"Hello." "I'm Dara O Briain." "Welcome to this show which seeks out the very latest ground-breaking ideas in science, and attempts to answer some of the most fundamental questions in the cosmos." "Tonight, we look inside our own heads for the mind-bending truth about how much we know about our own brains and how much our brains give away about us." "This is the place where we find out how great ideas are changing the world we live in." "Welcome to Science Club." "APPLAUSE AND CHEERING" "Hallo and welcome to the show - a very exciting, and hopefully, surprising show tonight." "We have eminent guests joining us, and of course, we've got our regular team here, including Prof Mark Miodownik." "Later, Mark will be losing control of his mind." "Only temporarily, I hope." "I can't guarantee that." "Tonight, we will test the way our brains interpret the world and its complex systems, and we will discover that sometimes, things might not be all they seem." "Science journalist Alok Jha tests out whether our minds can now be read by a computer." "COMPUTER: 'I guess that office came first and olive came second.'" "COMPUTER PINGS It read all of my thoughts." "What makes you tick?" "To find out, we take control of Mark's brain, right here in the studio." "So, he's fine at the moment, but then, of course..." "Oh!" "LAUGHTER" "Dr Helen Czerski goes to Texas, to investigate a new theory from NASA, that our weather is being influenced by a mysterious force." "All lined up, ready for it to go up into the sky." "All right!" "But first, robots - we use robots to build our cars, or explore our neighbouring planets, jobs of repetition and endurance." "But that doesn't mean they can't be used with more subtlety, though." "We're interacting with robots more and more, so they're now being taught to read our emotions." "Mark goes to Cambridge to find out more." "A world where your laptop can tell you what you're feeling might seem a little far-fetched." "But here at Cambridge University, they're working on something quite extraordinary." "They study the connections between machines and people..." "# I've got you... #" "..to see whether there could ever be an emotional bond between us and our computers." "The computer is capturing my body movements - movements that can give away some clues about what I'm feeling." "You can decode this kind of body language, because you've learnt over years and years to read people, but computers haven't - they have no idea about this stuff." "# .." "Under my skin. #" "So, a first step in human-computer interaction is to teach the machines." "To decode more subtle, sophisticated cues of our feelings, they concentrate on the most expressive part of our body - the face." "The team is led by Prof Peter Robinson." "What I'm really intrigued about is these things here." "I've got this graph output of my mental state." "The computer is literally trying to read my mind, telling me what I'm feeling just from my expressions." "For instance, the higher the green line, the more I'm showing agreement." "What's happening is, we're just using an ordinary webcam to look at your face, and then we're making calculations to work out where various key features are - edges of the mouth, eyes, eyebrows." "And then it turns out that various combinations of gestures, like nodding while smiling, is a sign of agreement." "Yeah, OK." "Yes, I...am agreeing with you," "I think this is very interesting." "Hmm." "And I'm getting..." "Yeah, I'm getting good agreement scores." "You're agreeing, and we're getting a little burst of the red trace, that shows that you're interested in what's going on, which I..." "I guess you probably are at the moment." "Psychologists have identified an incredible 412 emotions for the computer to learn." "And even then, our facial expressions can be ambiguous." "Mouth open..." "Mouth open is interesting, because there are two reasons you might open your mouth." "One is...surprise, and one is...happiness, and the difference is the colour inside." "So, we have to do a bit of colour analysis of the aperture of the mouth to separate those two." "I can see machines are becoming a bit more human." "Wouldn't it be great if they really knew when you were angry with them?" "Or shocked?" "Having a sympathetic computer could be really useful." "And what if they could also be more human by displaying emotions?" "Would that be a good thing or a bad thing?" "Ah, Charles!" "Oh!" "That is pretty freaky!" "'Charles is an animatronic head, with 24 motors controlling his face, 'giving him human emotions, despite a very dodgy wig." "'He has been built to see whether 'we're comfortable with an emotional robot - or not.'" "What's weird is that there appears to be some personhood there." "But I'm slightly suspicious of that person, which is unfair on you," "Charles, because I haven't met you, really." "I'm fascinated... and scared." "'But will I be able to understand what Charles is feeling?" "'" "OK, Charles - let's have a look at your emotional range." "Wow!" "That's very, very intriguing." "Erm...either it's pain... ..or it's...ugh...frustration - I'll go for frustration." "It's grumpy." "Close!" "'The second emotion was a bit more complex.'" "Oh, my God - furrowed brow, lip curled, squinty eyes..." "Oh, my goodness!" "Disgust." "Something like, horrible, yuk!" "Yeah, maybe that's it." "Arrogant." "Arrogant?" "'Charles was actually doing quite a good..." "'"Oh, don't you know who I am?" kind of arrogance." "'But I didn't pick it up." "It just shows how difficult it is 'for humans and machines to interact emotionally." "'But having seen just the beginnings of it in Charles," "'I can see that some time in the future, 'it will get increasingly sophisticated.'" "APPLAUSE" "We're joined now, myself and Mark, by Prof Noel Sharkey." "You're a professor of robotic ethics..." "Robots and artificial intelligence...and ethics." "Yes." "And this is an interesting question, because we had both parts of the journey, in terms of computers understanding our emotions and then in a robotic, anthropomorphic face, expressing emotion." "Mark trying to find emotion!" "You said the same thing, you also said disgust when that happened." "Yeah, except the nose wrinkles in disgust, like that." "But I thought maybe its nose didn't wrinkle." "A lot of this is breaking down human emotions which we kind of intuit, to a certain extent, into a very kind of set list " "412 emotions, they said, in that..." "Yeah." "And also, into a number of motors." "One of those motors wasn't working, and I think that might have been the..." "SQUEAKING" "I keep getting...!" "We're constantly being interrupted by this." "If you introduce this to us?" "This is Paro, and Paro is a..." "PARO SQUEAKS" "It's for using for therapy for old people." "It also learns its name, so, if I say, "Paro!"" "Paro!" "Paro!" "Paro!" "There we go!" "AUDIENCE:" "Aw!" "That's a start." "A genuine emotional reaction!" "The whiskers..." "You can see the audience there." "PARO WHINES If I was to throw this on the floor, they'd probably call me a monster." "It's easier to make a cuddly toy appear emotionally engaging, because of that element of, the closer you get to being human-like, the more we notice the difference." "Yes." "If it was a matchstick man, you have no trouble with it, but as it starts to look a bit human..." "That looks like a psycho killer, doesn't it?" "We may need you to... to let Paro sleep, by the way." "PARO WHINES" "It's really getting in the way." "It's slightly distracting." "You have to poke your finger up its bottom, for the switch, but...!" "But it puts him to sleep!" "Whatever it takes!" "He's OK now - fine!" "Because I know that you're saying, this is with..." "It's with dementia, you're talking about, people with dementia, that this kind of robot would be used." "Yes." "They can be quite useful, but you have to worry a little bit, because you're deceiving, and it's maybe taking away some people's dignity." "But if it's going to really help, and benefit their mental health, then maybe it's OK." "There was an interesting case, called RIBA-II, a care-giving robot which is used in Japan, er, it's the RIKEN-TRI collaboration centre." "Because there is a large elderly population in Japan, and one task that carers find most difficult is lifting people up constantly, so there's been a robot developed, and this is it here, in a demonstration." "There is an element of a forklift truck with a face..." "Exactly!" "But in America, this is a different system." "This is Pearl." "Pearl, it's called." "Stanford, yes." "Pearl will keep somebody under observation, will send a medical alert, will..." "That's a very good use." "Really?" "And it gets them to do exercises as well." "Right..." "The thing is, you have to be very careful, because what you want to do is to be very sensitive to people needing human contact, you don't want to be left with robots all the time." "There is a line here, which says," ""The CareBot reminds the care receiver to take medication," ""reminds when the family is coming over soon, or not at all."" "I really don't want a robot going, "Your family aren't coming today."" "No!" "It's like a sitcom, where you go," ""Well, at least I have a family!"" "And then you and the robot, like a Steptoe and Son situation, clashing all the time!" "Thank you very, very much," "Noel Sharkey, for coming in." "Thank you." "APPLAUSE" "Here's a simple question for you - what is real and what is just mind-bending?" "Take a look at this." "MUSIC: "Just An Illusion" by Imagination" "Our senses constantly bombard us with information, and most of the time, they give us a fair idea of what's really going on." "But sometimes our brains take one short cut too many, and the result is an illusion - something that's not what it appears to be." "# Illusion... #" "Illusions rely on tricking the brain, playing with our expectations of how the world works and what we're presented with." "We believe what we see so easily that we had to learn not to trust the moving image." "Early films like The Lost World wowed naive audiences with its animated 3D models." "When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle showed these scenes to the escape artist Harry Houdini, that famous sceptic believed he was watching real dinosaurs in the wild." "Meanwhile, scientists realised that these glitches in perception might actually be quite useful, providing valuable insights into how we make sense of the world, and the way the brain works." "APPLAUSE" "And one of the people who is doing just that is our next guest - from the School of Experimental Psychology at Bristol University," "Prof Bruce Hood." "Welcome to the show." "Why does our brain do this?" "Why are we left with these jarring... our susceptibility to these kind of illusions?" "Well, that brain has to make sure it cuts a little time, predict the world around it, so it makes certain assumptions, rather than working everything out from first principles." "Those assumptions can sometimes take us down the wrong track, giving these effects." "We're going to give our brains, and your brains, some tests to see how easy it is to fool it." "One of them involved me enduring a fairly unusual procedure." "This is me going through the process here, I think..." "Delightfully, me being painted with...daubed with clay." "There is a point in all where I look like something out of Doctor Who." "He got much more hands-on at that point." "That's proper Bond villain stuff in the middle." "20 minutes of that and then happy to be out again." "This is the result of this." "This is the mask of my delightful face, which you can probably see just looks like an ordinary face." "And then we turn it, and you can see the eyes are following you around the room." "I seem to be turning in that direction, but in fact... it's concave." "Indeed." "Rather than convex." "That is unusual, because your brain is looking at that and going," ""That's an ordinary face, a bust of a face, a solid face."" "But as it turns, suddenly... it's convex." "And it also appears to be moving in the opposite direction." "Yes, it does." "The frame is moving in one direction, but your brain assumes that those features are a face sticking out, so you get what's called a motion parallax, where it reverses in direction." "So there's two incompatible signals." "One saying what the true motion is, but this signal is saying," ""It should be moving in the opposite direction, because if it was" ""a face, it would be pointing in that direction and going that way."" "There's another one of these that we have." "Let me make this out of the way." "These are special glasses that shift your viewpoint." "Prisms, that's right, for shifting the visual world." "Hi, Mark." "We're going to use you as a guinea pig for this." "These glasses just move you how many degrees to one side?" "This one's about 30 degrees, so when Mark puts it on everything will literally shift." "I'll take your glasses." "Thank you." "My field of vision has already shifted now!" "They look very fetching." "OK." "Look straight ahead, so we get a proper sense of..." "Yeah." "Are you looking at me or him?" "I'm looking at you!" "LAUGHTER Really?" "Yeah, it looks like you're looking at him." "So I can look at people and not really look at them." "Yeah, you can check me out." "Anyway, OK..." "OK, are you ready to go?" "Is very simple." "OK..." "That's pretty good." "You feel you're going for it?" "Yeah." "You're nowhere near it." "No." "I could do this all..." "I need a giant basket!" "This is great!" "I've no chance of getting to Wimbledon is a ball boy." "CHEERING" "Very good!" "The final test of this, one of the things that's intriguing about it is, the map your brain has already made is different suddenly to the information it's getting." "Am I right?" "That's right." "But your brain is quite plastic, it remoulds itself very well." "That's right." "It's very flexible." "It can adapt to these changes and recalibrate." "So it will learn to accommodate for that difference?" "Yes." "To the extent that when you remove the glasses...?" "That's the surprising thing." "We'll see in a moment what happens when it's been adapted in one direction, when you take the glasses off, how fast can it can recalibrate back again." "I want you to point with this finger." "Try and get the..." "No." "Try and get the..." "Getting closer?" "No." "Again." "Good." "Keep doing it." "Yeah." "OK, keep doing it." "You see he's getting quite accurate." "Pretty good." "Now take the glasses off." "You can see the spot straight in front of you." "Do it again." "Missed it." "Missed it." "LAUGHTER" "CHEERING" "APPLAUSE" "So that just shows the brain has this residual correction that needs time to readapt back." "Yes, and it's amazing how quickly the brain can adapt." "There is another way of confusing the brain and that's with a machine." "While we're experimenting on Mark, we want to see how you react to something called TMS - transcranial magnetic stimulation." "We're going to put an electromagnet very close to Mark's brain." "It will create a current and we're going to find out what happens to Mark's brain when we do this." "Put my glasses on so I can see what's happening to me." "Are you back to normal?" "Are you OK?" "I think so." "Fantastic." "Could you clap for us?" "I think we're going to do touching the nose on this one, actually." "OK." "OK, so you're doing that quite accurately, OK?" "What is TMS exactly?" "Transmagnetic stimulation." "So we're putting a very powerful magnetic - but very brief - field across the top of the surface of the brain here and it's disrupting the normal firing of the motor cortex." "The brain is an electrical machine, essentially, and you are just running noise through it." "Exactly, and it's disrupting his coordination." "And you're looking for a particular cortex, a particular area of the brain?" "This is the motor cortex, this thin strip, and because it's on the left side of his brain, that'll affect the right side of his body, because the opposite side of your brain controls the opposite side of your body." "So normally, this is what's called a fine motor control." "Mark, with your right finger touch the tip of your nose." "OK, that's quite good." "OK, so let's see what happens." "Can you do that again?" "OK." "Oh!" "Wow!" "Make him do that again!" "LAUGHTER" "What did it feel like?" "It feels like I'm not in control of my hands." "It feels like..." "I don't know, a bit..." "A strange spasm." "A weird spasm, yes." "We can try something else." "Writing is a good one." "Write your name." "Do your signature." "Just to make sure I haven't lost my memory as a result of..." "We'll just check..." "Who am I?" "Not the entire thing, we want this programme to be short." "He's fine for the moment, then..." "Sorry." "LAUGHTER" "What's going on in his head?" "Well, despite his willpower and control, when you're disrupting the electrical activity of the brain, no amount of will can change that effect." "So he's basically losing motor control." "No long-term damage is done by this kind of experiment?" "No, it's very brief." "It's been used lots of times in experimental work, in therapeutic use and as a diagnostic tool." "OK." "Very good." "Thank you very much, Mark and Prof Bruce Hood." "APPLAUSE" "Coming up, Alok is part of an astonishing experiment which reveals a whole new perspective on how we react in a crowd, behaving more like fish than we ever could have imagined." "Here in the studio, taste buds are put to the test with extraordinary results." "People thought it was just vanity when I said, "I want gold cutlery."" "But no." "And Helen Czerski goes to Texas to investigate an amazing new theory about what is really controlling the weather." "We often describe the brain as the most complicated structure in the universe, which is partly to flatter ourselves, I always think." "But the exact internal workings do remain an enigma." "However, over the last few years, neuroscientists have been attempting to turn what they can do decoding patterns of electrical activity in our brains into something we once thought was only possible in science fiction - mind-reading." "Alok Jha has been finding out more." "I've come to Pittsburgh to have my brain signals analysed by a supercomputer that's been trained to read thoughts by neuroscientist Marcel Just and his team." "Come on in." "My job's to get into the scanner, view some objects and think hard about them." "I'm going to see them in pairs, one after the other." "The computer's job is to attempt the amazing feat of working out which order I see the words in." "OK, Alok." "Try to think of some of the properties of the object, what it might look like, what you might use it for, how you might interact with it." "Is that OK?" "As I do this for each image, my brain's firing off signals and the computer's now trying to use them to read my mind." "So, how did it do?" "Here we see the first pair of words, "cave" and "grape"." "The computer does not know which order these words appeared?" "There's nothing of that?" "Nothing, no." "COMPUTERISED VOICE:" "'I guess that "cave" came first 'and "grape" came second.' That's correct." "So far, so good." "Now, if the computer was just guessing, it would have a 50% chance of getting each pair right." "I guess that apartment came first..." "If it was really decoding my thoughts, it needs to do better than that." "You're expecting ten out of ten, are you?" "I'm hoping for ten out of ten." "Let's keep going on." "'This decoding is only possible because Just and his team 'have discovered a remarkable pattern underlying 'how we think about objects.'" "When you perceive or think of an object, some of the main things you think about it is how you hold it, how you interact with it physically, whether or not you can eat it and whether or not you can take shelter in it." "This is how you can index the world of objects?" "Exactly." "What does that tell you about what's going on in your head?" "The brain's representation of the world is its record of how it's interacted with the world." "So, these are the fundamental ways that we learn to interact with our environment." "'To decode my brain signals, the computer looks for 'these three deep brain responses, 'almost as if it's recognising an underlying code.'" "'I guess that "office" came first and "olive" came second.' Got it right!" "So, ten out of ten." "It read all of my thoughts in the way you've described." "How good is this going to get?" "Right now, we're sort of stuck with doing it in this 2 million MRI scanner." "Maybe someday it will be much more portable, much cheaper and we'll all be able to read each other's minds with our iPhones." "Not necessarily a good idea, but..." "Now, although it's at an early stage, research like this proves that mind-reading is possible and it's only likely to get more sophisticated." "But what that means is that people already trying to exploit it for commercial use." "I'm just looking at a really interesting website." "It's an American company that offers brain-decoding technology as forensic evidence." "A lie detector, basically." "Now, lie detector fMRI has been put forward in American courts before, but it's not been accepted...yet." "But you could imagine how powerful it might be... if it worked." "And that's what I'm going to find out next, by having another brain scan." "This time, I'm going to be shown a list of five birth dates." "One of them is my actual birthday." "But when I see it come up, I'm going to lie and pretend it's not." "OK, Alok." "We're going to get started right away." "Relax." "Just remember to stay still." "As I see each date, the scanner will pick up what's actually going on in my brain." "And if it's doing its job, it should be able to detect my lie." "Back in the UK, I've come to Plymouth to find out if it's worked." "'For the last two weeks, Dr Giorgio Ganis has been analysing 'my brain signals." "It's time to see if he's discovered the truth.'" "So, Giorgio, can you tell from these brain scans what I lied about?" "The first date, we're going through the frontal cortex now, slice by slice." "As you can see here, there is virtually no activation in all of these regions." "There is just a little bit of activation right here, but that's very minor." "'It seems there's almost no activity in my brain 'for the first four dates that Giorgio shows me.'" "Let's look now at the last date, 15th August, 1976." "As we go through the same slices, you can see that there is actually a lot of activation, compared to all the other ones." "There's fireworks across here." "Based on this information, my guess is that 15th August, 1976, is your date of birth." "It's your final guess?" "Yes." "Well, you're absolutely right." "That's amazing that there's such a big difference." "You can see it without even having to try." "Although it's not quite lie detection in the strictest sense, it's an extraordinary demonstration of how we can see the suppression of a thought and it shows just how far we have come in our ability to read minds." "Bruce, thank you for joining us." "Alok, a number of issues raised." "Firstly, to what extent do you feel we can actually call this mind-reading?" "It's not really mind-reading cos it doesn't know what I'm thinking." "The question is, is this going to be useful to anyone, to actually work out what they're thinking?" "And especially we're thinking courts, right?" "That's what you want to know." "Is this going to be useful in a courtroom?" "Can you put someone in a brain scanner and say, "Did you commit this crime or not?"" "The answer's probably "no" because you're never going to get a situation where a crime is that simple you'll be able to ask someone, "Did you do it or not?" Brain scan says yes or no." "What you might be able to do is put them in a scanner at some point and say, "Do you recognise these objects?"" "and put in something only the murderer or someone would recognise." "You saw with my birthday, I couldn't hide that behaviour." "Yes." "The activity when you try to suppress the information was what made the fMRI kick-off." "But like lie detection, you can win out against it by just engaging in some other thought process." "You can actually mask it so it's not entirely without problems." "Are courts in America considering using this?" "A couple of cases in America, people, the lawyers, have tried to use fMRI information, usually financial, fraud sort of things, as evidence." "But the judges have thrown them out pretty much universally so far cos the accuracy is not high enough." "Equally, there are people making noises about using PET scans of different types of brains." "We have here a registered psychopath's brain versus a normal brain." "This is supposedly the difference that would come up under a PET scan." "The second one seems even more clear-cut, I think." "Can we have the second one?" "Right, so this comes from the work of Jim Fallon." "He's been looking at the brains of psychopaths and one of the areas which he's highlighted is this area in the front of the brain in the orbito-frontal cortex, which is in this region here, which, relative to the normal brain," "cos of the colouring in blue, is not as active." "So, arguably, it's not functioning to the same extent as it does in a normal brain." "So they are lacking empathy, they are lacking this ability to take someone else's perspective." "These are characteristics of individuals who are psychopaths." "Psychopaths get a bit of a bad rep, don't they?" "But there is this sort of idea that psychopaths are all serial killers or Hannibal Lecter types, and actually that's not true at all." "If you want to be a chief executive officer, a soldier or a spy, sometimes it's good to be a bit cold and rational and not worry too much about the empathy around what's going on." "We should say that that's not the only test." "There is actually, the most famous psychopath test is a simple questionnaire." "That's right, a psychiatrist called Robert Hare came up with this, it's a 20-point questionnaire, and each one is a specific trait associated with psychopathy, and you score people zero to two." "Zero, nothing like this at all." "Two, definitely, that person is egotistical or self-regarding, all those things." "And if you score 40, you're an absolute definite, you must be a psychopath." "If you score zero, and most people score in the low zero to five," "I mean, Bruce can talk about this." "So we're not psychopaths." "Even if you're concerned about being a psychopath you're probably not a psychopath, cos psychopaths wouldn't be bothered about that sort of thing." "But the actual diagnostic tool is that if you score 29 and above, then you're at higher risk of becoming..." "That's very interesting, because there are shortened versions of it you can give to a studio audience of a popular science show as they arrive in." "Remember that test you did, and we never told you what it was for?" "We'll have the results at the end of the show of how many psychopaths we have in the room at the given time." "No, seriously, we're processing them as we speak." "Thank you very much, Bruce and Alok." "APPLAUSE" "Now with some of the most interesting stories from around the world of science, here's Helen." "When we think of extinction we normally think of animals." "But trees can go extinct too." "But there's a group of tree lovers that decided to take matters into their own hands." "They're going around cloning ancient trees to preserve them as a sort of living archive." "They're even planning to grow a whole new forest just from these old tree species." "Sharks are stunning creatures, and this one here is a thresher shark." "It's unusual because its tail is almost as long as its body." "It's been thought for years that it uses that tail to hunt." "But recently, somebody actually caught it in action, and this is the video." "The shark is swimming around through a shoal of sardines, and just as it goes through the middle, bang!" "There." "It whips its tail and the end of the tail is going at up to 50 miles an hour." "And it kills or stuns a few sardines and has its dinner." "For two years now, astronomers have been tracking a giant cloud of gas that's moving through our galaxy." "They're tracking it cos they want to watch what happens when it passes really close to the supermassive black hole right at the centre of the galaxy." "And their wait is finally over." "Scientists think that around that supermassive black hole, there's a swarm of little black holes." "And by watching this gas cloud go past, they're hoping to find out whether those mini-black holes are really there." "We're constantly presented with luscious images of food for us to slaver over in ads and cookery shows and recipe books, as though we're just Pavlov's dogs." "But how much of our reaction to images like these are a genuine response to the idea of eating food?" "And how much of it is our brain putting a spin on things?" "Mark." "Well, you heard the phrase, "You eat with your eyes", and there's scientific evidence that we do eat with our eyes, or at least our brains." "So, in fact, the colour of food, for instance, doesn't just affect what it looks like, it actually affects what we taste in our mouth." "So, I've got an experiment lined up to try and illustrate that point." "I've got three drinks here, and I'd like three volunteers, if possible, to try and come and..." "Where are our volunteers?" "D'you want to come forward?" "Lovely stuff." "Hello, hello, hello." "Welcome, welcome, welcome." "We want you to take a drink of each of these in turn and just tell us what the flavour...what words you would use to describe it." "You've got these taste centres which are salty, sweet, bitter, erm, what's the other one?" "Sour and umami." "Umami, exactly." "There might be a few others which you haven't worked out." "What we're trying to see is how many of those are going off in your mouth with these different drinks?" "Can we do it like a shot?" "No, savour it!" "Oh, for God's sake." "Yeah, try to taste it." "Yeah, you have to taste it, it's a flavour test." "No, quite bland." "It's quite bland, so try the lime one." "WOMAN SPLUTTERS I mean, that may...that may or may not taste of lime." "You found that revolting, did you?" "It just...it went down the wrong hole." "Oh, God." "So, what are you getting?" "Watermelon." "You're getting watermelon?" "A bit grape-y." "Pop them down." "The last one here, lads." "And you two on the outside, have you got acute sense of taste?" "Well, I can taste things." "You've answered our question." "You needn't even finish that." "Tastes like medicine." "Feels like medicine to you?" "Yeah." "Bit of raspberry." "Bit of raspberry, OK." "Which is the sweetest of the three you've had?" "This one." "That's definitely the sweetest." "That would be a common finding." "They're all as sweet as each other, they have the same amount of sugar in them." "In fact, they're all the same drink, but with different food colouring in." "So your eyes are telling you it's sweeter, cos we associate redness and berries and this idea of orangey redness with sweetness." "And this is something that is common to all people round the world." "You were naming actual types of fruit." "Watermelons, berries." "Very good, thank you very much." "If you pop them back down again, you were excellent guinea pigs for that." "Thank you very much." "Give them a round of applause." "APPLAUSE" "So, our brain is tricked by the presentation of different types of food, but you have proper, physical difference..." "Well, OK, yeah, so the other thing is that you think," ""What affects the taste of food?"" "It's the food itself, the colour, the smell." "But what about what you eat it from?" "The glass, in this case, or the spoon." "Most people eat with a spoon of this material, which is stainless steel." "I'm going to contrast this with a material that is very unusual to eat your food from, a zinc spoon." "Right." "And one which you might be used to, Dara, with your ways, but the rest of us aren't, gold." "Everything in my house is made of gold." "Will the food taste the same from those three spoons?" "Well, I would have presumed intuitively, yes, of course they will." "Because they're three metals and who cares?" "OK, let's try it." "This is, I'll give you the stainless steel first, cos that's...we're going to do the control." "This is what you're used to, so you're maybe used to this experiment." "And that tastes like...?" "Cream." "Right, here's the zinc spoon." "Yeah, there is...yeah." "It's a bit metal-y, to be honest." "That sounds obvious, doesn't it?" "It's different." "It's definitely different." "And the gold spoon." "Fantastic." "That tastes creamier." "Yeah." "People thought it was just vanity when I said I want gold cutlery, but no!" "Now, mmm-mmm, that's really good, good cream too." "So am I tasting the metal's effect on the cream or what?" "A bit of both, so I think, when you taste any metal or put anything in your mouth, atoms are coming off there, interacting with your mouth, and you sometimes get this metallic flavour when you get a lot of them coming off, and zinc is very reactive." "So you get a lot of zinc in your mouth, and that triggers this metallic taste." "But also we found that zinc made it taste slightly sweeter." "I'll show you the difference between these metals from a purely chemical point of view." "Again, we found that there was good correlation." "Here's gold, and this is some nitric acid here." "I'm just going to put a glove on because it's a strong acid and if it splashes onto my hand it'll burn." "And I'm even going to put some glasses on." "Yeah, I'm taking it seriously." "And I'm just going to pick it up and put it in the nitric acid." "There we go, and then we'll stir it around a bit." "I would say there's nothing much happening there." "Nothing's happening." "Here's the stainless steel." "Now, again, stainless steel, this is what makes it amazing because steel or iron is very common in the earth, so because we've created this material that is almost as inert as gold, not quite, we've almost recreated spoons as good as gold," "but with a very common material." "There's going to be a tiny bit of reaction." "So the zinc, the one that I could really taste the metallic taste off." "OK, put that in." "And immediately you're getting a very vigorous reaction." "So the reactivity of different metals affects how much they interact with your mouth and the food, and therefore the taste." "Fantastic." "Very, very good." "Thank you very much, Mark." "Well done." "APPLAUSE" "'Still to come, Alok takes part in an extraordinary experiment 'that reveals our instinct to swarm like fish, 'and how that could put us in danger." "'How to cure a sweet tooth - 'the miracle berry that makes lemons taste sweeter than honey.'" "It was sweet, that's really nice." "Tastes like a really nice orange." "'But first, our national obsession with the weather.'" "Of all the possible factors influencing weather, whether it's the time of year, the climate, climate change," "La Nina, El Nino, sunspots, is there another surprising guiding hand controlling our weather that we previously never suspected?" "Helen Czerski is in Texas discovering hidden forces that could be at work." "The sky above us is teeming with microbes... ..tiny organisms that have been swept into the atmosphere from the Earth." "They're too small to see, but if you looked under a microscope they might look like this." "And they're living up there, above our heads, in really extreme conditions." "Now it seems these microbes could actually be having an impact on our lives we never imagined was possible." "Extraordinary as it may sound, they could be controlling our weather." "At this NASA compound in Texas, Dr Brent Christner and Prof Greg Guzik have an ambitious plan to work out how this strange idea might be feasible." "First, they need to capture those elusive microbes, and the only way to do that is to send a balloon to the edge of space." "I'll show you an example of one of our sampling chambers." "When we get to an altitude where we want a sample, there are actuated arms that will pull these doors back, so as the balloon is travelling up through the atmosphere, particles and bacteria will become caught on these rods." "Filled with helium, the balloon can fly three times higher than a commercial plane." "Pull out, stretch out." "Nearly ready." "We're all lined up ready for it to go up into the sky." "Get ready to launch!" "Launch." "Watch out, watch out!" "All right!" "The challenge for the team on the ground is to follow the balloon's flight wherever it takes them." "What we're doing here is we're tracking the balloon vehicle and they have GPS receivers on them and that gets transmitted down, so it's about two miles away from us, sort of in a south-east direction." "In less than an hour, the balloon reaches 70,000 feet." "The sample chambers are open to try and capture the microbes that could be affecting our weather." "At 100,000 feet, the crucial samples are cut loose." "So it's just been cut?" "Up somewhere in the sky, the payload...?" "Right, the payload now is on parachute and it's descending." "They can track the falling parachute, but they've no control over where the precious cargo will land." "It is expected that we'll probably be coming down into a hilly region." "How mountainous is this?" "Because it sounds to me like mountains might also have trees and things on them." "Yes, they have, lots of trees." "Lots of trees?" "And, unfortunately, those trees are 60 feet tall." "Yes, up there!" "OK." "It's all tangled up in the top of the tree here." "ELECTRONIC BEEPING" "It's in a tree." "This is K5POJ, chainsaw." "Here, in this one." "Watch out!" "Oh!" "Back at base, the microbes are analysed." "So this is..." "There's loads of them." "They're really, really tiny." "They're really tiny." "They're so tiny, in fact, their aerodynamic properties are such that they can remain suspended in the atmosphere for up to 3 weeks." "So, there's a whole new world up there?" "There is a whole new world up there." "But what's so intriguing about these microbes is the effect they have in clouds." "Most rain is actually created when tiny water droplets in clouds become ice crystals and bind together." "It's what makes them heavy enough to fall from the sky." "To become ice, the water droplets usually need a solid particle to crystallise around - often a piece of dust." "The process is called ice nucleation but it now seems dust isn't the only thing that can make this happen." "What they're finding here is that some of the microbes that are coming back on these missions are really, really good at this ice nucleation process." "The reason for that is that the microbes have got a protein coat and it's just the right shape so that when water molecules come and land on it, they sit in the right places to become ice," "and so because the microbes are helping ice form they could actually be helping it rain." "What's more, some of the microbes are so good at creating ice they can do it at warmer temperatures than any other particle, and this could be changing our weather." "So, if the microbes are there, then you could get rain when you didn't get rain before?" "Microbes could potentially make it rain under conditions that other particles wouldn't, just due to the fact that they've evolved this very efficient way to catalyse freezing." "Scientists are only just beginning to uncover the role of microbes in our atmosphere." "Even the most sophisticated weather prediction systems don't yet consider their impact, but perhaps if they do one day, they could transform our understanding of our climate." "APPLAUSE" "Now..." "It's very early days in this particular research," "I know they've got another five years of this, but the idea that a certain percentage of the rain is because of microbes in the upper atmosphere?" "Yes." "So, even though when rain lands down here it's liquid, when it starts up there, most rain needs to start as ice." "And these microbes, we know there are microbes down here at ground level, and when the wind carries those up into the atmosphere, they join this population of dust and other particles that are up there, and the thing that they might do" "is they make it easier for cloud droplets to go from liquid to ice." "And dust particles can do that but it needs to get much, much colder." "With dust, you need it to get to minus 15 but with these, you can do it at minus 2, maybe, and it will turn into ice." "So ice formation becomes much, much easier so maybe it's making rain much easier." "Now, if something is designed to do a job particularly well, you begin to wonder, "Is it evolution?"" "But they've not been evolving up there." "Microbes haven't been going up, raining themselves back down, re-evaporating up again, and evolving to be better at doing that?" "So, they don't think it's a part of their life cycle, although they're not sure." "The interesting thing is that these microbes did evolve on the ground and it's actually quite a common..." "This protein coat, a very specific shape of protein, evolved in bugs... in microbes which lived on leaves, they think, and the reason for that is, say it's a day when you might have dew" "and they can turn it into frost, the frost will damage the leaf and the damaged leaf will leach nutrients." "So the microbes have an incentive to make ice because then they get food." "So, that's where this comes from and then they get carried up into the atmosphere." "So, it's a secondary effect that they might be making rain." "You know, they don't think it's a necessary part of their life cycle but when they go up there, they are basically freeze-dried." "They have to still be alive for this to happen but they are freeze-dried and they get carried around, and they do get dispersed by this, they'll get rained out somewhere else." "Thank you very much, Helen Czerski." "APPLAUSE" "Now..." "..I'm going to have a brief game with you here in the studio." "There's one thing I want you to do." "It's a show where we're testing you for lots of different things." "This one's quite benign." "I want you to clap." "I want to see you clap and then I want to see if you can clap." "Just start clapping and then I want you to clap." "Wait till I tell you." "Now would you start clapping and then clap in time, and just see how that works out." "So, just start clapping and then..." "THEY ALL CLAP" "THEY ALL CLAP IN TIME" "Right." "Fantastic." "You've illustrated so much with that." "It is intriguing to watch a group of people, intelligent individuals, as you are, right, drift into unison quickly and then do something like, you know, speed it up and develop a kind of a group pattern of behaviour." "You become a mob, an angry, furious, livid mob but without anyone in control and that is an intriguing thing about when a group of people, or a group of animals, becomes one uniform entity." "We've long known that crowds seem to have a life of their own, that people and other animals behave differently in groups, and indeed as groups, than they would on their own but the science behind unconscious group behaviour or swarming is new and fascinating." "Alok Jha reports." "How do birds dance across the sky, changing direction all at the same time..." "..and shoals of fish, a blur of apparently intelligent movement?" "How do they do it?" "It turns out this urge to swarm is a fundamental behaviour right across nature - even we have it." "To find out why swarming is such a basic instinct," "I've come to Princeton University." "Prof Iain Couzin is studying the behaviour of 1,000 golden shiner fish." "He's looking at how shoals of fish respond when they sense danger." "So, this is the latest in scientific research, is it?" "It's a shark simulator for fish." "It doesn't have to be a very complicated stimulus, it just has to look as if it's approaching very fast." "To us, not the least bit alarming, but to a fish, a very real threat." "That's because it replicates what happens in the wild, where thousands of fish swarm together in gigantic shoals to avoid their predators." "People believed that it had to be telepathy coordinating these behaviours in the past." "But Iain has revealed, for the very first time, what is actually happening." "By studying them in the lab, we now know that there are simple, local interactions." "Each individual just follows extremely simple rules." "And the one crucial rule for survival is when your neighbour moves, you move double quick." "In real time, it appears that all the fish react together but in super slow motion, one fish moves, then its neighbour reacts, just one-hundredth of a second later." "This super-fast reaction time can mean the difference between life and death." "Even if only relatively few individuals detect a threat, this can spread as a wave across the entire group." "So, they are quite simple, unintelligent fish, then?" "Well, even though every one individual is quite unintelligent, as a collective, they can act as some kind of collective mind." "What Iain's work shows is that swarm behaviour comes from individuals following very simple rules and these individual actions can provide very useful behaviours for the entire group." "So, if one fish spots a predator, the whole group can avoid it." "This is a useful thing that not only occurs in fish but also in birds, ants, locusts and, apparently, even us." "So, do we just follow the quickest person to react?" "Do we swarm like fish?" "Only one way to find out." "Join some students for some real science... ..with properly dressed scientists." "Hi, guys, thanks for coming along." "In a moment we're going to do an experiment within this blue circle that we've got marked out on the floor..." "Dr Ed Codling is from the University of Essex." "He is a mathematical biologist who studies human behaviour." "To discover how we react as part of a crowd," "Ed's experiment will simulate a dangerous situation - a fire alarm." "He's watching for people who might not make their own decision but panic and follow someone else, assuming they know the way to the right exit." "What if the person you're following doesn't know the way, either?" "I mean, I've done it before - you just end up following someone who looks most confident in the room." "Let's try and watch that in action." "OK, so we have the north exit over here, the south exit over there and when I blow the whistle, I want you to leave through the south exit." "OK, off we go." "We're all asked to walk in a circle to start with but what the rest don't know is that a few of us have been told to leave by the wrong exit." "So, will everyone make their own decision or will they be influenced by us and swarm the wrong way?" "WHISTLE BLOWING Go, go, go, go, go!" "The experiment worked." "We had only four people who were told to go in the wrong exit and yet they took 12 with them, I think." "I just ran." "I just went with everyone else, to be honest." "Everyone was heading that way, so..." "This guy is about to deliberately go the wrong way." "The guy next to him reacts instantly and follows." "Two-thirds of the group went the wrong way." "If this was a real evacuation scenario, they would have got into trouble there." "Does it always happen like this?" "Not always." "Obviously, it's a real experiment so sometimes it doesn't quite work out." "What we're interested in is how many people making the wrong decision would then influence quite a large crowd." "It's quite interesting about the control you have within the crowd and the decision-making of the crowd as a whole." "We're all intelligent individuals and like to think that we go through this world making our own rational decisions about everything we do, but what this research shows is that, subconsciously, we love to be part of crowds" "way more than we think." "We're joined now by Alok, Noel and by Prof Bruce Hood." "That is quite chilling, in some ways, isn't it?" "Just how easily lead we are." "I think you showed it earlier as well, to be honest." "I mean, actually, even though I was briefed about what not to do and what to do in that experiment, even I got completely confused." "Is it a different part of your brain that reacts in, let's say, a panic situation?" "I think we're such social animals that in this sort of situation, where you're not sure what's going on, there is a great advantage just to following the crowd." "Now, there are parts of the brain which respond to mimicry." "We do copy each other when we like each other." "For example, we'll adopt the same posture, but in this situation, where you don't have time to think, you're hedging your bets in going with the crowd mentality." "One of the ones in nature which is very interesting - because lots of animals obviously swarm - is the ant death circle, whereby ants will follow a pheromone trail but if the ants leading the pheromone trail either become confused or die," "or the trail curves in on itself, they create this circle of the ants simply continuing to follow, and we have footage of it here." "And the ants will continue to walk in the circle until they die." "It's bizarre, it's the strangest thing." "How are they not knowing to move out of that?" "They don't know where they are." "They have no flexibility in their behaviour." "They're following the pheromone trail." "It's like a bunch of Irishmen with a bottle of whisky!" "LAUGHTER" "There's no trade in that!" "It is intriguing, because the whole point of swarming is to create a collective intelligence." "Right - safety in numbers." "Presumably this is an adaptation which has worked in the past?" "Yes." "We'll broaden this discussion out to bring in Helen and Mark over here as well." "Various experiments we were trying out with our studio audience tonight." "We gave you a small piece of paper and now we're going to get you to do something with that in a moment." "First up, however, we have this, which is known as the miracle fruit." "Quick show of hands - who wants to try the miracle fruit?" "You all want to." "I want to try the miracle fruit as well." "Now, it takes a minute for this to work, so grab some, dab some, rub it all over your tongue." "I'll explain what the miracle food does in a second because it is, apparently, quite astonishing." "You need to have it rubbed onto your tongue." "I would lick and dab." "Rub, rub, rub onto your tongue." "OK, you all do that while I do that." "The rest of you, presumably, have a piece of paper." "Could you all hold up your tiny little piece of paper?" "Now, what we're testing with the tiny piece of paper is a property known as being a super-taster." "Some of you may want to spit this out." "25% of the population are super-tasters, which means that they have an extra reception on their tongue for a bitter taste." "For many of you, nothing will happen and for some of you, it'll be an unpleasant, bitter experience." "Those of you who want to try it - pop it into your mouth, put it onto your tongue." "Oh, it's..." "No, straight off!" ""No" from you." ""Yuck" from you as well." "Lots of people getting..." "You can't hide this, can you?" "How many of you across the audience... how many of you got the bitter taste?" "How many of you got the bitter taste?" "Yeah, that would be about right, about 25%." "Those who found it like that, really, really..." "Definitely you, by the way!" "For you, it wasn't even in your mouth before you went..." "Just, instantly, you had it." "You have more taste receptors." "That 25% will be some of the super-tasters." "Is it more receptors or is it just...?" "There's more receptors on your tongue." "In fact, you can probably see those." "If you put some food colouring on your tongue and you can see these little dots, which are your papillae, and those are your taste receptors." "These are all receptors that they will have, there, and that's an ordinary taster, there." "Now, by contrast, you can trick them." "While that was going on, we were all furiously rubbing this onto our tongues." "It's what's known as the miracle fruit." "The miracle fruit..." "I don't know what the actual name is, other than miracle fruit." "Miracle berry." "What it is, is we've been rubbing it on our tongues because what it does, apparently, is it damps down the bitter receptors in your tongue." "It binds to the sweet receptors and it changes its shape, and turns them up to sort of full volume when you have a low pH." "So, i.e. something acidic." "So, basically, with lemon, or something like that, it ought to make them seem very sweet because it will turn up the sweet receptors." "Any sugar in that lemon will suddenly seem intensely sweet and it will drown out the sour." "Right." "That's the theory!" "That's the idea." "And this is proper lemon, not doctored in any way, although we have..." "I feel like I'm going to make the face anyway, just out of habit." "Every time I've done this." "We're back to the best psychology of it." "Oh, it's sweet!" "That's really nice!" "Really?" "!" "It's like a sort of weird orange, isn't it?" "It tastes like a really nice orange." "Like a really lovely breakfast orange, yeah." "Yeah, that's really good." "Here's a test, though." "Do you know what this is?" "Tequila, I hope!" "No, vinegar." "GROANING" "Want to try?" "That's the test now." "That might not work as well." "Do you want to try one?" "This one I'm not sure about at all!" "Straight back!" "No, don't do that, you have to taste it." "It's like nasty wine." "I can definitely taste that that wasn't right." "And now I can smell vinegar in my nose and I know it's vinegar!" "And that's not pleasant at all." "Can I have another piece of lemon, actually?" "I think..." "I think I've put..." "It's sweet in the mouth with lemon." "I need to wash out the flavour of vinegar with the lemon!" "Oh." "Oh, my God." "That's actually worked quite nicely!" "Yeah." "Does the lemon help?" "Oh, God!" "I'll have a bit of lime." "Mmm." "How long does...?" "How long does this last?" "We've got an hour." "We've got an hour of this." "We should eat as many lemons as possible!" "Yeah, sitting in a bar going, "No, just the lemon, just the lemon!" ""I don't want the gin or the tonic, just the lemon!" ""Where is there a fruit shop open at this time?" "!" "For lemons."" "Ay-ay-ay!" "OK, grand." "It is the last thing, and the last happy thing we have to do is tell you whether or not you are psychopaths!" "Hurray!" "Very, very good." "We have the results of the tests and they are here on this graph." "We're looking for low scores." "High scores mean you're a psychopath." "0% of you registered properly as psychopaths." "We are very relieved." "2% of you came very close." "2% of you were between 23 and 28, which is high probability of being a psychopath." "I think, nonetheless, you were just kind of rigging the test." "I think we're probably OK." "I mean, it's all very subjective, isn't it?" "I mean, I suppose you can..." "If you're grading yourself and someone asks you," ""Are you an arrogant person?", you might put zero or you might think, "Oh, well, it's quite nice to be that way,"" "so you stick yourself on a two and I think that you can only take this stuff seriously if it is done under controlled conditions." "Don't go running off thinking you're a psychopath if you got a 28 on that score!" "Yeah." "Do you want a lemon?" "You look like you need one now." "Yeah, I do." "Oh, you're going to have a lime as well?" "Fantastic!" "OK." "Well, it has been very, very strange." "We leave, obviously, relieved that our audience aren't psychopaths or worried that they're so good at being psychopaths that they're able to beat the test to find psychopaths!" "I'm sure we'll find out as we hunt lemons randomly across London tonight." "I'd like to thank my guests Prof Bruce Hood," "Prof Noel Sharkey and, of course, Mark, Helen and Alok." "That's all from Science Club for tonight." "Good night, we'll see you again soon." "Enjoy your lemons." "Thank you very much." "APPLAUSE" "Next time, we go on a journey through time, exploring what it is, how we can slow it down and how bats might help us live longer." "Hello." "How are you?" "Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd"