The Infinite Monkey Cage - Brain Science

Episode Date: December 10, 2012

Will science ever understand the human mind? Brian Cox and Robin Ince are joined on stage by comedian and former psychiatric nurse, Jo Brand, and neuroscientists Sophie Scott and Brian Butterworth. With ever more sensitive brain scanning techniques and advances in brain science, how close are we to understanding the inner workings of the human mind - or is this a quest that still remains in the hands of the philosophers? Producer: Alexandra Feachem Presenters: Robin Ince and Brian Cox.

This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon Pull Apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey, and just five bucks for the small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. In our new podcast, Nature Answers, rural stories from a changing planet, we are traveling with you to Uganda and Ghana

to meet the people on the front lines of climate change. We will share stories of how they are thriving using lessons learned from nature. And good news, it is working. Learn more by listening to Nature Answers wherever you get your podcast. This is a download from the BBC. To find out more, visit bbc.co.uk slash radio4. Hello, on my right, a man who believes that everything in the universe continues to move from a state of order to increasing disorder, a law that seems to apply to everything in the universe,

apart from his own gorgeous hair. It's Professor Brian Cox. And on your left, Robin Ince, a man who used to be an observational comedian until he realised that an observation in itself is meaningless unless the reference frame is carefully specified. For example, in the 1970s, everyone thought their mother-in-law was fat, but of course she was only fat in her own rest frame. There were observers moving such that she would appear as a Lorenz-contracted pancake. Exactly. Ultimately, the realisation that mother-in-law jokes are frame-dependent

destroyed the Northern Working Man's club circuit. My mother-in-law's so fat. Well, what speed's she travelling? What? What's your frame of reference? Never mind, I'll do some blue jokes. All the jokes are blue. They're travelling towards us. If they were travelling away from us, then they'd be redshifting.

Today we're going to be examining the most complex thing in the known universe, something we all possess to a greater or lesser extent, our brains. Are we blasé about our brains? The mere act of looking in the mirror and recognising our own reflection has taken billions of years of evolution. Some say that understanding the human brain is an impenetrable problem. But is anything fundamentally unknowable? No.

There we go. I thought you might say... To discuss this, we are joined by approximately 300 billion neurons, give or take the odd million, that make up our three guests. Firstly, Professor Sophie Scott is a neuroscientist at UCL's Institute of Cognitive Science and studies the complexity of human communication, as well as writing a paper on the science of laughter, I believe. So hopefully you'll be able to give me an equation on why my punchline,

oh, no, you've collapsed the wrong wave function, went down brilliantly in Totten, but was a disaster in Cardiff last night. That's entirely true. Totten loves it. Cardiff, nothing. Brian Butterworth is Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Neuropsychology, also at the Institute of Cognitive Science at UCL, and is the author of The Mathematical Brain. He also diagnosed Ronald Reagan's Alzheimer's from errors in his 1984 re-election speeches

ten years before it was officially diagnosed. I've got to say, that is the first time, and I am hype, Brian, never before, when we've run out any of the achievements of our guests, have we had that proper game show. Ooh! You've become a wizard of the mind. Our final guest spent years preparing for a life of playing in rowdy comedy clubs by being a psychiatric nurse.

She was that for ten years, so however imaginative a stag night is, and they rarely are, they are unlikely to top the abuse of a vibrant night in the psychiatric ward. She is a keen celebrator of cake and homicide. It's Jo Brand. That's our panel. Sophie, we'll start with you. In terms of neuroscience, it is quite a new science. How far have we got? I mean, how close are we, in your eyes, to understanding the human mind?

I suppose it depends exactly where you take us starting from. So people have been interested in the brain and what it's doing since the time of the ancient Greeks. They didn't always get it right, so Aristotle thought your brain was cooling down blood and your heart was where all the really important thoughts were happening. But up until, you know, not long after that, people got the idea that the brain was important,

it was involved in some way in cognition. But then that didn't really change very much until electricity became easily available in the 1700s and people discovered that there was actually electrical impulses could change not just how muscles move but also affect how your brain worked there was one splendid italian who just stuck electrodes in his ears and heard a noise like thick bubbling soup which was frying his auditory nerve but that's that was an indication that what happens in your nerves the way that information was getting passed around your brain was based on electricity and then in the 1800s we found out that there was there were cells in the brain that there were these neurons that are actually making up the matter of the brain and then more recently

we've got much better techniques for actually looking at the function of the brain so we're not just saying well what's in there but actually what's it doing how does it work so we've got much better techniques for actually looking at the function of the brain. So we're not just saying, well, what's in there? But actually, what's it doing? How does it work? So we've got things like fMRI and TMS. So these techniques for actually investigating normal, healthy brains. That was one of the first lessons, though, in neuroscience, was after you went, oh, this is soup. Hang on, it's my own brain. That's when neuroscientists realised, you know what?

I'll use other people for these experiments. Oh, it does an offering offer ring yes i think definitely definitely joe psychiatric nursing so did you get into that because of a an interest in medicine interest in the brain because i suppose you worked at the sharp end of this subject there um yeah i'd say the reason i got into actually my dad um has had a very severe depressive illness for a long time and i think if you know someone who has a mental health problem, you're not frightened of other people with mental health problems. And it's, you know, it's fascinating as well.

And I think probably that's why I got into it. I'm not least bit interested in brains at all. Thank you, Joe Brand. But it is something we were talking about before we came on here, which is just briefly, as a sideways thing, which is what you were saying about having worked in psychiatric wards, that you were still surprised by the lack of understanding that people who don't know someone, or don't know that they know someone,

who's suffering from some form of mental illness, still have in this area. Well, I think there's such a huge amount of ignorance about like mental health issues you know I mean if if you go to comedy gigs which I'm sure you all do you'll find so many comics doing these kind of split mind jokes about schizophrenia you know roses are red violets are blue, I'm schizophrenic, so am I, those sorts of things. Ah! A little ripple there. Oh, right, it's quite funny. No, it's not.

So there is a huge amount of ignorance around. You're nodding there. It's not really changing very much, is it, Sophie? It's changing slowly. I mean, it's not something that you get taught in school. You learn about the natural world in biology, but you don't learn very much about, you know, sort of actually human brains and human mind and just the simple stuff about what goes wrong

and given the stats on how frequently things do... It's like one in ten of us will have an episode of some kind of mental health issue. That's a lot of people, a lot of people who are experiencing stuff which most people don't understand and are a bit scared of. And I also, I think, you know, like, for example when i when i was a nurse we would give people um ect and when people sort of talked about that they thought that we we did it as a punishment you know if someone hadn't eaten their dinner right you're getting 500 000 volts through you um and and i think that was all because of

one flow of the cuckoo's Nest, because actually that's what they did do in that film. I think most people's knowledge of mental health is One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, you know. And so you're starting from such a position of ignorance, in a way. Brian, we've heard a little bit about the medicalisation of the brain, essentially, and Sophie described the history of neuroscience. But when did it really become a science

in terms of the, I suppose, the experimental method and the understanding of the brain? Well, is it a science now? I mean, that's, I think, an important question. I mean, when we look at the brain through some of these new techniques like fMRI, so we're looking at the way in which blood flow changes when you're thinking about something,

and it changes different parts of the brain when you're thinking about different sorts of things. Do we really understand what we're looking at? So the analogy that comes to my mind is that we're rather in the position of Galileo looking at the moons of Jupiter. So he didn't have a theory of optics. He didn't really know what he was looking at,

but he knew that it was somehow important. And I sometimes think that some of the fMRI experiments that are reported are rather like Galileo looking at the moons of Jupiter. It's important. Something's going on there. But we don't know exactly what it is. And when you think that blood flow is only a very indirect measure of what's going on, you could be looking at electrical activity,

as Sophie was talking about. You could look at changes in the magnetic field of the brain, which is another method that people are developing now. How are all these interrelated in order to understand what's really going on? So in one sense, it's a science, because we have hypotheses, we test hypotheses. So it's not like string theory in that sense,

which we can't test. Sorry about that. LAUGHTER But, I mean, we do test it. So we do use the scientific method and we approach it in a kind of rational way, but I sometimes do wonder what we're really looking at. That's interesting, isn't it?

Don't say it like that. Just because you started your answer by going, is it even a science, which worried me when you said that, because I thought we might suddenly lead you to some existential angst. I've reached this point in my career and I've suddenly thought, is it a science? Essentially, Joe, because a brain, you would think, because, as we said in the introduction, everybody's got one

and you would think they were easy to observe in some sense. But as you said, the behaviour is extremely difficult. But as a physical system, you might think, I would have naively thought that we would have high-precision measurements of what's going on there. Well, you might, but, like, for example, I mean, I'm thinking, like, what does a thought look like? And how on earth could you ever tell by looking at the brain

what someone was actually thinking about? Because the combinations are endless, aren't they? I was going to say that Joe raised a really interesting point. Did I? Crikey, get me! What does a thought look like? Now, in order to know what you're looking for in the brain, you've got to have a theory about what a particular thought looks like. I mean, it's no good just saying,

oh, well, you know, it's a thought. I'm going to have a look in the brain and see what's going on there. You can't do that. You've got to have a precise idea of what you're actually looking for. So, for example, people have identified thoughts in the brain, and the way you do it is you do it... It's a very, very simple experiment. Either they're looking at a face

or they're looking at a piece of furniture, and then you try and figure out what the difference is in the pattern of brain activity for furniture versus face. Apparently, you could do that quite reliably. People have even done it for numbers, which is my favourite area of scientific research. See, if I looked at a piece of furniture and my husband, the brain activity would be exactly the same.

So it would have to be something different. Shall we put that to the test? It's interesting you mention numbers, because I think I recall reading that mathematicians, if they look at numbers or think of abstract problems, perhaps shape puzzles, you can see different areas of activation in their brain to non-mathematicians trying to address the same problems you see both the same areas and some additional areas so not an awful lot of research

has been done on this but there's a famous german calculating prodigy called rudiger gam and people have looked at his brain when he's he calculations as compared to normal people's brains when they're doing calculations. Now, there's no point in comparing GAM doing, you know, seven plus five. I mean, that's pointless. So they look at ordinary people doing seven plus five and Rudiger GAM, you know, finding the seventh power of a four-digit number. And what they find is, unsurprisingly, that he actually shows a different pattern of activation. He shows all the areas that you and I would show,

but in addition to that, he recruits an area which is involved in long-term memory. And it's kind of like he recruits part of his hard drive to supplement his RAM in order to hold more numbers in his head at one time, which is what I find difficult. And he also recruits more of his visual cortex as well, so it looks as though he's kind of imagining what the numbers look like when he's doing these calculations.

On the whole, typical people don't recruit those areas when they're doing ordinary, boring calculations. They just recruit a bit in the left parietal lobe, that's about here, just above the left ear. Is there a suggestion that that's learned behaviour, or is there a suggestion that his brain is hardwired in some sense in a different way to everybody else? Well, it is hardwired now, but he wasn't very good at maths at school, and he just decided

to teach himself to be a terrific calculator because he believed he could win a lot of money on a German TV show by doing these amazing calculations, and he did win a lot of money doing it. So he just trained himself. He trained himself, you know, five or six hours every day for about six months in order to be able to win the money on this show. It's one of the problems in terms of researching many of these areas that ethically it can be very, very difficult. I mean, a lot of the advances

that have happened have happened by hideous accidents. I mean, for instance, there, when you're talking about ideas which there has been beforehand, a great deal of debate, is it nature, is it nurture? We took two twins and separated them at birth. And now there's ethics committees which suggests that's not a good thing to do um and equally you have stories with ect where people were it was believed in the 1950s i think that actually to give people such enormous shocks you were creating a blank slate to start again people who've had piece of their brains removed which meant they could no longer form

memories that sometimes it was accidents and sometimes it was just really quite horrific experiments. Now obviously things have changed. Is that one of the hard things? That there are things you think we could find that out. All I need to do is this hammer, this nail and just chip that bit off and off we go. I mean essentially until we had

things like in the last 20 years we've got had things like positron emission tomography and fMRI which are giving us these pictures of the brain at work up until this point we've been entirely dependent on nature's accidents one of the things I'm very interested in is laughter and if you look at laughter it emerges when babies are very small it's essentially the first really sort of emitted emotion which is positive other than screaming all the time which babies are great at from when they're born and then laughter appears now what you'd really like to know is, because laughter always appears in social interactions, always, it's generally something like tickling, and of course you can't tickle yourself.

What would happen if you didn't have that interaction? What would happen? We know that rats laugh more if they are being tickled a lot when they're babies. Is that true of humans? Now, I'm not going to risk personal and professional disgrace by suggesting that anybody do that experiment, but it's the kind of thing that's unknowable for humans. Brian's looking absolutely baffled at the rat comment. I'm laughing.

I mean, I've never heard of this. Laughing rats. Rats laugh. Rat laughter is basically... They love Jerry Lewis movies. That's their main thing. It's depressingly similar to us. They laugh and they're tickled.

Do you know what? At any time, we're only seven foot from a human. That's hilarious. There was a guy in the US called Yang Pangsep who was working with rats looking at their fear vocalisations. Because rats are very small, they make very high-pitched sounds. We wouldn't normally hear them. So they're recording the rats all the time

and reducing the sound so humans can hear them. And they noticed that rats made a very different sound when they played with each other. And they thought, is that laughter? So they started tickling the rats, and the rats made the same sound. And then they noticed, in fact... LAUGHTER The rat tickler for any one particular rat, and the rats made the same sound. And then they noticed, in fact... LAUGHTER

The rat tickler for any one particular rat, when that rat tickler came in the room, the rat would start making the sound when they saw them. LAUGHTER It's a pity. We just had a show a couple of weeks ago on Ig Nobel prizes, and that seems to be a candidate, isn't it? Rat tickling.

I think it's rather lovely. I mean it's really striking in fact when you start looking for it you find laughter across mammal. It's a mammal behaviour. We think it's all sort of you know jokes and amusement but actually it's much more to do with bonding, showing affiliation. And chimpanzees use laughter in exactly the same way as us. They have a different laugh that they make when they are trying to make play continue than when they are being tickled. So just like us, we have very different laughs if you are helpless with mirth than if you're laughing politely. And for us, we do it with play, but also, you know,

most of the time, if you ask people, when do you laugh, they'll say, I laugh at jokes. If you look at when they laugh, they laugh in conversation. So you mostly laugh when you're with your friends. And most of the time, that's actually, you're deliberately laughing. You're laughing to show your friends you like them. I love the rat tickler thing, though, because when I was, anyone who's about my age would know

James Herbert's The Rats was one of the most terrifying books ever written. But now knowing it wasn't really their fault, they weren't tickled enough as children, changes the entire story. Don't blame them. There are a lot of ideas about the human brain which are very much in the world, which may have truth and may well not,

those kind of things that pop up often in pubs and pub quizzes. Jo, and I'm going to start off by asking you your ideas on a small group that we've kind of made up, and then I'm going to throw them over to you. One of the most famous ones is the idea that we only use 10% of our brain. I wonder what you think of that. I think that that is true for my husband, but not for me.

I think he uses 3% and I use about 79%. So the 10% of the brain, Sophie? It isn't true. It comes about from a self-help book, sort of the idea being you're only using 10% of this amazing organ, you can use a lot more. But essentially all of us right now are sitting here with brains that although they're about one kilogram in weight,

they're using 20% of the available oxygen in your body. They are very, very, very metabolically hungry. And that's because it's working incredibly hard all the time. Lots of stuff that, you know, it's requiring energy in your brain to understand the words I'm saying, but also to remain upright into the seat and to breathe and to all these other things that you're not necessarily particularly aware of

but which are requiring your brain to be doing things. If your brain wasn't there, you'd find it a lot harder. We're now going to choose two people. There'll be one control group. Sophie, can I just ask you a question? Is it true if you do cryptic crosswords you won't get Alzheimer's? It's certainly one of the things that will help it's the item there is quite a lot of value in this idea of

doing mental muscles you know actually doing things with your brain is preventative for certain things that doesn't mean to say you need to necessarily charge off and buy proprietary devices that are sold to you under the name of such trainers that's not, what you need to do is things that will involve you using your brain and also if possible doing so in a social setting, so doing things like playing bridge is brilliant or something that just gets you meeting other people, talking to them and doing sort of cognitively demanding work with them

is excellent for your brain. You're talking about the energy that the brain uses, I mean lots of people join gyms kind of the day after New Year's Day, would it be better just to join the library? And you know because it sounds really boring, the gym, whereas reading's great, there's loads of stuff in it. Well, unfortunately, it really helps to keep going to the gym as well because your brain is using all this oxygen.

It needs a good blood supply. So, actually, cardiovascular disease is a really big cause of problems with your brain, both in terms of big strokes that leave you with noticeable loss in function, but also there's something called multi-infarct dementia, which is where you just have lots and lots of little strokes, and it looks a lot like dementia.

You have a progression of decline. The good thing about it is if you treat the cardiovascular disease, you can actually improve the dementia. So there's a big interest in exactly how many people out there have got this problem rather than, say, something like Alzheimer's. But it does mean that keeping your heart healthy will help your brain. And then, Joe, you alluded to one of the other myths, which is that there is a difference between the male and the female brain.

By the way, by saying myth, you've rather given away whether it's a myth or not. Let's take this multitasking thing, for example. You know, do you think that's a myth, men? Can't even talk. So... APPLAUSE Because there's always this implication that women can juggle all these ideas in their head at once and some poor bloke, she's got a hammer in her nail going...

Like that. I can't possibly talk at the same time. And do you think it's an affectation? My wife thinks it's an affectation. I just claim that I can't multitask in order to avoid washing up. I think it's quite an intelligent affectation. But, yes, no, I do think it's an affectation. Why should they be any different?

I think we're the same, really, aren't we? Brian, the male-female brain, in terms of the differences, are there any physical differences? Well, there are physical differences. Like, the male brain is, on average, larger than the female brain. You liar! Just because men are... Well, also because men are bigger than women on the whole.

On the other hand, living in a household that's full of women, I now take the view that the male brain isn't as efficient. But, I mean, there is, I think, one quite important difference, which is that if you look at neurodevelopmental diseases, you tend to find... Or, actually, let's make this broader, just the range of abilities you find that there's a bigger spread of abilities in men than in women so you find more men who are at the bottom

end of the scale and more men at the top end of the scale proportionately even if the the average for both men and women is the same this is an i IQ, for example. For example, in IQ or in maths, for example. But not language. Language is where you get more high-performing women. Do you? Oh. Not many. It's not a big difference.

So, you know, you find if you took 100 women and 100 men and gave them a language task, the top people would be likely to be women, but there wouldn't be a big thing in it. Joe, I know you spent many years working in a psychiatric hospital, and so you have seen a lot of people whose brains were not working correctly for one reason or another. Did you feel that that gave you an insight into,

not necessarily how this complex organ works, but the complexity of it in general, when you see it, when it's beginning to fail? Did you feel that gave you an insight? Oh, well, very strongly, because i think the brain is such a complex organ that it can fail in so many and varied ways it's it's terrifying really and what i was like doing i was like you know when scientists go if what we know about the brain now is midday, how far round will it go before we know everything we need to know about the brain?

So, Brian. It is a hard thing. I find whenever I read about the brain or start kind of trying to understand the brain, my brain stops working. As if it's going, don't ruin the magic. I'm not going to let ruin the magic. Is it a machine?

I mean, at the basic level, ruin the magic. I'm not going to let ruin the magic. Is it a machine? At the basic level, is it a machine described by the laws of physics that runs algorithms, and is that all there is to the brain? I think physics is not a very good model here.

I mean, what we... The description. It's the only possible description of the component parts. Let me try and explain, all right? Which is, what we're talking about here is not rocket science. It's actually much more complicated than that. Rocket science is a matter of getting matter, getting a bunch of atoms from point A to point B, OK?

That's what I do when I walk. Right, exactly. Fine. This is what people do when they send a rocket into space. Right. That's why it's rocket science. Now, imagine that each of those atoms had a mind of its own and it was actually thinking about what the other atoms were thinking about. And in particular, there's the problem of what I call the Dostoevsky question and the Dostoevsky question goes

something like this, if everybody else thinks I'm going to go from A to B and even though going to B would actually be quite good for me I'm not going to go because what I want to do is I want to show that I'm not constrained by the laws of physics.

I'm not constrained by what's good for me. I have, next hard question, I have free will. And so I'm going to do what... I'm going to do what I want, even though it might be self-destructive. The other problem is that every brain's different. And the reason why the brain's different has got to do with the genes that go to build it, the experiences that it has.

And so we're not going to have a theory of the brain. We need to have a theory of brains and why your brain is different from my brain and Sophie's brain is different from Joe's brain and everybody in the audience has a different brain and that seems to me to be a massively, massively more complex problem than just say getting a rocket from point

A to point B or figuring out what a black hole is which seems to be trivial by comparison. Well... APPLAUSE It's show four, and neuroscience takes the lead. So, for the final question for you,

Joe was talking about where we are on the clock face in terms of understanding the human brain. I know it's a very difficult question for you to say anything, but where would you say we are on that clock face in terms of understanding the human brain i know it's a very difficult question for you to say anything but where would you say we are on that clock face of understanding the human brain well i have to say i mean i've been doing this for um about 15 years now and it has changed so much already so it's progressing so quickly i think we're probably about two minutes past if we're looking at you know like a 24 hour clock it's really really very early days and the fact that we can now take pictures of brains in action and look at them doing things...

20 years ago, when I was doing my PhD, it would have been unimaginable that you could routinely do this. It would have been impossible to imagine. And suddenly, now we can. It's becoming a standard research tool. Developed by particle physicists. Absolutely. Too late, too late to fight back.

Too late to fight back. Too late to fight back. Well, as usual, we have used the brains of our audience as well and turned them into a think tank to go a little bit further into the subject. And we've asked our audience assembled here, what power of the human mind do you hope is the next step in mental evolution? The first one is from Maddy. To stop people being wrong on the internet so we can all go to bed on time. I haven't slept for about a year.

This one says the ability to tell when politicians are telling the truth. This is a good one here. To understand the point of Jeremy Clarkson. Do you know what? I'm happy just remaining in the dark, to be honest. So, thank you very much for your answers there, and thank you very much to our fantastic guests today,

who were Professors Sophie Scott and Brian Butterworth, and Joe Brown. Well, yeah. Next week, we're joined by Ed Byrne and Philip Ball to discuss scientific attempts to create life. Are people right to say that man shouldn't play God? And what does playing God mean anyway? Does it actually mean she's been hiding so thoroughly

that no one believes you exist? Thank you very much. Goodbye. Goodbye. Thank you. co.uk slash radio4. This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull-apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey, and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply.

In our new podcast, Nature Answers, rural stories from a changing planet, we are travelling with you to Uganda and Ghana to meet the people on the front lines of climate change. We will share stories of how they are thriving using lessons learned from nature. And good news, it is working.

Learn more by listening to Nature Answers wherever you get your podcasts.