 Don't be fooled by the accent. He's just a good old country boy teaching in Bristol Raising some chickens studying hamsters and never dating girls wearing crystals I'm telling y'all he's a country boy who loves his mama good Like Batman's got his robin like Doritos our health food I'd tell you more if 3,000 miles to our show you Well, it looks like we're in business here. I hope you've got some image in front of you and if not, I'll just okay way Hey, it is Friday the 13th after all So, uh, it's great to be back here two years ago I talked about my first book Super Sans was all about the way the brain creates these illusions that there are Patterns and energies operating the world and you can understand that this is the basis for supernatural belief So, you know, this would have been a good day to return to that But today I wanted to tell you about a different type of no illusion one Which is actually more pervasive because it's an illusion shared by Believers and non-believers alike and that is the self illusion this idea that we're integrated coherent individuals Who are inside our bodies somehow operating it almost like a puppet master with kind of coherent thoughts and processes I'm going to claim that that sense of the self is not what it seems to most of us So what do you mean by the self? Well, if I was to say to you Do you like vanilla or do you like chocolate ice cream? You have a sense of the self of hearing a question Contemplating an answer and then formulating some some response. Now, that's the sense of the self in Conscious moment awareness. That's what William James would call the eye sense of the self But of course to answer that question you have to draw upon all the experiences that you've had You know when you've last seen nice cream and that of course is a legacy of all the experiences and influences and past events And if I was to meet you in the bar and say tell me about yourself You would say well, I was born wherever and I have this is a job and this is what I do And this is what I want to do for the future. These are all sorts of bits of information Which are what we call the personal identity of self. So William James called that the me So both the eye and the me are facets of the self, but I think they're both constructed by the brain I'm not denying people have events and Experiences of course, but I would argue that the brain abstracts these and weaves these together into a coherence a coherent characterization of identity and Certainly the idea that it's an illusion don't that doesn't mean it's not real an illusion means that it's not what it seems And we should be wary. I'm not denying you're having the experience What I'm trying to say is that the experience of the self is very different and we should be reminded by this from a classic film If you pop that up there I'm sure most of the geeks in this audience will well recognize this masterpiece of science fiction No slides nothing. Oh, that's a shame. You missed the soundtrack as well. Oh I went to all that effort never mind. Yeah, should I do it again? It's pretty cool soundtrack. Okay. Here we go. Let's try again Yeah, cool Let's walk some leather and dark glasses. It's always gonna be a winner, wasn't it? Now the thing about Neo is of course he thinks that he's a computer programmer But we know that and he like the rest of the civilization has been enslaved by the sentient computers To harvest them for their biochemical energy And the way they keep them enslaved is they feed directly into their brains a simulation this this matrix So that they never know now of course it signs fiction But the principle that if you could ever control the the working of the brain Then you would effectively control the mind is is one which I think is worth exploring Because I have to think that we we're not living in the matrix as such But we are simulating the external world the whole time and I also think we're simulating an internal Character to interact with that world. So for example at the moment You've got this very rich experience of seeing me with my hands and you've got all this detail of this amazing visual field But in fact, you're only processing a small part of it. You're only really processing the central part of your visual field It's colorblind and smeared in the periphery of your vision. You've got two black holes You know which correspond to the blind spots Portions of the retina with our new photoreceptors and yet your brain fills that in all the time very reliably You just would never know now Of course, you can move your eyes all the time to look around and investigate the world But every time you move your eyes your visual scene is literally blanking off You're you're actually blind every time you move your eyes If you don't believe me go to the restroom after the talk and have a look in the mirror And then stare your left eye and then your right eye and then your left eye and you can't see your own eye movements You're effectively blind for two and a half hours of every waking day But you would never know that because your brain creates this this simulation It's all filled in all just seems rich continuous and coherent, but that's not true Now I also think that there's a multitude of unconscious processes Which are really the basis our thoughts and behaviors, but we simulate this character the individual to try and keep track of all The multitude to give it a sense of coherence. So that's what I think the self is I think it's a sort of serial interface if you like between the complexity of the world out there and the multitude of all the unconscious processes So how does this happen? Well, how does this get created? This is this is me by the way This is my brain. I had an image in one of our studies a couple of years ago Everything that I am my anxiety speaking to all you people and my thoughts and my memories somehow are encoded and stored in This three pound lump of tissue, but of course I didn't pop out my mother's womb as Bruce That would have been a bit strange. I had to become I had to develop into Bruce And so there's a developmental processor. How does that happen? Well, you're all familiar now the brain is made up of vast networks of billions of neurons and they all communicate with each other through these electrical impulses and that information is Interpreted coded into these synchronized patterns that we are basically Presentations of the external world or representations representations are are the language of the brain and even thoughts and memories that you dwell upon or bring to consciousness Are representation systems? So how do those representations get there? Well, I think some are built in but a lot of them are required through experience So this is my interest by the way. I'm a developmental neuroscientist The baby brain is a lot smaller, but what you may not appreciate it actually has more or less the full complement of neurons as an adult Around about 86 billion, but what is changing of course is the connectivity between those neurons Basically, there are two processes is a very rapid explosion of connectivity this sort of progressive Wiring up generation of synapses, but there's equally a degeneration or pruning back of experience And the reason this happens It's a way that the environment can literally shape the brain because you don't want to keep connections Which are never going to be lost Never going to be used and in this way You know the brain is literally being shaped and this has some interesting consequences For example, you know that every child has the capability to learn language of the born of Japanese parents and race in the US They will easily effortlessly acquire English, but England quarry In developing expertise you become tuned in to your particular environment and lose the capability and flexibility of hearing and Perceiving other aspects. So this explains for example why it's often difficult to hear the differences in other languages We can test this out Let's have a go. Let's see how good you are with Hindi So I want you to listen very carefully and you'll hear two segments of Hindi You know, this is audience participation, by the way time I'm going to ask you to raise your hands if you think they're the same or different. I'll prompt you So pig pay attention. Let's go sound up on this You ready? duck duck Hands up if you think they're different Hands up if you think they're the same Yep, they're they're different. One's a word. One's a complete non-word. Apparently. Here's another example Dole dole Different you got it. Ah, you get you learn Hindi fast Yeah, they actually are different in general though. It's very very hard to tell these sorts of things It's not just sounds and voices also faces We are wiring in and tuning into the environment. The next one's a really good example I used this last time I talked but it's such a it makes a couple of really interesting points So this is the McGurk effect. So watch carefully and see tell me what you think he's saying ba ba ba ba ba ba Hands up if you heard da da da da da pretty reliable. You probably put money on it Okay, this time close your eyes and listen carefully. You ready? ba ba ba ba ba ba Gotcha. Yeah, he's saying ba ba. He's not saying that at all Why do you hear that? Well, it's because actually what we've done is we've cheated a little bit We're using he's mouthy gaga. Okay, so that shape of that visual information You don't have any representation in your brain for that shape of mouth on that sound so your brain basically Comes up with a solution to make sense of this incompatible information So you don't have any direct contact reality Your brain is giving that to you all the time trying to make sense of the world of ambiguity missing information Now these examples typically have been talked about in the realms of perception You know low-level vision voices stuff like that, but we're increasingly coming to understand that the brain Is really a social brain and it's really important to have very important very enriched social environments Now you can't do these sorts of deprivation deprivation studies Ethically with children, but every so often you do get these examples where children have been raised in terrible conditions of social deprivation The most scientifically studied example. This was the fall of the Chalcescu's Regime the Romanian orphans and they were basically Children who had been dumped by their parents who couldn't look after them So they had the food in the water, but they were kept in isolation and they were then taken out and raised in very nurturing environments But the point was despite that intervention these children still ended up a very severe Deprivation and they're now adults and they're they have social problems in many ways We should have known that anyway because the work of Harry Harlow in the 60s had shown that it's really important to raise To get a social environment. He raised Reese's Monkeys gave them all the food and warmth in the water that they could need But just left them isolated and they ended up socially retarded Normally an environment is pretty good. So but childhood, you know children just love other Other people, you know, that's what they do You know my I thought for example with You know faces are just like magnets to babies. They love other people. They pay that's the most important stimulus to a child It's not a toy or anything. It's other people This is what our brains have evolved to do and we will emulate and copy and in fact a lot of the learning really What only makes sense in the social context? I love this next one actually This is a this is a European MP who took her daughter to a very important vote in the European Parliament I don't know if she got the extra vote there But anyway, you know we emulate and copy our parents and this is what we do to become this strange race I was at DJ growth. He called us the social private sale. You know we congregate we spend a large amount of time Doing things which if you were an alien from another planet would look really bizarre, you know, we need other people I mean there are some of us who don't you who are isolates and try to keep away But for the majority of us we spend in an order amount of time becoming a social animal. So how do we do that? Well, we have to develop a sense of the self because I don't think we're like super social species like ants and bees and that I think that we are we are a very social animal But we're a collections of cells because we need to integrate or interact at an individual base basis We we don't interact with multitudes of unconscious processes. So how does that come about? Well, the sense of self I think is there's developed There I think babies probably have that I notion of the momentary consciousness I think that's probably there, but I don't think they have personal identity. I mean, how could they? That's something which I think they they pick up over the early childhood years. So for example self recognition They don't generally recognize themselves in the mirror. There's a famous rouge test. You put their makeup on their nose They'll just stare at the baby in the mirror and laugh and giggle. It's just another baby But you know from about 18 months onwards, they'll they'll remove it indeed other animals which are social animals also pass this task So there's some controversy about exactly what this test means But I think you know, they're certainly becoming self-conscious aware of others around them looking at them They start to pick up identity some the early identity markers are things like boys do this girls do that Children of this age are very kind of categorical. They don't have very nuanced ideas And that's only as they get older. They understand their set exceptions to the rules They acquire what we call a psychologist call a theory of mind They understand that others have mental states which might be different to their own because prior to that they're fairly Egotistic this assume everyone has the same thoughts as they do And then throughout this period is this increasing Concern about where they are in the pecking order. This is the development of self-esteem You know, they're starting to interact with their peer groups. They're starting to be worried about where they are And of course a lot of childhood is is focused on this concern about where there are where they are in the pecking order The worst thing is being ostracized bullying Then we have the teenage years and an attempt to establish yourself get your own identity separate to your parents Finding oneself. That's what the teenage years are all about and of course the irony is that everyone turns into the parents in the mid 20s So this is this is what happens now along with this This goes back to my first book on on on supernatural beliefs because I think this growing Sentience this growing self-awareness Also fits with the idea of Mind-body dualism, which is I think the most common Position that people assume when you ask them about the mind and the body They think that they're separate that we inhabit our bodies These are vessels which we sign up kind of right around and we control them And you know and they let us down, you know occasionally we say oh my legs given out or something like that We feel that we are separate to our bodies You know we face the mirror on a kind of daily basis We see the ravages of age and we see our external appearance changing But we feel internally that we're still have continuity So I think there is this tendency to assume that we are inhabiting our bodies And then we move with our bodies somehow and this is a There was some discussion of this idea today about the idea of duplication and I just filled around with keynote So please indulge me here we go That was worth it wasn't it? Yeah, I'm a bit of geek So the idea is that we never really questioned about the mind and the body being separate You know it's only when you face with these unusual thought experiments What happens if it malfunctions in episode five? I'm sure there's some start to it, you do remember that episode five? Yeah you're out there, you can't hide Yeah episode five we had James T. Kirk duplicated I prefer actually this film you haven't seen it you really should see as a classic Chris Nolan Batman director This is a film The Prestige about two Victorian dueling magicians And one of the protagonists Hugh Jackman meets up with a real life Nicholas Tesla Who builds them this duplicating machine I won't give the plot away because it's a great film but basically he copies himself And the question is if you could really build a machine which duplicates down to molecular level Then would the mind be duplicated? Michael Sherman mentioned this this morning It's a familiar thought experiment that philosophers talk about And most people think that you couldn't, they think their mind is indivisible Their mind is unique, their mind is something which can't be copied And I think that's a very common intuition but where does it come from? Well we started to as I say I work with children We wanted to know about this and we talked to six-year-olds And it's very difficult to discuss thought experiments with six-year-olds But what you can do is you can actually kind of give them an example And this is how we create the duplication scenario So this is how it goes Here's Mr. Strong, see how nice and squishy he is I'm going to put Mr. Strong in this box like that Then I'm going to close up the box Close up that box Make sure my machine's turned on And then turn it to green, turn this one to green as well And press go And see what happens So here there's Mr. Strong So in this box as well Ah, amazing, huh? It's not exactly James Randi, but you know I'm not going to give up the day job, I'll put it that way So children think, you know, say what's happening here And they think it's a duplicating machine, just like a photocopier Why wouldn't they? And we show them lots and lots of examples of every toy being copied And they believe this But the real question of interest is what happens if you put a living thing in there Now obviously the box is a little bit too small to put a person in there So what we did was we had the pet hamster And we told them, by the way, this work is coming out next month So I'm quite excited about it I've been talking about this for some time And it was never peer reviewed And now it is, and it's coming out in a good journal But here's what we found The long and short of the story is that We told them that we had this hamster Which had physical properties They couldn't see, it had a marble and a tummy and a broken tooth And then we gave it some mental states So we told the hamster the child's name We showed a picture the child had drawn And then we put it into the machine and then duplicated it And now there are two hamsters And the child's asked, well, does it know your name? Does it have a marble and a stomach? And the bottom line was they basically were quite happy That all the physical properties were copied So there wasn't a problem with that But they were very reluctant to think That the mental states were also copied That was only found in the first hamster In fact, the effect was even stronger If you gave the first hamster a name By calling up Bob So once you have identified an individual Then along with that comes a whole or baggage About unique minds being inseparable We're quite happy to believe that Simple animals without minds like aphids In fact, aphids are clones But simple animals can be duplicated But the idea of sentient and sentience And minds is something which we don't believe Can be manipulated or copied in that way So where is this self? Well, let's think back to the discussion of the eye Of the sense of the conscious awareness At the point in time If you get people to just try and meditate And then point to where they feel Their seed of consciousness is This is generally where they think they are This is based on another study by other people And you think you exist somewhere Inside your head sitting behind your eyes But there can't be a little person Sitting in your head behind your eyes Because that wouldn't make a lot of sense If they're inside your head Who's inside their head and their head And their head and so on So you get into the problem of the homunculus Or that's the infinite regrets That's why you can't have the unified self Inside your head This is probably a little bit more accurate As you can see, I use a lot of popular culture When I'm doing my science This is the num skulls And this is a guy called Ed And he has all these little people Now clearly you haven't got lots of little people In your head And even if you're dead You still have the problem of the homunculus But it is true to think about the mind As being comprised of a multitude of functions That somehow come together To form a coherent sense of self And I think that the evidence strongly supports this This is the work of Roger Sperry The Nobel Prize winner And his student at the time was Michael Kazanaga And they were doing work with these patients With intractable epilepsy One of the treatments for that Is to cut those connections I was telling you about the corpus callosum To separate the hemisphere It stops the epilepsy spreading Now the consequence of that is Because the way that your sensory and motor systems Are organized The left part of your field Is processed by the right side of your brain And the right part of the visual field And motor control is processed by the left hemisphere What you can do And this is what Kazanaga did Is you can present these split brain patients With information which is inconsistent In both hemispheres So in this situation, for example You get them to fixate the middle spot And say what they see on the screen Now language is predominantly in the left hemisphere And they would respond, oh, it's a ring And then you say, well, will your left hand Pick up the object from the table But because that's processed on the right side Which controls the left hand They would then pick up the key And when they're confronted With this inconsistency What they typically do Is they confabulate an account A story which makes sense Of all the incoherent information And I think that's what is going on I think the brain is creating That has a multitude of unconscious influences Which are somehow having to be reconciled I think Stephen Pinker captured that With the notion of the eye consciousness When you say consciousness isn't the master and chief It's the spin doctor of experience So I think that that's what's going on You're basically trying to create a coherent picture And this also goes for those memories Everyone thinks their memory is very reliable John Locke, the philosopher, talked about identity As the culmination of episodic memories Somehow being brought together But of course memories are not that reliable And they're always being reinterpreted Reintegrated with new information And our next speaker, Carol Tavris Is among some of the world's authorities On the way that we reinterpret information To fit with this characterization Of who we think we are We have this notion of an idealized notion Of our self And when we don't do things According to that character You say I wasn't myself Or it was the wine talking Well wine doesn't talk And if you weren't yourself Then where were you? So you know, it's true You must be this culmination of factors And again, if you think back Over the history of social psychology This notion that we are individuals Is always challenged by the fact That we just are so manipulable And sensitive to the cultural context The social context, so obedience Ashes' work Most people would actually administer A lethal electric shock Although most people claim They wouldn't listen to Milgram's work The arbitrarily set people up Into different groups They have in-group, out-group biases Start treating the other group nasty And of course all this work Kind of leads to this sort of explanation For why people do incredibly Inhumane things to other people So the idealized notion of who we are Is somewhat questionable So our brain is a social brain And from the very beginning I think it's one which is very much geared Towards other people and influenced By other people But you know, don't worry About this idea of the illusion Because I think people are concerned Well, illusions means it's not there But if you consider this illusion This is the Kniece illusion You know, you see a square But it's of course an emergent property Of everything there But here's the important point If you went into the brain To the visual processing areas You would find assemblies of cells Which are firing as if the square Really is there So although it's an illusion In terms of the representation It's effectively there In the same way I think the characterization of the self Is one which is an emergent property Of all the influences which have shaped You over your life But you be foolish to think That you exist independently of them In the same way You be foolish to think That the square exists independently Now, I went through that talk rather fast And I'd be wondering, you know Is he on speed or drugs? No, the reason I went through that fast Is because I decided to change The end of the talk I got a phone call on Wednesday night And I know you've already heard about this But it's such an important issue And I had a small role in it I just wanted to remind you And show you maybe some of the stuff You didn't see about Why this is so important I'm talking about the bomb dowsing thing That I was involved in some You know, three years ago You may not know But James Ramney in 2008 Was responsible for having the guys Who perfected this dowsing role This is this piece of equipment That they claim could discover You know, drugs and explosives The SNFACs that have put our business Where did they go? They went to the UK They started up again A whole bunch of companies We had the GT 200, the AD 651 And I would not have known About any of this If it wasn't for the fact That the New York Times Published an expose on Published a report showing The Iraqi government has spent $85 million investing in these devices To be used at checkpoints Rather than doing the appropriate thing Which was to thoroughly search The cars for the bombers The consequence was That hundreds of people Were losing their lives Now I'm an academic I'm not an activist normally And I wouldn't have done Anything about this But it turns out that the company Was just down the road for me And the director, Jim McCormick Was there So I blogged about it This is disgraceful We've got to write to MPs We've got to do something This is really outrageous There's just simply no science For this And to my great surprise Jim McCormick Maybe it was the fact That I was an academic And he was seeking some validation Wrote back to me And invited me to come down And we were going to test it And I thought this was an opportunity Which was too good to miss So I got in touch with the BBC And we did a sting operation Because we wanted to expose Jim McCormick At the time And this is a little bit Of what we did Good evening A news light investigation Has discovered that a supposed bomb Detector produced by a British company And sold for use in Iraq Simply does not work Following our revelations The government has to ban their export To Iraq and Afghanistan The Iraqi government has spent 85 million dollars on the devices Which have been widely used And there are concerns that the Detectors have failed to stop Bomb attacks that have killed Hundreds of people There are some disturbing images In Caroline Hawley's exclusive report Yes, see? Jim McCormick may be hiding From the cameras here in the UK But he did appear at a press conference In Baghdad after last month's bombs Filmed by Iraqi television He and this Iraqi security chief Were trying to persuade local journalists The detectors worked The grenade the device is meant to Detect is placed in full view Of the operator No surprise It points at its target It would be comic If the consequences weren't Potentially so tragic We brought the footage To show to Professor Bruce Hood Okay, well I was on the Look, there's been a lot of people Involved in this campaign I was just involved in the Part of the TV show Because basically this company Had been given an export licence By the British government Which was unbelievable And they would have done nothing If it hadn't been for the fact That we went on to national Television and broadcast that The following day He was arrested And the export order ban Was issued for the sale Of these items to Iraq And Afghanistan Now, at that point We thought that was a major success We then discovered That he was continuing to trade As was GT 200 And the other companies In fact, trading to your neighbours Mexico, where they have been Buying millions of dollars Worth of these pieces of equipment And I have to confess I was pretty upset That in fact we may have Lost the battle in the long run But then February this year The police visited me And I gave a statement And then I got this phone Call on Wednesday night To tell me that in fact They now had sufficient evidence That Jim McCormick was actually Going to face trial And indeed, yesterday morning He appeared in the High Court And not only Jim McCormick But all of them Gary Bolton The Trees Sam Schardt And Andy Rosell And they're all probably Likely to go down The result of the case Won't be probably until February We're going to be working More with the BBC To do a proper story about And I assure you James Randi's definitely Going to get credit for this So thank you very much One of ours One of ours Bruce Hood, ladies and gentlemen, fantastic