"Who are we?" "What makes us tick?" "How do our minds work?" "For centuries, these questions were largely left to philosophers and theologians." "around, about 100 years ago, a new science began to open a window to the inner workings of the mind." "it was called "experimental psychology."" "In this series, I will explore the history how this "new science" revealed things about human nature which were surprising and often profoundly shocking." "Theexperimentrequiresyou  to continue." "Buthemightbedead inthere !" "Ever since I was medicine student," "I've been fascinated in psychology, by its brutal history and how far some researchers have been prepared to go in search of answers." "This time i'm investigating how studying the abnormal brain has shone a bright light onto the workings of the normal brain." "It got totally out of control." "They smacked me and hit me and I pulled my hair." "When the brain is damaged by natural causes, or by operations that go wrong, the bizarre symptoms sometimes then the result have often been extremely illuminating." "Canyoutellme what was the number?" "Five." "What we have learned, from experiments done on these unique, unfortunate individuals, has implications for all of us." "This taught us astonishing things, not just how the brain works but its hidden potential." "I'm actually using it pretty much like I would vision." "Excellent." "THEBRAIN A SECRET HISTORY" "EPISODE3  DAMAGED BRAINS  Angela, a 45 year old mother, has been having epleptic fits." "One two Three." "Part of her temporal lobe is damaged, creating flurries of electrical impulses that spread across her brain causing frequent and uncontrollable seizures." "Drugs haven't worked, so she opted for a far more radical treatment." "We are going to take out roughly a line ..." " A line like that." " Right." "The surgeon, Paul Eldridge, is about to remove part of her brain." "The damaged area lies deep inside the brain, beneath the temporal lobe." "Paul has to open her skull and then carefully navigate through critical regions of her brain to reach the affected area." "It is an extremely delicate procedure." "If it works, it should end Angela's fits, but there are significant risks." "The knowledge that makes the operation like this possible has been hard won." "Success relies on an incredibly detailed understanding of what different parts of the brain do." "We know that thoughts, ideas, beliefs, things that make us human," "Are somehow generated within this lump of grey porridge up here in our heads." "But until recently, that wasn't fully understood." "In fact, up to about 150 years ago, we knew very little about what the human brain actually did." "So how did doctors began to put it all together?" "how did they start to map the brain?" "I came to Paris to see a brain a very special brain, because it kick started all modern neuroscience and also utterly transformed our understanding of how our own brains work." "The brain I'm looking for should be in this room here." "Anatomists in the 19th century made great strides in understanding how the key organs in the human body function." "And through studing deformed and diseased specimens, such as these Dupuytren Museum, they were able to learned how our organs develop." "But by far the hardest organ to study was the brain." "Unlike other organs, you can not guess what parts of the brain do what just looking at them." "Then, in 1861, a surgeon was called the bedside of a dying man." "His was named Leborgne, and we know relatively little about him." "Legend has it, that as young man, he contracted syphilis, rather like this unfortunate over here." "As a consequence, he lost the power of speech, apart from the ability to say one word. "Tan"." "Leborgne had gangrene in his right leg, and local surgeon, Paul Broca,was asked to examined him." "Broca became intrigued by the unusual speech impediment." "His voice box was undamaged, and he clearly he understood questions, so why could he only say "tan"?" "Broca could do nothing for Leborgne." "The gangrene spread, he died 2 days later." "The important thing is that Broca realized he had a unique opportunity here and he seized it with both hands." "He got out his saw, and he cut open Leborgne's head and he extracted his brain." "This brain." "This is the brain that Broca removed." "It's in pretty manky condition, but it is 150 years old." "It is fairly obvious, when you look at it, where the damage lies, it is this region over here." "What Broca was able to do, was he was able to put two and two together." "Leborgne had obviously suffered from a severe problem with his speech, he could only say "Tan, tan"." "There was a big chunk of his brain missing here." "That suggested to Broca that area here must be responsible for speech." "When news of his discovery got out," "Broca became extremely famous." "He modestly lent his name to the region he had discovered." "It is known as "Broca's area"." "Whatever it was that caused Leborgne's unfortunate brain damage, his life and then his death helped Paul Broca to establish a really important principle, that different parts of the brain have different skills," "They do different things, something called localisation." "Localisation is at the heart of our understanding of how the brain works." "Today, scientists still trying to work out, in finer detail, exactly what the different parts of the brain do." "And it is still patients with damaged brains that offer the greatest insights." "One area that continues to fascinate is the area that Paul Broca himself studied, language." "Julia Sedera is fluent in German, Spanish and English." "She used to work as management consultant." "I used to be on the phone all the time." "I talked, talked, talked." "But then, 3 years ago, she had a massive stroke." "I couldn't talk at all, I could say absolutely nothing." "I remember when When I had to say something, I couldn't even say ... my husband's man .. name!" "I could not even say his name." "The only thing I knew was Sophia." "She appears to have made a good recovery, but when her speech was tested at University College, London, a very different picture emerges." "You are going to look at the picture." "And then tell me what it is." "Flap, flap, abe, pa, perry, pa, pike, perry, peak." "It is." " Tab?" " Abba, perry, pay, pa, no." "Can you tell me anything about it?" "It's hot, it's very good." "In Brazil many people eat that a lot." "Julia is unable to name things." "You can buy them, They are called..." "What do you do with it?" "Put in there, paper." "Envel ...?" " Again." " Envelope." " "Tel"?" " Envelope." "For neurologist Cathy Price, rare cases like Julia are an invaluable opportunity to learn more about the intricacies of speech." "It is very clear when you are speaking to her that she understands what is happening, she understands what she is looking at." "Rum, brum, brum, tummel." "She is also able to generate a lot of speech that sounds very fluent." "The problem that she has is linking up." "Find exactly the right words to describe the meanings that the she's thinking of." "Jur, jury du jury jury, ah, jury." " Are you talking about Egypt?" " Yes that's right." "Tell me how you feel when you are doing this." "I just have no idea how to say it, I can not even think about it." "I know exactly what it is, but I have no idea what to say," "I do not know what to say, I can not say it." "Unlike Broca, who could only study his patients after they died" "Cathy can look at Julia's brain while it is processing language, to see what's gone wrong." ""Dome"." ""Cow"." "Looking at Julia's scan, the first surprise is her Broca's area is completely intact." "The damage is further back in her brain." "This is a picture of the structure of Julia's brain." "We can see a dark area Here, in the parietal cortex, where the stroke has caused quite a lot of damage." "This is one of the many areas the brain that are now known to be involved in creating speech." "the scans also shows Cathy" "Which areas light up when Julia tries to speak, which she can then compare to a healthy brain." "The red signal light shows that undamaged Broca's area is active." "The adjacent blue area is where the damage lies." "What you can see here in the blue area is that she has less activation than normal." "This fits in with her symptoms, as so far as this area is important for translating visual information into speech." "It is because this blue area is damaged" "Julia cann't say "pineapple"" "eventhough she knows what it is." "But there is another fascinating fining." "What's interesting is this yellow area here, the anterior part of the temporal lobe." "This is an area of the brain which is associated meaning." "This area is more activated in Julia, which suggests that she is relying more on the meaning of the word to work out how to say it." "Julia is one of hundreds of stroke victims which are contributing to Cathy's ambitious project to produce a detailed map of brain areas we use for language." "We now know that there are many brain regions involved in language." "Maybe we could label half of the brain involved in language." "And the new research is trying break those areas down into smaller and smaller components, where we understand how different areas of the brain respond in a much more precise way." "I think it is very good." "This emerging picture of language ability spread right across the brain helps explain Julia's partial recovery." "Although she's lost a large chunk of brain," "Julia is still able to communicate using some of the remaining undamaged language areas." "I can't say this or that, but I can say:" "Can you help me please, that way or that way?" "I'm playing around with what I'm trying to say." "I'm so much more myself again." "I think: "I can't say all these things, so what? "" "I can't help it." "But I can do what I think I need." "Taking off the top part" "It's an hour into Angela operation, and Paul is now working deep inside her brain." "He is carefully cutting his way through an area called anterior temporal lobe." "He is about a centimeter from scarred area that's triggering her epilepsy." "The temporal lobe down here, that is the last bit to come out." "He has managed to pick his way through Angela brain without doing her serious harm, thanks to maps." "maps based on years painstaking experimentation." "It means that Paul knows which areas are safe to pass through." "What should that bit of the brain been doing?" "Not much, so if take it out, not much seems to happen." "It is hard to believe that there are parts the brain that do nothing." "They were called "Silent areas"." "Right." "Now, Paul really has an excellent idea of where he is." "He's got all this technology around him." "But in the early days of neuroscience, they really had very imprecise maps and as a result, mistakes were made and terrible tragedies occurred." "But it was actually from those tragedies that the greatest lessons were learned." "Perhaps the most notorious example of surgical intervention that went horribly wrong occurred in 1953." "For a long time, the patient, Henry Molaison, was one of psychology's most valued and closely guarded secrets," "known only by his initials, H. M." "Doyouknowwhat youdidyesterday?" "." "No i don't" "Howaboutthismorning?" "Idon'tevenrememberthat ." "INTERVIEW WITH Henry Molaison 1992." "Canyoutellme day of the week it is?" "NoI can't." "An accident when he was young triggered a chain of events that robbed Henry of a normal life, but helped science unreveal one of the great mysteries of the mind," "How our memories work." "When he was 7 years old Henry was playing in the street." "Something caught his eye and he ran out into the road." "He was knocked to the ground by a passing bicycle." "A trivial sounding accident one that happens all the time." "Young Henry needed a number of stitches in his head, but seemed otherwise ok." "Yet this trivial accident would shape his entire life, and would eventually lead to him becoming the most studied person in the whole history of psychology." "At first, things carried on normally," "Henry played with friends, went on trips with his father." "But, increasingly, he found himself having vacant periods" "He couldn't account for." "On his 16th birthday," "Henry got into his parents' car and prepared to head off to town to celebrate." "As they crossed the bridge to Hartford, his entire body seized up, his limbs and head jerking violently." "The childhood head injury had left a terrible legacy." "Epilepsy." "From then on, Henry's life was dominated by his illness." "In the 1940s, attitudes were less enlightened." "His father turned his back on him, saying it was" ""Shameful to have a mental in the family. "" "By the time he was 27, he was having massive seizures on a weekly basis." "Something had to be done." "He was referred to a local surgeon William Scoville, whose chief specialties were ruptured discs and lobotomies." "A colleague of Scoville described him as a free spirit, unfettered by rules or regulations." "Probably not the sort of man who you would want operating on your son." "Scoville thought an area of the brain called the hippocampus might be causing Henry's epilepsy." "Little was known about this region, and the surgeons hadn't dared penetrate that deeply into the brain." "So, on no more than a hunch," "Scoville decided to remove Henry's hippocampus and see what happened." "Henry anaesthetized, but fully awake," "Scoville drilled his skull, and then pulled out his favorite operating tool." "He inserted a silver straw deep into Henry's brain and then he started to suck." "since Henry was awake throughout, you wonder what he made of it." "By the time Scoville paused for breath, he had sucked out the entire structure known as the hippocampus, and some of the cells around it." "Not surprisingly, Henry emerged from the operation a changed man." "He still had his personality and his IQ, but he could no longer form new memories." "It was like he was lost in a deep fog." "He could remember his childhood and up to the operation, but nothing after that." "Well,I possiblyhadan operation or something." "Tellme aboutthat." " I don't remember." "Doyouremember your doctor's name?" "No." "I don't." "DoesthenameDr. Scoville sound familiar?" "Yes,itdoes." "TellmeaboutDr. Scoville." "Well, he did a whole lot of research on people." "At first, Dr. Scoville seemed remarkably unconcerned by his error." "Apparently, he went home to his wife and said:" ""Guess what?" "I tried to cut the epilepsy out of a patient," ""And instead took his memory."" "What a trade!" "He eventually admitted that the surgery had been frankly experimental, and urged other surgeons not to repeat his dreadful mistake." "One thing Scoville did get right, was that he kept meticulous notes of exactly what he had removed." "His clean surgical strike meant he had created the perfect amnesiac." "Henry's surgically altered brain was a potential gold mine for psychologists keen to understand exactly how it is we build memories." "For the next 50 years, Henry was visited almost daily by a stream of eager researchers, keen to try out their ideas." "One of the last academics to come here, to Henry's care home, and investigate his brain was Prof. Elizabeth Kensinger," "From the Massachusetts Institute of Technology." " Good Morning." "Hello." " Good Morning." "Hi, it's very nice to meet you." "Do you think he minded at all people coming and probing inside head, or asking questions all the time?" "I don't think so!" "Of course, he would have no idea people had come to him with this frequency." "But it seem that most of the time we would have had fairly natural banter and he would know what was going on." "But if there was a knock at the door," "I had to turn and talk to the person who had just come in, and then I looked back at Henry, often it would become clear to me that he no longer had any idea we'd been talking about before." "Why was there so much interest in Henry?" "We suddenly understood that there is a particular part of the brain, the hippocampus and tissue surrounding the hippocampus, that was really fundalmently important, and that if you didn't have that tissue, you weren't going to be able to record new memories" "which you would have conscious access to." "Now they knew that the hippocampus was crucial for creating memories from the events of our lives, researchers could begin to explore the details of how it did this." "Memories require a really defuse association between a lot of different areas." "So if you think about your conscious memory of having breakfast this morning, it's going to involve the sight of the food, the smell of the food and taste of the food, it's going to involve all of these different elements." "But you need some part of the brain that can actually bind together those different elements and it be a representation that comes back to you and it feels complete." "It's astonishing just how much research was generated from this one man." " It generated an awful lot of research." " Yes Yes absolutely." "There have been over 100 scientists that have worked with him, and more than 10 thousand articles that have cited studies that have been done with him." "Basically everything we know about memory began with the study of Henry." "Down the years, every aspect of Henry's mind was examined, from the content of his dreams to his memory for pain." "Ok, so If you want to come on here ..." "But a simple experiment, involving nothing more complicated than a mirror, was perhaps the most surprising and revealing of them all." "So, what I would like for you to do in this task is to just look at the reflection in the mirror and use that to trace along the outline of the star that you see there in the mirror." "Ok, it seems a simple task." "I am going away, therefore I'm coming towards." "Damn it!" "The opposite doesn't, the opposite takes me off in that direction, so I need to do the inverse opposite." "So, I just think, I go this way!" "But you don't go that way..." "No, not that way." " Cor blimey." "Enough." "I give up." " All right." "How long dis that take?" " Not very impressive." " Right." "So, this is pretty typical of first trail actually." "Now, when Henry was given the mirror to test to do, over a series of days, he quickly became very good at it, despite insisting each time that he had never done the test before." "This revealed that Henry's surgery had removed his ability to form new conscious memories, or episodic memories, but it hadn't disrupted his ability to show learning on these motor tasks." "Since he had no hippocampus, remembering physical skills must be processed in a different part of the brain." " And this was was big, was it?" " This was huge." "Before this time, We didn't really understand that there were these different forms of memory." "Henry had unwittingly contributed to a major discovery, that there are two memory types." "One allows us to unconsciously remember physical skills, like riding a bike." "The other, to consciously recall the moments of our life." "Henry died in 2008, at the grand old age of 82." "Many people came to his funeral, mostly academics." "He had transformed our understanding of memory, but he had no idea of the part he had played." "Howlonghaveyou had trouble remembering things?" "ThatI don'tknowmyself." "Ican'ttellyou , because I don't remember." "Whatdoyouthink you'll do tomorrow?" "Whateverisbeneficial." "Goodanswer." "The story of Henry's brain didn't end with his death." "His brain was considered so important to neuroscience it was removed within hours of his death and taken on a long journey." "Henry's brain ended up here in San Diego, at a specially built facility, thousands of miles away from where he had lived and died." "This multimillion pound brain observatory was set up specially so scientists could continue to learn from Henry." "Henry's became the first brain to undergo an experimental procedure, devised by the professor Jacopo Annese." "It's been shaved forensically into 2401 micro thin segments and put through a chemical process to preserve every the detail." ""The Brain observatory." I'm in the right place." " Hello." " Hello." " Michael Mosley, hello there?" " Jacopo." "What a fantastic office!" " Thank you." " I've come to see Henry's brain then." "It is the only brain I keep in my office." "I'm going to show you some slides." "To Jacopo, these slides are not just research." "They are the essence of Henry." "It's not just a specimen." " It's actually a person." " Yes, he had a life." "And in fact you know calling them by name, knowing who they were, it just, everyone here feels very more reverent." "we are continuing the biography of H. M., based on these images." "Yes" "The new technique involves taking very high resolution images of each slice of brain, which can then be examined in all dimensions." "It's brain mapping on a micro level, the most precise ever attempted." "The goal was to be able to navigate everywhere in the brain, look at single neurons." "This is the resolution that we need to understand exactly what structures were affected by the lesion." "This new data can be cross referenced into the mass of psychological research collected on Henry over the years." "The aim is to build a complete picture of how the memory works, right down to the level of the neuron." " This is massively detailed, isn't it?" " Well this is a massive amount of data too." "But you can see, you can recognise individual cells." "So we're zooming in now" "You can resolve individual neurons in the cortex and individual fibres." "So again, you can go in little alleyways not just the big freeways." "The brain observatory is expanding, opening its doors to other extraordinary individuals who have been studied in life and will now be studied in death." "They have a hugely ambitious goal to find physical traces in the brain of all our memories." "Do you think ultimately we will be able to make more sense of this?" "We are trying to find out if there is indeed like clues left behind." "Like if this conversation, is there going to be something in these images in our brains that is a testimony of what happened?" " That is what is fascinating." " Do you think we are getting closer to that?" "It seems to me that what you're doing is getting to ever-greater levels of complexity." "Yes, but we don't know still what's relevant." "That's the big question mark." "That's why we're trying to catalogue and to make a registry that will catalogue every little detail in the brain." "Jacopo is carefully preserving unusual brains, in the hope that scholars in the future will be able to study them using technologies we cannot yet imagine." "The Latins used to say:" "Verba volant, scripta manent (what's in writing, stays)" "SO this is what's written in the brain and you cannot change that." "So a story that begins with a boy being hit by a bicycle nearly 80 years ago ends with his brain being preserved within this building in the form of, well, thousands of slices but also terabytes of data." "It is a form of immortality that I'm sure Henry himself would never have dreamt of." "It is now an hour and a half into Angela's epilepsy operation and Paul has succeeded in exposing the scarred area within her temporal lobe that he wants to remove." "So this is the source of her epilepsy?" "The source of her epilepsy is in this bit here." "So when you remove that, what's the chance that that will actually kill her epilepsy?" "The stated figures are around... 70% seizure-free rate." "Angela is fortunate." "Paul has identified the focus of her seizures." "When that isn't possible, a more drastic form of surgery, pioneered more than 60 years ago, may be called for." "Back in the 1940s, surgeons decided to try a completely radical new approach." "Instead of, as with Angela, cutting out a small section of the brain." "They decided it would be a good idea to cut the corpus callosum, the highway that connects the two hemispheres of the brain." "The effect of doing this was utterly unexpected." "Put your left hand through the screen." "OK, I'm going to put a number in your hand now." "Now observe what happens when the house wife cannot see her hands." "Can you tell me what that number was?" "Four?" "The corpus callosum is a band of 55 million nerve fibres which connect the two halves of the brain and keep them in constant contact." "OK, Dave, I'm going to start to divide the corpus callosum." "In the new operation, surgeons slice through this super-highway disconnecting the two halves of the brain." "This halted the flurries of electrical activity that cause seizures." "After they had recovered from their operation, they appeared to be normal." "Which was amazing given the extent to which the whole architecture of their brains had been altered." "This 12-year-old boy is doing some pretty impressive subdivision, and his spelling isn't bad either." "But, in psychology circles, they became legends." "And that is because these patients would in time reveal something that to me is truly astonishing." "The two halves of our brain each contain a sort of seperate consciousness." "Each hemisphere is capable of its own independent action." "This sensational finding came about by accident." "A group of scientists in California recognised the experimental potential of the split-brain patients." "Because their brains had been seperated, it was a unique opportunity to find out if the different hemispheres had different abilities, and, if so, what?" "To do this, they had to devise ingenious experiments that would test each hemisphere in isolation." "Neurobiologist Roger Sperry set to work." "The results were bizarre, for the patients and the researchers." "I remember seeing this footage nearly 30 years ago and being completely blown away." "Sperry's experiments made use of the fact that the right hand is controlled by the left hemisphere, and vice-versa." "Put your left hand through the screen." "Ok, I'm going to put a number in your hand now." "And what I want you to do is signal the answer." "So here's the first number." "So far, no great surprises." "But then the researcher asked to name out loud the number that she'd got in her hand." "Can you tell me what that number was?" "Four?" "Ok, now let me give you another number." "She gestures eight, which is the correct answer" "Can you tell me again what the number was?" "Six?" "But she says six, which is of course completely wrong." "So what's going on?" "What was happening is the numbers were put in her left hand, which is controlled by the right hemisphere." "But the right hemisphere can't speak, so the left hand communicated with researchers by waving fingers up like that." "The left hemisphere meanwhile is completely in the dark" "It cannot see or feel what the left hand is doing, so it just wildly guesses." "Five." "This was the first experimental proof of what people had previously suspected that language resides solely in the left hemisphere." "Sperry now decided to find out just what the right hemisphere could do." "So what's happening here is the left hand, which is controlled by the right hemisphere, is being given a puzzle to solve." "The puzzle required rearranging blocks so they matched the pattern on a picture." "And it's actually pretty good, it gets the puzzle solved pretty damn fast." "So now, it's the turn of the other hemisphere, and I have to say it's making a real pig's ear of it." "Clearly the left hemisphere hasn't got a clue how to solve this puzzle." "The other hand decides to come in and help." "No, never going to get there." "This is pretty convincing evidence that although the left hemisphere may have language, the right hemisphere has spatial skills." "This discovery that the right side is responsible for spatial awareness, was followed up by other discoveries, such as the fact the right side can recognise faces." "But more than that, Sperry was convinced, that as he put it, each hemisphere is a conscious system in its own right perceiving, thinking, remembering reasoning, willing and emoting." "In 1981, Sperry received a Nobel Prize for his work, but in a cruel twist of fate, by then he was suffering from a fatal, degenerative brain disease called Kuru, probably picked up in the early days of his research" "while splitting brains." "The split-brain had revealed the individual characteristics of each hemisphere." "The next question was..." "How did the two different halves interact with each other?" "Most people who have had their corpus callosum cut, who have had the split-brain operation, are perfectly normal afterwards." "You could cross them in the street and you wouldn't know anything had happened." "But there are some cases in which the end results are pretty dramatic." "What's going on?" "Tell us what's going on." "From childhood, Karen Byrne suffered from daily epileptic seizures." "She decided that having her brain surgically split was her best chance of a normal life." " Hello, Karen?" " Hi, how are you?" " Nice to meet you." " Nice to meet you." "I did have a little trepidation, as for what kind of condition I was going to be in after the surgery." "I woke up and I'm telling you," "I was not the same girl I was 48 hours before that day, that's for sure." "I was not the same person." "And I never would be again." "Surgery resolved the epilepsy, but created an entirely new problem." "Dr. O'Connor said "Karen, what are you doing?"" "And I just looked down and said:" ""What are you talking about?"" "He said:" ""Your hand is undressing you."" "And I had no idea my hand was opening up the buttons." "So I'm rebuttoning them with the right hand, and the left hand is unbuttoning them." "And he put an emergency call through to Dr. Sprung, and said: "Mike, you've got to get here right away."" ""You've got to get here, we've got a problem."" "Can you lift your hands up in the air?" "How about the other hand?" "Can you lift your left hand in the air?" "Can you give me a thumbs up with this hand?" "Thumbs up." "Karen emerged from the operation with a left hand that had a mind of its own." "What's going on?" "Tell us what's going on." "An extremely rare condition known as alien hand syndrome." "This is it." "This is what happened." " See it's my..." " You look almost possessed." "Yep, yep, yep." "Basically that's what you do." "It's terrible, terrible." "Do you find it disturbing?" "I mean I do, but..." "For myself, no, but for other people around me I do because I think it's very frightening for them." "It's unbelievably strange." "That's what happens, it smacks you so badly." "My own face was all swollen, so black and blue." "She was eventually discharged from hospital, she had to live with a wayward, willful hand." "This hand would do one thing, and this hand would do the opposite." "So you're trying to have a cigarette..." " And this hand would put it out." " Right." "The phone would ring, and I would answer the phone, and that left hand would hit the clipper." "to hang up the phone." "It really is just like an annoying five year old, isn't it?" "Definitely." "Definitely, and it got so frustrating." "And you couldn't get mad at it because it was you." "Karen's alien hand syndrome was caused by a power struggle going on in her brain." "Our brains normally function smoothly, because the analytical, left hemisphere dominates and has the final say in what actions we perform." "And this was certainly true of the bulk of the split-brain patients." "Karen was extremely unlucky." "After the operation, the right side refused to be dominated by the left, leaving her hands in near constant conflict." "It's very strange, isn't it?" "This thought that all of us, within us, have these two hemispheres and they are wrestling, to some extent," " for dominance." " Yes." "And that normally the left is in control but in your case, after the split brain, or for whatever reasons, the right became more powerful." "Oh definitely." "It's so dominant!" "Oh my gosh!" "For a short period of time, it really frightened me, it really did because I just didn't understand why it was fighting so hard to have such power over the other side." "Finally, her doctors found a medication that restrained her impulsive right hemisphere, bringing her alien hand back under her conscious control." "If you really think about it, a lot of it is just horrific and yet it's also tremendously funny." "It really is." "You've got to admit it!" "How can you not think it's funny?" "On the whole psychiatrists are not encouraged to laugh at their patients, are they?" "Karen, thank you." "It's been an absolute pleasure." "Thank you very much, I appreciate everything." " And lovely to see you." " Thank you." " Maybe I should shake both hands." " Yes, I think you should!" "You see?" "All right." "That's the way to do it." " Thank you." " Thank you, thank you." "Life with two warring hemispheres would be impossible." "In fact, scientists now believe it was the evolution of a left hemisphere that was dominant with its quintessentially human attributes of logic and language that helped us become what we are today." "It's now a couple of hours into Angela's surgery." "Paul is about to remove the scarred area of her temporal lobe that has been triggering her seizures." "This is the temporal lobe, and we have just detached the lateral part of it, so that we can see the medial part of it, that's the inside part, which is where we think the pathology lies," "this is giving us access to it." "And there it is." "That is quite a big chunk of brain, isn't it?" "Paul's now removed the damaged area and he's hopeful that she will now make a full recovery." "The success of an operation like this, the fact that a surgeon can take out a big chunk of brain, without damaging the patient, is dramatic proof of just how far we have come in understanding the anatomy of the brain." "Angela, open your eyes for me." "Hopefully Angela will now be given a new lease of life." "But there was one final discovery that sprang from the study of damaged brains." "It turns out that the map of brain function is not as rigid as scientists had always believed, and that has some astonishing implications." "This new way of thinking was triggered by a personal tragedy, one that would change our understanding of just what the brain is capable of." "In 1960, a poet called Pedro Bach-y-Rita had a massive paralysing stroke." "At the time, it was widely believed that once brain tissue is dead, there is no real scope for recovery." "The family were told there was nothing more that could be done." "Pedro's elder son, George, decided to ignore the doctor's advice." "He took his father home and began a series of exercises to see how far he could push his recovery." "Pedro couldn't talk or walk, so George made him crawl." "The neighbours were absolutely horrified; the idea that the son was making this elderly man crawl like a dog." "But, he started to recover." "And then George made him do tasks all round the house, like washing-up and when he broke the plates, he simply replaced them with metal ones." "He kept at it for three long years, by the end of which, Pedro had made an almost miraculous recovery." "He went back to work, he got remarried and when he eventually died, it was not from a stroke, but from a heart attack." "following a climb up a mountain." "By that time, Pedro's younger son, Paul, was a neurologist." "Because his father had made such a good recovery, he naturally assumed the stroke must have affected a small area of his brain." "Paul took the unusual decision to go to his father's autopsy." "What he saw was a complete surprise." "Paul was absolutely stunned." "There were huge areas of damage in his father's brain." "97% of the nerves connecting the cortex to the spinal cord had been destroyed." "So how had Pedro managed to learn to walk again?" "Paul decided that somehow his father's brain must have learnt to reorganise itself, replacing the work of the dead tissue with other sections of living brain." "Pedro's example showed that with the right support, stroke victims can sometimes make amazing recoveries." "It helped transform how stroke victims are treated." "Paul decided to dedicate his life to trying to understand what had happened to his father's brain." "It's a concept we now call neuroplasticity." "The idea is that your brain can, given the right stimulation, reconfigure itself, even in late adulthood." "Paul wondered just how far this concept could be pushed." "Just how flexible is the adult brain?" "Can it be trained to work in completely new ways?" "Many of his fellow neurologists did not believe this was possible." "Paul decided that the best way to convince his sceptical colleagues was to build a machine that was able to demonstrate just what he was talking about." "Paul was convinced that the blind can be taught to harness the part of the brain that is normally devoted to vision." "They can, literally, learn to see using a completely different sense." "Touch." "The important point here is that the brain is able to use information coming from the skin as if it were coming from the eyes." "He designed a chair containing a series of vibrating pins that made contact with the backs of his blind subjects." "An image picked up by a camera was then translated into a crude outline by the vibrating pins." "OK, it's a telephone, and the receiver is to the right." "Bach-y-Rita was something of a maverick." "His supervisor, and Nobel prize winner, told him to stop playing around with toys." "But Bach-y-Rita was convinced that his research would ultimately demonstrate that the brain is far more flexible and far more plastic than people gave it credit for." "So he ignored the well-meant advice and carried on his research, here, at the University of Wisconsin." "He died four years ago, just as the prototype of an even more ambitious device was completed." " This is the thing, is it?" " Yes, it is." "This is a Stephen Hawking box, isn't it?" "It's called "the brain port", and the idea is it will help the blind see using their tongues." "I'm having a go, under the instruction of Paul's protégé, Aimee Arnoldussen." "Looking very good." "Looking very stylish." "The lenses are blackened so I can't see anything and there's a camera that translates images to a device that goes in my mouth." " I'm guessing this is going to go on my tongue?" " You are correct." "There are 400 electrodes, so each of those electrodes is going to act like a pixel." "If you were to increase the intensity, as you do, you see the pixellation on the tongue." "And so any pixel that's white is a strong stimulation, any pixel that's black is no stimulation, and then with training, people feel the grey stimulation as the medium levels of stimulation." "I'm going to put something in front of you, and this is just to set the intensity." "You can turn the intensity down, or you can take it out of your mouth." "Tell me what you're feeling." "Oh, God!" "That's very, very tickly." "I am intensely ticklish." " I should have warned you." " I didn't know!" "Though it looks bizarre," "I am told you can learn how to use it very fast." "It's going to go to the front of the tongue." "This is what a horizontal line feels like." "Now it's in the field of view of the camera." "You're no longer laughing!" "You're becoming accustomed to the stimulation, now that you know what to expect." "Whatever I'm looking at there," "I feel a stimulation on the left hand side, and it's sort of going like that, don't know what I'm looking at." "It's funny you should say it because the contrast that you felt is a diagonal is where my shirt and my skin intersect." "Sorry, I'm just looking at your clevage!" "I know!" "I was trying to say that a little more delicately!" "Ah dear." "Once I immersed myself in the task and really focused," "I was surprised by how quickly I made progress." "On that side, it's around it." "Yes, very good." "What kind of things have that kind of shape?" " A spoon." " Very good." "Why don't you reach out and touch it?" "It's long and thin at one end, and more circular at the other end." "Excellent, that was impressive." "I wasn't even sure you would actually even get the key features." "But you did." "What is actually happening is it's like a torch which I'm using to illuminate an object and feel around an object, then I get a general sense of its shape." "I'm actually using it pretty much like I'd use visual, but in a funny way." "Yes, that's exactly what I'm doing." "Scanning studied have confirmed that the sensations on the tongue are indeed passing through to the visual cortex, something that wasn't previously thought possible." "And you're getting real good at reaching for and grabbing the objects." "Very good." "Proof of brain plasticity, that the brain, even in adulthood, can reconfigure itself, is turning the idea that its structure is unchanging on its head." "There is a map, but it isn't necessarily fixed." "The original thought of the brain not being plastic, or being very fixed, is an old notion." "Now that you also think that maybe the brain has capabilities that we haven't been able to measure just yet." "And so it responds to its environment." "It changes as a result of the experiences it gets." " Which is rather encouraging, isn't it?" " It sure is!" "In the last few decades," "We have learnt so much that is novel and surprising about the workings of our own brains." "And that, in no small part, is thanks to those individuals with damaged brains, who played such a crucial role in the history of psychology." "They were operated and experimented on in the name of science, and often with little personal gain." "Unusual individuals will continue to be prized and probed by psychologists but I do hope that in the future, they will also benefit from the insights they help uncover." "We owe them so much, because it is from them that we have gleaned the knowledge of how our own minds work." "They have opened a window into who we really are." "Subtitles by Andrew and Aaron." "You're welcome!"