Before Brain Science: When We Thought With Our Hearts | Matthew Cobb

SPEAKER_00 0:00 It seems incredibly obvious to us that the brain is what controls us, our thoughts, our emotions. But for a very long stretch of human history, we didn't think that at all. In fact, the ancient Egyptians thought so little of the brain, they literally threw it away during burial ceremonies. The brain would just be pulled out through the nose and then lobbed.

SPEAKER_01 0:22 Because it's a useless piece of grey glob.

SPEAKER_00 0:25 It was only a few hundred years ago that the brain started getting the attention it deserved.

SPEAKER_02 0:30 The problem, which looks so obvious to us, the actual experience every day would suggest the opposite.

SPEAKER_00 0:36 I'm Molly Giu, and this is what we did before, where we explore the history of everyday life. Matthew Cobb is the author of The Idea of the Brain, which explores the many bizarre and surprising ways we've tried to grapple with how our brain, or our heart, actually works. And he also explores why our modern understanding of the brain might be just as strange. Enjoy. Matthew Cobb, it's a pleasure having you on what we did before. Welcome to the podcast. Great to hear you and speak to you, Ollie. It's fantastic. Well, thank you for joining me. So it feels almost obvious to us in the modern day that the brain controls our body. You know, that we we are in some ways just a brain with a meat suit that kind of carries the brain around. But actually, this hasn't been true throughout history. This hasn't been the view. Historically, people thought the control center was actually somewhere else, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:33 Well, it depends on which peoples. And it's very difficult to know, obviously, uh outside of written history. So for the last 5,000 years, we've got a rough idea of what peoples in the Middle East and in Europe and in China thought. And in general, to the extent that they actually tried to localise thinking and emotion, it would have been to the heart. Now, this isn't true of everywhere. So, for example, the Australian Aborigines, that's not the idea of localizing your spirit, your ideas, your feelings to your body is not one that made any kind of sense because their view of themselves is completely linked up with the land and with understanding how the environment affects them and so on. But when people did try to think about where, if there was a place that there was emotion and thought, then it would have been to the heart. That's the main way that people thought of it, especially the ancient Greeks. Aristotle, for example, uh believed that the heart, because it moves, must be the site of emotion, whereas the brain, uh, he thought was some kind of radiator, uh, because it's connected to all various blood vessels and so on. It must be kind of cooling the blood. So I mean, whilst this sounds kind of bonkers, it is in fact absolutely what you feel. Nobody feels emotions, ideas in their head. You know thought is in your head because you've been told it, just like you know that the earth goes around the sun and not the other way around. But simple observation would suggest the opposite. When you're excited, it's your heart that starts pounding. If you're frightened, then you feel it all in your body and so on. So your ideas, your emotions are actually corporeal. They're based in bodily responses and bodily reactions. Uh, so if you were to try and localize thought, emotion, you put it in your heart.

SPEAKER_00 3:27 You wouldn't put it in your head. Yeah, even feelings like anxiety sit there around that area, around your heart. And um, you know, people often say this this phrase, follow your heart. They don't say uh, you know, and and they differentiate the difference between following your heart and following your head, as as though the heart is is in some way still in control of certain parts of what we do and certain parts of our emotional response, even today.

SPEAKER_02 3:54 Yeah, I mean, all languages have this. So I was in I was in Chile the other week and I gave a talk and uh about exactly this. And I started off with a whole set of phrases in Spanish that have heart, just like in English, we have heart where your heart on your sleeve, my heart was in my mouth, you're my sweetheart, etc. etc. Every language has these word, these phrases with heart in it. And if you put brain in it, and replace heart by brain, it doesn't make any kind of sense. And they're they're kind of linguistic fossils, they're remnants of the old way of thinking uh about our body, which actually are not entirely false. You know, that's as I said, that's what it feels like. Now, in reality, uh your heart is just a pump. It I mean, it's pretty amazing pump, but that's all it is. Whereas your brain and those neurons in some amazing special way that we don't understand produce this sensation, this experience, this inner life. And ultimately, you are indeed just your neurons and all the chemicals that are bathing around them, the axillary cells and all the rest of it. That's all there is. It doesn't feel that way, and that's one reason why uh understanding what's going on requires more than introspection, more than philosophizing in your armchair, because you'll get terribly misguided simply by thinking about what it feels like. You you'll end up thinking it's all about the heart, just like Aristotle did. You know, he was a very smart bloke, but he he didn't have the tools to actually investigate this very precisely.

SPEAKER_00 5:24 Well, I I was just wondering whether you could argue that, yes, the brain now we know is responsible for thought, emotion, and all of that sort of stuff that we thought the heart was responsible for for. But if you listen to people like Ann or Seth who say consciousness can only arise in biological beings because it emerges as a result of the confluence of the biological processes and all of the, you know, the heart, the fact that we can physically interact with the world, various aspects of that interacting with our brain is what allows consciousness to emerge. And he that's why he believes it can't emerge in a machine. You could argue that yes, the heart doesn't control emotion, but it still has some part to play in the whole system.

SPEAKER_02 6:06 Well, yeah, I mean, this is one of the one of the things that people have always been interested in. So, you know, if you if you make the heart go faster, if you inject adrenaline, do people feel excited? The answer actually is no. So you need also external circum external features to actually feel excited or terrified or whatever. You need a combination of things. Uh, I mean, I'm uh with all due respect to to Annal, who's a man who I respect a great deal, and his book is fantastic being you. I'm not entirely convinced that argument can resolve this. I mean, you know, I'm not, it's maybe surprise you for somebody who's written a book about the brain. I'm not actually terribly interested in consciousness because my my view is that it is not at the moment a tractable problem. Uh and uh I don't think it's one that it's one that is very difficult to do scientifically. And we know this because there are something like 250 theories of consciousness at the moment, and that alone tells you that people do not agree with what they're studying. If you were talking about, I don't know, physics, you know, quantum physics. There aren't 250 theories of of quantum physics, we don't understand it, but there are a relatively limited number of options, whereas in this field, virtually anything goes. Uh I mean I've got my views about how best to approach the problem, were one to do so, and that would be to look for neural correlates of consciousness. But we found them in a way, uh, and it hasn't really explained why consciousness emerges in certain in certain kinds of neurons in our heads and not in others. So we're we're at a huge impasse and have been, I mean, you know, this is not not new. People have been thinking about this for thousands of years. The scientific study is uh has been going on for whatever, about 150 in one way or another. And although there's a great deal of interest at the moment, uh, and clearly the development of uh large language models and chatbots has led to renewed interest. I mean, Richard Dawkins thinks that his uh his uh his clawed chat bot that he was chatting to and he uploaded his novel to uh is conscious, uh which is just yeah, oh yeah, didn't you not see this? Oh goodness. What a load of nonsense. Wow. I mean, you know, he I mean people, you know, it's like seeing Jesus in a piece of toast. So he's seen he's seen uh he's seen Jesus in not Jesus, but he even renamed it Claudia. Uh he's decided to feminize it for in reasons. Uh and yeah, he wrote an article the other day which explained how, you know, he couldn't see why it wasn't conscious. Whereas I can tell him, well, Richard, it's it's not, it's not actually doesn't understand anything, it's just telling you things you want to hear, basically. Uh, and part of the thing about being human is that we uh we have what's called a theory of mind. So we are able, we think, to understand what is going on in other people's heads. And this is quite remarkable. Now we know that some great apes can do this from very complicated experiments, but they've been done with gorillas uh and other great apes, which suggest that they have they can pass various tests suggesting that they they know what another animal thinks, which is really quite remarkable. But for humans, it's absolutely essential, it's what we do every day. It's why you you you tell your children don't hit that other child, because you know they will feel the same thing. So we learn it and we intuit it. And we then get in terrible problems with machines, because machines either like a chatbot really seem to be like us, or even to take something cruder. I mean, you know, I used to, when I used to work, I don't anymore, I'm retired, I used to yell at the photocopier uh because it would never juice what I wanted. Or if you think of Basil Faulty in Faulty Towers, you know, going out with a branch to beat his car because he's so angry with it. I mean, you know, we understand what's going on, but of course, the machine is no good hitting your car. It's not gonna do any good, make you might make you feel better. So that's the problem, I think. And it goes back to this idea of introspection and simply using ideas and thinking and logical argument, which of course is all philosophers have, it's not gonna work in this situation. I mean, I don't think it works in many situations, uh, but it's not gonna provide reliable knowledge about the nature and origin of consciousness. You need far more sophisticated tools than we have at the moment to resolve this. I mean, that that's my view. I mean, however, I'm you know, I'm not a researcher in consciousness, uh, so and I you know I don't dispute the value of carrying out this work. I just not convinced that it's going to resolve anything in the foreseeable future.

SPEAKER_00 10:47 Aaron Powell And perhaps um we are simply limited by the way that we view the brain in the modern age as a sort of computer. We have uh taken our world the world around us and we've projected it onto how the brain works. So we say the brain is like a computer, and we'll get onto how this has happened at various points in various different ways throughout history. But if I go right back to this idea that the heart was the seat of emotion, you mentioned Aristotle, who's often credited with sort of cementing this idea. But the idea does exist before him, right? So what exactly was thought was going on inside the body with the heart and how it was controlling people?

SPEAKER_02 12:30 Well, it's very difficult to know. Because you know, if you people didn't write things down, then we can't tell. So one of the few bits of evidence we have of uh what people thought before they encountered Western ideas, which were largely influenced by Aristotle and others, uh, for example, the the ideas we know from early anthropologists who went out in the 19th century and talked to people uh from the Northwest Pacific, uh from uh South America, and you get some idea of what the pre-contact ideas were, and they were all to do to do with the heart. And that's pretty much all we've got to go on, to be honest. I mean, you know, with that before writing, there's no recorded evidence. And once writing begins, and in particular once Western contact with peoples happens, then very quickly these ideas are uh intertwined, and it's very difficult to find out what people thought before they actually encountered us.

SPEAKER_00 13:33 But uh we do see that in ancient Egypt uh the burials seem to clearly point to this idea that the heart was more useful than the brain.

SPEAKER_02 13:41 I mean they're they're more yeah, I mean they they did write things down, and there are lots of you know, paintings and so on. So we know that they they too were focused on the heart, and the brain was just kind of thrown away. Uh so they would be very careful about what the heart was gonna what was gonna happen to the heart for a a mummy, but the brain would just be pulled out through the nose and then lobbed because it's a useless and you know, this piece of grey glob. So actually working out the role of the brain was in, I mean, it was extremely complicated, took a very long time. There is no brain-centric moment, there's no experiment, there's no, you know, Newton watching uh an apple fall, oh, there must be gravity, which of course didn't happen either. Uh, but there's no, you know, there's no decisive point. Uh and one of the things I found interesting in in researching for my book, The Idea of the Brain, is there's this there's this song in The Merchant of Venice, uh, one of the bits you skip over when you're doing it at school or whatever. And one of the, I can't remember who it is, somebody sings to entertain the the crowd whilst they're dealing with the more difficult moral issues of the of the play. Uh, somebody sings, tell me where is fancy ideas, thinking, tell me where is fancy bred, or in the heart, or in the head. So that's written at the end of the 16th century. And what it shows is that not only does Shakespeare know that clever people are uncertain as to where thinking is based, is it in the heart or is it in the brain? But it also shows that he was making a comment, reference, joke that the the groundlings, the the audience in the Globe Theatre or wherever, who were a rowdy bunch, and if they weren't impressed, they'd kind of lob rotten turnips at the crowd, at the actors and so on. But he could be confident that they'd understand as well. So it from the kind of 15th century onwards, it became increasingly certain that because partly because in the anatomy, so people could were carrying out very detailed anatomies of the brain and of the heart. And you know what? The heart's just a pump. This was finally established at the beginning of the 17th century by William Harvey, whereas the brain was clearly unimaginably complicated, was connected to the sensory organs uh and to the spinal column and so on in ways that had not been realized by uh the ancient Greeks. And all that kind of gradually convinced people that the heart was just a pump and the brain was doing in some mysterious way, which remains mysterious, was producing our or responsible for our thinking.

SPEAKER_00 16:14 It surprises me, though, that it was such a long period, given that, you know, um you could see in the ancient world, perhaps if somebody got clubbed by, you know, somebody else or or and sustained an injury to the head or the brain, that there would be, you know, I'm I'm sure they would have noticed some differences in behaviour or um some problems that would ar arise from that. Sure, piercing the heart would also kill them, but so would piercing the brain. So you would think that there would be some understanding of both of them playing um almost i even an equally important role in uh the functioning of the body and the preservation of the body.

SPEAKER_02 16:53 Well, you just explain it by the the effect on blood, right? So the heart the role of the heart is to push the blood around the body, and you get bashed on the head, you get bashed in the heart, then it's going to affect your ability to function. I mean, that would have I mean I can't we haven't got a TARDIS, so we can't go back and kind of prod them, but it simply is the case that people were not arguing that the brain had any function in producing thought or emotion or perception until very, very late, you know, the early Middle Ages, they began to think, okay, maybe this is what's going on. Uh, and it was only people could only become confident of this finally by the the the mid to mid-18th century.

SPEAKER_00 17:36 Aaron Powell Even earlier, you know, Hippocrates um famously went against this idea of the heart being the center of thought and did suggest the brain. Um But what evidence did he have, you see?

SPEAKER_02 17:46 So they this is Hippocrates and the I mean, is in fact it was a whole school of uh medical writers who wrote under the name of Hippocrates on Kos, the Greek island, and they argued that uh the brain was the center of thought, but there was no evidence for it. And and and everyday experience argued against that, right? So it's a bit as if they'd said, Oh, well, do you know we've got a heliocentric theory and uh the earth goes round the sun? And people would say, Well, you know, you know, I wake up every morning, the sun goes there and it goes around there. I mean, that's what it looks like. So, I mean, it is of a similar magnitude, the problem, which looks so obvious to us, the solution to it, but actual, if you have, do not you abstract from that very complicated knowledge which has been accumulated over centuries, the actual experience every day would suggest the opposite. I your excitement, your fears would all suggest that it's some part of your body, uh, probably your heart. If you don't know that the earth goes round the sun, it takes very, very careful observation to work out that it's the other way around, which is why it took so long.

SPEAKER_00 18:52 Yeah, and you you could almost imagine as well, for peoples who would experience that uh on a day-to-day basis and also been told by um sort of the medical people of the time that it was the heart, that anyone telling you it was otherwise, you'd you know, you'd almost be reluctant to believe it if it was to happen in the modern day that you were suddenly told something was completely opposite to how you've always believed it, you'd you'd you'd sort of go, No, I don't think it is.

SPEAKER_02 19:18 Yeah, but that that's why, you know, overwhelming. I mean, authority was extremely important. So to take the example of uh of Aristotle and uh the Hippocratic school, although the Hippocratic school got it right, as far as we're concerned, they had no evidence. And Aristotle didn't just write on the heart, he wrote on absolutely everything. And, you know, it was extraordinarily perceptive and accurate in the vast majority uh of his observations, you know, his dissections of animals, his description of how animals behave and so on is absolutely astonishing. And so the fact that he, you know, if you had to say, well, okay, well, these geezers on this island, these medics, they think it's the brain. This character has done all this other stuff. And he also says it's the heart, and you know what that feels like, then that authority carried a huge weight for many, many centuries in Western thinking. Other parts of the world do not seem to have been, as I said, not any of the Australian Aborigines, but equally, uh, Chinese culture was not terribly interested in localizing function to a particular place. So Chinese thinking tended, if it was going to think about anything, would think about the heart. But they were much more interested in thinking about forces and differing tendencies within bodies producing health or disease, rather than actually saying, well, it's this bit and having a very much more uh reductionist and mechanistic approach, uh, which is what ended up characterizing Western thought.

SPEAKER_00 20:47 Just a quick one. If you're enjoying this and you like weird stories from human history like this, do hit subscribe. It helps the channel massively. Right, back to Matthew. And it was um Greek physician Galen, right, who understood um the brain was important, but that there were these vital spirits or these animal spirits that flowed through the brain. So it was this kind of, I mean, a combination perhaps of understandings maybe of what you're saying with sort of aboriginal groups, but also of this localization.

SPEAKER_02 21:18 Well, part of the problem is if whatever's going on, right, wherever it is, this location of thought and emotion, you know, how does it work? And what Galen, who, although he was Greek, he was born in Turkey and he was a Roman citizen. So he's working in the first and second centuries uh of the current era. So it's quite a complicated way. You know, he wasn't a contemporary of Aristotle, he was a few centuries later. And and one of the big differences compared to Aristotle is he actually does an experiment which was very well known throughout the ancient world and was transmitted into the medieval world. It's a rather unpleasant experiment, but basically he's able to show using a pig that if you uh hold its heart, you hold it, stop its heart beating, the animal is still conscious. On the other hand, if you push on its brain, then it becomes unconscious. And this he argued uh was proof that the brain was the key organ and the heart was doing something else. But then the question is comes in either case, what is moving around the body? What is what is producing this effect? And Galen's ideas, which was fairly common, was there was some kind of spirit. Now, what exactly he meant by that is is very unclear. Uh, but something like the wind was moving about, and that relates to the highest technology that they had at the time, that you know, they had wind power. So that seemed so kind of like a legitimate way of trying to understand what might be producing this um this almost magical perception that we have in our heads, uh, whether it or in our hearts, whichever it was. I mean, you know, Aristotle had a similar kind of view, so it was very widespread. Amongst the in the ancient world, that that was the best explanation of what was happening.

SPEAKER_00 23:07 They couldn't go any further than that. I do wonder how challenging it would have been to understand mental illness or conditions like dementia if you have this limited understanding of the brain.

SPEAKER_02 23:19 It's pretty difficult to understand it now. To be honest, I'm not sure we're that much that much further on. You know, if you think about, I mean, the main way they had of understanding all diseases, and this was this was Galen who kind of codified this, was the theory of the humours. You have these different factors within your body, I can never remember them, blood, uh, red bile, yellow bile, or black bile, red yellow bile, and something else. Uh, there were four of them anyway. And the balance of these humours was the key thing. And these these humo get out of whack, then you're going to feel ill, you know, melancholy or whatever. Now, when you read these old accounts of what is producing melancholy, depression, and then you think about, you replace those words black bile and yellow bile with serotonin, dopamine, uh, then you know, people say, oh, well, his new, you know, his neurotransmitters uh are out of balance, uh, which is nonsense. That's not what what's going on, but that's what, in particular, in kind of the the set the final decades of the 20th century, that's very much what people thought was happening. That explains depression. You know, you if you're depressed to get today, maybe um you may be uh you may be prescribed SSRIs, which target uh serotonin. And one of the explanations you may get from your physician is, oh, well, it's to rebalance your serotonin levels. That's exactly the same as talking about humours. You know, it's not really any different. Um, we've got a bit more of a scientific understanding, but not that much uh about how mental illness arises. Uh, and it's still the the greatest challenge we have uh is understanding and understanding and remedying those those problems. And part of the problem is because we don't understand how the brain works and we don't understand what consciousness is, then it's very difficult to understand what's happening when it's going awry. And you can see this in the in the drug industry. So there are no new pharmaceuticals being developed for, say, anxiety and depression. Uh though these are huge problems uh all around the world. We have, you know, the the people who are making vast sums of money or could make vast sums of money do not think that it is worth investing in it because they cannot be confident that they will come up with uh a drug that will resolve them. And they may be right in that it may not be, as they say, a druggable issue. Perhaps we'd be much better off having talking therapies or you know, changing our diet, or whatever it might be, that you know, simply taking a pill is not going to resolve these much more subtle problems to do with our mental health.

SPEAKER_00 26:08 Yeah, exactly. And and you know, I know people who have benefited from using antidepressants, so that's where it becomes really hard to unpick exactly what is helpful and what isn't. Certainly what wasn't helpful in the 19th century was uh phrenology. This this I mean, was it helpful? I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 26:31 Well, so phrenology is the idea that rose at the end of the 18th century that you could tell somebody's personality from the shape of their head, and it had its origins in the far more simple view uh that you could tell somebody's uh personality from their face. Uh, indeed, Darwin was initially rejected to uh in uh going on the Beagle because the captain of the Beagle didn't like the look of him. I mean, it was a bit more complicated than that, but he he thought that Darwin's face meant that he was unreliable. And you know what? People still do this. They'll say, ooh, his eyes are too close together, or whatever. Um, so this is partly kind of nonsense and partly, you know, kind of folk uh beliefs, but it was codified in the end of the 18th, beginning of the 19th century into uh the idea that by feeling your skull, you could actually feel the shape of your brain. And your brain was composed of various organs, and each of these organs was responsible for particular characters like trustworthiness or uh likability or intelligence or whatever. Now, this is nonsense on a stick because you know your skull's really thick, whatever the shape of your head, it doesn't tell you anything about the shape of your brain. You can't feel your brain through your skull, I'm glad to say. Nonetheless, a bit like, you know, people have and still do to one extent or another, believe in astrology, which is equally rubbish. Um, in the 19th century, people, throughout the 19th century, people were obsessed with it. And there's virtually no 19th century novel that you can read that doesn't mention it in passing at some point. Uh, Dickens was very skeptical. Magwich, the convicted criminal, uh, says to Pip in Great Expectations, he says, well, basically they felt felt my head, they'd have been better off feeling my stomach. I, he was arguing, look, you know, never mind about my head, it's because I'm hungry, that's why I'm a criminal. But, you know, Queen Victoria had her children phrenologised, Karl Marx, a German revolutionary, would feel ahead of one of his comrades to see whether they were reliable and trustworthy and so on. And even towards the end of the 19th century, one of the first encounters of Sherlock Holmes, when Holmes meets Moriarty, uh, Moriarty makes a very disparaging comment about the shape of Holmes's head to imply that he's inferior. I've recently written about Bugfree of Francis Crick, and when Crick was uh a child, about eight, so in the 1920s, a traveling phrenologist came round and felt Crick's head and told his mum, oh, he's very clever. This is very interesting. Now, what a surprise. You know, you go and see a uh a fortune teller, they're not gonna say, well, you're gonna have a really boring life. You know, you're gonna end up living in a living in a suburban house and whatever, you know. I mean, that might be fine. Uh but uh, you know, they're gonna always tell you something interesting because, you know, that oh, I need to do another test. And occasionally they'll be right. Yeah. So what's interesting about this this idea is that it did suggest that there was local bit different bits of your brain were doing various different things. And that is a kind of assumption and an argument that has continued for uh nearly 200 years now about whether the function in the brain is localized to particular areas or whether it's distributed and a kind of unifying whole. And the answer is both, uh, to be very kind of crude about it. Uh, in in the 19th century, the part of the argument was that French philosophers and and anatomists, more to the point, accepting French philosophy, in particular Descartes, who said, look, thought is one and unified, uh, said, Well, therefore the brain must be, because if the brain's producing thought, then it too must have this unifying function. They then hit a big problem in the middle of the, in about 1860, when uh a French anatomist called Paul Brocker uh discovered that, well, I'm using it now. This part of your brain, the front left side of your brain, controls speech. It doesn't control language perception, but it controls the production of speech. Uh, and this was doubly upsetting to everybody, in particular Brocker, who didn't like, I mean, the data are all based on uh post-mortem examinations of people who had had strokes and had lost the power of speech. And because he was a good French, good Frenchman, he wanted to agree with Descartes and all this stuff about you know unifying unity of thought and the brain. But now he found that in patients who had lost the power of speech, they always had a lesion on the front left side of their brain. So this was doubly upsetting. One, because it suggested localization, two, because it was only on one side of the brain. So the apparent symmetry of the brain, which is what it looks like, if you look at a brain, just look at the structure, you can't tell any particular part of it different from another. Now it seemed that this part was very different from this part. So this is uh a reliable localization of function. Except we know that, well, two, two, uh one of the most striking bits of evidence was published three years ago uh with some uh researchers in America who were doing a set of brain scans, and they put an advert out to the public saying, you know, we're looking for patients to have their brains scanned. And this woman, who's a college graduate, uh, she was in her 30s, led a completely normal life. Uh, she said, Well, I think you might want to scan my brain because I've been told it's quite interesting. So they put her in the scanner and they show in the paper, basically, this left-hand side of her brain is just black. It's there's a hole there. There's nothing there. There's just no brain. No, no left-hand side of the brain at all. On the other hand, the right-hand side is quite normal. And so she lacks an awful lot of her brain, including Brocker's area. So, from what we know, she shouldn't be able to speak. And yet she is perfectly normal. Now, what they think happened is that, and this is illustrates a very important point and a problem with localization of function. When she was an embryo, she had some kind of stroke. That side of the brain died and degenerated, she's then born, she's emerges into this world full of speech and language, and you know, that's what babies do. They just absorb language like a sponge, and they end up speaking. They want to speak. It's an inherent thing to do with the organization of the brain. And in ways we have no idea how it happened, then basically this kind of pull, this push and pull from the environment and from the structure of her brain, led the right, presumably the right hand side of her brain, to be able to carry out that function, which it normally cannot. So there's a plasticity, there's a flexibility to the brain, in particular when you're young, which is one reason why you can learn lots and lots of languages, or you can learn to play a musical instrument, or you're very good at maths when you're young. And then the older you get, the harder it gets to learn a new language. And, you know, by the time you get to my age, it's pretty tough going. Whereas if a child, as we all know, children will pick up multiple languages. If they live in a uh a multilingual situation, then they will very quickly code switch between uh different uh languages and behaviors uh according to what is socially required. So, I mean, this extends this problem about localization of function, it's been you know largely studied by people using rodents in particular, because they're the main model we use. Uh, and clearly a rodent isn't a human, and there are bits of the brain, like Brocker's area is important for language production, another area is important for language perception in humans. Although there is localization of function, so we have a visual cortex, for example, which is at the back of the head. We also know that there are neurons which wrap all the way around the brain and connect different areas and able functions to be localized but distributed. So they are localized, but they're also kind of blurry and distributed uh as well. And it's very difficult to um there's a fine line between saying, oh, well, it's all localized. And I mean, you know, what is localized is my computer. My computer has a particular circuit for processing this audio, a different board for processing the video, and all the rest of it. And if I take the video uh circuit out, then we won't see me anymore, right? Um or you won't hear me if I take the audio circuit out. And that is the way it is, it's not going to fix itself. Whereas the brain, uh, these functions can, in certain circumstances, be shared and over time be repaired and taken up by by different areas.

SPEAKER_00 35:02 You speak about this idea as well that um where a specific brain region might be uh responsible for something at one period, at one point in time, that funct the place where that function happens can slightly drift over the course of time as well, right?

SPEAKER_02 35:19 Yeah, now this is very specific. I mean, it's we're not talking about drifting from this side to this side. What people have done is to so this relates to what I said earlier on about the the neural correlates of consciousness. So this was the idea of Francis Crick, uh working with uh Christophe Koch uh in the 80s and 90s and the 1980s and 1990s. What they said is the best approach to studying consciousness would be to find neurons, the activity of which correlates to a particular perception. And they were particularly interested in visual perception because uh we know an awful lot about it. And also it's I mean, I know this deeply because I I spent my career working on the sense of smell, and that's very different to difficult to control with you, you have to puff no smells up people's noses and all the rest of it. Whereas a visual uh stimulus, you know, you can flash it on a screen, you can control its contrast, brightness, and all the rest of it. And that's what Crick and uh Cock argued was the best approach to understanding where in the brain or what which particular neurons in the brain were involved in consciousness. So they weren't necessarily saying this activity would be conscious perception, but it would correlate in some way. It was the best starting place. I mean, despite my lack of interest in the or enthusiasm for the topic, I think that's that approach is correct. However, we have actually found such things. Um, there are cells that are associated, for example, with recognizing faces, both in animals and in humans. And this can even be really quite remarkable. So, Koch, together with some other researchers after Crick's death uh in the early, you know, about 20 years ago now, 15 years ago, did a series of studies of patients who were about to undergo brain surgery for severe epilepsy. So they were going to uh have parts of their brain removed so that they could uh be relieved from these terrible problems. And incredibly generously, they said to the surgeons, well, yes, of course, you can poke around in my head with an electrode and present various images to me and record from my brain. Um and what they found quite remarkably was uh these are from single cells. They found that single cells might respond specifically to, say, a picture of Jennifer Aniston, uh, but not to Jennifer Aniston with Brad Pitt, who she was going out with at the time. So this is absolutely bizarre. You know, and other other cells in another person would respond only to a picture of the Sydney Opera House or to a differential equation. So, I mean these were really, really specific kind of almost kind of concepts. The key point is that they aren't, there isn't just one cell that responds to you don't have a Jennifer Aniston cell on your head, right? Because you'd need so many cells that there aren't, you know, there aren't any. Some people do.

unknown 38:13 Well, maybe.

SPEAKER_02 38:14 What you will have is, I mean, clearly, in a way, it's not a surprise, right? Because you can recognize Jennifer Aniston or the Signia Opera House. And all that means is that you have a set of neurons that correspond to that. And that's how what memory is. It's a pattern of activity. And they had just by luck put an electrode into one of the many neurons that produce that network of activity, and they could then record from it. So you got the apparent, incredibly specific uh responses. People then kind of pursued this and said, okay, well, we could what about using using mice, which are much more tractable and we can do horrible things to them and people don't project quite so much. Uh and so you would record a uh from a mouse's brain and you would present it with visual stimuli in its environment, and you would say, okay, right, this set of neurons is responding to this particular uh either particular set of visual stimuli. And because you can leave the electrodes in, you can see what happens over a period of a month. And quite bizarre, what they found was, okay, you've got, I don't know, you know, say 150 neurons respond. There is a stripe in the right-hand corner of my cage or whatever. But over time, those 150 neurons would no longer all respond to that corner in the stripe in the corner of the cage. Only a handful would now be responding by the end of the month. And presumably other neurons, which you're not recording from, are now correspond to that perception. So they they call this and kind of get-out phrase perceptual drift or representational drift, which just means it's moving, which only makes it more complicated. So I think what's going on is that you know our brains are partly because meaning alters over time. And that, you know, the activity of brains is not, we're not simply a, you know, a brain is not a camera, our visual system is not a camera. Cameras can't see. They simply have an image, you know, they represent the outside world. But our representation involves meaning and significance, which is one reason why we forget stuff, because it doesn't have any meaning. Other stuff, stripe in the corner of the cage, that's where I got fed, that means something. Uh, and that's why the animal's going to remember it. But on the other hand, other things will have intervened in the intervening time, and therefore, this will move over time. So the suggestion would be that if you went back and you could recall from the same cell, uh, the Jennifer Aniston cell in one of these patients, you wouldn't find it anymore, because that will have been part of a general network of you know, generic blonde woman in her 30s or however old she was then. And Jennifer Aniston may be somewhere else. I mean, there'll be an overlap because there's still, I've got this concept of, you know, the Sydney Opera House or, you know, blonde women in their 30s, uh, of whom I don't know, I could probably put Madonna and uh Jennifer Aniston and many other famous people I can't think of, you know, different ages, times in their lives. You that would all correspond to that. But now the Jennifer Aniston-ness might have moved off because you don't watch Friends anymore, or you're not interested in, you know, stars or whatever it might be. So there is localization, it moves, which is a bit bizarre. I mean, it's not moving to the other side of your head, but it's moving within uh this part of your brain. And there are also these neurons that are incredibly long that connect various parts of your brain and seem to play a very important role in distributing the function and the perception and thought in some way. So, I mean, one, this is quite mind-boggling. Two, it illustrates that Crick and Cock's approach, whilst it was a great starting point, hasn't resolved the issue. I mean, we have neural correlates of consciousness that you can record from when somebody is perceiving the Sydney Opera House or Jennifer Aniston. Why those neurons? Why are those neurons producing this response, whereas other neurons in other parts of your brain are not? Uh, is it is that recording that you're making the same thing as perception? Is it the conscious perception of this image? We don't know the answer to that. And that remains something, you know, profoundly mysterious, which, you know, in the 19th century led people to, because people were worrying about this for a long time, you know, they knew the connection between brain and thought. And what is it in the 1870s, 1880s? People gave up. They said, well, wow, man, we can't figure this out. Either we'll never know, which is possible, but I hope we will, or they ended up going back into kind of mystical ideas. This is something that was common way into the I don't think, I mean, there are still some people who, scientists and philosophers who believe this, that there it that there is this immaterial force, which is perception, which is consciousness, which is not the direct product of neuronal activity.

SPEAKER_00 43:20 Yeah, there's this idea of pan-psychism that's. Oh, don't get me started on that.

SPEAKER_02 43:25 Instead of our brains. Let's let's deal with neurons, not rocks.

SPEAKER_00 43:29 Our brains tapping into consciousness on a uh on a universal scale rather than producing it, certainly goes slightly beyond uh the realms of this conversation, I think. But what one person I really want to tell the story of is Phineas Gage, because I was I was told his story uh ages ago by my co-host actually, Matt, who does some of the episodes of what we did before. Um and Phineas Gage is well, he really changed our understanding of the brain, didn't he? Because he um he had this metal rod fly through the bottom of his head, uh basically, and come out the top. And rather than kill him, he sort of stood up moments later uh with this gaping hole in his head and was still able to function with brain matter scattered on the floor. Um maybe maybe tell me a bit more about Phineas Gage and what happened to him.

SPEAKER_02 44:20 Yeah, well, the the point about Gage is uh the story is as always is much more complicated than what people think. And this is a his significance has been retrofitted by subsequent generations and particularly by textbooks, which tend to compress a very complicated story and ignore what actually happened. So, Gage, as you said, he works on a railway, he's uh got this iron rod, he's blowing up a cliff face to build a cutting or something. So he's drilled a hole, tamping in the explosives, and bang, it goes off, and this rod goes through his head. And he became incredibly famous afterwards. He was exhibited, or he exhibited himself in kind of traveling shows. Because he was still alive. I mean, so the the amazing thing we here's the amazing man, he's got this disfigured face, and you know, he's standing there with this damn tamping iron, this huge, great big metal rod. So that was that was what he was famous for. After his death, I mean he went on, he was exhibited, he went to he went to Chile as well, like me, but he was uh being a stagecoach uh driver in in Chile. So he he he functioned very, very well. After his death, his skeleton is exhibited, I think it's in Harvard Medical School, it's still there, and you can see this very gruesome uh injury that he suffered. And in reconstructing, in trying to understand what had happened and how he'd survived, subsequent authors investigating this came up with this phrase that was written several decades later that after his accident, Gage was no longer Gage. I hid his personality had changed. And it is alleged, but the evidence is in fact extremely flaky, that um he became much more impulsive and uh aggressive and had less self-control. And this was subsequently argued, aha, that's because these frontal lobes of his head, which was believed in a semi-phrenological fashion to be the site of control and restricting your impulsions, that was damaged. And so he became this very aggressive, you know, unable to control his his rage. I mean, there's very little evidence for that, if virtually none at all. And indeed, the fact that he was able to hold down a steady job as a stagecoach driver would suggest that he wasn't a complete lunatic, you know, wasn't raging maniac.

SPEAKER_00 46:40 Oh, that's so interesting.

SPEAKER_02 46:41 I always thought that came directly from his friends at the time, so that he is no longer gauge, but it's well it it is it's from people who there is some kind of writing, but it's several decades later when people are re-examining it. And indeed, it only becomes really important. And Uncle Ferrier in England was carrying out experiments on monkeys and was recording from their brain, stimulating their brain using very sender electrodes. And he went back and re-examined it in the light of what he knew from monkeys and suggested that there was this link. Now, it's quite possible that there was, and that is indeed what happened. But, you know, as I say, the story is in fact much more complex. There's a whole book written about it. It was published in 2002 by a chap called Macmillan, uh, who went through it all and kind of dug out all the detail, and you think, okay, well, this actually story is much more complicated than I thought. Um, but clearly, I mean, he, you know, one, he survived, which is quite amazing. So that shows us again that there can be some plasticity. I mean, it's not just, you know, if you have something through your head, generally a very bad idea. Uh, and he may well have had changes to his personality which parallel those uh that you can see in if you do various unpleasant things to monkeys. Um, and that's that's so we ended up with this idea of the localization of function to the front of the brain. If you read a neuroscience textbook, that's what it will say. It'll just compress all that story into you know this very simple view.

SPEAKER_00 48:07 And we've understood the way that the brain operates and works in various different ways through history, as I mentioned earlier. And we we now sort of see it as a computer, but Arthur Smee um noticed that you know the systems of the brain were similar to the systems of the telegraph, um, which was uh, you know, uh at the at a time when that was a popular technology, that was the comparison that was being drawn. Then you have uh Luigi Gavani's frog experiment, which sort of kicks off this idea that the nervous system is electrical, and and so um we start to see all of these sort of electrical ideas of the brain emerging. I really want to just talk about the electricity side of things because there's this interesting link between that uh sort of new experiment and also the f uh one of the most famous novels ever written, right? Well, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 49:01 So the um electricity is discovered uh in the middle of the 18th century, is mastered in the sense that you can generate it, basically what we would call static electricity, by uh rubbing, say, some wool against a piece of amber, then you can produce a static charge and you can do all sorts of strange displays. They would have something called the flying boy, where you'd get a lot of electric charge, uh, you'd charge up the boy, I do mean a child, you'd winch him up. This was done in kind of stately homes and stuff, you'd winch him up to the ceiling, and then you'd throw a load of feathers in the air. And as you may remember from your dad, or maybe you, with your children, you rub a rubber balloon against your wool jumper, and you can stick it on the wall, and the children amazed. So static electricity has these amazing powers. And then eventually, at the end of the 19th century, people were able to store this static charge in what was called a Leiden jar, which would, if you touched it, would then discharge instantly. So you get a nasty shocker out of it. You could, you know, store an awful lot of electricity. Uh, and this was used in various experiments, for example, uh, to show that you could get uh muscles moving in frogs, or indeed in monks. So a French philosopher got 200 monks to hold hands. Uh, so you've got about 400 uh meters worth of monk. Uh, and at one end he gets one of these Leiden jars and touches the wires to a monk and he jumps, and then the charge goes all the way down the 400 meters of monk. So it proves that it works in human beings as well. The key development happened, however, with the development of the battery, which was developed uh by Volta as a way of trying to understand how animals produced electric shocks. So uh this was done, he people knew that there's a fish in the Mediterranean called the torpedo, which uh is a bit like an electric eel, uh, which will give you an electric shock if you touch it. And he knew where the electrical organs were, and he tried to imitate this by using various layers of zinc and cardboard and acid and so on. And he was able to produce uh what in most languages is called a pile, because it's a pile of different layers. In English, we would now call that a battery, but at the time it's called a pile, and we've now eradicated piles from our uh language about electricity, except with the atomic pile, because that was developed by an Italian. That's what he called it. Uh so we that that's why you, you know, if you talk about Chernobyl, they'll talk about the atomic pile. It just means it's atomic battery, right? Because they still use that word in French, and all the romance languages would still say pile to describe uh this layering, this pile of different components. And what you could do with that was you could now slowly discharge rather than a single one. You could now control electricity. This was an incredibly important development at the beginning of the 19th century. And it was a, as I say, in fact, it was a bit of biomimicry. Somebody trying to understand a bit of biology, ended up inadvertently inventing portable uh electricity sources. And what this ended up being was you could use this in kind of entertainment, as it were. That is, uh, in the on the English stage in the 19th century, you could go and watch uh somebody with uh some of these batteries uh with a uh recently decapitated cow or sheep, and you put the electrodes on either side of its uh face and it would eyes would open, its eyes would roll, and its tongue would come out. Sometimes they have a whole cow on stage and it would kind of defecate everywhere. Really pretty foul. But this was this was entertainment, folks. Uh don't knock it. You know, people paid good money to go to fancy London theatres to see this. Glad we've changed somewhat. Yeah, I mean, obviously the future will look back on various of our activities and not be very impressed. Um so we shouldn't be, we don't necessarily have the more high ground, I don't think. No. Well, not permanently. And in 1815, in the early 1812 or something like that, then a young woman called uh Mary Godwin, who's a teenager, went to the Royal Institution in London to see one of these demonstrations. And it was known that this had also, in about 1805, been done with a human body. Uh this was a man who'd uh a convict who'd killed his wife and children, he'd been hanged, and then uh this is entirely done in private and secret. His body was immediately taken into a small cabin uh next to the gallows, and his dead body was touched with these electrodes, and his eyes opened and his arms started flailing about. And uh Mary Godwin was apparently very taken with this uh, or very struck more to the point, by this demonstration on an animal, on a dead animal, uh, that maybe electricity could reanimate uh life. And a few years later, after she got married to the great poet uh Percy Shelley, and she was now Mary Shelley on their honeymoon, uh it was very, very wet because there'd been a huge volcanic explosion in the it's already complicated, huge volcanic explosion in uh Indonesia, which changed the the world's atmosphere and led to the the the summer, uh the year without a summer because the weather was foul. Now you might think they'd have something better to do on their honeymoon, uh, but they didn't apparently, so they sat around and decided to write ghost stories. And uh Mary, uh hers was the most successful one, she writes uh Frankenstein, where this is well, very interesting. If you read Frankenstein, she doesn't actually say how he does it, how he recreates this, he just uses power. Um, but clearly the idea is, or the suggestion is that this novel is based on her experience of seeing animals apparently reanimated, or at least producing movement, uh, through the power of uh battery electricity. So that's why in the films you'll see lightning bolts and all the rest of it. But there's none of that in the book. The book's very, you know, she very wisely skips over how exactly Dr. Frankenstein produces his magic. But the key point was that this very strongly suggested that bodies worked with electricity in them, which is true, but not true, because it's not electricity in the same way as, you know, as in a a current in a in a wire. It's uh kind of electrochemical gradients that change incredibly rapidly. I mean, the the difference might seem quite subtle, but it I mean it it's important. We're we're chemical. Uh we're to do with movements of chemistry, in and out of membranes. That's that's how our bodies work. But you can it it's effectively the movement of electrons, which is what electricity is.

SPEAKER_00 55:45 I think um it's a great way to spend your honeymoon, to be honest, uh, writing ghost stories. I think that I would I would have loved that to be honest. Um I suggest you tell your wife, see when she's impressed. Yeah, yeah, I'm not sure she would like agree. Um just to wrap up, then, I I I want to bring back a point you just mentioned, which was we don't have the moral high ground now. And that is really true because as we've discussed and as your book lays out, we have typically viewed the way that the brain functions as analogous to the prevailing technology of the time. So right now it is computers, we see them as computers, which is why I think we believe neural networks and large language models are simulating the brain, because we kind of see them as one in the same. But there will be, you know, it's we can kind of look back and laugh and say, ha ha ha, our ancestors thought the heart controlled our bodies. That's so stupid. But do you think one day our computer metaphor for the brain may be just as outdated, given that we know still so little about how the brain actually functions?

SPEAKER_02 56:48 Well, I think it already is. I mean, uh, you know, no neuroscientist talking to another neuroscientist will say, well, the brain's like a computer. I mean, that's something you might explain to, you know, a relative who's not a scientist, or to uh simplify things for a child, but literally that is not what is happening. No, nobody literally thinks it's like a computer. As I said, there's you know, localization of function is hard, what literally hardwired into this computer I'm talking you to you through. But it's not in my brain. There's very little, there's some things that are hardwired in my brain, but most things are extremely plastic, um, which is one reason why we're different, you and I. You know, we're not exactly the same. I mean, even if you have two twins who've got exactly the same genome, they're not exactly the same. So brains are what the the last kind of century in particular has has convinced people of is that they in some way represent the outside world and they make predictions about what is going to happen, what could happen. They can model it and make a prediction about what will happen depending on what you do to intervene it. And that, as you mentioned, Annal Seth, this interactive point about being a human is absolutely essential. That we need to, you know, we're not well any animal, you know, any animal is making that prediction. It's got a representation of the outside world, and it makes predictions about what will happen if it acts in certain ways, and then may or may not act in that way, depending on whether that serves its particular ends at that particular moment. And that is very different from a computer, right? Which is part of this is because it's a computer hasn't evolved. Well, it's changed, but it hasn't evolved in the same way that we have. You know, it's been designed. It's been, okay, we want to have a uh a particular processor for dealing with the dealing with the video, because it's getting really, really complicated, so we're just going to increase that bit. Whereas in an animal, its evolution is entirely of a, you know, as a as a whole and has taken place over with a different process and over far, far greater depths of time. So inevitably, when we develop new technology, then our views of the brain are going to change, just like they've changed from thinking about the, I mean, you mentioned the telegraph, between the telegraph and the computer, there was the telephone exchange, uh, which is a flexible way of transmitting data. Uh, you can alter what goes in and what goes out by people plugging in different uh cables. I mean, young people have no idea what I'm talking about. But if you watch an old film, uh you can see people doing it. It's generally women picking up the receiver and then directing you, your your message, your telephone, connecting you with the person you want to talk to. And this metaphor, this flexibility, because it's got flexibility in it, it's really interesting. It's got flexibility, but also hardwiredness, that's still used. I mean, people still talk about, you know, neuroscientists will still say, well, this brain is a bit like a switchboard because it can move its signals around in a way that you can't do with a telegraph system, which is, you know, you've got a telegraph wire that goes from London to Manchester by the side of the railway, and that's it. And you send a message, da-da-di-d-d-d- and it goes there. You can't suddenly route it off to Hull or to Edinburgh if you want to, whereas you can do that with a telephone exchange. So inevitably, when new technology comes along, we're going to change our view. And I I don't think that large language models are that, because they are simply computer programs that have uh assimilated huge amounts of data, which of course they have stolen. I really wish to emphasize that. My work has been stolen. Uh, you know, I've got a many many people suing Anthropic for a pittance for the one book I'm allowed to sue for. Whereas, in fact, I know from the database they stole over 200 of my articles, books, and so on, right? And you know, I'm just a tiny little proportion of this global theft that has taken place by the AI companies in breach of copyright, of literary, musical, uh, artistic works. But all they're doing is being able to predict very with a high degree of reliability, what's the most likely next bit of data in a particular string. You know, how am I feeling today, uh, ChatGPT, you might uh ask it. And it will then say, Well, I don't know, or, you know, how are you feeling? Have you got a headache or whatever? It will then give you an answer, which is the most likely one. In the 1960s, this was all done hard uh by hard code. So you'd have a, you know, you'd talk to one of these uh apparent psychotherapist programs and Eliza. Yeah, right. And you'd say something like, Well, you know, um, I'm having problems with my m my mother at the moment. And Eliza would say, Well, that's very interesting. What are your problems with your mother? And it's just picked up those keywords mother problem, and then it's regurgitated. In a way, it's asking you a it's just asking you a series of questions. And that people were absolutely convinced that this thing was alive and conscious, and it's no different from so I don't I mean the problem with the LLMs, people go, oh, that's going to tell us something about how the brain works. Well, it they might, in that they might be able to look for patterns in data and pull things out that we can't perceive, but that's not the same as saying this particular form of uh communication between you and a computer is actually telling you anything about what's going on inside our heads. I think that is that's an illusion, uh, which, as I said, Richard Dawkins has fallen prey to. Um, it's no different from the illusion of people thinking that this uh you know program written in BASIC or whatever ELISA was uh is actually conscious. That's that's us tricking ourselves. I mean, Richard Feynman said the the physic great physicist said, there's nobody easier to fool than yourself. I mean he was talking about physics and believing nice, round, simple theories. That applies in spades to thinking about consciousness in the brain because our experience is so powerful and our impression is of something else being alive is so overwhelming that you you you know you lose your critical faculties very easily.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:02 I'm surprised someone like Richard Dawkins has fallen for it. Um flattery.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:09 Because these things flatter you. They say how great you are, you know. Oh, that's thank you very much. You think my novel is good. I mean, somebody said the worst thing is about this whole story is that he's writing a novel. Uh that's what he uploaded, and it went, Oh, that's from Richard, this is really very perceptive. I particularly like the way you said X, Y, and Z. I mean, this is what you know, chatbots are they're flatterers. You know, they are the the crowd around the um the emperor who's not wearing any clothes, going, oh, this is marvelous, fantastic. And I think we all need to be a bit more the little boy saying, he hasn't got anything on, it's just a machine.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:43 Yeah, I've seen people uh listing their co-author as Claude or Chat GPT because they've been so uh using it in such tandem with their own writing.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:54 Um it's not their own writing anymore, is it? It's uh it's something else. It's it's ultimately it's based on theft, as I said. I mean, I'm I'm laboring this point because uh you know, never mind about the ecological damage these devices do. There is a fundamental issue to do with creativity and creative activity uh that is absolutely dreadful. And uh will well, it it has yet to be resolved. And it's not just anthropic, it's meta, it's uh grok, it's you know Apple intelligence, all of them. That's the only thing they can do is just suck up from what's on the internet, you know. And it's not only not only creative activity, now they're getting access to corporations Slack conversations. So they want to know how people inter, you know, by seeing all that, they can see how people will will chat on Slack or other internal chat rooms. So you know, people's complaints about their manager are also going to be hoovered up and spurted into these devices to try and come up with something that they hope will be profitable.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:56 Well, that's sort of dystopian. But I think the It's reality, mate. It is reality. I think the upside, though, um, and the I I guess the final point to end on, really reflecting what you've said, is the fact that this means that the human brain, you know, we still know that it's so much more complex, so much more diverse than anything that we've been able to create so far. And so all the while AI is threatening to take jobs and is stealing content, human brains are still more powerful, more complex, and there's still much more to imagine beyond what we've found out so far. And I think that gives us a bit of hope that we are far more relevant in the future than perhaps we're giving ourselves credit for. Because I think a lot of people are are saying now humans are less relevant. Now AI is going to take over everything, and robots are going to take our jobs, you know. Um, maybe this lack of understanding about the brain is something to have, you know, is cause for hope.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:56 Yeah. And we are, you know, the the there was a very famous scientific article, the end of the last century, with a rather surprising take title, perhaps, for some people, which was The Brain Has a Body. That is, we are embodied. We are not simply a brain sitting in a vat. We have bodies. Uh, and there are, you know, I mean, no matter even if AI can, I don't know, organize calendars and do kind of dreary administrative tasks, which it can't reliably at the moment, I wouldn't rely on any of these things for anything. Even if that comes, which it probably will in a few years' time, next time you go on a plane, look up, look out the window when you as you're as you're before you take off. You'll see a load of blokes hulking around with big bags, shoving them on a conveyor belt, and then somebody's got to crawl inside the plane, move those bags around, put them in the right place. I mean, so something as as as crude as or essential to our current world as uh air flight is based on lots of people doing intelligent but physically demanding things that no robot can at the moment, or no robot we can imagine can do. So uh, you know, maybe don't want to be a you know a kind of uh low-level bureaucrat retrain as an airport baggage handler because you're gonna always be getting a job like that. Similarly, you know, I'm not having a robot wiping my bum when I'm you know senile. Uh I want a person to do it, I want to have a personal contact with somebody. It's uh and no robot will be doing that because of all the complexity of the interactions, the human interactions. Uh no matter how nice Claude might have been to uh Richard Dawkins, uh, it won't be able to wipe his bum in 10 years' time when he needs it.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:41 Well, I certainly hope you are right, Matthew. Um, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you on the podcast. Thank you so much for joining me. You're very welcome, Ollie. It's been great. A massive thank you to Matthew Cobb. I really hope you enjoyed this conversation too. Please subscribe, it helps us out massively. And as what we did before is independently made, if you'd like to support us and help me make more episodes like this, there's a link in the description. Your support is really greatly appreciated. I'm Ollie Giu, and I will see you next time.