raw_transcripts/lecture_1.txt

Good morning.

Just checking the mic works.

Yeah.

You can hear me.

Okay.

Okay.

We're going to get going with our lecture now.

It's 5 minutes past the hour.

So welcome to our first lecture in brain and behaviour.

Probably your first lecture, this academic term for these lectures.

We're in this chemistry auditorium, and it's very difficult as

you find, to come in and out.

So we will make some efforts to create a path

for the students.

It is very exciting to be back lecturing you.

I hope you were excited to be back in person.

We've got 20 of these lectures of this course.

I'm Professor Hugo Speers.

It's my details, it's my email address, my lab and

the title of today's lecture was very much looking forward

to teaching you on Moodle.

I'll just show you the the team briefly as myself

as Sam Solomon, who's a professor in psychology, a new

lecturer, Professor Stephen Fleming, Professor Daniel Bender, Paul Burgess, who's

mysteriously Hidden Valley Academy, who will teach you research methods.

And amongst them we have a team of experts who

are coming in to teach you today, and I'm the

first one up and I run.

I'm the convenor for this module.

All the lectures will be lecture cost.

If something goes wrong with those, we have an entire

back catalogue of carefully recorded lectures that are almost identical

to these.

So please do attend.

We hope the idea of these lectures that are starting

today are to kind of be there in person to

speak to you, hopefully inspire you to go and read

the things and have a voice, someone you're actually physically

talking to you.

So without further ado, I'll head into my first slide.

So human brain, there's a picture of the human brain.

There's this sequence of 20 lectures.

A brain in behaviour is all about this one object.

It's by far the most complicated object in the entire

universe, human brain.

It's capable of all the people being here.

Me talking to you now, all the discoveries, all the

history, everything humanity has ever done in terms of what

it's produced has come from the faculties of this brain

over other species.

It's an absolutely remarkable thing.

The beginning of today's lecture on our 20 lectures diving

into topics in brain of behaviour.

It's to take a step back and think, Wow, sitting

inside your head, behind your eyes, looking at me.

Now, next between your ears, listening to me now is

this object.

It looks quite attractive in this well, relatively in this

picture.

But if you were to see a real brain, if

someone was to have it, you know, accidentally removed in

front of us, it would be disgusting.

It's full of blood.

It's vastly for the blood vessels.

It's a really squidgy, pretty disgusting thing.

And for thousands of years in our prehistory millennia, people

weren't very aware of what it was doing.

So today's journey is let's take a look at the

brain history of the scientists.

This study, that is a way.

And if you do get into the brain and slice

it up, as I said, pretty disgusting.

You don't see very much.

The brain is just like this dull kind of, you

know, beige colour.

It's more disgusting than not when it's fresh.

But the scientists discovered over 200 years ago, if you

take something like silver nitrate, you can make dark stains

happen in stuff.

Most of the time you don't want to stain things,

but if you're looking down a microscope that's been developed

and you put a stain into a brain section, an

entire world opens to your eyes the early microscope, people

using microscopes.

There's early microscopist looking down with stain sections, discovered an

amazing world.

Here's a single brain cell in one and one of

these early sections.

If you look even closer, you can see these brain

cells take on these weird, strange forms.

Now, I'm a biased scientist.

I find these B cells that are just quite dramatic

to look at.

But there's not just individual cells.

There's whole collections of networks of these cells.

Here's some examples.

They're they're arranged in the most beautiful ways inside your

head as you're listening to me in how carefully arranged

neurones are doing important work of allowing you to understand

what I'm saying.

Take notes, think about what I'm saying as well.

If we cut through on the lowest bit, is your

body behind your neck and you look into the spinal

cord, you will see this object.

This is a cut through the spinal cord.

You could cut through a bat, a rat, a durable,

a human.

And it would very similar to this.

And again, the early this is hundreds of years old,

this picture drawn by these early anatomists, Peking duck microscopes.

If you look really close, these things look a bit

like sort of strange alien creatures with these incredible fibres,

connections, nerve cells are the neurones are very complicated and

take all sorts of forms and shapes and they're quite

incredible pictures to look at to start your journey into

brain in behaviour, the neurones you're going to be looking

at in a lot of the pictures of the science

today are quite boring.

We've reduced them down to simplicity.

I won't be showing exciting pictures like this through the

rest of the lectures, but I just want to start

with the beauty that exists in the topic we're looking

at.

Here's a particularly beautiful drawing one individual cell and a

sort of climbing block network of fibres from another cell

winding their way round that cell.

And all of those drawings I've just taken you through

step by step were drawn by one anatomist, Santiago Ramon

Cajal, the Spanish Year, an optimist who won the Nobel

Prize.

That discovery, he was the person who who argued.

First of all, I think they're brain cells.

It was a controversial idea.

There were brain cells and we'll come onto that in

a moment.

Reproduced all those beautiful images.

It was arrested in Oxford, actually, for trying to draw

pictures of the local community buildings because they just couldn't

believe he was really a scientist travelling Oxford.

They put him in jail, had to be let out

of jail.

But he's written incredible books about his life experience winning

the Nobel Prize and what you need to do as

a scientist.

Come back to him before we come back to the

scientists that made the stories behind this, I just want

to highlight you.

You are UCL student sitting in one of the world's

top universities for this topic.

We are kind of the top research institute in the

whole of Europe for neuroscience and the topics we're talking

about today.

That means excessive amounts of money coming into UCL around

this excessive amount of scientists have gone in, a number

of Nobel prizes have been made here.

There are lots of fellows the Royal Society in this

topic.

The story keeps going on.

So we're ranked second in the world was slightly behind

Harvard and M.I.T. If you put those two together, they

have a slightly higher number of Nobel Prize winners and

money have a lot more money.

Anyway.

What are we here to learn?

So every lecture we're going to get, you try and

get what are the objectives?

So today's objective of this lecture are two things I

want you to come away with.

Once you acquire the key and knowledge of the key

developments in our historical understanding of brain and behaviour.

My lectures in this course in the others are not

just about the structure of the brain for its own

sake, or how so receptors work.

We're absolutely obsessed in this course by behaviour.

This is the links between how the brain gives rise

to behaviour.

We also want you in this course to learn about

some of the key historical figures.

So if you were to pass in some wisdom, who

was who?

Who developed the ideas behind the brain?

So you would have an idea of who these celebrities

are that would run through maybe a few snippets of

facts about.

When you come to sit exams, the course will kind

of throw up and things.

So right from the get go, I want you to

think thinking about if we were to put up an

exam question after this lecture, what's the kind of exam

question we want to ask?

And you can put that in your head what you're

thinking through doing, How would I get to that?

And it might be something like how has her understanding

of the brain changed since the ancient times?

So what did the ancient people know and what do

we do now?

And I'll be teaching that in this lecture today.

We also run an MQ multiple choice exam for this

lecture, which is extremely easy last year, where we improving

that a little bit, but we'll be giving you lots

of help to make sure that you're absolutely up to

speed with the MQ.

I'm sure you'll nail it as long as you're students

that.

So an example question might be which ancient culture first

is first thought to have a specific word for brain

in the written text?

Greeks, Babylonians, Egyptians.

Persians.

If you go down to the British Museum and ask

the answer to that question, you'll find out in a

moment and give The answer is the ancient Egyptians.

So it's example of a kind of level of question

will be asking.

Let's start right back.

Not with the ancient Egyptians.

Let's go far back in time before those giant pyramids

were built and racing was even invented back to skulls

around 7000 years ago.

This one is it pretty looks like a sort of

Halloween type of skull.

It's quite intense.

But there's a key feature I'm sure you've all noticed

about this skull as a cut mark in the top

of his head.

A lot, a lot of historical skull was dug up

in 7000 years ago, have holes in them through axes,

spears in a brutal life 7000 years ago.

What's really creepy about this one is that the bone

had been cut and healed.

This person walked around living with this whole cold, carefully

cart, not cut with an axe or something in their

head.

And so scientists as well, archaeologists and palaeontologists have argued

that this cutting into the head happening was found 7000

years ago.

And we think we don't know.

There's no written text, but it was used for medical

treatment.

Perhaps this person had epilepsy or some other condition they

would.

They thought maybe if we open up the skull we'll

get the demons out.

What's interesting about this is that they thought that cutting

into the skull, into the head may be doing something

we don't fully understand, that we have no real way

of knowing.

But this is the earliest kind of thinking about humans

might be aware of the brain and doing something to

to medically approach it.

So we come now three and 4000 years forwards.

When the great Pyramids were built in ancient Egypt and

this incredible moment in civilisation when people were writing out

these hieroglyphic texts, which until, you know, a couple hundred

years ago were indecipherable and suddenly through the Rosetta Stone

in a British museum, they were able to decipher and

work out what was written in this hieroglyphics.

And what they discovered was that in these ancient texts

they were able to find from ancient burial sites was

that the ancient Egyptians, in fact, did write about treatments

for brain damage.

What to do if you're a medical doctor and someone

has damage to the head.

These are some of the things one might do.

Critically impressive things have been 5000 years ago it was

the ancient Egyptians discover that if someone hits like a

spear or some axe hits the right side of your

head, you lose the ability to move with the left

side of your body.

And if you smash into the left side of the

head, you'll lose the ability to move or say on

the right side of your body.

So this is known as this contralateral movement sensation.

So when I say contralateral, we'll get into that on

Friday's lecture about what we mean by these anatomical terms

that are quite remarkable.

This is sitting unknown for thousands of years in transcripts,

and it critically had this word brain.

You can see the hieroglyphics of the word brain.

But one fact is that they when they mummified the

ancient Egyptian bodies, most of you be aware of this,

they would put them into these tombs.

It's hard not to know about this, but they obviously

save parts of the body and put them into these

special jars like the intestines and the heart, particularly the

heart.

I just threw away the brain.

I thought it was not something to be preserved into

the afterlife.

So they clearly had some insights.

But then the cultural practice of burial didn't really follow

through.

We now move forward.

We're going to go through individual people.

These are the first person hypocrisies we'll go through with

all the way through it.

A lot of bearded men, a lot of white men

will eventually end on a female scientist passing through a

critical Persian scientist.

So we'll begin with this chap.

Hypocrisies.

Now he is the first person who people wrote about

mentioning his his followers wrote about him, saying, Here's all

the incredible things, hypocrisies.

We know when he lived, when he died.

We can date now.

We have evidence of his existence.

And why he's up here is that he is the

first person named, we can say, as far as we're

aware, to argue that the brain that was what we're

going to teach you in this course.

Brain supports the mind, supports your behaviour.

He argued this because he's he he was he was

really argues to be the first physician, the first doctor

who went round gathering information, building on knowledge and systematising

it to treat people so that doctors will take the

Hippocratic oath.

Do no harm to my patients.

You know, you might be treating someone you really don't

like, but as a Hippocratic Oath, you treat them nonetheless.

And this is where the Hippocratic Oath comes from.

Hypocrisy is arguing medicine should be for treatment above all

other things.

Critically, for today, he stands out as the person who

argued that your behaviour, all the movements you're making are

fundamentally coming from systems in your brain.

But he didn't know how.

He couldn't get much into it beyond that cool fact.

And that was a great advance.

It was held back by two very, very clever people.

This is Plato and Aristotle who came after hypocrisies.

This is the painting Leonardo da Vinci in the Vatican,

and we don't have any current pictures of them from

the time.

So they were they were philosophers that argued in and

really thinking about things, using your mind to mull over

and weigh up the natural philosophy to get into what

the state of the world really is.

They weren't so obsessed with doing experiments, looking at things

that came much later.

What they argue.

Plato in particular argued that reason in perception was in

the head.

So we do have this kind of sense from Plato

that some of the head might not be the brain

is this may not be the brain tissue itself, it

could be something else is what we might perceive the

world.

But all the passions, all your emotions, everything that drives

you, it's not to do with your brain.

It's in your heart.

We still have the idea of like, you know, we

do these heart emojis on your phone.

You will send hearts to say you care about somebody.

This goes back to those early ancient Greek times.

Aristotle even argued further, and he said he didn't think

that the brain was in charge of the body's movements

and the heart and foot.

And Aristotle actually went and did dissections.

He would get into lakes and take out fish and

cut into the fish and see what happens if you

cut into a brain, the animal, the main nervous system,

the had, you can still see a lot of movement

from the animal.

Its spine will still carry on doing things.

But if you cut it and stop the animal's heart,

the animal will die.

Stop doing any movement.

And Aristotle thought this is better evidence.

I can also see through Aristotle with his eye.

The blood vessels go everywhere.

The blood vessels permeate everything.

In this living being, the heart must be the sight

which controls that he couldn't see in the detail.

The nerve fibres that we know now exist or what

they were doing.

This really held up for a long time thinking about

threatening behaviour, and it persisted into the, you know, the

Middle Ages because these two men, Plato and Aristotle, had

so many insights into philosophy about ethics and the nature

of reality, and they were held up as absolute giants.

Disagreeing with them is hard, but as we go down,

we've gone through the first two characters.

When I moved to Galen.

It's not until we get to ancient Rome and the

gladiatorial combats that occurred there that delivered a huge number

of hideously mangled bodies.

The brutality of ancient Rome in early, you know, 150

A.D. was not a nice place, perhaps unless you were

an emperor.

Even that as an emperor likely to be killed by

your brothers.

But this this man, Galen, was a Greek physician who

moved to Rome, who operated there, was looking at these

cases and saying he found all these bodies and found

out the effects of different bits of damage to the

brain was happening and took penne and produced a cheese

like an argument written down of prescriptions.

The doctors that were preserved in scrolls that were handed

down about the nature of physiology.

And he made those of these not if you're in

a medical school you historically be learning about guy with

lots of reasons today I'm teaching you to he argued

back to evocative was right you the a gladiator comes

in with half his head in this thing he will

lose all sorts of functions.

So we argued against Aristotle.

The brain is responsible for sensation of behaviour.

Now.

Galen was doing physiology, looking at black bodies coming in.

He was thinking about what does this do?

What if we go to ancient Persia, becomes a Powhatan

or Ohaneze and is the Latinised name for this scholar?

So the ancient rabbit country was amazing.

A number of advances they made in thinking.

So it's not just this incredible scientist was not just

about saying, Oh, I can see this.

This body, this brain is important for moving.

He started you can see on the right side there

one of his diagrams.

What you see is hard to make out in that.

But the bottom bit of that curly bit is I'll

get a pointer if I can find.

Oh, no, not at this point.

The bottom part here is the nose and here are

the eyeballs and here are the the trucks, the infant

and the nerve fibres that come out of the eyeballs

and go into the back of the brain.

Now, the current thinking back in, you know, we jump

forward quite a bit and it's it's sort of 900

plus A.D. hundreds of years later.

Host Galen the still the thinking was that a bit

like I can touch the world around me I send

out and I touch this this theatre with my this

lecturer with my fingers Our eyes are doing something like

that with the visual world.

I'm kind of prodding the world with my eyes.

They're actively sensing out there and our hands and said,

No, I do not think this is what's going on

because he was obsessed with optics and the mathematics of

optics.

So you could see the eye was exactly like some

of the incredible optics.

And he wrote, These strategic treaties is arguing that our

brain is absorbing the light from the world.

Like the light coming into my eyes, I can see

because I'm processing the light into the back of the

brain.

He didn't even think it was in the eyes.

Incredible advances from our hands.

And about that is a fantastic YouTube video to watch

about his historical discoveries.

We'll jump forward now, maybe another 500 years until there's

a next big advance in terms of brain behaviour.

Reach up to Renaissance Italy.

This is the time of the Medici and a brutal

life again.

This is a frequently picking this up in the coming

to Italy, but medieval there is a renaissance occurring which

is incredible science, incredible odds.

And in this one man, Andreas Vesalius we have both.

We have incredible scientists.

He was a polymath.

It had lots of different things, highly liked, very charismatic

to it rhymes.

Crucially, we're now in 1500s.

He was able to print what he was doing.

He's able to take, as we can see in this

diagram here, this is one really beautiful drawings, although very

disgusting.

This isn't a human man's head because he's nose with

a skin removed, the skull removed in the brain, much

less nice than the first image of a brain.

But he had labelled it all.

He provided the first book published back in 1500s.

The Doumani Corporis Fabrica structure, The fabric of the human

body, covered everything in real detail so that any anatomist

in the world, anyone teaching medical school could go through.

And now this time we have the brain really in

detail.

Consider what bits might we have in the brain.

He also Andreas Vesalius started this process of thinking about

the maybe the soul, our mind.

This idea kind of interferes with our actions through the

fluid that's in your brain is a milky, pretty disgusting

substance in your head.

I'll talk to you about it next Friday.

When we come back, the lecture to these ventricles, these

holes inside your head look absolutely swollen.

If you have hydrocephalus, it's a very unfortunate condition by

the brain.

If you see someone hydrocephalus, the skull expands the ventricle.

But he thought this was particularly the way in which

our our mind interacts with our body and is a

very charismatic character.

This idea was really picked up in detail about this

very famous philosopher, René Descartes.

So if you had two lectures in philosophy, you would

have heard a lot of our stuff in Plato.

You then hear a lot about René Descartes is famous

for arguing, I think for Rico or ergo, some just

famous statements that What can we really know about reality?

If I'm thinking it must be there.

Today's lecture What's important about René Descartes is that he

argued that there's a big distinction, that there are some

things that I can't If I put my hand in

a fire, I got no choice.

I have to take it out.

I could try and hold my hand in there, but

naturally I'll take it out.

And we share that with all other animals.

What he had, what he.

We have reflexes, things that help us survive without thinking.

But there are other times when I might want to

get up and slap someone.

And I have decided I'm going to do I'm going

to make this decision.

I'm going to use my arm.

I'm not going to take it.

I'm going to take and slap someone.

And he drew diagrams highlighting.

We can see one here about the bottom that you

put your foot in the fire.

You'll need to take it out quickly.

But the other drawing at the top is about the

idea.

He started to think about sensation through to action, that

I might see something in the world.

It passes into my brain and then I can think

and then move my hand to change the world.

Before René Descartes, that wasn't really a distinction.

It was drawn this idea about the process, the science

of what might be going on.

And that's what we'll be obsessing over in the lectures

going forward into a whole range of why is it

exciting topics about emotions, movement, seeing, acting, smelling and memory.

All these things are going on inside our head.

But René Descartes really was the first to argue that,

you know, he discovered all sorts of ideas in mathematics.

The fact we have graphs, you know, algebra, a vast

range of things.

But he was really critical.

He argues that the soul, this mysterious thing that we

can't quite tangibly understand is separate from my body.

The thinking behind me is separate.

Going back to the long historical is not the way

science is.

Good.

Now think.

But you will be getting a lecture from an expert

on consciousness in this course.

We'll take you into some of these ideas where we

are now in 2022.

And if you jump forward into the 100 years after

René Descartes got interested in reflexes and how he might

act and the mechanics of moving, we have this again,

a really charismatic character.

Once again, Italian themes from 1700s.

This is Luigi.

Galvani is primarily a physicist, is messing around with all

sorts of things in physics, but he also got obsessed

with physiology and other things.

A lot of these people back then didn't have to

spend three years in a psychology degree to get to

grips with what was going on there.

He was able to learn a lot and discover things.

What he built was a vast room like this.

I five from here to the wall over there, vast

room filled with copper plates and Wolff are huge, big

thing and copper plates and wool all stacked up because

he discovered, you know, if you accidentally move on a

carpet, if you're wearing the wrong shoes, you can get

this nasty electrical charge this well, let's make loads of

that.

Let's put a lot of this kind of nasty electrical

shock together, put it what we can see here, put

it together is this huge, big building connects all those

copper plates up in and out and to a wire.

I can take a little while now and I can

tap it onto another wire and make a little flush

of electricity.

And what he discovered when he did that was he

was testing out what he could do with this.

And he got, you know, some frogs legs might have

been part of a meal back then, but he was

stimulating the frogs in different bits and finds, you know,

he stimulated blood vessels.

Nothing very boring.

But if you stimulate the top of his legs on

the white bit, the nerve fibres bundle the frogs legs

on their own, will show the exact pattern of movement

the frog would make, the whole frog would make trying

to swim through the water.

He'd reanimated the frog, brought its lower power back to

life using electricity.

And as a young female student who observed this, Wow.

Because he would tour around with this electrical model showing

people in different places.

This young female student called Mary Shelley.

This is amazing.

I went off and wrote a rapid study, the story

of Dr. Frankenstein, his monster drawing from those disgusting little

frogs legs because you just extrapolated from the frog, say,

well, if you could do this with an entire human

body, disgusting.

Why is this important for you?

Today's is the first step forward to discovering that your

brain works through electricity.

The connections between these nerve cells, the brain and nerve

fibres, pulse channel, electrical charge moves down those neurones, allowing

things to happen, like allowing you to see, to hear

all your sensation, allowing you to move.

This comes from Kobani.

A few years later, we move into Germany.

We're going to move into Germany and France and go

back and forward a bit.

Yohannes Peter Muller is a German physiologist.

He started to get obsessed with looking at different fish,

different amphibians and discovering, Oh, they do these in a

building on galvanise ideas.

You could see how the nerve fibres are organised.

And he started to systematise how we might organise in

a more organised way.

Our understanding of these brain structures went far beyond Vesalius,

his books from 1500s.

So now in the 1800s, around that time there's another

man and he he would tool around as well.

A little less charismatic, but still a great performer, Franz

Francisco.

And he had discovered he'd been interested in this idea

that he met people who had different faculties.

Some are really smart, some are really dumb, some he

really quick.

Some people were good at picking up language at different

skills and noticed that their heads might be different shape.

There was a lot of variation in Skull and he

thought that maybe the way the brain maybe there's one

way to to determine how the brain was related by

measuring the skull from the outside, the bones in the

way our brains are.

So some of the big back of the head.

So we were measuring lots of people's head in total

detail of the bumps and what they were good at

the first kind of assessments of IQ and, you know,

memory function and language trying to measure these things as

real move forward to science, but really wrong.

But because nobody really believes that the skill at language

isn't the best, just under AI or the obsequiousness, it's

somewhere at the back of your head.

Or empathy must be in this tiny bit.

But we just know that it was just wrong.

And he came to that through, you know, incorrectly correlating

one set of variables, bumps and another performance in a

very unsatisfactory way.

This whole idea is term phrenology and it's still cropped

up in the modern culture.

Is Homer Simpson, with his brain obsessed with doughnuts and

beer and sleep.

You know, this is a pervasive pervaded to know this

is another man's.

We now go from Germany and France, goobers galore.

A big fall is a big deal.

You'll still find them.

You go to Camden Market.

Phrenology heads.

You know, it's persisted till now, but this rather grumpy

man, Jean-Pierre Florin, hated this idea.

He really did not like goals proposal for the right

reason that it was wrong.

But he decided he would.

He would really try and do experiments on it in

stimulating these frogs is showing electricity.

But what if we went into the brain and start

to find out, do different bits of the brain do

things differently?

As ancient Egyptians had written about it, he didn't know.

In 17 the early 1800s we found when he went

in and started looking at damage to the brain, applying

lesions was that it wasn't really some great kind of

organisation.

His lesions were pretty poorly done, they weren't well delivers.

And he concluded The brain is just this mass.

The upper part of a brain does all these amazing

functions.

It is not organised in a way though, that argues

the language is in somewhere, etc. So he really in

France was a big fight between these positions of organised

versus non organised brains.

So we've moved right down up to the top of

this without coming to the latter part of the modern

year period when things really changed with this man, Paul

Broca, in France, same as Florence, around the same sort

of time.

He's an anatomist, a physician, anthropologist as well, and what

he's famous for is discovering Brook, his area, funnily enough,

named after him.

And this is a picture of one of the disgusting,

preserved brains that Brocket managed to take when he was

doing his anatomy work.

And what we can see in this brain is it's

got a lot of damage.

There was some event, some traumatic event.

It caused damage to this particular area.

And what Rocco realised was that he had a group

of patients who had the same problem.

They all couldn't speak properly.

It could, they could understand language, but they just couldn't

get the right words.

Still very clever.

He do lots of things, but they struggle with speech

and he found all these patients with almost all cases

had damaged.

The right frontal lobes in this particular area might extend

to other places.

But the common area was this area known to termed

Brock Azaria for the production of speech, and he established

that in most humans the left hemisphere is critically important

for language, which is still something that clinicians right now

are somewhere in a hospital in London will be determining

for somebody surgery.

You do not want to do the wrong surgery and

without someone's frontal lobe for language and discovered that they

can't speak and surgically because it could be their right

temporal lobe, one in a hundred is is actually doing

that job.

So it's a very critical thing.

Still, the broker is important in your story because he

is not the first to really say Florence is wrong,

go.

They're all wrong.

But actually there is organisation in the brain.

But we need to really think about the anatomy.

We need to think about specifics.

During this time in Germany, Karl Verner was also looking

at patients and he discovered a bit of wrinkle.

Verner Azaria I mean they named after him, which is

more posterior to rock.

Azaria Responsible for the comprehension of speech, and I put

it in very simple terms, but generally these were the

was the general idea.

You've got language production and language comprehension in the left

hemisphere in two particular areas.

And both these men really led the way into the

world of neuropsychology, of relating psychological function, speech reduction to

speech comprehension, these two different abilities you might have.

So.

Yes, he was an incredible.

These two men are incredible in advancing our understanding of

brain and behaviour, roots change and development of neuropsychology.

And this was going on in in France for for

four.

We go back to Brock having gone in in France

for Paul Brock and in Germany for Calvin.

And just you could walk there in 10 minutes down

the road in Queen Square.

John Healings Jackson is the other major figure in the

understanding of brain and behaviour this time.

So now a little bit for the mid 1800s, sort

of late 1800s.

And John healings Jackson.

Key takeaways.

You provide a whole range of important insights into the

cerebral, the cerebral cortex and study of these brain damaged

patients.

A vast range that I could list, you know, colour,

vision, sensation, spatial orientation, whole range of functions.

And his boss, the sitting in the National Hospital for

Neurology and Neurosurgery, where he worked for his career running

a a ward when he was dedicated to not only

helping patients, but making these discoveries about the brain, how

it's organised.

And so we have him to thank for a lot

of key neuropsychological discoveries, by the way our brains are

organised.

Now one of the most critical cases we're going to

come into a number of in this short lecture, we're

coming to two really famous cases against the celebrities who

made the key discoveries like Rocker and Veronica and John

Hughes Jackson.

But here's a man called Phineas Gauge.

I'm sure many of you in the audience may have

come across Phineas Gauge, but if you haven't, let me

introduce this remarkable story.

We don't really know that the urologist should have more

credit for the person who discovered in his details.

But it seems a move between different doctors and it's

a bit disputed.

The Phineas Gauge.

Here is a picture of his skull and a picture

of figure one in the paper of an iron bar

used for railway sleeper movers.

A Tiffany's gauge was a railroad worker.

He was responsible for moving around, dealing with the the

laying down a railway track.

At that time, they had these huge metal poles that

would allow you to move the big sleepers and move

the big rails.

You're putting a rope.

You needed something really heavy this time.

They're also using explosives.

They're using because they had to cut through the rock.

And for Phineas Gauge, a very unfortunate accident occurred or

was working away.

An explosion occurred on one of these steel rods just

blown right up through his head and lodged inside his

head.

He should have died.

He should have died.

But the fact the reason he didn't was the speed

of the of this rod penetrated his skull so fast,

it sort of it didn't cause the surrounding damage in

the way of a slow moving object.

So remarkably, they were able to remove this pole.

And he went on for a month or so for

some period afterwards alive before he died.

And what was remarkable in the case of Phineas Gauge

was that he retains more or less his knowledge of

who people were.

He could see things all sensation movement, a lot of

these general human properties, you know, things we take for

granted.

He could still do them despite this massive damage he'd

had.

What he lost was his ability to make careful decisions,

to plan for the future, and his personality was really

disrupted.

So he was he would curse is violence.

His entire sense of who he was, the people who

knew him said he's not the same as change.

So from that discovery of Phineas gauge, along with Brauchler

and Guernica, we had this and John Ewing's Jackson, these

discoveries about bits of the brain, it seems the frontal

lobes.

I'll be going through the anatomy on Friday show you

where the frontal lobes are, unsurprisingly in the front of

the brain.

But these frontal lobes are critical for that kind of

personality and thinking.

And and sadly, people went on to run frontal lobotomies

all around the world.

Popping out of these for periods is a very unpleasant

period in history that we may come back to later

in the course.

Paul Burgess in the last lecture will talk about the

history of frontal lobotomies.

So have Phineas Gauge railway worker and let's just listen

to what I've said there.

So he survived his personality disorders.

So what I've been talking to now is Rocco, Veronica,

John who these Jackson cases often escape each one of

these people in cases giving us real insight into the

organisation and function there has persisted.

And to this day we still people look for this

area.

People still think this is true.

What distinctly different Phineas gauge.

Unlike the previous hundred years before, there was a bit

of a mass, but it's around this time in the

1800s that we have this shift towards more careful experimental

science.

So Jean-Pierre Florins, I'll go back and see him again.

This is Jean-Pierre Florence that instigated in France, this idea.

We need to experiment to understand the brain.

We can't just observe in the period following these 33

men and this particular case, they're all about observing.

But at this late 1800s, we had these three men

that then revolutionised our understanding of brain function because they

went back to the idea Galvani had produced and Mary

Shelley had popularised in Frankenstein.

What friction hits segue on the right.

Everyone had big beards back then on the right in

Germany.

We were running a physiology laboratory but able to show

it, start showing that they had much more improved.

They didn't need a huge house to create batteries anymore.

You could get small systems for electrically shocking and working

with electricity.

This is 1800s.

So they were able to show that you could stimulate

bits of the brain and cause movement to occur on

the left here.

David Farrier was a physician, is a Scottish physician who

worked with John Healings.

Jackson's became known as a student who.

Again, 10 minutes away, you walked to where David Faraday

would walk around doing things in the ward, helping patients.

But he got a grant to start doing this experimental

work by stimulating, and he was extremely systematic in that.

And he he produced the first publication publication map of

where what happens when you stimulate where in the brain.

So if I stimulate above here in lots of different

in various different animals, I'll get certain reactions, certain movements

will occur.

And they were really interested in this, and not just

to make the fundamental discoveries we're talking about here.

They wanted to understand epilepsy, and they could see that

if you stimulate electricity in places you've got, movements are

very much like an epileptic fits.

So they're able to argue that epilepsy is this overreaction

to much electrical charge through the brain from these early

experiments.

But it is a very sad tale because they were

not using antiseptic techniques.

These came in.

So the experiments were really traumatic and indeed really drove

in the United Kingdom, the Anti Vivisection Society.

And to this day in the UK, we have some

of the most stringent laws around the protection of animals

do anywhere that animals.

And there's lots of animal work going on at UCL.

It's so carefully regulated and looked at with great care

to make sure that every every effort is made to

minimise any pain to any animals.

But back then, unfortunately things were not so good.

So reading these articles is somewhat is is not pleasant.

Unfortunately, this is the history of historically.

These two men, they move out of they move from

the study of stimulating brains and damaging brains and so

on to what happens if you look down a microscope.

This is going on simultaneously.

In the late 18th, we know in the early 1900s

how on the right and Emilio Golgi, two men who

had developed staining techniques.

You can see how this picture I showed you earlier

on the right and comedian Goldie's picture on the left.

These are the drawings of anatomy.

A key things that they had discovered that they could

use, particular staining techniques that when you stay in a

bit of brain wash it.

I you can see it under microscope.

Now Golgi and his name is all over cells.

Views on any cell biology, any or any biology really,

or probably where the Golgi apparatus inside a cell.

This is this, you know, larger than life Italian.

He put his name on it and he he discovered

an enormous amount of ourselves by very carefully looking at

microscopes.

But what he thought when he looked at the brain

was it was all the kind of big fibrous mass

like a sponge.

You know, sponges are one big kind of fibrous mass.

And how awful this was wrong, how it looked in

lots of sections.

And he could see quite clearly from his notes that

there appeared to be individual nerve cells that were not

connected up and they were growing.

And how argued this hypothesis that a brain is composed

of neurones is something we take for granted.

But it's only 200 years.

All these amazing scientists before that were not aware of

the existence of neurones.

It's quite amazing to think of.

They both received the Nobel Prize for this and they

went up on the stage to collect it.

It was all agreed in this period that pretty much

all scientists agree with the Nobel that the position of

neurones.

But apparently Golgi did not like this idea and his

entire Nobel speech to the community carried on arguing against

the hypothesis which really pissed off.

How does he come to collect the prize for the

same thing?

And they never really spoke to each other.

He had a real falling out over this idea, but

they made incredible advances and move forward this idea and

we looking a lot in this course of neurones.

So these are the guys behind the insights around this

time just a bit earlier.

In fact, we have Hermann von Helmholtz.

We're looking at neurones and we're starting to you have

rokkr looking at brains, but we have this incredible switch

to empiricism.

So if you do a psychology degree or neuroscience degree,

you're taught to take a problem, you reduce it down,

you systematically study it, you've hairy properties of the world

and you statistically test them.

And we have a lot of that in science.

There is a vision, perception of space and so on.

Where we're being examined by Helmholtz back then, the world

was not so big.

So these people neutral.

Helmholtz was David Faraday had worked with Helmholtz.

It was dialogue with John Giddings.

Jackson How was aware of how they were all in

cahoots in some ways, but disagreeing in agreement.

So it was a very productive time in terms of

changes.

Now we come to the 1900s.

We have colleagues shown there are neurones, but in Oxford

we have Charles Scott Sherrington and his work were moving

into the 1900.

This is the 20th century.

Science is now changing big time.

The methods you can employ, the precision of instruments, what

you can do.

Psychology and neuroscience have become topics that are investigated more.

And Charles Scott Sherrington In history, neuroscience is really important

for rolling out the first fundamental explanation of how brains

operate.

Jake Deka had written about reflexes and movement, but just

sketched it.

You saw the diagrams.

Sherrington had detailed diagrams and explanations.

He worked out that there was something wrong.

He went to how far stick the work around this

time, how information must flow through the nerve system, how

these with the stimulation of the frogs legs discovered there

was a gap in the timing.

Something was missing.

These cells should foster.

And he speculated that there must be some gap between

the cells, which he called the sign ups that were

some slowing and that stayed very controversial for 50 years

or so.

Fighting over the existence of sign ups did or did

not operate throughout tricity or chemistry or books.

Charles Scott Sharon's and was really the foundational figure in

terms of laying out the general principles of the nervous

system.

We have to thank for that.

We're going to wrap up now the last two people

for the end of the lecture, and here we go

again.

I think charisma carries through a lot of these.

We have not an Italian charismatic, but a Canadian.

We've got a Canadian neuroscientist while the Penfield, while the

penfield was drawing all that knowledge of fairy friction hits.

It's shown and very mapped out where you should stimulate

in animals to get certain behaviours.

What Penfield argued was that let's use that in our

surgery in Montreal, Montreal Institute back in this period of

the 19, maybe 1930, through to the through to even

now, incredible institute for insights into psychology and neuroscience, they

started to do much more careful work to have a

more experimental brain surgery where they would remove whole sets

of bits of the brain to cure things like epilepsy

or intractable pain, all sorts of things.

What you want you want to do neurosurgery.

What I said earlier with Broca's case, you do not

want to disrupt language and someone can't speak.

It's an utter devastation.

If they can do lots, if they lose other things,

not ever.

You know, if I can't find my way, I can

still get Google Maps or someone to tell.

I can't speak to you.

It's a disaster.

So Penfield was very carefully using electrical stimulation in his

surgeries to then make big discoveries about the brain.

He would go in and stimulate and he discovered there's

an entire map in the human brain of the of

our body where sensations occurred.

So what Penfield would do is have someone in surgery

for the first time awake and careful surgical techniques, open

up their skull, go into their brain while they're able

to speak.

There's no pain receptors in your brain.

They're all on the outside.

If you can anaesthetise all that, get it all set,

you can go in and stimulate.

And they still do this?

No, not quite the way he did, but then much

more carefully that he's able to stimulate and see what

people could tell him.

Things when you stimulate here.

Oh, my hand starts itching, I stimulate there.

Their knee will start to tingle.

You can map all this out and discover that it

was a very organised map of our human body or

surfaces inside our brain running along this area of the

Samantha sensory cortex.

I'll talk about that on Friday in more detail.

There was also a map of if you stimulate in

other places, they might start moving their hand, twitching, a

finger, moving their mouth, their lips.

And you can see one of his drawings there of

the these bits of the body.

And it wasn't just organised 1 to 1 go to

the tongue and the lips take up a huge number

of cells in your brain.

This will be true of all of you in the

audience, your brain.

Well, lots of brain cells.

In fact, somebody once commented The number of brain cells

in your as a human to move your finger is

more than the whole brain cells in a mouse is

so complicated human organising can move.

We have a lot of support cells we have a

lot of a lot of cells in the human brain.

So there is some huge amounts of of cells in

there organising our, our sensation in action, the last personal

ones.

And today's lecture as we come to the end is

a woman.

So she had a lot of bearded men so far,

these people who had the power to do what they

could do.

The Montreal Neurological Institute in the 1940s, 30, 40 years

going forward into the fifties is a change in women

are alive in medicine in fact show Charles Scott showing

some is one of the earliest people to really fight

to allow women into medicine they were not allowed to

study.

You know, when these historical unpleasantries UCLA was actually pretty

good at this changing things.

But here we have Brenda milner, who's 104 years old

at the moment, still alive, still has an office somewhere.

Her office is covered with every possible accolade you could

have in science.

And below her is a normal brain.

On the right, on the left is the brain of

a patient called.

Henry Lawson, who died about ten years ago, was throughout

her career known as Patient H.M..

So Phineas Gauge is famous because that's what was going

through his head.

Hey, Jim was famous because a young maverick neurosurgeon removed

his temporal lobe bilaterally.

You can see in the diagram here, he removed all

that brain tissue there and there, there, that huge amount

of brain tissue all scrutinised very carefully.

He survived perfectly healthy, lived for decades after the surgery,

and the surgery worked for what he was trying to

do.

It stopped.

H.M. had epilepsy, really severe epilepsy.

It stopped.

It was great, but it unfortunately did leave H.M utterly

amnesic.

After the surgery.

He never learned a single thing about anyone he met.

He couldn't remember any new details.

He couldn't find his way around the hospital.

He could remember what had happened to him long before,

but any new memories were unable to be laid down.

That bit of the capacity or other intellectual function, his

knowing language, IQ planning, he could do all the things

for this case couldn't.

His personality stayed the same.

But his memory had disappeared.

And Brenda milner really was the pioneer who brought forward

that and many other discoveries systematically about brain function.

So we'll come back to Brenda milner when it comes

on to our our next hour lectures on memory and

learning systems.

So today, we've gone through a whole sequence of celebrities

of the brain all the way through our ancient past,

Socrates.

So, Brenda milner, on Friday, I'll start to dive into

the neuroanatomy that underlies what we now know about the

brain.

To see you next Friday and enjoy the course.