 Our next speaker is Dr. Karl Krzysztofnicki from Australia. I saw him do a talk at TAM Australia, it was wonderful. He's an Australian science journalist, and he's a media personality, and I just found out that he's Ukrainian, so that made me very exciting. His talk is great moments in Australian science. Oh, and by the way, he got the science or fiction correct, he was backstage. Totally nailed it, totally nailed it. Here's his limerick. Australians are known to produce great science, both grand and obstruc. But when put to the task, all I can think to ask is, wait, is your name not Bruce? Please welcome Dr. Karl Krzysztofnicki. Hello, thank you. My name is Karl Krzysztofnicki. I'll have a soft introduction to cover the fact that I have a strange accent. It'll take about five minutes for you to understand what I'm saying. So this is some footage that I took down in the Antarctic. And I'm up in the pointy bit of the ship. So I've been trained, just a bit of background. I've been trained as a physicist and mathematician, a biomedical engineer, doctor and surgeon. But I don't do any of that stuff anymore. Instead, I tell stories. I'm a storyteller. I read my way through $10,000 worth of science fiction of science. So literature review, which is a pile of about a meter thick or a yard. And to make sure I can keep on reading my way through that big fat pile, I've got a very well-equipped library so I can spend hours and days in the library just thinking away and reading and wondering, what on earth will I come up for when I'm here to talk about the brain? Well, first, here's a bit of introduction about Australia. Over here is a map of Australia, superimposed upon the contiguous 48 states. So you can see they're roughly the same size. And I've spent 20 years test driving new four-wheel drives across the outback of Australia. And I've been through 15 of the 17 deserts. And this is my own personal vehicle. We've been in it through water up to the blue line. And here we are bogged in the oldest river in the world, 150 million years old, the Fink River. And we unleash the cable. And you can see on the roof we've got solar cells. All together we carried, for this particular trip, 160 gallons of fuel. We took my 12-week-old baby out. And here you see a whole bunch of diapers on the back of the car. That's a month's worth of diapers. So we started off in the middle of Australia, went west for 1,000 kilometers, turned north, went north for 1,000 kilometers. And in that month, we saw only one other group of people. And we had to carry all of our own food and all of our own fuel. The reason that the outback is red is because of rust, iron ore. It's just sitting there blowing across Australia. And so we took off from the center and out we went. And here you can see more of the outback. And there's our vehicle. The curiously soft quality of the sand dunes. And some of those plants have got roots that go down 20 yards, 20 meters, in an effort to try and get water. Here you can see some camel tracks. We've got a lot of camels in Australia. And this is a plant, a honey grevillea. And you can see, if you look at the arrows, you can see these little drops of honey. They are literally liquid sugar, liquid floating there. And so what you do is you pick it up and then shove it in your mouth and then you suck. That's me with hair several years ago. In this trip of one month, we drank between the five of us. That was three adults, two year old and a 12 week old baby. We drank one and a half tons of water, which we got by going to a well and pulling it out. And here's my 12 week old baby saying, oh, it's getting a little bit hot for me now. And on one occasion, she actually began to get floppy on us, which anybody who's worked in kids knows is a terrible situation. You don't want anybody to get floppy on you. So we chucked her in our drinking water bucket and she came good, hooray, that cooled her down. My two year old son then immediately wanted to duplicate that so we shoved him into a bucket as well. And he had a good time. So in our next trip, we start off at the center of Australia and went directly west, straight left. And we came across this, you've heard of life on earth being around for a long time and how the oldest fossils on earth are of stromatolites 3.8 billion years ago. That is a living stromatolite. It's a weird creature that sort of filters the water coming into it. And of course we've got dolphins, which we went there to get our psychic enlightenment. Nearby we saw a beach. And here on this beach, we call it Shell Beach. And there's 50 miles of shells like that. That's what it is, just for 50 miles, no humans. And here we are at another place called Calabari. It's not a very big arch compared to your archers, but it is Australia. And right next to it, it had an outcrop and I said to my wife, honey, carry the two babies and just keep on moving closer. No, no, a bit closer, it looks better this way. Keep going. And then on another trip, we went in a big loop around the center of Australia. You can see to the sort of middle right. And here we are looking at, or, this is weird. Ants, if you get an individual ant, it's got no IQ. But if you get a whole bunch of ants, suddenly you've got a creature that has a nursery and they have armies and they have babies and they have nursery centers and they go out and they get food and they have air conditioning and the termite nest can be arranged north and south and they work with it. This is up in the top left hand corner of Australia now in an area called the Kimberley. And you can see that sort of curious chute coming down that shiny thing and the arrows point at a tree. That tree is 15 yards high. So that chute, which is as smooth as a baby's bottom, incredibly smooth from all the water that goes down it, is about Olympic swimming pool size. These are the bungal bungal. Not bungal bungals plural. They got it wrong on that. It's just a plain old single bungal and the water flows through there at the rate of one cubic kilometer per hour in the wet season and it just gouges through the rock. These huge grooves and leaving behind these curious behaved structures, nice ponds up there and then going for another loop around the middle of Australia. This dingo kept on following us. You know about dingos in the Australian Outback? And this dingo would just follow us day after day and we end up at a pool which was only slightly radioactive and we swam in the hot water. So looking here, what are we talking about? We're seeing a brain, right? Is it a human brain? Maybe go and have a look at Wikipedia brain and see what the first picture is. And so we came to this fine establishment here and we had no idea what this was like. We thought, wow, this is a huge casino. Let's go for a walk and we went walking downstairs and we saw this, a poster for a movie called Lucy and my two daughters are going, hmm, I'm a little bit worried about this. Not Scarlett Johansson, but this, the average person uses only 10% of their brain capacity. Whoa, really? Now we have a clipping here, Dr. Bruce, we've got to have a clipping from a movie. This is the download of the trailer. Really slipped in package into your lower tummy when you're going to transport something very special to us. Yes! Take me to the hospital now. Hospital? Somebody put a bag of drugs inside me, I need you to take it out. It's leaking. It is estimated most human beings only use 10% of the brain's capacity. Imagine if we could access 100% interesting things begin to happen. Yes? Professor Norman, my name is Lucy, I just read all your research on the human brains. It's a little rudimentary, but you're on the right track. I thank you. I have access to 28% of my cerebral capacity. I can feel every little thing. Since when did you start writing Chinese? Happens when she reaches 100%. I have no idea. This knowledge, given unlocks secrets that go beyond our universe, I'm not even sure that mankind is ready for it. It's like all things that make me human are fading away. So by an amazing coincidence, we turn up here for a conference on the brain and what should we find but a movie advertised in the foyer saying, hey, you use only 10% of your brain. So I thought, of course, I will change my program and make up something special for you guys. So this is actually, the brain is actually very complicated. Okay, now Steve, very expensive to run, weighs a couple of percent of your body weight, but uses 20% of the energy that your body generates and it creates 20% of the heat generated. And the myth is that you use only 10% of your brain but if you use 100% of your brain, well blow me down, you'll be able to get a Nobel Prize and an Olympic gold medal and of course, according to Uri Geller, psychic powers. How did this myth started? You have to go back in time and one of the main do's was Carl Spencer Lashley. And he did an experiment back in the 1920s, he was a good guy and what he was trying to find out was where is memory, that same thing, the strange thing that makes us ask, where is memory stored? And what he did was he trained mice, rats, by the way, the definition of a rat is that creature which if killed in sufficiently large numbers will generate a PhD. So he got the rats to run through a maze and he removed more and more of their brain to see how they ran the maze and what he found was basically that memory, the strange thing that makes you, you and me, me, is not stored in a single part of your brain and secondly, he found that you remove any part of the brain, it led to memory problems. Okay, fair enough, at no stage did he ever say that you need only 10% of your brain, never said that. At no stage did he remove 90% of a rat brain but slowly the popular myth arose that rats did perfectly fine until you had only 10% of their brain left. How did this particular subset of the myth arrive? This guy here, Dale Carnegie, how to win friends and influence people and he wrote a book that sold 15 million copies eventually back in 1936 and he said in the way that motivational speakers do that if you just work a little bit harder after you buy my book, of course, you can improve your life enormously and then in his book with absolutely zero proof, he wrote that most people use only 15% of your brain. Now, this is wrong for various reasons and here is one reason why 100% usage of any part of your body is impossible and this is a fairly disturbing photograph of a man who has got tetanus and all the muscles in his body are switched on at the same time so his arms are both trying to contract and extend and the same with the legs and there have been cases where either the muscles in tetanus tear themselves off the bone or they stay attached to the bone and they break the bones. So you cannot have the situation where all of your muscles are switched on all of the time. You don't use all of your muscles each second but over a whole day you'll use most of your muscles a little bit of a way and in the same way, in your brain, you'll only use, each time you're doing something, walking, smelling, thinking, waving your arms, you'll only use a few percent of your brain but over a whole day averaged out all most parts of your brain will get a little use and if you were to use all of your brain at the same time, we're talking a terrible condition called status eftalypticus, which is a terrible, terrible thing. You can't use all of your brain at the same time. There are a few, so while I've on one hand sort of busted this myth to some degree that you use only 10% of your brain, there are a few exceptions here. So consider the condition called hydrocephalus where about two of every thousand babies have. You've got a constant flow of cerebrospinal fluid being generated in the brain, flowing around the brain and if you either make too much or if you have a blockage to the reabsorption, you can end up with two situations. Situation one is it can make the skull a bit bigger. The skull can actually expand in size or situation number two, the brain meat, the flesh, the substance gets squashed. So here's the CSF being generated in the blue area of the brain. You make about 500 mils. By the way, for our mostly American audience, I will translate mils into your normal unit. One mil is a cubic second per square furlong per day. That's the conversion. And you, okay, 150 mils is about a cup of tea. Okay, tea, you don't know tea. Okay, right, don't worry about it. Okay, and it flows, it's generated in the center and it flows around, comes back again. And here's a little movie of the CSF being generated and being reabsorbed. And the problem is when you can't reabsorb that. And this is a disturbing photograph of some kids whose brains have grown enormously. It happens, it's rare. And here you can see the black area is grossly enlarged. And between the black area and the white, which is the skull, is the brain meat. And that brain meat, the flesh, the stuff that makes you, you and me, me is normally about 45 millimeters thick. There is a case on record of a young man who had one millimeter of brain flesh, not 45, one. The inside of his skull was mostly fluid. And he had a Nike of 126 and an honest degree in maths, plural. You've all got it wrong, it's not a single math. There's a whole bunch of them. Anyway, this does not prove that you do, that most of the brain is useless. What it does prove is that in certain and very rare cases, the brain can recover from or compensate from major injuries. That's the first sort of disclaimer on the 10% brain. The second one is a new field called transcranial magnetic stimulation, where you get a magnetic field either from one ring or two when you shove it into the brain, induced currents, faraday, all that sort of stuff. And in transcranial magnetic stimulation, it's a little bit like ECT, kind of, in that you're inducing currents in the brain. And it's used to some degree with moderate effectiveness in depression and in migraines. And there's a guy at my university where, and other people have been doing this around the world, you get people who have no medical problems at all, you zap their brain, and you don't want to mess around with your brain for no reason, and you zap their brain, and temporarily, these people lose the ability to do the sort of day-to-day organization that all of us can do. If I want to get from here to the airport, okay, I've got to go to the phone and then ring up and then find out when the shuttles are going and then give them my name and then pack up my bags and then be down at the front desk so I can get to the airport, they can't do that. For a brief window of time, they lose the ability to work out how to comprehend a timetable. In response though, suddenly, they have this ability to draw a horse accurately for the first time in their life and they hold this ability for 10 to 15 minutes. So there are things that we can do with our brains that we don't fully understand yet, but to try and say that we use only 10% of our brain is rubbish. Talking about the brain even further, the well-known Flynn effect. IQ tests are calibrated so that the average IQ is 100 and you've got a bell-shaped curve. And looking at a standard test called the Wishler Intelligence Scale for Children, it has been recalibrated upwards three times over the last two thirds of a century, leading up to WISC-IV. And if you get a kid of today and you say, take the exam of 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 years ago, the average kid will get more than 100. Are we smarter? It goes back a long way, but the latest reincarnation is this guy here, James Flynn, currently in New Zealand, written about in the Scientific American called Solving the IQ Puzzle. Are we getting smarter? Looking at the results of IQ tests worldwide, you can see that the numbers in various countries are rising. Looking at just a single population, a single country, you can see that since the 19-somethings, the IQ scores are going up, but roughly three points per decade, nine points per 30 years, or in other words, your kids have got an IQ score nine points higher than you. And looking at it in different areas, you can see that there's a whole different ways of measuring IQ, verbal, spatial, mathematical abilities, similarities, blah, blah, blah, and they all come out differently, but the average is about 0.3 of the IQ point per year. Why, what does this mean? Well, over the last century, there have been massive changes in how our society runs. Back in 1900, only 3% of the jobs involved thinking. The rest of it was shifting stuff that people told you to shift. And our society has changed enormously from the concrete to the abstract. Get a kid back in 1900 and say, what is the similarity between a cat and a dog? And the kid would say, you use a dog to hunt a cat. That's concrete. Today's kid, what's the similarity? Oh, they're both mammals. Are we actually getting smarter or are we dealing with data in a new way? Read the articles, it's too deep for me to go into here, but James Flynn puts it nicely himself when he says that it is officially mysterious. Now, I'd like to talk a little bit here about the Apple logo because that deals deeply with the brain. Hey, how come the Apple logo has a bite out of it and originally it had a rainbow and how on my computer, why do I have snow white cuddling up to the Apple taking a bite out of it? It'll all come clear in the next couple of minutes. So this was the original Apple logo back in 1975. And you can see it's got Newton. It's really complicated. And this is the one with the sort of rainbow from 76 to 99 and they changed it after that. But what the heck? That is not a rainbow. See how red is in the middle? I have a rainbow on my house. See out the front? I just put it up there. That is a real rainbow, right? Right, and it goes from red to purple. This one is just a crazy rainbow. So going back to the Apple logo, okay, the colors are in the wrong order. Okay, we've got that out of the way. But why does it have a bite out of it? Is it some sort of pun that a B-I-T-E and a B-Y-T-E, which is a unit of data, pronounced the same? Or is it the Apple of Knowledge or Isaac Newton or all sorts of stuff? No. It is due to one really, really clever guy, Alan Turing. Alan Turing counts as one of the genuine geniuses of the 19th, of the 20th century. By the time he was 16, he could truly understand Einstein. And he, he invented the concept of a universal machine. Now let me explain to you what the heck this universal machine is. What you do is, suppose you can get one number. You might have a tape and you get one number and then you add it or subtract it to another number and then you store the results somewhere. He proved mathematically that if you can do that, you can invent, you can have a universal machine. A universal machine can do anything. You think, well, what the heck is this universal machine? It is the computer of today. Let me explain. In 2009, the family walked across Spain following the route of the El Camino. Read the book by Shirley McLean if you wanna have an interesting laugh. So we started off at one end and we walked about 790 kilometers, which is about just under 500 miles. And we walked our way across Spain and it was a lovely walk, about 25 kilometers a day. The olive branches, blooms, storms came. Ladies, look at my leg muscles. Now it wasn't me, it was some other guy who was a bicyclist. Oh God, he had leg muscles. Okay, so what was this universal machine? It was my smartphone. My smartphone was not just a phone or a camera and GPS and email and it's talking English, Spanish, dictionary. It was all these other things as well. All of this in one machine. Truly, Turing had put forward the idea of the universal machine. And in the Second World War, we're getting to the Apple logo and why I have snow white over here. And in the Second World War, the Nazis conquered Europe. And the United Kingdom was regarded either as an unsinkable aircraft carrier off the coast of Nazi-occupied Europe or an offshore attack base. Supplied by the United States who sent supplies across with high-speed sea convoys and these high-speed boats were sunk by the slow Nazi U-boats. How on earth do slow submarines sink fast convoys by being told where to go via radio messages that were encrypted via enigma? This is the enigma. By the way, I'm giving away a prize of a... This is okay, DJ Grovthy. He said it's okay. I'm giving away a prize of a BMW, a condominium block, and Australia to anybody who knows who funded the movie called Enigma. You've got five seconds. DJ, over there, that guy there. You can give him Australia as well. So Mick Jagger, in fact, did fund that movie. And here is the machine and look at the rotors and you turn the wheels and you do plug-ins and you hit the keyboard and you type the letter A and you get back B. You type the letter A again and you get back X. You type the letter A again and you get back N. What a crazy machine. It was a wonderful, wonderful machine. And to bust the code, they needed somebody clever and that somebody clever was Alan Turing. And he had to invent this machine to help him do it. Alan Turing, it is said. He did all his work at Bletchley Park. Alan's Turing shortened the Second World War by two years because it didn't begin to end until they could send the troops from the unsinkable aircraft carrier of the United Kingdom into Nazi-occupied Europe. D-Day happened just a little while ago. He shortened the war by two years, but nobody knew about it because the British had the Official Secrets Act. After that, in the 1940s, he worked on a stored program computer and then a thing called Baby, one of the first electronic computers. And in 1952, in 1952, he got robbed and a cops came up and they said, who... Sorry, whom? I used the objective, he said it's a subjective case, oh God. Whom do you suspect? And he said, I think that it was a friend of my boyfriend. He was gay, which was a crime. And he got busted. And he had a choice, go to jail or undergo chemical castration. He went for the hormones. His brain didn't work the same way anymore. He got depressed. And in 1954, he got an apple, injected it with cyanide and killed himself. Why? Because his favorite movie was the first full-length animation movie ever made, Snow White. And you know that scene in Snow White where she eats the apple and falls to the ground and see how the apple has a bite out of it and see how this apple has a bite out of it as well, the apple logo and the rainbow for gay. It's not true. It's mostly true. I'm an honest liar, thank you, James, ready for that. Alan Turing did die of cyanide poisoning. And yes, there was a half-eaten apple in the room. But the coroner did not analyze the apple. He analyzed him, but not the apple. And the guy who did the graphic design of the apple logo said and I quote, every apple I drew looked like a cherry. So I took a bite out of it and then suddenly it looked like an apple. And the rainbow, come on, it's San Francisco in 1970s. So it's a nice story, but it's not quite true. Sorry I had to lie to you there for a bit. So I'm just coming up to the end here with four minutes to go. So talking about the brain, I have to talk about how alcohol influences the brain. Rum and cola and blood alcohol, and this is some Australian research. Beer, God invented beer to show that he loved us. The pyramids were built on beer, which is why they have no doors. So if you have three rum and diet colas, the total calorie intake is around 225. If you then go for the regular cola, regular colas, three of them, will have 65 grams of sugar, which by an amazing coincidence is roughly equal to the average world daily consumption of sugar. Okay, forget that because we're getting off the topic. And so if you have your rum and your regular cola, you have twice as much energy in it, 450 kilocalories. And that makes a difference. So the stomach, that's this organ under here, not just the generic, everything from the bottom of your ribs to the top of your legs, with the specific organ called the stomach, it pushes its contents along into the next section into the small intestine where the alcohol can be absorbed at a specific rate. It varies. It's around two to three calories per minute. The longer that the alcohol stays in the stomach, the more it gets broken down. So if you have a couple of rum and diet cokes, you will go to 0.05, which is over the legal limit in Australia. If you have rum and regular coke, you'll be under the limit. Isn't that amazing? You drink the same amount of alcohol and you get either more drunk or less drunk. And the easy way around this is simply to remember the D for diet, D for drunk. Now, how's my time going? Got two minutes to go? Yeah, two minutes, yep, there it is. Okay, I'll try and do this one very quickly. This is a story about alcohol, and it's called alcohol consumption increases attractiveness ratings of opposite sex faces. The aim of this experiment was to see how alcohol, we're talking about the brain, affects male and female attractiveness of opposite sex faces. The method, reasonable sort of sample size, 80 people, and it was not done in the best laboratories in the world, which we know are the hair product companies where people with incredibly beautiful hair toss their hair around in slow motion, but rather the proper place, the quiet corners of university bars, and in the best tradition of psychology experiments, they lied to their subjects. They said, what we want you to do is to tell us the distinctiveness of opposite sex faces. Do they have big eyes or small noses? And as a control, can you tell us about the rating of attractiveness of watches? And then, when they were a little bit drunk, they said, oh look, by the way, we got all set up, you hear now anyway, why don't we just measure the attractiveness of opposite sex faces? Measured on a scale out of five, women are pretty good at telling whether guys have a big or small nose, big or small ears, whether they're drunk or sober, red for drunk, blue for sober. They do find watches more attractive when they're drunk. And ladies, haven't you had the experience of rolling over in bed after a night out with the ladies, rolling over in bed and finding an unfamiliar wristwatch on your left hand and saying to yourself, ladies, why didn't my girlfriends protect me from myself? I'm sure it's happened to you. I know it's happened to me. And when it comes to finding men more attractive, they definitely do. We have a scientific term. We call this the FAI or Facial Attractiveness Index. Looking at men, yes, they're not particularly good at telling whether women have got big eyes or small eyes. They still are a sucker for a pretty watch. But when it comes to finding women more attractive, they do. And we in Australia have a term for this. We call this beer goggles. Thank you very much. Dr. Carl, Dr. Carl. Awesome, so much fun.