"You're about to enter an environment which will be the most challenging your brain has ever had to deal with." "Your brain will have to perform complex tasks." "We can all do it without thinking about it." "You're going to a party." "It may seem effortless, but whenever you mix with other people your mind performs phenomenally complex tasks at a dizzying speed." "In fact what we do at a party would leave the world's most powerful computer standing." "From the moment you enter a room you pick out one face from another." "You begin a series of detailed assessments of every one." "From what their faces tell you, you decide what you think of them and even start to understand what they are thinking." "In this programme I'll be exploring how our mind does this and how what happens in a place like this shapes the world we live in." "This is the story of how we relate to other people... and understanding how our mind does that can help us use it better." "We'll see experiments that show the hidden potential of your mind, we'll learn how to tell a fake smile from a real one, how to tell if someone really likes you," "Or see how all of us can read minds.." "We'll discover how an experience like this can tell us who to trust" "and we'll find out just what our mind must do to win the friendship and love of those who matter most." "We all rely on our mind as we try to win over people that we've never met before." "Good afternoon pink class." "Good afternoon Mrs Bragg" "Are you sitting nicely?" "Yes we are." "The mind of thirty year old primary school teacher Mia Bragg is about to face a particularly tough challenge." "Now something very special, what's happening to Miss Bragg in the holidays?" "Mahardi?" "You're getting married." "I'm getting married." "But as well as tying the knot Mia will also have to get to know dozens of people she's never met." "I'm getting married in New Zealand, and I'll tell you why, because my boyfriend comes from New Zealand, that's where his family are, and I haven't met his Mum, I haven't met his Dad, I haven't met his sister" "so I'm going all the way over there to meet his family." "When are you getting married?" "I'm getting married on the 15th of August." "Hip hip hooray, hip hip hooray, hip hip hooray." "It's been an absolutely whirlwind since me and Matt met, it's been like a fairly tale, we met and then a month and a half later he moved in and then after a month after that we got engaged" "and it will be ten months that we will have actually known each other when we get married." "I asked her to call and they are coming around on Friday." "Mia will have to assess, understand and win round Matthew's family." "It will be one of the most complicated things her mind has ever done and we'll be following her as she tries to do it." "Yeah, on Friday, yeah." "No, we'll get on with them." "But why is getting on with people so complicated for our mind?" "Well, let's start at the beginning." "First, we have to be able to tell each person apart." "If we couldn't do that, life would be very difficult indeed." "Just imagine if all faces looked the same." "It would be a nightmare." "But we can tell each other apart and it's a skill we start to develop the first chance we get." "Keep it up keep it up keep it up keep it up keep it up keep it up." "Very good, and another one." "Push." "Longer push, push like that again, don't let it slip back, come on, push, just one long push and finish." "Come on, come on Kerry, push it, come on Kerry." "Push again and again, push Kerry, this is the last one." "Keep your panting now, open your legs and pant, keep panting." "Utterly defenceless, this little girl seems to have come into the world with few social skills." "Her name is Isla." "But she does have one crucial one and within seconds of being born she uses it." "Through the blur of her first sight, baby Isla instinctively turns towards a face." "This strengthens the bond between her and her mother." "But this, the first face she's ever seen is also physically altering her brain." "This first moment of Isla's social life is stimulating her brain at the tiniest level." "Our brains contain complex networks of brain cells called neurons." "Like all of us, Isla has been born with a staggering hundred billion of them." "These neurons are connected to each other at tiny junctions called synapses." "As Isla sees her mother's face for the first time an electrical signal is created." "This signal travels through these synapses along a pathway which is unique to her mother's face" "As she sees another face, her father's, a different pathway is stimulated in her brain." "From now on, Isla's brain will adapt and develop creating many more pathways as she meets new people, but even at this tender age, a baby's ability to distinguish between faces is almost unbelievable." "What now?" "What now?" "Like all babies, little Grace here can look at the faces of primates like these lemurs and actually tell one from another." "But what's interesting is that her older sister can't, to her all these lemurs look the same." "So how are you doing?" "Well, let's make it easier for you." "Can you tell them apart now?" "No, well you're not alone, because it turns out that even people who've spent a lifetime studying primates like these lemurs can't tell their faces apart." "But, just like little Grace, there was a time in our lives when all of us could." "And scientists at Sheffield University have proved it they showed primate faces to two sets of babies, one group under six months, the other over nine months." "To start with, all the babies looked at the faces and their attention was held, but when the researchers tried again with a different face, the results were astonishing." "The older babies refused to look at the new face, they were bored." "They thought they'd seen it before." "Clearly they couldn't see the difference in the two faces." "But when the younger babies were shown the new face it was a different story they were fascinated." "That's because they could see that this was a different lemur." "But in order to get on in the world of humans, all babies have to lose this extraordinary skill." "So what happens to make a baby's brain more like their parents?" "The answer to this tells us a lot about the way our brain develops its ability to communicate with other people." "A baby's brain is a little bit like this tray of cress, with all the seeds representing individual connections or synapses, all doing different jobs." "From the moment we're born the number of connections flourishes leaving babies with one and a half times as many synapses as an adult." "This gives them skills they'll simply never need like recognising the difference in primate faces." "Our brain now has too man synapses lt needs to specialise." "Which connections live others and die depends on who we look at." "Human babies grow up looking entirely at human faces, so the connections that process these continue to survive and grow." "What babies don't use they lose, including the connections that recognise primate faces." "This means by ten months their skills at recognising the difference in human faces are better than ever." "As babies," "Our synapses are being pruned to make us expert at dealing with other human beings which is just as well because the world is about to get a good deal more complicated." "After seeing only a few faces in the earliest months of our lives, we go on to meet many, many thousands." "But because our minds now specialise in human faces, we become experts in distinguishing one from another." "In fact of the six billion people on earth, most of us will be able to see a difference between every one of them." "But even this isn't really enough." "Telling faces apart is one thing, but working out what we think of them is quite another," "and doing this places extra demands on our brain." "Not only does your mind have to recognise faces but it also has to read them, it's a bit like that timetable." "You may know what you're looking at, but unless you can understand what it all means, you're not going to get very far." "Reading faces is key to how we form those all important first impressions." "It's the next step towards achieving what so much of our brain is devoted to." "Getting on with people." "None of Mia Bragg's family is able to be with her at her wedding in New Zealand, she'll be on her own as she meets her future in-laws for the first time." "If Mia and her husband are to make a new life out there, it's vital that she gets on with them." "I suppose I'm worried that if I go out there and I don't like it you know how can I turn around and say that you know I don't feel that this is the base that I want for the rest of my life." "So yeah l am definitely worried, it's a lot to think about." "Once she reaches New Zealand, no relationship will matter more than the one between her and Matthew's mother, Mira." "I think Mum's going to be excited but she's also going to be a few nerves about it too." "I mean she's not it's not every day your son brings home a girl from overseas." "Mum and Mia are both very, very strong willed people and they would both call a spade a spade and that's where l could see conflict coming into the equation." "I say it as it is, you know if I don't like something I say it you know whether they like it or not, it's too bad, if it's been bugging me for a while" "or someone's annoyed me for a while I mean bang, they get a mouthful and that's how it is." "So if Mia wants to get along she's just got to be herself." "How are you feeling?" "Dunno, feel a bit weird." "Keep going hot and cold, I've got heartburn now as well." "I'm just hoping that I'm the right person to his Mum and Dad, I hope I'm going to come across as the person that's going to make him happy and well l don't know cos l don't know them." "Oh my God." "Oh my God." "After months of waiting, much of how Mia and Mira feel about each other will be decided by their first impressions." "Welcome to New Zealand." "Oh it's so good to meet you." "Welcome to the family." "In the first moments of a meeting, our mind goes into overdrive." "As well as processing and storing faces, it registers countless signals," "but one signal more than any other affects the first impression we have of someone." "The smile." "It makes us feel they mean us no harm but in fact your mind doesn't always know whether or not a smile is genuine, that is unless you know what to look for." "This is actress Jacqueline Haigh and according to the world's leading facial expressions expert, she has one of the best fake smiles in the business." "But with our help you'll be able to tell when even she is faking it." "Jacqueline appears to enjoy buying flowers, and she seems happy to have met a friend, but a trained eye can spot that one of these smiles is in fact a fake, and that's because they're controlled by different parts of Jacqueline's brain." "A fake smile involves a direct signal from one area of her brain to another." "The part that plans what Jacqueline's going to do sends a signal directly to the part that controls her physical movement." "This moves the muscles around her mouth and makes her smile." "But no matter how hard she tries there are parts of her face that this type of signal cannot reach." "Her genuine smile involves a different type of signal, one that takes a more complicated route." "When her senses are stimulated by a genuinely pleasurable experience, this signal passes through the part of the brain that processes emotion." "Here it's boosted, so that when it arrives at the area controlling Jacqueline's facial muscles, it not only moves her mouth," "it also moves the muscles around her eyes they crease up and her eyebrow dips ever so slightly," "signs that show that of Jacqueline's two smiles, the one at the flower stall was the real thing." "And however pleased she seemed to see her friend, she was in fact acting." "So understanding what's going on in someone else's brain can help you form a more accurate first impression from their smile." "Just watch for the lines around their eyes." "But the first impressions we form of people are also shaped by what happens in our brains." "In fact, our brain makes countless judgements about people without us being aware of it." "And perhaps the most basic of these is, do I trust this person?" "To find out just how our mind makes that decision, I've come to the coast of South Africa and to some of the most hazardous waters in the world." "When we see a person that we don't trust there's a specific area of the brain that's stimulated." "It's like a bell that rings to tell us not to trust them, and crucially it's the same bell that rings when we're frightened." "To show how this trust area of the brain works, our volunteer has to be become really frightened." "So he's come not to meet an untrustworthy person but one ton of great white shark." "I can just about keep myself from clambering over this cage but I can't keep away from what's going on inside my head at the moment." "Right in the centre of his brain is that area which triggers fear and mistrust, and it's called the amygdala." "Every time a shark approaches it's stimulated and however much he tries he can't stop it happening." "And it's that area inside his head that's causing him to feel frightened at the moment." "That was really rather frightening, I'm very happy not to do that again I think for a while." "What's interesting, is that he knew the shark couldn't get to him through the cage but it still didn't stop him feeling frightened." "We clearly have no control over the way our amygdala registers both fear and distrust, which makes a huge difference when we come to meet people face to face." "So, what triggers our brain to distrust people in a way we can't control?" "To find out, we decided to test a panel of twelve volunteers - our jury." "We showed them a line up of five men of the same age and racial backgrounds and asked the jury to decide who they trusted the least." "This test was similar to research carried out by scientists in Boston." "Our results, like theirs, help reveal which facial features trigger distrust." "We believe the least trustworthy to be A, and the most trustworthy to be E." "So why according to the jury's first impressions was this man the least trusted" "and why was this man a close second?" "The answer is written on their faces." "His features really stuck out..." "Heavy featured." "...as being very sort of like very shifty looking." "Thin, weaselly features, and unfortunately for D it was his nose." "The faces of both these men are non symmetrical, they have smaller eyes and thinner faces than the other men." "These features caused the feeling of distrust in the brains of our jury." "And the two most trustworthy men?" "Well both of them have broad features with smooth skin and large eyes, faces that scientists would say are baby like." "I imagine my Mum going up to him and going like that, that's what made him most trustworthy for me, he was typically son like." "When we see faces like this, without knowing it our natural feelings for children are often hijacked, and that causes a feeling of trust in our brains that we can't control." "In fact all these men were selected because they work in highly trusted positions, so next time you meet someone you don't trust, be careful your brain might be fooling you." "Thirty seconds ago," "Mia met her fiance's parents for the first time." "Her mind immediately began forming a first impression of her future mother in law." "... quiet as well, I'm not normally like this, I normally chat for England." "Do you want a drink?" "Can I just have a glass of water please?" "You're not how I imagined you at all." "Aren't I?" "No, I haven't seen any photos either, I was like no, not at all." "Perhaps he can't describe me." "When I first came to the house there were a lot of cold silences where people weren't talking and I know I was trying to fill them with questions or different kinds of conversation." "I think I was conscious that they were probably thinking about me or making a split judgement or something more negative." "And you've bought a suit?" "Yes." "He's got a suit." "I think it would be nice to see everyone smart." "I've written a speech." "With first impressions out of the way, the process of really getting to know her new family can begin." "The wedding is in four days." "So this is where we're going to get married?" "Yeah." "What do you think Matt?" "On her second day, things don't seem to be getting any easier." "I mean ..." "those sort of decisions are not mine." "I think I'm probably the most stressed I've felt, I just want them to get to know me, I don't want to agree with everything about me but I want them to get to know me and me the same as them" "so you know we can have a bit more of a joke." "Does the groom want to have a buttonhole that's going to match the tones that you're having or do you just want him to go for a white rose buttonhole?" "Just the white rose." "The more time they spend together, the more Mia starts to notice Mira's body movement." "Does this provide a clue as to what she thinks of her?" "... so that'll be lovely." "I hadn't even thought about the greenery round the edge but I think that'll be nice." "She does that a lot, either that or that, and I think it is she's thinking, it might be kind of getting in front of her mouth so she's not going to say something yet," "that's how I took it anyway." "... an extension of yourself rather than you know something ..." "There are ways of watching how someone moves that can tell us what's happening in the mind." "In fact scientists have now discovered that this can even reveal if they actually like us or not." "To show this, we took two men." "Mr Nice and Mr Nasty and placed them in a controlled environment." "Then we asked several volunteers to meet them and discuss different subjects." "Favourite films." "Yeah well l've got plenty of those." "You go first." "What the volunteers didn't know was that while Mr Nice was being friendly and warm," "Mr Nasty was being as negative and as difficult as possible." "Philadelphia Story." "Yeah, didn't like that very much." "But crucially, both Mr Nice and Mr Nasty have been asked to deliberately move their bodies in specific ways." "Have you got any more favourites?" "While cameras watched for a response in the volunteers that would reveal what was going on in their mind." "Gradually, as the conversations developed, an extraordinary thing began to happen." "The volunteers with Mr Nice gradually began to copy him." "He kind of used them well and the acting was so good that they kind of all got away with it and the other one was..." "No, I've not seen that." "I mean there's no reasons to suggest that we should like that but..." "Meanwhile, those with Mr Nasty didn't copy him at all." "I'm really enjoying 24 at the moment, have you seen that?" "Saw it once, didn't like it very much." "No." "No." "Well I think it's the sort of thing, I like going to the cinema myself, I think..." "Because the volunteers like Mr Nice, their mind prompted them to mimic him." "A subconscious attempt to strengthen the bond between them." "Fantastic." "I saw Eamonn Holmes." "Did you?" "Did you speak to him?" "No." "Scientists have known for some time that our mind automatically notices and sometimes even makes us mimic what other people are doing." "What they haven't known is how the brain does it." "But recently, researchers made an extraordinary breakthrough." "What's more, they believe this discovery may even be the key to knowing what someone else is feeling." "It's all to do with something that happens in our brains when we see people move." "And if you want to know what that is, just watch these two crews race to that bridge." "Attention." "It seems the secret to understanding what people feel lies in watching them move." "But to know what's now happening in your brain, we have to look at what's going on in theirs." "A particular part of the brain is controlling each of the physical movements they're making," "but in this area there's also a small cluster of cells which help prepare their body for it's next movement." "Every action, in this case it's rowing, has it's own unique pattern, and scientists believe that these cells are the key to how human beings relate to each other." "Because not only are these cells firing in the brains of the rowers, they're also firing in exactly the same way in the brain of anybody who's watching them." "In other words, the cells which are helping these guys row now, are firing in your brain and mine just as if you were rowing yourself, that's why they're called mirror neurons." "Mirror neurons mean that you and I not only are watching what these men are doing," "our mind is actually feeling something of what they're feeling." "Even if we haven't done all the hard work." "But how does all this affect your social life?" "Well,if you know what somebody's feeling the chances are you'll know what they're thinking, our mirror neurons help us read other people's minds." "Mind reading is the ability to know or at least to make an informed guess, what someone else is thinking." "It's one of the most amazing skills the human mind possesses and what's more you do it with no apparent effort." "Take this woman - in an instant you can guess what she's thinking, and what's more by also reading the mind of the person next to her, you can work out why she's feeling this way." "What about a third person watching this scene?" "He clearly finds it funny that this man fancies someone who doesn't fancy him." "While they've been reading each other's minds, you've been reading theirs" "and what was happening in our heads to make it possible is astonishing." "The mirror neurons fire, helping us to understand what someone else is feeling." "But then, many other parts of the brain are triggered, areas which allow us to recognise facial expressions," "areas which let us draw on memories and past experience, and then the part which puts all this information together" "and decides what it all means." "Many different areas of the brain work together to achieve all this and it happens in an instant." "Out in New Zealand, things are becoming more relaxed between Mia Bragg and the woman who will in two days' time be her mother in law." "I think my relationship with Mira has progressed over the last few days, I think at the beginning she kind of sat back and kind of not withdrew but probably was thinking a lot more and pondering about things where now she'll come forward more and talk more directly to me" "which is a big thing." "Did you meet Jeannie?" "No, we were running late to the hairdressers so he literally ran in, got the.." "It's Mia's mind reading skills that are helping her better understand and get on with Mira." "I think Mira is probably quite nervous about the wedding so I'm being very kind of positive and I suppose giving her lots of praise in things I know she's already set up or organised." "Do you like the ribbons that she's got..." "Yeah, cos l think that will be perfect for my necklace." "And I'm reassuring her on any situations or decisions that she made before I got here were the right ones." "I think I made the right decision putting it in my suitcase." "And over the last couple of days I think I know from eye contact we're OK with each other, it's going to be fine, it is going to be fine." "Do you like?" "Yes I do, it's really nice." "If I didn't think it was I'd probably " "You would tell me." "Well I wouldn't tell you but I think you'd sense that I " "Yeah." "Mind reading doesn't just happen with people we know." "Virtually every time we meet someone we try to work out what they're thinking and this can make us say some surprising things." "As actress Tricia Dibb found out when we asked her to do some retail therapy with a difference." "She agreed to pick out the most unsuitable clothes she could find to make her look as unattractive as possible." "I would look awful in that, I'll have to have it." "Oh I haven't worn these since I was sixteen." "Gotta have them, look at them, what do you think?" "I would look absolutely awful in that." "I do like a bit of glitter." "Once she'd made her selection she would ask unsuspecting passers by what they thought." "Would people tell Tricia the truth... I can't go out like that." "..or would they read her mind and tell her what they thought she wanted to hear." "Excuse me, do you think these trousers suit me?" "Yeah I do actually,yeah they're not tight." "They're not too tight." "No they're not." "Oh it gets worse and worse." "Excuse me, this suits me you think does it?" "Yeah it does." "The colours, do you like the colours?" "Do you think they suit me?" "Yeah, it's nice, no that is really nice innit." "Excuse me can I just ask you, do you think this suits me?" "What do you think?" "I think it does." "Yeah?" "Yeah the colour's nice isn't it?" "I like this pink, it's really nice isn't it." "The whole outfit looks all right." "It does look nice." "Yeah?" "Well I thought she felt she looked nice in it and I just didn't think that it was fair to tell her that she didn't." "Excuse me, this suits me doesn't it?" "Yeah." "What do you think about the colour?" "Well I didn't like the colour, I think the colour suits you." "You think the colour suits me?" "Yeah." "She looked like really happy that she'd found something that she like really liked, I didn't really want to let her down I suppose." "Excuse me, do you think this suit me?" "I think it does, yeah it does, yeah." "Yeah?" "She probably shouldn't wear a top like that, it was a bit young for her." "I don't know, it fits nicely." "Yeah?" "I think she thought she looked quite nice in it because if you thought you looked really awful in it you wouldn't go and ask someone would you?" "I wouldn't." "Does this suit me?" "Yeah?" "is the colour good?" "All these people were reading Tricia's mind before answering." "The colours look nice don't they?" "The colours are ?" "you've got the right colouring haven't you?" "Yeah, yeah ." "It's even better isn't it." "Do you think so?" "That's nice." "is that nice?" "It shows just how often we use this skill to get on with people better." "It would look nice..." "Thank you, thanks for your help." "But of course socialising is only the start of the story." "How we deal with other people affects almost every aspect of the world we live in." "In ways we may never realise, we try to work out what others are thinking before deciding what to do ourselves." "Mind reading drives our economy and shapes our society." "It's what allows you to understand and accept that people have different interests and different views," "And this is what allows us cultural and religious tolerance." "This same skill that you see the world through the eyes of people you've never even met." "Able to imagine living other lives, we can create and appreciate so much of art, literature, and even entertainment." "But of all these things, what many of us value most, is the chance that our social mind gives us to be intimate with those closest to us, to like, to care, and even to love." "Oh they look lovely, they were my Mum's choice those." "This is going to make me cry." "Hi Mia, I just want to wish you all the very best, I love you lots, I love... I can hear you creaking." "I think you need instructions on how to undo it later on." "I think Mira thinks I'm good for Matt and I think that's made the whole process of getting married so much easier, and it could have been so different." "It does make me feel really kind of relieved and relaxed I suppose that I have been accepted." "She is a pleasant girl, she's gentle, she's caring and she's nice and I like her so I feel totally relaxed with her." "I didn't feel it right at the first instance that I met her, that is something that comes with being together in time." "We all want to wish you the richest blessings that marriage can bring." "Don't we family and friends?" "Too right." "I will endeavour to do what I can for Mia because she is part of the family." "Matthew and Mia I now pronounce you to be husband and wife, you may now seal those wonderful vows you made with a very good kiss." "I don't think my brain actually probably knows what it's done in the last week or so," "it's had to cope with a whole range of situations that it has never had to cope with before." "It probably would have been a lot easier if I'd met somebody in an Edgware pub, but no, you can't help who you fall in love with." "Over the years we've made huge advances in our understanding of how different areas of the body work." "But in many ways the mind has been the least understood that's partly because we're asking our mind to understand itself." "But what we've seen in this series is that each discovery we make about how the mind works can make us better at using it and if we can use our mind better, the picture of what makes us who we are might after all become clearer." "Why are you like you are?" "Could you be happier?" "And can you mould the personality of your children?" "It's your mind that shapes your personality, and this is the story of how it happens." "In this programme we'll see how a personality develops over an entire lifetime." "And we can start." "We'll be doing experiments that show our true selves." "We'll be finding out what a lemon can tell us about our personality." "Come on, move your....." "And we'll be following this man's struggle to change his." "I've got too much to lose." "I could lose Ange, I could lose Samuel, I could lose all of those if I don't change." "What makes us who we are is our personality, and most of think we've got a pretty good idea of what we've got." "I'm quite thoughtful." "I'm extrovert." "I'm a neurotic." "Sporty, generous." "Quiet and shy." "I'm a mad character." "I am playful and bubbly." "He's crackers." "But our personality isn't just centred around one characteristic." "In fact, scientists now believe that there are as many aspects to the human personality as there are people" "in this crowd of football fans supporting their team." "There are around five thousand characteristics in each of us which, mixed in endless ways, make every one of us unique." "And all these characteristics are embedded within our brain." "You might think that our story begins here, in the first few weeks after we're born, but you'd be wrong." "Little Charlotta is just a few weeks old but her personality began to form over nine months ago almost at the moment of conception." "It's at this moment she inherited a unique combination of her parents' personalities, from their genes." "This inheritance will form the foundation of many of Charlotta's future characteristics and we're beginning to find out which ones." "Even characteristics as important, for instance, as whether Charlotta will be introvert or extrovert." "A major part of these characteristics is inherited." "Scientists have even discovered how they are embedded in our brain." "To find out we're extrovert or not, most of us don't need to look inside our brains, we just need one of these." "Because apparently just one squirt of lemon juice can reveal the inner workings of our minds." "To put this to the test and discover how introversion and extroversion are created, we've come to Britain's busiest fruit market, Spitalfields." "Two groups have volunteered for our experiment." "They've been chosen from two professions which psychologists have identified as tending to attract either extreme." "So for our team of introverts we've physicists from Imperial College, London." "Meet the Labcoats." "And to make up our extroverts we've recruited a team of holiday camp reps, the Redcoats." "For our test you need a lemon, a psychologist and plenty of tongue." "The experiment to discover how much saliva our two teams can produce in just thirty seconds." "We'll stimulate their taste buds with a drop of lemon just and see how many fruit boxes they can seal with sticky packing tape." "So, can sucking a lemon give us a clue as to what's happening in our brain?" "OK, and three, two, one, go." "Right, go." "Stop." "Excellent, thank you very much." "Here's two metres and two centimetres, perfect." "Twenty seven." "Tilt your head back slightly, tongue out, two metres sixty five." "Already there's a difference." "These introverts are slick lickers but the extroverts don't seem to be licking much at all." "Down to the last two volunteers." "An awesome three metres twenty six." "Good work." "She's licked the lot of them, whereas that's one of the shortest." "Seventy five." "Mmmm that was, mmmmm." "That was lovely wasn't it?" "Nice." "So how have they done?" "Well, our extroverts have licked their way through eight metres of tape, enough to seal sixteen boxes, not bad." "But now for the introverts." "They've slobbered their way through a massive twelve metres of tape that's enough to seal twenty four boxes, half as many again as the extroverts." "Three, two, one, go." "So how does it work?" "It's all down to how our brain handles stimulation." "There's an area that reacts both to lemon juice and to meeting people." "OK, wow, that's incredible." "With introverts this area is very sensitive, which means that they react more to lemon juice but don't like parties." "And stop." "is that impressive?" "That's very good." "Whereas with extroverts this area is not so sensitive, so they react less to lemon juice but love to party." "Even though characteristics like introversion or extroversion have already begun to take shape by the time we're born, many other aspects of our personality are formed by what happens in the early years of our lives." "During childhood, all parents can influence how their baby's brain physically develops, by the way they play with and teach their children." "Childhood is the most important phase in our personality's development." "And the reason why are our experience as youngsters is so crucial to our future personality is because of what's happening our brain." "Every child's brain is growing in a truly amazing way." "And it's all going on at the tiniest level." "As young children, our brain cells or neurons are sprouting branches to create more connections with one another." "But at the same time, almost as quickly, other branches and their connections are being pruned." "It means that different aspects of our personality are growing in our brain as we grow." "This constant growth and pruning of children's brains is shaped by what's happening around them and how they react to it all." "So, specific experiences in childhood can help to form specific personality traits." "And this is how it happens." "The way a particular experience shapes our personality in childhood is rather like walking through a field of wheat." "When children have a new experience, whether good or bad, neurons on their brain make new connections." "These connections form pathways, and it's these pathways which affect the way children behave not only now but also later in life." "In the beginning, these pathways are hardly there, just like the trail we leave in a field of wheat for the very first time." "But if as children we have the same experience several times, our behaviour begins to form a pattern and the pathways in our brain become better established." "Until finally we've created the equivalent of an expressway, a new aspect of our personality has formed." "The characteristics we develop in childhood are those most likely to say with us for the rest of our life." "Some of these characteristics may be ones we like, but others may be characteristics we don't." "This is Shaun Carroll." "A family man with a lot going for him." "He's got a good job, a loving partner and a baby son, with another child on the way." "But Shaun risks losing it all because of one particular aspect of his personality." "Shaun has agreed to have a camera rigged in his car to capture his problem." "I can lose it very easy in certain situations, I can get very angry in a very short space of time." "Oh ..... yourself." "to the point of ultimately losing control." "For ..... sake, oh ....." "Your side of the road, dimwit." "Come on, move your ......" "The blood's pumping round me and I've got so much adrenalin and so much anger." "You ......" "My body takes over and the brain just takes a ten second blank." "......" "Don't indicate ....." "or nothing will you ...... I will shout, scream, holler, all of these things straight away, but then after that I'll be angry for a couple of hours and then after that I'll be ashamed." "And he isn't the only one, his partner Angie also has to endure his rages." "Although Shaun's never been physically violent to his family," "Angie fears he's a bad role model for his son, and their relationship is at breaking point." "I think it's probably because he's been behaving like that for such a long time, he knows that he does it, you know, and afterwards he hates himself for it, especially you know if he gets you know short tempered with Sam." "Do you want your nana?" "Do you want some nana?" "When he's old enough to understand I don't want him to think that Daddy shouts all the time." "He just can't stop and think and you know before he acts." "Come here." "What you doing?" "What you doing?" "I've got too much to lose, I could lose Ange, I could lose Samuel, I could lose all of those if I don't change." "Shaun knows that to keep his family together, the rages have to stop." "So he's going to try a new approach." "Shaun has travelled to see rage management psychologist," "Jo Ellen Grzyb." "Over weeks of intensive sessions, they will try to overcome Shaun's rages." "We're talking about how we express our emotions about angry, and over here are the two extremes, the nice side, and over here is " "The idea behind the therapy is ambitious, it will try to change the way Shaun's mind works by altering the structure of his brain." "Deep inside our brain is one area responsible for our emotions - it triggers anger." "Shaun's amygdala flares up too often and too easily, and at the moment there's not much he can do about it." "However, there's another part of Shaun's brain that can stop him acting on these impulses." "These are the frontal lobes." "They act as a kind of control centre in the brain." "If Shaun can strengthen the influence of his frontal lobes, he may be able to control his anger." " actually seeing the passion you might feel for Tottenham or the passion you might feel for Italian football, the passion you might feel about..." "And that's what Shaun's therapy is trying to do, or that's the theory, in reality it will only work if Shaun can put Jo Ellen's advice into practice." "So what happens, what sort of what's your trigger?" "What do you actually do?" "Shout, scream, adrenalin pumps, for about five to ten seconds my brain doesn't know what's going on." "And what about - do you ever hit things like kick a car or hit a wall or - l head butted a front door and put my head through the window." "In a sense there's parts of your brain that are fighting with each other, the conscious, aware, actually I know how I want to feel and behave, and the habitual part of the brain that's just used to snap reactions." "It's all about giving Shaun's frontal lobes a chance to overrule his raging amygdala." "One of things that I talk about a lot is buying time." "So sometimes when you don't have the words at the same time at the right moment, get yourself out of the picture." "I left something in my van I'll be right back." "Anything that gets you out of that immediate confrontation but they if you begin to work those in and practice those things even when it doesn't matter, you'll be able to do them when it does." "Shaun has just ten weeks in which to re-shape his brain." "When it comes to personality, it seems the brain is a bit like an orchestra, just as the orchestra comes together with various sections, woodwind brass and strings to play music, so it seems the brain has different parts which combine to form our personality." "The frontal lobes are just like a conductor." "They control different aspects of our personality in the same way a conductor directs the different sections of an orchestra." "When our frontal lobes are in control, our personality becomes a carefully orchestrated melody - music to our ears." "But control over our behaviour isn't always this harmonious." "Let's see what happens when a child picks up the baton." "Painful, isn't it?" "Young children often can't conduct themselves very well because their frontal lobes haven't developed enough to keep the rest of their brain in check." "During childhood, with so little control over our impulses, it's often more chaos than harmony." "That's why, when children throw tantrums, it's worth remembering what's happening in their brains." "Sometimes they simply can't help it." "Let's see." "Oh look at the sweets." "And it's not just anger." "Not only do immature frontal lobes mean children can't control their behaviour, they also make resisting temptation difficult." "To put this to the test, we secretly filmed twenty primary school children as they faced the ultimate childhood challenge." "We've told them that if they don't eat their favourite sweet for five minutes, they'll be given three more sweets later." "You can choose, you can either eat the sweet now or," "Daddy has to go out for a few minutes, if you wait until I come back you can have three sweets." "Does that make sense?" "Then you can have three,so you can choose, all right?" "I'm not going to eat it now cos l want three." "Do you think so?" "OK, I'll see you in a minute." "Little Jacqueline thinks she's on her own, but what she and the other children don't know is that our hidden cameras are still watching." "The temptation is almost unbearable." "Our experiment confirmed the results of previous tests." "Even though the kids knew they would get more sweets later, two thirds of the children couldn't resist the single sweet in front of them now." "It's all because their brain isn't mature enough to control their impulses." "It'll be another few years before their frontal lobes develop further and all of them can do what Jacqueline has done - resisted temptation." "A week has passed since his first anger management session and Shaun has been battling to keep his impulses in check." "Monday and Tuesday brilliant, brilliant, really really good." "Thank you sir." "Thank you, goodbye." "Wednesday was a little bit stressful with Samuel and I was still a little bit moody by the time I got to work." "One two three - oh you ...... I had such a crap end of the week that worried me." "Oh ..... indicate, you ...... I was totally ashamed of my behaviour." "What's the matter with you, you thick ..." "Totally ashamed, totally ashamed." "Personally I've seen no change in him whatsoever since the first session." "When he come home Sunday he was full he was full of ideas, he was full of talking about what had happened in the sessions and how he could think about it and change, and I really think that he wanted to try," "but now we've been through the week I think he can go back for his second session and hopefully talk about what's happened and we'll see some improvement next week, I think." "My head hurts, I can feel my head right across there, it's just like it wants to explode ?" "everything come out." "A battle still rages in Shaun's brain, and he's desperately trying to put what he's learned in therapy into practice." "Notice what you do, even if you can't control it, give yourself ticks, acknowledge yourself for doing something well," "it just keeps reinforcing the confidence that you're actually an OK guy." "But Shaun's journey is only just beginning." "One, two, three, hup." "During childhood as our mind develops, we begin to get to grips with who we are our personality is establishing itself and our ability to control it is improving." "Everything seems to be going smoothly." "At the end of childhood, something momentous happens to our personality, something so momentous that at times it can temporarily send us way off course." "And that something is puberty." "We all know puberty has a big effect on our body, but it has an even more dramatic effect on our mind." "This means teenagers get a personality all of their own." "In particular, they're known for being insensitive and socially awkward." "They're going to find out why." "Taking part in his experiment are twenty children." "The team in the red T shirts are around ten years old and those in the yellow are a bit older." "Although these children may look around the same age, there's a crucial difference." "Those in red and those in yellow are likely to be either side of an important divide - puberty." "The test is to find out how quickly the kids in the teams recognise other people's emotions." "We're going to flash up images of a face displaying different emotions happy, sad, angry, expressionless." "The images last only a fraction of a second and they'll have to make a snap decision about which emotion they've seen, the fastest correct answer wins." "So if the face you see is happy press the yes key, if it's any of the other faces then you press the no key." "And with that we can start." "You'd think that older kids, in the yellow shirts, would be better at judging other people's emotions than the children in the red shirts." "After all older should mean wiser." "Yet our results confirmed what researchers found when they ran a similar experiment." "Surprisingly, the older kids were slower at judging emotion than their younger counterparts." "Scientists believe this may explain the apparently insensitivity of the teenage personality." "The reason for this lies once again in what's happening in teenagers' frontal lobes." "During puberty our brain is once again sprouting a vast number of new connections between neurons, but many of these new connections don't yet have specific functions." "With so many of these new pathways, signals can get disrupted and confused." "Its' this disruption, caused by the new growth, which makes teenagers slow to understand other people's feelings." "So, with all that going on in the brains of teenagers, how good are they at controlling their personality?" "Let's see what happens when we make the transition from childhood to adolescence." "It's different but it still doesn't sound right." "Our brain's conductor is being overloaded by confused signals, we can't control what's going on." "So, in the teenage years, too much is happening in our frontal lobes, which is why being a teenager is most memorable for being confused, frustrated and moody." "Well, we all grow out of being teenagers it's just a passing phase." "But this isn't the case for all aspects of teenage personality." "Some characteristics we develop in our teens may stay with us for the rest of our lives, and one of them is risk taking." "The Kern River in California." "These kayakers only saw the appeal of this dangerous sport in their early teens, and now they can't get enough of it." "It's definitely a dangerous sport I mean you're at the mercy of the river and you're going to go where it's going to take you." "Going huge, chicks yelling on the shore, getting crowds of people excited, that gets me excited then everybody's happy." "It's definitely a thrill, yeah." "Because a teenager's frontal lobes are already confused, they're easily seduced by risky behaviour, and taking risks creates a surge of a hormone called dopamine through the brain, which gives them an instant high." "I'd never really done anything dangerous until I got around like some of my other buddies." "Sometimes I just I prefer losing control, I just want to have fun and let go." "The more risks we take as teenagers, the more we become desensitised to dopamine and need higher doses to get the same kick as adults." "So, if you're the sort of person who enjoyed taking risks as a teenager, chances are you could be a risk taker for the rest of your life." "So what happens to how we control our personality as we move from adolescence to adulthood?" "Our personality is now fully formed, and for the first time our frontal lobes are in control at last the conductor is properly directing the orchestra, and if we're lucky, we'll have a mind playing as harmoniously as this." "But that doesn't mean as adults we're stuck with what we've got." "It is possible to alter our personality in the short term." "And psychologists have found a powerful way of doing just that." "It's as simple as changing your mood." "To put this to the test we need two volunteers who are as alike as possible." "They need to act alike, think alike and have a very similar personality." "In fact, they need to be almost identical." "This is Charmagne Charles and this is Genevieve Charles." "They're identical twins." "I think mannerisms are the same, we have the same sort of mannerisms and the same outlook on life and the same perspective on life." "Even our partners, oh, it's embarrassing us sometimes when my sister's partner has kissed me or has kissed my sister and you give them this look, like what are you doing?" "Right now, Charmagne and Genevieve couldn't be more alike, but our psychologists are going to put them in very different moods." "If all goes to plan, at the end of the day our identical twins should be polar opposites." "It's seven am, the twins are awake and our experiment begins." "First, we're going to change their moods with music." "We've given Genevieve a happy tune, it's one of her favourites and reminds her of good times she's had while listening to it." "Scientists also believe the pumping rhythm may trick her mind into feeling upbeat." "At the same time we've given Charmagne a track with a downbeat rhythm that she associates with sad times." "To reinforce the girls' different moods, we've sat them down to watch two films." "Charmagne's is a sad story, she feels for the suffering of the character's on the screen and this has an affect on her mind." "Genevieve's experience couldn't be more different, she's watching a comedy, which should make her feel happier." "But the most powerful way to alter mood is also the most surprising it consists of simply reading a selection of words which trigger associations in our minds." "Genevieve is ready a set of carefully selected uplifting sentences, and all these influences should be changing what's happening inside her brain" "They should be triggering her brain stem, at the base of the brain, to release large amounts of a chemical called serotonin, this creates a feeling of happiness." "Whereas Charmagne is reading depressing works, the very opposite should be happening in her brain." "This time, instead of producing serotonin," "Charmagne's brain should be doing the opposite, reducing the amount of serotonin that's present." "With her brain starved of the chemical that creates a feeling of happiness," "Charmagne ought to be feeling sad." "Simple manipulation should have induced two moods in our twins." "Time now to put them to the test." "Believe it or not, scientists have discovered one of the best ways of testing mood is by watching how people behave when they're shopping." "Usually our twins are sensible shoppers with similar tastes." "But if they behave differently today, it will show how their personalities have been temporarily changed." "I think they really do suit me." "Genevieve is really enjoying herself her good mood has made her go into more shops to buy more items than she usually would, and she's more adventurous in her taste as well." "It's just if I don't like them can I bring them back to any First Sport?" "Yeah, so long as they're unworn and you've got the receipt." "Yeah, OK, that's fine." "But Charmagne's behaviour couldn't be more different." "Her sad mood means that she doesn't really want to buy anything, and she's only visited two shops she's just not her usual self." "I felt I had no self confidence in myself and what I was doing, I did I felt sad I guess." "I felt great, I felt wonderful I felt yes, I'm really happy, I'm really really happy, it was a fantastic feeling." "Sort of, I don't know,maybe impulse buying" "The proof lies in the shopping basket." "but now that I've looked at them properly." "You don't like them?" "I really don't like them, yeah that's it, what did you get, what did you get?" "I got loads and loads." "Oh wow." "Just to wear on the beach, because we will be going on holiday this year." "Oh you got one for yourself." "Throughout the day, the twins' different experiences have shown how we have the power to make dramatic changes to our day-to-day personality." "But mood manipulation doesn't affect personality in the long term, nor can it overcome extreme aspects of personality like anger." "Shaun Carroll has completed his intensive course of anger management therapy, and we're going to find out if he's got what he wanted a balanced personality he's in control of." "OK Sunday morning, got this stupid thing on here, stupid heart rate monitor thing." "What we're going to do is we're going to go for a little drive, see what happens and see if anything happens with my heart." "Shaun's heart rate is a good indication of the level of stress he's under, and how active the amygdala is being, part of his brain involved in triggering anger." "I've just seen the sign for this roundabout, it's a big roundabout ... nervous, I don't know why, I've done this so many times and now it's going off." "If his heart rate increases but he shows no outwards signs of anger, the frontal lobes of his brain are in control and the therapy has worked." "The ultimate test is if he can avoid feeling angry on a route he hates taking." "To be honest I don't feel any stress at all today, I don't feel stressed, I feel very relaxed, I feel very calm, I feel very happy, so..." "So far he's doing very well." "But something's about to happen that just ten weeks ago would have sent him into a rage." "I'm being overtaken by Alan Partridge, I don't believe it." "He's cut me up!" "I've been cut up by Alan Partridge." "Shaun has passed the test his brain really does seem to have changed." "All the famous stars." "Angie is very surprised at the way I've changed." "I've stopped a couple of times and I said you thought I was going to get the hump there didn't you?" "and she went well l was expecting you to like start shouting and like I've surprised her, she said I like this new Shaun and hopefully you can keep it up and I said well that's obviously going to be the hard thing is keeping it up." "All I can say is that I wish that I had more clients like you who respond so quickly and have not just intellectually you know emotionally taken on board but behaviourally has taken on board, has been fantastic and I'm really proud of you." "Thank you very much." "OK, and I think we're done." "It's now a month since Shaun's course of therapy finished." "What effect has it had on his relationship with his family?" "I think I've changed in quite a few ways to be honest, more relaxed, more calm, you know instead of just shouting and ranting and raving I'm thinking more, and especially at home as well with Ange," "you know, if I'm seeing a problem arise I'm trying to deal with Ange as well, so, just trying to be much more in control and I feel I am much more in control" "He seems a lot more calmer about just life in general at the moment, a situation would happen and he just tends to be much more chilled out about it all." "I think it would be the best, you know, beginning of a better relationship I think, I mean we've had a fairly good relationship the last four years and you know we've done a lot of things and" "a lot of things have changed in our life with obviously Samuel and the other one the next one coming along but you know it is sort of a beginning for us so yeah." "It's come at a good time for us as well hasn't it?" "Yeah, I think we need to just carry on and keep trying together so it should be that'll be the hard part but I think we can do it." "The brain is the most remarkable organ in the body because it can transform itself" "we can use our mind to change and improve our mind something that no other animal can do" "In the case of personality, it means we can become a little more like the person we would like to be." "But the human mind allows us to do even more we can use it to improve the way we interact with other people." "Because, in the next programme, we'll be finding out how our mind helps us make friends and influence people." "We'll see experiments that show the hidden potential of your mind." "We'll reveal how you can know when someone's genuinely pleased to see us, and how an experience like this can show us who to trust." "Why can this man sense danger when others can't?" "I suddenly thought it is time I have got to get the lads out." "How can an experience like this help us know whether to trust people?" "And how can this woman master complicated moves just by thinking about it?" "The answers lie in the most wondrous part of each and every one of us, our mind." "There have been huge advances in our understanding of the human body." "But the human mind is perhaps the final frontier in our understanding of ourselves." "In this series we will be discovering how it works and how we can all make the most of it." "In this first programme we will be finding out how our mind learns about the world around us." "We will see an amazing treatment that changed this boy from a couch potato into a top student." "We'll get tips from the 2002 world memory champion." "And we will be discovering how all this allows us to have new and original ideas." "Every waking second, without even realising it our mind is at work learning about the world about us." "But our capacity to learn is even greater than we think." "By discovering how our mind works we can improve our learning power and unlock our true potential." "Alison Ross is a woman who hopes to do just that." "She wants to achieve what many of us only dream of take up a completely new challenge and leave her old life behind." "After I left school at seventeen with my handful of CSE's and GCSE's, well actually it wasn't long after that I met Steve and I was engaged when I was seventeen, married when I was twenty and all I wanted to do was have babies really." "But three children and twenty five years later there was still a thought niggling at the back of Alison's mind." "Maybe one day she could become a midwife." "I had such a really nice time when I had my children, when I went in to hospital to have them and I remember thinking at the time that must be such a nice job to do and so nice to be involved with women" "at such a special time in their lives and I just thought mmm maybe one day, maybe one day I could do something like that." "At forty three Alison wants to swap her life as a home maker for the pressures and rewards of a midwife in a busy hospital." "For her it is a huge challenge." "When I knew I had got the place I think that is when the panic really set in." "I don't know if I can rise to the challenge, I don't know if I can cope." "Of course all my family were saying of course you can do it, of course you can do it and I thought well if they think I can do it, maybe I can." "But to achieve her dream Alison is going to have to learn many new skills." "And that means physically restructuring her brain." "For Alison as for every single one of us learning something new means rearranging the way her brain works." "Our brain has an astonishing hundred billion neurons or brain cells all connected together." "Learning is about creating and strengthening pathways through these neurons for impulses of electricity." "But between each and every connection in our brains there is a tiny gap called a synapse." "For any of us to learn something new the electrical signal has to jump across this gap to continue its journey." "The gap between the two brain cells is tiny, but that doesn't mean that it is straightforward for a signal to get from one side to the other." "For us it's like crossing a deep ravine." "And getting from one side to the other should tell us something about the way we learn." "The first time a signal crosses from one brain cell to the other demands the most effort and it is the same when we cross our ravine." "The first trip across is the hardest." "Having crossed the ravine once the journey's across get easier and easier and a similar thing happens when we learn something." "To start with learning is difficult." "But as the signal crosses the gap between the brain cells again and again, we establish a more solid pathway." "Sorry about that." "By the time we have made the crossing over and over again it becomes effortless we can do it whenever we like." "We finally learnt something." "But Alison is going to have to do a lot more than cross the gap between just two cells." "If Alison is to be trusted to bring new children into the world she will have to learn all the skills of childbirth, using ultrasound," "handling difficult births and making decisions when a child's or mother's life is in danger." "It means a huge amount of learning." "Millions of new pathways will have to be created between the neurons in her brain." "It is such a huge, it is such a huge thing to embark on, I just don't know if I am up to it." "And Alison's first challenge is just two weeks away:" "her first major exam in twenty five years." "I did begin to wonder whether I could cope with the amount of academic learning that there was on the course and I just wondered whether it was going to be too much of a challenge." "I thought well l am probably just going to have to work twice as hard as anybody else and I think I was prepared to do that." "For Alison, as for all of us, to learn better we need to make it easier to cross the synaptic gap between our brain cells." "And scientists believe that for many of us, they have found a surprising way to do just that." "Meet Elliot." "Last year his school teacher said of him:" "Elliot's memory seems to be letting him down and could be improved." "Elliot's reading and writing aren't what they should be." "Elliot is a nice boy but he finds it hard to concentrate." "He used to just come home and sit in front of the TV." "Trying to get homework out of him was a chore." "And in particular he had great difficulty committing himself to paper." "I wasn't really quite struck by lessons." "I thought that most of them were quite boring." "When I came home l just took my shoes off, dumped my bag, took my coat off, sunk into the settee and turned on the telly." "But this year something remarkable happened to Elliot." "Elliot was selected for a scientifically controlled trial run by Oxford University at schools in County Durham." "The children chosen were behind in class in some subjects." "In the trial the children took six tablets every day." "The scientists wanted to see if the tablets could improve the way the children learnt, how well they concentrated and remembered in class." "And after only a few weeks parents and teachers began to notice an extraordinary difference." "It's absolutely amazing." "After Elliot started taking the tablets the first two or three months he was more interested in work, he would go to the library." "Not so much interested in the TV." "It has been marvellous to see the actual changes that have happened in Elliot, his reading has really rocketed, I think it's two years improvement in reading age and so his desire to read has really improved and he is devouring books really." "Now I am not so interested in the TV, I just like reading books and the best place in all the world is the library, I absolutely love it." "And it wasn't just Elliot." "Many of the children in the trial taking the same tablets showed a big improvement in reading, memory and concentration." "The results confirm the findings of previous studies." "So what is the ingredient in the tablets?" "It's not a drug, it isn't a medicine." "It's a natural substance found in some oily fish called Omega 3." "And it seems to have a simple but extraordinary effect on brains." "Omega 3 can help learning by making it easier for the signals to jump the gap between brain cells." "And scientists believe Omega 3 can help not only children falling behind in class but also improve the memory and concentration of many of us." "But learning isn't just about facts and figures." "Our mind also learns to do things." "Think about driving a car or starting to walk as a child and scientists have discovered another rather surprising way in which we master new skills." "Rebecca Owen took up gymnastics when she was just seven years old." "Her life's ambition is to win an Olympic medal." "She has practised five and a half hours a day, six days a week for ten years." "Her hard work and great talent have already won her a silver medal in the 2002 Commonwealth Games." "Oh, it's fantastic, yeah, the crowd were marvellous, would like to thank everybody for coming and watching and they just help you, get you motivated for the whole competition, it's great." "But to stand a chance of ever being selected for the Olympic team Rebecca must learn a new, extremely difficult move." "It is called a ginga salto, it involves flying off the high bar, performing a back somersault and a half twist before re-catching the bar." "Basically you will watch somebody do it first so you can get a general idea of what you are going to be doing and what you want it to look like." "And then you will start the progressions and you will get like feedback from your coach and they will tell you what to do, what not to do and where you are going right and wrong." "Rebecca's coach is Colin Still." "Return, release the bar, arms down.." "He begins by introducing her mind to the move." "Did you see the bar all the way through?" "Yeah." "Hold a shape..." "When we teach a move to people like Rebecca, any gymnast, they must concentrate at the beginning, they know nothing and we have to fill their mind with the idea of what we are trying to get across and" "then we have got to get their body to follow their mind." "It's time for Rebecca to try the Ginga Salto for real." "So this one we will take from a handstand." "The first time you do it on your own you have to really concentrate on what you are doing." "When you are stood there waiting to go you do get a bit more nervous and you start to think about things that could go wrong." "Well, it was close, which is good, but you have got to see the bar and you have got to attack the bar with the hands so you actually grab the bar before the weight comes on the hands." "Ready." "It's just not working." "It's time for a more radical approach." "It's a learning method called visualisation." "Rebecca won't have to move a muscle." "Rather,she'll rehearse the entire sequence in her brain." "Rebecca stands still and concentrates." "She visualises every stage of the somersault, the moment she releases the bar, the instant she twists her body and the second she catches the bar." "And she does this over and over again." "Visualisation does help you when you are learning a new move, you can go through it in your brain before you actually have to do it yourself." "Scientists have discovered there is a region of the brain that is activated when we imagine a body movement." "When Rebecca rehearses the move in her mind, she's creating pathways through her brain cells as if she were actually doing the somersault all without moving a muscle." "It means that when she does perform it for real she should find it easier, because the pathways in her brain are already in place." "Will it work?" "Rebecca has repeatedly visualised each tiny twist and turn of the somersault in her mind." "But has she established strong enough pathways to make her body do it for real?" "Excellent." "Each time I do the move it gets better because it becomes more automatic so I can think about it less and think like more about what happened on the last one and try and correct it again on the next one." "When you start to do it in the competition you do get a bit more nervous but you just have to tell yourself that you have done it millions of times and you know how to do it." "Visualisation helped Rebecca establish new pathways in her mind that enabled her body to complete the somersault." "Understanding how to use her mind more effectively has given Rebecca a real chance of being selected for the Olympic team and winning a medal." "But visualisation isn't just for sports stars." "It can help us with almost anything." "Precise movements can be honed to perfection." "It can even help you to master a tricky new dance step." "And visualisation can do something even more surprising, it can actually strengthen muscles." "If you just imagine that you are working out at the gym scientists believe you can increase muscle strength by up to half as much as if you are actually doing it." "According to studies at the University of Iowa, it seems the visualising brain sends electrical signals to the muscles which makes them stronger, even though your body is stationary." "It is a virtual work out." "It's crunch time for Alison the day of her big exam." "She's about to discover if her learning has reshaped her brain enough for her to make it as a midwife." "The trouble is with an exam like this you have to learn so much and no matter how many times you keep going over it you just think I don't know if I have learned enough and if I have will I remember it?" "Each envelope contains one of three possible topics and she doesn't know which one she has chosen." "The one she fears most is breech birth when the child is delivered bottom first." "I am anxious about which subject I am going to get, I am dreading getting breech." "I am really ,really nervous about this exam, I, I haven't been sleeping properly for the last couple of nights." "Morning." "Good morning, Alison, how are you feeling?" "Nervous." "You've got your scenario, could you open it and read it out please." "It's not what Alison wants." "Breech presentation." "Claire, a twenty seven year old para one.." "And what do you think are the advantages of doing a CV?" "You don't have a uterine scar..." "Alison faces half an hour of tough questioning, designed to test her learning and knowledge to the limit." "Have you ever seen a baby with Erb's Palsy?" "No." "How do you think you would recognise it?" "I mean, I know with there is another palsy you can get on the face." "Her classmates are keen to know how she got on." "What did you get?" "What do you think?" "Breech?" "Yeah breech." "My worst nightmare." "To find out if she can continue her course," "Alison is now going to have to wait several weeks for the results." "It's one thing to fill your brain with facts." "It's quite another thing, though, to remember them, so how do we do it?" "Well, memorising something is rather like what happens when we set up a line of dominoes." "When we commit a fact to memory we create a neural pathway to it, a route of connecting brain cells to wherever that memory is stored in our brain." "And to retrieve those facts, all we have to do is to trigger the same pathway back to them." "It sounds easy." "And for some people at least,it really is." "This is Andi Bell." "In 2002 he was crowed World Memory Champion but just how good is he?" "Today we have set him a test." "He is going to try to recall the exact position of every single card in ten whole decks." "That's five hundred and twenty cards that have been shuffled by us." "And he has only got twenty minutes to look at them." "Andi has developed a special technique which allows him to remember literally thousands of items in rapid succession." "The twenty minutes are up." "Can Andi remember the position of the cards our referee selects at random?" "So deck one the very first card you saw." "The first card was the six of spades." "Same deck card number twenty three." "The twenty third card was the Queen of Hearts." "Deck two card number twenty seven." "Ten of diamonds." "No matter how many cards we fired at him.." "That was the King of diamonds." "Andi remembered them perfectly." "Forty eighth card was the Ace of hearts." "In fact Andi is able to recall all five hundred and twenty cards." "Jack of clubs." "Every one correct and in the right order." "Queen of spades." "So what's his secret?" "Before he even sits down with a deck of cards" "Andi uses his memory technique." "He takes a walk round London visiting a series of landmarks in a particular order." "Number one might be the Houses of Parliament and number two," "Westminster Bridge." "He walks the route several times to establish it in his mind." "But that is just the first stage, the second is putting his imagination to work." "When I memorise a deck of cards I turn each card into a picture and this is a colourful animal or object that I have learnt to associate with that particular card." "The Jack of clubs becomes a little bear." "The nine of diamonds a saw, and the two of spades a pineapple." "Then Andi puts the two stages together." "In his mind he imagines walking around London on his route." "And when he passes the Houses of Parliament he imagines the little bear with the saw and pineapple." "Andi creates a journey in his mind with this cast of characters." "As a child I had conventionally good memory but once you learn a technique like the location method I use it takes everything beyond what you could possibly do naturally." "Scientists have discovered our mind is better at remembering the route between locations than it is at remember unconnected facts and figures." "I think I have the same mental equipment as everybody else so it is something anybody can do." "When we use a simple story to memorise facts, we are creating several pathways to where those memories are formed in the brain." "It is as if instead of lining up one set of dominoes we are setting up several." "The reason we often have difficulties in retrieving a memory is because one neural pathway can easily get broken." "But by having several different pathways to our memory it means that if one doesn't manage to reach it another one will." "That's the advantage of the story technique, it creates lots of neural pathways in our brain." "And all our brains can work in this way." "Which is why everyone can use this method." "By using a story to memorise facts, we all have the potential to perform astonishing feats of memory." "By understanding the way our mind works we have seen how we can learn and remember more easily." "But what is surprising is that our mind can remember things without us even realising it." "It's this subconscious memory, or intuition, that can emerge in the most unexpected situations." "Andy Kirk has worked as a fireman in Leicester for over twenty years." "On the 5th October 2001 he and his team were called to a fire at a disused Bingo Hall." "Well it was a day like any other day, everybody was all up for the fire call, we were all on the way to the call." "The fire was big but Andy decided it was safe enough to send his crew into the building." "There was just smoke everywhere." "Absolutely everywhere it was almost like somebody had thrown a light switch.." "The adrenaline was pumping" "After five minutes Andy's team felt they were getting the fire under control." "We seemed to be getting somewhere, we seemed to be knocking, knocking the fire down slightly." "But then for no apparent reason," "Andy Kirk had a strange feeling." "I couldn't put my finger on it, I don't know what it was but I was sure that something out of the ordinary was going to happen." "I suddenly thought it is time I have got to get the lads out." "He told us that he wanted to withdraw." "Despite the protests of his team Andy insisted they came out." "It was just as well." "They were saying that they're OK and they will carry on, and I said, no you have got to come out, that is when all hell broke loose." "There was a very large rumbling sound." "It went from which seemed to be just a normal fire to one massive fireball which was chasing us out of the door." "We were running out of the building tripping over hose,breathing in the smoke." "It was just total chaos, really, I remember calling to them, really screaming to them were they there, calling their names out." "Without warning, a huge explosion ripped through the building bringing down the roof and destroying the walls." "An area the size of a football pitch was ablaze with flames shooting forty feet into the air." "I am sure if Andy hadn't pulled us out of the building at that time then we would have been killed." "In the aftermath, investigators began to piece together what caused the explosion." "From a fire investigation point of view we look at things in a clinical manner, we will take photographic evidence, witness statements, put everything together, build a picture up of what actually happened." "They realised that Andy had saved his men from one of the most dangerous phenomena in fire-fighting - a backdraft." "Backdrafts occur in enclosed fires when all the oxygen has been burnt up and the fire becomes explosively unpredictable." "Even with a protective equipment that we have got the, the thermal radiation is so high that it is almost like being boiled in a bag." "But back drafts are incredibly rare." "So how on earth could Andy have known what was about to happen?" "His mind had recognised danger even though he wasn't consciously aware of the signs." "Brain scientists think they know how this happens." "There is a part at the front of our brain that is always scanning the world around us without our knowing it." "Comparing our immediate to our past experience." "In Andy's case it compared the fire in the bingo hall with every fire he had seen before." "In a flash without Andy realising his scanning brain noticed three things that weren't quite right." "Firstly, the colour of the smoke was very orange unlike most fires." "Secondly, air was rushing into the building when the doors were opened instead of out, as usual." "And finally, there was no sound normally a fire crackles as it burns up oxygen." "Andy's mind had compared these unusual signs with his previous experience of normal fires and sent him a warning signal a feeling of uneasiness, an intuition." "It has taken a long time to reflect on the incident and all these little tiny things that were happening at the incident, the little snapshots of time and space that we were seeing, I was registering subconsciously gave me the feeling of uneasiness." "Listening to our intuition is a skill that we are all able to use." "Scientists believe that intuition is most likely to be right when you have experience of a situation, so just because you can't explain the feeling doesn't mean that you should ignore it." "This is Thames side." "OK." "Right." "Alison has passed her big exam." "Now she has been placed under the guidance of experienced midwives" "Myraid and Denise to learn from them." "We are just showing Alison around, she is a student midwife OK." "They are showing her the job beyond the facts and figures, it is about having almost a sixth sense of what to do next." "Myraid is introducing Alison to using ultrasound." "It is vital the scan picks up any potential problems such as a faulty heart." "We can see baby's heart beating and just roll a little bit further over for me." "But it is hard to see much detail." "Ultrasound operators often pick up problems intuitively." "They spot something which doesn't look right to their experienced eye." "In this case everything is fine." "Left atrium and the right atrium." "I was amazed how the, the ultrasonographer just through her experience and her intuition knows exactly what she is looking at and the detail of what she is looking at, I mean there is no way I could," "certainly at this stage make any sense of kind of what she was looking at but it was very interesting." "Thank you for letting me see that, that is great, lovely." "Developing this kind of intuition will be crucial if Alison is to deliver a baby on her own and that is her next challenge." "So far we have discovered the amazing ways in which our mind learns about the world." "How we remember." "How we perform physical feats and how our mind can work in ways we're not even aware of." "But our learning mind possesses another extraordinary talent." "It is something which helps define us as humans." "The ability to have original thoughts." "Human beings are able to combine different thoughts to create completely new ideas." "The combinations sometimes seem limitless." "And coming up with original ideas of course is something we do throughout our lives." "Believe it or not, you can actually see an original idea happening which is why this volunteer has been wired up." "Scientists now think they have identified the signal of an original thought from all the other brain activity that is going on at the same time." "The cleaned up trace looks like this." "But the problem with trying to measure an original thought is getting someone to have one in the first place." "It is virtually impossible to force somebody to have an original idea while they are connected to so much equipment." "But scientists believe that you get the same sense of revelation when you solve an optical illusion." "Scientists call it the "ah-ha" moment." "It looks like a load of black dots but if our volunteer stares at it for long enough there is something in there that he should will recognise." "He's got it, there is a Dalmatian sitting in there and it is camouflaged amongst the black dots." "That little high-peaked wave lasting just one fifth of a second is an intense burst of electrical activity, the unique signal of an original thought." "Scientists have not only discovered what it looks like they have also found that there are some times when we are more likely to have them than others." "Normally our brain is continually being bombarded by thoughts and sensations as we go about our normal daily lives." "And in this state the tiny electrical signal of an original thought simply doesn't stand out." "But if we can cut out some of this background noise there is a greater chance we will be aware of our "ah-ha" moments." "So the best way to stimulate original thinking is simply to find a way to relax." "Just look at some of the biggest ideas in history." "Isaac Newton figured out his theory of gravity as he lay in an orchard." "Galileo came up with the idea of using a pendulum to mark time while he sat quietly in a church." "And the structure of the atom was dreamt up by a scientist called Niels Bohr while he gazed as race horses thundering around the track." "People in relaxed states of mind have had ideas which have changed the world something perhaps we can all learn from." "Good girl, good girl, come on and again for me." "I can see the baby's head." "That last push was really good." "At last" " Alison's big test." "Rachel Waterer has just gone into labour, it is going to be Alison's first solo delivery." "So three years of all that hard studying and all the practical experience I have had and being looked after by the lovely midwives helping me." "I am now tonight hopefully I am going to deliver my first baby on my own." "Which is, which is daunting but it is really really exciting and I just hope that all that training and all the learning that I have done all comes together." "Big deep breaths now, good girl well done, just go with it." "Throughout the early hours Rachel's labour is long and exhausting." "The baby is not coming." "That's brilliant, keep that push, come on keep that push going." "It's dawn and Alison is worried she will have to hand over to a doctor, but she has got one more idea she still wants to try." "She's been here since midnight so that's just over five and a half hours now." "But I just have a funny feeling that if I can get her to just change her position it is just going to help the baby's head to come down a little bit better so I am going to try and get her to turn on to her side and" "I think we will have a baby really quickly, so I am just going to go and see if I can see if she is happy to change position." "Keep panting, keep panting." "And it looks like Allison's idea is going to work." "Head's out Rachel, OK." "Hello baby come on little pushes fine, push for me then," "OK and out well done congratulations." "Hannah, oh, another little girl." "Well done, congratulations, that's fantastic." "Oh you kept us all waiting didn't you?" "Hello, Hannah." "What time was she born?" "Nineteen minutes past." "For Rachel and her partner Vim the birth of baby Hannah is a dream come true." "And it is also a special moment for Alison, her dream has also come true." "She's proved she can make it as a midwife." "Hannah Grace, hello." "You took your time didn't you?" "Mmm?" "Mmm?" "She's lovely, we are all exhausted, you must be exhausted too." "I must look a wreck." "I am absolutely exhausted, really, really exhausted." "Oh it is just." "It went well, didn't it?" "It did, it went really well it did." "She's lovely, you did brilliantly." "Thank you." "You really really did." "I do have a really great feeling of achievement and I have to say, too, right at the moment when the baby's head was being delivered I had to really hold myself back because I could feel my throat tightening up" "and I thought I am going to cry." "Gorgeous." "We've been on a journey to discover how we learn about our world, something we are doing all the time." "In fact, simply watching this programme will have created countless new pathways in your brain." "And understanding how your mind works means you can make the most of it, but learning is just the first chapter in our mind's story." "Next on the human mind we will discover how our mind creates our personality and makes us who we are." "We will reveal what we can change and what we can't." "We will discover how we can influence our moods to become happier and we'll find out what a lemon can tell us about our personality."