line suddenly gives you consciousness is a fetus conscious in the womb if it is not the null hypothesis when does it become conscious is it screeching down the birth canal well that's a bit tough if you're born by says aaron section is exactly at 40 weeks well that's a bit tough if you're born the baby is born prematurely is it not conscious so the null hypothesis isn't really very robust to say to say that things are not conscious is a bit of a risk because you then say with you look at animals or look at the fetus how how is the difference because the human brain although obviously the parts may be bits are exaggerated in different sizes compared to other animals there's no magic brain region this different in humans from other other animals so where do you cross this anatomical rubicon you can't yet so i would reject the idea and say let us assume all animals are conscious right let's assume there for a fetus is conscious but then that's a bit odd because he really saying a rat is conscious like you or me know of

a sin on so you say well let's think about consciousness a little bit and for me my great thinker insight once when i was on holiday i suddenly thought with our thinking about unconsciousness and with an a c. easier and with sleep both forms of unconsciousness it's gradual you can have stages of sleep and stages of an a c z or you can have a different depth of being unconscious and so it reasons what if consciousness also could be very like a dimmer switch you could vary in degree and if that was the case then a rat could be conscious but not as conscious as a cattle dog and a cattle dog could be conscious but not as conscious as a primate and a fetus could be conscious but not as conscious as a full term baby in turn not as conscious as an adult so if you think about that that kind of makes sense because i'm sure you in russian i don't have the same things about. broadening your consciousness of deepening your consciousness here which if you go to mountains or lakes after. to either deepen or raise doesn't

matter which way you go your consciousness yet you feel like we can sort of switch it off the knowledge to gradually and it's gradual so for example when you're sleeping as i feel unconscious because i don't think my childhood over jones or the movies that i've seen before is what share stuff is this conscious of course is conscious and dreaming is a form of consciousness it's one however that isn't driven by imports for through your senses so that's why it's rather flimsy and why you have this strange fragmented sequences that at the time seem perfectly acceptable but of course in the cold light of reality you see very strange when someone turns into someone else while something happens but yes of course that's a form of consciousness i think if one accepts that consciousness is quantitative it can be there it changes that's brilliant also for science because you can then measure it of course you know you can say let's try and measure it rather than regard it as something magical but consciousness the way we understand it something totally intangible ok so in the brain we know some how some

functions of the brain i'm sure will there's a lot we don't know but like you know where the memories are stored and how things are go and signals and they're in there but where it is likely a conscious appear in the brain ok so this is why many scientists have a problem with consciousness someone called it a career limiting move if you want to strangle if you can't get grants or so not the problem with studying consciousness is that it is quintessentially the core feature is subjective what you are experiencing now i have no idea i can't hack into you and experience what you personally are feeling the color red i don't know what you are experiencing when you look at the color red because this is something called quality of their account it is not that you can look at magic brain regions of the brain isn't composed of little mini brain so when you say where members are stored in a sense that's not quite right because you don't have magic brain. regions or

special brain compartments but what you can do is try and find something have a shopping list and go to the brain is it ok brain i've got the shopping list now i want something that varies in degree i want something that changes from subsecond to subsecond time scale of can vary and i want something that can be driven by the senses or generated internally and what we have done is suggestive that it is collections of brain cells that work together for a very brief period of time a bit like ripples so imagine a puddle and throwing a stone then you have the reports there and what we have done is to try and identify something like that happening in the brain where the excursion of the ripples corresponds to the depth of your consciousness ok so if you like i can say the stone is like the long clock waking you up or it's like any strong sensory input coming in and then the size of the stone is how many connections and associations that that object of that event triggers and the force with which is

thrown is how strong the sensory stimulus is and then the way it spreads out is limited by the we save the scar city which is the glue penis like the thickness of the paddle and competing stones coming in on what i have done is to write a book of the book here a day in the life of the brain which was written in 2016 which. goes through with this and talks about this i think what scientists can do we can start to study consciousness with great humility and assuming that we're not going to establish a causal relationship i can't tell you how the water is turned into wine i can't tell you how electrical blips and brain cells and chemicals traffic and all of that i can't say you have that translates into a feeling of happiness but what i can do is say look when you're happy this is happening and when these blips and electrical signals are firing away then you might be feeling this the how the one turns into the other is the big question of

what i find interesting to say to people i'll say it here do you feel like trying to explain what consciousness is for scientists is like a french topic isn't wired ok because there's logic to what's important to realize for science is the thing that they need more than anything before they can do and i think it's money because unlike something right philosophy if you are a scientist by definition you want to work in a lab and that cosmo now how do you get money right you get money either by starting a little company as i have incidentally for outsiders disease or the private sector and that's or you apply if you're in a university you apply for grants not if you apply for a grant saying you want to study consciousness i can assure you don't you it's a kingdom you don't have much luck which is why it's not popular with scientists because it's very hard to get funding it's very hard to get people to there they'll say well what we're going to do is this how you going to study it whereas if you're studying some much more clear problem then people will feel tax payers money can

pay for a human chain to philosophy in their lives their labor tom stoppard they're literally called the hard problem it is us about what we're speaking a structure isn't it it's about a researcher how does you know by not the whole problem is suited to research we don't and just gives up and then he ends up in philosophy here do you feel a loss if you could somehow get out the scientific. part well i actually started doing philosophy myself so initially at school unlike probably all the other scientists with the exception of henry marshall if interviewed for my specialized subjects were after 16 so could a levels i did latin greek ancient history math pm us so. i was very into reason i didn't feel great i was really interested in philosophy and when i 1st went up to oxford for my 1st year oxford university i actually started philosophy and it was only when i got frustrated with doing formal logic having done math but i changed to psychology and then to neuroscience so i actually have i would like to think

a grounding in philosophy or i see things as a philosopher might and i think that's actually very helpful if you're doing science does that help advance so slick totally because you ask big questions and i think if someone has a conventional upbringing in science you are so constrained by the dogma you are so constrained by very being very precise and very specific to actually step back and ask these big questions like the ancient greeks asked i found that was a great privilege to do that. ok let's talk about sopped ok. we are once again somehow know how the body in the brain interact and rate and correct me if i'm wrong so here's my thought i want to bend my finger right. signal to my brain then the muscles to the heart. where is the thought in all of this i think we're going where is the free world. or that yeah what i mean where it is

born before look at was that where is it that's a really interesting subject if you relate especially to free will and it's an endless debate of what is free will and this is some song called benjamin the bet to stop he had this idea and i myself of a copy of this experiment have been the subject where you have electrodes on your head which are called your brain waves and all you have to do in this experiment is press a button but if you want to whenever you think you want to and what's really interesting is just press about randomly is just before you actually physically press the button already your brain waves have changed showing that there so it's a really fascinating thing that you think. if you have free will and you've decided but already your brain has changed before he has decided before now this is the interesting thing you are your brain such as well what it has decided for you is implying a certain journalism which is not right that is yeah clean is accurate so this is why it's an interesting question so my own views on 2 sides of the same coin. in

quantum theory which i'm not an expert in i gather you can express things either in terms of momentum or position but never both is not speaking russian or english you don't speak the 2 together you have one all the other a bit you might express the same idea i mean it's clear how is it. but for less less fortunate people you have to say something one language or another but you're saying the same thing but you're just accept your. so it's 2 sides of the same coin that either you can express things in brain terms. or you can express it in subjective what we say phenomenological to us that's to say in terms of your subjective experiences and both are valid and how the one relates is like position momentum you can't do simple tennis and even you can speak russian english exact at the same time you have to spit all switch very fast so that's i think what it is like and that's why it's interesting because it's not so much about the thought itself the subjective experience of

a thought in the illusion of free will or the physical occurrences in the brain it's more if there are 2 sides of the same coin what is the coin that's interesting i think i'll take a break right now when we're back we'll continue talking to the nearest scientist bar and ask susan greenfield about how human brain functions and what consciousness is stay with us. this is a story about what happens auster a stray bullet kills

a young girl in the streets. what happens to her family and daughters in florida another mother daughter is buried in a cemetery it is meaning messes with your head what happens to the community the public was screaming for a scapegoat the police needed a scapegoat so why not choose a 19 year old black kid with a criminal record who better to pin this on than him and what happens in court be be. shot after shot as far off society we feel. we don't know killed just for. the end of this trial unfortunately you. will still not know for childress for.

most people think just stand out in this is this you need to be the 1st one on top of the story or the person with the loudest voice of the biggest race in truth to stand losing distance just the dance the right questions and demand the right answer. questions. you know one of the things we talk about on the show if you read the financial press about the latest scandal it's just a new name for a recurring scandal like there's only 3 or 4 ways you could rip people off as it changes is the name they call to rip people off. in his community there are people who believe that it's ok. it's really hard there

are no jobs and you see that i've got kids that ask and as a parent. i can come up with lots of arguments and there's a lot of conflict within the game and between the 2 teams most of the conflicts i would say are over most from money and most of them money is made. close one you know the children's clothes he know each other is good business the state of california alone makes $6000000000.00 a year of the prison complex just to get some 20 a life where. you don't care anymore nobody cares about you so you don't care might anything. and i'm back with the nearest scientists barrenness susan greenfield susan i just want to bring you back into the the you know. the the raw stuff like saying with

a consciousness you know until you game with the ripples of explanation because if we know that brain in this part answers like the frontal lobe for this and this hemisphere for that and that hemisphere that why can't we physically observe the thought because the brain doesn't work record load of mini brains yes you do have specialisation in different parts of the brain but it's more analogous to instruments in an orchestra or ingredients in a dish of food they have to synergize they have to work together it's not as if they're just functioning independently of each other so for example vision is divided up among about 30 different brain regions and any one brain region can participate in different functions rather like a violin might make a big deal many of us so you can't you have to think of the brain holistically and holistically i would argue in a body you can't try and reduce it as sometimes people like to do to

a single gene or a single brain region or a single transmitter by that you're losing something if you do that so there is no way a star could ever be observed even if we've built way incredible michelle what what can be observed is the brain working on of course that's done with brain scans and people can do that but the mistake they often make is how they match up what they see in the brain scan with what is happening and some people think that it's much more specific than it actually is and they think that if they see something lighting up in a certain region it's the center for this or that and that's not really true moreover with brain scans in humans the time resolution that says is a. remember those old cameras in the 19th century where you could see physical things but not movement so you could see houses. a car but you couldn't see animals or people because they were moving and the exposure was to. so little bit like that with brain scans you can see long lasting things but you can't see fast things you

know for many people who won't be happy with the scientific explanation because there is no way we can physically actually. observe the or see the conscious where and how it's moving or born there would say you know that's about the soul and you'll never be able to see because that part is called soul ok so i thought you me ok i think we need to be really clear about terms so let's start with the most obvious one brain will know what the brain is it's a physical thing and i remember during deception i'm wondering if i got bit under my fingernails with that b. the bit that. there's a physical tangible thing then you have the mind now why do we use a different word for mind mind implies something highly personal thats different nor mind just different from mine was if you and i took our brains out of the gross level they would look pretty similar so the mind is something that already is slightly removed from the physical of the brain and to cut

a long story short my suggestion is that it's the personalization of your brain that something called plasticity which is how the brain adapts to things and when it adapts to things at the very micro level you're having changes in connections between your brain cells so no 2 people have the same pattern of connections that's what i would call the mind and then we have consciousness so when you go to sleep you don't say you're losing your mind you lose consciousness or that certain sonar is that you have the same say in russian where you blow your mind or lose your mind or your out of your mind your conscious but you're not accessing your personal way to us and war of the many ways in which you can and what wine women and song drugs and sex and rock'n'roll are ways and what that i found very interesting there is mindless you're still conscious of this incidentally even the ancient greeks thought about this a play called the baccy by europe it is in him all about this poor king who gets torn apart by these women who are crazed worshipping the wind god doesn't isis and

he says no there's 2 forces the one force and the brothel and they were diverse and just as a wonderful the greeks were so then that was the mind and consciousness which is separate again because you can be separate art you can. the mind less and have consciousness and you can have no consciousness but you still get them i say because if they are not we come then finally and then you have within consciousness you have the sub conscious and have the self conscious and the self conscious comes when you are about 2 or 3 years old so a baby is conscious but not self-conscious because on the continuum it's pairing up the subconscious as anyone who's read fraud will be aware of then you have the soul and that again is something that i would regard as separate because the mind and consciousness all parts of a living brain there are more than just the living brain but they are rooted in the living room of conscious even the subconscious so when you die that brain will die but as far as i understand i'm not deeply religious myself by research people who

are the whole point of the soul is its immortal. does it not that's all point the point of a soul is it survives and goes to heaven on earth so i mean if you look at the religious yes exactly so that's how you're defining so if the brain is perishable and it's mortal and the soul is immortal that i must be something else again so i think one has to be very careful about one's terms and distinguish very carefully brain mind consciousness soul or are just some are interesting topics but one shouldn't equate them they are separate things. so once a going to the scientific mill the lot of scientists try to explain different phenomena as biology clearly for instance i don't know love or feelings were saying it's all hormones in stop and mean or we're talking only to be happy. but when you explain that on a biological level it stands ground do you really explain what love is what again

it's not an explanation it's a description there's like say a chair will be somewhere that will love it i say that with just the chemical yes and you are dead if you're familiar with the series yes oh yeah ok so that's where the people who are not let's say you have imagine a straight line imagine a dog imagine officer call imagine another the random things if you put them in a certain shape if you put the 2 dots at the top of your page and between these are all the straight line and underneath them you put the half circle then you have a face so the components are in and of themselves not change but it's the relationship of the want of the other that has given you this concept of a face a pattern of a face so to say someone is it's lights and this is nothing but adopt it's nothing but a straight line depending on how it relates the one to the other will give it an emergent property so called a different property to just the reduction of the components because i was thinking if you can explain or you make this distinction explanation and description if you

can describe anything biologically then you can. just as well describe consciousness as world so you can get a revelation is that when you fall in love you have a rush of them in our rush of endorphins or that's fine and that is a co-relate but that doesn't explain why you have the subjective feeling of love so i explain. ok let's forget about love because that's really why i wish it was about love just think happiness to soak up a state of happiness when you have several. levels reacting or order of dopamine and for scientists it's all hormones and it's all chemically sort of manageable does this mean that if i take a happy drug and my serotonin levels go up and i feel happy then happiness in itself is an illusion because you can control it chemically i confess what i mean by happiness of course is that we all know that drugs was her and then when most obvious one of the opiates give people a feeling of euphoria

a feeling of euphoria is not necessarily happiness you can pass an exam you can achieve something you've been striving for you can have a sense of wellbeing all these are different types of positive feeling they have that people might put under the label happiness and if we had a society just where people wanted to be euphoric all the time i don't think we would find that a very satisfying lifestyle you wouldn't you wouldn't really admire or want to be someone who is just all the time euphoric i don't think i think the question is where like chicken and what happens 1st i mean is it the dopamine and then i get happy or i'm happy and they are there well that's right the interesting question especially in relation to depression which is the opposite of course because we know that if someone's depressed they can take prozac and hans's the levels of this chemical messenger you've talked about serotonin then that alleviates their their feelings but if they're on happy for a particular reason it doesn't make the reason the way if they've just lost someone

they love it doesn't bring that person back to life again it just is a distraction. for them a bit like when people drink heavily you know as a distraction that's not exactly to say that is making you happy it's distracting you it's giving you a strong sense of being aroused or sedated it's manipulating your arousal level of more than actually giving you what one might want to acquire in life in terms of what one would call true happiness i think i want to take now on how your take on this because the general idea is this big professionals in different fields would say well you know science takes care of the biological processes because we can describe them or some would even say you are playing them and then psychologists or or psychiatric whatever take care of the psychological side emotions in the way we sort of interrupt with the world on an intangible level. but should we really just be studying it all together because this is told that you're one big mechanism is steadily divided you are going out of his i'm going to further serve you well

having done arts myself as i haven't done philosophy i think it's insane to distinguish philosophy from there or science from or even from more political people are done but free will so the more we can be interdisciplinary i think the richer it is and i would go further in that people that are just neuroscientist mountains i'm just a neuroscientist i wish i knew more immunology for example i'd like to know the interface between the central nervous system and the endocrine system and the immune system because it's by understanding that your longer something you know understand the placebo effect will understand how your gut feelings literally chemicals released in your gut are affecting your sense of intuition so i think that we are the poorer if we put ourselves into silos of just being this or just being there and how much do you think we know about human brain if you do get certain to using from my great again there was an animal called the hydra and every time you chop it off one head 7 heads screw in its place and it's like that the

more you think you learn the more you realise you don't know. and i will both find it we had french in common when i 1st went and started speaking french i thought i could speak it and the more i tried the more i realized i didn't know that so the more you learn the more you realize how ignorant you are so i thought that with the brain yes of course we can explain how brain cells 5 little electrical blips and of course we can explain how chemicals go up and down and the manipulated by drugs of course we can explain the settings and when now we can of course with brain imaging see bits lighting up but i think it's extreme arrogance if we think that means that we know everything because what we should be doing is really asking the big questions like what is consciousness why do people fall in love why the war stop if it breaks or how does it happen as a joke as the big mystery of all that we want to get out of the biggest mystery of all i don't think. we're going to have time to discover any ways thank you so i was wondering when i enter your hope we'll meet again.

i'm going to fulfill the repeated promises apologise to the people and promise to be you know we've all pots to. be a. pretty. tough. pretty good group. now you want to 1st. know.

all the. big. a coming coming coming. we still got you to tie you to the let's move. on and that's a cool so we're going to call you described and i know you. could we're going to get by getting out of the law to your. children to what i did in my home. to eat too much haha good to be

a good tone confounded your gum often to get the what i feel when i'm not good children tell in the fall that you can say when it's time don't come fall. but.

now for the show month president donald trump picked thanksgiving to pay his fast a visit to afghanistan using occasion to tell us troops based the talks with the taliban. would slip in the grip of political instability if we talk to a lone female who was brutally beaten and publicly humiliated by rivals of ousted president evo morales. the also cut off my hair they beat me up but they can't change me and i want people to take a step back and think that the believe in people cannot live like this. and a meeting between the chief of nato and france's president.