical arm is specially designed to be like the human arm... in order to make it easier for the astronauts to use." "The joints on the robot arm are... identical to the joints on your real arm." "The arm moves in three different places... a shoulder, like your shoulder does... moves, in this direction, which we call pitch, up and down, and it moves back and forth, we call that yaw." "The elbow, your elbow only moves in one direction, here... and we call that pitch." "Your wrist will move in three directions... it will roll, it will move up and down, which is pitch... and it moves from side to side, which is called yaw." "And so the controls for this remote arm work the same way that your arm does." "We can control all of those joint angles... the same way the joint angles in your arm are controlled by your brain." "But the secret with moving a robot arm smoothly... is not to think too much about it... let the cerebellum take over." "For me to learn to use the arm... it was difficult to think about moving each joint as I moved it." "Finally one instructor said just do it." "Put your hands on the controls and move it." "And I just did it, and I don´t even know how that works." "The more experienced you get... the more rotations and translations you can make at the same time." "And that´s probably true of learning to use your hand... when you reach for something you make very complex motions with your arm... and that´s probably as learned a response... as it is learning to control the robot arm." "The astronauts use the same mental equipment to control the robot arm... as we first use as babies to control our flesh and blood arms." "People have a fantastic ability to make almost any tool... an extension f their bodies." "Surgeons make full use of their cerebellum to perform keyhole surgery." "Here a doctor is investigating why a woman is unable to conceive." "The surgical tools allow him to examine inside her... without resorting to major surgery." "After enough training it´s relatively simple for a doctor to co-ordinate... what they do with their hands with what they see on the screen." "Most of the time their movements are controlled automatically." "But if they´re doing something they´ve never done before... or when an emergency crops up... they become much more aware as to what´s going on." "They need to concentrate much harder, and the conscious brain takes over." "Most mammals have a cerebellum just as developed as ours." "A rat´s primitive brain is largely cerebellum." "They don´t need much more for their relatively simple lives." "And in humans the basic design of this rudimentary part of the brain... has changed little as we´ve evolved." "It is the rest of our brain that has enlarged so massively." "Why did it get so big?" "Well, surprisingly a whole quarter of our oversize brain... is devoted to vision." "Much more than for any of our other senses." "What you see when you peer into the back of the eye... is the only part of the brain which is visible from the outside world." "The optic nerve at the back of the eye... is a direct extension of the brain." "Travelling along the optic nerve we pass right through the brain." "Here, at the back of the head, is where the visual information arrives." "Our eyes are just a window, we actually see with our brain." "It´s difficult to grasp just how complicated vision is... until you try to programme a computer to see." "It´s staggeringly difficult." "What the scientists hadn´t realised was that the eye is merely the first step." "The brain does most of the real work." "These robots have excellent cameras on board... but they lack the clout of the brain to make sense of what they see." "This can be a handicap." "Our brains are so powerful we very much take our visual skills for granted." "To fly this nineteen forties biplane Marsha lvens relies... more on the view from the cockpit than instrument panel." "In an airplane like this. vision is your primary means of knowing... where you are relative to the world in the airplane." "My brand of flying doesn´t really require a whole lot of dials." "I can tell as I come closer to the ground what my rate of descent is... and that a pilot learns with experience." "So I make periodic checks for the altimeter and the airspeed... and the vertical speed indicator for that information... but mostly I do that by looking outside." "Whenever we look around us we see the world instantly." "The shape of a plane, its movement, its colour." "But what´s surprising is that all these aspects of the image... have to be processed by the brain separately." "We know these various elements of vision are distinct because... certain people with brain damage are missing one of them." "Some cannot discriminate colour." "While, more bizarrely, others are unable to perceive motion." "It´s as if they´re seeing a stationary snapshot of the world... every couple of seconds." "But in normal vision our powerful brain combines all these disparate elements... into one coherent view of the world." "As the brain power of our ancestors increased... they not only observed the world... but also invested ways of shaping it." "We can see this in action by looking at the tools that chimps make." "The chimps from this group use an impressive nineteen types of tool." "Most of them are to get at food." "Thin sticks help them catch ants and termites." "Chimps even use stone anvils and wooden hammers to crush the shells of nuts." "The creature that made this stone tool two million years ago... chipped away slivers of stone to give it a sharp edge... and it was probably used as a kind of axe." "Archaeologists here in the Great Rift Valley of Africa... are very interested in the tools they´ve found here because... it wasn´t apes that made them, it was people." "All of this site is special... because there´re such vast concentrations of stone tools here," "There was a lake here in this area... and the early humans were coming down to the lake... both to kill animals and use the stone tools on the carcasses." "To accurately make such a perfect tool... you´ve got to be fairly well practised... you´ve got to have a big brain... and quite good manipulation of your hands... in such a way to strike a flake off a piece of rock... and come up with a result like this." "And Louise believes that these stone tools were used to butcher meat." "We´ve found stone tools with a carcass say of an early elephant... where you´ve got stone tools... and you´ve got bones which show cut marks... so you´re pretty sure that those stone tools were used to butcher that animal." "A chimp cannot make a stone hand axe." "axe. lt´s not just a lack of brains." "A chimp´s thumb is very short compared to its other fingers... making it awkward to use all but the simplest tools." "But over hundreds of thousands of years... our human thumb lengthened." "This gave us an enormous advantage." "We could make a precise finger pinch between thumb and forefinger." "It´s called the opposable thumb... and it allowed us to manipulate objects with great dexterity." "Marsha harnesses this precision control of her fingers... to do safety checks on her plane." "I pluck the wires on the tail... and I should hear that they all ring relative to each other the same tone... if I hear one that´s tud or a dud then I know... that could potentially be damaging to the airplane... and the pilot." "As I walk around the airplane... sometimes your hand will feel something your eye doesn´t see." "If I run my fingers along the edge of the propeller... I can feel a nick in the propeller that I wouldn´t necessarily see... and I don´t want nicks in the propeller because that disrupts the airflow." "The sensitivity of our fingers comes from... the ridges and the grooves of our fingerprints." "These ridges also give us better grip, especially in wet conditions,... just like the tread of a car tyre cornering in the rain." "But what have fingers got to do with the brain?" "Throughout our evolution developments of the brain and the body... were constantly bouncing off one another." "As one advanced, it drove the other forward, and so on." "This positive feedback relied on a key turning point... one that other animals failed to make." "Chimps´ hands aren´t so dextrous as human hands... partly because chimps have to do two very different jobs with them." "Aside from holding things, they walk on them." "So they are a compromise." "Good enough for knuckle walking but not so good for creating tools." "Human hands excelled at creating tools and manipulating objects, because they could be dedicated to just one job." "Unlike chimps, we stood up on our hind limbs." "Proof of this comes from another site in East Africa." "Twenty years ago, Mary Leakey, Louise´s grandmother... uncovered a set of tracks." "There was something strange about them:" "there are no handprints." "These are the earliest hominid footprints ever found... from 3 millions years ago." "They were upright ancestral humans:" "two were adults... an one was much smaller, possibly a child." "Standing tall on two legs happened very early... on in the development of the human body." "Before we had opposable thumbs... before we had stone tools... before we had language." "Indeed, it was standing up that helped these developments." "Early humans literally had time on their hands." "Time to challenge their tiny brain, jump-starting it into further evolution." "As our brain got bigger so it perfected one rather special trick." "It learned to make order out of chaos putting things into categories." "Coffee with caffeine and coffee without." "Kenyan or Colombian." "It´s no accident that this is how we organise our daily life." "We came to classify things this way... so that we could cope with the complexity of nature." "To survive we had to learn which plants were poisonous... and which we could eat." "To know which animals would make a good meal... I and which were likely to make a meal of us." "Animals do this to some extent, but the human brain excelled at it." "We still use this skill in city life." "But out in the natural world... you can witness it the way it was originally deployed." "Philip Alderson is a park ranger in North Australia." "Forest fires sweep the park in the dry season... and Philip lights small control fires to burn up dry tinder... and stop the spread of a bigger fire that´s approaching." "It´s called back burning, a technique Aboriginal people have been using with great success... for thousands of years." "You can see that big cloud of smoke coming over... and it´s roaring through... so when the main fire front comes along... it gets really windy and you know, little whirly winds everywhere... and that´s why you do your back burn... so stop it from coming any further with all that wind." "So it´ll just carry it over across the other side of the road... all the debris and sparks and that." "The ability to understand and control the natural world... was crucial to survival throughout our past." "This river is teeming with crocodiles." "The same skills that Philip´s ancestors used to kill them..." "Philip now uses to count them." "He tracks them down with his knowledge of their habits." "They live in underneath the bank, where there´s tree roots." "They dig a hole underneath the tree root." "You can usually walk along the bank and see this hole." "it´s a breathing hole for crocodile." "They pick out an area where they do their hunting... and if any other crocodile go in there they sort of have a go at him." "Because they get very territorial." "To outwit nature, we needed our brains above all." "Most important was powerful memory." "Working memory, usually lasting only a few minutes... is like a mental blackboard, storing just seven items or so." "Working memory is remembering... whether that´s the same crocodile you saw minutes before... or where you just put your notebook down." "The vast majority of these memories quickly disappear." "But there´s a part of the brain... that ensures memories can be stored for much longer." "As certain thoughts are remembered over and over again... they are passed up to the cortex... the folded part enveloping the front of the brain." "This is where our long-term memory resides." "How these memories persist is not yet fully understood." "But the best explanation is that memories.." "are shared across many different neurons." "Over time the branching connections between these neurons are strengthened." "This is how we remember our family and friends... the important events of our life." "One estimate is that an average person can store in their brain... a million different items." "This powerful memory originally evolved... to help us navigate our way around our environment." "If you do come back at night... you can pick out certain points or certain pockets of water... channels that come in off the banks, where you are then you know." "Phil it is quiet isn´t it?" "Yeah it´s quiet.." "You reckon would´ve picked up one by now Phil." "Yeah oh, yeah, look straight up there mate." "The crocodiles prefer to come out at night." "In the dark Philip can still spot them." "Their eyes reflect the torch light." "There´s one there, straight up." "Just near the bank there." "Every time Philip revisits the river... he gets to know it that little bit better... as it´s etched on his mind." "Guess what... got a fish." "I will count down in the form of ready, steady, go." "Alright?" "A few people have memory skills well beyond the ordinary... and most of the best are collected here at the 13th Mind Olympiad in London." "They´ve come to flex their powers of recall." "At the point of my saying go all the stop watches are started... so you get fifteen minutes to commit to memory... starting now." "The contenders come from a surprising range of backgrounds." "There´s a DJ, a fireman, a naval officer and the usual contingent of students." "What they all share is the staggering ability... to memorise thousands of numbers off by heart." "Andy Bell has been coming here for three years." "The reason I´m here is to try and win." "It is very competitive, I´ve broken some records already... but the main things is to try to win the championship." "There´s little chance of that today." "Ready, steady, go!" "This man has won the memory championships four times." "This man has learnt the answer to every single Trivial Pursuit question." "The only thing that stands between him and victory today... is a full deck of cards he has to view in under forty seconds... and memorise in just three minutes." "He is Dominic O´Brien." "How do they do it?" "Stop memorisation, start recall." "The National Institutes of Health in America... has spent three years and a quarter of a million dollars... to find out what was different about these people´s brains." "Their conclusion, these people are completely normal." "They don´t have photographic memory... which most scientists believe is a myth." "In fact the only difference between them and you... is that they have trained the memory that we all share." "One minute." "Another victory for Dominic O´Brien." "So what´s Dominic´s secret?" "If you´re presented with a hundred digit number... it doesn´t really mean anything, unless I break it up." "So I break up a long number, sequence it into pairs of digits... and then I give each pair of digits a character." "For instance the number ten is Dudley Moore for me... and the number zero seven is Roger Moore." "Number ninety nine would be Mr Whippy." "So then I have something that I can work with... and then to remember those pairs of numbers in sequence... I imagine them in a journey." "So it´s a bit like making up a story involving those characters." "That means the story for the number one zero zero seven nine nine,... would be Dudley Moore... meets Roger Moore... for an ice cream." "Easy!" "We´re born to go and hunt and gather... and so that´s why I use journeys." "I have to translate the abstract." "thousands of meaningless numbers... to something that my primitive brain... if you like, my caveman like brain, can understand." "Dominic turns random information into stories... because his brain has evolved to absorb stories easily." "Stories have played a key role in retaining other much longer memories." "The Aboriginal animals and gods painted on this wall... tell their own tales from long ago." "Rock art is really just an extension of memory." "A more lasting way of storing traditions." "The big red kangaroo on the top there." "There´re some barramundi this one here." "Perch, another one." "If you´re first one out and you hunted your first fish... they´d paint it up on the wall for you... so everyone can come and have a look what type of fish it was." "A lot of these paintings are... twenty thousand to forty thousand year old paintings... and you could still see it was like almost painted yesterday." "As with rock art, so with music." "Every human culture has music... and aboriginal songs are at the heart of there´s." "Here, Philip´s uncle is making a didgeridoo." "Our human brain has evolved to enjoy and memorise... the melodies and rhythms of music." "We don´t use written language, we learn by... by using the songs and... they´ve been around for thousands of years, really." "So each song has a different meaning... you pick it up as a kid, you know... you can learn more and understand life more, you know." "You find them down there." "Sinking the hole." "Parents teaching their children is another way... of passing information down the generations." "Philip shows his son how to find the turtles that live in the mud." "...they´re in the hollow, Sam..." "Hollow one, like rock." "That´s the one." "Big one, eh, dig him up, Bob." "They´re learning a lot actually." "Teaching a kid from a very young age it´s very important because... it helps you keep your culture and... understand where the grass roots of where you come from really." "Through our parents, through art, through education... we learn about the world." "All this knowledge is absorbed by the powerful human brain." "The brain´s hardest task is how to deal with human society." "Perhaps the ability to cope with other people and get on in society... has been the main force behind the huge growth of the human brain." "Certainly, it makes sense in one way." "After all, the most complicated thing... that ancient human would meet in their lives... was not a tool, not food, not a predator:" "but another person." "The bottom line is that it´s other people, not the world itself... that´s difficult to deal with." "To work out the motives of others, to persuade, to charm... to make friends and not enemies, all this takes brains." "We can see it in action with our closest relatives." "Chimps are constantly vying with one another to be leader of the troupe." "Here a young male chimp is attempting to usurp the older male." "And while fights are certainly dramatic... often more important than just brute strength... is the ability to forge alliances with other chimps." "Brain over brawn." "Chimps spend hours and hours picking through the hair of their colleagues." "It´s called grooming, and it´s the key to social climbing." "The better chimps are at these social niceties... the more likely they are to rise through the ranks." "Scientists have now discovered that... the more complex the social group an animal special belongs to... the bigger its brain will be." "An ability to deceive, to make allies, to win others over... must have been vital in the development of the chimp mind." "Support for this theory has come from an unlikely source: bats." "The more social a bat, the bigger its brain." "Solitary species have small brains, but the vampire bat... which shares blood with its friends... is the bat species with the biggest brain." "They need a big brain to thrive in their complex little world." "Human societies are the most complicated of all animal societies." "There is continual pressure to be No. 1 ... and where better to look for it in the corridors of power?" "The Houses of Parliament in London." "While the ceremony of Parliamentary life looks rather splendid... it´s the jostling that goes on behind the scenes... that is often more important." "Politicians huddle together in conspiratorial whispers." "Deals are made and broken." "The MPs, the lords and ladies, are demonstrating skills... that haven´t changed for millions of years." "We´re not chimps but it´s a jungle out there." "And you don´t have to go to the Houses of Parliament... to come across politics." "All the time our brains are dealing with politics with a small P." "Gossip, flattery, backbiting... at home or in the office... it´s really just our way of getting along with people." "Over millions of years, the human brain and body... have evolved to meet ever more complicated challenges." "We learned to manipulate tools... we made full use of our visual sense... and we developed a powerful memory." "More recently we mastered language... a highly efficient form of social grooming." "We can now build up a detailed picture of the brain we´ve evolved." "The cerebellum responsible for automatic movements." "The back of the brain for vision." "The frontal cortex for memory." "There´s even a particular site for language... and another for our social skills." "But there´s still something missing from this map." "It´s the mysterious thing that makes you who you are." "Scientists call it consciousness." "Consciousness is the greatest of the brain´s qualities." "It´s actually very difficult to define... but essentially it´s our ability to be aware... of our own thoughts and feelings... for each of us to have our own personality." "Without consciousness we´d be little more than robots... trundling through the motions of life." "Consciousness allows us to appreciate the greater things in life." "Love, art, science and religion." "Consciousness makes our brain... more than just a collection of little grey cells and electricity." "It´s what makes us truly human." "As a subject consciousness is extremely difficult to study." "But a series of extraordinary surgical operations... have revealed some startling new facts." "This rather sad story began in the nineteen sixties." "Brain surgeons desperate to treat their severely epileptic patients... pioneered an operation to try and control epileptic fits." "Good." "OK, Dave, I´m going to start to divide the corpus callosum." "This dramatic surgery involved slicing the brain right down the middle." "They hoped to restrict future fits to one side of the brain only." "It was a radical approach." "But the patients had such severe epilepsy this was their last hope." "The operation usually worked... but it had some unfortunate side effects in a few patients." "Vicky is one such patient." "Afterwards, scientists discovered that the surgery appeared... to give her two independent minds... each controlling one half of her body." "It became apparent even when Vicky got dressed." "I knew what I wanted to wear... and I would open up my closet and a couple of times... one hand would like get ready to take it out... but my other hand would like just take control." "And a couple of times I had a pair of shorts on and... I´d find myself putting another pair of shorts on... on top of the pair I had already had on... and which I knew was, I knew was wrong." "I wouldn´t go out the house that way." "Each of her hands is obeying one half of her brain." "It´s as if her consciousness has been split in half." "Two minds in her one brain." "This is extraordinary." "If our consciousness is located in just one side of the brain, it can never be separated into two in the way that it is for Vicky." "So I cannot point at one part of my brain... and say that is where "l" reside." "Put simply, consciousness is part of the whole brain." "Perhaps in the same mysterious way... that the termites work together in the colony... so the many elements which make up our consciousness work in harmony." "It looks like the higher abilities of the brain:" "memory, perception and emotions... are seamlessly bound into one wonderful whole." "But is there more to it than this?" "Science is the most powerful way of finding out about the human body." "Even so, some feel that... there will always be questions it just can´t answer." "Most people believe that much of what makes us human... will forever remain mysterious, even spiritual." "They call it the soul." "If we take a line of people... one for each year of life from birth to a hundred... what we see is the remarkable development of human ageing." "As we journey through the first stages of our lives... our bodies develop to meet the challenges of each new age." "Year by year we´re continually developing, growing stronger... becoming more intellectually alert and more sexually mature." "All these changes bring us to the point... where we can reproduce... and so pass on our genes to the next generation." "But what´s particularly remarkable is that we go on." "On beyond the child bearing years... and the years it takes to raise our children." "On into the later years." "It´s remarkable because in this respect we´re unlike any other animals." "In the wild animals don´t grow old... but we humans have evolved to live long lives... longer than any other mammal in fact." "Why is something of a mystery... but for humans at least there might be something more to growing old... than a slow decline." "For we humans, a beating heart has always been more... than simply a muscle rhythmically contracting and relaxing." "With good reason, it´s come to symbolise life itself... and at the beginning of the century there was a theory about ageing... which centred on the beating heart." "It was called the rate-of-living theory." "It argued that each animal had a finite number of heartbeats." "About one to two billion." "So, while animals with a fast heartbeat might live for only a few short years... others, with a slower beat, such as humans... could live for the best part of a century." "Anyway the theory was wrong." "The truth is that... we don´t really understand very much about the ageing process." "But what we do know is very interesting." "We´ll see for example why a great French painter... gradually altered the way he painted his garden... and how an eighty year old cowboy can still ride a horse." "How sex hormones affect the way we age." "What we have in common with a space voyager." "Why very familiar sounds are heard differently as time goes by." "And why those of us who heard this music the first time round... no longer look the same as we did then." "But science can only give us part of the picture." "So we´ll be following the story of two people... who are actually living through the experience of growing older." "They are an elderly couple... living in a farming community in the Midwest of America." "Bud Mather is still herding cattle at the age of almost eighty." "He and his wife Viola have grown old together on their farm in Kansas." "We´ve been here ever since we married, forty five years ago." "And have never been gone more than twenty days I guess." "This place when you and I got married was just a little four room side house." "It didn´t have any water in it, it didn´t have any bathroom." "We just had to carry all the water in and out and... that´s why you married me so I´d cook for you because you couldn´t cook." "And you didn´t want to haul the water... so you married me... I´d take care of you, didn´t you?" "Yeah." "I´ll be seventy eight in November ... and Vi she was sixty three in August." "That´s about fourteen years difference in us." "And when we was going together, they were always kidding about... boy you´re getting one out of the cradle aint you?" "And I said you bet but I got somebody that´ll take care of me in old age." "Ageing is a process they´ve shared... since they first met each other at a dance... at the Old School House almost half a century ago." "Boy this place is a mess now aint it?" "I can´t believe." "Look at the terrible shape it´s in." "All the windows are gone." "Wasn´t like this when we met fifty... yeah..." "Seems like fifty doesn´t it?" "Forty six years ago." "Forty six years ago yeah!" "We met here at a dance, do you remember that?" "Oh yeah." "On the night of the dance that we met this place was full of people." "Music and laughter and people having a good time." "He came over and asked me to dance... and I thought he had the bluest eyes I had ever seen." "And I fell in love with those blue eyes." "She sure looked wonderful to me." "Her skin was real fair and smooth." "And then I guess I fell in love with her then." "As we grow on through the years... we get a little more here and a little more there... and a little less here and a little less there." "But I don´t think our love has got any less." "If anything it´s got deeper, more understanding one another." "Naturally, over the years both Bud and Viola have experienced... some of the changes that tend to happen to us as we grow older." "The first time that I realised that I needed glasses... we were driving in the car and Bud was driving... and it was late in the evening and I said:" ""Oh my goodness there´s two cars coming down the road!" "They´re side by side, be careful we´re going to have a wreck!"" "And he said:" ""what are you talking about?" "Those cars are not side by side, one is behind the other one." "You know I think you better go and have your eyes checked."" "And I said, well l´ll get the glasses but I´ll never wear ´em." "Well I got the glasses, I put them on... and I have never taken them off again." "Eyesight is so remarkably and wonderfully complex... that it´s arguably our most important sense." "Using a special camera it´s possible to look directly into the eye." "The pupil has been enlarged... so that we´re looking straight through the lens of the eye... at the pink retina at the back." "It´s pink because of the blood vessels immediately behind it." "This is what produces the familiar red eye in flash photos." "It´s the retina that carries the receptors... that actually register the light from the scene in front of us." "For such a complex system it´s remarkable how much... our brains have to compensate for what we actually see." "The lens in our eye produces an image on the retina... which is actually upside down." "Our brains correct this by telling us... that what we´re seeing is the right way up." "The lens itself is pretty basic... it tends to produce an image which is blurred particularly around the edges." "But when it comes to focusing... it´s not just the lens that matters, it´s the retina." "On the retina the white spot with blood vessels emerging is the optic nerve." "This carries the visual signals to the brain." "But the part of the eye that does most of the work... is that small dark circular area in the middle of the picture." "It´s called the macula and it´s only about one to two millimetres across." "Right in the middle of that area, it´s best seen in a green light... is a small pit with a yellow spot in the middle." "It´s called the fovea." "This is what gives us a focused image." "Every time we look at something and see it in sharp focus... it´s not the rest of the retina that´s doing it... it´s just that small spot, only a fifth of a millimetre across... that gives us that focused image." "But because it´s so small what it sees in focus... is only a small part of the scene in front of us." "So the way we view something like this is to move the eyes around... seeing one small focused area after another." "The brain receives these images and persuades us... that everything in front of us is in focus." "But it´s an illusion." "As we get older, our brain has to do more and more work." "When we´re children the lens in our eye has a very pale blue colour." "By middle age in many people the coloration is getting stronger... it´s going yellow, and by old age it can even be brown." "But all stages the brain corrects and takes out that coloration... so that we´re totally unaware of it." "And there´s something else going on." "At the front of the eye is the coloured iris... and immediately behind it is the lens." "In the eye of a small child the lens is almost completely clear." "But it´s at the start of an extremely gradual process that affects us all." "An eye at the age of eleven... by twenty it´s become a little bit cloudy." "At forty five more so." "At eighty, definitely." "As we get older we don´t notice this cloudiness developing... because we simply can´t remember... how clearly we could once see things." "But if it gets too cloudy there´s a limit to what the brain can adjust for." "It doesn´t happen to most people... but the lens in an extremely cloudy condition is called a cataract." "It´s so cloudy other people can see it." "The effects of cataracts were particularly important... for what happened in this garden some years ago." "Earlier this century the man who lived here at Giverny in Northern France... experienced many of these changes to his eyesight." "In his case it was particularly important because... he was one of the greatest French painters of all time, Claude Monet." "Over the years he painted many scenes in these gardens." "Not only are they masterpieces, but they provide a remarkable record... of what was happening as age affects eyesight." "What is noticeable is that around the time of the First World War... his paintings mysteriously began to change." "They became redder and redder." "The reason:" "he was developing cataracts in both his eyes." "These not only affected the sharpness of what he could see... but the way he saw the colours." "In 1923 Monet had an operation to remove the cloudy lens from his right eye." "It instantly changed the way he saw things." "Shortly afterwards he painted this scene... with the eye that still had the cataract in it... and then the same scene with the other eye... where the cataract had been removed." "They´re different." "A close up of the tree makes it obvious." "The painting made with the left eye with the cataract still in... is rather red... and the painting with the right eye, with the cataract removed... is much bluer." "Monet was so horrified by the colours he´d used... when his vision was affected by the cataracts... he wanted to alter many of his paintings... and even destroyed some of them." "Coping with the changes that accompany ageing needn´t be depressing." "The effects of growing older certainly don´t bother these people too much." "They´re Bud and Viola´s friends... and they all go back to that same dance at the school hall... where Bud and Viola met nearly fifty years ago." "Well it has really been nice to get together." "It´s about like it was back at the Old School House." "Same bunch." "Well we had a lot of fun then." "A lot of things we can´t talk about." "There are people that hate to turn forty and fifty and sixty... you know, because they think that they´re getting old." "Look at Bud Mather." "Now he isn´t old." "I mean the years might say that he´s old but he´s got a lot in him yet." "What I remember about Bud he had the prettiest waviest hair." "And that´s different now isn´t it?" "Yes it is." "And his skin was smooth, no wrinkles." "And he didn´t have any little pot here." "And didn´t have any false teeth." "Bud´s skin might not be as soft as it once was." "But he´s still not doing that badly considering his job." "As a cattle rancher his occupational hazard is the sun." "It can be extremely damaging to skin... because it gradually destroys what supports it." "Even those who tan easily will have skins prematurely wrinkled." "Regardless of any damage caused by the sun... normal ageing produces changes in the skin." "This ultrasound probe sends out high-frequency sound... that bounces back from the layers just under the surface." "A young person will on average have skin about half a millimetre thick." "An older person tends to have skin which is thinner." "A young person´s skin is on the left of the screen... an old person on the right." "And typically it´s about twenty five percent thinner." "The reason is that the older skin has lost substances... known as collagen and elastine." "These are proteins which provide... the underlying framework of a young, healthy skin." "Sunlight accelerates the loss of these proteins... and it´s thought that smoking has a similar effect." "The skin becomes less elastic... and the continual flexing of facial muscles gradually produces wrinkles." "It´s been estimated that two hundred thousand frowns... are enough to etch in one brow line." "One way to test the age of the skin is... to pinch the back of the hand and watch what happens." "Young skin springs back quickly." "By the time we´ve reached our thirties and forties... it´s getting a little slower." "And old skin definitely takes its time." "One thing´s certain though." "They may not be very popular with some people... but nobody´s ever died simply because they´ve got a few wrinkles." "Seems kind of windy out there and cold today." "Yes it is." "Well Bud how are you?" "Oh I´m doing all right." "How are you Gerald?" "Good Bud." "Get any more rain." "Like many older men Bud certainly doesn´t overwork his barber." "While his friend Gerald still has a full head of hair..." "Bud has been both bald and grey for some time now." "When I get older, losing my hair... many years from now... will you still be sending me a Valentine... and your greetings with a bottle of wine?" "Baldness is caused by the male sex hormone testosterone... but it´s got nothing to do with virility." "It might simply be that a bald man has hair follicles... which are just very sensitive to the hormone." "In other words, even small amounts of testosterone can make the hair fall out." "So unfortunately the only way to guarantee... that you don´t go bald is to choose your parents with great care... or get castrated before reaching puberty." "Women don´t usually lose their hair until after the menopause." "They make small amounts of the male hormone testosterone... and with the reduction of female hormones at the menopause... the effect of their testosterone becomes more marked... and this could be the cause of hair loss." "For the same reason some women grow a light beard at that time." "A hair actually grows at the rate of a centimetre a month... and for those of us that still have a full head of hair... what that means is that during this programme... we will grow a metre and a half on our scalp." "That´s around one thousand kilometres over a lifetime." "Whether your hair curls or not... depends to some extent on where you´re from." "Asian hair is circular in cross section, so it tends to hang straight." "Black people have hair which is a flat oval... so it naturally tends to form tight curls." "Caucasians or white Europeans have hair halfway between the two... so they tend to have slightly wavy hair." "White Europeans tend to go grey earlier in life than black or Asian people." "Again it´s down to genetics." "Despite all the stories about people going completely grey overnight... it´s impossible." "However, it can happen over a few days... as long as you´re partly grey to start with." "It´s thought that a sudden shock... can sometimes make the coloured hair fall out... leaving the grey hair behind." "Think that´ll be good enough for you Gerald?" "Yeah, looks good." "Well I hope so, I´m running out of hair." "Well that´s, that´s time to quit when you run out of hair." "When you get to Bud you´re gonna have to find his to cut it." "I´ll just hold the clippers up there, spin the chair and holler next." "Just about as long as it takes on mine." "But while testosterone makes men lose hair from their head... it produces more vigorous growth in other places." "Though it´s not always welcome... it tends to be in their ears and their noses." "Why testosterone has such differing effects on hair growth... is a total mystery." "Body hair is not the only thing that continues to grow as we get older." "Our noses appear to go on growing after we´ve reached maturity." "But it´s not clear if it´s real growth or a kind of stretching and sagging." "And the same thing happens to our ears." "All in all, these gradual changes mean that eventually... we just have to accept the loss of our youthful looks." "I´m making this cake for my 45th wedding anniversary." "I´m going to put some pink roses on it and little green leaves... and I´m going to put this wedding ornament on it... that was on my original cake... when Bud and I got married forty five years ago." "Now the ribbon´s a little tattered and torn... but Bud and I are a little tattered and torn too... so we´ll use that on there I think." "On the whole both Bud and Viola enjoy robust good health." "But as they´ve got older... they´ve occasionally had to deal with something serious." "I have always had wonderful health all of my life... until I was fifty eight years old." "At that time I came down with spinal meningitis." "In fact I was doing a big wedding cake for some people... four hundred guests... and I became very ill that day." "So ill in fact that Viola became unconscious." "She was rushed to hospital and apart from anything else... it looked as if she and Bud would miss a holiday together." "Then, whilst she was in the coma... one of the children came up with a right idea." "Susan said:" Mum you´re gonna have to get better..." "Dad´s gonna down the Mississippi with a friend of ours..."" "And she opened her eyes and that brought her to." "My eyes flew open and I came out of the coma." "I couldn´t believe it." "I couldn´t let Bud take another woman down on a beautiful trip... I wanted to go on that trip myself." "One trip Bud and Viola are about to make... will involve taking that cake to the family reunion... for their 45th wedding anniversary." "They´re going to meet children they haven´t seen for years... and grandchildren they´ve never met before." "But it´s going to be the trip of a lifetime... because they´re also going to visit Alaska." "We´ve packed enough stuff we can homestead up there." "For years they´ve longed to see the place... and plan to do it now before it´s too late." "But before that they´ve decided to stop over and see the big city." "They´ve heard and read about it all their lives but have never seen it." "They´re going to visit New York for the very first time." "Look at that skyline." "Look at that pink tower on top there." "Look at that... and there´s another one way down there." "Oh my gosh!" "Isn´t that marvellous?" "Well I don´t know." "I wouldn´t care and watch the pastures." "Oh but we never saw anything like this." "Never." "And I don´t suppose we will again here." "These tall buildings." "Yeah it´s..." "Oh of course." "All the cars, aren´t you glad you aren´t driving today?" "Yes I am." "I´m glad you aren´t driving today too." "I´d be a nervous wreck by the time we got." "Well I´d be more nervous." "And the Waldorf Astoria." "We´ve heard of that all of our lives, that famous building." "That´s a big hotel aint it?" "Although being in a bit city is both fascinating and exciting... for an elderly couple it can also be a little bewildering." "Partly because in contrast to... the relative quiet of the plains of Kansas... here it´s noisy." "Very noisy." "And, as we get older our hearing starts to fade a little." "Like all the senses of our body... hearing is both wonderful and extraordinary in the way that it works." "The fleshy outer ear collects the sounds that surround us... and channels them down the ear canal to vibrate the ear drum." "On the other side of the drum... these vibrations are transmitted through the middle ear by minute bones." "These are the only bones that stop growing soon after birth." "An adult has ear bones the same size as a new born baby." "One of them is the smallest bone in the body." "Known as the stirrup it´s about the size of a grain of rice." "The stirrup rests on the oval window of the inner ear... and passes vibrations through it." "On the other side is something rather intriguing." "Called the cochlea it´s a small bony spiral tube." "It´s the key to how we hear the vast range of sounds that we do." "If we zoom right the way in with an electron microscope... we should see something remarkable:" "the secret of how sound is transmitted to the brain." "There are rows of minute hairs only a few thousandths of a millimetre high." "As noise vibrates them, they send electrical signals to the brain... which we experience as sound." "It´s fascinating to watch, and we´re about to see it happen." "Take a closer look at these V shapes." "They are in fact clusters of three lines of hairs... which are part of a built-in amplifying system." "Now, if we take a look below... we should see the rest of the amplifier." "There we are." "The hairs are sticking out of a cell underneath shaped like a sausage." "It´s actually been possible to isolate one of these hair cells... so lets see what it does when we play it some music." "You might recognise the tune." "The joint´s jumping, literally." "The excited response of these hair cells amplify the faint vibrations... that arrive here from the outside world." "And they do it so well that we can actually hear the sound of a pin drop." "Unfortunately, from the moment we are born... one by one hair cells start to die." "And those that register high frequencies die off first." "The damage here is where hair cells have failed." "Because of the loss of these hair cells... by the age of ten we´ve heard a greater range of sound... than we´ll ever hear in the rest of our lives." "As we get older some people continue to hear relatively well... but in others, so many of the amplifying hair cells have gone... that they can only hear loud noises." "Most cannot hear high frequencies any more." "So the sound of the New York subway... which younger people might hear as something like this.." "will instead be heard like this." "I´d like to get off this." "Oh no, I could ride this all day." "Obviously if older people´s hearing is fading a little... and their eyes are not as good as they once were... their brains just have to cope as best they can." "And some think this may account... for why older people can sometimes appear... easily confused and bewildered." "It´s not so much that their intelligence is waning... although some brain cells will have been lost... it´s more that the brain has to work harder... to make sense of the limited information... it´s getting from the outside world." "This leaves fewer brain cells for memory and decision making... and might account for the confusion... especially in strange and noisy places." "New York is something I never thought I´d see." "So many people, cars, and hear so much noise... and everything that you just can´t quite sort it all out... I can´t anyway." "My neck´s almost sore from looking up all the time... they´re so tall here in the big city." "But I really enjoyed seeing it." "Couldn´t even have dreamed of coming to some place like this when I was a child." "It was a faraway distant place that... never imagined being able to come to... so much of our history is here... the tall buildings... just wonderful to be able to do this in our lifetime." "Later on the trip Bud and Viola meet up... with some of their children and grandchildren." "By the age of seventy... we´ll have lost about a third of our muscle strength." "But we needn´t have." "Regular exercise will help us retain it." "So as a physically active cattle rancher... it´s perhaps not surprising that Bud... does as well as his grandchildren." "But there´s something else that can happen... and we can see it with the help of a special camera." "A thermal camera can detect differences in the heat emerging... from the various parts of the body." "And it´s used by doctors to detect something that´s different... something that´s wrong." "Margaret was out walking one day... when she felt a sudden sharp pain in her leg." "To the naked eye there´s not much difference between her two knees... but to the thermal camera there definitely is." "One knee has a cool blue and green colour... but the other knee has a different colour." "It has a hot spot in red." "Let´s take a more detailed look at that knee joint." "Here, where the thigh bone and shin bone meet... they´re protected by a membrane of cartilage." "Now, take away the bones for a moment... and we´re left with that cup shape membrane." "If we take a look inside, yes... with wear and tear a small hole has developed in the membrane... and the two bones have come in contact through it." "As they touch each other and grind together the surfaces are damaged... and without treatment the joint can become extremely painful." "It´s called osteoarthritis and affects many elderly people." "Although physically very fit, Bud has osteoarthritis in both his knees." "No more chocolate." "Nor more chocolate for you." "Although they´re joking, Viola´s distorted image in the mirror... is very similar to what happens to women when they put on weight." "Fat tends to settle around the hips and the bottom... and there´s a difference between the sexes." "When a rather plump man is scanned in a special X-ray machine... it´s possible to see the outline of the layers of fat." "Men tend to put it on around the waist, so they become apple shaped." "Some believe that this happens because of... a drop in the levels of the sex hormone testosterone." "It´s thought it can reduce as a result of age and stress." "Fat around the waist tends to get into the bloodstream easily... increasing the risk of diabetes and heart disease in men." "The inside walls of young arteries are smooth and clean." "But after years of a diet high in saturated fat... old arteries can start to look clogged." "This sort of thing can trigger blood clots... and block the vital circulation to the heart." "Female sex hormones tend to make fat accumulate around the bottom... as it did at puberty... when a woman first developed her adult shape." "This is a safer place in that the fat here is inclined to stay put... and not circulate in the blood." "Women become pear shaped in comparison to men." "Bud and Viola journey on to the family reunion and to Alaska." "All in all, ageing means lots of changes as we go through our lives... but perhaps the more interesting question... is not so much how we change... but rather why do we change at all." "In fact ageing is one of the greatest paradoxes of human biology." "For it turns out that our bodies are constantly renewing themselves." "Our skin is continuously being replaced." "Most of the dust we encounter in the average household... is dead skin that´s fallen off us... as new cells are substituted." "Just rubbing your arm produces a minor dust storm of dead skin cells." "Likewise the lining of the gut is continuously replaced... so that there is in effect a total change every three days." "All this is done by making copies of cells." "The new cells then take the place of the old cells." "It´s going on all the time." "The blood is replaced three times a year." "Parts of the skeleton every four years." "So extraordinary is this process of copying a renewal... that very little of our bodies is actually more than ten years old." "But if our bodies are perpetually being renewed in this way... why do we gradually start to look old?" "Why don´t we all look the way we did... when we were young and in our prime?" "You can understand why we don´t look the way we did as a child... after all we were still growing." "But having reached maturity... why don´t we continue to look that way for the rest of our lives?" "Well, one possible explanation is likely to be... down to faults in the renewal process itself." "Because renewal involves making copies of all sorts of cells." "And copying can have its problems." "Supposing we took a photograph of a young man and copied it ... again and again and again." "The copying process is not perfect." "Mistakes are made, and the picture starts to look the worse for wear." "This is the equivalent of ageing in the human body... and of course, if we carry on copying for too long... we eventually disappear altogether." "That´s one theory of why we age." "But another has it that we grow old... because of something that is actually vital for life." "Oxygen." "We tend to think of oxygen as healthy and essential for life." "But this is the other side of it." "This blazing inferno requires oxygen for its power... and just like all fires, we, too, require oxygen." "Our bodies need it every second of our lives." "Yet it turns out that over years... oxygen can be as damaging and as dangerous to us as these flames." "Steel can resist fire but not the effects of oxygen... because that leads to rust." "Rust is caused by a highly reactive type of oxygen... called free radicals." "Given time these free radicals have the power to corrode and destroy... even the largest of steel structures." "Some of the oxygen we breathe into our bodies... turns into the dangerous free radical form." "This type of oxygen has a habit of ripping bits out of other molecules... damaging them in the process." "As these loose cannon roam around our bodies... they can play havoc as they start to damage our cells and tissues." "Many now believe that... years of accumulated damage produced by free radicals... are a very important cause of our ageing." "And what´s more it´s not just breathing oxygen that puts us at risk... we can get free radicals into our bodies in all sorts of ways." "Excessive sunlight increases them... and we can pick them up in such things as tobacco smoke... air pollution and eating barbecued meat." "But some foods, such as fruit and fresh vegetables... are rich in antioxidants... and these can destroy free radicals." "Free radical damage is one theory, there are many more." "But with this onslaught from free radicals and the like... the question inevitably arises:" "how do we manage to live for so long?" "The answer might be out in space." "One possible reason is that we´re built... rather like the thing that all this is listening to." "Right now this satellite dish... is peering at the far edge of our own solar system." "It´s listening to the feint signals... of the most distant object ever made by humans... about six and a half billion miles away." "It´s the Voyager space probe... and it started its journey twenty years ago... on a voyage of discovery." "Two of them were launched and their original mission was... to relay information about the planets Jupiter and Saturn." "By 1981 they´d achieved that original goal... but they were built so well, that they went on to do much more... and amazingly they´re still sending back information... as they head out into interstellar space." "But the point is to be doubly sure they achieved their original goal... they were over-engineered." "Built so robustly that they are capable of surviving into very old age." "Just like us in fact." "Though our original goal was to make sure we have children." "But can over-engineering really explain why we live so very long?" "After all, we have by far the longest lifespan of any other mammal... and we live way beyond an age when we can first have children." "Well, it could." "But first we need to think about what we´ve been over-engineered to do." "Perhaps it´s not just to have children and become parents... but to become grandparents." "Arriving at the family reunion for their 45th wedding anniversary..." "Bud and Viola encounter something... that would be very puzzling in other animals:" "Grandchildren." "Arguably, in evolutionary terms... all we have to do is to live long enough to have children... and rear them successfully so that they carry on our genes." "That´s what other animals do." "Yet Bud and Viola´s children have had children of their own... and Bud and Viola are still around." "So if we´re capable of living long enough to become grandparents... how has this affected our bodies and the way we age?" "Well, one thing, and it seems rather strange... happens to women as they get older." "It´s the menopause, and it´s virtually unique in the animal world." "For women it marks the end of their childbearing years... and it´s a little bit of a mystery." "Men can often produce fertile sperm throughout their lifetime." "At the age of a hundred a man is, in theory at least... capable of siring a child." "But that´s definitely not the case for a woman." "At birth she has about two million eggs in her two ovaries." "From puberty they start to be released." "At the rate of one per month... there should be enough to last a lifetime and longer... but there aren´t." "Most of the eggs die, until around the age of fifty... the body stops releasing eggs altogether." "In effect the store has been used up." "And yet some scientists believe that the menopause has evolved... because we´ve come to live so long... and what´s more... the menopause enables us to make the most of our long lives... by becoming effective grandparents." "The reason for this is that... to continue to give birth to children in an ageing body... is dangerous both for the mother and the child." "Much better for her to stop having children of her own... and instead to concentrate on taking care of her grandchildren." "After all they are carrying her genes." "So, the menopause helps us to make the most of old age." "I said that human beings are almost unique in this, but not quite." "Because interestingly there´s one other animal... where the female has a menopause... and that´s the pilot whale." "And it also happens that elderly female whales... spend many years caring for the offspring of their offspring." "Being grannies in fact." "It´s controversial, but some feel this supports the idea... that there´s a similar purpose for the human menopause." "At the end of their trip Bud and Viola have reached Alaska." "The natural cycle of life is birth and then eventually death." "I guess I sit here around this beautiful surrounding here in Alaska... I can see before my eyes the creation going on." "The small little trees that are coming on... and the tall trees that are a symbol of middle life... and then I can see the dead trees... all within a few feet of me." "I´d still like to be able to get around like I was when I was 35 or 40." "But old age catches up with you... so you just have to look back and... no, that´s the process that we go through... and it´s no other way of getting around it... and they´ve never found a youth pill that´ll keep you going." "I don´t worry about dying l think that´s just the next step in life... and life goes on after that... so that´s out of my hands... and when that happens and whichever one of us is left... they´ll find the strength to cope." "When my time comes there´s nothing I can do about it, but go." "And I want to stick around as long as I can." "We tend to think of the human capacity... for art, science and technology... as the thing that marks us out." "But though we don´t often see it this way... perhaps our ability to live to a ripe old age... is the human body´s greatest achievement." "Mum and dad, we´re all delighted to be here." "We are happy that we could share in... the festivities of your 45th wedding anniversary... and we just want to wish you happy anniversary." "Happy anniversary!" "Oh my god, we´ve gotta blow those all out?" "One, two, three..." "We go about our daily lives hardly ever considering our final fate." "Yet at every moment we are surrounded by death." "Around 5000 people will die in the world before the end of this programme." "We seldom witness death." "Often, our only experience is from films and television, which can present it as a violent and painful event." "In this episode, we travel a difficult journey... to see what happens... when this mass of biological activity we call the human body... ceases to be." "To see how all the previous ages of our existence are undone... in the final act." "The processes of death in the human body are remarkable." "This is what it would look like... if you could see the human body cool down over 24 hours." "Death comes not as a single quick event... but a slow winding down." "It is difficult to say when every cell in the body ceases to have life." "Long before we stop breathing, our brain may die... our personality lost for ever." "But the biology of death can seem cold and distant from the human story." "I want to die at home... because it is not nice to die in a hospital... as, there´s nothing in there, you´re only a number there, you know, at home you can die in peace." "Herbie and his wife Hannelore fell in love with Ireland... and decided to move here from Germany in 1981 ." "We started filming Herbie a year after he learned he had a fatal cancer." "I was driving in the car to Loch Rae... and on the way to Loch Rae, I collapsed." "And pain, the stomach, here, in this area... I was in, holy smoke, I was sweating... I had such a pain I was feeling:" "I am dying." "Then they called the ambulance, they put me to hospital in Galway." "The surgeon told Hannelore it was very bad." "The tumour have a size from two soccer balls... you know, it´s very big...." "Hannelore asked him:" ""What you think how long Herbie have to live?"" "And he said to Hannelore..." "Hannelore said:" ""How long l have here, a year?"" "And he said:" ""Oh my God, never, a couple of months, and it´s finished."" "It´s hard to get it in your head, it´s like... when you first hear the news, it´s like a shock." "You can´t really think about it." "You think only of, God, what´s now?" "What we have to do?" "And only a couple of months, and... and all the ideas... lt´s terrible." "It´s now October." "As the tumour expands in Herbie´s stomach region... it threatens vital organs." "The doctors are amazed... that his body has been able to cope for this long." "A couple of months ago we created this small garden here... I get from a good friend, from Switzerland, a couple of roses... and I planted them here... because when I die and get cremated..." "Hannelore puts the ashes afterwards around this roses what you see here." "This is my greatest wish and my will." "Where I want to be buried for ever." "And my spirit is around the land and the house." "The modern way to die is often hidden from view... in the sanitised world of the hospital." "But we have not always been so uneasy about confronting death." "In the Capuchin catacombs in Sicily, 8000 bodies are preserved." "Here, families would come to visit their loved ones." "To our eyes, this may seem a gruesome spectacle... but to nineteenth-century Sicilians... death was not something to recoil from in fear and dread." "Perhaps we have something to learn from their acceptance of death." "For death is part of the natural cycle." "And what makes us unique is that, unlike any other species... we are able to contemplate our own mortality." "Here, you come through, Herbie." "Yeah, that´s OK, so..." "Herbie, together with Hannelore... has decided to let us film the final moments of his life." "I know I never see this film in my lifetime." "No, as I say, it has spilled out a little bit more... here on top, hasn´t it, over last, over the last week?" "Yes, yes." "And I like that everybody see that a human being... can manage a illness like my illness... and everybody can see in this film... there is a way to make the best from your end of your life." "OK, that seems fine." "Your bowel sounds are perfectly normal." "And how, how´s your energy at the moment?" "I can walk around, so the energy´s good." "I can lift nothing any more." "I´m not so strong." "Herbie receives regular visits from his local hospice workers." "They look after his pain control... and help Herbie and Hannelore cope with the prospect of his dying." "Oh, they´re gorgeous!" "They´ve gotten so big, haven´t they?" "Oh, they´re lovely!" "The hospice worker and I, we talk very close together... and we trust each other... I asked her what would happen when I got to die when I have to die?" "And she said, Herbie, you don´t have to be worried about it." "You die painless and in peace." "And I´m not worried about when I die... perhaps tomorrow, today, or in a couple of months." "I know what´s coming." "And I face it." "Death seems an entirely cruel and negative event." "bringing loss and bereavement..." "Yet, from the very start... there is a fundamental link between life and death in our bodies." "Our bodies are built from organised colonies of cells." "In fact, what we seen when we look at ourselves... are vast communities of cells, billions of them." "Each one plays a particular role a heart cell, a muscle cell, a brain cell." "In an incredible act of harmony and organisation... they work together... performing the functions of the organ they belong to." "From the very start of our lives... this tireless dedication to duty often requires our cells to die." "Some cells in the foetus actually receive signals to self-destruct." "Here, the developing hand grows as an enormous bundle of cells." "Then, cells are systematically destroyed... sculpting the fingers and the gaps between... in much the same way a sculptor chips away a block of stone." "From the very beginning of the human body´s journey... death becomes an essential part of life." "Under the microscope, we can see how cells are destroyed." "This process continues throughout our lives... as cells become damaged or just worn out." "During the course of this programme... around a billion cells in your body will die." "This programmed cell death keeps us healthy and alive." "In this way, we can think of death as part of the creative force of life." "But do our own deaths play a part in the larger human story?" "Well, sadly not." "It seems that death is the price we pay for having sex." "When we have sex, we can create new life." "But we do not just produce copies of ourselves." "Each one of these babies is unique... the result of the particular mix of their parents´ genes." "Through evolution, winning combinations of genes... get passed on from generation to generation." "This process, which we call natural selection... has speeded up our ability to adapt and evolve." "Without sex and the mixing of genes... we would never have evolved into such complex organisms." "But as individuals, we do pay a price for such success." "Once we´ve had sex and passed on our genes... our evolutionary job is done." "As we hand over the genetic baton the relay race carries on without us." "We die, only our genes are immortal." "With the arrival of winter in Ireland, Herbie´s health gradually declines." "He has good days and he has bad days." "Hannelore phoned this morning, wasn´t it this morning?" "... and said that you had a lot of pain." "Was it during the night or when you got up this morning?" "It was the whole night." "When he wake me in the morning before 5 o´clock and I looked at him... I said to myself, now, now that´s the time... he´s dying or something." "You would have thought so..." "So different, everything was foully," "His face, it was so strange to me." "He was nearly crying and said:" "Get me help, get me help!" "Your face, you were in agony." "Yeah." "This is only the pain." "I don´t like the pain." "Oh, no, no." "I was so frightened, I´d..." "Unbelievable." "I was thinking it´s the end, its the end of his life." "but he was lucky enough, he´s a very strong person." "And he fights." "I was sitting, when he was lying in bed... I was sitting at the breakfast table and just crying, and said:" "Oh my God, how can I face it?" "Can I face it?" "It was really hard." "I hope I still see the spring time." "Keep doing what you´re doing now and then!" "I had a couple of bad nights." "What was it?" "Very bad!" "Oh, very, very bad!" "I had a time a couple of weeks ago, there was... I had a time I was thinking I´m dying," "Honest." "Ever since I have the syringe driver here." "Because, you know, because of the pain." "The syringe driver." "It just goes automatically, 24 hours." "When I´m in trouble with pain, I get more pain... I can give me an extra push." "And I get extra." "When I have the pain... it is very... very bad!" "I´m in a bad mood and bad feeling, you know... I can do nothing, by lying or I sit down or..." "No matter what I... I have to have this medication." "There´s no way any more." "Modern advances in pain relief... mean that we can now control many aspects of dying... and our modern medicine has also changed... many of the causes of death." "Better health care combined with better nutrition and cleaner water... mean that we now live twice as long as we did 100 years ago." "We are more likely to die from the disease of old age... such as cancer, stroke... and the number one killer, heart disease." "Today, heart disease kills a quarter of the population in the western world." "The most violent form is the heart attack." "...to the outside... on his backside, 40... 45... I was sitting in this chair watching a football game on television." "I got my first surge of pain from my heart... to the right side of my chest." "The pain started to travel in my back, to my back area... and I figured at that time that it was a heart attack." "The human heart pumps 7,500 litres of blood a day." "These small arteries, less than a millimetre wide... supply blood to the heart muscle." "Here, a tiny blockage is hampering the supply to one of the arteries." "They had me on the table there at about 12 o´clock." "I watched on the monitor as they went to each one of my arteries... and there was one little clot that caused all that problem." "The patient starts to feel a variety of symptoms." "Well, I literally felt the pain start from the centre of my chest.... and I felt the whole thing go down both arms." "It was almost like my chest was in a vice... and I was being crushed... as the vice was being turned, tighter and tighter." "When the cardiologist came in, he had seen my EKG... and he went out into the hall with the other doctors and interns... he said to these doctors:" "This man is dying, we have to do something for him." "My artery was so blocked... there was not the flow of oxygen getting through... and so a lot of my heart has died." "Thirty per cent of my heart, they said, was damaged." "Severe attacks can lead to cardiac arrest... where the heart stops beating altogether." "Now, the blockage stops the flow of blood." "Starved of oxygen and glucose... it is only minutes before the heart muscle dies." "Time is running out." "Electrical instability causes the heart to beat erratically." "As the heart quivers... it is unable to pump the blood around the body." "This is the critical moment." "Without a supply of blood, the brain fails within five minutes." "Then breathing and respiration stops death is moments away." "In a few moments, this beating human heart will be stopped... this time not by a heart attack but for an operation." "The patient is no longer breathing... and a machine takes over the task of the heart and lungs." "The small electric current breaks the heart´s rhythmic beat... leaving it quivering as if gripped by a heart attack." "That´s better." "Now the heart´s just twitching." "That´s right, just flickering." "This is a heart bypass operation." "While the heart is not moving... the surgeon can re-route blood vessels to parts of the heart muscle... where clogged arteries are restricting the flow." "Another stitch please... lt wasn´t so very long ago... when someone in this condition, not breathing and with no heartbeat, would have been diagnosed dead." "Now a little bit... table towards me, please." "Yet, in a short time, this patient will be awake... and chatting with his family and friends." "These days, we can´t decide if a person is dead... just by seeing if their heart has stopped." "Instead, we look to the brain... and to one vital part:" "the brainstem." "Buried at the back of the head... the brainstem is a relic of our ancient past." "Millions of years ago... this was all the brain our distant ancestors had." "They were primitive creatures:" "in fact, it is still called the reptile brain." "Evolution has buried it under layers of a more complex brain... but it is still the foundation of life." "It controls our most basic functions keeping our heart beating... breathing, regulating blood pressure and the body´s temperature." "That´s why, when the brainstem dies... doctors can be certain that a patient is clinically dead." "Christmas Eve I had to take them out of the water this morning." "Yes?" "Oh, that´s... lsn´t it horrible?" "Now we are ready for Christmas." "Happy Christmas, Herbie!" "Christmas time was really nice... because Herbie was feeling so well when it came... and we had a lovely dinner... and Herbie had three glasses of champagne." "But when the new year starts, he got weak and he got depressed... and you start every day, he goes slowly down." "This was for me very disappointing, and sad and... I wanted... I decided to get the injection, you know... I don´t want to live any more." "Because I had this feeling," "You know, normally I´m not a man I give up so quick..." "Never, you know, but in this moment I have a feeling to give up." "So I asked the nurse:" ""Please give me injection, I don´t want to live any more"." "And the nurse said:" ""Herbie, it is not possible." "Firstly it´s forbidden, to do it." "We have this medication to get you on the top again."" "And we tried something, I agreed with this." "And my feeling is... I have maybe only a couple of weeks to live." "That´s my real feeling," "Oh, again!" "Oops-a-daisy!" "Now." "So, moment." "So." "First..." "I have to stand up now!" "For a moment, for a while, to walk around... to get everything settled now..." "You know, before I can move around a little bit now." "When someone dies, we miss all the things which make them human." "Their personality, their unique identity... their emotion and warmth." "What is that sensitive of being, that consciousness which goes?" "And is there a place in our brain where it can be found?" "In this experiment, we will be able to see the brain at work." "A hundred and twenty-eight sensors... pick up tiny electrical signals emitted as the brain cells fire." "This is the pattern produced when the subject is relaxed." "All this activity is simply the result of doing nothing." "As soon as he opens his eyes, the brain leaps into action." "Even the simple task of watching television... involves his brain in millions of actions." "A single second stretched into a thousand steps... shows swirls of activity sweeping all over his head." "First, the information travels to the back of the brain." "From there, the activity moves through the short-term memory areas... and then to the front of the brain... the part actually involved in thinking." "The question is:" "Can we find a single part of the brain... that gives this man a sense of himself and the world... his consciousness?" "The answer is no." "The brain appears to work something like and orchestra." "There are parts that do different things:" "the conductor, the string section, the brass players." "What´s important is the order in which they come together." "That´s what produces the music, if you like." "But the brain has more than 100 musicians making music." "If you counted the connections between cells... just on the surface, it would take you 32,000,000 years." "This sheer complexity leads scientists to believe... it is our brain, taken as a whole, that creates our conscious self... the self we lose when we die." "Hi dear!" "Look who´s here!" "Hello!" "Hello, Dr Murphy." "Hello, Herbie!" "How are you?" "Nice to see you." "Good to see you always." "l come out here to get cheered up." "Yeah, thank you." "You make and extraordinary patient." "Any complaints?" "The tumour in Herbie´s body presses against vital organs... such as the liver and kidneys." "Good, Herbie, that´s lovely, no change." "They keep our cells healthy... by regulating the delicate chemical balances in the body." "Now, just show me your pulse, Herbie, it´s very important." "If these organs fail, the balance is lost... and the body can no longer sustain life." "Your family´s coming to see you?" "is your brother coming?" "My brother is coming, yeah, tonight." "Tonight?" "Yeah." "That ca be fun." "Maybe the last time I will see I´m." "I don´t, I don´t think so." "I hope not." "But,... lt goes..." "I feel it myself, it goes to the end now." "You think it?" "l feel it, yeah." "And that doesn´t worry you unduly?" "No, it doesn´t worry me." "I know... I think you´re extraordinary, you´re extraordinary!" "Sunday´s his birthday." "Your birthday?" "lt´s my birthday on Sunday." "l didn´t know that." "What age are you then?" "Sixty-three." "Sixty-three?" "Yeah." "Not a bad age." "Oh, I´m absolutely delighted, as I can see another spring time." "The season is changed now, the weather getting really better... the sun coming out... I´m, anywhere, I´m a man, I like the nature, you know... the flowers and the trees, when they start to blooming now." "Well, I never know what is tomorrow." "The tumour in my belly is a time bomb... you know, a real time bomb... and I never know what is tomorrow... and I enjoy now every day." "We can never know what it´s like to die." "But some people have come very close to death... only to revive at the final moment to tell the tale." "Their near-death experiences might offer some insight... into what happens in the dying brain." "I was in a motorcycle accident... in which I suffered a fractured skull... and numerous broken bones in my head." "I said, God, if you´re out there, because I was kind of an agnostic... you can have me now, because I´m finished, I can´t go on." "An it was at that point that I felt myself separating from my body... and entering into a near-death experience." "I became aware that I was in a tunnel." "There´s no other way of describing it." "You couldn´t see it, you could sense it," "And then, down in the distance... you could see this little speck of light... which gradually got bigger and bigger... as it would if you were in a tunnel and there´s a light at the end of it." "We travelled at some great speed and distance through the tunnel... and everything that ever was, is, and will be... were contained in this radiance." "Nearly all who have come close to death give the same accounts... of out-of-body sensations and tunnels of light." "Similar experiences are also reported by fighter pilots... when, subjected to massive acceleration, they lose consciousness." "Pay attention, platform and gondola have been secured." "Roger." "Flight deck is manned and ready." "This is the world´s largest centrifuge." "It is used to investigate the effects of high-g forces on pilots." "Subjects can be spun so fast... that the blood drains from their brain and they black out." "Ed, the run will begin on my mark." "Three, two, one, mark." "We feel that our investigation of loss of consciousness... is about as close as you can get to investigating... that next state, which is death." "As the subject enters g-LOC, gravity-induced loss of consciousness... their experiences are recorded." "Shit, I can´t get to the damn thing." "OK, is there is light loss?" "Shit, I don´t know where l am." "The sensations that we have associated with blackout ... nearly always include a tunnelling of the vision... down to a central point where you just have light ahead of you." "So why do extreme g forces and near-death experiences... produce the effect of seeing tunnels of light?" "While the brain is starved of oxygen... neurones which deal with vision fire at random." "This creates the sensation of bright light." "As there are more neurones devoted to the centre of our visual field... and less at the edges... the light appears to be brightest in the centre... creating a tunnel effect." "Had I had the choice, I would never have wanted to leave." "This was just so perfect, so wonderful." "Can´t describe it, it was, it was just total:" "love, happiness, bliss, knowledge." "Three, two, one, pressure." "That was ... with a 100%%... I´ve had about 35 loss-of-conscious episodes." "Nearly all of those have been such that they´re very, very pleasant... and almost give you a sense of euphoria." "The sensations of euphoria may be... because the brain releases opiate-like substances... to relieve the acute distress and pain." "These produce hallucinations in the parts of the brain... that deal with memories and emotions." "This research has certainly allowed me... to have a much greater understanding... and reduction in the amount of fear associated with... losing consciousness and then dying." "I believe when I´m dead I´m dead." "And that´s it." "There is no other life." "there is nothing," "When you´re dying you are gone for ever." "You can say dust to dust, because dust is what´s left." "Nothing, a handful of ash is left." "Monday." "It was just the normal day." "We had breakfast together and just like every day." "When we went to sleep, it was everything normal." "On Tuesday morning, Herbie called me around five o´clock." "And then he said to me..." "He was very heavy breathing and he was feeling very uncomfortable." "And then he said to me:" ""Hannelore, I think I die today."" "Tuesday, April 8th." "10 a.m." "When I talk about him, do you think he can hear me?" "Hearing is the last thing to go... even we cannot speak..." "That´s why it is so important never to say anything... that you wouldn´t say if they were in their full senses... because they can." "People who have recovered from being at death´s door... have told how they heard every single thing that was said." "Most important never to, you know." "Tuesday, 7 p.m." "Herbie wants something, he´s reaching there for the holder." "In the final hours, Herbie receives visits from friends." "Brendan and his young daughter Orla come to see him for the last time." "Just put those into Herbie´s hand." "Hold his hand, because he´s lovely and warm." "And if I was loaded with morphine, I think I´d be pretty warm, too." "Herbie hasn´t got long for this world, I suppose." "But he can hear you when you speak to him." "He´s been preparing for this for a long time." "Sing him the song from the heather." "Going all to the..." "Yeah, why not?" "Why not?" "Yeah, please." "You know the chorus..." ""Will you go, Lassie, go..."" ""All the summertime is coming..."" "The last time I walked in here I did the same." "I´m not going to be deprived now." "Herbie, take care!" "Herbie!" "It´s Mary!" "He´s very comfortable and he´s pain-free." "His breathing is quite easy at the moment... but I don´t expect that Herbie will live much longer than a few hours." "Hello, Dr Murphy, it´s Peggy, the nurse at the hospice." "I´m with Herbie at the moment, I just arrived and he´s very, very rattly." "I rang Mary ..." "and she said to give him..." "By morning, Herbie´s breathing becomes increasingly noisy." "This is a very common condition." "It doesn´t trouble Herbie, and is easily helped by medication." "I don´t think he has pain, it´s..." "No, no, it´s not pain, it´s only this rattly... and this shaking... lt just came." "Just started today, this morning?" "No, just when..." "Just before I came in." "Yeah." "He was shaking like this." "Yeah." "And is this normal?" "lt happens, it does, yeah." "Hey, love." "...goodbye..." "Now you´re in peace." "Now you´re in peace." "Now you´re in peace." "Mary?" "Herbie´s just died, yeah." "OK." "Yeah." "The cause of death is this inoperable huge cancer... because he had retroperitoneal liposarcoma." "His heart gave way then his lungs failed... and his liver failed and his kidneys failed," "General failure overall... due to the effect of the cancer over the last one and a half years." "It´s extraordinary that he has lived so long." "Afterwards, they laid him down and..." "He was so peaceful-looking, he was really nice-looking." "And I couldn´t cry, I couldn´t cry!" "It was just... a nice... for me it was a relief, that Herbie´s now in peace... and everything is over for him." "Not for me." "But for him." "I was happy for him." "We find it hard to contemplate our own deaths." "To imagine that one day we will no longer live in this world." "But there is a way in which our bodies continue after we die." "The cells in our bodies are made up of atoms... which have existed sine the start of the universe." "They´re constantly being exchanged and recycled." "So what today are our bodies... were once parts of plants, animals, trees... indeed, other humans." "And in the future... well, this journey that each of us takes, from birth to death... is just one tiny step in a much bigger journey... part of an endless repeating cycle from life to death." "Dear friends, it was Herbie´s wish to read his epilogue before us... we spread the ashes around the roses." "In 1981 , my wife Hannelore and I decided... to go to live in peace and harmony in Ireland." "I can look back on many fulfilling years together with her." "And I thank her deeply for sharing her life with me." "My wish is that all my friends and neighbours live together in peace... without jealousy and animosity." "May you all hold me in good memory." "Sing it like Herbie would have!" "The Human Body is a television series... that takes cameras to places they´ve never been to before." "It allows us to look in captivating detail... at how our bodies work... following the journey we all make... from the moment of conception to our last breath." "In this programme, we want to show you... how we´ve captured these remarkable images." "This is a six-week-old foetus... a real image enhanced by our own unique computer animation technique." "And this, a new-born baby." "We show you images of babies crawling... never seen before." "Hormones crystallising." "And with a revolutionary technique... we can show you a woman´s ovulation for the first time... a ruptured follicle releasing one of its eggs." "We´ll see a remarkable new view of the adult brain." "Blood pumping around your body." "And individual blood cells flowing through your veins." "You´ll see how your skin looks when it´s aged." "And that same skin, magnified a thousand times." "The human body, from birth to death." "To film this magical sequence... it took thirty people, twelve hours and a huge amount of equipment." "The crew went underwater... and with them came enormous waterproof lights." "They also had to figure out... how to get the stars and a watertight camera into the pool." "What we are trying to do today is to actually show the diving reflex... which all babies have." "They have it for the first six months or so of life... and it allows them to hold their breath under water... but also, they almost start swimming... and they can swim for a very short distance." "OK, we´re going for a take now." "OK." "Turn over." "Running." "OK." "And action!"" "Now we put the theory to the test." "OK." "Mark, can you move along a bit back, please?" "In some mysterious way... the babies are actually very calm and relaxed... when they go under the water." "There is a lot more to making this sequence than meets the eye." "The mums and helpers in blue will disappear from the final film... and the babies will swim into shot at precisely the right moment... or so the experts in the editing suite tell us." "The aim of this entire shoot was to make the babies really appear on cue... in a way which would actually be impossible in reality... as you would have to hold the baby underwater, holding its breath... and let go of them so they could actually swim up past the camera..." "The people who are in the pool are dressed in blue." "We use blue because it´s, there isn´t any blue colour in human skin... and this computer looks for the blue colour and makes it disappear... and that enables us to cut the babies out... with a shape like this and a nice clean edge... clean edge and put them over the clean water frames." "That means that when we get the background... we combine that with the cut-out shape." "We make the two together... and they end up with a nice clean edge around them... which makes it look more realistic around here." "And this is what we ended up with:" "a skill babies have and adults can only marvel at." "The truth is, whatever the origins of this remarkable reflex... we might never get to the bottom of it." "It is, for the moment, at least, a delightful mystery." "Another mysterious technique we´ve used is the cyberscan of the head." "Corn flour makes the subject´s hair reflective." "One of the things we wanted to do in the series... was to make the outside world... the world we can shoot with normal cameras... and the inside world, which we can shoot with tiny cameras... or which we can image using medical imaging technology." "The best way to do that is to be able to make a seamless journey... from that world, from the big world to the tiny world." "So we needed to get an image of a person´s head into our computer..." "And there is a way of doing that, it´s called cyberscanning... and it´s actually a way of making a laser scan... which uses the same kind of laser... that you scan our groceries with at the checkout at the supermarket." "It travels round the head and paints an intricate picture in the computer... of the topography, of the contours if you like, of someone´s head... and then that can be folded up to make an image of the face... which we can then manipulate with the computer and journey into." "The cyberscan allowed us to start this amazing sequence... a journey from the head into the ear canal... previously uncharted territory." "The fleshy out of ear collects the sounds of surrenders... and channels them down the air canal... to vibrate the eardrum." "On the other side of the drum, these vibrations are transmitted... through the middle ear by minute bones." "These are the only bones that stop growing soon after birth." "An adult has ear bones the same size as a new born baby." "We want even further into the detail of the ear... with another imaging technique, called scanning electro-microscopy." "If we zoom right the way in, with an electron microscope... we should see something remarkable:" "the secret of how sound is transmitted to the brain." "There are rows of minute hairs... only a few thousandths of a millimetre high." "As noise vibrates them, they send electrical signals to the brain,... which we experience as sound." "An SEM, or scanning electron microscope... is a special type of microscope... that uses electrons instead of light to look at some..." "With this microscope we can go to magnification of about times 300,000... but for most biological specimens about times 50,000 is plenty." "At times 50,000 you can see... details on the surface of an individual bacterium." "To prepare an SEM, Paul puts the tiny specimen... through a complex process of fixing... to preserve it." "Then he deeps it in chemicals to remove all traces of water." "If I was to put a specimen... straight into the microscope with it containing water... the vacuum inside the microscope... would cause the specimen simply to explode." "Once coated, the specimen can be put into the microscope... on this special motorised stage." "The camera position inside the microscope is fixed... so the only way we can get movement in the sample... is to actually move the sample itself." "I create the moving sequence using a method called stop frame animation." "Stop frame animation is a pains-taking technique... a bit like making cartoons." "This is an egg in the Fallopian tube." "Hundreds of still pictures are taken... each time in a slightly different position, to create movement." "A thirty-second sequence like this can take surprisingly long to make." "The whole process for a single specimen... can take about three days... from beginning to end to complete." "With SEM we´ve been able to show you some amazing details." "Here, the surface of the tongue." "And here, hair growing." "And different types of hair." "Asian hair is circular in cross section, so it tends to hang straight." "Black people have hair which is a flat oval... so it naturally tends to form tight curls." "Caucasians, or white Europeans, have hair halfway between the two... so they tend to have slightly wavy hair." "And here, a human egg... about a hundred times smaller, human sperm on its surface." "Images like this might make conception look easy, but it´s not." "Kate Hardy is a member of the embryology research team... at the Hammersmith Hospital in London." "For our programme on pregnancy... she filmed a remarkable sequence, never seen before on television." "So what we have here is a microscope... which enables us to look at the embryo at a high magnification... so we can see what the embryo is doing while it´s developing... and round the microscope we´ve got this Perspex box." "The embryo can´t grow at normal temperature... we have to keep it at 37º centigrade... which is the same temperature as the human body." "When we find the embryo, focus on it... set the video recorder going... so that we have one shot every two seconds... and we leave the embryo there for about a week." "So this is a very, very nice technique... for looking at development over a long period of time... and compacting it down into a short period of time... so that you can see the changes that are taking place." "What you start off with is a fertilised egg... which is a large cell... and this cell will divide about once every day initially... and these cells carry on dividing... until they are about 8 or 16 cells... about three days after the one-cell stage." "And then finally it gets to the stage... where it wants to hatch out of the jelly coating... that has been protecting it during early development... and then it´s ready to implant in the lining of the womb." "I think the most exciting thing that we have seen so far... is the way the cells divide... the speed that it happens over... you get a real feel for the fact that... there´s a long period of time when nothing happens... and then suddenly you get the cell division... and then another day goes by where nothing happens... and then another cell division." "It´s amazing watching that on screen." "It´s one thing to film an embryo under a microscope... it´s quite another to find a way... to film the foetus growing in the womb." "The only way you can get into the human body... without cutting it open and seeing what´s in there... is to use an endoscope... which is like a mini-telescope." "a little narrow telescope... that you can look through small holes or naturally occurring orifices... without having to do any damage to the patient." "The endoscopes have a dual system." "One is an optical system for getting the image out... and the second is a fibre optic system which allows you to take light in." "The amount you get depends therefore... on the size of the scope you can use." "You can use a big endoscope when looking at something big, like the gut." "When looking at something very small... where you need a very narrow scope... then light problems get worse, because everything is small." "Food doesn´t fall from your mouth to your stomach." "When your brain tells you to swallow... it triggers waves of muscle contractions." "They squeeze things along in your oesophagus... at around 4 centimetres per second." "The first scheduled stop is the stomach." "It´s essentially a biological liquidiser." "Its lining is covered in delicate folds... which allow it to expand with each mouthful." "Inside, a mixture of enzymes and hydrochloric acid... start to digest your food." "And, very probably, your dinner´s still in there." "It churns away for about four hours." "Soon, it will be released into your small intestine and... at a cue from your brain, bile will be added." "This will help you break down fats." "You´ll be carrying tonight´s dinner for about 24 hours... so I hoped you liked it." "These are the light guides and this is the lens." "David also needed to get good pictures of the vocal cords in action." "...until we see the vocal cords..." "And then we will try to get... we want to do some shots... where we´ll try and get you to, we´ll track across the tongue, but we´ll do it in reverse." "So we´ll probably start, get lined up, get you to sound a note... hold it and then we´ll pull it out." "All I´m going to do is watch and instruct." "When you make a sound, vocal cords vibrate at anything... from a hundred to maybe five or six hundred vibrations a second." "If you look at them under direct light, they are just a blur." "If you use a strobe light... then you can halt the movement of the cords... even though they´re vibrating, you stop their apparent movement... and that allows you to see all the interesting little ripples... and things that are going on on the surface of the cords." "I agreed to do this because it would be an interesting experience." "I´ve never seen my vocal cords before... and they do look quite cool on the screen." "I´ve never seen them move, I had no idea how it was going to work... and it´s just very interesting to see." "What do you do for a living?" "l´m a sword swallower." "Another day, another orifice:" "the ear." "Move back just a little bit and stop." "The endoscope is probably not going that far into the head." "It probably goes about a centimetre." "Ear canals tend to be quite bendy, curvy... so you need this little device just to sort of get you round the corner." "It´s just a matter of how close you want to go." "You can go right up, almost touching the drum... and if you do that, if the ear drum is clear and clean enough... you will see the bones through on the other side." "Throughout the series, we combined documentary filming, with endoscopic shots to reveal the intricate workings of the body." "However, you can´t film everything in the body with an endoscope." "So, we used another remarkable technique: medical scanning." "When we started the series we were very keen that... we were going to show things that you really could see inside the body." "That presents a big problem... there are obviously some places you can´t get to with a camera." "So we needed some kind of graphic technique... some representation of the body that was accurate... that was really what was going on inside." "In our film on pregnancy... we scanned our mum-to-be, Phillippa... in a magnetic resonance imaging, or mri, machine." "We did this before she was pregnant... to illustrate the geography of her body." "The machine uses magnetic fields to scan slices of her body... which are put together to create the whole image." "The difficulty is the way it´s used in medicine... is very opaque, very difficult, unless you´re really trained... to know, to make sense of that information." "So, what we set out to do was... to use the data that medicine can give us... big scanners, CT scans, mri scans... and to try and bring to that... some of the aesthetic charm and style of television graphics... the kind of thing we´re all used to seeing on TV... in computer games... and fly through things, voyage around them." "So, we worked with a medical imaging company... to write a computer program that could do that for us... that could take what´s actually going on inside the body... but look at it in an exciting and stylish way." "So, what we´ve got is we´ve sculpted out... the kidneys and spleen and the liver here...." "That was quite easy to do." "And you´ve just coloured them this way... so you can see them in the moment." "Yeah, they´re just arbitrary colours, pretty much arbitrary." "I mean that the main thing is right from this stuff." "Things don´t look all symmetrical and neat like they do in the books." "How they actually are inside the body is quite different." "This technique allows us to see the body in incredible detail." "You´ll you know, never have seen a woman´s body in this way." "It´s truly amazing." "Look at her ovaries, in white, and her Fallopian tubes next to them." "On average, the sequences which last about thirty seconds... take a number of months, a number of months each to create... because you have, from the very beginning, from gathering the data... doing the scan ourselves or getting the scan data... from somewhere in the world that´s done that kind of a scan... to actually getting into a visual form... is a number, a number of steps involving several dozen people... and at least a couple of months a sequence, I´d have thought." "And here is the brain scan from our puberty programme." "Here, deep inside the head, you can see where it all happens." "Shaded white, it´s the body´s autopilot... a tiny gland that constantly adjusts things like temperature... blood pressure, thirst, and hunger." "It´s called the hypothalamus... and it´s the driving force behind puberty." "Of course, we don´t have to be inside the body... to watch it at work." "Using time-lapse photography and morphing... we recorded the amazing activity and growth of the body... which would normally go unnoticed." "This is the first four weeks of life." "This is sweat on the surface of the skin." "Using time knots photography... we recorded the amazing activity and growth of the body... which would normally go unnoticed." "This is sweat on the surface of the skin." "This is what hair standing on end looks like." "And hair growing." "By filming three generations of the same family... we´ve shown the unflattering side of growing old." "Time lapse also traced the growth of the bones in the hand, over 20 years." "You can even watch a nail grow." "Kathy and Richard lbbetson, both dentists... carried out a unique time-lapse experiment on their daughter." "Fiona is the youngest of our three children." "She´s just turned one in January... and the other two are two boys, five and three." "When we first had the contact from the BBC... she would have been no more than about two months, I guess... something of that sort..." "The task was to film Fiona´s teeth actually growing." "The main problem was how to fix her head... and we abandoned the idea of doing her lower teeth... because we couldn´t fix those at all... and we looked at ways of fixing the upper teeth... as they were coming through... and I suppose the biggest concern was... whether or not that would be possible... how upsetting it would be to her to hold her head completely still... for the period of time required to actually do the filming." "Although she didn´t like it... and she didn´t like the bright light shining in her face... I knew that I wasn´t in fact causing her any pain." "One of the problems that we encountered was that... as she got older and she got bigger... it was actually more difficult to fix her." "So we had to develop a way... of keeping her arms down and close to her body... so that her little hands wouldn´t come up... and start shaking the whole contraption about." "So that did become a problem." "What I couldn´t get over was how long it seemed to me... to take for the teeth to come through." "On a professional basis, I was totally unaware of the length of time... from when those teeth first appear through the gum... to when they were reasonably erupted... and you could see a fair bit of tooth." "I didn´t bargain on this taking six months plus." "Some of the most impressive pictures are what are called time-slice." "You wouldn´t think it, but this is a camera, a time-slice camera." "In fact, it´s 120 cameras... mounted side by side on this unwieldy frame." "Chris Spencer, the director, decides where it should go... because once it´s in position, it´s going to be difficult to move." "Each of the 120 cameras will take a still photograph... from its own position in the semicircle around the subject... in this case, a metal workshop." "They will all capture the same exact moment." "When these stills are edited together... they will allow your eye to move around the picture." "It will be as if a single moment has been frozen in time." "Designer Tim McMillan lines up each of the 120 lenses." "Right, that´s the exposure length we´re going to have, is it?" "Yeah." "What´s that, a quarter of a second?" "Half a second." "Half a second?" "lt´s almost too long." "We could do one at a half and one on a quarter... I think I´ll, I´ll bracket a bit, with the speed..." "And there´s a, you know, it´s getting, losing detail and that..." "Can we close the doors, please?" "Please, thank you." "That´s lovely." "Watch out for the crucial moment." "There." "Some shots happened quickly." "Others took nine months to complete." "We wanted a single shot to represent an entire pregnancy." "To achieve this, we filmed mother-to-be Phillippa... every three weeks... in the same position, with the same camera moves." "We then combined all these pictures to create one moving image." "It was a meticulous process... made possible by a motion control camera." "A computer-operated device which, once programmed... performs exactly the same move each time." "With the camera lined up... the subject has to be precisely lined up too." "We have one variable, which is Phillippa... so she´s the only thing within this set-up... that we have to work at to get right." "...change in posture more of back... shoulders..." "There are some things that we´ve learned shooting this about pregnancy." "We were trying to get Phillippa into a posture... that was no longer natural for her... until we sort of realised by looking at the sequence that... her whole posture is changing as she´s becoming more pregnant... and we have to go with that... and so we´ve been just looking at being... looking at making that a fairly careful progression." "Lens cap." "After all that preparation, you´d think he´d remember the lens cap!" "The biggest problem lining up these shots is really in lining up Phillippa." "Can you drift forward slightly, please?" "So we not only had to make sure... that she was in the right place on the treadmill each time... but we´ve also got to make sure that... the rhythm of her walk is the same each time." "The guys here developed a little piece of music for me... so I know when it goes ping l´ve got to be right foot forward... and that helps, because... once we actually start and the turntable starts turning... I don´t have to be thinking about it... as I´ve got into the rhythm before she started to move it round." "And then I just try to keep my eyes on more or less the same level... as I move around the room." "It´s strange, some shots worked first time and it´s always... it seems to be a different one that causes the problem." "I come for a session about every three weeks." "So sometimes there´s very little change... and sometimes there´s quite a lot." "I don´t like having my photograph taken... so it was a bit strange to sort of not mind having to take my clothes off... but once you´re doing, it´s not nearly so bad." "I think the end shot will be wonderful as it will be incredible to see that... the change in the size and shape of my tummy... as my bump has grown." "I´m really looking forward to seeing it at the end... perhaps it´s another reason why I don´t want to see it now." "I just want to see the full thing right at the end." "And this is it." "Nine months condensed into 45 seconds." "All movement of the human body is surprisingly complicated." "and difficult to analyse." "But if you really want to understand motion... analysis is what you need." "That´s what the little markers stuck on this baby are all about." "They can be tracked by computer... to reveal the underlying motion of the skeleton." "Dozens of joints and bones moving in harmony." "The top speed of a crawling baby is about two kilometres per hour... and the average baby crawls perhaps 200 metres a day." "Motion capture analysis has identified... seven different types of crawling." "To film motion capture... we assembled ten babies and their mums... twenty crew, some of whom were specially trained... in sticking infra-red-sensitive reflectors on babies´ bottoms... a nervous director... eight infra-red cameras... and a team of French experts who knew how to use them." "What is it for, motion capture?" "Well, in the beginning it was for medical study... and for research, scientific matters... but now we use it more for computer graphics... for special effects, for video games." "Any time you need to know the movement in 3D of a character... you need to do smooth motion capture." "OK." "We´re nearly ready." "OK, shall I run on with it then, Bertrand?" "OK." "The only hitch was persuading the stars of the show to perform." "Come on." "Come on..." "We´re using motion analysis to really reveal... what the underlying movement of the skeleton is." "What is good about something like motion analysis is... it can tell you things... some about something like crawling... which you´d never realise." "The main problem is working with babies... who don´t know that the motion reflectors are not to be pulled off... knocked off, etc., etc." "So it was really getting a good take... where the baby crawled the entire length... which is four, five metres... with enough of the motion detectors on... that the people with the equipment could actually make it work... and bring the skeleton to life." "What we get back from the motion capture is we get a rod puppet... which moves in exactly the same way as the baby moved... and they make that using the dots off the original baby footage... and then what we do is we attach to the dots our model... over the top of their rod puppet... and that´s how we can make it move... in exactly the same way as the baby was moving." "The skeleton is a combination of a skeleton... that we bought from a computer model company in America... and some work which was done by a modeller here... particularly on the skull... to change the proportion of the skull to match a real baby." "What is missing is, is a lot of the cartilage and things like that... which we thought would make it look a bit too scary." "I think it´s a very difficult thing to do well... because there are problems related to capturing reality in this way... and applying it with computers, and you do get a different sort of animation to... the animation that you´d get if you were just copying something moving... you get gravity and things like that... and you get a different form of character animation... which is very realistic." "The end result is an amazingly accurate crawling skeleton... moving exactly like the real babies." "Another way of understanding how the body works... is to use a camera that detects heat." "Everything that´s alive, and quite a few things that aren´t... gives off heat." "That´s what you´re looking at now." "Every part of your body is burning up energy and creating heat... as it goes about the business of being you." "But the hottest bit of you is up here:" "your brain is burning up more energy than anything else in your body... almost a fifth of all the calories you eat and drink... and it uses up almost the same amount... whether you´re concentrating on something really difficult... or just wondering whether to put the cat out... because day and night your brain is challenged... with the most difficult task it will ever face:" "keeping you alive." "The thermal camera helped us to show... the changes going on in Phillippa´s body." "Hot area of Phillippa show up as yellow or red." "Before she was pregnant... her breasts were actually colder than most of the rest of her body." "In the first three months of pregnancy... the surge of hormones causes... the blood vessels around the breasts to expand." "Extra blood flow in these hot, red areas... feeds the breast tissue as it gears up to provide milk." "We also used the heat-sensitive camera... to show the muscle action of a contraction during birth." "Bob, one of the stars of the film on babyhood, has just been born." "His challenge is to keep warm." "Bob´s toes and nose suffer most." "The delivery room is 15 degrees colder than his mother´s womb." "Bob´s ability to control his temperature... is very limited." "Even the best special imaging techniques... could not always show how the body works." "Instead, we needed to find a range of unusual visual metaphors." "Some people compare the brain to a computer... but perhaps a better analogy is with a termite mound." "It´s all to do with the whole thing being greater... than the sum of the parts." "A termite colony is extraordinary." "It is as intricate and as complex as a small city." "It can dominate whole areas of the bush... and wage war against other insects." "But above all, it can build these stupendous structures... complete with columns and buttresses... and sophisticated air conditioning ducts." "So where is the knowledge for such an incredible organisation kept?" "Not in an individual worker termite." "They are supremely dim, with a brain the size of a pinhead." "Nor in the enormous squirming egg-producing queen." "Her brain is even smaller than a worker´s." "No, the intricate behaviour of the termite colony... emerges from the collective effort of all the termites." "The brain of our ape-like ancestors was very small." "Its volume was about half a litre." "Equivalent to the engine size of a Fiat 500... or a modern-day chimp brain." "A human brain is three times larger." "The size of a sports car engine." "We often have the illusion that... somehow we are in control of our bodies." "But it´s really our biology that controls us." "And nowhere is that more obvious than... during the great roller coaster ride of puberty." "And though we may think we know what´s going to happen... nothing can quite prepare us for how it will feel." "It feels exciting and dangerous... and we don´t even know how long it will take." "But the worst thing is, just when you think you´ve got it mastered... suddenly something else happens and your body changes again." "These synchronised swimmers provided us with a memorable image... to explain the complex process of programmed cell death." "Our bodies are built from organised colonies of cells." "In fact, what we seen when we look at ourselves... are vast communities of cells, billions of them." "Each one plays a particular role... a heart cell, a muscle cell, a brain cell." "In an incredible act of harmony and organisation, they work together... performing the functions of the organ they belong to." "From the very start of our lives... this tireless dedication to duty often requires our cells to die." "Some cells in the foetus actually receive signals to self-destruct." "Here, the developing hand grows as an enormous bundle of cells." "Then, cells are systematically destroyed... sculpting the fingers and the gaps between... in much the same way a sculptor chips away a block of stone." "From the very beginning of the human body´s journey... death becomes an essential part of life." "One of the biggest and most complicated shoots... was what we call the Line of Age." "Shot in a forest in the English countryside... we started at 6 a.m... running the whole thing like a military operation." "Richard Dale, the series producer... and lrna Imran, the production assistant... were among the first there... and straight away there´s a problem:" "some of the artists are missing." "The people who haven´t turned up already are a 19-year-old... a 29-year-old, a 50-year-old, a 51 ... and I think another, either 41 , 49, or 52." "Oh, so we´re missing quite a few." "...something about a shower." "Oh, yes, yes, I know set up this delightful agency." "Would you like me to undress for you?" "Not yet." "Things are hotting up... not only in the caterers´ truck." "Irna, what´s the problem at the moment?" "I´ve just got to go and tell the director about the weather." "He wanted a weather forecast and the Met Office have just told me... that we can expect thunderstorms this afternoon... but, sunshine in the early afternoon... so I´ve got to go and break that news to him... and some of my extras haven´t turned up." "Most of them have, though." "And they´ve got an unusual task ahead." "It was supposed to be my daughter... but they didn´t want her because she was too young , so she said:" ""Well, you can do, mum, they want somebody over 60"... so, you know, I´ve never done this sort of thing before." "I´ve had holidays on nudist beaches but..." "No, this is the first time I´ve taken my kit off for money, anyway." "I only had two days´ notice of this... and being eight and a half months pregnant... I immediately was met with, "oh, oh, please, please do it", so..." "We needed a hundred people, one for each year of age, from birth to 100." "Do you want another rehearsal?" "l think let´s go for it." "Let´s just build it up now." "OK, Max." "...it´s brightening up there." "Let´s put, full steam ahead, on getting all the extras in, please." "Great." "Right, as artists arrive... you have numbers, if you can stand in front of... the relevant cardboard cut-out with your number on it, please." "Keep your glasses on, that´s fine." "When the camera comes along, you can look at it a bit." "I don´t want you to feel you mustn´t look at the camera..." "You can look at the camera a bit... but make sure you don´t look at it for too long." "Everyone has a set place according to their age." "Were you introduced?" "What´s lovely about this kind of gathering, this kind of day... is that even though everybody´s working very hard... very quickly the barriers are broken down... and what you have here is a collection of people... a collection of humanity... and it represents everybody... from a two-week-old baby to a 102-year-old man... and there´s a great sense of camaraderie... and lack of tension in the air." "...dressing gown off, please." "Try not to look freezing cold, OK?" "OK, everybody..." "Rolling, so smile..." "Yes!" "Look at the camera!" "You can smile a bit." "Don´t look too solemn about it all." "Let us look, the camera, look relaxed." "Great." "The result, what we hope, is a memorable sequence... that captures what this series is all about:" "the human body, endlessly changing... ever surprising... and seen in these programmes... in a fresh and fascinating way." "Fine." "Smile!" "Relaxed!" "Good!" "Look at the camera!" "Keep looking!" "And... cut it!"