Conversations in Science with Dan Rather and Eric Kandel

[Music] what's the difference between the brain and the mind or is there any difference the mind is a series of processes carried out by the brain so the brain is responsible for every mental process that you carry out from simple reflex acts like hitting a backhand in tennis to the most creative acts of television journalism and one of the great contributions of 19th century brain science is to show the different functions different mental functions are localized to different regions or combinations of regions in the brain Broca in 1860 first showed the division on the left side in the front of the brain is responsible for articulation of language if you have a deficit there you understand language perfectly well but you can't express it a lesion on the same side and the back of the brain Veronica showed is responsible for your understanding language you could articulate it but you don't understand it so that first made us realize that a complex function like language has specific localizations in the brain and helped me with a definition neuroplasticity what's the definition of neuroplasticity is the ability the brain to change its behavior as a result of experience if we carry on a conversation we have a pleasant afternoon together and you and I remember that tomorrow or a week from now it's because our brain has been modified as a result of that experience how does the brain change and grow when one learned something signals are sent into the brain that activate modulatory pathways that cause the connections between nerve cells to change in function if you remember something very briefly like a telephone number you remember it for five or ten minutes it's a functional change that regresses back to its previous state if something is very important for you like meeting Dan Rather's or having an opportunity to do something interesting you remembered for longer periods of time or if you repeat something that actually gives rise to anatomical changes so that means that every single person has a slightly different brain than every other person identical twins with identical genes have somewhat different brains because they will have different life experiences and one of the interesting things about how you grow those connections is that the signals that are sent to nerve cells to grow new connections alter the expressions of genes in the brain people are astonished to hear that because they think the genes are the controllers of the environment they think we are what we are because of our genes but they don't realize that the genes are also the servants of experience when people interact to give rise to long term memory they do this by altering gene expression and it's the expression of genes that is responsible for the growth of new connections do you do you not find people still surprised by the plastic quality of the ever-changing brain well I think it's one of the great insights of the last 30 or 40 years let me give you an example there are some kids that are born with a large cyst in the left hemisphere terrible that interferes with the areas involved in language brokers and vertigo if you interfere with those areas in the adult person it's very bad news but in young children you can take out the whole left hemisphere this has been done in Hopkins the right hemisphere takes over and develops the capability for speech this is almost I'm tempted to say miraculous miraculous in terms of our understanding 50 years ago so I'm giving you the most remarkable example of plasticity we know removing a whole hemisphere including all the functions in it that god-given functions and you find it in the other hemisphere now let's talk about your path my path and begin with the distant past you've written about your childhood then about the Nazi concentration camps during the occupation of Austria and you were a boy doing this did the memory of those unquestionably traumatic events is that what got you into study of the mind in the brain absolutely it's had a profound influence on me I left because I think the end of the influence is so interesting in some ways funny so there are two aspects of it one is science and the other is my obsession about Vienna so I left Vienna in 1939 because we were going to get killed if we stayed there and I came to Brooklyn I went to Erasmus Hall High School and at Erasmus I got interested in history I want to understand how people who could read Goethe and Schiller who could listen to Hyden Mozart and Beethoven one day go out and beat up Jews the next day was incomprehensible to me that I would meet a classmate the day after Hitler came into Vienna and he would say to me candle my father said I'm never to talk to you again unbelievable and I try to come to grips with that so I began to study German in Austrian history I went to Harvard I majored in history literature and I wrote my thesis on the attitude toward national socialism of three German writers to understand how could intellectuals get involved with Hitler while there I got interested through a woman that I met in psychoanalysis and her parents who were major analysts in New York and they said to me history is not the way to understand the human mind it's through psychoanalysis so I began to read Freud and I was fascinated by Freud i ieave enriched him for the nineteen fifties not a lot it was an exciting new direction and he writes so well so I thought you know I would go to medical school with the idea of becoming an analyst and I went to medical school with one idea and then in my senior year there was a six selective period and we could do whatever we wanted and I thought even a psychoanalyst should know something about the brain so I took an elective actually here at Columbia and I got hooked and at the time 1956 when I graduated from medical school physicians were being drafted and those who are qualified could go to the NIH I was selected by the NIH and I spent three magnificent years there and I learned how to do science but you didn't start out to be a doctor a medical doc I not only didn't start out to be a doctor I knew nothing about science I had no interest in science and we didn't take pre-med I took the three required courses I took them because they were were prerequisites not because I liked any of them I didn't like them I got interested in science because I decided an analyst should know something about the brain and I started to do it not only that but we learn about science by reading books or doing Road experiments then working in a lab is a completely different experience it's like a Talmudic experience you're debating should we do this should we do that you know is this a good idea it's so much more intellectual it's so much it's a way of taking small degree of creativity and amplifying them so I found it just magical and I continue to find it magical look I'm not a young guy but I work every single day doing science and it's just addictive talk to you about how the brain makes memories memory is not a unitary function of the mind there are two major classes of memories one is called explicit memory or declarative memory it's what you conventionally think of as memory recalling people places and objects okay the other is called implicit memory and that is a memory for perceptual and motor skills riding a bicycle hitting a tennis ball when you drive and you shift you don't pay attention you don't tell yourself I have to move the gear shift this way you do it automatically after you've literally implicit memory the reflexive memory is unconscious you have to pay attention when you learn it but once you do it boom it's automatic explicit memory recalling your first television program your first love experience your first child it's a conscious recall so they are fundamentally different they involve different areas of the brain the critical structure in explicit memory storage in memory of people places and object is a region called the hippocampus and this was first discovered by Brenda Milner who's a spectacular psychologist now in the eighties at McGill and she studied this patient HM a very famous patient somebody on a bicycle knocked a gem over gave him a bilateral concussion and he developed seizures in both sides after while they became intractable so when he was 20 he was operated on and the surgeon dr. Scoville removed the temporal lobes and both saws and he went deep and he removed the hippocampus on both sides and he left hm with a devastating memory loss hm could now no longer take in any more new memories and form them as long-term memories so the ability to form long-term memory absolutely requires a per campus and he came out of scovilles surgery and HM had such difficulty that when Brenda Milner would come to visit him she did this on a monthly basis for about 20 years every time she walked into the room it was as if he never saw him before now he could do implicit things perfectly well he could call me say I could shave he could do all this stuff but anything that we've involved conscious recall reading the newspaper read one paragraph you forget the whole thing it's not all over again this is just a remarkable distinction between these two kinds of memory processes some of the most highly trained Western physicians are interested in using our ability to actually map the brain and apply that to meditation what are the chances were overstating the potential event I think zero I mean meditation is an interesting mind state the brain is in a particular functional state which gives you certain calm certain focus of attention allows you to control your body in certain ways it would be wonderful to understand that you know these are the challenges young people should be taking and you don't want to take a problem that's beaten into the ground do you want to take a problem that's opening up and I think this is a fantastic problem to define situations for gnosis one might be able to do certain kinds of dental procedures with the process I'm only you know this is not an area I'm specialised in but understanding special mental states is extremely important we know so little about the major mental illnesses depression or schizophrenia we just have the vaguest idea of perhaps this region is involved at that region so we need to understand the anatomical basis for major mental illness in order to make any progress in treating it more effectively and this is a major major problem there's been no improvement in the treatment of schizophrenia since the 1960s the new drugs have fewer side effects the chlorpromazine which is available to us then but they are no more effective by enlarge with some minor exceptions selective serotonin uptake inhibitors like prozac have been around since you know nineteen eighty no improvement has occurred so we are stuck here I want to get back to these Buddhist monks who have practiced meditation for decades on end but they are not scientists they are not people of medicine how much is it to be learned from their experience with meditation that can be applied to real science I think an enormous amount that let me step back and put this in a larger perspective when neurobiology began to be more powerful and was before people thought these neuro biologists are gonna come along and they're gonna wipe out psychology I mean everything we know up to this point is folk psychology it's what your mother taught you that's probably malarkey they're gonna come along really gonna have a completely new understanding well that's nonsense you know what we have learned from Freud me some of it is wrong a lot of it is right when we've learned from various people from Skinner from Thorndike from Pablo these are profound insights that we've gotten the function of science is to get a new level of understanding and to develop a new science a merger of psychology with neurobiology in fact modern neuroscience is the synthesis so if meditation is a new insight into the mind we want to understand it why not you know artists and thinkers about behavior often get very profound insights into what's important to people and what people respond to even religion I mean religion fascinates me I'm not a religious person but it's clear that this must be in some way instinctive inborn I mean wherever you go throughout the world people create religions for themselves just like they create art so to understand what is the evolutionary drive is it the concern about mortality that we are ultimately going to die or that there's mystery in the world and we are uncomfortable with it unstructured we have to develop some kind of a mythology about it but what is it in the brain that requires that we have arts we don't need it it's an essential for survival doesn't it's not food it's not protection but it enriches our life religion enriches people's lives so and to stay in that even though it comes completely from non scientific sources it's terrific now some a silly I think mental telepathy is nonsense you know I don't communicate with a guy in New Jersey by thinking thoughts but that's a personal opinion there are a few characters out there who believe in mental telepathy I think one has to use one's judgments about the fact that there are some folk ideas that are just plain nonsense but many things I mean I've seen people meditate and I've seen how they can strengthen their stomach and boy you can kick him in the belly and they don't feel it that's amazing they you and I can't handle a blow like that to understand what is it about the brain that allows them to fend off an insult like that is remarkable I want to understand it you must be doing it through your brain you know pain is a brain perception just like touch insight so if you become insensitive to pain something in the pain pathways shut off wouldn't it be wonderful to know how that works you know people have pain from all sorts of causes to know how to modify that in fact I would say that of the problems in medicine one of the most bothersome ones the various chronic pain syndromes we have very few good approaches to chronic pain we can treat acute pain go to dentist he gives you an injection boom where you take an allergy zyk but a chronic pain very difficult if we had other ways of doing this it would be terrific do you or do you not consider the brain the the last frontier science to understand how you work Dennis then have the inner parts of your psyche operate it's fantastic this makes us who we are you want to know what it's like in Mars who do you think that curiosity comes from it comes from your squash it comes from me a brain all the questions we ask of the world come from you call it the squash some time they said that what doctors call it the bread is a better term [Laughter] [Music] you

Channel: Wonder Collaborative

Views: 13,125

Keywords: Dan Rather, Eric Kandel, Nobel Prize, Nervous system

Id: oJoKlY5ndOI

Length: 17min 49sec (1069 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 05 2018