We're looking at a screen as seen by a cat.
The sporadic activity is from a single brain cell concerned with vision.
It lies in the back of the cat's head.
The cell sometimes responds to, sometimes ignores the moving bar of light in front of the eyes.
This particular cell, monitored by a microelectrode in the surface layer of the brain,
reacts to a horizontal line in a precise area of the screen.
Among the visual cells, there's an amazing specialization.
The animal is under an anesthetic.
We're at the Harvard Medical School in Boston.
The microelectrode seeks out another cell in the visual region of the brain.
At the projector is David Hubel from Canada.
Thorsten Wiesel from Sweden marks the screen as he listens to the cell.
During ten years of experimentation here in Boston, Hubel and Wiesel have uncovered the early stages
in which the brain picks out features in the patterns of light and shade that fall on the eyes.
First, lines and edges of a particular slope, then movements of lines.
In this case, the cell responds to a sloping line moving in either direction.
Every cell in the so-called visual cortex has its own special functions, and its functions are discoverable.
The cell is a very large, very small, very large cell.
It's a very large, very large cell.
Every cell in the brain has its own special functions, and its functions are discoverable.
In the brain, mystery is giving way to detailed knowledge.
This cell turns out to respond to a bar moving one way, but not the other.
But now, if Professor Hubel makes the line of light longer, the cell ignores it.
Nothing wrong.
With this degree of specialization in feature detection,
it's easy to understand why the brain needs so many millions of cells to operate.
The eye itself begins the analysis of what we see.
It's more than a camera, it's an outpost of the brain,
and the information the eye sends back is already partly processed within the retina.
Millions of sensitive detectors react to the light focused on them,
but among them, master cells compare the signals from many nearby detectors
and pick out bright spots or dark spots.
It's basically news about spots that travels along the nerves towards the brain.
The message is made clearer still at relight points where adjoining nerves interact.
The signals may stop actions by one nerve and trigger another.
Cells at the back of the brain review the information from many nerves,
looking out for lines or edges of particular slopes or for movement.
Each cell watches for one feature.
Huge numbers of brain cells help to analyze the diamond.
As the eyes wander, the image shifts on the retina and quite different sets of brain cells take over.
But some cells found by Jubal and Diesel hold on to the features even if small movements occur.
The brain's begun forming a stable internal impression of the diamond
out of ever-changing signals from the eyes.
But what the brain chooses to see depends on other factors, the effects of alcohol, for instance.
A man's state of mind affects his skill in a visual task.
In an experiment at Cambridge, England, a British sailor has been fed rum,
then he tracks a moving needle with the lever.
Apart from the rum, there's the noise.
Any light that shows, he must cancel without losing track.
The sailor's being tested at the Applied Psychology Research Unit directed by Dr. Donald Broadbent.
This kind of experiment helps us to give practical advice in how to lay out the work in submarines or in factories
or on the kind of mistakes that you might make when you're driving a car, even if you've just had a little bit to drink.
In addition, this kind of experiment gives us general clues about the way the brain's working.
In this sailor, most of the information which is reaching his eye or his ears or his nose
is literally escaping his attention.
The stresses, like noise or alcohol, as well as emotion and other kinds of excitement, are narrowing his attention.
His brain's made a bet, as it were, about what's going to happen next.
So when that rare light comes on, he doesn't see it or he hesitates.
Now, attention is the bit of the machinery that decides each moment what it is you're going to notice
and therefore what it is you're going to do.
None of us can take in all the time all the things that are striking our eyes or our ears.
For instance, if you've been trying to make out what color my eyes are,
then I'm afraid you may have missed some of the finer points of what I'm trying to say.
And because of this kind of thing, therefore there seems to be a sort of filter inside the head
which protects the big machines right in the middle against being overloaded.
The brain sees what it chooses to see.
But how does the chatter of cells in the back of the head become a recognized object, in this case a turning box?
You may see it suddenly turning the other way.
Your brain makes instant decisions, right or wrong, about what it's seeing.
And what about this object?
You may see it snaking in a peculiar way, but it isn't really.
It's just a piece of bent wire turning behind a screen.
For Richard Gregory, a British experimenter, tests like these help to show that our brains make internal models of recognizable objects.
This cube has lost some of its edges, but you may still be able to hold on to its shape as it turns.
The idea of rectangular boxes is extremely familiar.
But you've never met this shape before. You've no model of it in your head.
Apparently we don't see objects just as they are.
Instead, our brains make abstract models of them.
Nobody knows the precise machinery at this stage of perception, but we don't have to think it's a supernatural process.
Even electronic machines can learn to recognize everyday objects.
In Edinburgh University's Department of Machine Intelligence and Perception, this object tests the powers of a robot to pick out its special features and say what it is.
A television camera is the robot's eye, but the real work of recognition is done by a computer in another room.
Three ingenious programs supply it with processes of perception like those which must occur in the human brain.
The first step is analysis. The robot assesses the brightness at each point.
The aim is to organize the scene into regions of light and shade.
Where the scanning lines cross, the robot is exploring the light region inside the rim.
A second program relates all the various features, rim and handle, for example.
Finally, the computer searches its memory. It looks for abstract models that match the mathematical description of the object.
This should be the last step in recognition.
If it doesn't find a good match, the robot can always look again.
It says a cut, and it took 11 minutes. A little slow-witted?
Donald Mickey and his colleagues find it fairly difficult to give a computer abilities to come naturally to the human brain.
But no one here doubts that, in principle, an electronic robot can form concepts and use them intelligently.
Now, this is the total repertoire of possible objects. Up to about 10, isn't it? Spectacles, cut.
If the road to intelligent robots seems difficult and slow, it's as well to remember that many years go into the making of a full-fledged human being, too.
In some respects, a baby's rather like a robot running on imperfect programs.
Kirsten, at four weeks of age, doesn't like unsweetened lemon, that's clear.
But the automatic sucking reflex is too strong for her at this stage of life.
Anne, 14 weeks old, another piece of lemon.
Joanna, six months. She's made progress, at least the lemon's self-administered.
Rachel, nine months. A sign that our mental powers spring from the tissues of the brain is the way they're switched in one by one as the wiring is completed during childhood.
This small program for avoiding the sourness is complete.
Twelve, fifteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen.
Good. Now, have we both got the same?
Yes.
You've got sixteen and I've got sixteen. Is that the same number?
Yes.
Good. Now, if I pour mine in here, who's got more now?
Me.
Why have you got more?
Because they're all up like that.
Yes. Richard is a bright five-year-old, but his brain's not quite mature enough to grasp that objects don't vanish or appear from nowhere.
Who's got most now? You had sixteen and I had sixteen. Who's got most now?
Neither of us.
Neither of us. But both are?
Same.
Both are same. Good. Now, supposing I put mine in here.
You've got more than me.
Why have I got more than you?
Because you're from that to that and one from there to there.
He'll get that right when he's eight. But even at eight a child's reasoning powers are imperfect.
In this Manchester University experiment, Damien has to find out which of many points on the panel represents a hidden treasure.
These lights give him clear hints about whether each move is good or bad, nearer, farther, same distance.
Even so, at this age a child will rely on feelings and hunches rather than on reason.
The strategy, or lack of strategy, used in searching is a sign of the child's prevailing mental capacity.
But in the end, Damien locates the right point.
Ah, splendid. You found the hidden treasure.
For John Cohn, the searching mind automatically tracked is fascinating to observe.
Mental searches for words and ideas are closely related to these outward searches.
There's a much more systematic search in progress.
Shirley is thirteen. In mental capacity she's just about fully mature.
Ah, splendid. You found the hidden treasure. Very quickly.
Touch your nose. Touch your eye. Eye and nose.
Mental powers that emerge so gradually in childhood may suddenly be lost if the brain is damaged.
This man can take only one simple instruction at a time.
We're in Moscow at the Burdenko Institute, one of the world's biggest brain clinics.
An outstanding Soviet expert, Dr. Alexander Luria, tests a patient.
Ma-ma-ra-ra. Ba-pa. Pa-ba-pa. Ba-pa-pa. Pa-ba-pa.
Damage to specific areas of the brain causes predictable loss of mental powers.
These tragic effects are one of the surest sources of information about how the brain is organized.
Paris. Liverpool.
This man was a detective in a Moscow suburb.
He was saving a woman from being mugged when a blow injured a region of his brain that is involved in interpreting words.
The damage has seriously affected his powers of speaking and writing.
His ability to recognize and repeat music remain, however.
He was getting the words from the professor.
But can he do it alone, without words?
I don't know.
The separation of speech and musical powers in the brain is well known.
Another Professor Luria's patient, a Russian composer, Shabalin, wrote this work.
He conceived it even after a stroke had left him unable to understand speech.
Here was the damaged area.
But understanding music occurs on the other, unharmed side of the brain.
Mr. Kovach called this composition of Shabalin's, the brilliant work of a great master.
Put the triangle beneath the square. That ought to be easy enough.
But this man was an officer in the Red Army and in one of the battles of 1943 he was shot in the head.
He lost a part of the brain which supplies the ability to relate the positions of objects.
The mental arithmetic and the understanding of complex sentences are also affected.
The same brain mechanisms serve all these different functions.
Now he has to try and put the triangle above the square again.
Words like above and beneath, left and right, no longer have their obvious meanings for him.
He now has to use torturous reasoning to put the triangle above the square.
The wound also destroyed the soldier's normal writing ability.
But by using a different substitute brain mechanism he was still able to sign his name.
With effort and courage he built on that remaining mechanism.
He's even been able to write a book, a long account of his struggle for his mind.
Many people I know talk about cosmic space.
Our Earth is no more than a tiny particle in the infinite universe and yet people don't think about that.
They think and dream of flights to the nearer planets which circle around the sun.
But the flight of bullets, shrapnel, shells or bombs which splinter and fly into a man's head,
poisoning and scorching his brain, crippling his memory, sight, hearing, consciousness,
this is something people consider normal and easily dealt with.
But is it? If so, then why am I sick? Why doesn't my memory function?
Why have I not regained my sight? Why is there a constant noise in my aching head?
Why can't I hear properly or why can't I fully understand human speech?
It is an appalling task to start again at the beginning and relearn the world which I lost when I was wounded,
to piece it together again from tiny separate fragments into a single whole.
Would you say this woman in the painting was a beggar because she's stooping a little?
You might if you'd been injured in the front of the brain.
In fact, this Russian painting shows the unexpected return of an exile.
To find out why some patients with brain injuries make apparently silly remarks about pictures,
colleagues of Dr. Luria in Moscow have tracked people's eye movements.
Much speeded up, here's how a normal person's gaze first wandered over this picture.
Asked how old the people in the picture were, he studied their faces.
But a patient with severe damage in the front of the brain moved his eyes aimlessly, whatever the question.
Planning action and anticipating its effect seems to be the work of the frontal lobes of the brain,
which are particularly big in human beings.
Parts farther back have more specific executive tasks.
Back here, vision as we've seen, hearing words, control of movement.
And this is the part concerned with relationships, which gave that wounded soldier so much trouble.
In young children, some parts of the brain mature later than others do.
A wise mother should know that the front of the brain isn't fully developed in a two-year-old.
Even if he understands her instructions, he may be physically incapable of obeying them.
We saw examples of how the human mind emerges as the brain grows in childhood.
It passes through critical stages, and it can be affected by upbringing.
In a Massachusetts hospital caring for unwanted children,
brain scientists found small babies lying in cots like this with nothing to look at.
They asked permission to brighten up the visual world of the cots.
Then the babies learned to coordinate hand and eye movements seven weeks earlier than babies in the plane cots had done.
But the worst blight on the brains of the world's children may be malnutrition before or after birth.
International field work in Guatemala is confirming that severe malnutrition during infancy can impair mental powers, probably for life.
The effects of poor feeding are likely to be worst when the brain is growing most rapidly.
Very recent research has now established two times of rapid growth at around five months before birth,
and again from 15 weeks before birth until more than a year after birth.
So nutrition of the mother matters too.
Several million infants each year suffer severe malnutrition.
Hundreds of millions experience milder deprivation.
The total loss of human brain power is incalculable.
Now let's go back to that experiment in New Delhi.
You'll remember we left the yogi deep in his trance in his airtight box, and now he's showing signs of disturbance.
Dr. Chena is on watch, and it's nearly six hours since Ramana and yogi was sealed up.
Just in the past half hour, the yogi's begun showing effects of the rising carbon dioxide in the box.
The trance isn't as deep as it has been.
Heart rate and breathing are faster and less regular.
The next air sample is due now.
The yogi's come out of his trance, and he wants fresh air quickly.
He seems to be in good condition, considering that at one stage in the experiment,
his body was making do with only a quarter of the oxygen he was supposed to need.
So that's that.
The remarkable test we've been watching must help to change our basic attitudes to the interactions of mind and body.
The yogi's self-control, now verified by the instruments of science, is a private kind of accomplishment.
But does not all human achievement begin with inward dreams made public?
The mind of man has taken charge of the planet that gave it birth, ruthlessly driving back the wilderness,
settling in a kind of peace in vast communities, pooling the talents of a million brains.
But the restless hunter still drives his limbs to unprecedented feats.
Wherever his mind can lead him, he sets his footprint,
and he fills his caves with instruments stalking the secrets of nature.
He strives to save the individual human mind from oblivion,
but he turns to faith and awe where comprehension fails.
And with his brain-borne skills of hand and eye, man seeks for beauty, calling it truth.
Our special powers of language play an indispensable part in human accomplishments.
Nothing is more challenging or difficult to explain than how the brain supplies those powers.
These regions, all on the left side of the head, are involved in language.
Measurements made recently at Boston University show there's a language lump here,
a definite enlargement not found on the other side of the brain.
But mapping these regions tells little about how we learn language and use it.
Is the child's brain like a clean slate on which language is inscribed by a process of trial and reward?
Dr. B.F. Skinner of Harvard University and the behaviorists think it's so.
But they're challenged by those who say our powers of language must be largely inborn.
That's why there's so much interest just now in how children learn to talk.
Take the little matter of when you say the thing and when you say a thing.
The rules are very complex indeed and depend on what you think the other person knows.
No one dares tell children these rules. They just pick them up by about the age of four.
Well, Julia, once there was a man who was a photographer. He took pictures of animals for a living.
In Harvard University's Department of Social Psychology, a research student tests Julia's mastery of A and D.
The first thing he saw, there was a lion and a tiger having a fight. Now who do you think won the fight?
The tiger.
Yeah, the tiger won the fight and he gave a great roar to show how happy he was at winning.
Well, he thought that was a very good picture. So he went to have been on through the jungle.
And next, he saw a rabbit and a turtle. They were having a race. Who do you think won?
The rabbit.
The present controversy about language and the mind of man raises important issues about brain mechanisms and also about human self-esteem.
A leading figure in this argument is just along the road from Harvard at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
a distinguished theorist of grammar, Noam Chomsky.
A number of years ago, people were quite enthusiastic and hopeful about the possibilities of using computers to, for example, translate human languages
and to construct computer programs that would be able to comprehend and understand languages.
These hopes have been very largely abandoned for the short run at least.
It's now recognized that the principles of human language are far too subtle and complex for present day technology
and understanding to encompass and express them precisely.
And this is an interesting and important fact because, of course, every young child of normal intelligence
very rapidly acquires a complete and full knowledge of his language and uses it with perfection.
And he does this on the basis of extremely poor data and often on the basis of no teaching or very little teaching.
I believe myself that this fact leads us to the conclusion that the major properties of language structure
are inherent to the human mind, that they are simply qualities of mind,
and that the child brings these qualities of mind to bear when he learns language
and he must only then learn the particularities, the specific details that distinguish one language from another.
And I think that this conclusion is supported by the research into the variety of languages.
For example, here at MIT, we have work on the structure of English, on the structure of Australian bush languages.
And I think it's fair to say that very similar universal properties appear in this wide range of languages,
which must, I believe, be attributed to properties of mind.
I also think that there is no evidence whatsoever that other animals, let's say apes, share these qualities.
Furthermore, I don't think that we are led to the conclusion that there's anything mystical about this.
No doubt, someday, physical properties of the brain will be discovered that account for these, at the moment,
quite incomprehensible innate abilities.
But this is far off, and I believe we therefore must be quite careful not to underestimate the originality and skill
and the depth of the properties of mind that are revealed when a simple child uses an original sentence.
Remember we played a game with the cars all going down the hill?
Dr. Chomsky's work restores our sense of wonder about human powers,
but whether his theories are right, only patient research will tell.
Let's get them all close to you.
I'm always tired, too, because my mother always wakes me up and says, uh-oh.
My back is all right.
I'm just trying to get this set up.
Bard is an autistic child.
In autism, the natural powers of language sometimes fail, and children may act like deaf mutes,
although there's nothing physically wrong.
In these circumstances, Dr. Skinner's principle of trial and reward can help to break through the barriers.
When Bard, who's six and a half, came for treatment at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich 12 months ago,
he was completely speechless and unsociable.
Peter Gotwal uses a conditioning technique developed in the United States and England to help Bard talk.
He rewards any progress with a pat and a spoonful of ice cream.
The procedure is based on the methods used in training laboratory animals.
An essential first step is to make eye contact.
Look at me.
Good. That's good.
Basha here. What's that, Bard?
My...
Right! Good! What do you want?
Ice cream.
Good.
Great skill and patience are needed even in this seemingly simple routine.
And ice cream.
Good. Great.
Look at me.
What's that?
My...
Basha here. What's that?
My...
Good. That was good. What do you want?
My...
You're weak.
A star pupil after 18 months training.
When she was eight, Irina behaved like an infant, saying little and being easily upset.
Now she's maturing socially and can use short sentences.
What's that?
That's the patina.
The behaviorist technique has worked for these autistic children.
But that doesn't prove that more normal children learn language by simple trial and error
or that there's no inborn basis for the development of language in human beings.
There are many people on it.
Come on, Sarah.
Come on.
Good.
Sarah is a student at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
They're trying to teach her to reason with words.
It's one of the current experiments in communicating with chimpanzees.
Obviously chimpanzees can't talk.
But can Sarah read and write using magnetized characters that represent words and questions?
Question mark. Apple. Is. Read.
Question mark. Banana. Is. Yellow.
Sarah knows 130 of these symbols.
These experiments seem to challenge the belief that man alone among the animals can reason with words.
Question mark. Apple. Is. Read.
Question mark. Yellow.
No, that's not right.
That's better. Question mark. Banana. Is. Yellow.
To answer these questions, Sarah is first supposed to remove the question marks.
She has a choice of other symbols, two meaning yes, two meaning no.
She's supposed to take the symbols meaning yes and put them at the head of each column.
Sarah removes the question marks and looks for the right answer.
But does the trainer unconsciously give her any hint?
Come on.
The psychologist in charge, David Premack, says he's guarded against that possibility, which always hangs over tests of this kind.
Other experts are impressed but still deny that chimpanzees can use language in any human sense.
Nevertheless, like other experiments with apes, this one reopens the question of whether the powers of language are truly unique to man.
But it is relatively certain that no ape has ever asked himself how stars are born or how atoms behave.
At the California Institute of Technology, Richard Feynman, the theoretical physicist and Nobel Prize winner,
seeks the answers to questions like this in an ambitious creative exercise peculiar to the mind of man.
Sometimes I feel like an ape trying to figure out how nature is going to behave, pulling around with all these symbols.
I always thought about what it is that goes on when I think about these things,
and I realize it's a big mix of pictures and symbols and in my head is a kind of confusing mess.
But the symbols are inventions of other people which make our thinking about nature efficient.
And so I must, I have a great advantage over the apes because I have the experience of all the other individuals who've invented these things to help me to think.
And I've invented some things too. There's a thing called the Feynman diagram that other people use and helps them to analyze the way nature's going to behave.
My father got me interested in all these things by telling me how wonderful nature was,
teaching me how to think about things and what pleasure it is to look at something from a new point of view.
But he couldn't ever know the terrible excitement of making a new discovery.
He gets so excited he can't calculate, he can't think anymore.
And it isn't just that nature is wonderful because if someone tells me the answer to a problem I'm working on,
it's nowhere near as exciting as if I work it out myself.
I suppose it's got something to do with a mystery, and that's the mystery,
how it's possible to know something, at least for a little while, that nobody else in the world knows,
to know how nature's going to behave in a situation that's never been tried before.
How is it possible? What have we got in our heads that make it possible for us to find such things out?
And I suppose it's the mystery of that that adds to the terrible excitement you get when you make a real discovery,
which hasn't happened to me very often in my life. So I keep trying.
Whether it's concerned with universal laws or with the appearance of a hillside, the human imagination seems boundless.
Knowing so little about the functions of the mind, what can we say about the brain mechanisms that can allow man to create a work of art?
Marc Chagall is one of the great painters of our time, noted for his strange mixtures of the real and the fantastic.
The imagination builds on basic functions of the brain,
the machinery of vision which makes mental models of objects serves in imagining as well as in actual seeing.
Genius is indeed close to the anguished inventiveness of madness or the unreal flow of ideas when drugs interfere in the transmissions between brain cells.
But judgment is what distinguishes the artist from the madman, picking out the good idea from a mass of bad ones.
Judgment too appears in the most ordinary workings of the brain, as when we recognize an object from a distance.
In matters of shapes and patterns, the right hand side of the brain is particularly involved.
The mechanism of recognition comes into play with a feeling of excitement and conviction as the painter recognizes the right idea.
But what is right depends on the times.
In the face of competition from photography, the imaginative powers of the painter are tested to the limit in showing us sights never seen before.
Jagal himself once said that if you can discern no single object, even mountains of color piled on a canvas won't necessarily make it seem right.
In the greater realms of imagination and language, the maps of the brain become sketchy.
Successes with more ordinary powers like moving and seeing may be putting brain research where astronomy was in Galileo's time,
when man began saying the planets were not propelled by angels and our world might even be in orbit around the sun.
At about the same time, the French philosopher Descartes kicked the mind of man right out of the physical universe.
He declared that mind and matter could not interact and so allowed the soul to be immortal.
But his separation of mind and matter has endured with both the main forms of psychology of the 20th century.
The psychoanalysts, followers of Freud, deal with mental events without reference to physical brain mechanisms.
The behaviorists use the physiological conditioning methods of Pavlov and Skinner to study outward results of brain action without attempting to relate them to inner mental processes.
But when we think of putting our mental world into orbit inside the skull, eminent spokesmen for these rival schools of thought united in their skepticism.
I do not agree with the argument of this program.
We do not need to create a duplicate of the brain called a mind.
We can deal with the brain in other ways.
My name is Skinner and I'm a behaviorist.
As such, I study rats, pigeons, children and adults, normal and psychotic.
The behaviorist does not ignore consciousness, as is often said.
He simply deals in other ways with the facts which are said to show that a person is conscious.
In explaining these and other facts, he emphasizes what has happened to a person during his lifetime.
Naturally, the brain plays an important role in bridging the gap between what has happened to a person and his current behavior.
Eventually, the physiologist will tell us how the brain does this.
But we cannot wait for him because we must get on with the analysis and in particular with applying it to the solution of problems in the world today.
This program is misconceived if you think you learn much of the human mind by looking at brain mechanisms.
Knowing how a television set works tells you nothing about the content of the programs.
My name is Mayne and I'm a psychoanalyst and this means I have to switch on the set and listen.
My colleagues and I listen hard to our patients and try to understand the depths of the mind in what we hear.
I deal in concepts, unconscious concepts such as envy, gratitude, joy, grief, revenge and remorse.
These are matters of mind and they're no less important than molecules or brain cells.
Indeed, in terms of man's daily experience, they're greatly more important and more convincing.
Today's emphasis on atomic sciences and methods and their mimicry by biology poses a needless threat to our humanity
if it's to lead men away from their own inner awareness just because it can't be put under some microscope.
Study of externals, animal behavior, ordinary human behavior, brain cells and so on, have their own importance.
But the study of man's inner experiences and their personal meanings for him is what psychoanalysis is about.
It begins where this program leaves off.
I have spent a lifetime studying the working of the nervous system
but have not yet begun to understand how my brain gives me consciousness.
In fact, all I know is what my mind gives me in perception and memory and imagination.
By seeing, hearing and touching, I come to know a world of nature.
And as a scientist, I try to understand that world, including even my own brain.
The really interesting features associated with that world, light, color, sound, smell, form, pain, are not in the world at all
but come to my mind as interpretations of signals to my brain in a manner that is completely beyond any scientific comprehension.
I believe that there is a fundamental mystery in my personal existence
transcending the biological account of the development of my body and my brain.
That belief, of course, is in keeping with the religious concept of the soul and with its special creation by God.
For understanding man, the dreamy hunter, no method is uniquely right.
Yet science is now leading us into the mazes of the brain for some of the answers.
One successful pathfinder for this new approach to mental life, which we followed in this program, is the Canadian, Dr. Donald Hebb.
Thirty years ago, here in Montreal, I was faced with a great puzzle.
I was studying some of those patients with large chunks of brain removed and could find nothing wrong with them.
Nothing wrong with memory, nothing wrong with their intelligence.
Consciousness unimpaired, which was indeed a very great puzzle.
In the years followed, I developed what might be called, I think, fairly a crackpot theory, but that's had some support.
It implied that thinking consists of the interaction between brain cells and nothing more,
that consciousness, that intelligence is a function of the interaction of brain cells,
that emotionality will increase as intelligence increases, that the more intelligent a person is, the more subject he is to emotion.
It implied that man is a complex organism, complex beyond my imagining, complex beyond any words of mine,
and all this with no element of the supernatural at all.
Perhaps a more generous view of human nature begins with wonder at the machinery that makes it.
This evening, we've seen progress towards understanding how our personal systems of brain cells arouse themselves, watch, and learn.
Consciousness certainly remains a mystery, but in that connection, there's one more state of the human mind to show you.
It's the most extraordinary of all.
A few years ago, the life of this Los Angeles woman was in danger.
She suffered from frequent severe epileptic seizures that stormed across her brain.
A surgeon, Dr. Philip Vogel, decided on a treatment of last resort.
He split the upper parts of her brain.
The connections, which normally carry a continuous stream of information between the two big hemispheres of the brain,
go by three thick cables of nerve fibers.
The surgeon cut them.
When this drastic treatment first came into use,
surgeons were amazed to see no resulting disturbance of ordinary behavior in their patients.
This patient now leads the normal life of a housewife.
The operation left untouched the nerves that direct the incoming signals from the right side of the body into the left side of the brain and vice versa.
Although the two sides of the brain are now separated, the eyes and other senses help in sharing information, and the hands still cooperate skillfully.
No wonder surgeons first thought that splitting the brain had little effect.
Only recently have careful psychological tests shown that the split brain operation leaves the mind in a very strange condition indeed.
In fact, it creates two separate minds under the same skull.
The split brain condition has nothing whatever to do with the so-called split personality of the insane.
Instead, it gives new insight into normal human consciousness.
This lady is quite sane in both her minds.
Today, at the California Institute of Technology, our housewife is visiting the experimental psychologists.
They've been studying the human split brain here since 1961, led by an outstanding brain scientist, Dr. Roger Sperry.
He observes what happens when the housewife cannot see her hands.
Put your left hand through the screen.
I'm going to put a number in your hand now.
And what I want you to do is signal the answer.
So here's the first number.
Can you tell me what that number was?
Four.
Okay. Now let me give you another number.
The housewife feels with her left hand, which means the information goes to the right side of the brain.
That right side doesn't control speech, but it can count and it can signal.
Can you tell me again what the number was?
Six.
Okay. Now let me give you another number.
Only the left side of the brain can talk, but it has no idea what the numbers are.
It just guesses. Her left brain doesn't know what her left hand's feeling.
Can you tell me what it was?
Five.
Nor is it just an inability to say the right thing.
The sense of touch in the two hands is divided.
As we'll now see, the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing.
Put your left hand through the screen.
I'm going to put an object in your hand now.
Feel it, and then I'm going to take it away, and I'll ask you to find it again.
Okay. Now see if you can find it.
When you find it, hold it up.
The left hand and the right side of the brain know all about the cup.
Now I want you to find the same object with your right hand.
But the right hand and left side of the brain know nothing about the cup.
Okay.
Now I'll put another object.
Left hand again.
Ah, that was a giveaway.
The other side of the brain may have heard the sound of the brush.
Try to find it with your right hand.
There's an auditory cue there.
Yes, she did hear it.
Dr. Sperry believes that experiments like these have now revealed
the chief mental consequences of the split brain operation.
Even after working with these patients for more than eight years,
I still continue to be impressed with the way this surgical division of the brain
also divides the mind into two separate realms of conscious awareness.
Neither mind right nor mind left in these conditions
has any direct awareness of the existence of the other side,
nor is either one aware of its own incompleteness.
The mental capacities of the two hemispheres are distinctly different.
The left one is the dominant, literate, talkative side of the brain,
capable both of verbal reasoning and of difficult calculation.
It also is a more aggressive hemisphere and is very much in charge of behavior,
and this is the one that we meet in ordinary communication.
Special tests are needed to make this left dominant hemisphere stand aside
and allow us to uncover the minor right hemisphere.
This new test is designed to confirm that although the right side of the human brain
is mute and unassuming, it's considerably better at dealing with patterns and shapes.
This pickup will keep a check on eye movements because it's essential
that each side of the brain sees only what it's supposed to see.
This wire will detect any head movement.
They're going to show the housewife faces out of this selection
and ask her to identify them, but in fact they've taken the two faces in the middle
and cut them together like this.
Which of the two faces will she identify?
When the eyes gaze in a fixed direction, each eye will divide its information
between the two sides of the brain.
Whatever lies off to the right is seen on the left side of the brain and vice versa.
So the mute left side of the housewife's brain will see only the little boy,
the right side only the girl in spectacles.
Neither side will know that there's more than one face.
We are going to show you a picture of a face, and after you've saw it,
point to one of the faces right here on the table with your right hand.
Okay, put your face up close and look steadily at the red spot.
Keep your eyes steady.
That's the face the right brain saw. It's the one on the left here.
The question was which side of the brain would make the choice?
The right side of the brain won because it's much better at recognizing faces.
It guided the eyes to its target and the right hand followed its aim.
We are going to show you another face, except that now we want you to describe it to us.
This is what you'll see. Only the left side of the brain can talk,
and it should see only the old man.
Okay, watch the red dot. And you keep steady there.
Seeing an old man's face for a beard.
Did you see him clearly? Did you remember anything else about him?
He had a hat on.
Nothing unusual, nothing strange.
He had a beard. It's like he had a beard.
He actually had a bushy mustache.
For those of us in brain research who are beginning to think beyond behaviorism,
the findings in these patients narrow down somewhat the search for that
number one enigma, the nature and localization of the conscious mind.
The results seem to pin down our conscious functions to those upper regions
above the brain stem and the cerebellum.
It looks now as if consciousness in man can be tied to the living,
alert brain in action.
I just can't agree with colleagues who insist that our conscious experience
is only a mere passive byproduct of the work of the brain.
My own view would make consciousness a real force in brain function,
giving our thoughts, mental images, feelings, and so on
a direct controlling influence in brain activity.
If Dr. Sperry is right, the conscious mind of man is brought back into the physical world.
Its powers will be fully stretched if it's ever to understand itself.
But this ambitious scientific enterprise is well begun,
as all the discoveries we've sampled this evening show.
The aim isn't to degrade mind to matter,
but to upgrade the properties of matter to account for mind,
and to tell how from the dust and water of the earth,
natural forces conjured a mental system capable of asking why it exists.
This is David Prowett, NET, in London.
Thank you.