In this year's Christmas lectures on BBC Four, Professor Bruce Hood aims to reveal the brain in all its mystery and complexity
Human beings are the most intelligent species on the planet
because our brains have evolved to cope with complex social situations,
according to this year's Royal Institution Christmas lecturer, Professor Bruce Hood.
This important function takes decades to develop properly, however, and
explains why we humans spend a much larger proportion of our lifespan
as children than any other animal.
In three one-hour lectures – entitled Meet Your Brain – Hood will examine how the brain is constructed and creates the world we perceive around us. He also hopes to inspire a new generation of neuroscientists from among his audience of schoolchildren by showing that scientists are only beginning to understand the workings of the brain.
"I'm going to leave open a lot of questions and, hopefully, they'll see that this has got many years of work in future," says Hood, an experimental psychologist at the University of Bristol.
Whether or not they (or the millions watching at home) end up studying the brain, Hood hopes that people come away from the lectures with a deeper appreciation of the white and grey matter. "We take it for granted – the things we do every day. We don't understand how complicated they really are. I want people to come away with a sense of wonder about how a thing like the brain has such flexibility and such powerful processing capability to create this experience we have."
The Royal Institution's Christmas lectures were initiated by Michael Faraday in 1825 as an attempt to bring science to young people. They have run every year since (except during the second world war) and lecturers have included David Attenborough, Richard Dawkins and Dame Nancy Rothwell.
From a set that resembles a 1950s horror movie, Hood plans to take viewers on a trip through the capabilities of our most important organ. "The brain is seven times heavier than you would imagine for an animal our size. It's full of billions upon billions of brain cells," he says. "It's not the number of cells that's really fascinating, it's the connection between the cells because that's the secret of the processing power of the brain. It's connections that encode information."
Babies are born with almost their full complement of brain cells, so it's the increase in the number of connections between the cells that explains the change in the size and weight of the brain as it matures. All of this helps to create a representation of the external world.
"You're encoding experiences and storing that," says Hood. "When the brain brings these back to think about them, it's almost recreating the original experience. It's not a photograph captured in time, these things are constantly dynamic and changing."
Hood will also discuss a uniquely human capability that our brains have evolved: the ability to be social. "Childhood used to be thought of as a time of immaturity," he says. "But we now realise that this is the period where we're becoming social. The species which have the longest periods of childhood tend to be the ones which are more flexible or intelligent."
Not only do human children learn from others, they learn to become like others. "We spend up to 15-20 years in childhood and that's a large proportion of human lifespan and that can only be because it serves a really important process, which I think is learning from others and learning to communicate and share information," says Hood. "We don't simply read behaviours, we put ourselves in other humans' shoes, we take their perspectives, we can empathise, we can see their points of view. This is a whole area called 'theory of mind'. Without that you cannot anticipate what other people are thinking and doing."
The human desire to socialise, to see people around us, can also trick us. "Seeing faces [in inanimate objects] is a very common thing because faces are the most important social stimuli to humans. We have areas of our brain dedicated to processing faces," says Hood. "The problem is that we're trip-wired to seeing anything that could be face-like. This has often explained why people have seen faces in clouds or trees. Often, religious deities are the things that people spot."
Hood's own research involves examining the human ability to form connections with objects by inferring some internal property that gives them a specific character. "Children at 3-4 years of age will know that cats are different from dogs but they can do that over and beyond the outward appearance. They start to think there must be something inside a cat that makes them different to a dog – a catty essence," he says. "They're starting to infer a deeper property to the living world."
In recent experiments, Hood has found that people wanted to wash their hands after touching or wearing a cardigan that they have been told once belonged to a murderer; but they wanted to hold a pen that had been told had belonged to Albert Einstein. "I think this is the basis of why we go to museums and collections: we want to see the original objects," says Hood. "As soon as we discover it's not the original, our regard for it disappears."
Prof Bruce Hood wants people to come away
from his Christmas lectures with a greater appreciation of their white
and grey matter.
Human beings are the most intelligent species on the planet
because our brains have evolved to cope with complex social situations,
according to this year's Royal Institution Christmas lecturer, Professor Bruce Hood.
This important function takes decades to develop properly, however, and
explains why we humans spend a much larger proportion of our lifespan
as children than any other animal.In three one-hour lectures – entitled Meet Your Brain – Hood will examine how the brain is constructed and creates the world we perceive around us. He also hopes to inspire a new generation of neuroscientists from among his audience of schoolchildren by showing that scientists are only beginning to understand the workings of the brain.
"I'm going to leave open a lot of questions and, hopefully, they'll see that this has got many years of work in future," says Hood, an experimental psychologist at the University of Bristol.
Whether or not they (or the millions watching at home) end up studying the brain, Hood hopes that people come away from the lectures with a deeper appreciation of the white and grey matter. "We take it for granted – the things we do every day. We don't understand how complicated they really are. I want people to come away with a sense of wonder about how a thing like the brain has such flexibility and such powerful processing capability to create this experience we have."
The Royal Institution's Christmas lectures were initiated by Michael Faraday in 1825 as an attempt to bring science to young people. They have run every year since (except during the second world war) and lecturers have included David Attenborough, Richard Dawkins and Dame Nancy Rothwell.
From a set that resembles a 1950s horror movie, Hood plans to take viewers on a trip through the capabilities of our most important organ. "The brain is seven times heavier than you would imagine for an animal our size. It's full of billions upon billions of brain cells," he says. "It's not the number of cells that's really fascinating, it's the connection between the cells because that's the secret of the processing power of the brain. It's connections that encode information."
Babies are born with almost their full complement of brain cells, so it's the increase in the number of connections between the cells that explains the change in the size and weight of the brain as it matures. All of this helps to create a representation of the external world.
"You're encoding experiences and storing that," says Hood. "When the brain brings these back to think about them, it's almost recreating the original experience. It's not a photograph captured in time, these things are constantly dynamic and changing."
Hood will also discuss a uniquely human capability that our brains have evolved: the ability to be social. "Childhood used to be thought of as a time of immaturity," he says. "But we now realise that this is the period where we're becoming social. The species which have the longest periods of childhood tend to be the ones which are more flexible or intelligent."
Not only do human children learn from others, they learn to become like others. "We spend up to 15-20 years in childhood and that's a large proportion of human lifespan and that can only be because it serves a really important process, which I think is learning from others and learning to communicate and share information," says Hood. "We don't simply read behaviours, we put ourselves in other humans' shoes, we take their perspectives, we can empathise, we can see their points of view. This is a whole area called 'theory of mind'. Without that you cannot anticipate what other people are thinking and doing."
The human desire to socialise, to see people around us, can also trick us. "Seeing faces [in inanimate objects] is a very common thing because faces are the most important social stimuli to humans. We have areas of our brain dedicated to processing faces," says Hood. "The problem is that we're trip-wired to seeing anything that could be face-like. This has often explained why people have seen faces in clouds or trees. Often, religious deities are the things that people spot."
Hood's own research involves examining the human ability to form connections with objects by inferring some internal property that gives them a specific character. "Children at 3-4 years of age will know that cats are different from dogs but they can do that over and beyond the outward appearance. They start to think there must be something inside a cat that makes them different to a dog – a catty essence," he says. "They're starting to infer a deeper property to the living world."
In recent experiments, Hood has found that people wanted to wash their hands after touching or wearing a cardigan that they have been told once belonged to a murderer; but they wanted to hold a pen that had been told had belonged to Albert Einstein. "I think this is the basis of why we go to museums and collections: we want to see the original objects," says Hood. "As soon as we discover it's not the original, our regard for it disappears."
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