Everything that human beings have ever accomplished is a product of the machinery inside our heads.
This is the size of the human brain, the organ of the mind of man.
It generates all our feelings, our actions, our thoughts.
There are new ideas about how it works, about waking and dreaming, about our emotions and
the strange partnership of mind and body, about how we see and how we remember, even
where consciousness operates within the brain.
So tonight we'll examine that imprecise quality human nature and search for the powers within
this lump of tissue.
I'm David Prowett of National Educational Television.
The life of the mind is still deeply mysterious and some of the distinguished contributors
to this program will dispute the approach we've chosen.
But it leads us at the very least to remarkable new discoveries about the mind of man.
Our search begins here in London and will take us around the world, not only to Western
Europe, the United States and the Soviet Union, but to India too, where the yogis say they
can exert amazing mental control over their bodies during meditation.
In New Delhi we begin our first experiment.
Ramanand is one of India's most accomplished Raj or master yogis.
Allegedly he was once buried alive for 28 days.
Using this airtight metal box, Dr. Chena and his colleagues at the All India Institute
of Medical Sciences are going to put the yogi's powers to a severe test.
Before he's sealed inside, Ramanand yogi prays.
He's 46 years old and he's practiced yoga for nearly 30 years.
Dr. Bal Krishnan Anand is in charge of the laboratory.
He's already proved some claims of the yogis such as the ability to stop the heart to be
false.
The question now is, could other claims be true?
Is it possible for a man to control his body's need for oxygen just by the power of thought?
These wires will measure electric rhythms in Ramanand yogi's head.
They'll be the main guide to this state of mind during this remarkable experiment.
And for recording the yogi's rate of breathing, this tube.
One problem Ramanand faces is the suffocating effect of carbon dioxide which will build
up as he breathes the air inside the box.
An untrained man would be fighting for breath within a short time.
Twice an hour, small samples of air drawn from the top of the box will show how much
oxygen the yogi has used.
The doctors have already calculated his body's basic needs at complete rest.
These leads from head and body will inform the experimenters instantly about his condition.
But in case Ramanand wants to be released in a hurry, he has an emergency alarm buzzer.
Everything's ready now for the box to be sealed.
Now the yogi's brain must repress the demands of his body.
No air can seep in here as it did through the dirt when Ramanand was buried underground.
The dancing pens report the yogi's condition.
There's no outward sign of the battle that's beginning between mind and body.
The heart beats steadily.
These unusually rhythmic waves on the electroencephalograph show that the yogi's brain is very peaceful
indeed.
What will the result be of Ramanand's strange journey into the depths of his being?
We'll go back to Delhi later to find out and to see what it means for those of us who aren't
yogis.
You at home are the real heroes of our story as owners of this machine.
It's inconceivably more complex than the mightiest computer, yet it weighs only three pounds
and it fits snugly into your skull.
It's the most subtle of all the works of nature, an end product of billions of years of evolution.
The brain doesn't work in isolation.
It's both servant and master of our bodies.
Every experience, every sensory impression, every thought we've ever had, every second
of every minute of every day has left its influence.
It inherits 50,000 years of human progress and tradition.
The brain itself has not changed since our forefathers lived in caves.
The armchair psychologist could miss important features of his mind if he forgets it evolved
for practical action.
This mind machine supplied the hunter's skills of hand and eye, his quick wits and the communal
bonds of emotion and language.
But the dreamy hunter turned out to be capable of much else besides, and his powerful brain
changed the natural world to suit itself.
As we saw in those rhythms from the yogi's scalp, the human brain is an electrical machine.
Inside my head, billions of nerve-like living cells are carrying a chatter of electrical
impulses through a vast forest of connections.
Many communicate with the outside world, but most of them talk to one another.
Impulses passing from one brain cell to another have to jump a narrow gap between them.
The electrical impulses release special chemicals, transmitter substances.
Traveling across the gap, they stimulate the brain cell on the far side.
That means the brain is a chemical machine too.
How can we connect that microscopic bustle with our conscious minds?
One obvious fact is that sometimes we're awake and sometimes we're asleep.
For sleeping and waking, and for dreaming too, switches have now been located here in
the stem of the brain.
They're among the first parts of the brain to start working.
This crown of electrodes will draw a picture of the first tentative flickers of a young
mind in the making.
Little Delphine is a premature baby being cared for at the Port Royal Hospital in Paris.
Officially, Delphine is four weeks old, but she was born about nine weeks too early.
She weighed only three and a half pounds.
Even now, her brain's not as ready for life as the brains of most babies are at birth.
Physicians now have to find out the baby's true stage of development so she can receive
the right care.
Her brain rhythms give clues about that to neonatal research specialists Nicole Monod
and Colette Dreyfus-Brisak.
It was Dr. Dreyfus-Brisak who discovered the telltale changes in brain rhythms of premature
babies, indicating their true ages since conception.
This baby is already old enough to show the typical pattern of quiet sleep.
Now a change.
Look closely.
Under her closed lids, Delphine's eyes are flicking back and forth.
This is called REM, rapid eye movement, and her brain reflects this normal state of sleep
by beating out a different rhythm.
This active sleep is the first state of sleep that's recognizable in premature babies.
We know that during active sleep, older people have vivid dreams, but who can imagine what's
going on in this young mind?
Babies begin their sleep in the quiet state, then move to active.
Babies start with active sleep, then spend more than half their time in it.
The machine monitors her eye movements.
Five weeks before normal birth, many parts of a baby's brain are still unconnected.
Delphine's world is small.
Her senses still vague and indistinct.
But her brain's electric rhythm show that the switches of sleeping and waking have begun
operating, switches that involve chemicals at work in the brain.
At Göteborg University in Sweden, Annika Dahlström examines specially treated tissue
from the brain of a rat.
Chemicals called transmitter substances glow like fluorescent paint in ultraviolet light.
Professor Dahlström's discovered that the little containers for the chemicals have to
travel to work.
With this technique, we can study the action of the transmitter substances within nerve
cells.
Now, these substances are specially designed to transfer messages from one nerve cell to
another in all parts of the body, including the brain.
Now, in order to be able to carry messages, these transmitter substances must be stored
in special small particles called transmitter granules.
In this preparation, we can see a bundle of nerve fibers from a rat.
A thread was tied around this bundle at the dark area to the right.
The transmitter granules could not pass this constricted area and are therefore jammed
in huge numbers like cars at traffic lights.
This preparation shows the nerve endings in the eye of a rat.
The transmitter substance is located in the small bags which look like strings of brightly
fluorescent pearls.
At the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Dr. Kjell Fuxa uses the same research technique
to see how drugs work.
These are brain cells in a normal rat with a colored transmitter substance gathered
inside them.
But if a rat's had a dose of a stimulant like amphetamine, the whole area is washed with
transmitter substance which is leaked out of the cells.
This is how amphetamine attacks the brain by overstimulating it.
Here's another section of normal brain tissue showing typical weak fluorescence and here's
the effect of LSD, a drug that's particularly damaging to reason.
The brain bottles up the transmitter substance in an effort to protect itself, according
to Dr. Fuxa.
And even so, it can't escape the madness produced by LSD triggering certain brain cells.
The natural transmitters have drug-like influences themselves as shown by research on sleep at
Lyon in France.
This is Dr. Michel Gouvet.
Well, like most hunting animals, cats sleep a great deal.
And usually at midday in Europe, cats sleep and dream.
Here is a typical pose of a sleeping cat.
But this one, as you can see, is very wide awake.
We have given both of these cats a big dose of amphetamine, a pep drug.
This one won't sleep for 12 hours.
But this cat does sleep because six hours earlier, another drug cut the supply of the
transmitter substance, noradrenaline, nature's own pep drug.
This indicates that amphetamine can only stimulate when it's working with the natural substance.
Studies of waking and sleeping in cats have located the switches of consciousness in the
brain.
About 20 years ago, American and Italian scientists discovered that a special network of cells
in the stem of the brain has the job of arousing the brain as a whole, turning us on, if you
will.
Also in the brain stem, as Professor Gouvet has found, another switch must be thrown if
we're to sleep.
The switch for dreaming is in the same area.
We have found a trigger zone just around here in the brain, which is responsible for dreaming
and which is also responsible for the mechanism which stops us acting out our dreams.
Now, we know that cats are dreaming just by sticking two electrodes here to record the
rapid eye movement, which usually are corresponding with dreaming.
We'll put that there.
Pick up your rapid eye movements during your dreams.
Just stick it down.
At Edinburgh University, Ian Oswald investigates dreaming with the help of volunteers like
Joanna.
Why our brain should tell strange stories while we sleep is still unexplained, but
the detection of rapid eye movements is dispelling some of the mystery.
Good.
Well, good night.
Sleep well.
I hope that arm of yours doesn't give you any trouble.
Good night.
Joanna broke her arm in a cycling accident today, and although she's a regular volunteer
in this research, it's still not easy to drop off to sleep with wires on your head connected
to a recorder and the experimenter keeping watch.
The machine that records Joanna's brain rhythms and eye movements will use more than a quarter
of a mile of paper before morning.
Mental life goes on all through the night.
Joanna's passing into her first hour of quiet sleep, a time for the repair of the body.
If you're a specialist in sleep research, you lose a lot of sleep yourself.
At last, the strong, slow brain rhythms of quiet sleep give way to faster activity associated
with dreaming.
The eyes begin to jerk about rapidly.
Joanna is now dreaming.
Every healthy adult dreams for about two hours each night.
Most of us just don't remember it.
The recorder is a surer guide.
During active sleep, we're also sexually excited.
Babies have a great deal of this active sleep, and Dr. Oswald believes a child's brain is
growing during these periods while an adult's is repairing itself.
Joanna should be well into her dreaming by now.
Joanna, wake up.
Have you been dreaming?
Someone was talking to me just before I woke up, but before that, I was thinking about
an old district in Edinburgh, which was suddenly becoming named Public Place because everybody
could go there and talk about anything they liked, and therefore it was at the service
of the public.
And then these two strange beings arrived, looking like pirates, and smashed two bicycles
together.
And they were sort of dancing up and down on the bicycles, and a crowd of people were
watching, and telling themselves seriously that they were being educated by machines.
Joanna dreamed of bicycles after crashing on one herself, but why of pirates?
Our nighttime creativity defies explanation so far, but it turns out that dreams are most
vivid at particular times, for instance in women just before menstruation, and in people
giving up sleeping pills.
The brain's more democratic than experts used to think.
The brain stem down here is a channel selector and volume control for all these executive
regions on top.
We've also heard about chemical influences on the brain by natural transmitters and by
drugs.
Of course, alcohol and other traditional drugs told of a chemical factor in mental life long
before the potent new drugs appeared.
But seeing how amphetamine and LSD attack brain cells to produce states resembling insanity
may help to dispel any glamour that remains in taking them for kicks.
Some of the mind drugs are very valuable in psychiatric hospitals, but their abuse by
healthy people is terrifying.
As researchers find out more about how the drugs work, antidepressants, stimulants, tranquilizers,
psychedelic drugs, we can expect to see ever more potent and specific agents.
So if we don't lick the problem of abuse quickly, it may get past solution.
People could become chemical automatons, changing their moods with a chest full of pills.
Memory, that's what we turn to next.
The most important ingredient of the human mind, but not easily accounted for.
The Montreal Neurological Institute in Canada is a famous hospital where surgeons often
have to remove diseased parts of the brain.
This is the right-hand side of a living human brain exposed during an operation for epilepsy.
The patient stays awake and reports his feelings while an electric probe explores the brain
surface.
The surgeon can then cut out large portions of brain tissue without harming the patient's
memory or mental powers.
Memories are somehow scattered and repeated in the brain.
But you have to be careful.
Two regions under the side of the brain turn out to be essential for laying down new memories.
In one grim case in the United States, a surgeon interfered with both these regions in a young
epileptic.
The man concerned can remember almost nothing that's happened to him since then, to more
than a few minutes.
The span of what's called the short-term memory.
In the normal brain, learned information passes from that short-term memory into the more
permanent record of long-term memory.
It takes an hour or more to consolidate it.
During that time, items of information like the name and face of someone you've just met
somehow change the very fabric of the brain so you'll recognize him in the future.
How does it happen?
That's one of the most basic questions you can ask about the machinery of the mind.
The commonest opinion among the experts is that learning and memory depend on changing
or reinforcing particular connections between brain cells.
The lasting importance of nerve connections appear in a situation which shows resistance
to learning, as we'll see in a short piece of laboratory film.
It's from Roger Sperry of the California Institute of Technology.
A tadpole had pieces of skin on its back exchanged left to right and right to left.
Now the frog's grown up.
When he's tickled on the right, he scratches himself on the left.
But if he's tickled where the skin's not been crossed, he scratches the correct side.
From the lower piece of skin, the nerves are still saying left side.
Some process in the growing frog made sure that the nerve connections with the brain
corresponded to the original positions of the skin.
There must be some kind of chemical tag on the nerves.
Does another kind of tagging allow for altering connections during learning?
The search is on for chemicals involved in the learning process.
This rat is right-handed.
It's clear which paw he uses given a free choice.
But he's going to learn to use his left paw.
Here at the University of Göteborg in Sweden, they've used this procedure many times to
find out what chemical changes take place in the brain during learning.
Now the rat can reach the food pellets only with the left paw.
He has quite a difficult task, like that of a right-handed human trying to write with
his left hand.
But after a few periods of practice, the art is mastered.
The use of the left paw has been learned.
Dr. Holger Hedene on the left here and his colleague Dr. Paul Lange developed special
techniques for finding the chemical changes that took place in the rat's brain during
learning.
Their work focuses on the region of the brain which is the first to be engaged when the
rat's learning to change paws.
It's one of the regions that's known to be essential for memory, the hippocampus.
For this training session, the rat's been given an injection of a radioactive chemical.
Now protein forming in his brain will itself become radioactive.
And that's the key to this extremely delicate analysis.
In this tube is material from about 200 cells from that particular region of the rat's brain.
There's less than a millionth of a gram, the weight of a gas bubble in a glass of soda
water.
The brain material is transferred to another tube containing a special jelly.
The material will now be electrically drawn into the preparation.
Since different kinds of protein molecules in the brain material travel into the jelly
at different speeds, they'll now be strung out like runners in a very slow race.
After ten minutes, the jelly is eased carefully out of the tube.
Then it goes into a stain which will make the proteins visible.
Bands in the jelly represent the different kinds of protein extracted from the rat's
brain cells.
This instrument measures the darkness of each band and gives an indication of the amount
of protein in it.
Eventually, each protein type finishes up in a sensitive Geiger counter.
Its radioactivity will tell how much of it was formed during that last training session.
The experiments in Dr. Hedane's laboratory suggest that the learning brain makes extra
amounts of a particular protein.
These three bands are proteins from brain cells of an untrained rat.
From the cells of a trained rat, four bands.
The extra band and the one near it are forms of a brain protein called S-100.
According to Dr. Hedane, they were made during the learning period.
The real meaning of this discovery is still controversial, but in California, a leading
investigator gives his views.
Dr. Samuel Barandes.
All cells do jobs as individuals.
The special problem for nerve cells is to work together to communicate with each other.
Now the way that nerve cells learn to form communications and pathways, we believe is
due to protein substances on their surface.
The experiments with frog skin show that certain of these connections or pathways are inborn
and unchangeable.
Other nerve cells, we believe, have the option of forming new relationships or strengthening
other relationships during the course of adult life.
We believe that this change in relationships also requires protein.
Now the work that Hedane and Langa are doing is an attempt to find proteins which are made
during learning.
In our own work on inhibitors of protein synthesis in nerve cells, we find that when you block
the making of proteins in nerve cells during learning, long-term memory is markedly impaired.
Now the major point of all this work is that we're beginning to think of nerve cells and
the nervous system not only as a box full of electrical components, but as a bunch of
blobs of protoplasm which make use of common mechanisms, the making of protein for one,
for a very special purpose, to communicate with each other.
We're going to listen in on a cell engaged in communication.
At the State University of New York in Buffalo, scientists are exploring a part of the brain
which learns then controls complex physical movements.
Their research is also helping to solve the mystery of memory.
This tube of glass is about to become a delicate instrument fit for eavesdropping on brain
cells.
The fine tip of that tube slides gently into the brain of an unconscious cat.
Bearing an electric conductor, it eases through the dense forest of living cells.
This microelectrode, as it's called, can distinguish the electrical pulses of a single
cell, the chatter of one individual in the vast population of the brain.
In this small room, shielded from all outside electrical interference, an international
expedition in the darkest continent of all, the living brain, is in progress.
It's led by Sir John Eccles, a Nobel Prize winner and perhaps the most experienced brain
researcher of our time.
His wife and colleague, Elena Taborshikova, comes from Czechoslovakia.
Another member of the team is from Japan.
Professor Eccles himself is from Australia.
Specialists from the United States and Lebanon complete the team.
Now, we're losing it a bit.
I think we're moving away.
Could you try now, Helena, to go a little up or down and see if we can lift it again
up to where we had it?
Each movement is just two thousandths of a millimeter, about a fiftieth of the thickness
of a human hair.
Yes, there's the pulse coming up now.
That should be climbing fibers, I think, shouldn't it?
With latency, just a bit too.
The microelectrode is searching for one of the main cells in the cerebellum, a special
part of the brain that controls learned movement.
The cerebellum's job is to coordinate skilled movements of the muscles.
It gathers information from all over the body.
The experimenters now want to see how this particular cell is influenced by nerve signals
coming up from the cat's leg.
What nerve effect you've got on?
This is superficial, really.
Try it on deep, will you?
Yes, enough to find that.
There's good inhibition now.
I think if we added that up, we'd see quite a good inhibition.
Sensitive electronic equipment is used to find the pattern of the apparently capricious
activity of the cell.
The effects of repeated signals from the leg are added up and show that the incoming signals
briefly suppress the activity of the cell in the cerebellum.
Here, that brief silence is shown differently by a flattening effect.
In brain signals, silence can be a message too.
Don, can you make that three-pasta now so it's easier to integrate it?
Yeah, that's better, isn't it?
Dr. Echols and his team may spend several hours with one cell until they know it thoroughly.
Every cell has its own peculiarities.
This particular one is one of the output cells of the cerebellum, which sends instructions
to the muscles during a skilled movement.
That's a very nice cell indeed.
Dr. Echols and other investigators have drawn the first detailed wiring diagrams of part
of the brain.
In the cerebellum, a pattern of cells is repeated many times.
A British theorist, David Marr, has suggested how this living machine learns to control
skilled movements.
Each of these big output cells controls one specific movement, in this case turning the
wrist.
We'll see how the massive nearby cells help teach it when to operate.
This child learning to drink from a cup has to think what she's doing.
What next?
The cerebellum receives signals that the cup has touched the lip.
Special cells broadcast the news.
But watch on the left too for word of the decision of the conscious brain to turn the
wrist.
Many broadcasting cells that are active now strengthen their links with the output cell
as it echoes the command.
Meanwhile, the action continues under conscious control.
The cerebellum hasn't yet learned to take charge automatically.
The output cell must learn its job with practice.
The same action and the same news is broadcast by the same combination of cells.
Prompting from the conscious brain is still needed.
Turn the wrist now.
But it makes those links stronger still.
Again, the action proceeds under conscious control.
After enough practice, the cerebellum is ready to take charge itself.
The news of cup touching lip broadcast by the same set of cells turns the wrist without
any conscious decision because the links are now sufficiently strong.
Turn the wrist now.
The order goes out to the muscles and the cerebellum has learned another skilled movement.
Many circuits like this take part in drinking from a cup.
And one circuit can be needed in hundreds of different actions.
It can learn to respond to news of other situations.
For example, the wrist has also to turn when we strike a match.
Now a different pattern of signals will trigger the same action.
In a most economical way, one group of cells stores information about many different tasks.
The same principles may well serve in other parts of the brain for learning and remembering
using comparable circuits of cells.
But that isn't the whole story about the control of movement.
The simple action of raising a coffee cup to my mouth involves two amazing things.
Firstly, there is the machinery, the muscles, the thousands of nerve fibers, the millions
of nerve cells that are concerned.
Then there are the complex interacting circuits by which the cerebellum takes over all of
this and gives me the smoothness of operation as when I put my cup to my mouth.
The second amazing thing is the will, how by taking thought I can carry out any action
that I please.
If anybody tells you how that happens, don't believe him.
We still are completely ignorant of the way in which mind controls the operations of nerve
cells.
It is very humbling indeed for a biologist to be faced up with a problem of how a human
mind can control movement in the beautiful and subtle way that you now see.
That was Maria Krecherova from Czechoslovakia.
The question of how the brain learns was baffling only a few years ago.
We've seen that it's gradually yielding to new discoveries.
The region's essential for implanting long-term memory, the way the same regions in a rat
make special proteins during learning, and how the cells in another part of the brain
remember past activities by strengthening their mutual connections.
But the brain might not bother to learn anything if it didn't have motives for doing so.
Brain colors all human life, love and lust, appetite and ambition, fear, mirth, aggressiveness.
These are products of the living brain, especially of its central regions.
And here the brain's strongly coupled with the body.
Excitement makes the heartbeat faster.
Hunger or high blood pressure can make a man irritable.
Emotions are sometimes vicious and disabling.
Rage can be blind and fear petrifying.
Milder arousal is necessary for any practical action, and emotions can be strong yet tender.
Before looking again into brain mechanisms, let's see some outward effects of emotion
in young animals.
When there are monsters around, this young monkey clings to his mother.
He was reared as an orphan, and this cloth-covered stand took the place of his natural mother.
He clearly prefers it to the more lifelike doll in the same cage.
At the University of Wisconsin, Dr. Harry Harlow has spent many years finding out how
the capacity for love and friendship develops in young monkeys.
These youngsters have grown up with cloth mothers, but they are accustomed to playing
with other monkeys of the same age.
Psychologists often say that boys and girls learn their differences in behavior from adults,
but Dr. Harlow finds the differences are inborn.
Young monkeys who've never met an adult play in characteristic style according to sex.
These are young males.
Young females simply don't wrestle like this.
For this young monkey, even a cloth mother means nothing.
He's lived up till now in complete isolation, with only himself to hug.
At present, he's emotionally devastated.
For another deprived monkey, rocking provides self-comfort.
These monkeys, reared on their own, have so far no idea of how to play.
Their new companions will show them what to do, and they'll slowly recover.
If the isolation had continued much longer, they'd never develop affection for any other
monkey.
Learning to love is a serious business, and in monkeys, Dr. Harlow sees striking parallels
with human behavior.
The parallels between behavior in monkeys and man are brought even closer in another
experiment in progress at Wisconsin.
In the wild state, monkey fathers take little interest in their mates and offspring.
Here, these monkeys are made to live like human families, in a group of cages resembling
an apartment house.
This experiment is the work of Dr. Harlow's wife and collaborator, Margaret Harlow.
The normally promiscuous male adults have to stay with their mates because the front
door is too small for them to leave.
But the youngsters are free to play together in the yard.
So, the fathers just have to make the best of their enforced domesticity.
In more normal circumstances, it's rare to see an adult male minding the baby.
Here it happens.
As with humans, the neighbors have their little disputes.
The psychologists at the University of Wisconsin who arranged this unnatural kind of life with
father, are surprised at how well all the monkeys have adapted to it.
The basic human family of father, mother, and children may not be as strange an arrangement
as some people think.
The young monkeys in particular seem to benefit from the family grouping.
According to Mrs. Harlow, they're the most self-confident youngsters she ever observed.
How does the brain generate our impulses and emotions?
At Stanford University in California, Dr. Seymour Levine tackles part of the question.
Most of you will agree that sex is a unique creation of nature.
But it may not have struck you that sexuality and brain complexity have evolved together.
Reproduction involving two individuals is so much more complicated than the division
of a single cell that behavior such as this demanded a major evolutionary step in brain
development.
S sexuality is built into the brain and the male and female brains are indeed different.
This female rat was given a single injection of male hormone shortly after birth.
That one shot was enough.
She now has the brain of a male and she will almost always act accordingly.
If presented with a normal female in heat, she will show many of the male sex behavior
patterns even the characteristic licking of the genital area.
We're just beginning to understand how the glands in the brain interact throughout life.
The brain directly controls the master gland lying beneath it, the pituitary.
It tells the pituitary when to release special hormones which travel throughout the body
causing other glands to produce other hormones.
The blood carries those hormones all over the body into the brain where they influence
behavior.
The pituitary hormones encourage self-preservation.
Thyroid hormone keeps body and brain active.
Adrenal hormones serve in time of stress while female sex hormones operate the menstrual
cycle.
One pituitary hormone makes the ovaries produce estrogen.
That sex hormone induces the brain to release another pituitary hormone causing ovulation.
Two weeks later, the woman menstruates and the cycle starts all over again.
Menstruation builds up to trigger the release of the ovulation hormone and again menstruation.
This is the rhythm that is broken by the contraceptive pill which basically misleads the brain.
Shortly before menstruation, a woman is four times more likely to commit a crime than at
any other time.
There is also during this period a marked irritability and depression.
Now the cause of these emotional states appears to be that at that period of time there is
a sudden shift in hormonal levels prior to the switch over to a new cycle.
This is the area of rat brain controlling the pituitary, the mast gland that regulates
the hormones of the body.
The green fluorescence in the outer layer shows the chemical transmitter dopamine.
And this is from the same area of a pregnant rat.
And notice the absence of transmitter in the outer layer.
We think that this is due to the fact that the brain is so busy inhibiting the pituitary
to release eggs from the ovaries that it's using up its transmitter at a higher speed.
And this general region of the brain which so powerfully controls the chemistry of the
body is called the hypothalamus.
Our basic drives come to a focus in the hypothalamus, a region near the top of the brain stem no
bigger than a thimble.
Activity here can cause aggressiveness.
The sexual drive starts here.
When we're thirsty it's this region that says so.
Number two are the dieters controls, switches for hunger and satisfaction.
The brain also has its pleasure centers.
In return for electrical stimulation here laboratory animals will work until they drop.
Yet the hypothalamus is only one cog in the complex machinery of emotion.
Squirrel monkeys use a wide range of actions and calls as signals of emotion.
This male is the ruler of his little colony.
But he has a surprise coming today.
Dr. Manfred Maris is going to challenge the dominant male's authority.
This experiment is being done at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich.
Dr. Maris has remote control of the brain in another male monkey who will be the challenger.
The cap is a receiver and beneath it wires run deep into the monkey's brain.
All is peaceful at present and the subordinate male keeps his normal place.
And here's the boss again content in his authority.
When the subordinate monkey receives a mild electrical stimulation in a chosen part of
the brain abnormal behavior will begin.
Brain stimulation off.
The German experimenters are seeking a better understanding of emotions and their outward
signs by using remote control of the brain.
To tell us why the leader of the research team Dr. Detlev Plug.
A single monkey is only half a monkey.
Its normal life is shaped by interactions with its companions.
In human life too communication with one another is the main factor.
As a psychiatrist I believe that the cause of mental illness is a distortion or even
a breakdown of the communication system.
But the human communication system is very elaborate and we can't experiment with patients.
That's why at a psychiatric institute we investigate the gestures and calls of these animals.
These calls can now be produced at will.
You've a Juergens has mapped the regions of the squirrel monkeys brain involved in different
calls.
No other monkey has so large a range of sounds and electrical stimulation can evoke them.
The brain's being stimulated here but in fact that same call can be evoked anywhere in these
regions.
It denotes general aggressiveness.
Similarly stimulation anywhere here will produce this call.
It's a sign of high excitement.
That's a threatening call.
This one is probably used just to attract attention.
Large deep lying areas of the brain operate in each emotional state.
The call simply communicate these states to other animals.
Up to now no animal could tell human beings exactly how it was feeling.
The next goal in the Munich experiment is to find out more precisely how each call affects
other monkeys.
The squirrel monkeys calls are a powerful new tool for finding out how the brain produces
emotion.
Like monkeys when we humans express our emotions we inevitably influence the actions of other
people.
Unlike monkeys we can reflect on our emotions and channel them which gives a special dignity
to human life.
There they are citizens of Montreal going about their business efficiently and politely.
How much more immune to emotional disturbance don't you think than a pack of wolves or
a gang of monkeys?
Appearances are misleading.
Man is probably the most emotional animal of all.
A pioneer of the new psychology that links mental and physiological mechanisms to explain
emotion is Chancellor of Montreal's McGill University Dr. Donald Hibb.
Nobody would seriously suggest for a moment that the spider is capable of emotional disturbance.
The rat may be capable of some fear but that's about all.
With a dog we have something more complex.
The dog is capable of jealousy, of grief for a missing master and certainly of fear.
With the chimpanzee we've got something that's very human.
The chimpanzee that is teased and feeding may sulk for weeks and shown a death mask
like this may be utterly panic stricken.
Notice that progression.
The price of intelligence is a more complex brain, more easily disturbed, more vulnerable
to emotional disturbance.
The temper tantrum of the human child is an example of pure unadulterated emotion.
He grows out of it you say?
If he does I'm wrong.
The theory I'm working with says that the human grown up is twice as emotional as the
three year old.
How does it conceal?
Well how long is it since you told that neighbor what you really think of her?
How long is it since you handled a corpse?
It seems to me that society is structured by human beings so as to protect them from
the consequences of their great capacity for emotional disturbance.
Dr. Hebb who was just talking to us paid healthy students good wages simply to rest on a bed
like this with nothing to see or hear or touch.
They were strangely affected lying here.
They had hallucinations, sights of marching squirrels or parades of eyeglasses, sounds
of a music box or church choir.
For those who endured a few days the world seemed distorted afterwards and for a while
simple tests were difficult to do.
Small wonder that solitary confinement is used in so called brainwashing.
For normal efficiency human brains depend on a continuous inflow of information.
Some need more than others but we're all vulnerable to boredom on the one hand and to over excitement
on the other.
Studying emotion in patients is not a proper matter for surgical experiment as Dr. Plougue
shared but one or two clinics elsewhere have put wires deep into human brains to produce
emotional effects by electrical stimulation as in those monkeys we saw.
However these experiments strike you ethically such cases confirm that the emotional machines
in human heads are like other animals and hormones flowing in the blood influence our
mood and conduct.
So is man some kind of chemical robot?
Should brain research make us scornful about human nature?
Happily as we're going to see new discoveries restore the balance between mind and chemistry.
But don't forget a much older token of human ability to master the outward signals of emotion,
the art that every actor has to learn.
Take it off it's hideous.
Here comes a candle to light you to bed and here comes a chopper to chop off your head.
Take it off!
Goosey goosey gander where do you wander?
Upstairs and downstairs and in my lady's chamber.
There I met an old man who wouldn't say his prayers.
So I took him by the left leg and threw him down the stairs.
Take it off!
Jake it's not funny.
Yes hold it there a minute.
I think that bit can probably be tightened up quite a lot.
There's a bit where the tension here is going out of it as you're doing the second part
of goosey goosey gander.
What you want is not just a reaction to an executioner's mask, it's not grungy in that
sense but it's the feeling that this man is raping your soul, stealing your personality.
So to get that in I think why not try it as a mirror game and see how it goes yes?
Close observation of each other but him taking everything from you and mocking you with it,
mocking you with yourself so that he drives you in on yourself to the edge of a nightmare
and straight to what one's after.
Please take it off.
Jake it's not funny.
What are you going to do?
Here comes a candle to light you to bed and here comes...
Have you anything you wish to say before?
Before?
A cottage on the Essex coast.
My father.
Is dead.
Father.
Dead.
Don't put me in the gas mask.
Techniques of the yogis of India were recommended to actors by the famous teacher Stanislavski
for mastering emotion but back in New Delhi Ramanand Yogi is mastering more than emotion.
His brain is still very calm after four hours in the airtight box yet he's brought his life
almost to a standstill.
The shaded area represents the theoretical minimum of oxygen the yogi's body needs to
survive when completely at rest.
In the first half hour he managed with less then he settled at half.
That's a level he reached in earlier tests but after three hours look the air sampling
shows him down at one quarter of the so-called minimum.
There's no mistake because the next half hourly measurement shows the same level.
Now it's time for the next air sample.
They check not only the oxygen used but also the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the
box.
But already the team at the All India Institute has found that the yogi strictly through mental
control can cut his oxygen requirements far below the theoretical minimum.
Oxygen that's needed for the most basic routines that sustain and repair the body.
So here's a case of mind over matter a triumph of the human brain over chemistry and over
the glands and internal organs systems usually thought to be self-governing.
It's like willing your hair to grow more slowly.
Professor Anand is equally surprised by the yogi's continuing peace of mind apparently
undisturbed by the rising concentration of carbon dioxide in the box.
In the Bhagavad Gita holy book of the yogis it is written as a blazing fire turns fuel
to ashes so does the fire of knowledge turn all actions into ashes.
But you don't have to be a yogi to take some control of your body.
Just set your mind free relax breathe regularly and when you hear the tone that tone will
mean that you are succeeding.
That's all I have to do.
That's all you have to do keep the tone on as much as possible.
Okay all right.
In a New York hospital we're about to see something which up till now most doctors would
have thought was quite impossible.
Oh now start in recording.
This healthy volunteer is going to attempt to lower his own blood pressure simply by
willing it.
Coming down.
Good.
Coming down.
Wrong way.
Better.
Coming down.
Down.
Good you're keeping it on a long time very good.
Excellent.
In charge of this experiment is a leader in modern experimental psychology Dr. Neal Miller
of the Rockefeller University.
Excellent.
The best yet.
Way down.
Blood pressure is down by 16 percent.
Conscious control of the body's inner workings few physicians thought it was possible.
Dr. Miller has staked his reputation on the belief that it is.
So strong was this prejudice that I had extreme difficulty in getting even my own students
to work on this problem.
But in the end we were able to show that the brain has more direct control over internal
organs such as the heart the kidneys and the intestines than even those rare perceptive
physicians had believed.
I believe that my work lends additional support to that of Professor Anand.
With rigorous experimental controls we have shown that we can train animals to modify
a number of internal functions.
We hope that it may be possible to use the same training techniques to teach patients
with high blood pressure to reduce that blood pressure.
Since we are just starting this work this remains a hope.
Dr. Miller speaks modestly.
His work could mean a revolution in medicine when its full import sinks in.
The implications for mental factors as causes of disease and perhaps also as cures are truly
staggering.
There's a broader conclusion too.
We've always been telling ourselves that our emotions are foolish and unruly and it
did seem as though the lower parts of the brain conspired with the body to keep emotion
inferior to conscious reason and left human nature at the mercy of chemistry.
All that's changed by what we've been seeing.
The mind can overrule chemistry even to the extent shown by the yogi cutting his oxygen
needs.
The brain connections thus confirmed should help to scotch the old idea that emotion is
foolish while reason is wise.
They're equal.
In this age of H-bombs and napalm should we bet on logic to save us or on love?
So far we've been dealing mainly with deep lying mechanisms of the brain including the
brain stem with its switches of sleeping, waking and dreaming.
The cerebellum and what it shows about the machinery of memory and central regions that
organize our drives and emotion.
But our powers of seeing, thinking, talking and so on seem mainly to lie in the roof of
the brain.
After a brief pause for station identification we'll be back to explore these higher parts
of the machinery of the mind of man.