How Subtile Chemistry Evolving in the Mammalian Brain Opened it to the World of Feeling
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NobeliumMagma
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:16
Thank you Ernst, you won't know perhaps that I knew Ernst long, long ago when he was in
00:25
Montreal and then in Seattle where he was I think for 13 years professor of zoology. So this goes back a long time and it's nice to be meeting here again today and
00:40
thank you for your introduction. Now, I have a strange problem, you know, how can I talk to chemists as something interesting? And then I thought, well, what I'm doing actually does demand not only ordinary chemistry
01:01
but chemistry that still doesn't exist. And so I'm trying to tell them this is subtle chemistry of extreme importance and which we can as yet say nothing but I believe that these conferences are not just to tell you what has happened but to tell you how the new questions will go, where is our future?
01:21
And I'm going to tell you something about our proposed future. So there is my story explained. The ultra microscopic structures and their performances in the brain have got properties beyond anything that could have been predicted.
01:41
And these properties, and that is what my, I'm getting to start something new now. These properties of the brain give it the opportunity for interacting with another world out of the matter of energy world into the world of feelings and experiences and thoughts
02:04
and intentions which we know. Now, that was not happening before a certain stage in evolution and that stage was involved in the bringing into existence of new mental arrangements, new neural arrangements,
02:22
which opened it to the world of feeling and that was what we have to know. The world was mindless until this happened. And all of this is still, it was a tremendous problem now for chemistry. How did you get out of a mindless world, a mindful world that we live in? And how far back in evolution do we go in this?
02:42
So the first slide, please. Now, here's the point. Because I'm not going to be doing a lot of arm waving, I'm going to be showing you real stuff, pictures and so on here. And here is then on the same scale, a lot of brains from humans to chimpanzees
03:04
and right through mammals here. And then to the pigeon, finally to the reptiles and the amphibian and the fish. Now, my point is going to be that these animals are mindless. They get on in life very cleverly with all kinds of performances,
03:24
instinctive and learned, but they don't know about anything. They have no experiences of pain or suffering or pleasure. The bird is a dubious case. It's in between and I will believe that we're with Thorpe
03:42
and that there is some mind in birds, but we don't know the brain story yet for that. You see, there are little stories that no one looks at. Don't think that science is finished. It's just beginning. And here are then the mammals. And my story is that this was all the world of consciousness
04:01
came in with the first mammals long before the opossum, but with the insectivores. So that's where we get to when mind came in, when the world of feeding came in. And now what I will try to do now is to try to understand
04:23
how the properties of these real structures in the brain could have given this experience of another world. And before that happened, say before these mammals came, this whole world here, the whole world of the cosmos was mindless.
04:43
No feelings, no suffering, nothing. And then it came. So the next slide, we have to look now at the brain of an ordinary mammal. And here is Ramani Kahaal's picture here with nerve cells. And I'm wondering, oh, I need that light, don't I?
05:02
Can you see this all right? The picture's okay. These are pyramidal cells. Yes, that's better. Thank you. The pyramidal cells have a cerebral cortex. Ramani Kahaal, last century, made these beautiful drawings and there you can see the units of the brain, nerve cells,
05:20
with all their center here and their branches here and their axon going elsewhere. This is Ramani Kahaal's picture, beautifully drawn by him. And there's another levels of pyramidal cells. That's the principal cell of the cortex, because I'm going to really unashamedly say that we have to go to the neocortex
05:42
eventually for consciousness. You won't find it in the spinal cord or you won't find it in the brain stem. It is the cerebellum, which I do know something about. Consciousness and the world of feeling came only with the higher development of the neural cortex. And these are cells.
06:00
And here's a synthetic picture. And there's a beautiful picture of a pyramidal cell, which is the unit, really you might say, of the cerebral cortex, running up with its axon, then right to the surface, and relating to its axon here going elsewhere. These are nerve cells in the units of the brain.
06:21
But the special kind is the pyramidal cell. And next slide, please. So this shows you another syndagitide drawing here. You specially gave me, for clarity, just the other day, pyramidal cells in lamina 5. These are the six lamina of the cerebral cortex from the surface into the great white matter.
06:44
And these big fellows here, lamina 5 pyramidal cells, you can see that apical dendrite goes all the way up to the surface with little knobs on it. Here, another one. Here's then lamina 3. There's one there, one there, and one there. And if you look at that one, you'll see the apical dendrite.
07:02
That's the thing I'll be concentrating on, this apical dendrite of the cell going up to the surface and having these little knobs on them. And you can see a nerve fiber coming up here and making contact with synapses there. Those are the units of communication in the neocortex.
07:22
I wanted to show you this because I think I don't want to talk to an audience that hasn't yet got informed about the basic elements. The basic elements in other cells, the nerve fibers going elsewhere, the dendrites going up and getting synapses. And here is one synapse on a dendrite here with a spine coming out
07:43
and a nerve fiber like this one here. That's really a drawing of that enlarged. And there you see the presynaptic element. Impulses come in like this to do their action. Nerve impulses are brief pulses of negative wave depolarization
08:02
that run along nerve fibers and last about a thousandth of a second. So those are the signals that run up here to the synapse here. And here's the synapse with the presynaptic. That's where the signal will come in. The impulse will come in here. And then with some subtle work I'll talk about,
08:22
gives rise to depolarization here, which runs down the dendrite and meets with others. That is a story that will come up. And the important thing here in this picture is to see the little round vesicles here, synaptic vesicles filled with the transmitter. And this chemist would know these are specific substances
08:42
for the cerebral cortex are glutamate with aspartate as an alternative. We do know all that chemical detail. And the number here, about 5,000 to 10,000 molecules of the transmitter substance in each one of those little vesicles. Well, that's the beginning of the story that I'm telling you.
09:04
And now I should ask for the next slide, please. Now, here is now—to getting on there is a pyramidal cell. You see, I've drawn this or taken it out. Oh, yes, I've drawn it. A pyramidal cell with an axon going somewhere.
09:21
And this is the unit, then, of performance in the cerebral cortex. And with this apical dendrite going up like this to the surface, where it branches a lot, and with side branches. And on those, you see those little brobs. Those are all synapses that I've shown you just in the last slide.
09:41
Each one of those is an incoming fiber comes there with transmitter and making synapses on the branches or the main stem of the apical dendrite. Now, there are—for such a cell as that, we can count the number of boutons or synapses. And it's about surprisingly high number, over 5,000.
10:04
So every nerve cell that's converging on it over 5,000 impulses coming from somewhere by these little synaptic knobs here or boutons. And that is what we have to study. These are the basic elements of the brain. It's not just frills. This is the way it works.
10:22
And we have to know this. Before you talk about—and that's the problem I have in the world today— is that all kinds of philosophers and even scientists come in and think they know about the brain and talk in this knowledge about the brain-mind problem, but they don't know the detailed structure at all. And I'm going to tell you that today.
10:40
It's there. It's not that I discovered it. I did some. But people just don't read the literature. They get their obsessions and go ahead. And I have to always insist that if a philosopher talks about the brain-mind problem, he has to understand the brain. It's just like you can't talk about a car in operations. And if you don't look under the bonnet and know what's there,
11:03
they won't even do that. So here is then a dendrite going up with its knobs. And now here is another picture of pyramidal cells here with their apical dendrites going up. And they are coming, as you see, together, bundling here.
11:22
And all the apical dendrites, almost all, bundle together as they go to the surface and make a big structure. Now, this structure's been around since 1972 when it's described by Fleischer and Bonn. And in 73, it was exactly found out also in Boston by Peters
11:51
and their associates. But for some reason or other, people haven't realized that this is fundamental work. Bonn and Boston together agree completely.
12:04
And it's this bundling here of the apical dendrites to make a structure which is therefore receiving. Each one of those is this, you see, with all of these inputs going here. And so you will have making up such a bundle
12:21
about 100 apical dendrites from lamina 5, lamina 3 and 2, all coming together to make this structure. You can see the 16 microns in diameter in several cortex. This is the depth and this is the surface. So this is the unit of reception of the cell neocortex. And these are the terribly important facts.
12:42
I'm not giving you a theory now. These are facts discovered and reported and checked by many investigators. So I call this structure here, this receiving of there. Each one of these receiving hundreds of thousands of impulses.
13:00
I call that a dendron, d-e-n-d-r-o-n. And that's another unit, you see. We have the unit of the nerve cell, the unit of the synapse, the unit of the dendron now. It's just like in physics or chemistry, you have to have your units and work in those terms. So this is the dendron and the great receptive unit in the several cortex.
13:21
Next slide, please. And that picture was from Boston. Now one from Bonn here, because it's just the two. And in German, I must tell you about Fleischhauer, director of Bonn now, who discovered it. And he has a nice lady, Cordelia Schmalke,
13:43
who drew this drawing to show you the pyramidal cells coming and joining together gradually. And if you look at the top there, you will see that there is a section of another lot of little cut across dendrites there. The two three dendrons are shown in part there
14:01
with the nerve cells. And she is working on, and then she's got a doctorate in anatomy, neuroanatomy, and is working together closely with me, Cordelia Schmalke. So that's for the German students, you see. It's Germany, and it is well in the game. Next slide.
14:24
So I'm back here now to this. We've seen that already. You've seen all this slide before. But here is the unit now of the synapse, which you can see here coming. We're now getting now to detail. These are the little synaptic vesicles
14:40
filled with the transmitter substance, lying there on the line, fronting the cleft and the postsynaptic membrane. And when they liberate their contents here into the cleft, the molecules of glutamate travel across and then act here and do very special ionic properties,
15:02
which relate to the work that got the Nobel Prize for Germany, done in Heidelberg. But that's far more subtle than what I shall be doing today. But this is the same thing as this. Glutamate works and opens ionic channels here
15:21
on the postsynaptic membrane. And so an impulse begins here that causes liberation of vesicles. They cross the substance, crosses the ax here, and causes a membrane depolarization here of the dendrite. And that is a dendrite, which belongs to any of these neurons here, say.
15:42
And that is the beginning of the action in the brain. The synapse impulses coming in like here and acting on the dendrite to make ionic changes, giving you the membrane potential.
16:02
And next slide, please. So now I come to something that's getting more subtle. My title is Subtle Chemistry, and I have to now... So far, it's all conventional. Just a background for you. And now it gets more subtle because here is work done...
16:23
Most of this work is local. This is done in Zurich by Konrad Ackert and his group. And here is then the axon terminal, the fiber terminal, making a synapse here on a dendrite. And when you look at this with very special techniques
16:42
that Ackert and his group in Zurich were famous for, you see the axon terminal here coming here. This is a single nerve fiber coming in here, and that's where the synapse is here. And it is just cut away in a kind of perspective drawing. There is real structure in this axon terminal,
17:00
and this structure is still not explained. It's, again, how did it come and what is the properties? This is subtle chemistry for you, and very subtle indeed. These are dense projections made of protein, but we don't know how it's all organized. And it's done very specifically. This is a beautiful... You'll see more of this in a moment. Dense projections coming out here,
17:22
and there they are shown. They're triangular arranged. There's some chemistry in this organization. This is about a thousandth of a millimeter here. So it's quite micro stuff. And these are synaptic vesicles with the transmitter, which are just scattered in here.
17:41
You're going to see in a minute them in more detail here with these strange dense projections of protein. This is the ultra-structure done by electron microscopy and freeze fracture and special blocking techniques by Ackerton and his associates. Done quite a long time ago.
18:01
This picture is 1969. But it hasn't been fully appreciated until now. I know Konrad very well, and he's done this beautiful work and has felt that it's been neglected. It was before its time. Now I think it's coming right again.
18:21
And I will help in that. Next slide, please. Because... Next slide. So now we're back here, and you've just seen the details of one of those boutons there. I wanted to show you this, though, to show you how they all are coming in,
18:41
fibers coming in into all these endings, many thousands here. And they are summing up. Each one of them is working by its little synapse and depolarizing the membrane. And that depolarization makes a mini, what I call a mini EPSP, exactly postsynaptic potential, mini depolarization.
19:02
And they all are adding up here. And if they get to a big enough stage, 10 to 20 millivolts now, some hundreds of times larger from what the single one does. But they all add up electrotonically on the X, on the dendrite. And if it's big enough, the cell will fire an impulse down there and to elsewhere in the brain.
19:21
So that's the ordinary conventional story. Convergence, summation, impulse generation, impulse discharge, down here, the axon, to somewhere else in the cell cortex or elsewhere in the brain. So that's the unit of operation. Next slide, please.
19:41
So we're back here on this structure for a moment to give you a feeling again for the organization here of this, which is yet unknown how it comes about. But this is the basic structure of the synapse, which is the key operator in the cerebral cortex.
20:06
So next slide, please. And now you might wonder at the detail but this is a real microphotograph. There's a tenth of a millimeter by Ackert also.
20:21
And now you can see the dense projections there. And now you can see if you look right hexagonal structure here. And those are the synaptic vesicles shown here in a tangential section of the synapse. This is very subtle work indeed.
20:40
But there's another. These dense projections then are in triangular array, as you see here, triangles. That's the basic structure upon which this whole thing is built for the synapse. But the vesicles themselves are arranged in a here. And you can see it better, of course,
21:02
with all this work. Then Conrad Ackert and his group then made idealized drawings of this synapse. But it is really, this is a microphotograph of a tangential section. Next slide, please. And now you see their beautiful picture. It's so beautiful that people don't believe it.
21:21
But that tangential section was along here and it's showing you the dense projections and the vesicles. And in vesicles, see the hexagonal here, hexagonal, hexagonal. You see this? And so this is what we call a paracrystalline structure. This is something quite beyond any understanding yet.
21:44
It's more subtle chemistry involved in trying to understand that. Because this is the single synapse here. One of those millions in the year, hundreds of thousands in a dendron. And this is in partial perspective to show you then the synapse here,
22:03
postsynaptic membrane that you've seen. And here is the vesicles. And here is one vesicle here, which is opened, it's stuck on the membrane, closely related like here. But here it has opened its tube contents and pours its glutamate into the postsynaptic membrane here,
22:22
into the cleft of the membrane. So that's the basic element in the brain of operation. Synaptic vesicles and one of them every now and then empties its contents across here. That is called exocytosis. It's a word. But now there are about 40 to 60 of these vesicles.
22:44
Actually, this is the nicely one here around the dense projection. It's a paracrystalline thing, you see. And you might say, when did this start? Well, it started in Aplysia, even. It's described in a mollusk by Eric Kander and his group. Primitive types, but still the same thing.
23:00
Chemical transmission has got this organization. And a great deal of the beauty of the work has been come from the mountain cell by Korn and Faber in Paris. But, of course, it's not used there for the mind. It's used there for conservation. When you get to a chemical transmission,
23:21
impulses come here, and the little packets here of a few thousand molecules in the firing line touching the membrane here. If all of them were active by the calcium coming in, then you'd soon run out of transmitter, and that would be the end. You're paralyzed. But so you have to have it ready for use,
23:43
but conserved. And that is what is involved here in this strange performance we'll see that when every time an impulse comes along here, there are 40 to 60 of these vesicles stuck. There you see the pattern. When you take them off, you see they're all stuck in this beautiful hexagonal pattern.
24:03
They're all there waiting to discharge their contents filled with the transmitter, but only every now and then does one do that. And that is still not understood at all. We just know the numbers, but we know that impulses come in here, calcium ions come in excess. It's necessary for that process to have calcium
24:23
to make the vesicle empty, exocytosis. But we don't know why all the others don't do it. They're all equally ready to fire,
24:41
but only one goes. Now, that is good in the primitive animals. You can say it was there designed to conserve the transmitter. But what we have to now tell you, this is the most fundamental property of the brain, and we have to study that, because only then do we get moving to the next level of understanding of the brain.
25:03
It's this mission of one only when an impulse comes in here. And every now and then, never more than one, that we all know, but all synapses have been studied. When an impulse comes in and hundreds of thousands of molecules of calcium ions come in,
25:21
only one emits at the most, and usually not one, several. So if you do it with a bump, you see, I could do this with a bump, you're having fibers coming. Only one.
25:41
This is the excess exocytosis. That's the way it goes. And we don't know why it doesn't go all the time. So that's, again, something for the chemist to work on.
26:02
Here you see the beautiful structure, without this cutaway to show detail, of such a structure, with the dense projections here in triangular array and the hexagonal-ordered synaptic vesicles. It's a beautiful structure, you know.
26:20
This is something, a most beautiful structure that I know in nature. I think it beats the fly's eye. And it's not only is it beautiful, but it is beyond compare, wonderful and important. So there is design,
26:41
and again we don't know the chemistry, how this is all linked together and how the synaptic vesicles are liberated. After Acker did all this beautiful work, finishing in 1975 in Zurich, he had nobody following on except Heinrich Betz,
27:00
who's now in Frankfurt from Heidelberg. And he went on more recently to try to discover the structure of the vesicle. It's the capsule, you see, with the transmitters are in here, within here, 50 micron, 50 angstrom diameter.
27:24
They're all arranged in this beautiful pattern. But he admits in his last publication of last year that although they have found the proteins and so on on the synaptic vesicle surface, synaptic phasing, synaptic pouring,
27:41
and have done a tremendous amount of work in analyzing a detailed performance, we still don't know how it works, as is pictured there. But this is subtle chemistry. We need to know much more about how, because this is chemistry, how did this all get put together, how does its properties perform, and so on.
28:03
And the only one doing it is Heinrich Betz in his school in the world. Next slide, please. And this is to show you exocytosis. This is the synaptic vesicle here on the surface,
28:23
here into the cleft. Calcium goes in. These are meant to be the molecules, you see. Just a pictorial picture there. Apposition, and then reopening, and emptying here of the contents into the cleft, and so to work on the membrane.
28:41
That is the exocytosis. And here is Betz's picture of this. That was a long ago picture. And Betz is showing here a synaptic vesicle coming with a special attachment site. And this is one with the proteins around it. Synaptophytes and synaptophorin are making the vesicle,
29:01
along with, of course, the ordinary outer carbons. And that's the contents here, the molecules. And it makes a contact with the postsynaptic membrane here, opening up the channel, and the contents here is pouring across the membrane into the cleft.
29:20
And then it finishes by complete emptying. So that's the drawing of Betz's group, and it's in agreement with the other one. So this is what we call exocytosis. And the important thing is, when you do have it, you get the complete emptying. It's not just a few trickle out, but the whole thing empties in that way.
29:42
It's a unit of performances, and the most important unit, really, in the cerebral cortex is the unit of exocytosis, which you've seen there. And so that's the way we have to work all the time. The transmitter has to be liberated,
30:00
and we have to understand that. Next slide, please. There's many other things like the filling and all that. Well, this just shows you, then, what I want to... Here are synapses on a dendrite of a hippocampal cell. And there, the synapses are shown. And this picture...
30:21
And there's one there. But this picture is just to show you that. They're all in parallel on the dendrite, and you've got these ones I didn't draw in. I drew this myself. And the calcium ions are shown coming in here. And the point is that... I show this for... That some of these will be, every now and then,
30:42
exocytosis and an EPSP, and here and there. And all of this adds up. There are some thousands of these on every cell, on the dendrites, thousands of these synapses. And every now and then, when enough get through,
31:01
they will depolarize enough traveling down here to fire an impulse down there. That's the conventional story of neuroscience, which I was much involved in at various times. So this is, again, I'm giving you the kind of unitary performance of this. And we go to the next slide then.
31:23
Now we're getting into some really tough work. We've wanted to know for a long time how this whole thing worked. Here is a hippocampal... That's the cervical cortex. A simple part of the cerebral cortex is the hippocampus.
31:43
And here is then a nice design which has been much used. There are cells... You see the cells with their dendrites and their axon coming off here. There's another cell with its dendrites and its axon coming off. And this is in this particular cell here, called CA3.
32:05
This is CA1, just in the cortex of the hippocampus. So there's the body of the cell and the dendrites and the axon. The axon has a collateral, though. Instead of going off here, it also gives off a branch. These, by the way, are recording electrodes.
32:21
It gives off a branch, chaffa, named after chaffa, chaffa collateral, which comes around here. And one axon here makes a synapse with the dendrite of a CA1 neuron. And that is what we're looking for. We want to understand and look at what happens when a single impulse comes to a single neuron
32:45
in order to define and see the properties across the synapse. And so here we can do it, you see. You can stimulate here the CA3 and put an impulse that travels along here to a CA1 neuron.
33:01
And then you have to intercellular record from it. Well, now, there are thousands of these fibers. You've got to actually be able to put the microelectrode and keep it there in a neuron whose dendrites are being activated by here. And you stimulate here, you see, there, and send the impulses here.
33:22
But then you've got to get your microelectrode into the right neuron and hold it there. And this has been accomplished in Australia. Australians are the only people who do this. And Redmond is the master in Canberra. And he has now got incredible techniques.
33:45
If you do that, you see, even if you get it right now, this is what you see recording here. The stimulus goes in here. Here is the stimulus. And there you can see in the noise the depolarization of the UPSP.
34:01
Sometimes nothing at all, sometimes here. And those are single impulses coming along a fiber to the cell being intercellularly recorded. But you can't do anything. You see, the noise is as big as the signal. But you can then put in some thousands, repeat, repeat, repeat, and average,
34:22
and now you get here the stimulus and the EPSP, beautifully shown. There's a single impulse produced by a single impulse coming to the cell you're intercellularly recorded from. And this is a wonderful technique. And there's another one there.
34:42
So you can do it with subtlety. The next thing is how often you want to know what the question is. How often does an impulse come here, one single impulse, and set up nothing at all here, set up the impulse here, a depolarization.
35:03
And it doesn't do it every time. And when we are analyzing it out, it comes out that it's very... I told you, never more than one when you fire an impulse into a neuron, maybe more than one vesicle is emptied in exocytosis.
35:22
And we want to find out how often it does really happen in the brain. And with a very sophisticated technical procedure of statistics, they are able to do that. It's especially immense complexity of mathematics
35:42
and recording, but they're able now in Canberra and something in Sydney to make the discovery of how often this happens. So we're down to the unit. And the next slide, down to the unit of performance.
36:01
And so now the impulse comes down here. And as we said, only one empties, but it doesn't empty every time. And we're now studying that for the synapses in the cerebral cortex. And the important thing here is the same beautiful arrangement. And what they're doing in that,
36:20
you've just seen, put the impulse down here and get the EPSP generated here. It was recording in postsynaptically with a microelectrode here. What you have to be sure is there's just one impulse, and that is what the technique involved. If you have several impulses, then it's all a mess.
36:41
You have to be sure that you've got just one single impulse invading here, liberating, causing the exocytosis every now and then. And liberating here. And you want to know what is organizing this. And so that's the fundamental thing.
37:02
What we find out now, and this is the latest work, is that an air of impulse coming down here, only every about in the cerebral cortex, much more rarely, one in five or one in six times. That is, you have five like this, then one does emits a probability.
37:24
It's a probability problem, and this is very low probability there, and that is the key thing. That gives us now a chance to get onto the world of feeling, because this is where feeling can work.
37:41
And there's a lot of subtle chemistry involved in this, as you can see. So this is a fundamental picture of Ackert and his group, who didn't know how fundamental it was. They were doing this beautiful work. This is just their picture. I haven't done anything. It's been around, this picture, since 1969. And no one has taken it,
38:02
understood the full significance. These are the vesicles, and there are a lot more lying in here, of course, thousands or so, in the bouton. And only this 40 to 50 are on the firing line, stuck here, as you see here, in text, angle, or ray.
38:20
And when an impulse comes down, only one fires every now and then. That's the probability, and that's the message I have to give you before I can go on. So next slide, please. Because my message is going to be that. That's where the mind can work on the brain.
38:41
It can alter the probability from one in six to, say, one in three, coming down. And in that way, without breaking, infringing the conservation laws, the mind can get brain action in this way. Now, I now look at the brain here,
39:02
because I now want to show you how the mind works on the brain. And so we're going to then be, here's a subject, and it's going to be looked at the brain with radio xenon technique to see various areas of the brain. We're not down out the microstructure, we're in areas of activity due to action and circulation.
39:24
And so here is the brain, and now we're going to, the first picture will show you, you're going to intend to move your finger. This is done on humans, you understand. These techniques only do it on humans, because you can't instruct the monkeys to do it that way, but they have other ways of doing it.
39:43
So here is then the brain, and we're looking at certain areas, and there's an area here, supplementary motor area, that we're going to look at specially, because that's when I want to move my finger through any action. This part of the brain is active, and somehow or other the mind comes to this part of the brain,
40:01
the supplementary motor area, and goes then to the motor cortex, and then from the motor cortex it can go down to the muscles. But this is the first place as a rule where the mind gets on to the brain and causes action. And so that's what we're concerned with,
40:21
and we'll have to look more lately. How does it do it? Next slide will show you. We go quickly through three slides now. This is moving your finger, and here is not moving, that's moving, now you're not moving. You've got a complex motor sequence test, but you're just doing it in your mind,
40:40
not carrying it out. You see, so it's a pure mental happening, and then you get a part of the brain. Here's the brain, and the supplementary motor area is active to quite a high level as shown by the circulation increasing in the brain there as tested by regular xenon, and you can do it also as PET scanning. And so this is there, and that's the other side
41:01
where the mind does actually work on the brain. Thinking of some movement gives you activity in the brain, and that is a fact, an experimental fact, and you just have to realize that the mind does work on the brain very effectively to put up the circulation. That means firing a lot of neurons. Millions of neurons are involved in that.
41:22
So the next slide will show you again other clever things. If you're just doing mathematics, 50 minus three, the subject is lying there silently just doing this in his mind, then he gets a tremendous amount of brain activity is coming in here, and that's the little area for calculation.
41:41
We know that if that is lost, you can't calculate. So there's a part of the brain that we're using. We're using the brain in a very subtle way that we still don't know anything about. I don't know how I use my brain to do all my talking. I just have learned, but the problems of language and the mind of the brain and language coming in
42:02
studying only recently, and the foremost member of the German Otto Kreuzwelt has just died, and he was the most advanced investigator of that, a great loss to us all, Otto Kreuzwelt, of Göttingen. So here then is 50 minus three, and all of this activity
42:21
has done a little bit of arithmetic. You're just doing 50, 47, 44, 41, etc., in your mind, not moving at all, and you get all this activity in the brain. And here is a... Well, we took the root. It's a simpler one. This is all done in Sweden. And there you see somebody that's just lying there,
42:41
couch, eyes closed, and everything's at rest, and just imagining going out his front door in his mind only, never moving, and what he will hear and see as he goes out into the street and sees and turns right, etc., and he's following it through, and you see his brain is intensely active as shown by the circulation going up
43:02
in all these areas. Immense operation going on in the brain. I wouldn't have as much activity in my brain right now when I'm talking to you as this man lying there thinking of just a mate in his mind walking along a street. The brain, we can do all those things, you see.
43:21
Mind does work on the brain, and my problem is how does it do it? Next slide. And this is here when you're doing something quite simple. Here, there. That one. You are just thinking of a touch on the finger.
43:42
The touch is not applied, but you're thinking you'll be touched, and that's all you're doing, and that brings up activity in the part of the brain related to the touch so that you can be more sensitive to the touch when it actually happens. And so this is again to show you how the mind can work on the brain. Well, we have to go back now
44:01
with that in mind and look at how can this happen, and no one has yet really got there. Next slide. And so now I come to a new twist in the story. I've still got a little time. I'm given till 10 o'clock.
44:22
Here, this new twist is that when we are talking about the mind and all the events of our perceptions, experiences, just call it experiences, we are from morning to night here,
44:41
tapestry, a rich tapestry of experiences are flowing in our minds all the time. We don't realize it, but it's continuous and beautiful often and useful. So this rich experience, we haven't got a way of handling this in psychology. And I have proposed
45:01
that just as the gases were helpful based, and there's reasons for believing that. And you can handle this whole question if you think that there's immense granularity in our experiences. All our mind experiences are made up, say a vision of color and so on.
45:21
There would be all levels of granularity in the experience, giving you pattern and shape and hue and all that. It all blends together, but it's made up of individual units of the mind. And so how do we put it together? Well, here is,
45:41
and why do I do it? Here is dendrons then that I've told you about already in Lamina 5, these apical dendrons going up here and with a dendron, you see, bunching together to be a dendron. That's a dendron, a receptive units of different kinds. Now, and we have about 40 million of these
46:02
in our brain. And so we have a large capacity for action. And I'm proposing that every dendron, a unit of reception, is related to a cyclone, the unit of experience. And so there is the cyclones now drawn this way. You don't see it this way,
46:20
but it's just for diagram. Here, this in-sheathing here is done by a structure which is identified by solid squares, you see. So that's in-sheathing a dendron and that is where the brain-mind problem will be happening is between the mental events of the cyclone and the neural happenings in the dendron.
46:42
So that's the mind-brain problem reduced to a hypothesis, of course, but you have to have a hypothesis before you can move at all. And then you can, knowing it's a hypothesis, you go on testing it and developing it. And its explanatory power is what gives you the right to go on still further.
47:01
And this has immense explanatory power, this taking off the rather gas-like effluvium of your mind down to units. All the units of color and speed and light and so on can be here. So this could be, for example, these squares could be the cyclone
47:21
concerned in seeing a little red patch. And when this is activated here, comes the neurons here, the cyclone picks up that brain-mind problem and becomes the mind experience of a little red patch. And all the time in life, when these cells go off,
47:41
you have a red patch in your mind. And here, now just to give you a different thing, here is another lot, another dendron, and we give it here a cyclone. And that cyclone would be, to give you some realistic, a pain in your right big toe. This pain there, located. And when this is all active,
48:01
there you have your pain. Very active experience. That's another experience. Or here could be another one, to move my left finger. And when my intention to move my left finger is this cyclone, everything in the mind is then taken into a cyclone, a unit cyclone, and this unitary relationship to a dendron
48:23
made up of this hundred or so pyramidal cells in the neocortex. So that's the way I think we have to go on in science with these hypotheses, challenging hypotheses, always realizing their hypotheses, and always at the same time getting confidence
48:43
because of their great explanatory power. And don't think that it's, you put up a hypothesis simply like this, and then in the Popperian manner, you have to immediately falsify it, try to falsify it. I know Karl Popper very well, and we don't believe that anymore. What we regard as the most important thing
49:00
about a hypothesis is its explanatory power. And to give you an example, you cannot, for example, put up a testing thing for the Darwinian evolution. There's no test for that. But the explanatory power is enormous. But who can test Darwin? So this then is the basic thing of mind-brain problem
49:24
that somehow or other we're getting across from the brain to the mind. And by the way, in this unitary manner. The next slide, please. And so here we have then, here is the action of an impulse that's coming here
49:41
and giving you an EPSP with this probability. And now you can work out the probability from all of this by the very subtle Redmond and Julian Jack and other people analyses and find out this probability number of say one in five or one in six, one impulse.
50:05
Now, my hypothesis is how does the mind work on the brain? My hypothesis now comes that the mind is altering the probability of emission. And this number here giving you that EPSP with this probability and arresting a cerebral cortex
50:21
for one nerve fiber, one nerve impulse, giving you this, which is made up of adding all the probabilities. If the probability was increased of impulses coming and emitting vesicles, then that would increase and make a stronger EPSP. Now, we haven't done that experiment.
50:41
It'll be very difficult to read. But it's the only way you have to go forward is to think that you can, by your mind influence on this dendron, alter the probability of emission here of the vesicle, of the exocytosis. And this, why do I want to do that?
51:01
Well, the man who's got the whole story here is in the audience, Frederick Beck of Darmstadt. And he's come over especially to talk to you this afternoon in the discussion on this. It's a probability, it's a quantal story of how the mind can do it without infringing the conservation laws.
51:22
That's the point. You can mind can now act effectively on the brain and the conservation laws say okay. And it is just to do it with probability. If you alter the probability, you will get this increased here. And if you can just do that, say 50% more or something, now you've affected the mind on the brain
51:41
by altering the probability of synaptic emission, exocytosis. Next slide. And so now I come to the end of my story. I think I've still got a little time. This will be easy after that. We've now got to find out when this mind came.
52:02
The mind coming into the world gives you the mind, the feeling that I've talked about. It is because of this being able to get the happenings in the brain related to the mind world. And this is done by this transmission, as I've been talking about, of quantal probability.
52:23
And here are the animals which have, I think, got cerebral cortices which are adequate. Only could get this mind-brain problem happening if you have the neocortex, this is all neocortex, appropriately active.
52:41
And this came in evolution. And before that, the world was mindless. And when the mammals came, they didn't know about it at all. Of course, they got it for other reasons. They had this brain, it was there. Next slide. They had the brain developed. And here you see an insectivore,
53:01
the most primitive mammal. There is the brain, you see. And this is the cerebral cortex, the neocortex. Neocortex is actually enabled neocortex with all the laminae. And here is the transverse section here through it. And there you can see the neocortex here, over a millimeter thick. And you can see the laminae
53:21
and the vertical arrangement of pyramidal cells and running up here and so on in this way. Now, a cartilage marker. And this is the brain of a hedgehog primitive mammal. And she is studying this now in Bonn, to see the actual dendron structure.
53:41
And from that, we will say, here is the fully developed brain for the mind to work on, as with probability and all that story. And so there it is. Evolution came in 200 million years ago. These insectivores began with their little cerebral cortexes here, about 1% of ours.
54:01
But it's good cortex. That's the point. It's not small, but it's good stuff. It's the stuff I would say is involved in the mind-brain problem. And so these animals actually had experiences of feelings and so on, with a brain like that. It came in evolution. And next slide,
54:20
view the difference. Here is a reptile. And that's what the brain looks like. You see the cerebral cortex is now just the same poorly developed structure. These are the nerve cells here. But it's not this great beautiful structure here that the insectivores have. And they came from reptiles by the development of this structure
54:41
and achieved, I think, conscious feelings. And in so doing, it was that big developed hair that gave them consciousness. We don't know where the birds are, but you see all the reptilian performances down here in this triatum. And of course, if we have the slide before, can we go back one?
55:01
Can we go back? It doesn't matter. No, that's forward. Back. There. You can see the difference between this and what I've just shown you. And that is the cerebral cortex then which began it all and which we have too. Next slide. So we move on. I'm at the end now.
55:21
Next slide. And so we've got then to the story. I've only dealt with the most primitive mental performances of feelings and pains and so on of a conscious being. We have it all. The whole world of consciousness
55:42
share with animals. But we somehow, that I read a book about, in evolution, you got to a higher level of this, namely the human brain. And the human brain has self-consciousness. It has a new world coming in, and that is what this picture shows you,
56:00
the world here of language, cerebral cortex. Not just the ordinary stuff here for the animals have, and especially areas, but a new world of subtlety of neural performance, which we don't know anything about. The only person working on this was Otto Kreuzfeld and is associated in Seattle,
56:20
subtly trying to discover the neural performance and the different language performance here with different words and so on. But we have a long way to go. We're only beginning to understand a little bit of the human brain and how it can give us self-consciousness. They let you know that you know. And this is a mystery beyond Darwinism, I think.
56:42
And I think with that, I should really close. Oh, we'll have the next two slides to show you the point. And that's the difference. This is the animal world with the brain here and in this diagram here. These are the dendrons. And there you see
57:00
the world of the mind world, too, with all the outer sense of that and all the inner sense of thoughts, feelings, memories, etc. All of that is the world of the mind of even a primitive mammal using that structure that develops in evolution.
57:20
So we share with them all of that. On top of that came with human evolution. Next slide. This is the last. Who came in the next slide? Same slide. The same outer sense with all the receptors, etc., and inner sense, but a central core of being, the psyche, the self, or the soul, the unitary that each of us is.
57:42
And this is the same. This is for religion and this is for philosophy. That's the psychology, philosophy, religion. It's the same thing. It's the central core of our being came on in the human evolution. Only the human of anything like this, the self, but we kept also
58:01
what the animals had developed already, that the mammals had that, and now the self, and that involves, again, very special areas of the human brain which have evolved quite late. And this tragedy is that this lately developed part of the big areas, 60% to 70% of the human brain, are involved in this.
58:20
And when that deteriorates, you have Alzheimer's disease, and that's why it's the last to evolve and the first to go. And so, you see, this is really important, this work. We have an immense relationship to psychology and our understanding of ourselves and meaning in life, and that's what has driven me on
58:41
through my whole existence from the age of 17, trying to understand the brain I have in order to understand the meaning of my existence. I hand you on this. It's got many books and many for sale out there, I see, translated to German. And one big one just come on evolution,
59:03
which is hard cover still. So that's my life, and thank you very much for the occasion.