good evening i'm a violent step for science for the public and i welcome you to tonight's contemporary science issues and innovations program modern culture is money with the brain and especially the degree to which social environment biological aspects shape our mental processes and mental health well our guest is a leading authority on the subject and therefore we will form distinguished neuroscientist alan jason off professor of biological engineering mit and director of the mit center for neuro biological engineering dr jason office knew both the biological mind how brain body and environment collaborate to make us we are underscores the importance of the social environment and the biological factors in the construction of he's here to explain the making of the mind and the nature nurture controversy that still center for neural biological engineering and a leader in functional m r i research we're very honored to welcome our welcome sir thank you very much and we are delighted to get a chance to talk about the brain in a very enlightened way could you start us off with just a little background how you sort of got to this point what's our traditional view and how are we changing yes well so the book is about phenomenon that i call the cerebral mystique which is the notion that the brain is a very special organ organ that it's an organ that is distinct in some ways from the rest of biology and fro the environment around us in much the same way that a traditional soul was so a lot of us think of the mind as you know as a physical analogue to what religions over thousands of years have told us about souls that are immaterial that trans migrate between bodies i'm half indian so i think about moving from body to body but some think of it is moving between body and heaven we have that embedded in western philosophy as well so it's most famously it's an idea that's most famously associated with the philosopher dick art who we associate with if you call dualism dualism refers to the separate existence of mind and body and their interaction that brings about the living person but nevertheless the fact that they can and dualism is something that most scientists don't believe in and at least not consciously we believe that the mind comes about through physical interactions that involve the brain and things around it but one thing that i've been struck by as a neuroscientist working in the field now for close to twenty years is the extent to which attitudes left over from dualism left over from religious views are actually still alive in the modern discourse of neuroscience particularly in the popular sphere certainly agree certainly see it all the time that that the brain of the mind is treated very differently in example the whole consciousness issue a lot of things like that so i think there's no doubt anything much we truly couldn't do anything havior without our brains nevertheless that sort of the rhetoric around that idea which i think is is this true and commonplace is that it is more extreme is the idea that we are our brains that our brains are actually just sort of these you know computer like entities that live in our heads and that basically conduct our mental activities a lot of people in fact like to say that the mind is the software yet of the brain and if the brain was the self contained entity that runs the mind and that i think is sort of the product of this idea that the brain is somehow different from the things around it that it's different in two ways one that it is different in its makeup that it's somehow autonomous of the surroundings in a way that other physical entities aren't so for instance when we  a light on something it gets a limited we see the reflection back the light doesn't come out of the thing that we that we see similarly when the brain does something for us when we do something with our brains  relationship to the world around it so i talk about two of these about these two categories of differences in the book and on the subject of how we perceive the brain as being different there are two main ideas about the brain that i think are often emphasized so one is it's sort of inorganic or computational after you know that the brain works by electricity we actually know that it works by electricity because we can put electrodes our heads  and and measure aspects of brain activity but what a lot of people don't realize is that actually the reason why those electrical happenings are going on in the brain is actually because of chemicals and the brain's life you know close up is actually much more about chemicals and much more about sort of wet and slimy things like the rest of our bodies than it is about electricity and circuits and i talk about a couple of examples of sort of you know maybe lesser known aspects of n functions lesser known aspects of brain function in the book an example is in fact the role of chemicals many of us know that there is this ancient way of thinking about the body that involve these humor before humors yes exactly yes that's right and you know we tend to laugh at that right now the more cake way to think about things but actually when you look at how the brain works it's got on the order of one hundred humor so we call them  they're substances that allow the cells in the brain to communicate with one another and many of them have very specific roles so for instance the most famous in our transmitters are glutamate and something called gab which are contrasting the effective neurotransmitters one of them that produces excitation the other one that produces inhibition and these things act on cells in our brain but they also you know they also diffuse they also you know they have concentrations there can be more of them in a place and less of them in a place in a way you can think of the brain is having ripples of these neurotransmitters you know sort of reverberating all around it as well as the little electrical effects that they're related to  are really important there are also many cells in the brain actually about half of them that are not electrically active at all and you know the importance of these cells to some extent challenges the notion of the brain is this electrical computing organism organ lilja yes the take it up and that's actually part of the process that limits communication the brain if you didn't have the glia there well that kind of communication would be a totally different thing it would it would it would probably be pathological and the interaction of these different factors of the cells of the cells of multiple types and the neurochemicals and the electrical potentials that they induce this interaction is all important for how the brain works it's like gears in a clock they all work together and you can take one of them out well and a lot of that according to your book the the stimuli the speak it's very important the environment in which this occurs has tremendous effects that you bring up some very surprising facts along this line with certain conditions for example that we have treated is so in the brain but you're saying no this is anchored out here so p t s d scale schizophrenia a whole lot of things sort of isolated is that true you know well so so as i said i mean i i kind of cite examples of how people view the brain is different and the example of a computer computer like brain is an example of how people think the brain is different and it's something people so talk about it's extraordinary complexity and that's another way in which the brain is distinguished in its substance but what you're calling attention to is a different type of distinction a brain body distinction that relates to how the brain works how it causes things and one of the you know big ideas that  circulating around these days is the idea that what we do and in particular pathologies in what we do are caused by defects in the brain so you cite the example of schizophrenia that's and that's an example where  you know a lot of people want to think of schizophrenia as being caused brain and you know the truth the dark truth of the matter is we don't really know all that much about what causes schizophrenia we know that it's largely genetically determined in the sense that if you look at what are called heritability studies you can find roughly eighty percent paired ability of schizophrenia meaning that about eighty percent of the kind of cases of schizophrenia can be explained by variation in ours now how that actually crops up is rather uncertain so in particular saying that there's a biological calls  how what comes in between the genes and the mental you know mental phenomenon so one of the things that i talk about in the book a fair amount is the idea that actually a lot of mental phenomena are actually late to coupling between our brains and our brains and our environment if it involves human behavior somewhere the brain is involved that's for sure but that doesn't mean that it's and one of the actually really interesting examples about in urban areas of peoples to this state so those are those findings although they're old they're not necessarily wrong and they have actually been reproduced they've been reduced repeatedly and people still don't really understand why that is and it may have to do with an environmental effect many of the most obvious ideas have been ruled out like you know that people who have mental problems move into this area exactly right i mean that is sort of an obvious you know what we call confound and that doesn't seem to be true right one of the other things that i talk about is the idea that there may be peripheral bodily caused by peripheral i mean outside the brain but i still brain center here and that these things may be causing mental disorders also and a couple of the examples i cited there are  famous older examples from history so in particular if you looked at it at an insane asylum out of use word now but an unsatisfying from the nineteenth century you'd find that probably the greatest single population of disorders of the nineteenth century and eighteenth century as well was actually caused by a bacterial disease that now we can treat with antibiotics and in a way it's sort of cuts both ways i mean this example tells us two interesting things and one interesting thing and i think this disorders are biological in some way right ok but it also tells us that they needn't be brain they needn't be caused by agents in the brain the brain is involved right if i do art a physical thing exactly and so that's that's why you know if you look at sort of that now the modern landscape where there's this great movement to essentially redefine mental diseases as brain diseases that that movement misses out on something that is a very good point yeah and i think you know i think more and more people are realizing this now it misses out on many potential causes for mental disorders as well as multi factorial situations where ok well maybe we are in the you know maybe we have the genes that predict that we should have schizophrenia but well what's causing us to have an episode what's making my friends why is it that not everybody gets it you know that those who may have a disposition but that exam like that urban thing at p t s d might be another couple of reasons why i think it's it's really important to look more broadly and it has to do with more than just sort of realizing that there are multiple causes a yeah and that's that's all well and good but it's also sort of ivory tower ish but what does it mean for actual people patien figure well one thing it means is that it might help us combat the stigma so one of the key issues as you know for mental disorders is the stigma of you know facing your community facing yourself actually when you believe you have a mental disorder and you know a lot of people i think thought that ok well by redefining mental disorders not as kind of moral problems but as brain diseases we could view them the way we might you having a cold but that's not the truth and part of the reason for that is in fact this kind of mystique of the brain that actually you know if there's something wrong with our brains we don't just take that the same way that we would take you know a kidney disease or something else  it's actually special that's because we identify with our brains in a way that we don't identify with anything else yeah so self stigma is a big problem for people who have been diagnosed with mental illness and  true for some people that there are brain lesions or that there is something that that that is different about their brains compared with someone who doesn't hasn't been diagnosed or the average person i should say who hasn't been diagnosed with  whatever the condition is the truth is much more nuanced and very good than that right it's always the brain in a context the context involves both the body of the person and the the environment around them including society including inorganic aspects of the environment one of the one of the examples i discuss which is well known about how the environment affects our minds is the example of sad seasonal af am disorder and you know here we are in the northeast of the united states and we are sad i don't know i don't know i got to the point of the year when where i can wake up in the sun has already started and you know i feel i feel the effects of of light deprivation on my mood yet my personality i find if i don't spread if i have biological biological you know predispositions of a certain sort that environment might not work for me and i think what's important is that you know people recognize that there is this interaction and that it's not just one thing the other thing in addition to the issue of stigma that is very important is how we view treatment so it's difficult of course to make an assessment of you know why do people choose the different treatments that they choose but nevertheless it seems to be documented that a rising awareness of the importance of the brain for mental disorders has coincided with a rising use of pharmacological friends for mental illness as opposed to other treatments like talk therapy behavioral therapy and so on and while i'm not i'm not a doctor and i don't have sort of a horse in that race i can say that if one of the reasons why you're taking a drug we're going to and rather than talk therapy is because you think the drug acts on the brain whereas the talk therapy doesn't that is wrong and part of i think the value in appreciating that the brain is sort of in a sense  when we have a conversation when when when when i have an interaction that that alters my behavior or or influences my behavior that is that is just as brain centric as a drug is right i would like to ask you in our remaining time to about some other things that you have touched on and one of these that's very popular right now is the whole idea of brain hacking and then the transhumanist tren which is just fun but it can be very eerie but could you tell us a little bit about that what you said about that yet well so you know i live in a world at mit that is very very  something i think we all share a commitment to regardless of where we think our species is guy and or at least all of us in the center but that there are a lot of increasing numbers of voices i think out in the in the public sphere as well as even at the university who are interested in kind of in henson human existence going handing the brain right and you know the many people who actually take a really  of that stuff and i have to say that i personally don't find it especially attractive but what i what i discuss in the book is the idea that actually a lot of the feelings about enhancing the brain  idea that the ok well the brain is special it's special both in its makeup and in its calls all relationship to the world and in capsule it's our essence there's this phrase that's used we are brains it's sort of figures and popular science writing and it actually you know it's actually a very old idea i mean you know from the times when people were debating whether the brain was the center of the mind or the heart was you know people went all the way because it's easier to go all the way when you have an idea so when you believe that we are brains then clearly the future of we the future of us is somehow going to be dependent on this and one of the movements i think that's that's quite right these days is this idea that ok well we should be making implants so that our brains could communicate better with the outside world and that was their memory exactly memory you know you know of course i have a chip for memory enhancement imagine doing with the brain that are already there you know we drink coffee to enhance our cognition we could pick their concentration we yes well ok well we take pills for concentration we also take pills to you know we also have aides that work around our brains even more kind of circuitous lee so you know here we are in the boston area and i like to cite the fact that ok well if we want to enhance the cognition that relates to driving  actually the best way to do that may be just to have the computer do it i mean that's something that's of course widely recognized as well but you know i think the extent to which gaining independence of the brain might actually be a good thing for many of the cognitive tasks we want to solve  body is something that i think with a could be better realized right the other more we don't have a whole lot of time left but i was really wanted to get this in that the there are out there there are two the two kinds i don't know how quickly you could address those but the one and you mentioned the military is certainly interested in this but things like torture but other the  to genetics ultimately could go that way these kinds of things where the brain can be actually manipulated that's physically the other is left over from time immemorial in which your ideas well i think so there are two things which what say you well i mean there's a lot to say of course but the you know i think you know up to genetics is a tremendously powerful technique for studying the brain because you can go in there and  they come sort of you know a lot more questionable whether this is something to do there is of course hope that a certain or a logical conditions could be treated with that kind of intervention so for instance parkinson's disease which is commonly  relatively commonly treated with deep brain stimulation with electrodes it might be that a better version of that could come about through up to genetics although the field is nowhere near actually  mind control that is per you know that's made possible by these kinds of technologies and one of the things i would say and i do say in the book is that in a sense the worry about that is perhaps exaggerated precisely for the people worried about inequality in our society because of the use of brain technologies they're also worried about brain technologies falling into the hands of big brother and someone and that's well enough i mean you know i would worry about those things however to the extent that we are worried about those things we should worry about the modern analogues of the things that are going on right now yeah and i think the distinction between brain technologies and peripheral technologies is overplayed and that is a almost almost a fun thing except that it's taken very seriously and in this area there are groups like this the transhumanist and the idea that you just could lift your brain up into something or other and  eternal what is that movement like is this a part of cyril mystique so i think that it i think that it is related closely related and you know actually just just a couple of weeks ago inject you or the word is perfuse you with a certain type of substance take your brain and it's going to store it and in you know liquid nitrogen or something like that until the technology is available to totally you know we scan it in some way probably using a form of microscopy to work out all the connections in your brain and to try to reconstruct your mind based on that and i think that's a product of the  mystique in more than one way you know the most you know the broadest way is that of course the reduction of the person to their brain is inherent in that approach and i think that that's scientifically prong in the sense that you know well there are a lot of things about your body that influence your emotions that influence your personality and the way you look and of course the way that you interact and you know just a brain sitting by itself in a vet is not going to have your though i just saw i guess very glad you had done that because that even reminds me of the soul we're right back there at the beginning this isolated thing this entity that is you know completely separate from the body from this example here and everything else is very special and so it's well done i want to say in closing i want to chalk about several other things i'm afraid we're out of time but baby i'll do it again maybe we'll do repeat in the mean time i'd like to say i think your book event at the harvard coop which was scheduled for last week whatever it was the snow came in faustin of course i do hope that people in the boston area will feel free to go the harvard coop and you go to talk to dr jason off and buy the book also this is really very interesting reading and very important at this time so i hope that other people will enjoy this is much as i did and keep writing for a while for sure dr jason i thank you very much for coming in and for giving us all this wonderful information thanks so much for having