Susan Greenfield Meet the Author

Now it's time for Meet the Author, with Jim Naughtie.

You can try to understand the brain in many ways,

As a biological mechanism, maybe as some kind of philosophical

machine or as the source of our emotions, but so many

Well, Susan Greenfield, one of our best-known neuroscientists,

and a celebrated guide to the complexities of the brain,

is offering quite a novel way of looking at it.

A Day In The Life Of The Brain is the title of her book

and it explains how she has gone about her exploration.

From dawn to dusk through sleep, She describes what is going

on inside our heads and lays out a theory about how it all works.

You are using the device of a day in the life of a brain,

a human brain, to try to tell us a story about what's going on.

OK, what I'm trying to do is explore something we all take for granted,

and bring home to people how actually, it's no short

of a miracle, and that is the subjective, in a world

We call it consciousness, it's very hard to define but we all know

It's what you lose at night and it's what you lose

But I try and probe a little bit through the prism of neuroscience

to share with the general reader just what we know,

what we don't know, what kind of questions we ask.

I think the reason I chose the day was because, carrying on from a book

I wrote 15 years ago, but now backed up by experimental

evidence, I suggest that consciousness isn't all or none,

And as you go through the day, then things vary.

Your depth of consciousness varies according to what you're doing

I think we should get that that, that...

Let's get that out on the table straightaway.

What is a neuronal assembly and why does it matter?

OK, let me answer the second part of the question first.

The problem with consciousness is that either you have the subjective

phenomenon that we can all appreciate and understand,

and then we have the bump and grind of the brain cells,

And how the two relate is very hard and until now,

people have struggled to relate the subjectivity of conscious

experience to the objectivity of how the brain works.

Now what we need is a Rosetta Stone, after the famous stone

where you have the two languages so you could actually see how the two

If we had a way of describing how you feel, that also could translate

into a way of describing brain events,

and these neuronal assemblies do just that.

So what they are, are large-scale coalitions or groups of brain cells.

Now, that doesn't sound very exciting but they're very large

scale, so they're much bigger than the average network

They're much smaller than a brain region,

the sort of things you see in brain scans.

And they are very transient and sneaky which is why

people haven't really studied them much before.

They are corralled up and disbanded in less than a second and they vary

And it's those that I think match up to degrees of consciousness.

I think there's a lot of material in here which people

will find fascinating, because you suggest

explanations for particular states of consciousness.

Things that affect us in a certain way.

And it seems to me, one of the intriguing things

about your experimental findings is that they tend to support

It's always reassuring when that happens!

So sort of walking in the countryside

So for example, you might like to know that people

who are exposed to rural environments are more creative

than those who have been exposed for the same period of time

Because of what it does to their state of consciousness?

And if you're walking and putting one foot

in front of another, in a funny way,

that actually reflects a thought process.

The man that developed the treatment for Parkinson's

disease a long time ago, one of my favourite quotes

he came up with was, "Thinking is movement

Now if you think about it, to separate out a thought

from a movement, sorry, a feeling from a thought, a thought always has

You always end up in a different place to where you started.

Whereas if you're just having a feeling, you're having a feeling.

And how did you get to that new place?

We talk about thinking straight, being on track.

I think that therefore, and Nietzsche said this,

by that thought process being amplified and echoed

and reinforced by physical stepping, and the Greeks knew this

when they debated and they had their dialogues, as you say,

it makes absolutely intuitive sense, but perhaps people need

Are you saying something about how easily we can live lives that

will produce beneficial effects of which we are possibly not aware?

Up to a point, but I should caution this is not a self-help book, so...

No, and I should say to people, it's not written in that style at all.

It's more what I wanted to do primarily was take

forward my own fascination with consciousness

Now, if along the way, people pick up some interesting

snippets or something they didn't know, then that's really good.

But it's not meant as a sort of manual on how to live your life.

There is one aspect of this, finally, is very interesting,

and it's about the exposure to, for example, video games,

social media, that kind of thing, which is something that people

are aware of, concerned about, want to think about.

Now, you've been subjected to some criticism from people

about banging on about this too much.

I mean, what is your essential feeling

about the danger that we should be aware of?

OK, all I've ever said is that there's a debate to be had

and if we want to go and have a certain type of society,

then we should at least be aware of that and we should think

of all the options and the possibilities.

How would you describe the effects on the way our brain works

and our consciousness of the kinds of activities, for example,

that children are now exposed to at a young age?

When you and I were young, a long time ago, do you remember

you'd say to your friends, "Let's make up a game.

"You be this and you be that", and this glass of water would be

the magic goblet and this chair would be a spaceship.

What you were doing then and what I was doing

was rehearsing our own little identities.

We were rehearsing a little life story when we played

the game, but it was coming from inside and it was dominated

by inside, by the imagination, because the things were all pretty

The drawing pad did not ask you to draw on it.

The tree didn't ask you to climb it, you know?

And I think that was very important for us growing up,

as it is for every generation of kids because you rehearse

identity and you learn to be proactive.

You are in control of your story, your little life story.

Now, poor little things, sitting in front of a screen,

and this is my concern, where's the scope for imagination?

By definition, a screen will be visual and auditory.

So where is the scope to develop your own storyline,

And above all, to be proactive in control, and above all,

to have your little firewall of what you are and what I am?

And the long-term effect of that, you can't say.

Well, I think we should consider there might be a long-term effect.

Susan Greenfield, thank you very much indeed.

Good evening. It is going to be another mild start of the day on

Friday. A rather murky one, because