TEDxDelMar - V.S. Ramachandran - Our Place in the Cosmos and What Makes Us Unique

it's my very great pleasure now to introduce dr. Ramachandran he is the director of the brain and cognition Center at UCSD and he's also of course hugely participating at the salt Institute he's been named by Newsweek as one of the top 100 people to watch in the next century and was named by Richard Dawkins the Marcopolo of neuroscience please welcome dr. Ramachandran let's what I do is a research on the human brain so let's pause for a minute and ask ourselves what we're dealing with so we need to inside the cranial cavity there is this lump of flesh three pounds weighing three pounds and this lump of flesh asks questions about interstellar space the vastness of interstellar space ask questions about the meaning of infinity ask questions about itself asking questions and its own place in the cosmos and how does this come about it's 100 billion nerve cells firing away in the brain creating whole spectrum of abilities we call human consciousness or human nature so my approach has been to look at lesions in different parts of the brain producing characteristic changes in behavior what you get when there's a lesion is not just an across-the-board reduction in all your mental capacities but often a highly selective loss in one mental ability with relative preservation of other abilities so that gives you some confidence that that region of the brain is specialized for that function now in today's lecture what I like to do is to focus on three aspects of human nature which we regard as unique and human beings are especially good at you perhaps we're the only creatures even capable of it one is humor and laughter what is the brain basis in evolution of humor and laughter and the second question would be empathy and the origin of civilization culture and civilization in humans and the third question would be creativity what makes us creative and I'm going to cover all that in the next 20 minutes ok let's first talk about let me let me begin with empathy and humor nature let me begin with humor okay it's always fun to do so humor and laughter let me begin with the patient patient named Mickey who I saw not long ago I was doing a routine neurological testing on this patient testing of touch sensations touching various parts of her body and it's all completely normal mentally she was normal fluid in conversation attentive to everything was fine then I poked over the needle as part of the neurological exam different parts of a body what do you feel ouch that hurts don't poke too hard okay so okay so she said that that's painful that's painful and then many patches of body when I and I touched her she would say haha and she started giggling like crazy so here's a human being laughing at the face of pain it's the ultimate oxymoron how can a person laugh when poked with a needle right so why does this happen got me got me start thinking about humor and laughter in general why did humor evolve if a Martian ethologist was watching all of you here in the audience every now and then you'd stop and start shaking your head and making this funny hahahaha noise and you'd be extremely puzzled why does this happen what creatures whether humanoids do this so I started thinking about this and then I realized that first of all it's probably universal it's probably hardwired in the brain because every culture every civilization every country has some form of laughter and humor except Germans okay animal animals of course there's no humor but of any kind so the question is given it's hardwired in the brain wine what is it it exists well when you look at humor and laughter you see it has the following form all jokes you know humid as incidents humorous narratives you lead the pot along you lead the the person along a garden path of expectation right and at the very end you're building up a story you introduce a sudden twist or punchline that entails a complete reinterpretation of all the previous data and that's what you call humor now that's necessary but it's not sufficient supposing this guy is building up an elaborate scientific theory and you put the bubble and say it's wrong and it entails a completely into pleasure you won't think it's funny okay believe me I've tried a lot so what makes it funny okay let's take slapstick the champ is walking along preferably a portly gentleman self-important gentleman walking along the road there's a banana peel and suddenly slips and falls down okay so you're building an expectation that the gentleman will reach his destination but he doesn't he slips on a banana peel falls down now if he falls down and cracks his skull and blood starts building that you won't laugh hopefully not you'll go and call the ambulance or you rush to his aid to tell people rush to his aid all of them but supposing a slips on the banana peel falls down and then wipes it off and looks all around then you start laughing it's the basis of all slapstick comedy so what's the key difference between the two scenarios the key difference is in the first case there's been a genuine alarm the alarm bells start ringing genuine danger so you call the ambulance you do something appropriate your aunt in the second case your brain realizes this is a false alarm and you don't want people rushing to his aid and wasting their energy and resources so this is your natures false alarm bell by laughing and producing a characteristic sound you're telling everybody or kin we share your genes don't waste your resources rushing to this saps aid so this is my theory now how do you test this let's go back to my patient Mickey who had who's to laugh and giggle every time I poked her how do you explain that well you go and look inside her brain it turns out that an area called the insular cortex the insular cortex in the temporal lobes the sides of the brain and that insular cortex sends projections indirectly to the anterior cingulate the insular cortex is the region of the brain that receives pain the sensation of pain the pain sensory signals go to the insular cortex and then there's a wire that goes from there to the anterior cingulate which experiences the agony of pain Wow okay that that so pain in fact we think of a single single thing but in fact as many steps involved many stages many layers of pain involved starting from mere sensory signals all the way to the objective experience of agony the verse of quality of pain now that wire was cutting her so what's going on in her brain initially there's an alarm saying potential alarm saying a something painful is coming in the very next second the anterior cingulate st. but nothing is happening it's not painful the two ingredients are in place potential alarm then deflation of alarm saying there's Fenian the guy starts giggling uncontrollably so here is an aspect of human nature namely humor which you would think is inaccessible to experiment you know an experiments with these pathways are involved in the brain and also tell you about the evolution and perhaps a function all of that in one simple patient one single patient right now we've still none of this is true or not but you can do brain imaging to test it now the other thing of course is tickling same sound you produce why would there be tickling well think of what happens the menacing adult approaches the child about to do something nasty and it's Egypt Egypt we took you and I don't mean anything so again there's a lot of potential alarm and the deflation of them and I think tickling is rehearsal for adult humor okay so to speak now what other situations do you laugh and I want that's a whole lecture one going to it the second part of the lecture was about creativity how do you study creativity now we latched on to this when we saw a phenomenon called synesthesia and this is first reported by Francis Galton who's Charles Darwin's first cousin in the 19th century and he noticed that some people were completely normal otherwise had the following peculiarities following quirk in their brain and that is every time they saw they saw a particular number the number will be tinged at the particular color so red is 5 is red 6 is green summon is blue 8 is shark-tooth 9 is indigo and so on and so forth and sometimes tones or colored c-sharp is blue f-sharp is green and so on and so forth now why would this happen now one of the first thing I did was hey this champion saying numbers are colored okay what if I give him instead of or instead of Arabic numbers I mean actually I call them Indian numbers they come from India so so you take you take Indian Arabic numbers instead of that you saw him roman numbers V or V one or whatever what does he see colors an obvious experiment and he says no I don't see any colors so this is what this is proving is not the numerical concept of sequentiality ordinality cardinality is driving the color it's the visual appearance of the number so we started experimenting on this and we found that there's a structure called can next slide thank you next slide I'll just show you neurons you all know about it next I maybe leave it there okay next slide sorry skip all that's all phantom limb stuff skip all that sorry ski keep keep skipping it keeps giving sorry it's another lecture here keep skipping you should get to a point where you see taste synesthesia okay next slide next slide sorry next slide this is going to take up the entire talk next line next leg two more slides there's a brain image there it is okay if you take a slice through the brain of coronal section what you find is the number is right there at the right circle it's in the fusiform gyrus of the brain and the color area is also right next to it in the fusiform gyrus of the brain then I said to myself what's the likelihood that these two areas color and a number are almost touching each other in the fusiform gyrus the most common form of synesthesia is number two color maybe there is some sloppy wiring here every time you see the number you see the color also in the fusiform it's the visual appearance of the numbers represented not the high-level concept that fits the observation that roman numbers don't evoke colors ok all right so far so good how do we prove this will be whole bunch of experiments but mainly we did brain imaging if you take a normal person show them numbers each number area lights up if you show a normal person colored numbers number hand colored area lights up if you show a sinister plot and white numbers number and colored area lights up normally that people have now done diffusion tensor imaging and actually shown wires cross wiring between these two areas now you say what's all this got to do with creativity and all that first of all you ask or yourself why does this happen why do some people have this quirk what I found was contrary to previous claims one out of 50 people has this condition so they may be one on two of you here who have not come out okay so 150 people have synesthesia now why would one out of 50 people have this condition well the secret comes from the fact that even the fetus or in the infant brain everything is connected to everything it's not a strictly accurate but there's a tremendous redundancy of connections in the brain and as the brain develops the excess connections get pruned away to create the characteristic modular architecture of the adult brain okay now this is done by pruning gene or pruning genes in the brain supposing there's a mutation of the pruning gene then you get inadequate pruning between adjacent brain regions and if some of the genes are expressed selectively in a number of color region in the fusiform gyrus then you're going to get color excess connections between those regions in the fusiform gyrus namely number and color so every time he sees a number he sees a color now I say what's this got to do with creativity well it turns out people have known for a long time synesthesia is about seven times more common among artists poets and novelists and in the rest of the population people didn't know why in fact the common ideas about synesthesia since the time of Francis Galton there been several theories about this one theory is there are acid junkies and pot heads there aren't drugs and there may be some truth to this because they're much more common at sdsu and then UCSD here but jokes aside you do see synesthesia and under drug use it's not a silly idea but not all of them most of them in fact are not on drugs so you have to explained that another theories maybe they're just being metaphorical and they say five is red and six is green and all that anyway I'm not going to go into all the theories most of which don't make any sense so we are a very simple theory which is based on this cross activation of cross wiring and the genes being mutated causing excess connections and if the gene is selectively expressed in the fusiform it can happen because of transcription factors then you get number color synesthesia if it's happening somewhere in the auditory areas you get auditory color synesthesia what if the gene is expressed throughout the brain right defective pruning gene is expressed throughout the brain and different concepts and ideas are also in different regions of the brain there's a lot of evidence for this just now I told you arithmetic or numbers are here the fusiform arithmetic high-level arithmetic multiplication all of that is in the angular gyrus higher up in the brain what are the sort of ideas and concepts are also in the different parts of the brain and there's greater connections between different parts of the brain your brain there's greater propensity to see linked seemingly unrelated ideas and what do you mean by that you mean creativity you mean metaphor like what's a metaphor take an example of from Shakespeare it is the east and Juliet is the Sun what does that mean Juliet is the Sun that means she's a glowing ball of fire I mean actually schizophrenic say that but that's another lecture if you most normal people they'll say it means Juliet is warm like the Sun radiant like the Sun nurturing like the Sun rises like the Sun rises in the east rises in bed or whatever right so your brain instantly formal forms all these links and Shakespeare of course was a master at this now so what I'm arguing is these people have access connections make creating a propensity to link seemingly unrelated ideas hence a propensity towards metaphorical thinking and towards creativity so that's now you could say that's the reason this gene survival there's a useless gene you know a gene that makes you see it fibres red why would it persist in the population one in 50 people has it you've been weeded out a long time ago through genetic drift to a natural selection but it's still present why is it present because it makes some outliers in the population creative and metaphorical now when I say there's people in the audience often ask me if it's that good synesthesia gene is making you creative how come you don't all have it well that's a silly question because evolution takes time maybe another hundred thousand years everybody will have the synesthesia and soon as TCG but the more important reason is you don't want everybody to be metaphorical and creative right I mean Errol surgeon doing surgery on your brain you don't want them getting metaphorical on you so you want you on surgeons to be you know perfectly straight-laced focused and all that so this to preserve the heterogeneity of personalities and creativity that's why you don't see it in everybody okay now I'm going to go on more on ahead to the third section of my talk we talked about humor and laughter the evolution of humor and laughter the purpose of human of humor and laughter in humans what purpose function it serves and what the neural basis might be if you can humor and laughter and of tickling even smiling by the way may have the same origin somebody comes to you and smiled in a social situation why he says I'm a pal I'm friendly now how did the zoo evolve early early in evolution you bear your bear your mouth you show your teeth you can on saying I'm aggressive so when a big file for mail is coming towards you and does that it means he's aggressive and you take defense and you worry about what's going to happen so there's a potential threat and alarm but if that guy comes in he wants to tell you no I don't mean any harm he aborts the aggressive gesture halfway the net result is a smile he said I don't mean any I'm your pal you know me so deflation potential alarm deflation alarm that's why a smile has the same subject of qualities of laughs you could think of it think of it as a lesser laughs it's again about deflating alarms okay I'm going back and forth here because of the time limit let's go Denny you merchants of civilization in humans and a lot of it occurs because in the early civilization in the birth of civilization is done through imitation what do I mean by culture and civilization supposing you have a polar bear it has to evolve a coat for the winter it took about three four hundred thousand years through all their code a human child watches his mother slay a polar bear skin the polar bear put it on and just maybe half a dozen times it watches it maybe a little bit of practice learns it so evolution from being natural selection and genes became Lamarckian right it became acquired in one generation what would have taken 100 several hundred or several thousand generations now the key question then is how does the child imitate a mother because once it imitates it and spreads like geometric proportions but their white fur wildfire both vertically parent-offspring and horizontally other peers in the group and that's the origin of culture so how does it come about okay it turns out that the answer comes from phantom limbs believe it or not one of the things we study is patience with an arm amputated and they have a vivid sense of a persisting phantom arm right now why does this happen we have an elaborate theory of why it happens we've developed a cure based on putting a mirror and the guy looks at the reflection of the normal hand in the mirror so we resurrect visually his phantom if you move our normal hand the phantom looks like it's moving often relieving its pain now it's widely used in clinics all over the world because it's been tested double-blind placebo all that ok but let's go back to phantom limbs one of the astonishing observations were made in recent years is a group of neurons called mirror neurons in the brain we all know there are neurons in the front of the brain which fire when you make a movement when a monkey makes a movement monkey reaches for a peanut one neuron fires when he reaches in pulls a lever and other neuron fires it pushes something at third neuron fires these are called motor command neurons discovered by Byrne and mount Castle about 50 or 60 years ago they're very very well known ok so the programming a set of muscle twitches to make a motor making appropriate semi scale okay but about ten years ago giacomo rizzolatti in Parma in Italy discovered something amazing a subset of these neurons neurons say the neuron that fires for what format for it for moving and grabbing a peanut a subset subset of them will fire when it watches in the monkey what is another monkey reaching out and grabbing a peanut this absolutely astonishing it's like this monkey is taking the other monkeys point of view of the world is doing a virtual reality simulation of the other monkey adopting the other monkeys vantage point and putting itself in the other monkeys shoes so to speak and now we have shown that this exists in the human brain two mirror neurons okay so it's like a mind reasoning mind reading one neuron monkey-see monkey-do neuron okay the exist in humans now another type of mirror neuron is for touch that's recently discovered if I touch if somebody touches me there's a whole map of my body surface on my brain and one of the neurons fires if you touch me here another neuron fires if you touch me here another neuron fires astonishingly about 10% of these neurons will fire if I watch you are being touched okay so the question then becomes if these neurons you can call empathy neurons right because they're something empathizing I'm empathizing with your touch signals if the neuron fires and I simply want you I don't actually feel the touch the same neuron is firing if somebody touches me or touches you and I'm watching you why don't I get confused and say hey stop touching me or somebody pokes you with a needle what is there ouch okay why doesn't that happen well the answer it turns out is you got a normal skin so I'm watching you being poked my mirror neurons are firing strictly they should make me feel you being poked doesn't happen because my normal skin receptors are sending a null signal saying don't worry you're not being poked that inhibiting part of the mirror neuron output so emphasized by all means but don't feel the pain okay because you're not actually in pain don't worry your skin's not being destroyed so think of the implications okay now what happens if the arm is removed or you just inject the arm with an anesthetic completely removing the arm signal the astonishing thing is this this person now experiences touch sensations deliver to other human beings he literally experiences or if you poke him he says out you're hurt okay so we call these hyper empathy syndrome or we call them the neurons okay because basically they're dissolving the barrier and beating you and other people is not Eastern mysticism these neurons are like Facebook or internet they don't know bloody difference whether he's being touched or you're being touched and I'm not talking in some metaphorical abstract sense quite literally the neuron doesn't know okay so what I'm arguing is these neurons emerged initially if we allow adopting another person's vantage point which is absolutely critical for imitation if you want to emulate or imitate what somebody's doing you have to adopt that person's point of view in fact we've Sean Sean also that they're deficient in an autistic children and then there may be one of the key deficits and then they're not able to adopt another person's point of view or empathize another person although and other cognitive skills they may be okay especially high functioning autists so once mirror neurons when in place and I don't mean just mirror neurons are enough because monkeys have them they're not the proud bearers of the civilization but once they got going they've got hooked up to other brain regions like inferior parietal lobule frontal structures and this God is all going on the path towards becoming completely human and all the other attributes that we treasure and cherish thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 46,369

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Keywords: ted talks, Ramachandran, Future, V.S., ted x, tedx, TEDx, Big, ted talk, tedx talk, Picture, Mar, Del, tedx talks, ted, 2010

Id: LKGQwNlmrQo

Length: 21min 0sec (1260 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 29 2010