The Infinite Monkey Cage - Brains

Episode Date: August 27, 2022

Brian Cox and Robin Ince are joined by comedian Alan Davies and neuroscientists Prof Uta Frith and Prof Sophie Scott. They discover the secret to why humans are such social creatures and why two brains are definitely better than one. Our brains are wired to learn from and mimic other brains we come into contact with, even though most of the time we don't even realise that is what they/we are doing. The subtle cues we get from other people and the information in their brains, affects our own wiring and experience of the world. With this incredible complexity, might we ever be able to create an artificial brain that mimics our own and the human experience?Executive Producer: Alexandra Feachem

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. BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Hello, I'm Brian Cox. I'm Robin Ince, and this is the Infinite Monkey Cage. Now, last week, we ended the show with a trailer for this week's show,

which was going to be about flat earth and conspiracy theories. But since then, and this is true, our lead panellist called and he got an illness and had to cancel. Yeah, isn't that weird? Meant to be doing a show about conspiracy theories. The main guest suddenly gets ill, suddenly says he has food poisoning. I hear an Illuminati owl out there somewhere. So basically, as we've discovered, yet again,

the Illuminati have used a complex system of slightly off volovans to make sure that they will silence the true sceptics and reinforce the narrative of the mainstream media. You mean he didn't check the sell-by date on some pastry? Oh, that is very much what the scientists and the experts would say i would imagine anyway we've postponed that show until the autumn can i just say actually though that

because you use the term autumn as someone who is very interested in flat earth i am also an autumn denier i think the seasons are an illusion created by the leaf blower industry. So today we're asking a different question. Are two brains better than one? And given Robert's introduction, I suppose the answer must be it depends which brain you choose. So how important to the human mind is interaction with other minds? And what have we learned from the strange experiment of two years of living in relative isolation? To answer these questions, we're joined by two neuroscientists and a new romantic, and they are... My name's Sophie Scott. I'm the director of the Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. And my most underestimated aspect of

the ability of the human brain is the ability to grow and change. You are born with 86 billion neurons, and those are pretty much the ones you're going to have for your whole life. So any change, any development, anything different that happens to you in your experiences over your life, all of it, is because of change in your brain. Anything you remember from this evening will change in your brain. Anything you remember from this evening? Well, because your brain has changed. Good noise. So hi, I'm Uta Frith. I'm Professor of Cognitive Development. So developing brain, yes, big mystery but my idea of the most underestimated amazing ability of the brain is learning from others just by watching them not having to make your own mistakes all the time but actually letting other people making those mistakes. I'm Anna Davis.

I'm a comedian and an actor and a sometimes writer. And my most underestimated feature of the human brain is I read a thing that said that when the baseball pitcher throws the pitch, the time it takes to get to the hitter, it's so quick, it's impossible for the reflexes of the hitter to hit the ball. They just shouldn't be able to move their hands in time and yet they do frequently it's impossible how do they know where it's going

to be and this is our panel you know i think in the tradition of infinite monkey cage we should tear up the script at that point and the first question should be to answer Alan's question, because it's an interesting question. So how can we respond so quickly to something so complex as the flight of the baseball? It's such a good question, and the answer is, the brain and the mind, both the same thing, of course,

the brain is a prediction engine. That's what it's doing all the time. Now, I'm not talking about prediction next year or even next week, but from millisecond to millisecond. So that's what the brain does all the time. And there have been millions and millions of years of evolution for this to get really refined from the very very simple organisms who didn't have a brain onwards till we're talking about our own human brain and I think it's pretty much accepted in

our circles that yes prediction is what the brain does one of the reasons why we're able to make these predictions is because the ball doesn't just leave the pitcher's hand they've moved to get to that point and what you're doing is you're tracking everything associated with that movement and there will be cues there that the brain can use to work out when it's coming and exactly where it's going and that's something that we actually do all the time you when you look at people moving you are working out what they're likely to do next and you hardly even have to pay any attention to it your brain is always trying to predict people's intentions by them is it true that to be able to hit that

baseball you have to have whether it's 10 000 hours of practice or not you have to be able to hit that baseball you have to have whether it's 10 000 hours of practice or not you have to have been able to be on the receiving end of that pitch a certain number of times you're still talking about the brain learning and changing and growing absolutely so part of your skill so i remember i haven't played baseball i've played rounders and i've had enough kind of rounders balls bounce off my forehead to know that there is a certain degree of skill involved in actually being able to not just predict where that's coming from and how it's moving but of course coordinate your own reactions to that there might be one brief action but actually everything that's led up to that is highly coordinated and highly skilled so i would also like to add something about you know my pet theory about how good we are learning

from others well one of the things we do is copying others. Not necessarily consciously copying, not visibly copying, but when you observe somebody making a movement, you kind of make it internally yourself. We almost can't help doing that. Copying is absolutely pervasive. Sometimes we notice it, we catch ourselves, we might copy somebody's accent or the way they walk. But most of the time, it's entirely inside,

that the brain is just preparing these things, these actions, in case it has to make them. And here you see example. It's called upon to catch, and it does that. And it's almost, well, it is unconscious in a sense, isn't it? We're not aware of the fact that we're making these predictions and preparing to hit the ball. I mean, it's almost a reflex.

It's too fast to have to think about it. But the interesting thing is that we also have another gear where we can be conscious. But that takes quite a lot of time. You have to really think about it. Now, the thing about copying, if you do it very, very fast and very subtly, the effect is that the other person likes you more. Very interesting.

It sort of gives a bond. But if you do it in such a way that the other person actually notices that you're copying, that's disaster. That's mocking. And you get very, very upset. And that gets into the conscious bit, which is always always always the arena for possible deception manipulation and a lot of not so good things well it's interesting when i remember when patrick stewart was on the show and i asked him afterwards about um we had a conversation about acting and i was going to ask you and i said how do you do this you know these shakespearean plays and he said you have to learn it to the point where you are not trying to remember what you're going to say next because then you look like you're

acting and the it terrified me the idea that you would stand up and do hamlets or something and had no idea what you were going to say but then he said to me well you have no idea what you're going to say next now and i wonder whether you you have to rehearse hugely but what the other thing interesting about performers and and sports people too is although in the motor skills or the rehearsal it's the moment of pressure the moment of opening night or the cup final and you have to perform there and then everyone knows that there are emotional pressures that begin to impact on the brain's ability to put your hands in the right place at the right moment and that's quite an interesting both of these things appear to be unconscious both moving your arm and the your emotions moving it slightly wrongly do you do

that when you're acting do you um forget the lines essentially so when when you act do you not know what you're going to say next i think once you if you've been doing something for a while it's what's really odd is if you are doing a play and you do you have done it over and over and over and over again and then one night something happens in the corner of your eye in row h and the next line's gone and it is absolutely not retrievable you look at the person opposite you and they think oh it's gone isn't it yeah don't worry i'm going to say something i don't between you and your eyes are you that you're saying you say something now because it will come back if you say something

and then they'll say something like did you mean to talk about the taps yes the taps language is like like that isn't it? It's an unconscious... Yeah, it's a wonderful example, actually, that you've just given about an interaction where we can, you know, throw balls literally to each other, except it's in words. And I would have thought,

Robin, if you're complaining about not being a, you know, sports hero, you really are a verbal hero, aren't you? You can basically, you know, never run can basically you know never run out of words never run out of things you say which is not actually for many people who know me a heroic position but you can also take turns at the right moment you don't interrupt people you or you interrupt them when they're boring which is a very thing. But this kind of interplay also depends a lot on this secret copying. And I don't think that you need necessarily a lot of practice for it.

But that's what we do. That's just there, even from birth, from hours after birth. So something like that already puts us into the world and that is social world we are interested in what other people are doing or saying where they're looking because that that is really our world you know our habitat so what's interesting you know go back to your point about acting and what patrick stewart said is if you rehearse enough, enough, enough, enough, that it's so you really aren't thinking about the next thing, what begins to emerge is you and your confidence and your skill,

you, the person. And then the audience may connect with you, the actor, through and behind it. I watch Keir Starmer, who I respect a lot, give a speech at the Labour conference last year and he was under-rehearsed. He didn't sound like Keir Starmer. He sounded like someone who, give a speech at the Labour conference last year, and he was under-rehearsed. He didn't sound like Keir Starmer. He sounded like someone who was giving a speech

that had been written, perhaps been worked on, even late the night before. And I called up a friend of mine who's a theatre director and said, you need to get a hold of Keir Starmer. He said, he needs to rehearse. He needs to practise this and rehearse and rehearse and rehearse. And once he's got it, who he is, he's a greatly respected former crown

prosecution surface head he it will come through but at the moment he's trying to be something he's not and he's not practiced enough and it's not working it was that it's an interesting thing what's happening there sophie is the brain it seems as though it's sort of the skill is sinking into your unconscious in some sense so you're becoming less aware of what you're doing when you're practiced and you're getting better at it what's actually happening well it's interesting if you look at something like talking because it's always a performance at some degree and that literally comes down to the brain system so humans have a strip of control brain areas that control motor actions in a voluntary way. And we can do things in a sort of, we have control over our body other primates and other mammals don't have.

So our bodies and our brains have kind of evolved together to make us these terrifying little machines that we are. But that means that when we do a voluntary action, it's always a bit of a performance. So I'm talking to you now and I'm thinking, well, I'm just sounding like Sophie, and actually I'm not. I would sound different if I was back in Blackburn, I would sound different if I was on Chapel Market trying to buy fruit, or if I'd just been arrested, or all sorts of situations where you might, perhaps all three at once, be...

So there's an element of performance there, and I think often what we resonate to when we listen to people talking is a degree of their comfort in that performance so if you are unsure or uncertain you're you've got a speech that you don't know well so you're concentrating on reading it and your attention will be there and we're very good at telling if someone's reading versus speaking spontaneously it's one of the secrets of acting is to sort of get to that point so we there are these two things always going on there's always a performance and we as listeners are very very good at picking up when there's something a bit inauthentic in that performance someone's trying to do something that's not quite working they might be trying to make their voice sound different and Margaret

Thatcher was famously instructed to lower the pitch of her voice and often when you listen to her now you can kind of hear the effort she's trying really hard to stay down here and actually women in the west have generally done that they've lowered the pitches of their voices as they've moved into the workplace and most of the time it doesn't sound quite as inauthentic because she was trying really hard and you're hearing that effort you're hearing that you don't necessarily know why it's happening but you're hearing that something's not quite right something's not someone's not totally confident in that performance brilliant now we're going to use that as one show now let's move to show two which is I want it because as you said

at the beginning you were saying that the mind and brain are the pretty much the same thing but I wondered what it is there a divide though There's a line which Brian always tells me off because it's a line I used to use over and over again, but Ken Campbell, the great theatre director and writer, used to say, you is just one of the things your brain does. So is the mind something in the brain rather than saying the mind is the whole brain? How do we define the difference between mind and brain

if we wish to try? Well, you can kind of take an analogy which doesn't entirely work with computers and say that the brain is the is the hardware and the mind is the software and how how it runs it's probably not quite as simple as that because you can imagine you can think of the mind as being some of the things that the brain does. But the brain does a lot more than the things that we tend to think of as mind. So right now, we're all sitting in chairs. We're not sliding down onto the floor. Because actually our brain's doing a huge amount of work to maintain the muscle control that keeps us upright and sitting in a chair.

And again, you have no way of accessing that information. It's very hard to make yourself relax so much you'd slide onto the floor. Don't try. I'm so disappointed. I thought, but like when you were talking about walking and going down steps, I thought the whole audience would forget how to do it, and we'd just, ooh, they'd slide down together. So we don't normally think of that as a function of the mind.

This, I think, is beautifully put, Sophie. I would mention, I think whenever we talk about the brain, we should really also talk about the body. The brain and the body, I mean, you know, they're there. And we quite often think of the mind, generally, as something sort of outside,

you know, outside everything, just sort of floating above. um it's all wrong um we we really are totally sold on this idea that we are our conscious selves everything else is going on behind our back you know the brain does it and we have nothing to do with it kind of but that's all a very strange illusion because that conscious bit is a tiny tiny percentage of what really goes on not just in brain and body but also in the mind itself because we have ways in the lab to probe and find out these things that normally don't never see the light of day these unconscious processes that are always going on and we do know that there is a there is a conversation there's a dialogue between the the unconscious automatic bits doing all their

different jobs in an amazing way. And they have ways of communicating. If something goes slightly wrong, and then control comes and says, well, maybe slow down, maybe, oh, careful, do something else. And this conscious bit right on top is an amazing interface to other minds this is really very very useful because as i keep saying we learn from others others have so much more experience than one person on their own and we can take advantage and we can sort of use a lot of information that they've already filtered out as really important, really valuable.

We just get it immediately. Yeah, there's so much in there. I sort of can't let you go, you said we have ways in the lab. It sounded quite sinister. Could you give just one example of the ways you have in the lab? Deep underground is a silent lab. Underground, deep underground in Queen Square,

where Sophie resides, there are these scanners and there are EEG machines and magnetoencephalograms and all sorts of devices. And they have to be deep underground because they have to be completely shielded. She used one of the magnetic devices on me didn't you yeah so there's a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation and everything that utah's just described is these are all amazing techniques for taking pictures effectively of the brain in doing things so we can either look at the brain's electrical discharges or look at where the brain's doing neural activity and we can get phenomenal amounts of information about that

and i'm sure we'll come back to it but you can also try and directly disrupt the functions of the brain by using transcranial magnetic stimulation and that basically involves that's just physics you have a coil which is placed over the sun it's only physics it's not the tough stuff as the most as the most kind of important part of it you have to you basically have a an h-shaped coil that you place over somebody's head robin's head or my head as we've both done it and then you send a very large electrical signal through that coil and then that generates a magnetic field strong enough to penetrate through the scalp and actually have an effect on the brain cells which sits underneath because your brain cells are driven by electrical charge they they send information in

this way so you can get the cells to these brain cells to send messages all at once because you suddenly set off this discharge and you can either use that to stop bits of the brain from working or to make them stimulate parts of the brain so if you move down somebody's motor strip that brain area that i said controls voluntary action you can move fingers and legs and things i can't recommend it it's not very nice i loved it i think it's great i was really annoyed when you couldn't find the bit that made my heart do that. But then you... If you get someone really fancy, there's a little wrinkle in the motor strip called the hand knob.

You're a scientist, have a sense of humour. And you can move the fingers individually. It's very striking. But then you move very slightly forward from that on the left-hand side of the brain, down here, and you can turn off somebody's ability to talk robin we did this i think i did did you jab walk it was something like that it was brillig and the slithy toves did gar and gimbal in the way all mimsy were the boy and then and it was just and you got this like you did it about five or

six times didn't you yeah it was and it was such an intriguing thing because sometimes you could see the words and you couldn't quite understand why you couldn't get... And then sometimes there was like a blank... Each time... He was moving very slightly, wasn't he? I really wish that we'd been able to get more information from you at the time because you could see him moving around very slightly around this area of the brain.

It's called Broca's area because it was discovered by a neuroscientist, a neurologist called Paul Broca. But as you're just moving around that, and it's a verycker's area because it was uh discovered by a neuroscientist neurologist called paul brocker but as you're just moving around that it's a very complex bit of brain you could see the very slightly different experiences that you were having as you were trying to talk so there's so much more going on inside there we're going with a pretty blunt tool but it was very dramatic you did suggest i recommend it to you all all of you get no don't you you did suggest he was unusual there actually you see did he give the suggestion that there was something complex about robin's response i just i just wanted to what we generally do is we say we're going into that bit of the brain and we give

someone a task to do and we you know like you can't move your eyes anymore you can't speak aloud anymore you're slower trying to name things what we don't generally do is just say what does that feel like and it made me think we should do that more particularly with someone who's got a lot of insight into their ability to speak because you were reporting very different you know aspects like you just said sometimes you knew exactly what word you wanted to say but you couldn't say it and other times it was all just gone and And there were tiny, tiny movements involved. So it would have been very interesting to actually spend more time mapping around rather than saying, oh, we've got 40 people and we've got this effect,

just do a journey into your brain. I'm available. I'm happy. I don't care. I don't care if it ruins me. I would like to be, at the very least, I'd like to be a footnote. You know what? Because it was also the inner voices stopped, which was even better, because they don't always stop you know Alan there's a stand like that yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah would you offer yourself up for these kind of experiments Alan because I find it quite I don't know I find it you've got more to lose than I have I mean you're known for your brain right I'm just this kind of rambling hobo, so it wouldn't make that much difference.

As long as I've got a duffel coat, it's fine, you know. I feel like I've never, for example, wanted to be hypnotised. And I'd feel like anything where control was taken away would alarm me, I don't know. Are you alarmed by the idea that... Because it strikes me, the fact that the ways people... For example, the way people in London speak now is different from the way people in London spoke 40 years ago.

That actually evolution might be happening a bit more quickly than we think. People now, kids are going to come out of wombs in the future and start looking for a phone immediately because everyone's brain has evolved to stare at a screen all day long. It's completely terrifying, but there is absolutely no evidence for evolution processes having influenced the modern human brain since we appeared 200,000 years ago. So you're talking about cultural change. You're talking about culture, which is the medium that we're all living in.

And of course, that is what affects the changes in conversations in language and in our love of social media at the moment. As soon as we can get hold of that, that's just what we always wanted, gossip. We had only a few people to gossip with. Now we have millions of people if we need to. And it's the same desires and the same interests but you know multiplied so obviously we go for it it's just like having you know cream cakes rather than

black bread you have all these people to communicate with do you have an anxiety about who they all are yes are they nice and do I like them critical and how do you decide which of them are okay or not okay and that is absolutely what we have to do all the time that's what we are in the background you know busy sort of evaluating is this going to be somebody I can collaborate with is this going to be somebody who will take advantage of me so So we actually, again, are very, very alert to what we hear other people say about these potential collaborators. So if somebody, this is a gossip thing or a tweet, gives you the impression that that's not quite a trustworthy person,

that has enormous weight, and actually experiments have shown that that can trump your own experience with that person that person might be completely trustworthy but you heard that bit of bad stuff about that's fascinating because you've all heard someone say how could you believe that of me yes you know, and someone told you something about me, but you've known me 20 years, you know I would never do that or say that. But they do. Indeed, we all collect this information. It's really very important, of course,

that we realise that we should be suspicious and sceptical of some information, but, you know, it's hard work. The information that we get, good or bad, from other people, is very often much better than the information that we can get from first-hand experience, because we can make lots of errors. We can misjudge the person just by having this, you know... Do we not trust ourselves?

Should we trust ourselves? We might be in a bad mood. We might have provoked that person. Who knows? We are bound to make mistakes unless we have a very, very long time with that other person. Then we know. The consistency of their behaviour

will give us really very good information. But you don't usually have such a long period of time. You need pretty quickly. Ute, tell me why people tell so many lies. Is there some... Does it give pleasure? Is it something that's fun and nice? Some people seem to take more pleasure in lying

than almost any other actor. Well, there are, of course, white lies, which we can't do without entirely, otherwise there would be a lot of friction. And there are embellishments and exaggerations and omissions. So there are an enormous amount of different kinds of lies. And of course there are the outright manipulations and frauds and so on. Yes, because we are human beings

who are not just collaborative, we are a lot of the time collaborative, we are also very competitive. We do want to get advantages over others and somehow we need to be aware of both these sides. You mentioned that we can't understand the brain without reference to the body, so you consider it as a single system. But also you're suggesting that you can't understand the brain without reference to the body. So you consider it as a single system.

But also you're suggesting that you can't understand the brain without the interaction between your brain and other brains. So I want to really see this human network. If we're going to understand our individual brains, we have to understand very well this interaction. And people very often talk about culture as the medium for the human brain in particular. People now also talk about animal culture, and that's quite interesting.

But there is a very big difference. You know, you get different kind of tool use in different tribes of chimpanzees, for example. And that's known as kind of cultural learning. They imitate each other but in in humans there is something else there is what's called cumulative culture it sort of seems to you know build on other things so we're not just influenced by the people who are present here and now we also can be influenced by people in the past through reading. So literacy is one of those major cultural inventions

that sort of suddenly, you know, sped up all the changes that can occur, the accumulation of knowledge and, you know, giving rise to technology, which then again pushes ahead. But it is our human nature to be like that. By the way, lying and deception is dependent on one of those amazing brain abilities that have not been talked about. They've been totally taken for granted until about 50 years ago.

And that's sort of known as theory of mind. That's sort of known as theory of mind. So the idea that you track what other people might believe or know or not know, what they think. And again, that sort of tracking goes on below consciousness. We've talked about, you started talking about the brain as partly mechanical. You said 80 billion neurons. And so you could imagine imagine we can imagine constructing that

or a simulation of it you can imagine in principle measuring everything and every molecule and every neuron and making a construction but also we've talked about this immense complexity because we have to take account not only of our bodies and and everything else that goes with a human but also the other humans and the culture in which we live so do you think you know when we talk about uh artificial intelligence and we think well it's okay we could we could simulate a brain i mean there are projects to simulate brains now there's a human brain project isn't there how much more complex is the human condition than just the the physicality and the structure of the brain well partly it's got to acknowledge the fact that brains don't work out of the box they are shaped and molded by your

development so if i could simulate a brain tomorrow i'd still have to grow that brain for sort of 25 years to get to an adultish brain and and it's not that you kind of grow your brain up to 25 years and then amble along happily until everything rots your brain it makes sense to think of the adult human brain is actually continuously in a state of change because you're affected by minute to minute by emotions and by context but also over a longer time scale by experience and things you learn and you'd also need to think about well what culture is it growing up in what is it learning about because actually where you grow up does affect how your brain works people growing up in the himba community in northern namibia have very different attentional systems from us and we have no idea why

and that in all sorts of directions you find these cultural differences on on how the brain works and then of course it's never only have never happening in isolation and i can't emphasize utah's point enough we don't grow up in test tubes we're intensely social primates from the minute that we're born fully embedded as brains developing in the world in these world created by the other brains around us you'd want that in your simulation as well which would probably only make things harder do we know do we have a number you know if you talk about you know gigabytes of memory or have we tried to estimate how much how many bits are contained in the human it's a very very interesting question and it is really interesting that because of this plasticity

of the human brain just and this ability just can to continue forming new connections, there actually is no known limit to the memory capacity of the human brain. We've never got to the end of it. Now, what you can do is find it difficult to retrieve information, but it doesn't seem to... You can forget, right? Well, you can...

I mean, increase... You can forget, but... Forgetting is often because you didn't actually fully learn it in the first place. How your brain encodes information is quite complex. So everything that's happened to you over today, when you go to sleep tonight, a lot of what you experience as dreams is in fact your hippocampus teaching the rest of your brain about your day. That's why things that happen during your day sort of turn up in your dreams. And that's getting integrated with

and consolidated with the other stuff that you know, such that tomorrow you will actually have learnt better about the things that you did today than you do today. It's why you should always revise the day before an exam, guys. This is informative, helpful information as we move towards GCSEs. Because of these consolidation processes. So when you don't remember something,

it's often because it didn't make it through that consolidation process. And that means it was never part of a memory. One of my favourite things about memory is if you meet somebody, if you've known someone for a long time, if you have friends for 30 years and then you meet someone, what about that time when we went to such and such a place? And you did this and you did that and we did you know it's a bit like the song you I was wearing blue no you I was wearing

the memories that they have are things that you have no memory of the memories that you have no memory of you each have your own individual packet it makes writing history entirely points everybody's memories of the same day the same shared experience are different even had... I found my diary from when I was a teenager and made myself read it, although a lot of it was miserable. And it was really striking. It was like it had been written by somebody else. Like a complete stranger had come in who had a general knowledge of some of the people in my family

and some of the things that happened in my school. If you asked me what happened when I was at school, I would have mentioned almost none of the things that were in the diary. I have to say, a lot of it was also in code. I think maybe strange sex stuff, I don't know. But what's different about me now and me when I was 16 is I want to remember that differently. I've got different aims.

I'm fond now of being 16. 16 at the time was a bit more hard-going. And what mattered to me was different so I'm remembering the same thing completely differently. I love that I don't know if anyone has read the Tracy Thorne's book uh Tracy Thorne from everything but the girl many other things where she she went through her teenage diaries and went I don't understand why I put this down and not a real event she said this was a day where some incredible things happened to me but all I wrote down was I couldn't find the scarf I

wanted in Brent Cross. Now, we've not got to question two, but let's not worry, because we've run out of time. So, well done, by the way, for going straight to the last question, because that was good. Well, it makes me feel that we actually completed the script. No, it creates the illusion of a narrative

arc, and that's the way brains create patterns. So, the audience listening will eventually create the pattern of this appearing to be a cohesive show he hopes um but i very quickly want to just talk about this period of isolation and solitude that we've had uh i wondered from from both utah sorry and and sophie this sense of um what have we been able to learn or have we been able to set up experiments within this period of time during the pandemic to see in this very unusual social situation to learn more? Yes, I think psychologists have been very busy already studying what happens to people. And I think there will be much more research to come. and I think there will be much more research to come.

So we find it, I think to begin with, it was very strange to have these Zoom calls, but now it's an everyday event and I'm sure we will continue to use this instead of travelling long distances just to give a talk or to listen to some speaker. So the question is, what is different when you see people on Zoom? Well, one funny thing is that you see yourself as well, which is not the case when we speak and we're there. The other thing is that we can't really make eye contact. And that is very disturbing. but i suppose we sort of got used to this

or we can have a slight distance from it we have a little more idea but i think it took us a bit of learning to get on with this remote interaction um that's interesting so you you can't use those things that have been we've evolved evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. Especially the eye contact is such a crucial thing for us. And I would guess that there will be techniques developed, a technology developed that enables you to have proper eye contact. If I'm having a conversation with someone on Zoom and I notice there's a biscuit crumb on my screen i can't wipe it off because it feels too it feels like i'm actually you know i feel like they almost feel that my what are you doing what are you doing right at the start of the

first lockdown my partner's also a neuroscientist and we said we really should be scanning everybody shouldn't we we should be somehow we should be allowed to drive around the country with an mri machine i like the way you pretend that's only during lockdown. That's true, that's true. I think one of the things that really made me miss physical space with people, because having an interaction with somebody isn't just talking to them. So for example, where you sit relative to somebody is quite a strong marker of how affiliative you feel. So Zoom is giving you the straight face-to-face thing, which is actually quite aggressive. The most affiliative position is side-by-side. Apparently, that's also true for sheep.

So in case you need to ever know this, you can tell how friendly sheep are by how sort of side-by-side they stand. Just don't say I'm not giving you very useful information for life. But when I go into a meeting at work, actually, it matters who I sit next to. and that's part of the sort of the experience there and you're stripping all of that away laughter zoom is great for having a conversation it's

terrible for laughter because it only lets one person make a sound at a time and you can't if you start laughing together then you all only hear yourself and it's so there's a lot of the kind of the physicality of interactions were harder to manage and it's so there's a lot of the kind of the physicality of interactions were harder to manage and it's made me so much more enjoy being back in the room so one concrete example in my life is it's made me realize how good lectures are for actually not just sharing information with students but having conversations with students and knowing what students look like and knowing what their voices sound like and i would imagine it's fantastic for them to see me. So this is one of the positives that has come out of it that we can actually appreciate more how important it is to

get all of these extra stimuli, this extra feedback. I mean for for example, I really think that when you give a talk on Zoom, it is absolutely terrifying that you have no idea how this is received, do you? Clearly, I mean, you're all in the dark here, and I can't really see individual faces, but I still get a sense that there could be some feedback. It could tell me, stop now talking. That's obviously, you know, don't do that. Or encourage me. Just by being with other people in the same space. That sounds like one of those really awful moments you get in a gig.

You know, when you're playing a town and it's not going well and half an hour in, you're just there going, I still get a sense there could be some feedback. You laugh, not entirely sure. So, Brian, we also asked the audience a question, didn't we? We did, which was, if I could change one thing about my brain, what would it be?

So Kate said, a better long-term memory so I can remember where I put that Kit Kat bar in 1972. She's been bothering you, presumably, for 50 years. Carly says, the ability to remember what I went into a room for. Here it is. To swap with Einstein. But then comma. Obviously when he was alive.

Carol says, the ability to allow me to understand a Brian Cox lecture. This is excellent, Chris. This is a very practical suggestion. A removable brain, so I could take it out before I get a hangover. Chris has said, it's location. I've always wanted Brian Cox's body.

And the good thing about that is at the end of every series, we always auction off the old Brian Cox that we've used before we get the updated model. So keep an eye on eBay. There's one for you, though. Kimberly said, to be more like Robin Ince with his infinite knowledge of books. Let's end there.

To have the ability to know the answer my wife really wants, because then things can only get better. So, thank you very much for those, and thank you very much to our panel, who have been Uta Frith, Sophie Scott and Alan Davis. Next week. Next week week we are asking if one mathematician is traveling from leeds at 40 miles per hour and another mathematician is traveling from exeter at 60 miles an hour and a statistician is having to use a bus replacement service from fort tolbert at 17 miles an hour what is the

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