The Infinite Monkey Cage - The Mind v the Brain

Episode Date: August 7, 2017

The Mind V The Brain.It's one of the hardest problems in neuroscience. How do the chemical processes and electric signals produced by our brains result in the complex and varied experiences and sense of self that we might describe as our mind? Brian Cox and Robin Ince are joined on stage by comedian Katy Brand, and neuroscientists Professor Uta Frith and Professor Sophie Scott to ask whether the mind is simply a product of the biology of our brain, or is there more to it than that? Can you have a brain without a mind, and is the mind simply an unexpected consequence, an emergent property, of our highly evolved and sophisticated brain. They'll also be tackling the question of free will, and whether we really have any, and if you could in theory simulate a fully working brain, with all its signals and complexity, would a mind naturally emerge?Producer: Alexandra Feachem.

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Learn more by listening to Nature Answers wherever you get your podcasts. This is the BBC. Hello, I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Brian Cox. And this is the BBC. Hello, I'm Robert Ince. And I'm Brian Cox, and this is The Infinite Monkey Cage. This week, we are wondering, are you really in charge of you? As the great theatrical innovator and autodidact Ken Campbell said, you is just one of the things your brain does.

Most of the time, your brain doesn't even bother to tell your mind why it's doing what it's doing. Every single day, your brain is. Most of the time, your brain doesn't even bother to tell your mind why it's doing what it's doing. Every single day, your brain is stopping you doing things that you didn't know you were ever going to do. You will have had a moment today where your brain was going, no, not here, not in this shopping centre! Did he do it? No, he didn't. Should we tell him? No. Yeah, you weren't expecting that.

I did. No, I was just thinking your Ken Campbell was more like Ken Livingstone. That's what Ken Campbell's... Ken Campbell's a wonderful book. Great big bushy eyebrows, love of Robert Anton Wilson. Do get on with it. An increasing number of experiments seem to demonstrate that our brain gets on with doing things that our conscious mind just takes... Oh, I'll read that again.

My brain... Looking back, shouldn't have been quite so superior when I screwed up something I was just making up. Mine was just my brain doing that. Yours is there. Yours is there. The second line follows the first. I hope that helps. An increasing number of experiments seem to demonstrate that our brain gets on with doing things

and our conscious mind just takes the credit. For instance, Brian's brain has decided to tell his finger to point towards the Crab Nebula long before conscious Brian is aware that he's about to say, it's the shattered remnant of a star that died in a supernova explosion. And it's wonderful. Today we ask, what is the difference between a brain and a mind?

What is the advantage of having a mind as well as a brain? Do all creatures with brains have a mind? And would we be better off not having a mind at all? Robin. Thank you, Cathy. So, to help us reach an answer or at least generate more questions, we are joined by three minds that really know brains or three brains that really know minds, or a little bit of both,

and they are... Sophie Scott from University College London, and my favourite thing my mind does is go to sleep. Uta Freth, also from University College London, and my favourite thing my mind does is that it can think about itself. I'm Katie Brand. I'm not from any university. I'm a comedian, and my favourite thing about my mind is that when I feel guilty about something,

it will eventually decide that it wasn't really my fault. And this is our panel. Uta, we'll start off with, I suppose, a definition, which is what is the difference between the brain and the mind? Well, first of all, you'd think there is a huge difference. After all, you know, the brain is something you can touch, you can see, and the mind is invisible, let's face it. You can't see it but we've all decided

that what the brain does essentially is produce the mind so without the brain there is no mind so you might as well call it brain mind. Sophie would you is that the definition you'd go for as well? Yes at some level if you wanted to talk about minds and be able to talk about them in any animal I think you'd be quite comfortable saying it's the computational processes of the brain it's what the brain is working to do it's odd because it doesn't feel that way so i feel i mean the ancient greeks thought that it was all the important stuff was happening down in the viscera because that's kind of where it feels like it's happening when you're inhabiting it but that's still your brain telling you that that That's all still being interpreted through your brain.

I was going to ask about that, but then I thought I'd be told off for going off on a tangent too early, but now I realise there's never a too early, is there? Because people do say the gut has its own mind, that it's some sort of separate and it works independently of the brain. Is that complete nonsense, or is there some truth in that? It's not complete nonsense. What we tend to think of as brains across the animal kingdom

is when you get a collection of nerve bodies together and the way it's organized in vertebrates is you've got one big old one that clearly we've got a brain there um but actually it doesn't have to be that way and even in our own bodies we have other little points where there are these collections of nerve bodies that seem to have some computational processes so for example serotonin which is very important in your brain, is produced in massive amounts in your gut. That's a neurotransmitter. So it's definitely the case...

I think the estimation is you've got something about the size of a cat's brain throughout your gut. Now, hopefully... I knew there was something lodged in there. She'll explain how they found that out with that experiment. You're not allowed to do that any more. It was a dodgy pub. I don't know if you're sitting there going,

look at the guts thing, I wonder which animal's brain that's exactly like. I'm going to go out and find it. It's not the shrew, let's try again. But it does seem to suggest that it's probably not doing a lot of the mental work that your brain inside your skull is doing, but it's certainly the case that you've got potential for neural properties elsewhere in the body. So you have the computing power of a cat in your gut, in some sense?

Or is that not the way to look at it? Only if you equate size, I think. It probably doesn't have... So mammal brains aren't just undifferentiated, they've got structure to them. And I think what the gut people mean is if you gathered together all those neurons, it would be about the size of that brain. It wouldn't make it work like that brain.

Which raises the question about the brain is not just the mass of the neurons, but the way that it's connected together. And not only that, I think there's been maybe in the last hundred years or a bit longer where there was really a possibility to think of the brain as just, you know, one thing, one computer doing everything. And what we really have discovered is that there are many, many specialised brains inside it, or minds, you could say that,

and they're actually, they're geographically distinct, and that's really absolutely wonderful. And one of the things that we're all trying to find out is which of these are really there at birth, which of these are put in there by our experience, and how can we change them? And that is all part of our research. And exactly like you just said, you've got these structures,

and it is quite interesting to take a kind of evolutionary perspective because brains have been around for a while. If you go to London Zoo, they've got something in the reptile house where they've got a crocodile skull and it's massive. It's got these great big teeth and these great big sort of nostrils and these eye holes and right at the back, and it's really thick, right at the back there is something, there is a cavity the size of the top joint of my little finger, which is very small and dainty.

And that is its brain case. That's where its brains go. Now, crocodiles do pretty well with those brains. You know, me and a crocodile are facing off together in certain circumstances. The crocodile would probably still win. But it's doing a phenomenal amount with just that. And actually within that, you have some of the same structures

you have in your brain. Some of the stuff in the brain stem, the stuff sitting at the top of the spine, is operating in a very similar way in the crocodile and then in evolution we've adapted and elaborated and grown upon that. There was something you said there, Uta, which fascinated me, which you said there are many different

sub-brains in there, which I can imagine, picturing the structures that have been distributed around the brain. But you also said all minds. Oh, yes. Did you mean that there are autonomous centres there? There could be. Well, people call them hubs, I think.

It's all to do with the connections between these various localised little bits. But I think you've already alluded to the fact that there is at least two minds. One is this conscious mind and the other is this big unconscious mind of course there are many more divisions that we can make in in both of them and it's really really interesting to think about how they communicate with each other is it just the tip of an iceberg we see there or again is it all very um you know

sometimes very uneasy relationships between the two and i think get that sense of, like, different bits... Well, I do, anyway, different bits of my mind talking to each other. The other day I was sitting outside in the garden and two parts were having a conversation with each other and I thought, that's it, oh, that's great, that's just me talking to me, that's fine. And then I suddenly had a thought of going, oh, that's nice, look, you two talking to each other nicely, that's nice.

And I was like, the other bits turned around and went, who the hell are you? It's like bits just turn up throughout the conversation. I don't know where they are. Because I was going to say that self is often perceived, I suppose, as being a singular thing. I mean, I tend to think of myself as one thing. So this would be the self at the top of everything.

This is sort of an idea that seems so plausible, doesn't it? And we all work on it. It's one of those amazing stories that we just have to believe because it makes our social life possible. But if we're looking for that in the brain, it's nowhere to be found. There was an idea, I think, that there could be a little... What is it, a mini-me, something like that somewhere in the brain.

A self-symbol, I've read sometimes. Is that just nonsense? Well, I would love to find such a thing, I have to say, but it's always elusive. We have this possibly elaborate story, illusion, that we are this continuous whole self, but what do we know? It's lots of gaps, probably, that we just paper over and don't notice. We have these experiences.

You all have the experience that you've been, say, reading a page in a book, and you suddenly get to the end of it, and you have no memory of what it actually was that you were reading. And that, you know, your mind was busy doing that, but you're not necessarily aware of it. But that's... When you were saying about the little man, that kind of homunculus, isn't it, the idea of the heart?

And that doesn't work, does it? Because then you have to go, hang on a minute, the homunculus, what lies behind that? And that homunculus needs a homunculus to observe it. And, you know, where does the buck stop? That's sort of the problem. It's a nice idea, though, isn't it? I think so.

Infinite regressive homunculi. I love it. I love it. I love it. I'm still having some hope you will find some place in the brain, somewhere deep down, really deep down, where everything comes together. Well, just a big sneeze one day. Oh, my goodness! What am I doing here?

Oh, I'm sorry, Hermione, cos I'll stick you back up now. And exactly what you were saying about kind of papering over experience, one thing that happens every single time you move your eyes, so if people in the audience, if you look from Uta to Brian and then back again without moving your head, you're making what's called a saccade, and we do it all the time. We continuously move our eyes around. When you do that, you stop vision.

You turn off vision in your brain. You stop seeing. Now, you feel like you're seeing. You probably felt that you saw Robin, but actually you didn't. And you move your eyes all the time. It takes about 200 milliseconds of you to then move your eyes again. So you're doing it continuously. And also, this happens every single time you blink, which seems like redundancy, because you've already closed your eyes,

but your brain also closes down vision. What this means in practice is that we are functionally blind for 15% of the day. And we don't realise it. We're not aware of it, you don't notice it, you feel like you're seeing it because your brain fills it in. It knows roughly what's going on. I could do an experiment where I asked you to look

from Uta to Brian and then I could replace Robin with, you know, some hats and there would be a second... Do you know what? Rakey4 have been suggesting that. Apparently. This seems to be quite offensive, Brian and another human. What about some hats? What about a pile of trilbies?

That's episode four, by the way. Is that how you see yourself? A pile of trilbies? That's episode four, by the way. Is that how you see yourself, a pile of trilbies? Yeah. I see myself as any hat that... Bobble hat. Yeah, a thing with a few threads. Maybe flaps and a cute hat. No, no, no.

I am any hat that Herbert Lom would have worn. There was a thing I was interested in as well, and now we're on the subject of blindness. There are some people that I've read about that believe themselves to be blind and genuinely experience life as a blind person. But apparently when sort of tested in terms of walking a straight path with an obstacle, they will still move around the obstacle or they'll flinch if someone does something. That seems like a very interesting sort of

dysfunction between the brain and the mind. And part of that seems to be, there is a distinction, part of what the relationship between conscious and unconscious processes is, does depend on brain areas. So there are some brain areas and some brain processes that we are much more conscious of than others. So the parts of your brain and the brain processes that are doing right now, say, understanding the words I'm saying, the recognition processes, recognising faces,

that tends to be what you're aware of. If that's damaged, you can have the experience of not seeing those things. However, there are other parts of your brain which don't care at all about what you're looking at and absolutely care about getting you safely about the environment and guiding you visually.

They can still be intact. That's the idea. You might be functionally blind and have no experience of seeing things but actually still react to stuff that might be a threat to you because parts of your brain going whoa get around that and it doesn't mean you're lying it doesn't mean you're faking it it means genuinely your visual processing is not one thing perception is never only one thing and only part of that normally is what we're generally actually aware of and there's loads of perceptual processing that happily buzzes away without you're generally actually aware of. And there's loads of perceptual processing

that happily buzzes away without you ever really being aware of it. But it's absolutely critical to you doing things like moving around in the world. It explains how an ex-boyfriend of mine could both ignore me and avoid me at the same time. Extraordinary, extraordinary. I think the example is really interesting also because it tells us that we can really learn about our mind if we look at people who have some brain damage and nothing tells you more about the dependence of the mind

on the brain than cases of brain injury and this is actually sad as it is this is how we learn most about it you know people who had lesions in the war that were very focal, you know, not just the whole head, but certain things. That's how the neurologists and neuroscientists first became aware of the fact that you could have such strange disconnections that we thought, you know, it all comes in one package.

And this was the first time that we could see all these different compartments. I heard... Was it Claudius Galen who came up with it? He was looking at... He was a doctor, amongst other things, for gladiators. And at that point, I presume the brain was still considered to be predominantly a heating system. They'd kind of zeroed in on the brain,

but they thought the important part were the ventricles. So there was debate for a while. Aristotle thought it was really the liver and the heart and the brain was not particularly useful. Galen, by that stage, they knew there was something going on in the brain. They even had quite a good idea about where you'd had a sword stuck into your head might lead to specific problems for the short amount of time you were allowed after that. I'm assuming. I don't know very much about gladiator injuries.

It's always nice to find out a scientist has got a weak spot. Don't ask anything else about this. If you look at the brain, it's floating inside the brain case, inside the skull. What it's floating in is cerebrospinal fluid. That gives us a certain amount of flexibility.

We can move our head around without our brain brushing up against the rather harsh inside of the skull. And that cerebrospinal fluid is kept under a very constant pressure. And one of the ways your brain keeps... the whole system keeps us under a constant pressure is there are also... there's fluid around it, and then the fluid kind of goes inside into these kind of reservoirs, and they're just ventricles.

There's just gaps where there is more cerebrospinal fluid. And if, for example, your brain starts to atrophy and gets smaller, more cerebrospinal fluid will be kind of pumped in so that you keep the pressure the same. That's what it's doing, it's a reservoir. Now, because the brain autopsy is really, really hard to work with, it's runny, it's hard, it doesn't seem to have much structure, it goes off super quickly, apparently, if you're in ancient Greece.

But because cerebral spinal fluid is clear, that was felt to be a much better candidate for sort of the noble functions of the brain. I'm taking a very long time to stay. He therefore thought it was the ventricles was actually where everything happened. So even though you've actually got a pretty good idea about injuries to the front of your brain

do do something different from injuries to the back of your brain but they still thought it's because the ventricles have been compromised the way you're speaking about the brain so things like vision so it's a it's a physical process processing essentially so it's something that happens in order to run your body and then there's this other thing which is mind which sort of emerges as you described it perhaps maybe yeah you take issue with that word but well perhaps first of all you shook your head there when i said it's interesting because i'm always a little bit dubious when when somebody says it emerges because it to me that says oh we can get somewhere from bottom up you know you do the physiology and you you get everything right you get all the nerve cells you do the physiology and you get everything right,

you get all the nerve cells there, and in the end you get the perception. Maybe not. Maybe you need something that comes from the other side. Maybe you need an idea of what it is that you might be seeing. I mean, that's the funny thing about perception. It isn't in that sense bottom up. It isn't as if you could expect to always get a meaningful impression. On the contrary, it's clear, I mean, amazing as it is, but I think we are born with certain ideas, forms in the brain. For example, what a face is roughly like. It really is amazing, but people have done experiments with newborn, you know, minute-old babies,

and they showed, like, a pattern of dot, dot, dot, you know, their sort of most primitive face, and they waved it in front of the face, and the children were very interested, and they turned it upside down, the dot at the top, not like a face at all, and they weren't interested. Because the second part of that question I wanted to ask was whether the mind, so our experience of ourself, whether that's a side effect of this processing power that we evolved in order to run our bodies, essentially, and do the things that we do.

That's a very nice idea, but it stood us in good stead because it made us into the social beings that we are. Because I think that's what's so interesting we we can talk to each other about our experiences so it's not really very much I can't call it a side effect if it's an absolute basis for our you know conversations tonight for example that's one of the interesting things about consciousness isn't is it right that when we develop as we develop language consciousness develops alongside that so you can sort of see so for you when you can name something you have a concept of it and then you can abstract the concept and then that becomes part of your mind it's certainly so the perceptual processes we tend to be more conscious of are for example the ones

involved in language that we're recognizing language understanding language producing thinking about your own language you're much more aware of that aspect of auditory processing. But that might still actually be some kind of re-descriptive process. So Rosemary Varley, who works at UCL, has done amazing experiments with people who've had strokes which have completely robbed them of language. You have to communicate with them by drawing pictures and they'll draw a picture back in a diagram.

So she has one chap who is really phenomenally impaired in terms of his language. He is absolutely perfect on logic problems. He is better than young people at math problems because he's older. I take a great deal apart from that.

If I just naturally improved at maths with age, then that would be fantastic. So one of the things that's really interesting about her data is it suggests that even that aspect, that contribution of language may not be central. If I'm doing a maths problem, I feel like I'm using linguistic skills to do that and I feel like I'm consciously aware of them.

Her data suggests that you may not be and you may not need to. But it doesn't mean to say that it's pointless or it's just a sort of epiphenomenon. There might be other people make other arguments that there could be other value to this. So that you're kind of running internal monologue or perhaps always a dialogue, maybe you're always talking to someone. That might not be entirely pointless

in terms of perhaps your management of your emotional state or lots of other things that we do. It's not all solving logic problems and maths. Because sometimes... Because I remember being offered magic mushrooms once, and the guy said it's amazing because it's like your brain all split into quarters and start talking to each other.

And I was like, but I feel like that all the time. What I want is something that makes them all kind of collapse into a sort of one mess that I can deal with, and there's a drug for that which I really like, and it's called booze. And I find that works very, very well. So I have this constant chat anyway, and sometimes it drives me nuts.

And I never know who's... What is the nature of that? I know it's sort of an unanswerable question, but... Do you experience it as people talking to you? Do you feel like you're having conversations with other voices? I experience it as if I'm listening to, like, a radio play. I can actually hear the dialogue. I can hear three or four people talking, not different voices.

Am I sort of diagnosing myself with...? No, no, no. Is there going to be an ambulance outside? It's actually... So for a very, very long time, in modern psychiatry, hearing voices was considered for a long time to be a symptom of psychiatric problems. And indeed, many people with psychiatric problems, people with a

diagnosis of schizophrenia, people with bipolar disorder, hear voices. It's now become clear that for every single person out there who has a psychiatric diagnosis anti-voices, which is not everybody with a psychiatric diagnosis, there are as many people who have no psychiatric diagnosis whatsoever and hear loads of voices all the time. And they've always been around, people like Joan of Arc. They used to be venerated and considered to be very important, and nowadays, because we've got very labourly about it, they tend just not to tell you.

Oh, yeah, hear loads of voices. Well, now I've confessed it on Radio 4. I expect to be burned at the stake on Portland Place. And it's really interesting. So one of the ideas is that maybe you're really describing essentially what everybody's experiencing, but there is something qualitatively different about your experience that's giving you this sense of otherness to aspects of those voices.

So it's possibly all you, as you're describing it, and that's basically what you said earlier, but your experience is still kind of labelling it other. Yeah, or do you not have a conversation, like when someone's really annoyed you and you want to really give it to them, do you not sort of rehearse and enjoy you winning the argument in your head first

and do their bit of the argument but losing? Don't you? It's actually quite a good point, because there's an argument that says that what you do when you have an internal dialogue is very fun. For most people, it's not very fleshed out out it's kind of like a frame of words but you haven't got a voice to it and if you're having that and I definitely I've had this experience if I start running you know I think about something that makes me more and more and more and more

angry say it myself just before I get to the point of actually saying oh shut up Sophie I've got to the point where it's become more and more and more voice. And then it becomes my voice, and I'm saying it, and I'm actually walking down the street shouting at myself. But it's the emotion that's doing that. It's not just the presence of the voices, it's you and your emotional state that's actually starting to make it more real. So sometimes emotion is kind of the side of this

that you need to factor in, because it's actually often argued to play quite a big part in these sorts of experiences and is emotion considered to be encompassed by the word the mind oh yes oh everything the brain does is the mind you know whatever happens in our head and it certainly includes the emotions but is the mind bigger than the brain to brian's question which i think in in a way was you know, do we actually know what the mind is for, the conscious mind is for? Why do we have it at all?

Yes. And I think that is a really, really difficult question because we can operate in many ways so well without being consciously aware. And one of the possible answers is really that it gives us this huge capacity to communicate with people like ourselves and to have a really fluid and excellent sense of our action and therefore our responsibility. So we know we are agents when we do things. That's what I was going to ask. Is there a

moral dimension to that? There is a moral dimension. You also mentioned that example that you can tell yourself why you shouldn't feel guilty about something. Now, that's something I believe our conscious mind is an expert in. It always finds justifications post hoc. And it's just, like, made for that. Is that because the mind makes us the hero of our own story sort of yeah yeah yeah it is exactly that you know it gives us all sorts of other feelings about you know feeling good about ourselves of course and in a way it's it's necessary because

we wouldn't do do anything probably or you'd or many i you know i'd probably all the things up bad things i've done to feel guilty about i I've thrown myself off a bridge by now. So thank you, mind, for telling me that every single time I was actually in the right and perfectly justified in stealing that bin, I was absolutely fine. I bought a bin before. I've spent a lot of money in that shop and it had gone wrong. Anyway, I'm just going to stop talking now. We have never had someone admit to so much...

First of all, can I deal with my voices? Then some of my crimes. Did the voices tell you? Take the bin. See, I think in performing, though, don't you have a lot of voices? Because I think that's quite normal. I think the moment that you're using, you know, voices... You know, I spend most of my day...

I had a pretend Mexican in my head doing a narration today just to kind of make life... Someone with gravitas. When? We've been together all day. You mean half the people sat there to pretend Mexican. I haven't listened to a thing you've said. You have spent the whole day... What was the Mexican saying?

Well, I couldn't hear some of it because Ennio Morricone played every time he came on. But it's interesting you say that because I have it on stage while I'm performing. Do you have that? Which is one of the worst and most freaky things is that when your voice is saying the words, not necessarily scripted in stand-up,

but words that are familiar that you've performed before, another part of your mind just sort of breaks away and starts observing you on stage while you're saying the lines and the audience is there and they're laughing, just going, what are you doing? What a ridiculous job this is. You're going to mess up the next joke. I bet you don't even remember it

and then another part of my brain comes in and goes this is very cocky of you to just be observing yourself I think you'd better get back on it the reason I asked the previous question about how this emerges and whether it's a side effect is that there surely can be no evolutionary advantage to the sort of thing that Casey's describing there

I mean it's more likely to be eaten on the savannah... I'm a dud. ..when you're sat there having an argument with someone. We're all examples of introspection. And that is one of the phenomena. Why on earth is this possible in the first place? We can really do that. That's the thinking about ourselves.

And what does it do to us? Well, it's incredibly important to tell each other about these things. We probably learn about our own thoughts and voices and stuff like that by interacting with others, listening to them, what they're saying. And in this sense, we really have to come to that point that our mind is totally dependent on this sort of social context and is actually shaped and formed by it. So, you know, tiny children, we know nothing about the world,

we have to learn everything, but we don't learn it from scratch. We learn it by observing other people who've already learned it before. So we are much faster. We can really do these things. And the really fast thing is if we can give each other instructions. We don't have to work it out. Ah, all right, this is the way you do it. You can just tell me. And this is how our conscious mind and our introspection,

I think, really enables us to sort of go up a notch compared maybe to other animals. It is quite interesting. If you look at, along these lines, if you look at the emergence of modern humans, as far as we're aware, there have been no changes. There has not been an evolutionary process that means we are different from the first appearance of modern humans.

So if you potentially could take a baby from that time, drop them in now, raise them in this culture, they would not struggle for a second with any of the things we encounter. And if we consider that one of the hallmarks of these big brains that we've got is that we are phenomenally, we're kind of novelty seeking, we're interested in finding

things out, we're kind of motivated to see things as being possibly different. On the world, as soon as you get modern humans, they start making things beyond completely utilitarian things we were making tools before we were modern humans when we start making beautiful tools and we start making jewelry and we start caring about other sorts of stuff that how we could change the world around us so one of the things that seems to be genuinely different

one of the things about human cognition is this kind of motivation for change and difference and novelty, and maybe that's kind of feeding into a desire not to be bored. Obviously, that's the way we get... One of our colleagues was really interested because he thought he'd found a dead crocodile and he went to conference. He'd got a PhD, and he and all his PhD friends go up, oh, definitely a dead crocodile, and they pursue this dead crocodile,

get right up to it, throwing sticks at it to prove it's definitely dead, and then, of course, the crocodile goes, ah, and chases them for ages, and they couldn't get their bikes back. So in that context, again, the novelty-sinking brain... I have so many questions about this story. This is a whole spin-off series. Neuroscientists don't know gladiator wounds or alligators. They are the two biggest things.

Alligators or any of the crocodilia, they're rubbish at it. Right, terrible. Just until I could lock, point at it. Ah! Oh, now I've lost my grifter. But this kind of, like, continual shift, and it's one of the things that really marks us out as unusual is we can pretty much live anywhere.

We can pretty much eat anything, we can hunt. We're continuously sort of thinking things to be different finding out about things, making stuff and then losing those to change, you know to solve problems we didn't even know were problems But that's sort of having an imagination as well So that's what I'm saying, maybe that's the kind of thing

we should think of in terms of, again, of a value we're not just reacting to the world we can think about how it could be different and it doesn't matter when you do that. Consciousness is useless for getting you around the world. If you trip and you stumble and you catch your feet back underneath you, you had no conscious say over how that happened.

If you waited for consciousness, you would be lying flat on the ground with your face pressed against the concrete, thinking, yeah, I think I've fallen, better sort that out. And you don't need to be conscious of that stuff, but maybe you do need to be conscious about creating things and making things and thinking things. Things could be different, and you're interested in finding that out.

Does this mean that there isn't a kind of spectrum of mind amongst other animals? So you see there's a bit of mind in a cat and a bit more in a dog and a bit more in a chimpanzee, maybe. Does it mean... You seem to be implying that there's something very different about Homo sapiens. It's almost switched on. It's not a linear thing where we could get all the animals in the world

and list them, but you do see these bits appearing. One of the things that's really interesting is if you teach other animals to communicate with humans, and you can, you can teach chimps to sign. You can teach gorillas to sign. You can teach parrots to talk. And Alex the parrot was very good at discussing things with... You know, could do quite a lot of stuff with language.

You can teach seals to talk. People have pointed out what they never do is ask questions, OK? They say things like, I want a nut. I'm a parrot, uh, you know. Or, you know, there's a parrot at London Zoo that's learned to say hello and what it means when he says hello is he's going to attack you, it's a threat. You know, so they're really interesting. So the thing to me, you can kind of use that symbol,

but you're, that's it, I've got the symbol, I've got my nut. One thing that once, Alex the parrot, they were teaching him colours. So you could say to Alex, find the green triangle, and he could do that and he wouldn't get the red square. He could use that information referentially. And when they'd been teaching him colours, he was looking at himself in a mirror and he said, What colour?

Meaning, what colour am I? And they told him he was grey. And then he knew the colour grey, but he also knew he was grey. And that's literally the only example out there. I mean, maybe we haven't just taught enough animals to speak yet. Come on, science. But it does suggest that Alex had some sense. It was him he was looking at in the mirror.

And hang on, you haven't discussed this colour at all with me. A parrot said, what colour am I? I feel slightly tearful. What, you think it was disappointing? It was just, look, grey. Look at those macaws! But there is something terrifying. The point that you first get an animal you've talked to speak and it just suddenly goes, why?

And you think, that's never going to be happy again, is it? He's reached his sultra stage. But this does imply, then, that mind is something that emerges from complexity and the more complex by some measure your brain is, the more mind you have. Well I suppose we've been using mind to mean different

things. Sometimes we're just meaning to describe any kind of behaviour that I'm going to impute some processing to. We are also using it to mean conscious experience and actually kind of some functional role, so that was some emergence of that. So I think this is... It pains me to say this,

but it's a situation where it's quite useful to have a philosophical take on it, to be really careful about what we think we're saying. I think I'm happily studying minds. I pretty much never study consciousness. So I think there's that. But I think it is really interesting that it's almost

certainly not something that is coming out as one single property that somehow just builds up and up in complexity. So you can see that with Alex, you were able to find out that he had some idea that he was there and that he had a colour and you haven't told me about that and I want to know what it is. So that kind of curiosity was there in addition to the ability to be able to communicate it, in addition to the ability to realise it was himself in the mirror. Those are already three quite separate things. To know who to ask, to perceive that the other person might have the knowledge.

That's Alex. I mean, I'm going to find him and see if he'll have dinner. I've got very, very sad news. That's him perceiving that there're sweet. Oh, no. And normally they live so long, but he'd heard rumours. Bran's coming for you. Why?

That's going to take him to Nando's. He wouldn't like that. One of Nando's. Nando's? You are what? A toxic individual. Bin thief with your many voices saying, take the parrot to Nando's as a threat.

Do you want to go back to my place? I'd better, yeah. Or do you want to live in a bucket? I'm just going back to definitions, because we've ended up talking about a lot of other things, but the mind thing, I just quite... Theory of mind and mind, because when I've sometimes read things about theory of mind, that seems

to talk about actual understanding, empathy, things that are conscious parts of our experience and our way to... So, when we say theory of mind, are we looking at a different definition of mind? Well, this is Uta's. Yeah, well,

it's folk language, you know, it's folk psychology when we talk about theory of mind. Well, this is Uta's. Yeah, well, it's folk language. You know, it's folk psychology when we talk about theory of mind. Actually, it all comes from a very sensible division that we make. The physical world and the mental world. Think about that. We shouldn't really do that, should we? We should think of it all being physical, in a sense. But it works out very, very well

if we think about, you think about looking for cause and effect and different objects in the physical world. We can understand that. And when we talk about the psychological world, the mental world, other people, we're not looking at cause and effect. We're looking at intentions, desires, feelings. So it looks like completely different rules and different things. That's what's called a theory of mind.

But actually, it's not conscious. I mean, philosophers have that. They can write about it and so on. But how we do it? Well, we have a brain system for it. We do have an app for it. It's there. It's a very, very interesting question about,

is it only in humans? Well, maybe. There was a really nice study from Germany where they showed that dogs have something that looks like a theory of mind in that they will steal food they've been told not to eat if they know the human who's in the room with them cannot see them. Well, we've all been there.

I've got to say. It gets pretty close. It gets pretty close. And they do this by manipulating the lights in the room. Now, if you turn the lights off on the human so the dog can't see the human, the dogs don't steal the food, because they know. They're not like children going,

oh, you can't see me, I've closed my eyes. They know that although they can't see the human, the human can still see them. And that being said if you look at the study, every dog was running in every condition and some dogs simply stole the food. It doesn't really matter what the lights were doing they were like, yeah, yeah, having it. My dog used to put his head

in the hedge but then poo on the path. Because he thought if he couldn't see anyone then they couldn't see him. Did you take him to Nando's? Because both of you work at UCL, and I've been to UCL and had my brain scanned, and it was there, so shut up.

But how much can we learn from that kind of technology? I mean, are we able to learn... What do we learn from the kind of technology? I mean, are we able to learn... What do we learn from the mind by the level of brain scanning that we have now with the MRIs, et cetera? Well, you're asking someone who does it, so I'm going to say masses. Absolutely masses. It's absolutely central and critical, in fact, to understanding of the mind. It has been really, really helpful.

I mean, other than, you know, the initial studies were basically saying things are happening in the brain, which we were up on that. We knew the brain was important. We're not Aristotle. But actually, the level of precision and the kinds of different ways we started to be able to relate function to anatomy has been really helpful and interesting, and also individual differences. So our colleague, Garen Rees, has shown that you can give people a visual illusion where you get a sense that two circles are a different size

because of how you've shaped space around them, shaped lines around them, you can find that there will be difference across people. Some people are more susceptible to that illusion, some people are less susceptible. But you can actually see the traces of this in their brain responses. So the people who think they're seeing a bigger circle show a larger response. So it's also... That does seem to suggest that there is some meaningful dimension to their experience of being more or less tricked by the illusion. People talk often on social media about the hive mind, don't they, about all of us having this sort of shared cultural...

Social beings, as we are. I was always interested in the thing about marketing. For example, on Disney, where Mickey Mouse is just three circles, and Walt Disney's thing was, you need to make an image just out of three shapes, and if that's the basis, then anyone will be able to recognise it. And that's true of Mickey Mouse. If you see a big black circle with two black circles above it,

most people in the sort of Western world will say, that's Mickey Mouse. Is that a kind of a cultural sort of hive mind where we're all kind of perceiving shapes but making it into a sort of cultural reference? I think it's what Uta was suggesting we do all the time, so we try and see meaning. We don't kind of look at the world and then go,

oh, hang on, there's some blobs out there, maybe they're faces, possibly, hang on. I think I see a nose. I think we have some pre, you know, we have some kind of templates. Priors. Yeah, priors, as we call them, already there to start with. But what's very interesting about Mickey Mouse is that it also moves in a way that we perceive as biological movement, the movement that an agent has.

And it's very different from, you know, billiard balls or rock or something like that. And we're very sensitive to this. Here, it could be a predator or something nice to eat or God knows what. So this is really, really an important aspect of what the mind, brain does. But I wanted to give an example of an experiment which, just to say, it has been changing our mind about what the mind is. That was one of the very earliest experiments done when just the idea started with PET scanning, not the way it's done now, with this very dangerous method. I won't go

into it. No, it was brilliant. I loved it. You made people radioactive. Yes. It was brilliant. I loved it. You made people radioactive. Yes. It was real. I loved it. See, the way you made science. Positron emission tomography, that's antimatter. I actually injected them with radioactivity. I loved it. So in those good old days...

Anyway, it was really... A first... A really simple experiment, absolutely brilliant. I can just describe it. It was the idea, how can we find out if there is something about willed action, voluntary action? So the experiment was like this. You had two hands lying in a scanner,

and you had two buttons under the hands, under the fingers, and you were touched on one side or on the other side, and then you had to use that finger to press the button. That was the non-voluntary condition, OK? Control, baseline. And then you had the condition where you were also touched just to keep everything the same. Good experiment.

But you were told, now you choose the left or the right so that's your own free will and what could you see when you compare the brain activity in these two conditions you know it's really very crude because the brain of course is completely active and it's only hugely tiny amount but you can see a very significant area of activity in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. That's absolutely wonderful. So there was something special and different about the voluntary action. And furthermore, this very same area, when that's damaged in cases that you can study, that willed action doesn't function anymore. These are people who, first of all, they can't do anything, they have total apathy, they don't have the interest to do things,

and secondly, they are completely dominated by outside stimuli that grab them. So there's this example about the pair of glasses on the table, patient takes them, puts them up, another pair of glasses, puts them on top, another pair of glasses on the table, patient takes them, puts them up, another pair of glasses, puts them on top, another pair of glasses, which is exactly a non-voluntary stimulus-driven action, two very different phenomena. So that sense, just looking at the brain activity,

could give you a localisation, which was amazing, combining it with data from brain damage, telling you that it was an area that was necessary for that experience. You know, we're almost running out of time, but I just have time to ask you what free will is. OK. It's the feeling that you're not trapped in this world where you have to respond immediately to everything,

like this patient who didn't have that brain area functioning anymore. It's that release that we have to be able to plan a little bit ahead and to feel that we are master of our actions. I had one question. Am I allowed to ask it? Yes. Thank you, Robin. Which one of your voices will you use for your...

I'll say it, and then you can decide. I was in... At the beginning of the show, we had a brief discussion about memories creating... A patchwork of memories creating a sense of self and the sense of the self being a sort of part of the mind and whether that's an illusion or whether that's real and it's all ever-changing and I was wondering as we talked about that whether now with people being able to

document their lives and capture their memories so comprehensively with camera phones and social media whether that will have an effect on how accurately your mind perceives your... You know, whether that will have an effect on the mind and the self, because in my mind, you know, memories from when I was little are kind of strange snapshots and all of that stuff, whereas teenagers now will have incredibly well-documented sort of catalogues.

I think it's an excellent question, and the same question was asked when photographs first became available, because before, people even knew what they were like as young children. They didn't have that either. And then think further back, you know, before diaries could be written, or any... Even not a diary, but just, you know,

like a date of birth or something like that. So we actually have been changing. I think these are the sort of effects on our probably conscious mind that we absorb and that changes our brain in certain ways, in the way it functions. So I think this would have an effect. I'm sure it will. I'm not necessarily sure that it will be sort of, like, more truthful.

I think it will always be a story, because that's what we do about ourselves. We're telling ourselves stories. Sophie? I found my diary from when I was 16. Now, I liked being 16. It was great. And I could tell you things I did. And I found the diary.

Well, don't stop there. Very excellent time. I had very good shoes. But the thing that was really striking was it felt like someone else had written it. Because almost none of the stuff in it I remembered, and the stuff I would have told you about that happened in those times were not included. It was quite

extraordinary. Of course, someone else had written it. The story I wanted to tell when I was 16 was completely different from the story I'd like to tell now about when I was 16 was completely different from the story I'd like to tell now about when I was 16. Yes. So there is this weird kind of negotiation of the self. Well, there's a sense that you're performing to yourself.

You are entirely. The same thing with a diary, is that I abandoned it in the end because I was never properly honest in my diary because I would write it with the expectation that someone was going to find it and read it. So I would just try and present my best self for two months. That's probably always yourself. That's always our best guess right now for this situation.

Now some things do seem to stay the same. Personality traits don't change very much over your lifestyle. Should you be born incredibly extrovert, it's probably going to stay that way. For example... Lots of other stuff. The kind of stories,

your affiliations, what you'd like to be, your aspirations, they can change, but there will be other things that have remained pretty constant, and we don't really understand how the tension between those two is being played out at all. Could I just ask, as we get to the end, last week we had a long discussion about whether

or not we're living in a simulation, which I'm not going to ask, but part of that discussion was whether a computer could, at some point, have a mind, or whether we think the mind is linked, so inexorably linked to the brain.

But I don't think it's just linked to the brain. All of us have spent a long time training our brains up. Everything Uta was talking about in terms of development is affected what your brain's like now. So I think the computer couldn't just be programmed. It would have to grow up. I agree.

You would have to develop that brain. It could be conscious in principle. It could be conscious in principle. I absolutely think so, yes. Right, unfortunately, we have run out of time, which has meant that I've not been able to ask any of you whether, in fact, all of our experience and what we believe we've done is merely post-hoc rationalisation, which is a great pity, because...

We could have a one-word answer, Sophie. No, let's... Yes. Oh, you know, who'd say yes? Who'd say yes? For large chunks of your conscious experience, it's just you kind of, well, that just happened, and now I'm explaining it to myself. Why did I just do that? It was probably for brilliant reasons.

So the answer is yes. Good. I've just been distracted, because ever since PET scans came up, all I imagined was that was the term you used when you went cruising for parrots. So we asked... I go cruising for parrots. This has been... Considering you've been on the show eight or nine times and I've known you for ten years,

but I've never known as much about you as I have found out in the last half hour. That's because I've drunk a bottle of gin. Or have you? Maybe you have... Anyway, so this is... We asked the audience a question and this week the question was, what's the oddest thing you've done without being consciously aware of it? And the answers have included,

once, after drinking too much absinthe, I prepared for my sober self a sandwich with a £10 note inside. Well done, Tim. Sue Neill says, got married. I hope your husband isn't angry with you. Whilst on a walking holiday in Wales, I foolishly decided to call a snap general election. LAUGHTER

APPLAUSE Oh, the wheat fields near Gower will have been damaged. So, thank you very much to our panel, Professor Sophie Scott, Professor Uta Frith and Katie Brand. That is the end of this series of The Infinite Monkey Cage, in which we have met a man who's been on the moon, debated if we're merely part of a computer

simulation, and eaten grasshoppers. Except Brian didn't, because he went, oh, I can't, they don't really agree with me. More and more as I hang around with Alan Bennett. Oh, Mother saw the crab nebula the other day while... ..putting paste on an oat cake. Anyway.

And when I look, there's a black hole in the sugar. It's not the dark matter that worries me, it's the dark energy, and I seem to have none of either at the moment. LAUGHTER So... APPLAUSE So... Anyway, Brian, as it is the end of the series, what are your final thoughts? I was just thinking about a dinner I had the other night, actually.

No, at the dinner, I learnt that, actually, indeed, as I suspected and feared, it's not possible to push the Big Bang singularity infinitely far into the past in an inflationary universe. Although in quantum gravity, all bets are off. 16th series in, and I still haven't got a clue. I have no idea. I know for him, it's good news.

So, what a nice way to end the series. Thank you very much, and bye-bye. APPLAUSE Thank you very much and bye-bye. Thank you. 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.