your 1st woman interview and i'm very excited to talk to thank you special about the brain because it seems to be the eternal topic so you're very. well known and respected neuroscientists and you have covered many aspects of human brain and how it works and all of that and i have talked neuroscientists and most of them tommy that we're very dual beings that brain and body are 2 separate entities one is. by the other they all seem to somehow stick to this theory i want her you think there are really 2 separate things the strange image of the brain in the body are separate you look a bit weird if you that was the case. no they're very integrated if you think about it the immune system the end of crown the hormone system are things that we have in common so the placebo effect for example where you can take a drug that's completely in or it completely has nothing active in it but you think it's going to make you better and it does of the so-called perceiver fecht that has

to work in conjunction the central nervous system has to work in conjunction with the immune system and the endocrine system hormones because otherwise you'd have biological amoco if they were separate so there has to be a system for the brain in the body to be really integrated in the brain after all is just another organ of the body very important organ a very greedy organ in terms of energy but nonetheless it is an integral part of your body it's not as if it's a separate or machine that's perched on top of the body directing like a little rover and of course not you have these chemicals are iterating throughout your body from the great control systems of blood in the streets the central nervous system the endocrine system and the autonomic nervous system which over controlling the heart our talk a bit of a consciousness there because that's a huge topic for you and like for all of us what is a consciousness from a neuroscientist point of view is it what makes us human i mean do animals. ok so

that's 2 separate questions were so 1st of all. i think if we say all scientists like to do is say let's take the null hypothesis let's assume it's not the case so let's assume an animal is not conscious right. when and where and how the suddenly you cross this magic line that 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 biases and 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 when 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 that's different in humans from other other animals so where do you cross this anatomical rubicon if 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 this in 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 this or 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. or deepening your consciousness here which you go to mountains or lakes. to dive the deeper nor raise doesn't matter which way you go your consciousness yet you feel like you can sort of switch it off the knowledge to gradually and it's gradual so for example when you're sleeping i feel unconscious because i don't think my childhood over anyway is known as are the movies that i've seen before is what your stuff is is 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 seem really strange when someone turns into someone else while something happens but yes of course that's

a form of consciousness so 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 and i'm sure we there's a lot we don't know blake you know where the memories are stored and how whose are gone signals and they're in there but where do you think is likely contra like appear in the brain at that so this is why many scientists have a problem with consciousness someone called it a career limiting move if you want to strike which you can't get grants for so now 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're experiencing when you look at the color red and go this is something called quality i think we're ok it isn't in 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. 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 that 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 and then you have the reporter 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 alarm 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 say 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 26th in 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 can hold up 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 and what i find interesting to say to people all set 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 there was a fee if you are a scientist by definition you want to work in a lab and that caused by now how do you get money right you get money either by starting a little company as i have incidentally for outsiders disease to 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 certainly

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 of structure isn't it it's about a research how do you know by not the hard problem is how to to research it and it just gives up and then he ends up in philosophy here do you feel like you asked if he 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 him very much so if interviewed for my specialized subjects after 16 so could a levels i did latin greek ancient history math pm us so. i was very into reason i didn't do greek 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 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 yeah. ok let's talk about sort 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 do the hard. 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 small change german that that thought he had this idea and i myself of done a copy of this experiment in the subject where you have electrodes in 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 the way it has decided for you is implying a certain journalism which is not right that is yes actually it 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 if you don't speak the 2 together you have one all the other a but you might express the same idea i mean it's clear how is it. but far less less fortunate people you are the 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 that's to say in terms of your subjective experiences and both are valid and how the one relates out is like position

momentum you can't do simple tennis lee 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 will continue talking to the nearest scientist darren asked susan greenfield about how human brain functions and what consciousness is stay with us.

i'm going to fulfill the repeated purpose is probably to the people come on you know we've all pots. you. know you want to work. you know. for. 5 a. living. and

i'm back with near a scientist bonus susan greenfield says and i just want to bring you back to the you know. that the raw stuff like saying with a consciousness you know until you came in the. possible explanation is if we know that the brain in this part answers like the frontal lobe for days and this hemisphere for that and that hemisphere that why can't we physically observe this. art 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 or 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 be to 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 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 have built way incredible machine what what can be observed is the brain working and 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 of this or that and that's not really true moreover with brain scans in humans the time resolution that says is a bit like 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 exposure was 2 years or 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 want to be happy with a 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 of 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 is different from mine was if you and i took our brains are at a 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 at 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 there's certain

sonar is that you have the same say in russian where you blow your mind or lose your mind or you're out of your mind you're 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 as sex and rock'n'roll are ways and the book that i found very interesting there is mindless you're still conscious and 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 digressing 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. b. mind less and have consciousness and you can have no consciousness but you still get them i say because if they are not become 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 for oid 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 or 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. they're not us 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 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 millet a 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 it's dopamine or serotonin we need to be happy. but when he explained that on a biological level one stands ground do you really explain what love is what again is not an explanation it's a description of his like say a chair will be somewhere that will love it i say that with just the chemical yes and you know i don't know 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 thought 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 changed 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 a dot 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 that you can. just as well describe consciousness as well so you can get a cover of asians so when you fall in love you have a rush of dope them in our rush of endorphins or that's fine 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 we show you are

always about logic 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 confirms what you mean by happiness of course we all know that drugs walk her and then will most obvious one of the opiates give people a feeling of euphoria a feeling of euphoria is not necessarily happiness if 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 a good think we would find 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 we're like chicken in there 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 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 there are 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 it's a distraction that's not exactly to say that it's 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 and i think i want to take now on how your take

on this because the general idea is to speak 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 a 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 are one big mechanism is steadily divided you are going to accept 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 low political people are done but free will is 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 that you will understand in your 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 well how much do you think we know about human brain if you get certain to using from my greek 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 would 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 and 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 that we 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 it. as a job as the big mislabelled you know we want to go after the biggest mystery of all i don't think. we're going to have time to discover any ways thank you so i want to and i are entering i hope we meet again.

the nato military alliance was a relic from the cold war back then it was relevant and even necessary today it is an alliance in search of a mission that search has almost completely impale eastern expansion towards russia but the lingering question remains is the average american and western european interested in a war over the solvent the dystonia and montenegro. we still got us into thailand indeed let's move. on to going to mexico where all records are cool and the description i. could want to think about getting out of your mates and you to want to look at them as old. as you didn't have them do need to get to be are you told you could have

them to your often to get those people to feel when i'm in the good children tell them that's all that's you in taiwan next time you don't come fall who will do more vocal than your. i.

breaking news from the u.k. capital where a terrorist attack has reportedly left of the public. announcements he's quitting. because the former new government after weeks of violent anti-government protests in which hundreds died. and with bolivia in the grip of political instability we spoke to a local man who was brutally beaten and publicly humiliated by rivals of the ousted president evo morales. and i want people to take a step back and think.