Zgłębianie funkcji mózgu i tajemnic

The brain controls every aspect of our lives. As humans have evolved, it's doubled in size. It weighs only 3 pounds, but it consumes 20% of all the fuel our bodies take in, generating enough energy to keep a light bulb burning. And you have to consider the brain having evolved like an old house, where we just added different rooms. So there's all these stairways and connections. In the basement is the oldest part, called the brain stem. It's something we share with reptiles and other mammals. It's what keeps us alive, governing vital functions like heart rate, respiration, digestion, and blood pressure. Things that happen without having to think about them. The next level up, the first floor, more evolved, hundreds of thousands of years later, is called the limbic system. This is very important in the processing of emotions. Within the limbic system are the amygdala, two nuggets of tissue, one in each half of the brain. They are no bigger than a fingernail, yet they are the brain's central command center for our emotional reactions. One of the simplest and strongest of these is fear, a primal emotion we all share. If you had to pick one brain region that was most important in fear, it would be the amygdala. There's no better place to explore how fear affects the brain than here at the Navy SEAL Special Warfare Command in San Diego, California. Recruits are put through specialized training to change the way their brains react to fear. We introduce our students almost from day one to absolute chaos. And they will struggle. When you look at historic mistakes on the battlefield. they're almost always associated with fear or with panic. So the capacity to control these impulses is extremely important. Out of 140 candidates who start each class, On average, only 36 make the final cut. Successful recruits seem better able to adapt their brains to the demands of the job. It's not really necessarily the physical people who get through there. There have been Olympic athletes who've dropped out of training. And there's this 140-pound farm kid from Nebraska who'd never seen the ocean before and he graduated. Why is that? To answer that question, the Navy turned... to neuroscience. When confronted with fear, it's the amygdala that responds to information from our senses and instinctively presses the body's panic button. The amygdala is actually one of the most interconnected regions of the brain. So it actually will both send signals to parts of the brain stem that now elicit a range of bodily responses. As you start to sweat, your heart races, You know, you might freeze for a while, you might run away. This exercise, known as the hooded box drill, is part of the close quarters defense system and is one of the ways the US Navy conditions its recruits to control these amygdala signals. Our students are deaf and blind. Our instructors will set up a scenario. And then the hood comes off, and the student has to respond. Well, when you're under that hood, you have just a moment to kind of gather your thoughts and think of scenarios that could come your way. Sometimes the correct response is swift and lethal. Sometimes it's non-violent. Hey there, do you know where the gas station is? My car ran out of gas. Yeah, there's one back out there. There is? Alright, thank you. It's supposed to simulate those quick snapshot situations, those high-risk situations that just happen in an instant. Get down here! On the ground, on the ground right there. They're trying to introduce you to the fact that panic is going to be less and less an option throughout your career. So the right way to do training is to expose people to scary situations where they can get used to them and know how to react when they're confronted with it. Through constant exposure to fearful situations, recruits learn to suppress fear that could otherwise make them react the wrong way and get them killed. But how do their brains do that? What scientists discovered is that as humans evolved, another part of the brain, called the cortex, also became involved in processing fear. The part that makes us most human about the brain is our frontal cortex. If the amygdala is the first floor, the cortex is the second floor of the brain. It's the brain's thin, wrinkly outer layer that's divided into four sets of lobes. If you unfolded the cortex of a monkey, it would be about the size of a piece of paper. If you unfolded our cortex, it's about four sheets of paper, large. And the reason it's wrinkly is... because you have to squish that all inside of the skull. The frontal lobes comprise the area just above our eyes, and these are the newest rooms of the brain. As humans evolved, the frontal lobes became the place where conscious, rational thought is produced. processed. It's where we do our problem solving. The frontal lobes are so interesting because they are really the conductor of the brain. They synchronize all activity. Scientists made a major breakthrough in fear research when they found that information from our senses reaches the amygdala almost twice as fast as it takes to get to our frontal lobes. The speed of the different brain signals means unless we instinctively know know how to react to a potential threat, we may freeze in fear, waiting for the frontal lobes to catch up to figure out the right response. Part of what happens with fear and panic is the unknown, is not knowing what to do next, and so your brain essentially freezes the way a deer freezes in the headlight. So the amygdala may get very fast signals about fear, even, but sometimes they're wrong, and quickly the situation may say to you, no it's not a fear situation, and you're not afraid. So these very quick amygdala signals that you get can be controlled in sort of a top-down way. This is where the Navy's training comes in. It teaches recruits to minimize that delay by generating fast accurate reactions to situations. With demand for special forces increasing, the Navy continues to develop brain training techniques to see if they can improve the pass rate. But there are some fears that scientists believe are pre-programmed into our brains. Primal fears or super fears that few people can overcome. The Navy makes its trainees tackle these head on. It's why their most dreaded exercise happens underwater, as recruits face the fear of drowning. There's almost nothing more scary than not being able to breathe. We are learning more now about the brain than at any other time in history. How it's put together and how it operates. Breakthroughs in brain science are helping the Navy to rethink how they train SEAL recruits. Everybody keep passing the commands! Specialized exercises can improve their brains reactions in fearful combat situations. But the candidates need something more to cope with a super fear like drowning. Experts believe evolution has hardwired our brains to dread being trapped underwater. As a result, it's almost impossible to control the brain's overwhelming impulse to surface for air. And it's why recruits struggle so much to pass the underwater pool competency test. Pool Comp is a very important milestone in their career here. They're being tested how they can deal with fear underwater. And there is controlled harassment, planned harassment, projected at them underwater. And we see how they can cope with that. Students must spend up to 20 minutes underwater, enduring repeated attacks on their breathing equipment by an instructor. Half of the time, they are without air. Their air is shut off, their breathing hoses are wrapped around in difficult positions, and they need to respond to those problems. ...problems with a series of emergency procedures. Step-by-step instructions for untangling their gear are drilled into the recruits'heads beforehand. They must follow these to the letter. But putting theory into practice isn't easy. Go down the bottom and the instructors, they come down, they'll start attacking you, taking your mask off, just creating all this stress. And the more the stress builds up, they want to see how you'll handle it. As the trainee begins running out of air, his brain's amygdala pushes the panic button that urges him to stop. him to surface. His frontal lobes must win this battle in the brain if he's to stay in control. Physically it's very challenging. You have to hold your breath for longer than you normally would. The instructors just take you kind of to that breaking point to see how you respond. No sooner has the candidate untied one set of knots than his instructor is back attacking him again and again. The more the stress builds up, they want to see how you'll handle it. Will you want to go to the surface and get air, which you want to do, or will you take the little air you have and all the problems and solve them and do what's necessary in order to pass the test? More SEALs fail pool comp at this stage in their training than anything else. The Navy wanted to know what was going on inside their recruits'heads to cause this. There's almost nothing more scary than not being able to breathe. That creates a tremendous stress response. You have this huge release of stress hormones that make controlling things with thought more difficult. Under normal conditions the brain communicates with the body using minute electrical signals. The brain sends out electrical impulses from its nerve cells to others that travel at over 270 miles per hour. This is one way your brain can tell your body to do something. But under extreme duress, the brain releases chemical hormones. The part of the brain that senses fear, the amygdala, triggers a chain reaction that sends adrenaline and cortisol hormones into the body's bloodstream. These stress hormones act as a SWAT team, quickly preparing the body for action. They increase breathing, heart rate, and blood pressure. Senses become keener, memory sharper, and the body becomes less sensitive to pain. But even in this heightened state of alertness, pool comp is still too challenging for many trainees. Your mind is going everywhere and you're seeing your friends come up from the water, they've passed or they've failed, and you're kind of sizing yourself up saying, well, he failed, can I pass, and vice versa. So your mind goes everywhere and it's key just to stay focused on what you have to do. Eventually, the student completes the series of tasks and can touch the bottom and then surface to learn from the instructor whether he's passed the test. I feel fine. Few SEAL candidates succeed at Pool Comp the first time. They get four attempts and there's more at stake with each try. The most common reason for failing pool comp is panic, losing composure underwater. Some of our students, that's it, we will performance drop them from training. The Navy wanted to help borderline candidates who had the potential to pass these crucial phases in training. After consulting with experts, they came up with a groundbreaking mental toughness program, a set of techniques to boost the trainees'ability to control fear, even in the most extreme situations. You guys need to stay fired up while you're out there. The pain, the cold, and all that stuff, it's gonna eat away at you, but you got to keep going. The techniques that we're most interested in are what I call the big four. Goal setting, mental rehearsal, self-talk, and arousal control. Scientists think goal-setting works by assisting the frontal lobes. As the brain's supervisor, the frontal lobes are responsible for reasoning and planning. Concentrating on specific goals lets the brain bring structure to chaos and keeps the amygdala, the emotional center of the brain, in check. I got up every morning and I said, I'm going to make it to breakfast. And then at breakfast I said, okay, I'm going to make it to lunch. And then I'm going to make it through the run this afternoon. And then, you know, you take it in these little sort of chunks. The second technique, mental rehearsal or visualization, is continually running through an activity in your mind. So when you try it for real, it comes true. ...more naturally. If you practice in your mind first and imagine and rehearse how you might do in these stressful situations, the next time in reality you're faced with these situations is actually, in effect, the second time you've faced it. So you'll have less of a stressful reaction. The third technique, self-talk, helps focus the trainees'thoughts. The average person speaks to themselves at a rate of 300 to 1,000 words a minute. If these words are positive instead of negative, can do instead of can't, they help override the fear signal coming from the amygdala. The frontal lobes are always on, so it's very easy to think about something difficult, something bad, like I'm going to fail. What am I doing here? I didn't practice enough. What you're trying to do is you're trying to replace those bad thoughts with good thoughts. The final technique, arousal control, is centered on breathing. Deliberate slow breathing helps combat some of the effects of panic. Long exhales in particular mimic the body's relaxation process and get more oxygen to the brain so it can perform better. Breathing is a great focusing strategy, but you can only do it so much because in a response to fear your brain will get jacked up. On its own, arousal control wouldn't work. The amygdala sends out such a powerful signal, it's tough to suppress if we're still feeling fearful. But combining the four techniques made a big difference to the trainee seal's pass rate, increasing it from a quarter to a third. The idea of pushing boundaries may not be new, but here is positive proof that you can train your brain. And now, science knows how. It goes back to a lot of much earlier sort of warrior traditions where you're sort of transcending whatever it is you thought your limitations were. I am a different person actually. Your confidence goes through the roof. You see things and do things that you wouldn't have imagined before. But it's not just the battlefield where brain science... Only blood flow. It's measuring the amount of blood going to different parts of the brain. The brain has many... miles of blood vessels. When nerve cells are busy firing, they need lots of energy-laden and oxygen-rich blood. When they're not, they need very little. So you see, what brain? Blood gushes to the top of the brain stem. As well as being one of the oldest parts of the human brain, it's the area that controls the release of dopamine across the brain. Dopamine is a type of hormone called a neurotransmitter. Scientists know dopamine generates very strong feelings we associate with pleasure. What became clear is that the dopamine is released a little bit in advance of these things, like food. Dopamine plays a major role in motivating our brains to do all kinds of things. Yeah! What is it about the pursuit of pleasure that would make these base jumpers in Moab, Utah want to throw themselves off a cliff? Pretty much all the cliffs out here have a pretty high danger scale. On a 1 to 10, they're all about an 8. Mistakes can be fatal. When you run off a 500-foot rock, you've got about six seconds to live. And is that extreme? Yeah, you're darn right that's extreme. And if this is the ultimate thrill for some people's brains, why not for everyone's? This thrill is just basically essential for us to be happy, to have that feeling alive inside of you, so then life is worth it. Science tells us that as a base jumper is thinking about the jump, their brain begins releasing dopamine. Dopamine plays the role of building anticipation. The amygdala doesn't shut down. Instead, it's sending out fear signals. Before a jump I'll get the jitters and I'll get nervous and palms might get sweaty and a million thoughts racing in my mind. Most of your mental preparation is okay what if my parachute opens backwards, what if I have a problem with one of my toggles. Even though the jump is a little bit hard, Jumpers are focused on the jump itself. You know, what they might not realize is that the dopamine kick is happening all along during this process. Cresta Christensen is a newcomer to base jumping. I'm feeling excited. My heart's going a little bit faster. Because I know that that gear check means that it's getting a little bit closer. Three, two, one, see ya. Oh, I get so nervous. It is unlike anything else that I've ever done, especially for someone that's scared of heights. Cresta is nervous because her amygdala, where she harbors her fear of heights, is pressing the panic button at the sight of a 400-foot drop. About as physiologically aroused as a person can be. You've got the stress system going, so you've got adrenaline being released. That gets the heart going. You've got hormones being released. You've got stress hormones like cortisol going. You've got neurotransmitters like dopamine being released in anticipation of the euphoria. But at the same time, Cresta's frontal lobes weigh in, making her question if she's doing the right thing. The fear, the pleasure, the potential risks. All these competing signals get processed into action, experts believe, in the striatum, in the middle of the brain. The striatum is kind of like a switching center. It's also the part of the brain that has the densest concentration of dopamine receptors. As Cresta's dopamine rush bombards her striatum, her motivation for pleasure battles the other impulses. But will it be enough to make her jump? Inside the brain of a novice base jumper, there's a battle waging as she makes a life-threatening decision. Will Cresta risk everything for pleasure? And just launch. Okay. Clearly the decision to jump means that the anticipated reward has won the battle between the good outcome and the potentially bad outcome. If it was the other way around they would back away from the cliff and call it a day. It was awesome, it was great. I'm ready to go up and do it again. Gotta pack first though. No sooner have these jumpers survived one death wish, than they're getting ready for the next. They seem addicted to finding new locations with fresh dangers and more challenging conditions. Scientists say there's a reason for this. When we look at what happens in the brain, we see that on repeated exposures to pleasures, whether it's... What makes some brains evil? The answer may lie in groundbreaking experiments being carried out at New Mexico prisons. Scientists estimate 1 in 20 inmates has a personality disorder that could be psychopathic. So there's no shortage of potential test subjects where Dr. Keel carries out his research. His aim is to develop new treatments, but to do that, he needs to find out what's different about their brains. The ideal goal is to be able to help us reduce the impact the disorder has not only on the individual, but also on society. First, he interviews the prisoners to identify those who exhibit psychopathic tendencies. So this is going to be an interview that we kind of cover different aspects of your life. So we're going to start out with school history. We'll talk about employment history, talk about your family, talk about criminalization. activity, things that you've done, things like that. Psychopaths have remarkably similar patterns of behavior. Did you ever get in trouble when you were a kid? All the time. They have an impulsive nomadic lifestyle. They move from place to place, relationship to relationship. They're very sexually promiscuous. They tend to get themselves in trouble.... Dr. Keel sends the prisoners he's diagnosed as psychopathic for brain scans. In the first test, he wants to see how they react to making mistakes. We've scanned over 300 inmates. So we've actually collected one of the largest brain imaging data sets in the world, and by far and away the largest brain imaging data set that's ever been collected in psychopaths. This is obviously the magnet. It doesn't sound like much now, but it will get very, very loud. The scanner uses magnetic fields and radio energy to monitor blood flow in the brain while the inmate is thinking and reacting. So in this task, you're going to see a series of X's and K's on the screen. What I want you to do is press the first button with your right index finger whenever an X appears on the screen, but do not press when a K appears on the screen. The two letters flash by so quickly that the challenge is near impossible for anyone to get right. It's very difficult. People tend to make a lot of mistakes. They press buttons when they're not supposed to. And what we want to know is how does their brain learn to appreciate a mistake and how does it recover from that mistake? By observing brain activity during this test, Dr. Keel can see that psychopaths don't care as much as normal individuals when they make a mistake. But that doesn't mean they're unintelligent. Serial killer Joel Rifkin, for example, has an IQ of 128, which places him in the top 3% of the population. What's really kind of dumbfounding is that they're above average intelligence compared to the rest of the inmate population. They're very hot-headed and impulsive, but they are very manipulative and conning. In a second test, the New Mexico inmates are asked to rate photos on whether they are morally objectionable. A moral violation is an action or an attitude that is considered to be wrong. You should make your decision based on your own system of moral values, not what you think others or society would consider to be wrong. Does that make sense so far? Yeah. Okay. We're trying to understand how inmates process information that has a moral value. And there are different brain systems that we believe are deciding whether or not something is a moral violation or not. And whether or not those systems have not developed normally in the psychopathic inmate. This pioneering research is proving what scientists have wondered for years whether psychopaths have an impaired ability to reason what they found is that their frontal lobes the brains most recent addition and the amygdala one of the more primal parts parts of the brain are not communicating properly. What's more, in a recent study, Dr. Adrian Raine found that the brains of psychopaths are physically different. He was able to show for the first time that they have a shrunken amygdala, on average 17% smaller than most people's. And this is another crucial piece of the puzzle in understanding why psychopaths are not afraid to commit evil acts. Psychopaths know it's wrong to kill someone. someone. But why do they do it? They don't have the feeling of what's moral. I'm not going to stick a knife in you because I'll feel the pain myself. I'll experience the pain. I've got empathy. I can put myself into your shoes. Murderers like Joel Rifkin can't do that. He killed those prostitutes. Because he didn't care about what it might feel like to be strangled. How did you feel while you were strangling them? Uh, just intensely focused on that. I mean, uh... I'm not thinking about much or much else. Rifkin committed so many murders, he was bound to get caught eventually. But what about all those other psychopaths, that one in a hundred? Why don't they wind up in jail? Dr. Rain's research has pinpointed the difference in the brains of white-collar psychopaths. The kind who think nothing of swindling people out of their life savings. Yes, they have the smaller amygdala, but it appears to communicate with their frontal lobes normally. They have less capacity for empathy, but have the brain power to be a good liar and a cheat. Successful psychopaths showed very good executive functions, very good planning ability, very good ability to regulate and control. They had good awareness of themselves. They had very good stress reactivity. And frankly, you need these executive functions to successfully con and manipulate individuals. With scientists now sure that psychopaths have impaired brains... It begs the question of when they go wrong. We believe that in large part the feeling of what's right and wrong is wired into the brain. The brain is set to be somewhat less moral or more moral depending on your genetic and neurobiological... background in other words it's in our genes and it's how our brain grows in the womb but according to dr. rain that's still only half the story of course you can't rule out the environment that's 50% of the equation It's like two sides of a coin. It's both genetic and environmental. If finding the location of good and evil in the brain has been a challenge for scientists, there is an even bigger mystery waiting to be unlocked. Memory. Thanks to memory, the brain is constantly traveling through time, pulling fragments of the past into the present. This ability is key to a human's existence. The reason we have memory is so that you can make better decisions the next time. around. So all of your thinking and your future planning is dictated by your memory. While the workings of an organ like the heart are well understood, scientists are still figuring out memory in the brain. The big breakthrough came 80 years ago. So in the 1920s a neuroscientist named Carl Lashley taught rats to run a maze and then He damaged parts of their brain selectively to see where the memory of how to run the maze was stored. And what he found is that it's not stored in any particular place. And you have an extremely complicated, very networked system. The system is so complex, in fact, the most advanced supercomputers don't even come close to the storage capacity of the brain. With science, 10 trillion bytes of memory. The brain is the most complicated device we've found in the universe. It has 10 billion cells just in the cortex, which is the outer part. And in a single tiny piece of cortex, a cubic millimeter, you have more connections than you have stars in the Milky Way galaxy. All those connections make the brain capable of storing and retrieving massive amounts of data in some amazing ways. Perhaps none more incredible and extreme. than what's called photographic memory, or mnemonism. As we try to understand vision and memory in neuroscience, we're really fascinated by people who are mnemonists. They have an untaxable memory. They can remember everything going in. British artist Stephen Wiltshire has this extraordinary ability. He can remember complicated cityscapes and reproduce them in staggering detail. For his latest sketch, he's climbing to the top of Tower Bridge for a bird's eye view of London. He need only stay a few minutes since he claims his visual memory of the scene will never fade. Just looking at the buildings and skyscrapers, I feel like to take about 20 minutes and then do it from memory. To appreciate how incredible Steven's skill is. It helps to understand how vision works. Sight is processed at the back of the brain, in the occipital lobe. or visual cortex. Two eyes give a field of vision of about 200 degrees. They can detect 2.3 million different shades of color. And experts estimate they send 72 gigabytes of information to the brain every second. That's like 18,000 songs on an iPod. Back at his gallery, Stephen begins to draw what he saw. He's using several areas of his brain. His parietal lobes, in particular, are working to control his spatial manipulation and hand-eye coordination. Cross-checking his sketch with the view reveals just how uncannily accurate it is. In little more than an hour, he's recreated the panorama. This picture will sell for $4,000. Stephen's talent is almost superhuman, but his skill comes at a cost. He is an autistic savant, which means his brain has developed differently. Most of us don't have the capacities he does because our brains are doing 57 other things. We're thinking about our careers and our mortgages and our futures and what we're doing at the grocery store later and so on. And as a result, the neural real estate... is divided among lots of different tasks. In a savant's brain, essentially all of that real estate is devoted towards one thing, like solving that Rubik's cube or playing the piano. And as a result, they have deficits in other aspects of their life, for example, in their capacity to socialize. Geniuses like Leonardo da Vinci, Mozart, and Monet all had incredible memories, and there's speculation they may have been autistic too. While some brains can remember nearly everything they see, other brains can barely remember anything at all. Welcome to the life of Clive Waring, a man with the worst case of amnesia in the world. What were we doing before we sat on the bench? Even though Clive Waring has seen his wife Debra numerous times today, every time he meets her, it's like he's seeing her for the first time. Clive has the worst case of amnesia. in the world. His memory span is at most 30 seconds long. What were we doing before we sat on the bench? No idea. Do you know what this building is? No. Have you seen it before? No. He said to me, it's like between before waking up and waking up, it's like the in-between stage. You haven't yet grasped where you are. What do you know? Nothing at all. Nothing. Never had a thought or a dream. Day and night the same. Day and night the same? Yeah, blank. Whole time. Clive was an acclaimed British conductor and musicologist until a viral infection developed into encephalitis in his brain. When the acute inflammation subsided, his brain had been severely damaged. It's left him with only a very limited short-term memory. Clive has absolutely no memory of anything that's happened in his life since the ambulance took him away in March 1985. And his autobiographical memory is so vague as to be almost not there. Who's that? I can't remember. That's him. My son. Your son, that's right. That's Anthony. Yeah. And that's his children. His children? Yeah. I see. They're much bigger now. Although memories are spread across the entire brain, there is one part that acts like a key to the storage and retrieval process, the hippocampus within the limbic system. We know this because without the hippocampus, new memories do not form. There are at least two types of memory in the brain, and most generally we divide that into short and long-term memory. So short-term memory is if I tell you my phone number and you have to remember that for a physical memory. seconds while you go over to dial it. Long-term memory involves things like where you grew up and where you went to school and what you did today. That's all stored in long-term memory. What's happening with Clive is that he has a very short-term window of memory. He's not able to translate the short-term into long-term. He's not able to cement down the activity in the short term into something in the physical structure in his brain. Clive have found severe damage in his hippocampus, and they think that's what's preventing his brain from storing memories. Clive Waring suffers from both anterograde and retrograde amnesia. That is, he can't learn new things, but he also has a hard time recollecting old things. And it primarily seems to be affecting his ability to recollect information at will. Watch what happens when Clive's wife asks him what his son does for a living. Do you know what Anthony's profession is? He's an electrical engineer. Oh, is he? Yes. And do you know what he designs? No. Have a guess. No idea. What's his profession? Car motors. Oh, car motors? Yes. Electrical car motors. What a good idea that is. Yeah. Stop the poisonous gas coming out of the petrol engine. That's right. Yeah, that was a very good idea. It's a disastrous idea, that part of it. That's right. Do you know anyone who designs electrical car motors? No, I don't. Do you know anyone who does that? No. Your son does. I see. Anthony does. He's actually got his own business. Oh, well done. Yeah. Hmm. Do you know what, what, do you remember what Anthony's doing these days? I was still at school the last time I was conscious. What makes Clive such a unique case is that while he can't remember details about his family, he can recall other things. The fact that his language is preserved so well and he is articulate illustrates the procedural memory for how to speak and how to construct words is stored separately than the issues about episodic memory, what you did, the facts about your life. Different types of memories are stored very differently in the brain. Experts believe language memory could live in one of the temporal lobes, the one responsible for sound and speech on the left side of the brain. What's even more amazing is that Clive can still play the piano. His procedural memory for playing the piano on the right side of his brain is undamaged. When he is performing music, that is where Clive finds a continuum. He has a momentum that kind of carries him through time. It's a great illustration of the way that these different types of memory can be separated out. Do you know what month it is? No. April. April? April is your birthday next month. Clive today appears upbeat, but that was not always the case. I'm ready to say a bit of a funny thing. Well, use your intelligence. This was Clive in 1988. three years into his amnesia when he was frustrated and angry. For the first ten years, Clive lived in a world where he said the same few things over and over again because of the anger. The anxiety, the fear, the terror, the horror of his situation. Each new moment he felt he was awake, he wanted to write it down. When it was such a compulsion that he would have written it on the table, on the wall, on any available surface. So how do you think it got there? I don't know. I presume the doctor don't know. But you must have. No, I haven't. You listen to me, please, for heaven's sake. When I say no, I mean exactly that. The pages of his diary are filled with exclamations and words crossed out. Eventually though, his anger subsided. He started to change after about the first 14, 15 years. He began to remember things for longer. His mood changed. Deborah attributes this change to her faith and her prayers. Scientists have their own explanation. We do know that your brain physically changes. And that's what we mean by plasticity. It's always rewriting its own circuitry. With children, the brains are extremely plastic. That's why children can learn language so much more easily or learn how to play new instruments. What we're now discovering is that the adult human brain is much more plastic than we previously thought. So when people get brain damage, other parts of their brain can shift around and take over the missing functions. This year, Deborah wondered whether Clive still needed his diary. When he looked through the previous days and weeks and months and saw that he'd just written the same thing over and over again, it tended to upset him. And we thought, well, let's just take it away and see whether he misses it. To everyone's surprise, after writing in his diary every single day for 23 years, Clive didn't ask for it back. That compulsive need to record each moment of awakening must have passed. Scientists have learned a lot about memory by studying Clive. But they've also gained valuable insight on other brain functions that contribute to a person's identity. A lot of people say memory makes us who we are. And boy, did I find out how wrong that was. Clive's personality. thank god is intact fancy a cup of coffee oh i love one he's funny he's also very compassionate lead the way to heaven on earth he has no knowledge about himself but he is who he is unchanged pure clive Memory plays a pivotal role in everything we do, including sports. It's finally dawning on athletes that it's not only brawn, but also brain that makes a champion. In the 80s, we developed a lot of muscle training methods to increase sports performance. And now, in the 21st century, we're taking the brain to the weight room. The more we learn about the brain, the more it informs every aspect of our lives, including professional sports. Sports performance is all about the brain, but it wasn't like that all the time. For the longest part of the history of sports, people didn't care about the brain. They would consider an athlete a good player if they had good muscle definition and they were very coordinated. Just within the last 10 years, we think that about 50% of all sports performance, and sometimes the most important part about elite performance, is related to brain functioning. Now, athletes have caught on to how important the brain is to their performance on the field. 90% is mental. It's a tough game. You really have to have control of your mind to play this game. So how does the brain improve the game? Almost all the sports is dynamic. And requires millisecond to millisecond decision making. And if you miss it by a small percentage, you miss the putt. You're a tenth of a second too slow. Your shot falls off the rim. It's that little differentiation between super world class and good. At a basic level, it's about hand-eye coordination and practice, practice, practice. And there's no better place to see this than at the Cirque du Soleil, where performers must practice constantly. We use our frontal lobes to learn how to carry out an activity. But the area of the brain that benefits most from practice is the cerebellum, at the back of the brain. It helps to think of the brain as an old house with new rooms slowly added over time. The brain stem is the basement because it evolved first. The cerebellum came next. It's an old part of the brain, sort of set up off the first floor. the basement. It's almost entirely responsible for movement, complicated sequencing of movements. The cerebellum sends out signals to the 100 billion nerve cells in our bodies, which in turn tell the muscles what we want them to do. The frontal lobe is monitoring the activity, but most of the time gets out of the way and allows the cerebellum and the rest of the brain to engage in this behavior that's been practiced over and over and over again. Scientists think that the frontal lobe simply cannot keep up with the speed of information processing necessary to perform a high-level skill. Which is why the cerebellum takes over. It's procedural memory, the same kind Clive Waring uses to play the piano. It's the idea that you can go into a filing cabinet and pick out a motor memory that you've already practiced. And experts now know why practice makes perfect. The more you practice, the better the cerebellum becomes at knowing exactly which nerves and muscles to trigger each time. In the sports psychology, there are suggestions that it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice in order to achieve the level of expertise. Such extreme levels of ability may actually lead to memory within the muscle itself, guiding a sequence of contractions and relaxations. But the brain is still essential. You damage the brain, there is very little activity. Of course you need an intact body, you need physiology that works. In basketball it helps to be tall, in racing horses it helps to be small, but every of those athletes has a brain that has to be synchronized with athletic activity. But beyond practice and having the right body type, the brain plays another vital role in sports. Just imagine a weightlifter who is trying to lift an amazing amount of weights. They have to be extremely pumped up. The Navy SEALs use a breathing technique to calm down, whereas athletes need to vary their level of excitement. Sports scientists call this process arousal modulation. We think of arousal modulation as the volume button of the brain. Once again, it's the amygdala in the limbic system that controls our emotional response. In this instance, it gets us psyched up to compete. Back when the brain was evolving, it's how early man would get ready for the hunt. But the amygdala needs to be triggered. One simple way is by using sensory stimulation, such as cheering and clapping. You can control it externally through loud noises, by slapping a person. Why? Because those sensory mechanisms go in into the first floor of the brain. So you'll see in sports a lot of times people using this intuitively. A lot of noise. Come on, come on, come Athletes need to get themselves into a position where when the game starts they're at the right level of arousal. Because basketball is a contact sport. You gotta push out. You have to fight for the rebounds. And it's almost a simulated war. Once you're in a high arousal level and you got to come down, it's just as difficult as it is to go up. It might even be more difficult. All of a sudden the game stops and they have to shoot a free throw. The player needs to turn... from pumped to quietly focused in seconds. Inside the player's brain, the frontal lobes must quickly muffle the amygdala response to calm emotions, relax the body, breathe slower and lower heart rate so that he stands a better chance of making the shot. This is tough because the player's body might be too pumped. Or the frontal lobes might be distracted by other nervous thoughts like the fear of failure. If these thoughts are strong enough, they could feed back to the limbic system and trigger the fear response. This would then make it extremely difficult to focus on performing a complicated action well. It's a situation experts call performance anxiety. Performance anxiety is the largest culprit of poor athletic performance and the successful athlete has complete control over that. It is tough to get your heart rate down and get focused and get concentrated on what you have to do because everything is so chaotic that all you want to do is go as fast as you can. You just need to relax and just try to stay cool. Stay away from that white line, Graham. Stay away from that white line. Get it wrong, and the consequences can be fatal. If your concentration slips for any moment of time, most often it would result in a crash. Top speeds can be up around 230 miles an hour, and at those speeds, anything can happen, and when you hit the wall, you hit it hard. Few sports demonstrate performance anxiety better than golf. People love golf because you'll see a world-class athlete miss a two-foot putt to win a major tournament and lose hundreds of thousands of dollars. Cutting requires a very low volume of activity. It's a small motor movement. And the frontal lobes probably should be turned off. We know that Tiger Woods can do this because he has done it many times. But what is it about his brain that he's able to put the ball into the hole? What we found is the brain can either help you succeed in this athletic activity, or it can help you fail. And we think Tiger Woods has found a way to succeed most of the time because of his ability to modulate his own brain functioning. Scientists can't scan Tiger Woods'brain in action. He would need to lie motionless, which would make playing golf impossible. So instead, they must make an educated guess. Because he's blinking so little during a putt, we think that his anxiety is very low. Because eye blinking is usually related to anxiety. So he's very relaxed, like a drowsy state, a drowsy, sleepy level, but yet enough concentration that you can focus on the task. Athletes call this special feeling being in the zone, when their movements seem to flow without conscious effort. It is the supreme combination of practice involving the cerebellum, concentration of the frontal lobes, and low anxiety of the amygdala within the limbic system. It's very hard to get into. I really feel like if I can control my breath and I can get it as slow as possible, that'll slow down my heart. As soon as that happens, I feel like I get total consciousness of everything. All five senses are working the best they could possibly work. Experts think the brain gets so focused, it's somehow able to block or ignore any irrelevant input. Brain and body begin working in perfect sync. Athletes and everybody else for that matter all want to be in that zone and there's something special about it. Everything gets aimed at the one task at hand and when you do that, incredible things can happen. You have a real clarity of thought and decision making. When I'm in that moment, everything around me is synced. and I can control what I'm thinking, I can control what I look at, I can control what thoughts enter my mind, and in turn that gives me the greatest chance for success. Being in the zone could be the brain's ultimate control over the body. But there are some people who claim its ability extends even beyond that. I'm being pulled here. The notion that the brain has a sixth sense. He's also telling me to talk about either Staten Island or... That's where we live. Okay, let me tell you exactly what he's showing me then so you know where. If you were to go over the bridge and through the toll and then take that first long road down the left... That's where I live. Okay. Our five senses are the gateways between our brains and the outside world. We receive signals from our skin, eyes, nose, tongue, and ears. The different areas of the brain interpret the sensory information as touch, sight, smell, taste, and hearing. But what if there were a sixth sense that enabled our brains to see into other people's minds, anticipate events, or pass on messages from the dead? Although one in four Americans say they believe in extrasensory perception, only a handful of scientists entertain this possibility. Dr. Dean Radin researches psychic phenomena at the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Northern California. His working theory is our brains might all have some extra sensory ability, though we may call it something different. One thing that people commonly talk about is a gut feeling, and a way it expresses itself often is while driving. They get a sense there's something wrong about those corners, and more often than not, a car is in fact coming from the other direction. So I've learned to pay attention to my gut feelings. It's like pushing your attention a few seconds into the future. Other things are the feeling of being stared at, which is a very commonly reported effect, typically by women feeling that a man somewhere is staring at them. There's also telephone telepathy. Without looking at your caller ID, sometimes people will hear the phone ring and immediately know who it is. And these are not cases where only one person ever calls, but somebody unusual is calling. So these are ways that these kinds of events appear in the everyday world. Your hand a little bit. Yes. Ooh, that's a very good signal. Okay. I think we're ready to go. Dr. Radin has tested more than 300 volunteers in electromagnetically shielded rooms. He shows them a series of images and measures their reactions. We present in a random sequence pictures which are calm or emotional, and also pictures in between. The more emotional pictures evoke a stronger response. What Dr. Radin found is that while his pool of subjects is randomly chosen, he always finds people who respond accurately before they see the image. They seem to know ahead of time the kind of picture they'll see. Though their degree of psychic ability appears to vary. Not everybody's going to be able to play golf as good as Tiger Woods. But everybody can play golf a little bit. And so what we tend to see in the laboratory is everybody playing golf a little bit. And occasionally we're lucky and we get the equivalent of Tiger Woods. Somebody's claiming they were buried with gum. Somebody was buried with gum. You buried somebody with chewing gum? Take the mic, please. John Edwards'success as a TV medium would suggest he's in the Tiger Woods category. In the history of science, we've often been wrong. We used to think the Earth was flat. We were wrong. We used to think the sun revolved around the Earth. We were wrong. We used to think physical objects were solid and static. We now know that was wrong. So I start from a point of view when anybody makes a claim, whether it's a medium or a healer, I approach it as, I don't know, could be yes, could be no, show me the data, I'm open. You only put a couple of sticks in? Um, his old secretary, they used to chew the same gum and we put it in the casket with him. A couple of sticks? It was, uh, I think they're like individual packets, like the bazooka, the one with the comics, I think. Okay, so that's what I'm feeling. You're individual. Alright, would this be like a father figure to you? It's my dad. Okay. And do you still see his assistant? Yes. He wants you to tease her, like what, she could spare a few more slices or like, like I couldn't have the whole pack? The way the process of mediumship typically operates is that the mediums get little pieces of information. So he's making me feel like, wasn't he already kind of gone? Yes, he was. He was. Not because the other side is fragmented, but because they're just able to pick up little snippets. It's like you've got a semi-good connection on your cell phone and you get a piece of information here, a piece of information there. People say, well, where are they and how do you do this? And it's like, well, where's the internet? It's a place that exists, but you can't go there with a physical body. You have to have a conduit of some sort, some sort of connection to get to it. You've got to be plugged in somehow. Anybody have a plastic frog with them? I'm being pulled here. So. So like from here over, you guys are safe. Over here, no. If I'm doing an event, I will get a pull to the section of the room, a specific area of people. My nephew asked for, for Christmas, a toy frog. And it was his dad that passed away. And his dad passed before Christmas? Yes. When I'm hearing something, I don't hear it in my ear. I feel like I'm hearing it outside of me, but it's a thought that I'm hearing. No. John is one of several psychic mediums who agreed to undergo science. scientific testing at the University of Arizona. We're going to put a cap on you that has 19 electrodes. I did three experiments with John Edwards, each one more controlled than the next. The most controlled of them involved fitting the mediums and the volunteers with EEGs on their heads and EKGs on their chests. One of the ways to address the question, is the medium reading the mind of the sitter versus reading the mind of the deceased? is to record the brainwave activity and the cardiac activity, the heart and brain of the medium, and simultaneously record the brain and the heart of the sitter. The medium never meets the subject and they sit separated by a screen. John and the other mediums have to get whatever information they can about the subject's deceased loved ones. I'm going to tell you what I'm seeing, hearing and feeling and basically asking you to do the same. I ask you to confirm and verify it simply by yeses and ohs. Okay. Okay, um, the first thing that's coming through is to tell me to talk about a male figure to your side. A male figure to your side would be a husband or a brother who has crossed over. Do you understand that? Yes. Okay, actually there's two, there's three. There are complications that... I sat with people and got nothing. You know, like, I got absolutely nothing. And they'd be like, why is that happening? I'm like, I don't know. I'm like, maybe it's me. I don't know. So I got zeros for that. But sometimes, John will get accurate information. The sitter will either think he's wrong and later discover he's correct, or the sitter won't know the answer, and they'll have to then contact some of the family members and friends and lo and behold discover that it was correct. And we found that. experiment as well. John's accuracy rate typically averaged 80 to 90 percent and the monitoring machinery showed his brain waves and heart rate were not mimicking the subjects. We discovered that John's heart actually went out of sync with the sitter, which implied, of course, that his attention was somewhere else. They were also telling me to talk about the dog that's named after a drink, so I don't know if there's like a time... Yeager. Yeager? Yes. Yes. By the way, apparently needs a bath. Yes, he smells right now. He does. Based on the laboratory experiments that I've done with John, I am clearly led to the conclusion that John is a real medium. The so-called afterlife experiments remain highly controversial within the scientific community, in part because they raise more questions than they answer. At the present time, scientifically, we don't know how real mediums like John Edwards do what they do. The working hypothesis that we entertain in our laboratory is that we all have energy. This energy continues, like the light from distant stars. And what John does and others do is that their brains and consciousness serve as an antenna and receiver. And what they do is they learn how to tune in to the signals that are present and keep their noise low and then receive these subtle signals. The concept of a connected fabric of reality. Of which we are part of that, by virtue of being here, is similar to something like the Force from Star Wars. Obi-Wan at some point suddenly feels a disturbance in the Force when a planet is blown up. And in a sense he's feeling ripples through this space-time medium that he's able to sense directly. The phenomena we call ESP probably operate on something like that. name for this distant connectedness it's called quantum entanglement at the moment it's just a theory being applied to electrons and molecules scientists don't know yet if it could apply to the brain But the breakthrough that confirms extrasensory perception could come sooner than we think. It's always very difficult to predict when such things happen. I would guess maybe 20 years. Somewhere, sometime between... Tomorrow in 20 years. The next two decades promise to unlock many mysteries about the brain. Neuroscientists are already working on smart technologies that could change our lives in ways we'd never imagined. We will get to a point, I believe, when there will be instantaneous communication from the web to our brains. That I'm sure. What if we could supercharge our brains using machines and take the next leap of evolution within a single lifetime instead of over many lifetimes? Radical innovation is the goal of programs being funded by the semi-secret DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Their mission is to be kind of the blue sky thinkers of science for the national security establishment. And they've produced some amazing technologies that we take for granted, besides the Internet, the computer mouse, and of course the stealth bomber. They take some of the smartest scientists in the country and they ask them to push current science 30, 40 years into the future. They take big leaps. DARPA is funding one such leap at Columbia University in New York. Scientists there are developing a computer program that helps the brain process visual information at lightning speed. In our modern society, we're bombarded with information, whether it's images from technology, television, images on the web, one's job, and it's starting to be overwhelming and we need to figure out which images we really need to spend time looking at and which we can ignore. The idea behind cortically coupled computer vision is to create the best of both worlds, the versatility of the human brain enhanced by the speed of a computer. It's very hard to tell a computer vision system find something that's funny or out of the ordinary or suspicious. It's much easier to have a computer vision system that's not just a computer vision system. have a person do that. Of course, computer vision systems are very fast, so the question is, how can we actually make the human visual processor faster? In this example, the images are aerial shots of Seoul in South Korea. The analyst is looking for helipads. The old slow method would require a methodical search of thousands of individual photos before marking each helipad. The new method involves the analyst wearing an EEG cap. Dozens of electrodes can now detect electrical brain activity just below the surface of the skull. In normal brain processing, the visual cortex extracts detail from a scene. Information is sent forward to the frontal lobes for decision making. Then the motor cortex generates a response, the click of a mouse or the movement of the eyes. The prototype program intercepts the signals, filters out irrelevant brain activity, and focuses on the subliminal aha moment when the eyes spot a helipad. In just a few seconds, the analyst can sift through the thousands of images. Although he may not be consciously aware of it, his brain is remarkably accurate at identifying the few shots that have helipads in them so they can be marked up later. Essentially we're going to tap into the signals that are involved in deciding whether there's something interesting and without having the subject having to make a response use that to now reorder or resort image databases to improve search. This boosted vision technology helps the image analyst work up to four times faster. It could be adapted to help fighter pilots make better split-second decisions, or to improve the sifting of surveillance footage by police or security personnel. And then there are possibilities beyond defense and intelligence. One potential application that's of interest in which there's high throughput of information might be in the stock market or in trading. I mean, many times traders, they're assimilating this information across different screens. something might catch their eye, but they can't actually act on that at that moment. So that information can be tagged that it grabbed the interest of the trader and processed by some other person down the line. Medical research might be interested in these devices too, and marketing teams could use them to record people's first reaction to a product or advertising campaign. A video game company in California is already ditching the joystick in favor of brain power. A headset, similar to an EEG, picks up electrical activity from the brain, as well as twitches from facial muscles. The signals get translated into on-screen commands. Players raise rocks and vanquish villains, not with a click, but with a thought. The future potential for implanted personal data assistance, or PDAs, is almost mind-boggling. As we get older, we... We all worry about our inability to remember names and faces. We're going to find ways to compensate for that loss of natural, evolved memory. We're evolving in the direction where we will have devices that will do that for us. And I think ultimately we're going to have a Facebook in our heads. At that point, it's going to be pretty hard to see where we end and the technology begins. At Duke University in North Carolina, neuroscientists are taking that next step already. They've implanted electrodes into a monkey's brain and isolated the brain signals for walking. During one recent experiment, a monkey paced on a treadmill, while her brain activity was sent via the internet to Japan to instantly control the walking of a five-foot humanoid robot. The monkey got raisin treats for making the robot walk. Then her treadmill was switched off. In her desire for more treats, the monkey kept the robot walking, using only her thoughts. And there's been a similar breakthrough at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania. Monkeys, fitted with tiny sensors in their brains, have learned to control a mechanical arm and use it to reach for snacks. It will have tremendous implications for medicine, for people who are amputees, for people who are in the hospital. are quadriplegic, giving them the ability to move robot prosthetic arms and legs in ways that will allow them to interact with their environments, which they have not been able to do before. Could there be hope in the future for someone like Clive Waring, whose brain damage means he can't process new memories? I don't remember sitting down in this seat. That was unknown to me. There's work being done currently with rats that might one day create a synthetic hippocampus for humans. If you could do that in theory, you could actually introduce instantaneously new memories as we do in computer chips every day these days. What if instead of taking months and months to learn a language, we could download a basic dictionary of a language? What if never having been somewhere, instead of having to carry that tour guide or book around, that clumsy book, and stopping in the middle of the sidewalk every few minutes to see where we're going, we actually had a rudimentary map that had been downloaded into our brains of that new city that we're visiting, or those modern cities that we're visiting? monuments that we're looking at. Drugs are being developed for combat troops that would allow them to stay awake for two or three days with no ill effects. A new class of chemicals called ampoquines are thought to help the neurotransmitter glutamate work better in a tired brain. so improve memory, learning, and cognition. These could eventually find their way into everyday use. Lack of sleep historically has meant that you are inclined to make mistakes. I think we're going to be able to resolve that problem. Shift workers, people who have to work all night, might be able to do without sleep and function very well. Students who are studying for exams, people who have to travel across time zones as part of their work. In the near future, scientists expect to perfect portable brain scanners. Light-emitting diodes, fitted in a headband, would bounce light into the frontal lobes to detect brain activity. That information would be fed into a unit no bigger than a pack of playing cards. Instead of lying motionless in a giant MRI machine, wearers could discover what's going on in their brains while, for example, playing sports. We will be able to look into super athletes brain like Federer or Agassi or Tiger Woods and see not that they're different anatomically necessarily but functionally they are different in terms of how they process information. The second application is that you can use this new technology to help athletes perform better or perform up to their capacity. Imaging technology is still in its infancy. In widespread use for less than 20 years, compared with over 100 years for x-rays, it's limited only by our imagination. The pictures we get of the brain right now, though there are several really amazing technologies, they're pretty gross. They're at a large level. Now people are saying, wow, it would be really good if we could get a more granular more fine-grained, deeper images of the brain, so at the molecular level. And I think that's the next frontier for brain imaging. For all that we have learned about the brain, we still have so much to discover. There are many unsolved questions that remain about the brain, and they're surprisingly simple. How is memory actually stored and how does it get reconstructed? Why do brains sleep and dream? What is intelligence? Why do people have a variety of skills and talents? How do we perceive the world? How does the brain represent time? What is consciousness? If we do manage to answer these questions over the course of perhaps one more lifetime, what will this mean for the brain, an organ that is so complicated and so often driven by primitive instincts? We evolved in a world very different than the world we live in today, so we have to adapt now. And this to me is the greatest mystery of neuroscience right now, is how

And you have to consider the brain having evolved like an old house, where we just added different rooms. So there's all these stairways and connections. In the basement is the oldest part, called the brain stem. It's something we share with reptiles and other mammals.

It's what keeps us alive, governing vital functions like heart rate, respiration, digestion, and blood pressure. Things that happen without having to think about them. The next level up, the first floor, more evolved, hundreds of thousands of years later, is called the limbic system. This is very important in the processing of emotions. Within the limbic system are the amygdala, two nuggets of tissue, one in each half of the brain.

They are no bigger than a fingernail, yet they are the brain's central command center for our emotional reactions. One of the simplest and strongest of these is fear, a primal emotion we all share. If you had to pick one brain region that was most important in fear, it would be the amygdala.

There's no better place to explore how fear affects the brain than here at the Navy SEAL Special Warfare Command in San Diego, California. Recruits are put through specialized training to change the way their brains react to fear. We introduce our students almost from day one to absolute chaos.

And they will struggle. When you look at historic mistakes on the battlefield. they're almost always associated with fear or with panic. So the capacity to control these impulses is extremely important.

Out of 140 candidates who start each class, On average, only 36 make the final cut. Successful recruits seem better able to adapt their brains to the demands of the job. It's not really necessarily the physical people who get through there. There have been Olympic athletes who've dropped out of training.

And there's this 140-pound farm kid from Nebraska who'd never seen the ocean before and he graduated. Why is that? To answer that question, the Navy turned... to neuroscience.

When confronted with fear, it's the amygdala that responds to information from our senses and instinctively presses the body's panic button. The amygdala is actually one of the most interconnected regions of the brain. So it actually will both send signals to parts of the brain stem that now elicit a range of bodily responses. As you start to sweat, your heart races, You know, you might freeze for a while, you might run away. This exercise, known as the hooded box drill, is part of the close quarters defense system and is one of the ways the US Navy conditions its recruits to control these amygdala signals.

Our students are deaf and blind. Our instructors will set up a scenario. And then the hood comes off, and the student has to respond.

Well, when you're under that hood, you have just a moment to kind of gather your thoughts and think of scenarios that could come your way. Sometimes the correct response is swift and lethal. Sometimes it's non-violent. Hey there, do you know where the gas station is? My car ran out of gas.

Yeah, there's one back out there. There is? Alright, thank you.

It's supposed to simulate those quick snapshot situations, those high-risk situations that just happen in an instant. Get down here! On the ground, on the ground right there.

They're trying to introduce you to the fact that panic is going to be less and less an option throughout your career. So the right way to do training is to expose people to scary situations where they can get used to them and know how to react when they're confronted with it. Through constant exposure to fearful situations, recruits learn to suppress fear that could otherwise make them react the wrong way and get them killed.

But how do their brains do that? What scientists discovered is that as humans evolved, another part of the brain, called the cortex, also became involved in processing fear. The part that makes us most human about the brain is our frontal cortex. If the amygdala is the first floor, the cortex is the second floor of the brain. It's the brain's thin, wrinkly outer layer that's divided into four sets of lobes.

If you unfolded the cortex of a monkey, it would be about the size of a piece of paper. If you unfolded our cortex, it's about four sheets of paper, large. And the reason it's wrinkly is... because you have to squish that all inside of the skull. The frontal lobes comprise the area just above our eyes, and these are the newest rooms of the brain.

As humans evolved, the frontal lobes became the place where conscious, rational thought is produced. processed. It's where we do our problem solving.

The frontal lobes are so interesting because they are really the conductor of the brain. They synchronize all activity. Scientists made a major breakthrough in fear research when they found that information from our senses reaches the amygdala almost twice as fast as it takes to get to our frontal lobes. The speed of the different brain signals means unless we instinctively know know how to react to a potential threat, we may freeze in fear, waiting for the frontal lobes to catch up to figure out the right response. Part of what happens with fear and panic is the unknown, is not knowing what to do next, and so your brain essentially freezes the way a deer freezes in the headlight.

So the amygdala may get very fast signals about fear, even, but sometimes they're wrong, and quickly the situation may say to you, no it's not a fear situation, and you're not afraid. So these very quick amygdala signals that you get can be controlled in sort of a top-down way. This is where the Navy's training comes in.

It teaches recruits to minimize that delay by generating fast accurate reactions to situations. With demand for special forces increasing, the Navy continues to develop brain training techniques to see if they can improve the pass rate. But there are some fears that scientists believe are pre-programmed into our brains.

Primal fears or super fears that few people can overcome. The Navy makes its trainees tackle these head on. It's why their most dreaded exercise happens underwater, as recruits face the fear of drowning.

There's almost nothing more scary than not being able to breathe. We are learning more now about the brain than at any other time in history. How it's put together and how it operates. Breakthroughs in brain science are helping the Navy to rethink how they train SEAL recruits.

Everybody keep passing the commands! Specialized exercises can improve their brains reactions in fearful combat situations. But the candidates need something more to cope with a super fear like drowning.

Experts believe evolution has hardwired our brains to dread being trapped underwater. As a result, it's almost impossible to control the brain's overwhelming impulse to surface for air. And it's why recruits struggle so much to pass the underwater pool competency test.

Pool Comp is a very important milestone in their career here. They're being tested how they can deal with fear underwater. And there is controlled harassment, planned harassment, projected at them underwater.

And we see how they can cope with that. Students must spend up to 20 minutes underwater, enduring repeated attacks on their breathing equipment by an instructor. Half of the time, they are without air.

Their air is shut off, their breathing hoses are wrapped around in difficult positions, and they need to respond to those problems. ...problems with a series of emergency procedures. Step-by-step instructions for untangling their gear are drilled into the recruits'heads beforehand. They must follow these to the letter. But putting theory into practice isn't easy.

Go down the bottom and the instructors, they come down, they'll start attacking you, taking your mask off, just creating all this stress. And the more the stress builds up, they want to see how you'll handle it. As the trainee begins running out of air, his brain's amygdala pushes the panic button that urges him to stop. him to surface. His frontal lobes must win this battle in the brain if he's to stay in control.

Physically it's very challenging. You have to hold your breath for longer than you normally would. The instructors just take you kind of to that breaking point to see how you respond. No sooner has the candidate untied one set of knots than his instructor is back attacking him again and again. The more the stress builds up, they want to see how you'll handle it.

Will you want to go to the surface and get air, which you want to do, or will you take the little air you have and all the problems and solve them and do what's necessary in order to pass the test? More SEALs fail pool comp at this stage in their training than anything else. The Navy wanted to know what was going on inside their recruits'heads to cause this.

There's almost nothing more scary than not being able to breathe. That creates a tremendous stress response. You have this huge release of stress hormones that make controlling things with thought more difficult. Under normal conditions the brain communicates with the body using minute electrical signals. The brain sends out electrical impulses from its nerve cells to others that travel at over 270 miles per hour.

This is one way your brain can tell your body to do something. But under extreme duress, the brain releases chemical hormones. The part of the brain that senses fear, the amygdala, triggers a chain reaction that sends adrenaline and cortisol hormones into the body's bloodstream.

These stress hormones act as a SWAT team, quickly preparing the body for action. They increase breathing, heart rate, and blood pressure. Senses become keener, memory sharper, and the body becomes less sensitive to pain. But even in this heightened state of alertness, pool comp is still too challenging for many trainees. Your mind is going everywhere and you're seeing your friends come up from the water, they've passed or they've failed, and you're kind of sizing yourself up saying, well, he failed, can I pass, and vice versa.

So your mind goes everywhere and it's key just to stay focused on what you have to do. Eventually, the student completes the series of tasks and can touch the bottom and then surface to learn from the instructor whether he's passed the test. I feel fine. Few SEAL candidates succeed at Pool Comp the first time.

They get four attempts and there's more at stake with each try. The most common reason for failing pool comp is panic, losing composure underwater. Some of our students, that's it, we will performance drop them from training. The Navy wanted to help borderline candidates who had the potential to pass these crucial phases in training.

After consulting with experts, they came up with a groundbreaking mental toughness program, a set of techniques to boost the trainees'ability to control fear, even in the most extreme situations. You guys need to stay fired up while you're out there. The pain, the cold, and all that stuff, it's gonna eat away at you, but you got to keep going.

The techniques that we're most interested in are what I call the big four. Goal setting, mental rehearsal, self-talk, and arousal control. Scientists think goal-setting works by assisting the frontal lobes.

As the brain's supervisor, the frontal lobes are responsible for reasoning and planning. Concentrating on specific goals lets the brain bring structure to chaos and keeps the amygdala, the emotional center of the brain, in check. I got up every morning and I said, I'm going to make it to breakfast. And then at breakfast I said, okay, I'm going to make it to lunch.

And then I'm going to make it through the run this afternoon. And then, you know, you take it in these little sort of chunks. The second technique, mental rehearsal or visualization, is continually running through an activity in your mind.

So when you try it for real, it comes true. ...more naturally. If you practice in your mind first and imagine and rehearse how you might do in these stressful situations, the next time in reality you're faced with these situations is actually, in effect, the second time you've faced it.

So you'll have less of a stressful reaction. The third technique, self-talk, helps focus the trainees'thoughts. The average person speaks to themselves at a rate of 300 to 1,000 words a minute. If these words are positive instead of negative, can do instead of can't, they help override the fear signal coming from the amygdala. The frontal lobes are always on, so it's very easy to think about something difficult, something bad, like I'm going to fail.

What am I doing here? I didn't practice enough. What you're trying to do is you're trying to replace those bad thoughts with good thoughts.

The final technique, arousal control, is centered on breathing. Deliberate slow breathing helps combat some of the effects of panic. Long exhales in particular mimic the body's relaxation process and get more oxygen to the brain so it can perform better. Breathing is a great focusing strategy, but you can only do it so much because in a response to fear your brain will get jacked up.

On its own, arousal control wouldn't work. The amygdala sends out such a powerful signal, it's tough to suppress if we're still feeling fearful. But combining the four techniques made a big difference to the trainee seal's pass rate, increasing it from a quarter to a third. The idea of pushing boundaries may not be new, but here is positive proof that you can train your brain. And now, science knows how.

It goes back to a lot of much earlier sort of warrior traditions where you're sort of transcending whatever it is you thought your limitations were. I am a different person actually. Your confidence goes through the roof.

You see things and do things that you wouldn't have imagined before. But it's not just the battlefield where brain science... Only blood flow.

It's measuring the amount of blood going to different parts of the brain. The brain has many... miles of blood vessels.

When nerve cells are busy firing, they need lots of energy-laden and oxygen-rich blood. When they're not, they need very little. So you see, what brain?

Blood gushes to the top of the brain stem. As well as being one of the oldest parts of the human brain, it's the area that controls the release of dopamine across the brain. Dopamine is a type of hormone called a neurotransmitter. Scientists know dopamine generates very strong feelings we associate with pleasure. What became clear is that the dopamine is released a little bit in advance of these things, like food.

Dopamine plays a major role in motivating our brains to do all kinds of things. Yeah! What is it about the pursuit of pleasure that would make these base jumpers in Moab, Utah want to throw themselves off a cliff?

Pretty much all the cliffs out here have a pretty high danger scale. On a 1 to 10, they're all about an 8. Mistakes can be fatal. When you run off a 500-foot rock, you've got about six seconds to live.

And is that extreme? Yeah, you're darn right that's extreme. And if this is the ultimate thrill for some people's brains, why not for everyone's? This thrill is just basically essential for us to be happy, to have that feeling alive inside of you, so then life is worth it.

Science tells us that as a base jumper is thinking about the jump, their brain begins releasing dopamine. Dopamine plays the role of building anticipation. The amygdala doesn't shut down.

Instead, it's sending out fear signals. Before a jump I'll get the jitters and I'll get nervous and palms might get sweaty and a million thoughts racing in my mind. Most of your mental preparation is okay what if my parachute opens backwards, what if I have a problem with one of my toggles. Even though the jump is a little bit hard, Jumpers are focused on the jump itself.

You know, what they might not realize is that the dopamine kick is happening all along during this process. Cresta Christensen is a newcomer to base jumping. I'm feeling excited. My heart's going a little bit faster. Because I know that that gear check means that it's getting a little bit closer.

Three, two, one, see ya. Oh, I get so nervous. It is unlike anything else that I've ever done, especially for someone that's scared of heights.

Cresta is nervous because her amygdala, where she harbors her fear of heights, is pressing the panic button at the sight of a 400-foot drop. About as physiologically aroused as a person can be. You've got the stress system going, so you've got adrenaline being released. That gets the heart going.

You've got hormones being released. You've got stress hormones like cortisol going. You've got neurotransmitters like dopamine being released in anticipation of the euphoria.

But at the same time, Cresta's frontal lobes weigh in, making her question if she's doing the right thing. The fear, the pleasure, the potential risks. All these competing signals get processed into action, experts believe, in the striatum, in the middle of the brain. The striatum is kind of like a switching center.

It's also the part of the brain that has the densest concentration of dopamine receptors. As Cresta's dopamine rush bombards her striatum, her motivation for pleasure battles the other impulses. But will it be enough to make her jump?

Inside the brain of a novice base jumper, there's a battle waging as she makes a life-threatening decision. Will Cresta risk everything for pleasure? And just launch. Okay.

Clearly the decision to jump means that the anticipated reward has won the battle between the good outcome and the potentially bad outcome. If it was the other way around they would back away from the cliff and call it a day. It was awesome, it was great. I'm ready to go up and do it again.

Gotta pack first though. No sooner have these jumpers survived one death wish, than they're getting ready for the next. They seem addicted to finding new locations with fresh dangers and more challenging conditions. Scientists say there's a reason for this.

When we look at what happens in the brain, we see that on repeated exposures to pleasures, whether it's... What makes some brains evil? The answer may lie in groundbreaking experiments being carried out at New Mexico prisons. Scientists estimate 1 in 20 inmates has a personality disorder that could be psychopathic. So there's no shortage of potential test subjects where Dr. Keel carries out his research.

His aim is to develop new treatments, but to do that, he needs to find out what's different about their brains. The ideal goal is to be able to help us reduce the impact the disorder has not only on the individual, but also on society. First, he interviews the prisoners to identify those who exhibit psychopathic tendencies.

So this is going to be an interview that we kind of cover different aspects of your life. So we're going to start out with school history. We'll talk about employment history, talk about your family, talk about criminalization. activity, things that you've done, things like that.

Psychopaths have remarkably similar patterns of behavior. Did you ever get in trouble when you were a kid? All the time.

They have an impulsive nomadic lifestyle. They move from place to place, relationship to relationship. They're very sexually promiscuous.

They tend to get themselves in trouble.... Dr. Keel sends the prisoners he's diagnosed as psychopathic for brain scans. In the first test, he wants to see how they react to making mistakes.

We've scanned over 300 inmates. So we've actually collected one of the largest brain imaging data sets in the world, and by far and away the largest brain imaging data set that's ever been collected in psychopaths. This is obviously the magnet.

It doesn't sound like much now, but it will get very, very loud. The scanner uses magnetic fields and radio energy to monitor blood flow in the brain while the inmate is thinking and reacting. So in this task, you're going to see a series of X's and K's on the screen.

What I want you to do is press the first button with your right index finger whenever an X appears on the screen, but do not press when a K appears on the screen. The two letters flash by so quickly that the challenge is near impossible for anyone to get right. It's very difficult. People tend to make a lot of mistakes. They press buttons when they're not supposed to.

And what we want to know is how does their brain learn to appreciate a mistake and how does it recover from that mistake? By observing brain activity during this test, Dr. Keel can see that psychopaths don't care as much as normal individuals when they make a mistake. But that doesn't mean they're unintelligent.

Serial killer Joel Rifkin, for example, has an IQ of 128, which places him in the top 3% of the population. What's really kind of dumbfounding is that they're above average intelligence compared to the rest of the inmate population. They're very hot-headed and impulsive, but they are very manipulative and conning.

In a second test, the New Mexico inmates are asked to rate photos on whether they are morally objectionable. A moral violation is an action or an attitude that is considered to be wrong. You should make your decision based on your own system of moral values, not what you think others or society would consider to be wrong.

Does that make sense so far? Yeah. Okay.

We're trying to understand how inmates process information that has a moral value. And there are different brain systems that we believe are deciding whether or not something is a moral violation or not. And whether or not those systems have not developed normally in the psychopathic inmate. This pioneering research is proving what scientists have wondered for years whether psychopaths have an impaired ability to reason what they found is that their frontal lobes the brains most recent addition and the amygdala one of the more primal parts parts of the brain are not communicating properly.

What's more, in a recent study, Dr. Adrian Raine found that the brains of psychopaths are physically different. He was able to show for the first time that they have a shrunken amygdala, on average 17% smaller than most people's. And this is another crucial piece of the puzzle in understanding why psychopaths are not afraid to commit evil acts. Psychopaths know it's wrong to kill someone. someone.

But why do they do it? They don't have the feeling of what's moral. I'm not going to stick a knife in you because I'll feel the pain myself. I'll experience the pain.

I've got empathy. I can put myself into your shoes. Murderers like Joel Rifkin can't do that. He killed those prostitutes. Because he didn't care about what it might feel like to be strangled.

How did you feel while you were strangling them? Uh, just intensely focused on that. I mean, uh... I'm not thinking about much or much else. Rifkin committed so many murders, he was bound to get caught eventually.

But what about all those other psychopaths, that one in a hundred? Why don't they wind up in jail? Dr. Rain's research has pinpointed the difference in the brains of white-collar psychopaths. The kind who think nothing of swindling people out of their life savings.

Yes, they have the smaller amygdala, but it appears to communicate with their frontal lobes normally. They have less capacity for empathy, but have the brain power to be a good liar and a cheat. Successful psychopaths showed very good executive functions, very good planning ability, very good ability to regulate and control.

They had good awareness of themselves. They had very good stress reactivity. And frankly, you need these executive functions to successfully con and manipulate individuals. With scientists now sure that psychopaths have impaired brains...

It begs the question of when they go wrong. We believe that in large part the feeling of what's right and wrong is wired into the brain. The brain is set to be somewhat less moral or more moral depending on your genetic and neurobiological...

background in other words it's in our genes and it's how our brain grows in the womb but according to dr. rain that's still only half the story of course you can't rule out the environment that's 50% of the equation It's like two sides of a coin. It's both genetic and environmental. If finding the location of good and evil in the brain has been a challenge for scientists, there is an even bigger mystery waiting to be unlocked.

Memory. Thanks to memory, the brain is constantly traveling through time, pulling fragments of the past into the present. This ability is key to a human's existence.

The reason we have memory is so that you can make better decisions the next time. around. So all of your thinking and your future planning is dictated by your memory.

While the workings of an organ like the heart are well understood, scientists are still figuring out memory in the brain. The big breakthrough came 80 years ago. So in the 1920s a neuroscientist named Carl Lashley taught rats to run a maze and then He damaged parts of their brain selectively to see where the memory of how to run the maze was stored. And what he found is that it's not stored in any particular place. And you have an extremely complicated, very networked system.

The system is so complex, in fact, the most advanced supercomputers don't even come close to the storage capacity of the brain. With science, 10 trillion bytes of memory. The brain is the most complicated device we've found in the universe.

It has 10 billion cells just in the cortex, which is the outer part. And in a single tiny piece of cortex, a cubic millimeter, you have more connections than you have stars in the Milky Way galaxy. All those connections make the brain capable of storing and retrieving massive amounts of data in some amazing ways.

Perhaps none more incredible and extreme. than what's called photographic memory, or mnemonism. As we try to understand vision and memory in neuroscience, we're really fascinated by people who are mnemonists.

They have an untaxable memory. They can remember everything going in. British artist Stephen Wiltshire has this extraordinary ability.

He can remember complicated cityscapes and reproduce them in staggering detail. For his latest sketch, he's climbing to the top of Tower Bridge for a bird's eye view of London. He need only stay a few minutes since he claims his visual memory of the scene will never fade.

Just looking at the buildings and skyscrapers, I feel like to take about 20 minutes and then do it from memory. To appreciate how incredible Steven's skill is. It helps to understand how vision works. Sight is processed at the back of the brain, in the occipital lobe. or visual cortex.

Two eyes give a field of vision of about 200 degrees. They can detect 2.3 million different shades of color. And experts estimate they send 72 gigabytes of information to the brain every second.

That's like 18,000 songs on an iPod. Back at his gallery, Stephen begins to draw what he saw. He's using several areas of his brain.

His parietal lobes, in particular, are working to control his spatial manipulation and hand-eye coordination. Cross-checking his sketch with the view reveals just how uncannily accurate it is. In little more than an hour, he's recreated the panorama. This picture will sell for $4,000.

Stephen's talent is almost superhuman, but his skill comes at a cost. He is an autistic savant, which means his brain has developed differently. Most of us don't have the capacities he does because our brains are doing 57 other things.

We're thinking about our careers and our mortgages and our futures and what we're doing at the grocery store later and so on. And as a result, the neural real estate... is divided among lots of different tasks.

In a savant's brain, essentially all of that real estate is devoted towards one thing, like solving that Rubik's cube or playing the piano. And as a result, they have deficits in other aspects of their life, for example, in their capacity to socialize. Geniuses like Leonardo da Vinci, Mozart, and Monet all had incredible memories, and there's speculation they may have been autistic too. While some brains can remember nearly everything they see, other brains can barely remember anything at all. Welcome to the life of Clive Waring, a man with the worst case of amnesia in the world.

What were we doing before we sat on the bench? Even though Clive Waring has seen his wife Debra numerous times today, every time he meets her, it's like he's seeing her for the first time. Clive has the worst case of amnesia. in the world.

His memory span is at most 30 seconds long. What were we doing before we sat on the bench? No idea. Do you know what this building is? No.

Have you seen it before? No. He said to me, it's like between before waking up and waking up, it's like the in-between stage. You haven't yet grasped where you are. What do you know?

Nothing at all. Nothing. Never had a thought or a dream.

Day and night the same. Day and night the same? Yeah, blank. Whole time.

Clive was an acclaimed British conductor and musicologist until a viral infection developed into encephalitis in his brain. When the acute inflammation subsided, his brain had been severely damaged. It's left him with only a very limited short-term memory. Clive has absolutely no memory of anything that's happened in his life since the ambulance took him away in March 1985. And his autobiographical memory is so vague as to be almost not there.

Who's that? I can't remember. That's him.

My son. Your son, that's right. That's Anthony.

Yeah. And that's his children. His children? Yeah.

I see. They're much bigger now. Although memories are spread across the entire brain, there is one part that acts like a key to the storage and retrieval process, the hippocampus within the limbic system. We know this because without the hippocampus, new memories do not form.

There are at least two types of memory in the brain, and most generally we divide that into short and long-term memory. So short-term memory is if I tell you my phone number and you have to remember that for a physical memory. seconds while you go over to dial it. Long-term memory involves things like where you grew up and where you went to school and what you did today. That's all stored in long-term memory.

What's happening with Clive is that he has a very short-term window of memory. He's not able to translate the short-term into long-term. He's not able to cement down the activity in the short term into something in the physical structure in his brain. Clive have found severe damage in his hippocampus, and they think that's what's preventing his brain from storing memories. Clive Waring suffers from both anterograde and retrograde amnesia.

That is, he can't learn new things, but he also has a hard time recollecting old things. And it primarily seems to be affecting his ability to recollect information at will. Watch what happens when Clive's wife asks him what his son does for a living. Do you know what Anthony's profession is?

He's an electrical engineer. Oh, is he? Yes.

And do you know what he designs? No. Have a guess. No idea. What's his profession?

Car motors. Oh, car motors? Yes. Electrical car motors.

What a good idea that is. Yeah. Stop the poisonous gas coming out of the petrol engine. That's right.

Yeah, that was a very good idea. It's a disastrous idea, that part of it. That's right. Do you know anyone who designs electrical car motors?

No, I don't. Do you know anyone who does that? No.

Your son does. I see. Anthony does. He's actually got his own business.

Oh, well done. Yeah. Hmm. Do you know what, what, do you remember what Anthony's doing these days?

I was still at school the last time I was conscious. What makes Clive such a unique case is that while he can't remember details about his family, he can recall other things. The fact that his language is preserved so well and he is articulate illustrates the procedural memory for how to speak and how to construct words is stored separately than the issues about episodic memory, what you did, the facts about your life. Different types of memories are stored very differently in the brain. Experts believe language memory could live in one of the temporal lobes, the one responsible for sound and speech on the left side of the brain.

What's even more amazing is that Clive can still play the piano. His procedural memory for playing the piano on the right side of his brain is undamaged. When he is performing music, that is where Clive finds a continuum.

He has a momentum that kind of carries him through time. It's a great illustration of the way that these different types of memory can be separated out. Do you know what month it is? No. April.

April? April is your birthday next month. Clive today appears upbeat, but that was not always the case.

I'm ready to say a bit of a funny thing. Well, use your intelligence. This was Clive in 1988. three years into his amnesia when he was frustrated and angry. For the first ten years, Clive lived in a world where he said the same few things over and over again because of the anger. The anxiety, the fear, the terror, the horror of his situation.

Each new moment he felt he was awake, he wanted to write it down. When it was such a compulsion that he would have written it on the table, on the wall, on any available surface. So how do you think it got there?

I don't know. I presume the doctor don't know. But you must have.

No, I haven't. You listen to me, please, for heaven's sake. When I say no, I mean exactly that.

The pages of his diary are filled with exclamations and words crossed out. Eventually though, his anger subsided. He started to change after about the first 14, 15 years. He began to remember things for longer. His mood changed.

Deborah attributes this change to her faith and her prayers. Scientists have their own explanation. We do know that your brain physically changes.

And that's what we mean by plasticity. It's always rewriting its own circuitry. With children, the brains are extremely plastic. That's why children can learn language so much more easily or learn how to play new instruments.

What we're now discovering is that the adult human brain is much more plastic than we previously thought. So when people get brain damage, other parts of their brain can shift around and take over the missing functions. This year, Deborah wondered whether Clive still needed his diary. When he looked through the previous days and weeks and months and saw that he'd just written the same thing over and over again, it tended to upset him. And we thought, well, let's just take it away and see whether he misses it.

To everyone's surprise, after writing in his diary every single day for 23 years, Clive didn't ask for it back. That compulsive need to record each moment of awakening must have passed. Scientists have learned a lot about memory by studying Clive.

But they've also gained valuable insight on other brain functions that contribute to a person's identity. A lot of people say memory makes us who we are. And boy, did I find out how wrong that was. Clive's personality.

thank god is intact fancy a cup of coffee oh i love one he's funny he's also very compassionate lead the way to heaven on earth he has no knowledge about himself but he is who he is unchanged pure clive Memory plays a pivotal role in everything we do, including sports. It's finally dawning on athletes that it's not only brawn, but also brain that makes a champion. In the 80s, we developed a lot of muscle training methods to increase sports performance. And now, in the 21st century, we're taking the brain to the weight room.

The more we learn about the brain, the more it informs every aspect of our lives, including professional sports. Sports performance is all about the brain, but it wasn't like that all the time. For the longest part of the history of sports, people didn't care about the brain. They would consider an athlete a good player if they had good muscle definition and they were very coordinated. Just within the last 10 years, we think that about 50% of all sports performance, and sometimes the most important part about elite performance, is related to brain functioning.

Now, athletes have caught on to how important the brain is to their performance on the field. 90% is mental. It's a tough game.

You really have to have control of your mind to play this game. So how does the brain improve the game? Almost all the sports is dynamic.

And requires millisecond to millisecond decision making. And if you miss it by a small percentage, you miss the putt. You're a tenth of a second too slow.

Your shot falls off the rim. It's that little differentiation between super world class and good. At a basic level, it's about hand-eye coordination and practice, practice, practice. And there's no better place to see this than at the Cirque du Soleil, where performers must practice constantly.

We use our frontal lobes to learn how to carry out an activity. But the area of the brain that benefits most from practice is the cerebellum, at the back of the brain. It helps to think of the brain as an old house with new rooms slowly added over time. The brain stem is the basement because it evolved first. The cerebellum came next.

It's an old part of the brain, sort of set up off the first floor. the basement. It's almost entirely responsible for movement, complicated sequencing of movements. The cerebellum sends out signals to the 100 billion nerve cells in our bodies, which in turn tell the muscles what we want them to do.

The frontal lobe is monitoring the activity, but most of the time gets out of the way and allows the cerebellum and the rest of the brain to engage in this behavior that's been practiced over and over and over again. Scientists think that the frontal lobe simply cannot keep up with the speed of information processing necessary to perform a high-level skill. Which is why the cerebellum takes over.

It's procedural memory, the same kind Clive Waring uses to play the piano. It's the idea that you can go into a filing cabinet and pick out a motor memory that you've already practiced. And experts now know why practice makes perfect.

The more you practice, the better the cerebellum becomes at knowing exactly which nerves and muscles to trigger each time. In the sports psychology, there are suggestions that it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice in order to achieve the level of expertise. Such extreme levels of ability may actually lead to memory within the muscle itself, guiding a sequence of contractions and relaxations.

But the brain is still essential. You damage the brain, there is very little activity. Of course you need an intact body, you need physiology that works. In basketball it helps to be tall, in racing horses it helps to be small, but every of those athletes has a brain that has to be synchronized with athletic activity. But beyond practice and having the right body type, the brain plays another vital role in sports.

Just imagine a weightlifter who is trying to lift an amazing amount of weights. They have to be extremely pumped up. The Navy SEALs use a breathing technique to calm down, whereas athletes need to vary their level of excitement.

Sports scientists call this process arousal modulation. We think of arousal modulation as the volume button of the brain. Once again, it's the amygdala in the limbic system that controls our emotional response. In this instance, it gets us psyched up to compete.

Back when the brain was evolving, it's how early man would get ready for the hunt. But the amygdala needs to be triggered. One simple way is by using sensory stimulation, such as cheering and clapping. You can control it externally through loud noises, by slapping a person. Why?

Because those sensory mechanisms go in into the first floor of the brain. So you'll see in sports a lot of times people using this intuitively. A lot of noise. Come on, come on, come Athletes need to get themselves into a position where when the game starts they're at the right level of arousal. Because basketball is a contact sport.

You gotta push out. You have to fight for the rebounds. And it's almost a simulated war.

Once you're in a high arousal level and you got to come down, it's just as difficult as it is to go up. It might even be more difficult. All of a sudden the game stops and they have to shoot a free throw.

The player needs to turn... from pumped to quietly focused in seconds. Inside the player's brain, the frontal lobes must quickly muffle the amygdala response to calm emotions, relax the body, breathe slower and lower heart rate so that he stands a better chance of making the shot.

This is tough because the player's body might be too pumped. Or the frontal lobes might be distracted by other nervous thoughts like the fear of failure. If these thoughts are strong enough, they could feed back to the limbic system and trigger the fear response.

This would then make it extremely difficult to focus on performing a complicated action well. It's a situation experts call performance anxiety. Performance anxiety is the largest culprit of poor athletic performance and the successful athlete has complete control over that. It is tough to get your heart rate down and get focused and get concentrated on what you have to do because everything is so chaotic that all you want to do is go as fast as you can. You just need to relax and just try to stay cool.

Stay away from that white line, Graham. Stay away from that white line. Get it wrong, and the consequences can be fatal.

If your concentration slips for any moment of time, most often it would result in a crash. Top speeds can be up around 230 miles an hour, and at those speeds, anything can happen, and when you hit the wall, you hit it hard. Few sports demonstrate performance anxiety better than golf.

People love golf because you'll see a world-class athlete miss a two-foot putt to win a major tournament and lose hundreds of thousands of dollars. Cutting requires a very low volume of activity. It's a small motor movement. And the frontal lobes probably should be turned off.

We know that Tiger Woods can do this because he has done it many times. But what is it about his brain that he's able to put the ball into the hole? What we found is the brain can either help you succeed in this athletic activity, or it can help you fail.

And we think Tiger Woods has found a way to succeed most of the time because of his ability to modulate his own brain functioning. Scientists can't scan Tiger Woods'brain in action. He would need to lie motionless, which would make playing golf impossible. So instead, they must make an educated guess.

Because he's blinking so little during a putt, we think that his anxiety is very low. Because eye blinking is usually related to anxiety. So he's very relaxed, like a drowsy state, a drowsy, sleepy level, but yet enough concentration that you can focus on the task.

Athletes call this special feeling being in the zone, when their movements seem to flow without conscious effort. It is the supreme combination of practice involving the cerebellum, concentration of the frontal lobes, and low anxiety of the amygdala within the limbic system. It's very hard to get into. I really feel like if I can control my breath and I can get it as slow as possible, that'll slow down my heart.

As soon as that happens, I feel like I get total consciousness of everything. All five senses are working the best they could possibly work. Experts think the brain gets so focused, it's somehow able to block or ignore any irrelevant input. Brain and body begin working in perfect sync. Athletes and everybody else for that matter all want to be in that zone and there's something special about it.

Everything gets aimed at the one task at hand and when you do that, incredible things can happen. You have a real clarity of thought and decision making. When I'm in that moment, everything around me is synced. and I can control what I'm thinking, I can control what I look at, I can control what thoughts enter my mind, and in turn that gives me the greatest chance for success.

Being in the zone could be the brain's ultimate control over the body. But there are some people who claim its ability extends even beyond that. I'm being pulled here.

The notion that the brain has a sixth sense. He's also telling me to talk about either Staten Island or... That's where we live.

Okay, let me tell you exactly what he's showing me then so you know where. If you were to go over the bridge and through the toll and then take that first long road down the left... That's where I live.

Okay. Our five senses are the gateways between our brains and the outside world. We receive signals from our skin, eyes, nose, tongue, and ears. The different areas of the brain interpret the sensory information as touch, sight, smell, taste, and hearing. But what if there were a sixth sense that enabled our brains to see into other people's minds, anticipate events, or pass on messages from the dead?

Although one in four Americans say they believe in extrasensory perception, only a handful of scientists entertain this possibility. Dr. Dean Radin researches psychic phenomena at the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Northern California. His working theory is our brains might all have some extra sensory ability, though we may call it something different. One thing that people commonly talk about is a gut feeling, and a way it expresses itself often is while driving.

They get a sense there's something wrong about those corners, and more often than not, a car is in fact coming from the other direction. So I've learned to pay attention to my gut feelings. It's like pushing your attention a few seconds into the future.

Other things are the feeling of being stared at, which is a very commonly reported effect, typically by women feeling that a man somewhere is staring at them. There's also telephone telepathy. Without looking at your caller ID, sometimes people will hear the phone ring and immediately know who it is. And these are not cases where only one person ever calls, but somebody unusual is calling. So these are ways that these kinds of events appear in the everyday world.

Your hand a little bit. Yes. Ooh, that's a very good signal.

Okay. I think we're ready to go. Dr. Radin has tested more than 300 volunteers in electromagnetically shielded rooms. He shows them a series of images and measures their reactions.

We present in a random sequence pictures which are calm or emotional, and also pictures in between. The more emotional pictures evoke a stronger response. What Dr. Radin found is that while his pool of subjects is randomly chosen, he always finds people who respond accurately before they see the image. They seem to know ahead of time the kind of picture they'll see. Though their degree of psychic ability appears to vary.

Not everybody's going to be able to play golf as good as Tiger Woods. But everybody can play golf a little bit. And so what we tend to see in the laboratory is everybody playing golf a little bit.

And occasionally we're lucky and we get the equivalent of Tiger Woods. Somebody's claiming they were buried with gum. Somebody was buried with gum.

You buried somebody with chewing gum? Take the mic, please. John Edwards'success as a TV medium would suggest he's in the Tiger Woods category.

In the history of science, we've often been wrong. We used to think the Earth was flat. We were wrong.

We used to think the sun revolved around the Earth. We were wrong. We used to think physical objects were solid and static. We now know that was wrong. So I start from a point of view when anybody makes a claim, whether it's a medium or a healer, I approach it as, I don't know, could be yes, could be no, show me the data, I'm open.

You only put a couple of sticks in? Um, his old secretary, they used to chew the same gum and we put it in the casket with him. A couple of sticks? It was, uh, I think they're like individual packets, like the bazooka, the one with the comics, I think.

Okay, so that's what I'm feeling. You're individual. Alright, would this be like a father figure to you? It's my dad.

Okay. And do you still see his assistant? Yes.

He wants you to tease her, like what, she could spare a few more slices or like, like I couldn't have the whole pack? The way the process of mediumship typically operates is that the mediums get little pieces of information. So he's making me feel like, wasn't he already kind of gone? Yes, he was. He was.

Not because the other side is fragmented, but because they're just able to pick up little snippets. It's like you've got a semi-good connection on your cell phone and you get a piece of information here, a piece of information there. People say, well, where are they and how do you do this?

And it's like, well, where's the internet? It's a place that exists, but you can't go there with a physical body. You have to have a conduit of some sort, some sort of connection to get to it. You've got to be plugged in somehow. Anybody have a plastic frog with them?

I'm being pulled here. So. So like from here over, you guys are safe. Over here, no.

If I'm doing an event, I will get a pull to the section of the room, a specific area of people. My nephew asked for, for Christmas, a toy frog. And it was his dad that passed away.

And his dad passed before Christmas? Yes. When I'm hearing something, I don't hear it in my ear.

I feel like I'm hearing it outside of me, but it's a thought that I'm hearing. No. John is one of several psychic mediums who agreed to undergo science. scientific testing at the University of Arizona.

We're going to put a cap on you that has 19 electrodes. I did three experiments with John Edwards, each one more controlled than the next. The most controlled of them involved fitting the mediums and the volunteers with EEGs on their heads and EKGs on their chests. One of the ways to address the question, is the medium reading the mind of the sitter versus reading the mind of the deceased? is to record the brainwave activity and the cardiac activity, the heart and brain of the medium, and simultaneously record the brain and the heart of the sitter.

The medium never meets the subject and they sit separated by a screen. John and the other mediums have to get whatever information they can about the subject's deceased loved ones. I'm going to tell you what I'm seeing, hearing and feeling and basically asking you to do the same.

I ask you to confirm and verify it simply by yeses and ohs. Okay. Okay, um, the first thing that's coming through is to tell me to talk about a male figure to your side. A male figure to your side would be a husband or a brother who has crossed over. Do you understand that?

Yes. Okay, actually there's two, there's three. There are complications that...

I sat with people and got nothing. You know, like, I got absolutely nothing. And they'd be like, why is that happening? I'm like, I don't know.

I'm like, maybe it's me. I don't know. So I got zeros for that.

But sometimes, John will get accurate information. The sitter will either think he's wrong and later discover he's correct, or the sitter won't know the answer, and they'll have to then contact some of the family members and friends and lo and behold discover that it was correct. And we found that. experiment as well.

John's accuracy rate typically averaged 80 to 90 percent and the monitoring machinery showed his brain waves and heart rate were not mimicking the subjects. We discovered that John's heart actually went out of sync with the sitter, which implied, of course, that his attention was somewhere else. They were also telling me to talk about the dog that's named after a drink, so I don't know if there's like a time...

Yeager. Yeager? Yes. Yes. By the way, apparently needs a bath.

Yes, he smells right now. He does. Based on the laboratory experiments that I've done with John, I am clearly led to the conclusion that John is a real medium.

The so-called afterlife experiments remain highly controversial within the scientific community, in part because they raise more questions than they answer. At the present time, scientifically, we don't know how real mediums like John Edwards do what they do. The working hypothesis that we entertain in our laboratory is that we all have energy.

This energy continues, like the light from distant stars. And what John does and others do is that their brains and consciousness serve as an antenna and receiver. And what they do is they learn how to tune in to the signals that are present and keep their noise low and then receive these subtle signals.

The concept of a connected fabric of reality. Of which we are part of that, by virtue of being here, is similar to something like the Force from Star Wars. Obi-Wan at some point suddenly feels a disturbance in the Force when a planet is blown up. And in a sense he's feeling ripples through this space-time medium that he's able to sense directly. The phenomena we call ESP probably operate on something like that.

name for this distant connectedness it's called quantum entanglement at the moment it's just a theory being applied to electrons and molecules scientists don't know yet if it could apply to the brain But the breakthrough that confirms extrasensory perception could come sooner than we think. It's always very difficult to predict when such things happen. I would guess maybe 20 years. Somewhere, sometime between...

Tomorrow in 20 years. The next two decades promise to unlock many mysteries about the brain. Neuroscientists are already working on smart technologies that could change our lives in ways we'd never imagined.

We will get to a point, I believe, when there will be instantaneous communication from the web to our brains. That I'm sure. What if we could supercharge our brains using machines and take the next leap of evolution within a single lifetime instead of over many lifetimes? Radical innovation is the goal of programs being funded by the semi-secret DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Their mission is to be kind of the blue sky thinkers of science for the national security establishment. And they've produced some amazing technologies that we take for granted, besides the Internet, the computer mouse, and of course the stealth bomber. They take some of the smartest scientists in the country and they ask them to push current science 30, 40 years into the future.

They take big leaps. DARPA is funding one such leap at Columbia University in New York. Scientists there are developing a computer program that helps the brain process visual information at lightning speed. In our modern society, we're bombarded with information, whether it's images from technology, television, images on the web, one's job, and it's starting to be overwhelming and we need to figure out which images we really need to spend time looking at and which we can ignore. The idea behind cortically coupled computer vision is to create the best of both worlds, the versatility of the human brain enhanced by the speed of a computer.

It's very hard to tell a computer vision system find something that's funny or out of the ordinary or suspicious. It's much easier to have a computer vision system that's not just a computer vision system. have a person do that.

Of course, computer vision systems are very fast, so the question is, how can we actually make the human visual processor faster? In this example, the images are aerial shots of Seoul in South Korea. The analyst is looking for helipads. The old slow method would require a methodical search of thousands of individual photos before marking each helipad. The new method involves the analyst wearing an EEG cap.

Dozens of electrodes can now detect electrical brain activity just below the surface of the skull. In normal brain processing, the visual cortex extracts detail from a scene. Information is sent forward to the frontal lobes for decision making.

Then the motor cortex generates a response, the click of a mouse or the movement of the eyes. The prototype program intercepts the signals, filters out irrelevant brain activity, and focuses on the subliminal aha moment when the eyes spot a helipad. In just a few seconds, the analyst can sift through the thousands of images. Although he may not be consciously aware of it, his brain is remarkably accurate at identifying the few shots that have helipads in them so they can be marked up later. Essentially we're going to tap into the signals that are involved in deciding whether there's something interesting and without having the subject having to make a response use that to now reorder or resort image databases to improve search.

This boosted vision technology helps the image analyst work up to four times faster. It could be adapted to help fighter pilots make better split-second decisions, or to improve the sifting of surveillance footage by police or security personnel. And then there are possibilities beyond defense and intelligence. One potential application that's of interest in which there's high throughput of information might be in the stock market or in trading. I mean, many times traders, they're assimilating this information across different screens.

something might catch their eye, but they can't actually act on that at that moment. So that information can be tagged that it grabbed the interest of the trader and processed by some other person down the line. Medical research might be interested in these devices too, and marketing teams could use them to record people's first reaction to a product or advertising campaign.

A video game company in California is already ditching the joystick in favor of brain power. A headset, similar to an EEG, picks up electrical activity from the brain, as well as twitches from facial muscles. The signals get translated into on-screen commands.

Players raise rocks and vanquish villains, not with a click, but with a thought. The future potential for implanted personal data assistance, or PDAs, is almost mind-boggling. As we get older, we... We all worry about our inability to remember names and faces.

We're going to find ways to compensate for that loss of natural, evolved memory. We're evolving in the direction where we will have devices that will do that for us. And I think ultimately we're going to have a Facebook in our heads. At that point, it's going to be pretty hard to see where we end and the technology begins.

At Duke University in North Carolina, neuroscientists are taking that next step already. They've implanted electrodes into a monkey's brain and isolated the brain signals for walking. During one recent experiment, a monkey paced on a treadmill, while her brain activity was sent via the internet to Japan to instantly control the walking of a five-foot humanoid robot.

The monkey got raisin treats for making the robot walk. Then her treadmill was switched off. In her desire for more treats, the monkey kept the robot walking, using only her thoughts.

And there's been a similar breakthrough at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania. Monkeys, fitted with tiny sensors in their brains, have learned to control a mechanical arm and use it to reach for snacks. It will have tremendous implications for medicine, for people who are amputees, for people who are in the hospital.

are quadriplegic, giving them the ability to move robot prosthetic arms and legs in ways that will allow them to interact with their environments, which they have not been able to do before. Could there be hope in the future for someone like Clive Waring, whose brain damage means he can't process new memories? I don't remember sitting down in this seat.

That was unknown to me. There's work being done currently with rats that might one day create a synthetic hippocampus for humans. If you could do that in theory, you could actually introduce instantaneously new memories as we do in computer chips every day these days. What if instead of taking months and months to learn a language, we could download a basic dictionary of a language?

What if never having been somewhere, instead of having to carry that tour guide or book around, that clumsy book, and stopping in the middle of the sidewalk every few minutes to see where we're going, we actually had a rudimentary map that had been downloaded into our brains of that new city that we're visiting, or those modern cities that we're visiting? monuments that we're looking at. Drugs are being developed for combat troops that would allow them to stay awake for two or three days with no ill effects.

A new class of chemicals called ampoquines are thought to help the neurotransmitter glutamate work better in a tired brain. so improve memory, learning, and cognition. These could eventually find their way into everyday use. Lack of sleep historically has meant that you are inclined to make mistakes. I think we're going to be able to resolve that problem.

Shift workers, people who have to work all night, might be able to do without sleep and function very well. Students who are studying for exams, people who have to travel across time zones as part of their work. In the near future, scientists expect to perfect portable brain scanners.

Light-emitting diodes, fitted in a headband, would bounce light into the frontal lobes to detect brain activity. That information would be fed into a unit no bigger than a pack of playing cards. Instead of lying motionless in a giant MRI machine, wearers could discover what's going on in their brains while, for example, playing sports. We will be able to look into super athletes brain like Federer or Agassi or Tiger Woods and see not that they're different anatomically necessarily but functionally they are different in terms of how they process information. The second application is that you can use this new technology to help athletes perform better or perform up to their capacity.

Imaging technology is still in its infancy. In widespread use for less than 20 years, compared with over 100 years for x-rays, it's limited only by our imagination. The pictures we get of the brain right now, though there are several really amazing technologies, they're pretty gross.

They're at a large level. Now people are saying, wow, it would be really good if we could get a more granular more fine-grained, deeper images of the brain, so at the molecular level. And I think that's the next frontier for brain imaging.

For all that we have learned about the brain, we still have so much to discover. There are many unsolved questions that remain about the brain, and they're surprisingly simple. How is memory actually stored and how does it get reconstructed? Why do brains sleep and dream? What is intelligence?

Why do people have a variety of skills and talents? How do we perceive the world? How does the brain represent time? What is consciousness? If we do manage to answer these questions over the course of perhaps one more lifetime, what will this mean for the brain, an organ that is so complicated and so often driven by primitive instincts?

We evolved in a world very different than the world we live in today, so we have to adapt now. And this to me is the greatest mystery of neuroscience right now, is how

Transcript for:Zgłębianie funkcji mózgu i tajemnic

Transcript for:
Zgłębianie funkcji mózgu i tajemnic