Brain Dara O Briain's Science Club

Let me tell you a story about a man called Dante Autullo.

He lives in Illinois, he's 34 years old,

and a couple of years ago, he was doing some DIY around the house with a nail gun, as you do,

he fired a nail into his own brain.

But he never realised, because the brain has no pain receptors.

He had a nosebleed and the following day he felt a bit nauseous,

and his girlfriend said, "You should get that checked out."

So he went to a doctor and they showed him the X-ray, and he simply didn't believe them.

We know this because he found time to post the X-rays to Facebook

in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.

Ah, the brain! The most mysterious object in the universe,

but it can still make you behave like a bit of an idiot.

I'm Dara O'Briain, welcome to Science Club.

APPLAUSE

So, welcome to our show, which takes one major topic each week

and looks at it from every angle to see what we can learn.

As ever, we have our curious audience and illustrious guests -

this week, neuroscientist and developmental psychologist Uta Frith. Welcome.

Our regular reporters, Alok Jha, Helen Czerski and Tali Sharot.

-Our very special guest - Jessica Hynes. Jessica, how are you?

-Very well.

-Good stuff.

And Mark Miodownik, as ever, our materials scientist, ready to do some messing around over here.

Now, on the show tonight, we're looking at the human brain,

peering into the mass of grey and white matter

to find out the latest thinking about...thinking.

Through the media of filmed reports and experiments,

we'll endeavour to understand where we're at with this most complex but fundamental organ.

Dr Helen Czerski travels to the US to discover amazing, cutting-edge brain research.

-And so, do you feel that you're one step closer to being able to mind-read?

-Yes.

Reporter Alok Jha finds out about smart drugs

which seem to maximise our cleverness, and asks whether we should all be taking them.

I'm really tempted to try one.

And 2012 actor Jessica Hynes undergoes memory testing

and literally sees what's going on in her head.

I'm looking forward to having a picture of my brain!

And later, Prof Mark Miodownik will be putting a brain in a blender.

All in the name of science, of course.

If you want to get involved with the show or follow us on Twitter,

the details are on your screen.

Very good, OK.

But first, let's meet our science guru,

neuroscientist and developmental psychologist, a Fellow of the Royal Society,

Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Psychology at UCL,

please welcome Uta Frith!

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

-How are you?

-Hello.

-Nice to have you here. Welcome.

Uta, over the course of your long and distinguished career,

you've changed the direction of the stuff that you've been doing

because what we know about the brain has changed,

and the technology with which we learn about the brain has changed.

-almost unrecognisably, since you started.

-You're absolutely right.

When I started being interested in psychology,

and also in how the brain creates the mind,

all we had at the time was really looking at

people who had some kind of brain damage.

Eventually, sort of from the 1990s,

we were able to see the living, thinking, feeling brain.

-So it all came about because of the invention of MRI scans?

-Absolutely.

-A fabulous invention.

-So, the amount of information you had, because...

Listen, I've seen these textbooks about Phineas Gage,

the man who fell onto a spike and it went through his brain,

was the proof that personality is contained in the brain.

That was important information that we had.

But it was abnormal situations like that were how we knew what happened in the brain.

Exactly. And we are waiting for more technological breakthroughs so that we can see even better.

More exact in what we see. OK, we're going to talk about many of the topics it raised here,

but it's worth taking that historical overview.

For many years, finding out about the brain just involved looking at,

measuring it, trying to make assumptions on that basis,

but since the advent of MRI scanners, we started to understand its innermost secrets.

This is what we used to think.

A long time ago, when the Greeks had money and dressed in sheets,

it was thought that thinking came from a kind of internal self,

what the Romans later called the homunculus, the little man.

No-one suspected that thinking happened in the brain.

It was just so dull.

Instead, it was the more exciting internal organs, like the heart,

the liver and the spleen that were marked out

as the essential parts of thought, reason and emotion.

Complete nonsense, of course, but progress was slow,

because for a long time, dissection was banned by the Church.

Eventually, however, it was noticed that the eyes are connected to

the dull, wobbly parts inside our heads, and that, in turn,

it was connected to the rest of the body

by a stringy network of wiry structures - the nervous system.

By the 18th century,

an Italian called Luigi Galvani

had discovered that the wiry bits carried electricity,

which operated muscles.

This he endlessly demonstrated by attaching frogs' legs to a battery.

It was now clear that the brain actually has an important job to do,

controlling the body with electricity.

Gradually, physicians started paying more attention to the brain.

They noticed that injuries to specific parts of it

would affect specific abilities.

Injuries changed the ability to smell, hear or speak.

Accidents revealed a lot about how the brain worked,

but well-meaning surgeons showed even more.

A severely epileptic American was treated by such a surgeon,

who scooped out the part of his brain called the hippocampus.

The fits stopped,

but so did patient's ability to form new memories.

The brain, it turned out, is responsible for memory.

All of a sudden, scientists were all over the brain, probing it,

recording electrical activity.

One of them, Wilder Penfield, made a map of the brain

by poking about in the brains of conscious patients.

He produced the sensory homunculus,

an image of how the brain senses the body. It was also discovered that our brain

is responsible for us being conscious, or unconscious,

and that it's responsible for us being aware of being conscious,

our consciousness. It was also found that the way the brain works

can be altered using drugs,

and that there's another part of our brain that's running the show -

our subconscious -

and that means that our brain knows what we're going to do before we do.

It's almost as though

we're being controlled by another version of ourselves.

Traditionally, the brain is compared to

the most impressive technology available.

In the past, it would have been a kind of complicated steam engine,

an electronic telephone exchange, and a microprocessor.

Today, the brain is presented as being a bit like the internet.

Tomorrow, who knows?

The fact is, no-one actually knows exactly how the brain works,

but at least we now know where to look.

So, in many ways, we've just stepped onto the moon,

we've just started that journey, essentially,

when it comes to finding out what's happening in the brain.

Explain to me the way it's different from other organs. I'm intrigued by this.

The lungs, for example,

it's like a series of corridors that lead to smaller and smaller corridors,

that lead to rooms that perform a discrete job.

The heart has its valves.

The brain seems more like a continuum, like a large hall.

-Like an orchestra.

-Is that how it is?

And all of these parts of the brain can adopt functions

-from other parts of the brain?

-To some extent.

I think we don't know quite the limits of how they could do absolutely everything.

I think there are some that are very much more specialised than others.

The main job of the brain is, really, to keep us upright,

keep us from falling over,

maintain our breathing,

all sorts of things that we are not at all aware of,

but they are very heavy-duty tasks, jobs,

that you need a brain for.

-In fact, perhaps we should look at the brain.

-We have brains here.

-It is so tempting.

-I love the way we have essentially put it on a cake stand.

I know! It is absolutely amazing.

I really love holding it, because it is the weight of a...

That, by the way, is not, I presume, a brain.

That's a new type of surgical training device.

Yes, and it feels nice and cool and sort of jellylike,

and that's always how I imagine the brain to be,

except, it is nearly always liquid when you really see it,

and you have to do something to it to make it fixated.

-So the grey mass that we see is something that we have treated?

-Yes, it has to be treated,

otherwise it will just sort of liquefy very soon.

But it's a really, really beautiful structure. It's really amazing.

This is, of course, underneath here, is the cerebellum,

which is often hidden from view,

and yet, it's probably a structure of the brain

that's just...active and used in almost everything we do.

Absolutely everything.

It used to be thought it was especially to do with movement,

movement control, but, in fact,

it turns out to be kind of the brain's computer.

The cerebellum is very, very important, and we share this cerebellum.

It's the same structure in other animals.

Now, we're going to keep coming back to that for reference.

Yeah, you're right. It is very pleasant.

I'm getting the calming effect of touching it.

We were saying about how the brain has evolved to do with the environment that we are in,

and at different stages, we have, to a certain extent,

passed on duties to technology that we previously had the brain doing.

We invented writing and printing, and that stops us having to memorise tracts...

That's a perfect example of incredible niche construction,

of this sort of cleverness...

-of the brain, that we can outsource...

-We can outsource certain parts of it.

-The obvious example now is mobile telephones, smart computers.

-Yes.

To a certain extent, we've freed up other skills because of this.

The example that someone has given us, 20 years ago,

we would all have known the telephone number of our partner's workplace...

-Now we just... One click.

-We know it's kept for us...

It's all rubbish that we don't need to bother...

-So we basically passed a job on to technology at different stages.

-Yes.

19 million of us own these smartphones, by the way,

but how many of us actually know how they work?

We'll be back to this fabulous beauty in a second.

LAUGHTER

Just in terms of the way we pass these things on,

Mark Miodownik has been taking a smartphone apart.

The invention of the telephone changed the way we're connected to each other,

but it was a physical connection, and so engineers dreamed

of severing that connection,

of creating a phone you could use anywhere, any place,

and the realisation of that dream was this, the mobile phone.

Since it came on the scene some 30 years ago,

it's transformed the way we communicate.

But now it's become so much more

than merely a way to connect to each other.

It's changed the way we entertain ourselves,

the way we read and write, and even how we get up in the morning,

and all in something the size of a cassette tape.

And now there's evidence that it's even affecting the way we use our brains.

The smartphone - you're very likely to have one of these in your pocket.

You may even be watching this on it.

But how does something so small do so much?

Smartphones are masters of miniaturisation,

apart from the battery, which still takes up most of the room.

But packed around it are microphones, speakers, a processor,

a SIM card, and let's not forget the antenna,

which makes it all mobile.

Of course none of this would matter if you couldn't tell when your phone rings,

and it does that using the main speaker,

or by this nifty little gadget. Let me show you.

LOUD BUZZING

Of course, that means you can have your phone on silent.

Because they're so good at connecting us,

smartphones are well on their way to becoming

the fastest-spreading technology in human history.

But, of course, they have one extra thing that makes them truly smart - a logic board.

The heart and soul of the phone.

Because there's a processor to control the digital signals,

that effectively turns the mobile phone into a mini computer,

and once you have a mini computer in your hand, well,

all sorts of things can become possible.

It becomes a music player, a video player and, crucially,

a portal to the internet.

This constant access to information means we're relying less and less on our brains,

and it appears that we're actually outsourcing our memory.

And then all you need is some way to control it.

There's no doubt that the defining feature of the smartphone is the screen.

There's an awful lot packed into just a few millimetres -

light-emitting diodes, transparent electrodes

and liquid crystals that rearrange themselves to control the light -

but the thing that never fails to amaze me is how it responds to your finger.

The touch screen works by monitoring the electric field on its surface,

and this is disrupted by an electrical conductor,

but not ANY electric electrical conductor will work.

It's trained to recognise the characteristic signature of a human finger.

Error-correcting algorithms ignore anything with a different electrical signal.

But it's the addition of the camera that really brings the screen to life.

Of course, this is not just for taking photos.

It's one of a growing number of sensors that mobile phones are requiring.

As you can see, the phone knows which way is up. That means it knows which way gravity is.

It also knows how fast it's turning.

And that's really quite remarkable, and it's down to two sensors -

a gyroscope and an accelerometer.

They may look just like blobs of plastic,

but inside, they're microelectronic machines with moving parts smaller than the hair on a flea.

These intricate components vibrate and move,

and so can sense motion and the force of gravity,

making the phone, in a sense, aware of itself.

This is mechanical engineering on a phenomenally small scale.

Mobile phones have embedded themselves into every aspect of our lives.

They wake us up in the morning, they tell us where we need to go and how to get there.

They allow us to communicate globally.

They become an intimate expression of who we are.

PHONE RINGS

Yeah, hey! How's it going?

Tell me, firstly, Mark, I think you've voided your warranty

by opening it up. Don't go back to the shop with that one.

We pass on certain duties, certain memory tasks, to it.

Do we fill the space in our brains with something else, then?

I think the brain is very busy all the time.

I don't think we even notice that we don't have to remember these numbers any more.

But we have to remember that there have been technological innovations

all the time, and every time, for example,

when printing came in, there was a huge worry about what that might do to people,

and what, in fact, print might do to memory.

It would atrophy, that was the prediction.

And you could say again, we don't even remember phone numbers any more.

The important thing about memory is that it we know how to get at it,

and that's what these phones and these things like Google are so useful for,

because we can... we know where to look up things,

and that, of course, needs a lot of learning and a lot of practice.

So, now it's a different skill. As an academic, are you finding that

students have different skills now to what we expected?

I think the mobile phone, the internet,

these are things that are going to make us much more rich, intellectually.

-I think it's unarguable, really, and I think they should be welcomed.

-OK.

Now, a huge chunk of our brain is taken up with movement.

In fact, massive parts of the brain,

not just in getting the legs moving, modelling the space around us

and making sure we don't fall, and co-ordinating us.

If you're ever wondering about that, next time you're walking,

in the middle of it go, "Where is my left leg going?"

Don't do that on the stairs. You will actually fall. That's bad advice to give.

But there is interesting science around the information coming to our brains from different senses?

Exactly. We thought we'd do an experiment to sort of test that out.

-I've got a hand here. It's an artificial rubber hand.

-A mannequin's hand.

There's no way you'd think that's your own hand.

-Of course not.

-But maybe there is.

Maybe we could actually fool the brain into thinking that is your own hand

by some very simple mechanical movements.

It's remarkable, how you just obstruct someone's sight

and have a hand that could be yours

and then start doing the same thing to both, how you can start to feel this alien hand.

-So, we need a volunteer for this. It could be you or I...

-We know it's a fake hand.

-So, I'm going for that guy there.

-OK.

-Conveniently wearing a microphone.

-What can I say?

-Come here.

Now, our fake hand has got this shirt on,

so do you mind wearing a similar shirt?

-The largest man we found! What's your name?

-Luke.

-How are you, Luke? It suits you.

-It's nice.

-A good fit.

-Could be made for you.

Would you sit down, Luke? As if that is where you'd be sitting,

-with your hand in front.

-Yeah.

-That's it

-OK, cool.

-How does that feel?

-Yeah.

No, we also have to put this on, so that it feels like a continuous...

Gotcha, gotcha. Sort of shirt...

Now, you think this is weird? Watch this.

I'm going to get on this box and give you a manicure.

-Have you ever had a manicure?

-Not professionally, no.

-OK.

Well, this is not going to be a first for you.

It's definitely an unprofessional manicure.

So, you can see that hand and, in a sense,

your brain is thinking, perhaps, "That is my hand,"

because it's in the right place, isn't it?

Now, that's just your vision,

but we want to do multi-multi-multimodal perceptions,

so we're going to start adding the sense of touch.

So, if I stroke both fingers at the same time and in the same place

with the same frequency, your brain is thinking,

"Hold on. I can see it's perhaps my hand,

"and I can feel exactly what I should feel."

The back of the hand is very sensitive, like that.

I do feel like I want to move it now.

Really?

LAUGHTER

APPLAUSE

-Did that feel strange?

-Yeah, really strange. It felt like...

Yeah. Like I had a really bad dead arm, or something,

-and I was just trying and trying.

-Did you...when the hammer came up,

-did you think...?

-Yeah.

I thought, "Oh, God, my hand's squished."

-That hand there, does the hand flinch in any way?

-I couldn't see...

Yeah, it did.

We have a slow motion, by the way,

of your reaction to the arrival of the hammer.

LAUGHTER

-Cheers.

-Well done. Thank you very much indeed.

-Thanks a lot.

So, someone with an actual limb, you give them a false limb, you give them the impression

of the false limb, their brain can fill in the gaps.

But the opposite is also true.

Exactly. So, phantom limb syndrome, where someone has lost a limb -

they sometimes feel that their limb is still there.

But sometimes that's even weirder because it is clenched

or they're in great pain.

So in order to get rid of that feeling,

people use a similar technique with a mirror and a box, so one arm

is reflecting the other, so you'd perceive yourself as having two hands,

-and then you can get the other hand to be all flexible and stretch.

-Stretch?

-Stretch, yeah.

Getting our brains to control things remotely, that are not directly

attached to you, again sounds like the ultimate in science fiction.

But Dr Helen Czerski has uncovered some new research which is starting

to make some startling inroads in that direction.

I'm finding it quite hard to control this robotic arm.

But a few months ago, a woman called Cathy Hutchinson picked up

a coffee cup with a robotic arm.

It was a special event because Cathy is paralysed from the neck down.

She was controlling the robot arm just with her thoughts.

This remarkable moment was the result of five years' intense

collaboration between Cathy and a team of over 40 scientists.

Our brains are buzzing with electrical activity,

signals whizzing around all the time.

They listened in on those signals,

isolated the ones that are just associated with moving one hand,

and then used those signals to control an external device.

'Leigh Hochberg, who led the research, is going to show me how it all works,

'starting with a brain on loan from the medical school.'

-Oh, it's got stuff at the bottom!

-It does.

This stuff would be the spinal cord.

'If you have a stroke, it can disrupt the connections between your

'motor cortex and your spinal cord, leaving you paralysed.'

'But remarkably, when we imagine moving, we still generate

'signals in our motor cortex that can be detected with electrodes.'

So, tell me what this is.

This is the BrainGate implant that we've been

using in our clinical trials.

If you squint your eyes, there's 100 tiny electrodes,

each of which is a millimetre or 1.5 millimetres long.

It would be placed essentially right on the motor cortex,

right about there, and then the cells of interest are somewhere

between a millimetre and 1.5 millilitres deep inside the brain.

Soon after the implant was placed in Cathy's brain,

Leigh's team recorded this signal from a single neuron.

CRACKLING

It is the sound Cathy's thoughts as she imagines moving her hand.

Open your hand.

Relax.

-You can hear it firing away, that rat-tat-tat-tat.

-That crackling.

That staccato crackling, like an old AM radio.

That's the language of the nervous system.

It's how neurons talk to neurons,

it's how neurons talk to muscle,

and that's the language that we're trying to decode.

'It took a long time, but gradually the team learned to recognise Cathy's

'different brain signals as she imagined moving her hand in different directions...

'until they were finally able to use them to drive the robotic arm.'

-How did you feel when that happened?

-It was an amazing moment for her,

it was an amazing moment for all of us on the research team,

and it suggested that we're on our way towards developing

a technology that would allow somebody with paralysis

to regain some of that mobility and independence that they'd lost.

'While Leigh and his team are decoding the brain

'signals from the motor cortex, another group of scientists

'are beginning to tune into the very heart of human consciousness.

'They are trying to isolate the brain signals of speech and thought.

'But tuning into our brain's language centres isn't easy.'

If you're squeamish,

it might be a good idea to look away for the next few moments.

This is footage of an epileptic patient having life-saving surgery.

'You can see a sheet of electrodes being placed over the surface of their brain.'

The surgeons use these electrodes to locate the source of epileptic

seizures, but this unusual access to the brain also is an enormous

window of opportunity for research.

Because it brings the otherwise inaccessible language centres

of the brain within our reach.

Here in St Louis, Missouri, brain surgeon Eric Leuthardt has been using

this system to tune into the most basic building blocks of language - phonemes.

A phoneme is a unit of spoken sound like "ah" or "ooh".

Eric asks the participants in the trial to speak those sounds

out loud so that he could monitor which areas of the brain were active when they were spoken.

He also asked them to imagine the sounds,

and what he found was really interesting.

Thinking of words before you speak

happens in a different part of the brain than actually speaking them out loud.

Eric and his colleagues managed to isolate signals from both areas.

It was the first time anyone has ever tuned into our unspoken, inner voice.

To demonstrate it, he taught his computers to recognise

the brain signals and use them to move a cursor.

Here is a video of the patient,

who has her electrodes implanted over the surface of her brain.

Now, what she's doing is, she's saying, "Ooh, ooh, ooh,"

or, "Ah, ah, ah."

Essentially, each time she says, "Ooh,"

it moves the cursor in one direction, just a little bit.

And each time she says, "Ah," it moves in the opposite direction.

So she really has to use her speech intention to get the cursor

to go to the target.

Here you can see she's imagining "ooh" and "ah" to control the cursor.

-So no sound is coming out of her mouth?

-She's not saying anything.

This is purely based on her inner voice.

'The computer is effectively reading her thoughts.'

So do you feel that you're one step closer to being able to mind-read?

Well, yes.

I think that again, as a scientist,

you always have to be cautious about what you can promise.

But it does provide some of the early demonstration that

we can start to capture some things that more closely approximate

what it is to make up human thoughts.

-That's incredible stuff.

-Just astonishing.

It's astonishing.

Whatever about seeing the brain's reaction of being able to

measure as they actually said it, even thinking about saying

"ah" and "ooh" is enough to create the same reaction in the brain?

Yeah, so, what they did was very clever.

They showed her an arm moving

and made her imagine that she was doing it and then

they looked at the signals and then gradually they gave her the control.

So they learned from her and she learned to control the arm.

I am completely amazed at this film.

I think it's really, really interesting, particularly

that it's not just about having a specific movement

or a specific sound that is made,

but imagining the movement, imagining the sound.

What kind of conditions is this going to help you with?

Amputees, people with locked-in syndrome, people with strokes?

So the first thought is obviously people who've been injured in some way,

and the most serious injuries come to mind, first,

so locked-in syndrome is one, amputees, paralysis, lots of things.

But then Eric, certainly the second brain surgeon, is completely

convinced that this will become normal for healthy people,

because machines can do a lot of things we can't.

They can go to places that are colder or have conditions that

we can't go to, or they're on other planets.

But we have... Humans are amazing at pattern recognition and

at solving problems, but if you have direct control, we could go there.

-We could use this for space exploration or for mining or for surgery?

-Anything.

-Anything at all.

That's fantastic. Still to come - Jessica Hynes goes on a journey

into her own brain, and Alok Jha asks if we should be using smart drugs.

You can get more information

by going to the website or following us.

Details are on your screen now.

OK, but first, our brains are also responsible for our personalities.

That's the location of our personality.

I want to bring in our resident neuroscientist, Tali Sharot.

Tali, thank you very much.

Tali, you're currently in your own research investigating

one aspect of personality. Which is that?

Well, one thing that we're looking at is optimism.

So that's our tendency to expect positive events in the future.

But what's really interesting is that most of us

have what is known as an optimism bias, or unrealistic optimism,

which means that we tend to overestimate

the likelihood of experiencing good events in our lives,

such as longevity or professional success, and we underestimate

the likelihood of experiencing negative events in our lives.

A lot of people will say, "I'm a realist, I'm a little bit of a pessimist."

So we're not aware of our own optimism.

It is a bit of a trick that our brain plays on us.

Are there any sample questions we can ask?

We can try it here. Let's see.

OK, so, who here believes that if and when they get married,

they will get divorced? Just put your hands up.

-OK.

-And the divorce rate is?

Divorce rate in the Western world is between 40% and 50%.

I would say, what, 5% of our audience.

Very few people get married going, "Ah, I'll probably give this five years."

Exactly. People who get married... There was a survey...

Newlyweds estimate their own likelihood of divorce at 0%.

LAUGHTER

Even people who should know better, like divorce lawyers,

they estimate their own divorce rates as about 0% as well.

Let's do another one.

This time, think about how well you get along with other people, OK, relative to the population.

So, who believes they're at the bottom 25% of getting

along well with others?

Bottom 25. So we have one person, two, maybe three people.

Bottom 50%?

Not many. Top 50% for getting along well with others?

Right, that's about 90% of the population.

So 90% of the population think they're in the top 50% of the population?

Well, actually, in an actual survey, they found

that 25% of the population believe they are at the top 1%

That's known as a superiority illusion,

which means that we tend to think that we're better than most

other people and we're better than what we actually are.

Now, you've been studying this for a number of years, I know,

and you set tests for this,

not only on our studio audience, but on the team here as well.

Yeah, so we put together an experiment

and I think we're going to show you the results in a little bit.

Fantastic. Now, we've also talked, by the way, about memory.

We've touched on memory a couple of times.

Memory's very interesting as well because it's not like there's

one store for memory, essentially, is there?

Well, there are many different kinds of memory.

The memory that you will call on when I ask you what you

had for breakfast this morning is completely different from

the memory that's where, for example,

when I ask you, "What is the capital of Mongolia?"

We have spatial memory, which is very different, visual memory,

auditory memory - all sorts of memories.

Long-term memory, short-term memory...

Should people be really insulted by the fact that I can't remember their names?

-Because I really am bad with names.

-Some people can't remember faces.

I'm also bad with faces.

I'm sure you have ways of glossing over this.

-I do, I do. I am tremendously charming.

-We all do.

This is why people, in order to remember,

recommend a special method, which is quite interesting.

It's like wandering through a space, through a house.

You walk through a house you are familiar with.

Yeah, and that seems to work.

-That's a trick that will increase all your memory.

-Very good, OK.

Actors obviously use their memory constantly,

with new scripts for show after show.

We send Twenty Twelve actor Jessica Hynes to find out

what effect this was having on her brain.

I'm on my way to a cognition and brain sciences unit,

where I'm going to meet some scientists who study the brain.

They do this by actually looking inside the brain

and then studying the brain's responses to controlled stimuli.

I can't think of a better way to spend an afternoon.

Scientists here are trying to measure how effectively humans

can control their consciousness.

Michael Anderson and Roland Benoit plan to use MRI scanning

to watch how effectively I can do that in a memory test.

But first, they say they need to train me.

No press ups involved, I hope.

Vice.

Hero.

In the very beginning, she's provided with a set of word pairs,

and she's trained to provide the second of the two words

on the right-hand side

whenever she's given the word on the left-hand side.

So if I see the word "vault", I have to think of the word "gold".

Hexagon.

Parent.

And she's drilled until she knows these pairs really well.

I'm really looking forward to having a picture of my brain.

'Michael and Roland also want a picture of my brain,

'using their MRI scanner.'

But this is no mere memory test.

First, they'll watch what parts of my brain are active

when I remember a word pair.

But then they'll look for a difference

when I'm instructed not to think of a pair.

When a reminder pops up in green,

like it's happening right now,

that's her instruction, "Go,"

to think about a memory that goes with that.

However, when a reminder appears in red, such as this one,

that's her instruction to stop,

to prevent the associated memory from entering consciousness, even for a second.

Good on the first red, and then, just as it went off the screen,

the associated word just popped into my head.

Please do your very best, yeah, OK?

When Jessica is trying to keep something out of consciousness,

whatever part of the brain it is that is doing that will have

to work harder.

When it's working harder, the blood flow increases

and that's what we can see.

As the experiment progresses,

you just work out ways of blocking it out.

And the more you think about the red word,

the easier it is to actively forget the associated word.

What we're looking at here is a slightly creepy

three-dimensional rendering of your actual skull.

I like the wood look.

Yes, this would be what it would look like

if you had a wood sculpture of your head.

-A wooden head.

-Yes.

On the periphery here, it's slightly darker grey.

-Is that a problem?

-No! It's perfectly normal.

-Good. I was just asking.

-That is your grey matter.

On the inside is the white matter, literally, fat.

So it takes £1 million-worth of Cambridge's finest scanning

equipment to tell me that I have a wooden head filled with fat.

I'll give Michael a while longer to process my results.

In the meantime, his colleague James Rowe can show me

where memories are in the human brain.

This is about the right size and weight of a human brain.

It's not a human brain. It's made from wood, but it's about the right size and shape.

Even I could have told you that...

'Wood effect is obviously very popular.'

If we look here at this model, this is a plastic model of the brain.

It's slightly larger than a real brain.

But it's inside here, we see where the hippocampus lies,

which is critical for those long-term memories.

But it is in constant communication, or conversation,

between the hippocampus and the frontal lobe.

And the retrieval which comes with this conversation

between different memory areas is very precisely tuned.

It's very exact in what you want to call in mind and when you want it.

-And it doesn't take much to make that inefficient.

-About four pints?

Less than four pints, in my case. You may be better trained than I am.

So, what about me?

Could I control what I chose to remember and what I chose to forget?

So this is the proportion of the words that you recalled correctly

in the controlled condition, which you did fantastically well, by the way.

95% correct. Very good memory.

Nice tie.

Thanks!

The ones that you tried to keep out of consciousness,

you were successful at blocking out some of the memories.

In fact, I would say you're better than average.

That was such an interesting day.

I'm going to go and now spend a bit of attention on my basal ganglia

and my ventral striatum.

Ladies and gentlemen, Jessica Hynes.

Hi, very nice to meet you.

How are you?

You looked quite sheepish there, but you did way better than average.

He said that I was about 16% effective,

and he said the average person is about 8% effective.

So I was about twice as effective as the average person.

-Why, do you think?

-It was interesting.

He asked me and I sort of was going to say,

"Maybe you could tell me. I don't know. You're the scientist."

The only thing I could think of was whether there was a relationship

between the type of work you mentioned, you know, learning lines.

But I think it's beyond learning lines

in terms of actually memory recall.

I think there's a part of performance and creativity

which is as much about suppression as it is about remembering.

If you're trying to create a reality with another actor,

very effectively and powerfully,

what you want to do is suppress the real reality.

-Who they actually are.

-And who you are as well.

So I did wonder whether there was some connection there.

-Does that make sense?

-Yes, it does. Absolutely.

An act of creative doublethink,

that you can keep both realities compartmentalised?

Yes, that, certainly. But there has to be this huge control...

And they did talk about control,

and a large part of the human brain is exactly about control,

you know, switching on, switching off, doing very subtle things.

This bit can be trained.

The idea of suppressing memories would be useful

to post-traumatic stress cases?

I think the idea of wiping out certain memories is fascinating.

But I think there might be more bad effects than good effects.

Surely if we could just wipe out...

I have facts about Kim Kardashian in my head that are no use to me...

-Images.

-Images, all of this.

I have a dossier about this woman in my head.

You never know how this will come in useful.

The stuff of the brain is similar in all animals.

But the ratio of different sections differ

depending on the environment they have adapted to.

For example, human brains put a lot of effort into understanding and using language,

but it is not the same for all animals. Here is some data.

You live inside your brain, 77% of which is water,

8% protein and 12% fat. The rest is a mixture of carbohydrates,

soluble organics and salts.

What is it that makes us so smart? Is it the size?

The biggest brain on the planet belongs to the sperm whale, at 7kg.

But a dolphin's weighs in at 1.6kg.

The elephant's brain averages 4.7. The average human's weighs about 1.4.

Interestingly, Einstein was a lightweight.

His brain weighed only 1.2kg.

Clearly, size isn't everything.

Scientists have compared an animal's weight to the size of their brains.

This is what is called the EQ. A rabbit has an EQ of 0.4.

A cat has an EQ of 1. A dog, 1.2. The elephant has an EQ of 2.

A dolphin of 4.1.

Our kissing cousins, the Neanderthals, come in with 4.7.

And we humans have an EQ of a whopping 7.

However, this overlooks how much of the brain is actually used for thinking.

More recently, scientists have begun to count neurons.

A leech has about 10,000. A cockroach, 1 million.

A cat has 1 billion. A chimp has close to 7 billion brain cells.

And you? Most recently, it has been calculated that we humans

have 86 billion neurons firing in concert.

This is the brain.

It uses 20% of the oxygen in our bodies and yet accounts for only

2% of our weight, which is something worth thinking about.

Anyway... Right, we have a number of brains here.

We are presuming that they are from adult animals. There are similarities.

There are many similarities.

They all have these two hemispheres

and they have this folded sheet.

Yes, why?

We have a sheet here to fold. Actually the human brain, if you stretched it out flat, the cortex...

-This is the outer bit.

-The outer bit, yes.

It would be about that big.

All these folds would be that large. The volume of the human brain, if you took the surface

-and it was smooth, would be that big.

-That's right.

-But because it is all folded...

All folded in valleys and ridges

and it sort of goes altogether, like this.

It is a great evolutionary trait because that allows you to have more activity into a small area.

Absolutely.

The increase of abilities is often associated with these structures.

That means that this limited area of contact with the core is

suddenly magnified.

It is a brilliant way of getting around the fact that you

cannot really get a massive head, or it's not so great to have a massive head.

We do have a picture - I think we have used me for this - of what I look like

and what I would look like if we had to have the same volume.

-What is that?

-That is a fresh calf's brain.

Those people wondering whether the brain is hardware or software,

let me tell you it is soft.

It is kind of amazing to hold in your hand.

There's 12% fat in it

and actually, if you take out the water, it's more than 50% of the matter.

The important thing is that when you put a brain in a blender...

You are not really going to do this, are you?

-You are not really going to do this?

-You can discover where that fat is.

I don't want to know. Oh!

Oh! Oh!

Now we have moulded the blood and the fat and protein, you might

-think that would be a delicious thing to eat now.

-I would not.

We can look at what the constituents of this thing are. That is what it is.

If we add one of our other favourite...

Our favourite.

It is almost neat alcohol. This is a very strong vodka.

-We use this for everything.

-And then we mix this up.

The fat is going to start dissolving in that alcohol.

It will leave behind things like the protein mass and the other constituents in there.

You can see it kind of changing. I am mixing it around.

It is difficult to get this kind of technique going.

It looks easy.

If I gave this spoon to you, Dara...

With my lack of training, yeah!

Now, if we are right, the fat should have

dissolved into this alcohol layer.

We can separate that off by putting it through a filter.

-We are taking all the protein out.

-That has all been left in there.

What we should be left with is a solution which is mostly alcohol

with some dissolved fats in it and a few other things.

-How do we show that? It looks clear.

-I know it looks like that.

You could take my word for it, or we can get the fat to come out of solution by adding water.

Fat doesn't dissolve very well in water, it sort of floats.

This should go cloudy. There it goes.

That is a little emulsion of fat globules from that brain.

In case you were wondering where all the fat is - there it is.

It is the so-called white matter in the brain. It is white because of the fat.

But it's sheath around nerve fibres

and the more of these sheaths you have, the better the conduction is

of the speed of the signals.

This is the fat that sheaths the neurons, allows you to think fast

and watch this television programme.

Thank you very, very much.

We are covering a mind-boggling range of topics on tonight's show.

If you have any questions about the brain,

we have our after-hours Science Club starting at the end of the show

where a top neuroscientist will be waiting for your questions.

We are at our Hall of Fame. Is there anything you want to add to this?

Yes. My hero is Hermann von Helmholtz.

-Here he is.

-He was a physicist. He was involved in thermodynamics.

He was an incredibly well-known physicist in the 19th century.

He was a polymath.

What is less well known is that he was also a neuroscientist.

And he made some stunning discoveries.

So he was actually able to measure the speed of conduction in a nerve.

The other thing I like about his neuroscience is that he

discovered, he invented the idea, of unconscious influences.

He actually invented the deep cognitive unconscious

well before Freud.

-Wow, that's very good.

-That is why I want him to be recognised.

I'm going to add a few people to this.

Every week, I jokingly mention people who have made silly contributions to it,

but there are people constantly on Twitter, Facebook and the website,

about people who they think should join the canon, as it were.

Ernest Rutherford gets a lot of votes from people -

the father of nuclear physics, in the Cavendish lab in Cambridge,

discovered the enormous amount of space within it.

Nikola Tesla, because they think that Edison did him down.

He invented alternating current. Edison invented direct current,

and Edison had 1,000 patents to his 100 patents.

He is some sort of geek nerd hero.

And a woman who doesn't... Rosalind Franklin.

CHEERING

Great.

Who published a paper on the structure of DNA in

the same edition of Nature as Watson and Crick, and a lot of people feel

she does not get the credit she deserves for her part in that.

It is also a lot about this sort of non-visibility of female scientists.

It is important.

The human brain has approximately 86 billion neurons

but are yours working to full capacity?

So-called smart drugs and medicines were developed for the treatment

of mental health conditions,

but now they are available to buy on the internet.

Alok Jha reports on what could become a modern dilemma.

If you look on the internet, you will find loads of examples

of people who take smart drugs, writing about their experiences.

I have got some of them here. "I went from a C average student to an A plus.

"I wrote 2,000 words in an hour and a half." "My senses are sharper.

"My work is much faster."

I am always putting things off, dreading the big pieces of work that I have to do.

If these drugs could help me out on that, I mean,

I am really tempted to try one.

So-called smart drugs cover a variety of prescription medicines

originally developed to treat a range of brain disorders.

Neuro-psychologist Mitul Mehta

studies the different effects they have on the brain.

If you think about cognitive enhancers, neurotrophics or psychostimulants,

these are all terms that you might hear in relation to smart drugs.

But they really refer to drugs that are designed to treat people

with cognitive impairments such as Alzheimer's disease,

patients with schizophrenia, patients with attention deficit disorder,

traumatic brain injury.

What are these drugs doing in the brains of people who are healthy?

It might enhance information flow in certain brain systems,

stabilising neutral activity, and this is one way

we think psychostimulants might work in the frontal lobes of the brain.

Another way they might work is by enhancing the signal-to-noise ratio,

so making the signals a bit clearer in the brain.

I did not realise it, but the use of smart drugs is allegedly quite widespread in the world of academia.

Anders Sandberg is a philosopher who studies smart drugs.

-Often under their influence.

-My main cognitive enhancer is caffeine.

But I do use modafinil, a prescription drug

originally intended for narcolepsy,

but I am using it for alertness and sharpening in my thinking.

What should people be wary of before taking something like that?

The cognitive enhancer, many of them are stimulants,

and of course stimulants tend to raise your blood pressure,

improve metabolism and exhaust you.

But also, you can think about memory enhancers.

They affect memory systems. You might learn a little bit too much.

You can go a little bit obsessive. There are always trade-offs.

You need to figure out the right drug for the right task.

In sports performance, enhancing drugs are banned

as we want athletes to compete au naturel.

It is the same with exams.

Schools and universities want to test your natural ability

so, in that context, taking any smart drugs is cheating.

At Cambridge University, Barbara Sahakian

is looking at the wider social issues surrounding smart drugs.

I have discussed it with student groups and some of them

feel they are being coerced into using them.

They know that other students are using them to get an advantage.

But outside of competitive cleverness...

Do you think that these drugs could help us have a better and more productive society?

First of all, we obviously need to have the safety information,

long-term safety information.

But when you consider that we do have an ageing population

and people want to stay at work better,

want to function in their own homes for longer

and not go into institutionalised care,

we may well find that this is very good.

We may also find that people are making faster discoveries and inventions.

So smart drugs could help us be mentally sharper,

boost concentration and stay focused.

If we were all taking them,

then society as a whole might even benefit,

and as we are all living longer,

smart drugs could help keep us mentally competitive in old age.

So would I take them?

I have got a lot of work on and lots of deadlines to meet,

so I think anything that could help me along with that,

I would be well up for it.

-Are you on drugs right now?

-Before you say that... No, I'm not.

Why are you not on drugs right now?

I did mean that at the end, that I am tempted by it,

because Barbara Sahakian, who you saw there, has published something recently where

she has indicated that one of the drugs we talked about, modafinil, a drug for narcolepsy,

it's been tested for that, it's safe for that, but that drug

can make you focus on something you might not find too interesting.

You can focus on it for several hours, get the job out of the way.

There are loads of things where you just want to get something out of the way. You procrastinate.

There is something important to be said about all this.

These drugs are not illegal, but we do not know how safe they are.

You have to be quite careful when thinking about what to do in terms of taking them.

You can't just jump in and take them yourself.

Fine. I can understand the ethical debate about, we don't want some students

who are on smart drugs to be competing with those who are not.

-But in everyday life, I wouldn't mind my air-traffic controller being...

-On drugs?

On drugs. On the drugs that will make them

better at that kind of shape recognition.

A surgeon or whatever...

It sounds great until they are forced to do that,

so what if you have a situation where lots of surgeons are doing it and

then the hospital says, "If you want to be a surgeon,

"you have to take these drugs?" That is more dodgy.

There is the question of exams.

You may want to keep everyone on the same level. It is fairer that way

because what if, in the future,

this stuff is available and only the rich people can afford it

so they become cleverer or whatever else?

But what would you have?

Would you have a drug-testing lab at the start of every exam?

-A little fingerprinting pinprick or something like that.

-Everyone has to pee into a cup before they...

That is the future. A little pinprick to see whether you're on...

Depending on how many buckets they have taken from the exam room.

There are so many enhancing things that you can do

that cost nothing at all.

For example, exercise is really good for the brain.

For example, sleeping is very good for the brain.

You're doing all these things... and fairly and easier.

Banging on about exercise.

-Like that's the answer to anything.

-..You have a very good diet.

Stop it. We are not dealing in science fiction here(!)

Diet, exercise and sleep(!)

We're going to scan across the room.

How many of you would take smart drugs?

About 60% of the room.

How many would approve of other people taking smart drugs?

That's interesting. Different people raised their hands there.

Earlier, Tali told us about her work on optimism.

We're going to bring her back in. Tell us about the results.

It is assessing a predetermined bias towards optimism in people.

The puzzle was, how do we maintain these positive expectations,

because we get information that is discouraging all the time?

Our process was that

we must learn more from good news than from bad news.

So we go throughout life learning more from positive information than

negative information, that will create this biased view of the world.

-So we put together a study.

-You tested all of our reporters.

Helen, Mark and Alok are there. All three of them did this.

-Were the results normal?

-Two of them look normal.

We can show it on screen now.

We have two normal individuals on the left. I say normal, you know!

They act like normal individuals, learn more from good than bad.

The candidate for the magnetic hat is M3.

This doesn't mean anything.

80% of the people show the effect, 20% don't. Not all 20% are depressed.

There's not anything wrong with them.

If I had to choose which one of the three

was most likely for the bad news,

would it be the happy smiling one who has done the experiments,

the one who has been all round the world

looking at different treatments, or the one who wanted pandas to die?

-And who's sat here.

-I know. Is that Alok?

I thought the same thing when I saw it.

Maybe it was a panda dying.

In fact, it was the guy who blended a dog's brain a few minutes ago.

-With the flowery shirts and the cheery demeanour?

-Yeah.

-That is Mark.

Are you OK? You are not feeling down about things?

I'm an emotionally scarred individual, that's clear, as you can see.

I don't think your flowery shirts are hiding anything any more.

We want to thank all our guests. As ever, our reporters -

Alok Jha, Tali Sharot and Mark Miodownik and Helen Czerski,

our special guest Jessica Hynes,

and our science guru Uta Frith, ladies and gentlemen.

There is so much we have learned.

We have learned how to move things with our minds, that you can

disguise a fair amount of depression

using only a flowery shirt and some Polish vodka,

and we've learned that Alok Jha is on smart drugs.

But I am naturally optimistic and I think he is going to beat it.

That is all from us tonight on Science Club. We will see you again. Good night.

MUSIC: "Crazy" by Gnarls Barkley

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd