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radio and then share why you have using the hashtag. Why public radio and thanks
open. One more quick thing wondered how your brain actually works well, there's a lot
of mysterious, murky and unknown aspects about the human brain. But scientists are
doing incredible things to answer one of the biggest unanswered questions in biology.
How do our brains make us us. This episode originally aired in February 2015. Hope
you enjoy it. This is the 10 radio hour each week groundbreaking had talked to the
technology entertainment design design. Is it really never known delivered and it had
conferences around the world. Gift of the human imagination. We had to believe in
impossible things is true nature of reality beckons just beyond those talks those ideas.
Radio guy rise show today. The unknown brain, the mystery of how billions of neurons
make us who we are in the one brain that you think you might know your own. That
might be the biggest mystery of all. Could you ever imagine that your brain would be the
one that would come to define your life and your career. Now this is Dr. Joe Baldy Taylor
I'm a trained neuroma, anatomist, and about 20 years ago. Jill was doing lab work at
Harvard. She been researching other people's brains for years, particularly brains with
schizophrenia or bipolar disorder brains that just didn't seem to function properly and
she was widely recognized as a rising star in the field, but then one morning it was the
morning of December 10, 1996. Something happened to Jill's own brain. Once I awoke,
I could not walk, talk, read right. I could not recall any of the details of my life Joe Baldy
Taylor died that day. Jill was having a massive stroke on the left side of her brain, and
soon she be rushed to the emergency room. Jill told the story on the 10th stage, I am
writing in an ambulance across Boston to Mass General Hospital. I curl up into a little
fetal ball and balloon with the last last bit of air just just right on the balloon. I just found
my energy left and just I felt my spirit surrender and moment I knew that I was no longer
the choreographer of my life and either the doctors rescue my body and give me a
second chance at life or this was perhaps my moment of transition Jill stroke what got
almost everything she could do. She was, she later wrote in her book in an instant, she
became a woman trapped inside the body of an infant, and yet today if I could go back
to that day and have the stroke or not have the stroke I am so grateful that I had the
stroke experience thing is on that morning of the stroke even though she was a brain
scientist at Harvard. Jill at least initially didn't know what was happening to her. I woke
up to a pounding pain behind my left eye and it was the pain caustic pain that you get
when you bite and ice cream and it just correct me and then it released me and then it
just correct me and then released me unusual for me to ever experience any kind of
psychotic account to start my normal routine and I jumped onto my cardio glider, which
is a full body full exercise machine way on this thing and I'm raising funds look like
claws grasping onto the bar peculiar and I looked down on my body. Weird looking thing
consciousness had shifted away from my normal perception of reality and the person on
the machine having the experience from esoteric space where I'm seeing myself having
this experience was purely on my headache was just getting worse. I get off the
machine across my living room floor and I realized inside of my body has slowed way
down step is very rigid. There's no fluidity to my pace and there's this constriction in my
area of perception. So I'm just focused on internal systems in my bathroom getting
ready to step into the shower. I could actually hear the dialogue inside of my body and
her little boy same muscles you contracting your muscles. You relax and balance
against the wall. My arm realize that I can no longer the boundaries of my body because
the molecules of my arm blended with the atoms and molecules of the law text was this
energy energy asking myself what is wrong with me what is going on. Knowing what
you knew about the brain where you will most likely mapping it in real time. Yes, on the
morning of the stroke. It was a pure mapping experience. So as soon I was having a
problem with the volume of the way that the water hits the Tubman. There's this
incredible amplification sound, well, you know, I immediately have a visualization of the
circuit of the sound system in understanding amplification and knowing that I'm passing
information through my brainstem and I'm having problems at that level and brainstem
is the potential for death. This is now a do or die situation. So yes I mapping as is. I'm
losing circuit by circuit. At the same time, I'm going what is wrong with me because of
course I've never had a stroke before it's amazing to me is in some ways, what makes it
even more terrifying. Here is how remarkable guy. Remarkable. Not you like the way
you describe it is that you had control like you were calm, you will rational. Well I didn't
know how severe it was. And you know people always asked me was it to your
advantage to be a brain scientist or not. And I think that on the morning of the stroke. It
may not have been an advantage because I was fascinated instead of panicking okay
okay I got but then I immediately drifted right back now generally referred in this space
is Lala land. But it was beautiful there and what would be like to be totally disconnected
from your brain chatter that connect you to the external world. So here I am in this
space in my job and any stress related to mice my job. It was gone Peter in my body
would feel like to lose 37 years of emotional euphoria for my right arm went totally
paralyzed by my side and I realized then the next thing my brain says to me is this Jill of
course didn't really have a choice. She was rushed to surgery the doctors took a blood
clot. The size of a golf ball out of her brain when she woke up it was as if her brain was
like a computer was booting up for the first time. For example, my mother would ask me
what I wanted for lunch and it was it was file opening time. She would say you know
what you want to have a peanut butter sandwich and I go hunting you know where's
where's peanut butter. Is there a file in my brain that understands peanut butter and if
there was then that I would say okay and then she would say you have a tunafish and I
go hunting for the file in my brain that understood but tunafish was and as soon as we
hit a file that I couldn't go in and hunt for an find some kind of association to then we
would relive that. So then she would give me tunafish so that I would have that
experience and I had to learn everything we didn't know if I would have language again
because of where the hemorrhage had happened. This blood clot that was pushing on
the fibers running between my ability to create sound create language as well as to
place meaning on language, but I had to learn vocabulary from the beginning I had to
learn what emotions were. I had to be able to describe to my mother what I was feeling
inside of my body that took her constant care and boy it took a lot of sleep and that was
Kiefer my my healing. It took eight long years of rehabilitation before Jill felt anything
like the person she'd been before. And by the end of it she realized her stroke taught
her more about the brain and years of research in our lab at Harvard. Not just about its
resilience but about how our brain makes us who we are in ways we might never fully
understand. Are you a different person like the you the same person you were before
December 10, 1996 I'm I'm okay so the way I look at this is a new character has come
online. My color scheme that I like to dress in is different before you would look in my
closet and all you would see his red white and black stripes polkadots any version, but it
would be red, white and black is every day I would get up and I would want to wear red,
white or black. So I keep the other stuff in the closet. Today I'm sitting here I'm in blue
jeans which I never wore before, always were corduroys and now I'm in florescent
green. I love the florescent colors so this never would've happened without other
characters so no I I see myself as a very different person with a very different value
structure. Then I had before and there was a lot of pain in my past that got relieved and
wasn't that a lovely thing to be able to hit the reset button on my emotional circuitry so
that I'm then capable of functioning, fresh and new, without any antagonism towards
anybody. I didn't know if there was anybody I was supposed to be mad at because it
was all gone. So you said earlier that you were grateful for your stroke, you know, there
are hundreds thousands of scientists who can do the work that I was doing in the lab,
but for me to be able to have this internal experience of watching my own brain
completely deteriorate in its ability to process all information and then to go through the
experience of surgery and recovery has given me such an insight into my own workings
of my brain and fortunately an insight into what is it take in order for a person to actually
recover from a brain trauma. Now we understand that there is neurogenesis. We do
grow some new neurons. We know that there is neuro- plasticity. People are capable of
recovering from brain trauma and that's a completely different perspective than 15 years
ago Jubal to tailor her book about all this is called my stroke of Insight. You can see her
full talk. One of the most popular ever Ted.com on the show today. The unknown brain
are there mysteries of the brain that are better left unsolved.

Think so stay with this guy Roz and this is the Ted radio hour from NPR will everyone
just a quick thanks to two of our sponsors to help make this podcast possible first to
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hour from NPR. I'm guy, Roz, and on the show today.

The unknown brain, the mystery of how billions of neurons make us who we are, you
know, when I was starting this whole thing and just creating the method the lab I worked
at had blender kitchen blender just sitting there on top of the shelf and I remember
walking in and looking at that and thinking and I really still wish him and brain into a
blender. This is Susanna's is on a particular cell. She's a neuroscientist and a professor
at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and that blender just sitting there on
top of the shelf, what letter to the blender was a question that had never really been
answered why I what is a human brain have it no other brain does. Why did we become
the dominant species on earth. The human brain must be special in some way
compared to every single other brain on earth, but how one popular idea was a number
100 billion 100 billion hundred billion billion euros and 100 billion 100 billion neurons
and always thought that was more than any other brain on the planet but believe it or
not, that one had ever actually counted them before until Susanna did Jackie do it and
not in the blender, what you use is okay so a blender would be a little crude, instead she
used a special detergent to dissolve a brain turn it into soup but leave the remnants of
cells behind account. Not one by one, of course, but using an equation and how many
nuclei you find in a given volume. Okay, so what's the answer. How many we found an
average of 86 billion neurons, 86 billion neurons in the human brain, which is pretty
close to that hundred billion estimate, but I like to point out the 14 billion that are missing
an entire boom brain out. Wow, that's a lot of guns if we had the mystical 100 billion
neurons. We would be leaning towards the extraordinary. Like I said that's an entire
boom brain away 86 billion neurons didn't explain what makes a special infected seem
to suggest compared to our primate cousins pretty ordinary care. Susanna's Ted talk so
the human brain to be remarkable, yes, but it is not special in its number of neurons. It
is just a large primate brain. Let's play along if openings were made the same way
anyway to compare animals with brains of different sizes larger brain should always
have more neurons than smaller brains in the larger of the brain. The more cognitively
able its ownership be the largest ring around should also be the most cognitively able
and here comes the bad news, our brain, not the largest one about things quite vexing
while brain weighs between 1.2 of 1.5 kg but brings weight between four and 5 kg and
whale brains can weigh up to 9 kg. That's because the size of the brain usually follows
the size of the body. So the main reason for saying that our brain is larger than it should
be exit comes from comparing ourselves to great apes. The Vilas can be 2 to 3 times
larger than we are so very brain should also be larger than ours, but instead it's the
other way around. Our brain is three times larger than a gorilla bring some special
amount of energy that uses, although it weighs only 2% of the body. It alone uses 25%
of all the energy that your body requires to run pretty. That's 500 cal out of a total of
2000 cal just to keep your brain working in the human brain is larger than it should be
uses much more energy than it should. Special. This is where the story started to bother
me. So Susanna asked another question. Why does our brain burn so much energy and
what she found is that it's not about how many neurons we have, but where those
neurons are located 16 of our 86 billion neurons are clustered in a part of the brain
known as the cerebral cortex so the cerebral cortex is really responsible for all those
things that we like to think of as superior cognitive abilities. The ability to plan ahead to
look back, to learn from your mistakes. So what is so remarkable about the human brain
is that we managed to have a number of neurons in the cerebral cortex that is many
times larger than any other animal heads wow so 16 billion neurons in our cerebral
cortex. How many I know like his mouse have mouse has about 30 million in an
elephant elephant is 5.6 billion rights. What about like and eight 9 billion neurons in
cortex so we get like almost twice as many as eight well the answer is that to add more
neurons to your brain. You need more energy brain with more neurons costs more
energy and gorillas and orangutans eat raw foods leaves fruit bark. They spend about 8
1/2 hours per day every single day, collecting food, eating food and looking for food and
with the amount of energy that they get from that food. They can just sustain the large
bodies that they have in the number of neurons that they have now what about humans
with the brain that we have today. We would have to spend more than 9 1/2 hours per
day, looking for food and eating food. So somewhere back in our history and our
evolutionary history. Our ancestors must have found a way to modify what we eat in a
way that gives you many more calories than just raw food and watch. We know that
does that beautifully skulking cooking. We are who we are because of cooking. We
learn to modify the food that we eat and that allowed us to just cram more neurons
inside the brain clock is to use fire to pre-digest foods outside of your body cooked
foods are softer so they are easier to chew and to turn completely into motion. Your
mouth so that allows them to be completely digested and absorbed in your gut, which
makes them viewed much more energy and much less time so cooking freeze time for
us to do much more interesting things with our day and with our neurons then just
thinking about food looking for food and gobbling down food all day long. So because of
cooking. What once was a major liability. This large and dangerously expensive brain. A
lot of neurons now become a major asset. Now that we could both afford the energy for
a lot of neurons, and the time to do interesting things with them. So I think this explains
why the human brain through to become so large, so fast in evolution. All the while
remaining just a prime just like completely changes the way I'm going to see top Chef.
Now I know it completely change the way I look at my kitchen. The act of cooking has
become something of not a miracle but something revered so houses like houses
change the way you think about what it means to be human. I think it's very humbling.
We are just another species. It so happens that we were able to pack so much
processing power in our cerebral cortex that we were even at that point now of looking
at ourselves and gaining insight on how we work is amazing that we are starting the
section of the statement that runs us right which is a lot of fun that some philosophers
cease to say that you know it's impossible. How can you ever use your very brain to
understand how your brain works and hold neuroscience has proven them wrong. Let's
neuroscientist Susanna her Giotto house on check out her full talk Ted.NPR.org so we
know the brain is this complex collection of 86 billion neurons. But until pretty recently,
scientists weren't really sure how those neurons work together was the brain like a utility
knife. One tool that did many different things or was more like a Swiss Army knife with
specific mechanisms for specific tasks to take one specific task. For example, one that
your brain performs pretty much every single day and that is recognizing someone
else's face. Well, there's a bunch of different things that happen when you see a face.
This is Nancy Ken Widger. I'm a cognitive neuroscientist at MIT and just think, she says
about all the different variables. Your brain has to grapple with. When you look at
another person right like every time you see a person they look different from different
viewpoints. A profile in front you are totally different from way their hair falls on their
face. The expression on their face the lighting without you know it when you see a face
and you know it, but you can place it right you get a signal like I know that person yeah
but that's a different thing that which particular person is that in terms of what else do I
know about them. I meet them and that in turn is a different thing than what is their
name and the thing is it's possible for your brain to get hung up anywhere along that
chain is my face when I do this so this is a video that Nancy pointed us to credible video
was made by some colleagues of others. Just a part of easy and calico specter to
neurologists who were treating a man with epilepsy they want to find the source of his
seizures. They placed electrodes on the surface of his brain by chance. What they
found was a pulse from those electrodes shots the right place had an unintended effect
on their patient and the guy was looking at the surgeon when they stimulated that region
to and he said, used, or something else. The doctors face instantly became
unrecognizable. So he supplied us for different the effect of that pulse had accidentally
re-created the condition that actually exists in real life condition where you can't
remember faces. It's called face blindness. That's right, or post up and noted some pros
of agnosia which is been known for a long time is that people can selectively lose their
ability to recognize face and how does that happen. They have brain damage, usually
from a stroke or from a physical injury to the brain and if it's very very focal and just a
tiny part of the brain, then you are perfectly normal at absolutely everything else, but
you can't recognize faces, which raised the question for Nancy and her colleagues at
MIT hears her to talk. We wanted to know if there was a special part of the brain for
recognizing faces so I was the first subject I went into the scanner. I lay on my back held
my head still as I could while staring at pictures of faces and objects and faces and
objects for hours. So as somebody who has pretty close to the world record of total
number of hours spent inside an MRI scanner. I can tell you that one of the skills it's
really important for MRI research is bladder control. I got out of scanner. I did a quick
analysis of the data, looking for any parts of my brain to produce a higher response. I
was looking at faces when I was looking at objects and here's what I saw that region
right there that little blob. It's about the size of an olive, and it's on the bottom surface of
my brain about an inch straight in and with that part of my brain is doing is producing a
higher MRI response that is higher neural activity when I was looking at faces than
when I was looking at objects pretty cool, but how we know this isn't a fluke, while the
easiest way is just do the experiment again range again and I like the part that's
responding to facial recognition is like lighting up and and and you do this, like several
several hundreds of times. I like it in their what we would like was peaceful. I go in there
and I think working to get this great data I have these wonderful students. I can't wait to
see what my brain is doing what I do this task. So let's find the face region and we found
it right away. I remember I was just so excited. I remember like a week later is like a lick.
It was tried again. I can remember running out to this we have this computer right
outside the scanner is like to a quick analysis, I snuck and still be there is still bit (as we
did that, like 10 times before we really believe that the thing was for real. We talk about
regions of the brain light up talking with an area that encompasses billions and billions
of neurons and and trillions of synaptic connections right that's right so the smallest unit
in in my data is usually called a foxhole. It's like a three-dimensional pixel will continue
little qubits two or 3 mm on a side and so it's either has some magnitude of responsive
brightness that their basic unit, but that teeny little voxel has half a billion neurons and
allow so that just tells you a lot of stuff we can't see we see this just drastically blurred
version of the actual neural code to try and get a better grasp of what that blurry image
means Nancy and other scientists are asking why is it that some tasks don't seem to
have their own special real estate in the brain when other tasks like recognizing faces
were processing colors or even identifying body parts. Do we also have specialized
brain regions for other senses like here we go here's a region that we reported just a
couple of months ago in this region respond strongly when you hear sounds with texts
like these pay. In contrast, that same region does not respond strongly when you are
perfectly familiar sounds that don't have a clear pitch like these what's important to me
about this work is not the particular locations of these brain regions, but the simple fact
that we have selective specific components of mind and brain the first place. I mean,
otherwise the brain could have been a single general-purpose processor more like a
kitchen knife, a Swiss Army knife instead. Brain imaging is delivered. Is this rich and
interesting picture of the human mind is early days in this enterprise. The most
fundamental questions remain unanswered. How are all these things connected in the
brain. How does all of this, every systematic structure get built both overdevelopment
and childhood and over the evolution of our species. This is, I think the greatest
scientific quest of all time either some some process that is happening right now as I'm
speaking to you in your speaking to me and were stringing these words together and
having a conversation and it's just it's just the damnedest thing is in it. Yeah me the
whole question of how you take a thought and a bunch of sounds come out your mouth.
Great yeah how does it ever does it happen what I think we want to do these things to
know who we are. That's why work in this field as I want to know who we are and I think
modern human cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience are starting to give us an
answer to that lease who we are as thinkers and who we are as thinkers are is is these
machines that have a bunch of highly specialized components, some very general-
purpose machinery that were starting to know what those components are what each
one does like that's it. That's the beginning of the depiction of what a human mind is an
incredibly exciting thing to have Angie Campbell sure is a cognitive neuroscientist at
MIT. You can see her full talk to Ted.com show today unknown brain guy rise in your
listening to the Ted radio hour from NPR everyone just a quick thanks to two of our
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guy rise. Anthony on the show were asking how patterns of electrical pulses passing
between cells in an organ in your body can be stopped or you know is brain work make
us who we are an almost impossible question, maybe, but one that totally excites
Rebecca's sex. Could you think of anything better. Rebecca is a neuroscientist at MIT.
She's actually worked with Nancy Campbell sure there who we just heard from the while
Nancy studies how the brain recognizes faces. I study how does the brain. Figure out
what somebody else is thinking. So how does it happen. Well, here's one way of
thinking that watching and you see Juliet she can't see Romeo yet. Right now what's
going on in her mind. She knows that she's in a mausoleum. She knows she's not dead,
but that everybody thinks she dead right now. What she thinks is everything is worked
out whole plan has worked so now imagine you're in the audience watching you see
Juliet you know what she's thinking everything is good to be fine. I get to marry Romeo
and run away and all worked. But you also know that she's totally devastatingly wrong,
this this Romeo is already ready to shoot your brain are devoted to solving just those
problems. Knowing where the girl is doing what words you say knowing what the
sentences mean that get processed many many many different brain regions until you
distill it down to this one more complicated problem above and beyond the words and
the images is the set of meanings that are about her thoughts and feelings. So how
does the brain do that 15 years ago when I started in this field. It wasn't clear you could
ask that question is assigned to me that's kind of the miraculous thing. It's not that there
is an answer. It's that the very limited tools we have now for studying the brain are
enough to let us make a little bit of progress in Rebecca is slowly making progress on
the central question of her work. How can one brain know another tear she is on the Ted
stage and put another way that the problem is the machine that we use for thinking
about other minds, our brain is made up of pieces, brain files that we share with all other
animals with monkeys and mice and even sea slugs, and you put them together in a
particular network and what you get is the capacity to write Romeo and Juliet are to say,
as Alan Greenspan did. I know you think you understand what you thought I said but I'm
not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant. So first, the first thing you
want to tell you is that there's a brain region in the human brain and your brains whose
job it is to think about other people's thoughts. It's called the right junction it's above and
behind you right here and you don't use it for solving any other kind of logical problems.
You want to say that this brain system is that although we are really good at
understanding other minds. We were always that way. It takes children a long time to
break into the system and show you a little bit of that long, extended process to show
you as a change between age 3 and five. As kids learn to understand that somebody
often have beliefs that are different from their own time and show you a five-year-old is
getting a standard kind of puzzle we call the false belief the false belief test is a way of
measuring how well a child think about someone else's thoughts. Rebecca showed us a
video of the task which involves a five-year-old and a puppet show starting to Pirates.
This is the first part. His name is Ivan you apart. It's really like parts really likes cheese
sandwiches yeah oh yes all parents love cheese sandwich. Anyway, here's what's
happening. The first part Ivan puts his cheese sandwich down on a treasure chest and
he realizes he forgot his drink to go with the sample to Ivan just to get a check. Ivan is
away. The wind comes and it blows the sandwich down onto the grass and now here
comes the other parent. This part is called Joshua. Joshua also really love cheese
sandwich. Joshua, the second pirate. He also has a cheese sandwich is own sandwich.
He says Yum Yum Yum Yum Yum. I love cheese but he puts his down on the treasure
chest as well. Now we have to cheese damages Ivan's which is now on the ground and
Joshua's which is now sitting on top of the treasure chest, Joshua's, that's right yeah
that's exactly right now and then. The key thing that happens is the first I can't
remember who's the first part is the first one Ivan I think Ivan's first one is yes Ivan the
first pirate he comes back and he says I want my cheese damage. So which one you
think Ivan's can I take you can take down I see you are Ivan of course takes the clean
sandwich on the chest because that's where you left it. That's what he thinks he thinks
right inclusion or five or 10 or 53-year-old can't work that out effect. If you are three you
fail this test yeah because you can't quite understand what the first pirate was thinking
can work out that he could have beliefs different from reality. Your average three-year-
old can't quite process. The idea that another person can think different thoughts, but a
five-year-old can and although we know that something happens between the ages of
three and five in that little patch of brain that Rebecca studies we still don't know what
that little patch of brain is made up of millions of neurons but it's like if you were looking
down at Iowa from airliner. There's all these fields fields are plants and plants are
growing their individual years of corn you can't see the ears of corn you can't see the
plants but you can see the fields you can see that some of the fields are little brighter
green and some of them are little darker green were looking at the brain from airliner
and we can see the difference in some kids you can see okay bright patch over there
darker patch over there and another kids pretty much all the same color all over the
fields to the challenge of modern neuroscience is to try and figure out how we can see
the kernels of corn in those fields, not just the colors they had up to the Rebecca says
even knowing where those fields are. That's a huge leap forward in what we know about
the brain because this science is so hard. Most ideas don't work for a million reasons
that when you have a theory in a prediction, and the method and you think if I'm on to
something. I know what to expect here and that happens, that's kind of amazing
Rebecca sex runs sax labs and neuroscience Lab at MIT. Her full talk is a Ted.com so
we can hearing from brain scientists who are asking how a bunch of neurons in synaptic
connections in the brain add up to us to who we are but it's consciousness, the
subjective experience of the mind that allows us to ask the question in the first place
and where consciousness comes from. That is an entirely separate question. I like to
sing between easy problems of consciousness and problem, this is David Chalmers
he's a philosopher who coined this term, the hard problem of consciousness. Easy
problems are ultimately a matter of explaining behavior things we do brain science is
great. Problems like Vatican isolated neural circuit and show how it enables you to see
a red object to respondent say that Fred will have a problem of consciousness and
subjective experience. Why, when all that happens in the circuit court something out of
6 billion neurons and correcting inside the brain coming together. How does that
produce the subjective experience of the modern world. Here's how David Chalmers
begins his tick-tock right now inside your head as it's around so what you're seeing and
hearing. Right now you have smell and taste taught a sense of your body. Pay hunger,
motion, helping memories, but seems from your childhood playing before zero stream of
consciousness one conscious nothing in our lives meaning or value the same time as
the most mysterious phenomenon in the universe. Why are we conscious. Why is
consciousness more than just the sum of the brains parts will. The question is what is
the brain assist during conflicts computer a bunch of interacting parts with great
complexity. What does all that explain the explains, objective mechanism
consciousness is subjective. By its nature as a matter of subjective experience seems
we can imagine all that stuff going on in the brain without consciousness. The question
is where is the consciousness from their stomach due to the Nobel Prize here is a
mapping from the circuit to the state of consciousness underneath that is was going to
the question why, how does the brain to be consciousness in the first place. Right now
nobody knows the absence of those questions related one or two ideas that initially
seem crazy for can come to grips with consciousness scientifically. The first crazy idea
the consciousness is fundamental for is sometimes like some aspects of the universe is
fundamental building blocks space and time, unless you build up the world from there. I
think that's a situation wherein if you can't explain consciousness in terms of the existing
fundamental space time. The next thing to do is to postulate consciousness itself as
something fundamental fundamental building block of nature. Second, crazy idea the
consciousness might be universal this year is sometimes called parent sarcasm time for
all fight for mind is conscious, but just humans, dogs, Morris flies, but even microbes,
some degree of consciousness. Photons are intelligent, thinking that a photon is racked
with around there. The speed of words slow down and smell the roses maybe have
some element of rule subjective feeling some primitive creatures to consciousness. This
is this a pretty big idea right like that that not just flies but microbes are photons all have
consciousness and I mean we look as humans we want to believe that our
consciousness is what makes us special right like different from anything else. Why
would you assume the fact of consciousness does not make a special permit. We got a
special type of consciousness goes you know consciousness is not on an offer comes
in only rich and amazing varieties. This vision was hearing. This thinking is motionless
on. So consciousness is far richer. I think the consciousness I have a mouse or a fly, but
if you want to look for what makes us distinctive for just a view conscious for the kind of
consciousness we have for devil were self-conscious were coaches on ourselves.
That's not something which probably lost about consciousness and other systems like
computers. What about the artificially intelligent system in the movie for Samantha. She
conscious will to take the informational pencil. She certainly has public information
processing and integration so the author is very likely yes she is conscious, raises pretty
serious ethical issues about both the ethics of developing intelligent computer systems
and the ethics of turning them off. Finally, you might ask about the consciousness of
whole groups. The product will local level integrated group what the audience attend
conference. We now have your collective consciousness for this country which is
distinct from the other movies. Question one. So if consciousness could be collective,
but he couldn't mean that it might not believe in the brain. That's a tricky question
women. I think you could say consciousness. For example, is a universal touches the
particles, the euro, but electron has consciousness, the consciousness is somehow
attached to the particle to look at somewhere else attracted by the idea of your
consciousness is like what things like on the inside yeah physic studies all the stuff in
the outside of their interactions with each other the relations to each other but the good
have an intrinsic nature to be something of physics on talks about maybe that's
consciousness maybe when were introspective your and consciousness. This is actually
getting some insight into the intrinsic nature of the matter is what our brains is is is the
biggest mystery of the brain. I think the biggest mystery in the universe of your estimate
is certainly the biggest mystery of the brain where does consciousness come from,
nobody knows nobody understands Norman few hundred years ago we were there with
likesome time pretty well before you massage well at some level within consciousness
to sticks out like a sore thumb. Which is just the burden is something more. David
Chalmers teaches philosophy at New York University. You can hear his entire talk at
Ted.com 000 logs. Thanks for listening to our show on the unknown brain this week
production staff at NPR includes Jeff Rogers, Brent Buckman is making Kane Eva Grant
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